“Hey you, we’re late,” Dada shouted as he ran.
My brother wouldn’t call me by my name. Not even when the earth was coming to its end.[break]
“But I can’t find the ball,” I said as I craned over from the swampy little cave under our bed. My nostrils flared up in reaction to the dust tickling my nose. I found a broken leg of a spider, a slender, knitting needle with a corn-like head and a midget Nataraj pencil, sharpened on its both end.
“But it was just there. I saw,” the careless voice hovered over the cave and mingled with the dust. “I can’t. I can’t.”
That was where it all began.
It wasn’t surprising that an angry rain would suddenly come slanting, any season – unwarned, uninvited, unanticipated – washing the whole city of Dharan, thrashing it for some unknown fault of it.
So we shouldn’t have been surprised when the moss-like clouds clumped over the city that particular Sunday when Mamu had gone for grocery shopping with Rai Aunty.
“See, I told you,” the words escaped from my brother and crept into me like a creeper that spat thick black venom as it crawled.
I told you. I told you.
I envied the fact that he appeared so much calmer and unfazed, now that the monster that was to engulf the world was gnawing its fangs in the sky in those clouds.
“It’s just rain,” I tried to sound reassuring, perhaps more to myself than to him.
Groundless But he knew and I knew. It wasn’t just the rain.
The tiny, antlike whispers that crawled from ears to ears, from bench to bench and classes to classes, secretly, masquerading-ly, had bloated into a full-fledged discussion that lurched over the dinner tables where adults dismissed it off with “groundless” cynicism.
It was said that a huge shooting star would collide with the Earth, causing the whole world to explode. However, NASA had devised ways to collide the star outside the earth’s atmosphere and hence “postponing,” as Mishra Madam, my devout Christian neighbor, would emphasize, the Apocalypse “for a while.”
“The whole prediction is groundless, after all,” my father would say and I would repeat it in my head. My brother wouldn’t agree. Not that anyone cared.
Groundless After fumbling in darkness for a while, when my brother was assured that the ball “wasn’t just there,” and the swelling clouds were, indeed, the fangs of the monster that would engulf the world, which he never acknowledged, he suggested (read dictated) we play indoor instead.
Our home was full of convertible props that could, at times like this, be easily transformed into a set for our plays. The carom board, for instance, could be decked at the back of unused latches missing, useless trunk that, after being cushioned and draped, would work as a sofa.
We had little red plastic scoop from Bournvita that could be burnt at the arm of a handle and twisted in semicircle to work as a cup from which we would sip imaginary steaming hot tea. At times, my brother would pretend that he burnt his lips. And there was Coca Cola metal seal that on being pressed on rubber plant leaves would give circular, frilly cutouts, which was the bread we ate while we drank the “tea.”
“Okay then,” my brother broke the ice after the basic prop sets were readied. “I’ll be the headmaster and you be the math teacher.”
“No, you’re always the headmaster. I’ll be headmaster today,” I retorted.
Pretending to ponder over the issue, but not really doing it, he said again, “But you aren’t old enough.”
“Nor are you,” I said. Groundless My father was a principal, and cool one at that, which is why we always wanted to emulate him.
When my brother pretended to be headmaster, he would put on that mirthful smile of Baba, and speak in a low poetic voice, which didn’t agree with the rest of his restless self. Not that I cared, but I was convinced, for some rather unexplainable reasons, that I could do the emulation a lot better.
“But I’m older than you,”I couldn’t possibly beat that one. He was. Older. And meaner, too.
Outside, tiny drizzles had swollen into thick droplets that drummed on our roof like a herd of angry horses. I peered outside through the window, a large wooden frame crisscrossed with slender bamboo sticks – a grotesque leftover of Anglo design that had traveled through an Indo-British villa during the early 1930s.
“Do you think the world would really end,’ I said, heartbroken, half suspicious, now that the angry rain had prostrated most of the poppies in our garden.
“Noooooooo, they’ll explode the star outside,” Dada repeated in parrot fashion, and the phrase held our hopes together.
“I’m scared,” I spoke for both. After the ensuing silence, Dada blurted, out of the blue, “Stop bugging me okay, okay?”
He wouldn’t admit he was scared. He was older, meaner, and he played Headmaster. “But why is it raining like this?”
And suddenly, unwarned, uninvited, unanticipated like the rains in Dharan, a coffee mug, a real one, the one with a bunch of happy merry-go-around around the cherry vine, came flying and hit me on my forehead, where it trickled into a small stream of red blood.
The merry-go-around disintegrated into tiny edgy china pieces that swirled rather calmly, to the floor, where they eventually flopped down.
I blanked out and flopped into the chair, like the disintegrated merry-go-around that prostrated, guilty, at my feet.
From dizzy-frizzy blurs, my brother appeared and placed his hand on my temple. “Are you all right?” he would still not call me by my name.
“It hurts,” I managed to mumble. “Iamsorryiamsorryiamsorry,” Dada went on until the whole room started to echo IAMSORRYIAMSORRY.
Dada then dragged me to our bedroom where he asked me if I wanted to drink anything. I said I didn’t. He then asked me if I hurt badly. I said I did.
Over the roof, the angry horses drummed more angrily than ever. “Wait, I’ll find a bandage.”
My brother didn’t find a bandage. There weren’t any. In desperation, he found a duct tape, the black one, which Mamu used to repair the cooking-heater wire with.
“Don’t panic,” Dada suggested as he cut the tiny snip of the tape and plastered over my cut. But the bleeding wouldn’t stop.
He placed his palm on my head for the longest period I knew, longer than the time he placed them around my eyes before we walked through the kitchen, living room, our bedroom, then finally Baba-Mamu’s bedroom to find our first badminton racket.
When the bleeding didn’t stop, he came up with this plan that would bring a little apocalypse in our little lives.
My brother started to tie the tape around my temple like a turban, round and round, until my heart started pumping in my head instead.
My whole face started to swell due to sudden rupture of blood flow. Slowly I heard nothing but the angry rattling of wild horses that ran over my head and face.
The rattling went more and more crazy and I felt that my ears had started to drip blood.
The star was colliding; the world was coming to an end.
I woke up to a canopy of dangling faces hovering over me like the swarm of dragonflies. I saw my Mom first, her eyes red and swollen, desperate; then Rai Aunty, a bit desperate but more curious; my father, desperate but poised, hopeful; and my brother – desperate, guilty, scared, anxious, hopeless.
Mom patted my right cheek. “Are you alright?” “I am.”
Dada came jumping and held my hand, his hands still sticky with the glue from duct tape. He didn’t say anything, just held my hand.
“I’ll see that you won’t be practicing any quackery,” Mamu admonished Dada. He always wanted to be a doctor.
“I promise. I won’t hurt you ever, EVER,” he whispered. I clutched his sticky hands a little tighter and smiled.
The horses had stopped altogether. And few rosebushes, like us, had survived the apocalypse.
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