LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      “Get to know each other,” Abdia pressed. “Leila, ask him where he goes to school.”

      Leila did as told, but Rajan answered gruffly, “I don’t!”

      “You don’t go to school?”

      “No!”

      Rajan walked a little farther away from their grandparents. Leila got the message and followed him.

      “How come?”

      “How come what?”

      “You don’t go to school?”

      “Well . . . I do.”

      “Really?”

      “I’m joining a new school.”

      “Really? You must be excited!”

      Rajan sized her up. She was an excitable little girl, he thought. Not more than fifteen years old. “I’m not a student anymore,” he said with a hint of arrogance. “I’m going to be a teacher.”

      Leila was wide-eyed. “You mean you’re the guy my grandfather talked about?”

      Rajan was about to respond when Babu called them back. “I don’t have the whole day, but you two will have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

      Abdia winked at her husband, who cleared his throat and smiled.

      “All right, all right. Mr. Rajan, now that you have another home away from home, I’m sure Leila would be happy to show you around . . .”

      There wasn’t much to see in the sparsely furnished rooms that Leila rushed through before escorting him to one with a foldable safari bed tucked in a corner.

      “This is your room,” Leila said. “Remind me to get you some sheets.”

      They heard Babu calling again and Rajan rushed out.

      “You need to get your luggage out of the car, young man. What shall I tell your granny when I return?”

      Rajan shrugged and said nothing.

      “The schoolmaster expects you tomorrow. Get some rest, do some reading, get ready.”

      Rajan nodded.

      He neither rested nor prepared for school. He just sat, dumbfounded by the turn of events. Had anyone told him he would have encountered half of what he had in the preceding twelve hours, he would have thought it a cruel joke. He cast a look around the room. The Karim household was noisy. Abdia spoke like a sewing machine, Karim smiled day and night. Leila sat cross-legged and giggled at Indian songs blasting from her transistor radio. When Karim and Abdia weren’t looking, Leila rolled her eyes at Rajan.

      Dinner was served in this chaos, and it wasn’t long before Rajan excused himself. Leila offered to get his bedsheets, and as he made his way to his room, tired to the bone, she tried to trip him. He pretended not to notice, so when she delivered the sheets, she rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue. Rajan laughed quietly and bid her goodnight.

      * * *

      The school comprised a block of mud-and-wattle rondavels with grass-thatched roofs. A small party was hosted in Rajan’s honor by a dozen other teachers. The schoolmaster was short and mustachioed, with his hair parted in the middle in a style called a “lorry” because the gulf was wide enough for a truck to drive through.

      “We are honored and privileged to have you here,” the schoolmaster said in a quivering voice because he had never been so close to an Indian.

      The children stared openly at Rajan. “Haiya, muthungu! Muthungu!” those streaming into classes after break time screamed, alerting their friends to come and see a white man. It appeared that a few hours on the road had turned his brown skin white.

      Rajan volunteered to teach history, but the diminutive schoolmaster had other ideas. “Why don’t you teach English? The children think you are a white man!”

      * * *

      There were about twenty kids in the class, three or four sharing a desk so that each had to give way for the other to write or else they’d elbow each other.

      “Good morning, class,” Rajan smiled on that first day.

      “Good morning, madam!” the class returned.

      Rajan took no offense, correctly guessing that the previous teacher had been a woman. “Boys are males, girls are females,” he started, pointing randomly to different pupils. “Tell us, are you a male or a female?”

      Several boys said they were females while a number of girls said they were males, eliciting lots of laughter from their classmates.

      In the second week of Rajan’s posting, Leila arrived at the school one afternoon. “My mother said an Indian boy must miss samosa and masala tea, so she made some especially for you,” she gushed.

      Rajan nodded his appreciation, silently wondering if the treat couldn’t have been served at home. He invited Leila into the humble staff room and poured the steaming tea into the only cup available. All the other teachers were in class.

      “Karibu,” he invited her to partake of the tea.

      “You go first,” Leila returned.

      “No, you first.”

      “I asked first.”

      “I am your host.”

      “I made the tea!”

      “I thought you said your mother did.”

      “She and I did.”

      “So who did what?”

      “She made it. I listened to her. She said a cup of tea is like love: it is sweeter when shared.”

      Rajan blushed. What did this child know about love?

      “Do you agree with that?”

      “What?”

      “The idea of love as a cup of tea,” Leila said with a grin.

      “I thought your mother was talking about you, not me.”

      “But now here we are. With a cup of tea to share.”

      “Why?” Rajan responded cautiously.

      “Because you have only one cup . . .”

      They ended up taking sips from the cup while quietly giggling. Despite his initial misgivings, Rajan realized he enjoyed Leila’s company immensely, and he continued to in the weeks that followed. What Rajan liked the most were their evening walks. Sometimes they played games along the way that occasionally ended up in Rajan’s room. Once, as they wrestled on his bed, Rajan came to the sudden realization that Leila’s childlike frame was developing into womanhood. She had sizable breasts that she hid under large sweaters. She became aware of his discovery when Rajan loosened his grip and gently stroked her face. Just as they were about to kiss, Abdia’s voice filtered into the room: “Leeeeiiiiilllaaaa!”

      Leila rushed out of the room without a word, and what followed was a crackle of violent Punjabi inflexions finished off with the whack of a slap.

      That night, Rajan remained holed up in his room and skipped dinner, awash with the shame of being caught fooling around with Leila. He also started taking long walks through the village after school just to avoid being confronted by Abdia. At school, he drifted from hour to hour, day to day, still without any clarity as to what could have prompted his grandfather to consign him to the wilderness. The other teachers were all older than he was, and at first, a few invited him to their homes, but Rajan declined all the offers. It was in this period that he started reading the books that Babu had given him: Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Booker T. Washington’s My Larger Education, Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya, and Kwame Nkrumah’s I Speak of Freedom.

      During

Скачать книгу