His name was Ram Lal, but we always called him by his pet name, Bablu. Besides being much younger than I, he was also much smaller in build. All our family, including the girls, are big; only he stayed small. I could lift him even when he was grown up. I used to do it for a joke. When I put him down again I would hug him. I often hugged him and kissed him. He knew I loved him. Before my marriage we shared a bed, and when he cried out in his sleep—he often had bad dreams—I pressed him against my chest. He was six years old when I was married. A little satin coat was stitched for him, and he sat behind me on the mare on which I rode to the bride’s house, with a band playing in front and cousins and friends (they had taken opium) dancing in the street. My wife’s family made a good wedding for us, and he enjoyed it all. But he never liked my wife and she never liked him. From the beginning there was this between her and me. She tried to change my feelings for him and could not succeed.
It was not just weddings he was fond of but all festivals where special food is cooked and good clothes are worn. He didn’t like anything that was old or ugly. He didn’t like our home—two rooms in an old house in Kabir Galli, where we had to share a bathroom with eight other families. He was also unhappy sitting in the shop with me, because the bazaar is so crowded and smelly. At that time, the whole town was in a bad state, with all the old houses falling down and with dirty water from the gutters overflowing in the streets. In the old parts, it is still like that—in Kabir Galli, for instance, and in the bazaar where my father’s shop used to be—but now there are also completely new areas, with bungalows and the temples that people have donated out of their black-market money. When we were children, all these areas were fields and open ground where we could play. He spent many hours there alone in those days. He sat by the canal or lay under a tree—whole days sometimes.
I expected him to be a good student when he grew older, because although he was so quiet, his mind was always busy. Even at night he was alive with those bad dreams he had, while the rest of us, heavy with food and the day’s work, lay asleep like stones. But it turned out he wasn’t fond of studying, and whenever possible he stayed away from school. By this time, with the growing market for our cloth, I began to get free of the debts by which our family had been bound hand and foot since my grandfather’s time. There was nothing to spare yet, but when he wanted some little sum he could ask me and I was in a position to give it. He was fond of going to the cinema, and if it was a good film he would see it six or seven times. Like everyone else, he knew all the film songs, though he didn’t sing them out loud. He never sang and he didn’t speak much, either; he was always very shy and alone, even when he was enjoying himself in the cinema or at a wedding. His face was always serious. It was unusual, almost strange, to see him smile. That may have been because his teeth were so odd—very small and pointed with spaces in between. When he did smile, his gums showed, like a girl’s, and when he grew up and became very fond of chewing betel they were always red and so were his lips and tongue.
Now I must record a small incident that I have never liked to remember. It was not just one incident, in fact, but several. The first time it happened, he was about nine years old. One day when I came home, my wife told me that she had seen Bablu taking money out of the metal box that I used to keep under my bed. Her eyes shone as she told me this, as if she were happy that it had happened, so I frowned and told her he had taken this money at my instruction. She didn’t believe me. “Then why did he say he was looking for his slippers under the bed?” she said, challenging me. She said that he had tried to run away but that she had caught him and given him one or two slaps. When she told me that, I became angry, and said, “How many times have I told you never to raise your hand to this boy?” For she had done it before—she is a strong woman, with a strong temper—and he had come to me crying bitterly and didn’t stop until I had rebuked her. But when she slapped him because of the metal box he never mentioned the incident to me.
From then on, she was like a spy with him. She would watch his movements, and more than once she reported to me that she had awakened at night and seen him searching through our clothes. I wouldn’t believe her; I told her to keep her mouth shut. She became cunning, and one night she whispered in my ear, “Wake up and see.” I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see what she wanted me to, so I turned around on my other side and pretended to be angry with her for waking me. Next day, when he came to bring me my food in the shop, I said, “Bablu, do you want money?” He said yes, so I gave him three rupees and said, “Whenever you need money, I’m always here.” He was silent, but he looked at me as if he were saying “Why are you telling me this? I know all that very well.” His eyes had remained as I remembered them when he was a baby. All small children have this very serious look—as if they know things their elders have forgotten—but with him it remained till the end.
People say that you can learn a lot from a person’s eyes. The moment I saw that one—the other one, the one whose body no one wanted to claim—I noticed his eyes. Although he was dark-complexioned, his eyes were very light—like a Kashmiri’s or a European’s, or even lighter, for they had no color at all, so that at first it looked as if he had no vision but had lost it because of disease. I hated and feared him from the beginning. We all did, yet we had to tolerate his presence in our house. I even had to be grateful to him, because it was he who had brought Bablu back after he was lost to us for over two years.
When Bablu was sixteen, he wasn’t like other boys—nothing like the way Sohan Lal had been at that age, when we had to find a bride and marry him off before he became too troublesome. Bablu was no trouble at all in that way—or in any other way. He never even smoked or drank anything. He was fond of nice clothes made of terylene, and modern shoes with pointed toes. He also grew his hair long, and to keep it in place used a costly brand of oil, with a very sweet smell. But it is common for young boys to be careful of their appearance. Sohan Lal also dressed up and sat with his friends outside the Peshawar Café, and they talked among themselves the way boys do, and when girls walked past they shouted. This behavior is to be expected before natural satisfaction is obtained in marriage.
Bablu, though he dressed so nicely, never sat with friends in the Peshawar Café. He was always by himself. Never once did I see him with a friend. He didn’t care to come and help us in the shop or with the rest of the business, which was just starting to do well. Most of the time he stayed at home. We were still in our house in Kabir Galli, it was a very small place, but during the day the children were at school and Sohan Lal’s wife liked to go to neighbors’ homes to talk. So usually there was only my wife at home with Bablu. She didn’t like it; she kept asking me to send him to the shop or find some other work for him, but I said let him be. Although he never did anything or had anything to read except some film magazines, I could see that he was thinking all the time. I had respect for him for being such a thoughtful person and not at all like Sohan Lal and me, who were always busy and had no inclination for thinking at all.
One night when I came home, my wife called to me from the other room—the one where our beds were put out at night, and also where I kept a metal safe I had bought when the business began to progress. When I went in, she wouldn’t let me put on the light, but I saw at once that the safe was open; the bundles of money I’d had in it were gone, though the jewelry was intact. My wife was sitting on the floor. “Quickly,” she said. “Help me.” I squatted down beside her, and she put one hand over my mouth to stifle my cry. I saw that she had tied up her arm with a bundle of cloth, but already this cloth was soaked in blood. Neither of us spoke. I threw a shawl round her and, hurrying through the other room where the family were all sitting, I took her out into the street and put her in a cycle rickshaw, and we went to the hospital. There she explained that the knife had slipped while she was cutting up a chicken that she was preparing for a feast.
We didn’t see him again for two years. At first I was glad he was gone, and I told a lie to everyone about how I had sent him to Ludhiana to look after a new business I was starting there. I even told this lie to Sohan Lal, and he kept quiet, knowing there was something it was better for him not to know. If only I, too, could have remained as ignorant!