Happy Birthday!: And Other Stories (29 page)

If only Guruji was here and not travelling to important places that Ramesh searches for on a map. There are so many things that Ramesh wants to tell him. Mostly about his mother's condition that has become worse. She lies in bed for most of the day with her face pinched, thrashing her arms for hours, pulling her hair out. Or she goes on a rampage—beating their chickens, force-feeding slop to the goat or wandering off alone in the dark. She will become okay if he feeds her nice food. That's what separates us from the rich, she always tells him, they eat well. That's why Ramesh wants to be put on kitchen duty, so he can learn how to cook for his mother.

Guruji will not say no to him. After all, out of all the ashram children, Guruji only allows Ramesh to sit on his lap and even tickles him till he laughs.

Ramesh doesn't like it when the other children snigger and he reads their lips saying, ‘Look at the son and father,' or ‘Guruji has a mad wife and a deaf son.'

My mother is not mad, he tells them, but on those days, when he goes home, he asks his mother, ‘Who is my father?'

His mother says nothing but she looks at him, sometimes teary-eyed, sometimes angry, and sometimes she makes an air beard with her fingers—the Guruji!

Guruji?

And why not? How does it matter? It's not like Ramesh remembers his father, any father anyway.

The school bell rings. Ramesh is glad the day is over. He starts walking home. He takes the broken wire cycle out of his brown shorts, wondering if he can use the coir from his mother's broom to fix it, when someone touches him on the shoulder. He looks up to see a vaguely familiar white man. He has an orange bag. It's that crazy American! Though no longer as fat as he was when he first came, he still towers over Ramesh, his green eyes bloodshot, red hair standing up like daggers and an unreadable expression on his pink face. Ramesh knows this man is trouble. The first day they met he offered Ramesh a hundred rupees (‘Money,' his mother had told him, ‘is one way through which shaitans steal souls'), though Ramesh saved himself by repeating the line that Mata had taught him to use for such situations. But then the American broke the Noble Silence and, on top of that, he complained about Ramesh to Mata. He's a bigger shaitan than that woman outside my class, Ramesh realizes. And they're alone here, all alone on this highway. There's no one to save him. Dropping the cycle in shock, Ramesh runs.

He turns around to see that the shaitan is not chasing him. He slows down. From the corner of his eye he sees his chicken Champa on the opposite side of the road. His mother has put her up on the tree again; she's probably having one of her bad days. He runs across the highway. On reaching the other side, he turns around again, but instead of the white shaitan, he sees a car crushed under a truck.

There are accidents every day on the highway; this is not as bad as the four-car pile-up he'd once seen or the time when an entire bus caught fire in front of him with all its passengers inside. Judging by people's expressions after these accidents, he knows that the horror of hearing a crash is much worse than watching it; it's the only time he's glad to be deaf.

This destruction, it's part of his life, as much as the ashram is his life's construction.

Ramesh climbs up the tree and brings Champa the chicken down. They are going home.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mom, Papa, Iva and Sorabh, my sun, my moon, my stars. For keeping the light shining on me, especially when it gets dark.

Meru Gokhale, my brilliant editor. For enabling this book. For believing in me. For believing in short stories.

Fazal Rashid. For your dedication and promptness. For not letting me get away with a single abstraction or adverb.

Archana Shankar, Caroline Newbury, Rukun Kaul and the rest of the wonderful team at Random House India. For letting me run with my imagination, and keeping up with a smile.

Jeet Thayil. For being so incredibly talented and so incredibly awesome. I want to be you.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Namita Gokhale and Ashwin Sanghi. For your grace, for your time, for knowing that talent is powerless without recognition.

Suhel Seth. For your originality, kindness and thoughtfulness. For making these qualities so much fun.

Anurag Hira. For giving a beautiful visual milieu to my stories with this book cover that we all immediately fell in love with.

Tehelka. For publishing the fantastic article, ‘Nagpada's Hoop Dreams' (June 2010), that inspired my story ‘Hoopsters'.

Shahnaz Shroff. For ploughing through my first stories and telling me, over so many appletinis in Manhattan, that yes, I could be a writer.

Priya, Moobu, Dhruv, Tina, Bhavya, Ali, Preeti, Suddu, Benaifer, Arya, Payal, Vahbiz and Abhi. For almost two decades of friendship; for being there in my noise and in my silence.

Avatar Review, Eclectica, EGO Magazine
and
QLRS
for respectively publishing ‘The Message' (previously titled ‘Flurt!'), ‘Gecko On The Wall', ‘Lemon and Chilli', and ‘Shaitans' (previously titled ‘Chicken on the Treetop').

Readers. For reaching out to me via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, emails and in person. For your encouragement, faith and support that stay with me every time I write. May your tribe increase.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Photo credit: Bhavya Kalsi

Meghna Pant is an author and financial journalist.
One & A Half Wife
—Meghna's debut novel—was published in 2012 to critical and commercial acclaim. It went into multiple reprints, won
Muse India's
Young Writer Award and was shortlisted for several other awards, including the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. Meghna's short stories have been published in over a dozen global literary magazines, including
Avatar Review, Wasafari, Eclectica
and
QLRS
. An economics graduate with an MBA in finance, Meghna has worked as a TV anchor for Times Now, NDTV Profit and Bloomberg-UTV. A nomad at heart, she has lived in Delhi, Singapore, Zurich, Dubai and New York City. She is currently based in Mumbai. Meghna will be donating half the proceeds from
Happy Birthday!
to Safar Trust, a Mumbai-based NGO that helps slum children and trafficked girls lead financially stable lives.
Happy Birthday!
is Meghna's first published collection of short stories.