Hope and Other Things!

( for those looking for a traditional love story, maybe try something new?)
I was born in an orphanage in Mumbai. Yes I said born! I know this is going to sound awfully Bollywood filmy, but to cut the long story short, one day the door of the sharda devi orphanage (The Cave, as I addressed it) rapped and a woman collapsed her way in and obliged giving birth to a child, not having the decency to at least tell someone her name or the father’s before dying.
Anyways that’s not what this story is about. To make you understand the story, I’ll  have to start by telling you about bala. He was my best-friend growing up in that somewhat forlorn establishment. He was my knight in shining armor, extricating me from the sheer dreary hanging in the air of the orphanage. And I on the other hand, kept his we-are-all-gonna-die-one-day attitude at bay. I could not imagine even a day without him. But it wasn’t for a long time that I realized I liked him like that. The idea was unimaginable to me. We were just so different. The only thing we ever agreed on was patriarchy, but that shouldn’t count since we both belonged to the favored side. He always had this stupid libel he used to throw at me whenever he was about to lose an argument, ‘raghav, the crazy farm called, they WANT YOU BACK’. Infantile isn’t it!!
Yes I was gay. I am gay, present tense! I had realized I preferred sticks to holes at a tender age of 14 and was never ashamed of it. You see, although most of the striplings hanging their hat at The Cave were consigned to oblivion, bala and I shared a different fate. We were among the few privileged in the society of orphanages to have received the scholarship to attend a private school instead of a public one like our fellow confrères. It wasn’t a very extraordinary institution but it was still an extravagant luxury for a less fortunate lot as us. The point is, I had read a bizarre amount of books specially YA (considering my age) by then to be terrorized by a discovery of being different. (A bibliophile, I was. Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: let’s not forget this. They are magic)
Even though the fee was covered by the scholarship, we had to work odd jobs for to finance school supplies, projects etc. It was our last year of high school. We no longer needed much money lo school requirements but still had to find work to hoard a considerable amount to go to Bangalore, for our respective(thanks to certain VERY generous scholarship  programs) colleges, I for a minor in literature and bala, for one in botany. Bala, again fulfilling his role as the knight, solved the problem. Thanks to his very impressed botany teacher, we got jobs as gardeners, frequently at the edifices situated in bandra, powai, andheri and south Mumbai, belonging to the supposed ‘Darcys’ of the supposed ‘pemberly’.
One month before our school ended we managed a very yielding job close to our school, working in gardens of the Sahni’s. It didn’t take long to realize what a malevolent lot they were, but the actual mystery was held by that particular room on the 2nd floor of that monstrosity (who requires a FREAKING COLLOSEUM for a family OF MERE 5!!). Or rather the window of that room, which contained always a shadow, the most yearning eyes peeking out in the distance at something unfathomable. Me and bala often amused ourselves by guessing who that might be and what her story was (we had got a glimpse of the master of the shadow, yes it was a girl). We played this guess-the-life-of-a-complete-stranger game all the time. I decided she was a secret superhero who flew to distant places helping people but lived her free hours planning in solitude, as a loner here to protect her identity. Bala, disagreed (of course) and claimed that she was a nonmundane creature from a planet Grypton and was sent here to plan an invasion on our dear, dear mother earth. We were both however proved wrong when the housekeeper kamala, while out plucking clothes, told us in a jiffy, ‘I shouldn’t say anything. She is our master’s sister’s daughter, her parents died in a car crash and the Sahnis, being her legal guardians, got control over all of their estate and her. They made her drop out of high school a month before graduation, that poor child.’ On further encounters with the rasoiya, whose sentences (mostly Marathi jibber-jabber) always kicked off with ‘I shouldn’t be saying this…’, we learned some more. About how pretty she was and how jealous little Ms. Sahni was of her , and how they let her out of the house only for going to the grocer’s and other chores, and made her fag all day giving her nothing but execrations and how sad he was for her &c. 
I found a scrap of paper one day while working on some carnations. The few lines written on it were follows:
How vain! The wish to be a bird
When the flight is to be taken in shackles
How vain! The wish to be the wind
When the only way to flow is assailed
How vain! The wish to have a life
When to be, is nothing but formlessness
How vain!
It was signed ‘Gia’ with a flowing snakey ‘g’. I showed it to bala. He kept looking at it for minutes, hours, I don’t know. He said he wants to keep it and I nodded and we both resumed our work. In the evening when the cook came to deliver our conventional evening chai bala asked what the shadow’s name was, not in the exact syllables though. We were not surprised to learn it was Gia.
It was the last day of our school, as well as our work at the sahni’s. I was in particularly high spirits, skipping my way through the corridor. I, as always, met bala at the school gate. He was waiting for me on the driver seat of the shabby old namesake cycle we had gone to and from the orphanage for the past 10 years. We had, after 2 hours of deliberate discussion (fighting), named her dhanno. Partly because it looked as old as the iconic movie in which the horse, on which the heroic actress fought the battles to save her dignity, went by the same name and was very famous. But mostly because it looked like one. We were both so happy to finally be so close to leaving. We sang THE QUIRKIEST numbers and shouted the loudest huzzahs on the whole ride, making most of the fellow dwellers look at us in disgust.
Bala was still parking dhanno under the big banyan tree in the verandah when we saw her. The cook was right, if I recall correctly enough. She was very pretty; with her perfectly sculpted face her long, thic braided hair and the kind of legs that would make you care about legs, if you are into the straight thing of course. She saw us looking at her and smiled. She had the most perfect teeth and fuller lips, but the smile lacked the impish charm and the eyes lacked the twinkle. She was sitting outside with the servants under the shade reading moby dick. I was wondering why they were all sitting outside in the ridiculous humidity if they didn’t have to, when I realized that it was blackout that day and the electricity was supposed down indefinitely. I couldn’t see the wretched devils (the leeches who robbed an orphaned girl who was FAMILY!), which was a relief. We were dragging through, digging and sowing and digging, bathed in our own sweat when she came to us with two glasses of sherbet.
‘Here, this will help’, said she, in a voice I don’t seem to remember anymore. This is the truth about memories; they are flushed and overwritten when new ones are made. The more you explore the more you are distant from the beginning. Even if you go back, your perception of it changes, thus altering.
I found bala staring at her now and then, as if trying to uncover a mystery. That day, when we reached The Cave, Bala decided to resort to the quiet of the bathroom in our room as he sometimes did when he had to study.
‘He must be reading about some other flesh eating plant, as if humans weren’t enough!’ I presumed.
But when at about 9 p.m. I barged in, overpowered by my primal instinct to pee after too much beer (In my defense, I was celebrating!), I found him staring at that scrap of paper I had found. I felt something that day which I dismissed as too much drinking and ,as wise as I was, went back to the beer.
There was only a month left now before me and bala had to leave for Bangalore, so we decided to roam the mystic, dirty and crowded, but still the mystic streets of Mumbai for one last time, on our beloved dhanno.
We used to peddle and sing and laugh and play pranks on the sleeping coolies and tiffinwaalas at the station, ring doorbells, ride the local trains to their last stops, have vada paaos and cutting chai, and just have fun the whole day. But on our way back, bala began taking the route through andheri, one of the longest to reach the cave, making it imperative to pass through the street on which she lived (or passed her minutes) and EVERYDAY. At first I thought he just didn’t want our little adventures to stop too abruptly, but with each passing day I began to realize he went for her. I felt the first pangs of jealousy somewhere in those days, I can’t accurately say when for I, being in denial for the 1st time, was confused. Two weeks before our departure, I took ill, and had to resort to my bed for the whole day. We were playing teen patti sitting at the threshold of our room to escape the humidity, a task OFTEN performed poorly by the sole tortoise of a fan in our room. The sun had just set to soaking the skies with a brazen combination of topaz and orange. I was just marveling the sheer sincerity with which he was studying at his cards, when he abruptly looked up, making me fiddle like a flabbergasted fool. He declared that he needed some air. I don’t know what made me lose control over my tongue.
‘That air wouldn’t be somewhere near andheri now, would it? ’,I blurted
‘What?’, he said, obviously surprised at the sudden outburst
‘You like that girl?’
He just smiled. And I had had enough.
‘Look bala, I don’t know in what world would there be anything possible between you. But then it’s the same case with us too. I know there is no possibility, but I can’t take it anymore. I like you. In a way that makes me want to spend every minute of every day with you. In a way that gives me goose-bumps at any part of my body. I don’t expect you to do anything about it, but I had to get it out.’
And then was silence. The deafening silence, making me aware of my insides crushing with every passing second.
After what seemed like eternity, I heard this.
‘ We were supposed to go there the next day to collect our pay but you were completely hung-over from that beer charade the night before; I decided I’ll just go alone. There was a weird calm in that house that day and when the cook answered the door, I asked him what was going on. Gia had committed suicide Raghav. She was, and is, no longer a going concern. Lack of hope in her had often struck me on a deeper level, but that day something much more registered.’
‘You think I go there for some stupid crush? No raghav, I go through those streets, that house, because I never want to forget what I had comprehended. You see, thinking about her despondency, made me realize how grateful I am for you. And I never want to forget even for a second how important you are in my life. You are the reason I haven’t met the same fate as her. I know, that no matter how bad things get, and even when all hell is set loose or the mahishasur himself is after me, you’ll always wait for me on the other side. Its what has kept me going all these years. You. I love you, I need you, you are my standing pillar of happiness and everything else that matters. And I never want to forget that.’
This was bala, saying the most amazing and absurd (mahishasur, really!) thing in the same sentence. Even though was he said was the most succinct, simple and amazing thing for my ears, heres what I replied
‘Whoa, um, that was, quite an explosion. Reminded me of the one you had in class in after having those 6 vada paaos. The only difference was the copious amount of methane that day’
And we laughed.
This is how I fell in love folks, like a strike of lightening, instant and hard. He became the sole center of my universe (I know what you’re thinking, ‘as if he wasn’t ALREADY was!’. No, it was Batman). He still is, well, one of them. Yeah, my universe is an ellipse now, the second focus being our beautiful, six year old daughter Gia (Georgia). She came into our life a year ago, three years into our marriage (owing to the fact that we shifted our humble abode to the map of Brooklyn four years ago). Every night after I tuck her in, she wants to hear the same story.
‘Tell me how you fell in love with daddy, daddy!’. And I tell her the same, except for the suicide part. I’m attacked with a lot of questions now and then, mostly repeated.
‘What happened to gia daddy? I mean the other one.’
‘Did you ever go back?’
‘Can we meet her? Please can we go to ee-ndia I really wanna meet her, pretty please.’
And its becoming harder to stall her with each passing day. How do I answer her truthfully, without breaking her heart? How do I explain a six year old, that even though all could seem-the kind of word you would expect from an NYU lit major- shitty, there’s still hope and love and magic!
How do I make her understand, something even us grown-ups matured and fail to. That even though life might not always be chocolates and rainbows; it’s not a perpetual cloud of black smoke either. Can you?