I woke up to the shrill sound of the alarm. I looked at the clock and went back to sleep. The thought of sitting through another day at school filled me with dread and nausea. I dreaded school not like the average thirteen year old would, but I had this unhealthy, almost morbid anxiety come over me. Being in the eighth grade felt like being a middle aged office clerk who was silently dying within the confines of his 9 to 5 job and 4 by 6 cubicle.
I guess being thirteen, at this cusp of adolescence – that awkward place between childhood and youth is hard for most. Every decision, every tiny detail is blown up and examined under a microscope. I remember when I started the year, and had to pick out my seat – I agonized over the decision for days. We would sit in pairs of two, and once you picked your seat out you would have to sit there for the rest of the school year – so it was a big thing. I knew I couldn’t sit next to a popular girl or a cute guy. And I knew I didn’t want to sit in the front of the class or the back of the class, because the teachers always picked on students sitting in those rows to answer questions. I wanted to be totally inconspicuous, and in many ways I was. My presence was so ephemeral and unsubstantial, that my classmates barely noticed my absence. And if the teachers hadn’t been forced to make a note of it in their daily attendance registers, even they wouldn’t have known I existed.
Needless too say I didn’t have too many friends, probably two. And they weren’t even really my friends but we acknowledged each others presence because we were so alike. We were neither smart nor stupid. We weren’t popular or notorious. We didn’t excel in sports or music. We weren’t pretty or ugly. We were right in the middle. Mediocre. But I desperately wanted to have something, a quality that would stand out. That would redeem me from this abyss of mediocrity. I wanted to be a star; I wanted to be scintillating at least in some small measure. So while I went around school trying to be inconspicuous, at home I was stand in front of my bathroom mirror and wonder what it would be like to win a singing contest , and have the whole school look up to me and applaud. I would wonder what it would be like to be Surabhi who was a junior prefect. She was intelligent, she was pretty and everyone loved her. I even wondered what it would be like to be Manasi – the girl whom everyone loved to hate. She had lots of boyfriends, wore a very short skirt and somehow managed to have long nails even though it was strictly forbidden in our school.
One day I was walking back from school, kicking stones across the pavement as I stared absent mindedly into the space ahead of me. Lakshmi came up beside me, she gently tapped touched my shoulder and smiled.
Lakshmi was our neighbor’s maid servant . Through she called me Didi, she was in fact the same age as I was. I had seen her several times before, but had never really spoken to her. To me she was inconspicuous, part of the invisible world that cleaned our houses and washed our clothes. While I was not a badly brought up brat who was rude to the servants, Lakshmi was never real to me the way Suarbhi or Manasi were, so it caught me by surprise that she was speaking to me. The first thing that struck me about her was her voice. It hadn’t lost its innocent girlishness but it wasn’t shrill and self-conscious. It was calm, gentle, and genuinely friendly.
As I walked with her, she with her bags of groceries and I with my school bag, her voice engulfed me. And I felt an affection that I felt for very few people outside of my family. I felt strangely comfortable around her. We talked about stuff – girly stuff. We talked about movies and film stars. We debated the merits of chat versus bhel puri, and we even talked about boys.
Over the next few months, I began spending more time with Lakshmi. She was my first true friend in a long time, and I adored her. In fact I almost envied her. To me, she seemed to possess all the scintillating qualities that I seemed to lack. She could sing well while all I could do was croak. She was beautiful – fair with straight silky hair while I was dark and had unbelievably wavy hair. And she was incredibly charming. I would walk over to her house, and sometimes just watch while she went about her work in the kitchen. The fact that she could make a three course meal in two hours, while I could barely manage to boil water amazed me. While my parents never said anything to me about spending so much time with Laskmi because they were probably glad that I had finally found a friend, Mrs Bhagat who was Lakshmi’s boss had commented a couple of times that I was spending too much time at her house. In my naiveté, I responded, “But Aunty, Laksmi can’t come over to my house – she has a lot of work to do. Maybe she could come over next weekend. Could you give her the weekend off?”
Lakshmi was a Nepalese girl. Her parents had come to Delhi with their four daughters and two sons almost a decade ago. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother worked in several houses as a part time maid servant to make ends meet. Laskmi started accompanying her mother on her rounds when was eleven, and when Mrs Bhagat offered to take on Lakshmi as a full time servant, her mother was more than happy. Mrs Bhagat was one of the nicer memsahibs – kind and generous. With Mrs Bhagat, Lakshmi would get a roof over her head, three square meals a day and seven hundred rupees to spare. And she did treat Lakshmi well. She rarely screamed at her, and she often gave Lakshmi her daughter’s old clothes. Lakshmi was even allowed to watch her favorite night time soap on TV. Laksmi was grateful for what she had, and she didn’t want me to make things difficult for her – a weekend off was a luxury that was too much to ask for.
Lakshmi and I had an unspoken arrangement. I never talked to her about what I did in school , and she never told me about what she did Mrs Bhagat’s kitchen. But I did tell her about all the annoying, silly things that my classmates did, and at times she would tell me about Mr Bhagat’s snoring or their son’s ever-changing hairstyles. In retrospect, I feel that I needed her more than she did. She was my touchstone. She was the thing that made me special. But for her, being friends with me was a foolhardy thing to do. Neither her boss nor her mother approved of it. She was a crossing a line she wasn’t supposed to.
That summer, Mrs Bhagat’s daughter, Priya , who was away at medical college returned home for the holidays, and Mrs Bhagat invited my mother and a few other people over for a tea party in honor of her daughter. Rumor had it that Priya had to take the medical entrance exams twice , and even then she couldn’t make it to a regular college but had to go to a “donation college” in Karnataka. But her parents were delirious with joy when she finally got in. Mrs Bhagat took every opportunity to mention the fact that her daughter was studying in medical college. In a world where there are only two career options –engineering and medicine, and parents , especially mothers who do don’t have careers of their own, are judged by the success of their children, the stakes are high.
My mother insisted that I go with her for the party, but I didn’t want to. I knew that Lakshmi would be toiling away in the kitchen while we sipped nimbu pani and ate samosas. But mothers being mothers , she eventually forced me to go.
“Ananya, it will be rude if you don’t go,” she said sternly.
“But Ma..,”
“ You are over at their house every day doing God knows what with Lakshmi, and now that Priya is here and you don’t go, it will look bad. What will Bhagat Aunty think?”
So I trudged along to their house reluctantly. The party, as most tea parties go, was boring - middle class housewives swapping recipes and small talk. Everyone commented on how beautiful Mrs Bhagat’s garden was, and everyone asked Priya if she liked medical college. I as always was invisible. Well, to most people except Lakshmi. Every time she would come by to serve snacks, she would look towards me and smile. I smiled back but somehow my stomach knotted itself when she passed by me.
Priya who was sitting close to me, on the other hand, seemed to have no qualms about Lakshmi’s presence. She was more than happy to be waited upon. “Is that coffee or tea?, “ she asked peering into the cups as if they were a chest xray.
“ Tea, didi”, replied Lakshmi.
“I think I want to have coffee.”
Ten minutes later thirteen year old Lakshmi was back with coffee for nineteen year old Priya.
Priya took one sip of the coffee and wrinkled her nose in disgust, “Eeew, this is so sweet and milky. Why did you put sugar and milk into it?”
Lakshmi didn’t get a chance to respond, and even if she did, I doubt if she would have said anything.
Just then, Mrs Bhagat came by and asked in a voice that was so full of concern you would think that her daughter had just swallowed poison, “What happened Priya beti?”
“I drink black coffee Ma, and Lakshmi’s made this sugary milky thing. “
And Mrs Bhagat, who I had never previously seen raise her voice to Lakshmi, said in an annoyed and irritable tone, “ Lakshmi, how many times have I told you to bring the milk and the sugar separately. I teach you all these things and you keep forgetting – you do the same things again and again.”
“Now, go bring Priyadidi her coffee. And remember, milk and sugar separately. And bring the plate of sandwiches as well.”
I sat there, watching this happen. I don’t know what I felt. Shame; guilt; anger; pain. And just like that our friendship unraveled. A couple of months later, my father got transferred to another city and we moved. I remember the last time I saw her. It was about to rain and my mother had asked to close all the windows. I was in the study room and I tried closing the window but it wouldn’t shut. Across the wall, in the cemented backyard of Mrs Bhagat’s house, I could see her wearing a red Salwaar Kameez unhooking saris and shirts from the clothes line. It was dark and overcast, and she was struggling to get a grip on the clothes that were flapping wildly in the wind. I stood by the window, transfixed by what appeared to me as a delicately choreographed dance – girl against nature, red against grey. I knew then that I was the enviable one.
