won’t get lost,” she said, thinking that perhaps that was what scared him. But Maneck did not budge.
Fed up with his moping about the house, she began scolding him. “All the time indoors, like a glum grandpa. It’s not natural for a young man. And you’re driving us crazy with your pacing up and down the whole day.”
His idle presence now began to distract Om, who was once again taking extended tea breaks with him at the Vishram, or playing cards on the verandah, showing a general disinclination to work. Ishvar reproached his nephew, and Dina reprimanded him as well, to no avail.
At the end of the week they took a different approach; they decided it would be best to let Om have a vacation too. Expecting him to slog at the Singer while his friend waited around was unrealistic. After all, it was bad enough having to earn his living at an age when he should have been going to college like Maneck.
So Om was told he could reduce his hours and sew from eight to eleven in the morning. “You have worked very hard these last few months,” said Dina. “You deserve a holiday.”
Now there was no keeping them at home. The minute Om finished his short shift, the two were not seen again till dinnertime. Then it was nonstop talk through the meal and until bedtime, for they were full of the things they had done.
“The sea was so rough, the launch was jumping like a wild horse,” said Om. “It was scary, yaar.”
“I’m telling you, Aunty, your paying guest and half your tailoring factory almost drowned at the jetty.”
“Dont say inauspicious things,” said Ishvar.
“After that launch ride, even the aquarium made me dizzy — all that water around us.”
“But the fish were beautiful, yaar. And such stylish ways they have of swimming. As if they were out for a walk, or shopping in the bazaar, squeezing the tomatoes, or like police running after a thief.”
“Some of them were so colourful, like the cloth from Au Revoir,” said Maneck. “And the nose of the sawfish looked exactly like a real saw, I swear.”
“Tomorrow, I want to get a massage at the beach,” said Om. “We saw them today, with their oils and lotions and towels.”
“Be very careful,” warned Dina. “Those massagewallas are crooks. They give you beautiful chumpee till you are so relaxed, you fall asleep. Then they pick your pocket.”
The next three days, however, were spent at the museum. Om came home and said that the builders must have modelled the domed roof after his uncle’s stomach. “If only I could honestly claim such prosperity,” said Ishvar. For three evenings he and Dina heard all about the Chinese gallery, Tibetan gallery, Nepalese gallery, samovars, tea urns, ivory carvings, jade snuff boxes, tapestries.
Particularly transfixing had been the armour collection — the suits of mail, jade-handled daggers, scimitars, swords with serrated edges (“like the coconut grater on the kitchen shelf,” said Om), bejewelled ceremonial swords, bows and arrows, cudgels, pikes, lances, and spiked maces.
“They looked like the weapons in that old film,
And so they devoured their holidays with youthful appetites. The wonders of the city tumbled from their tongues for Ishvar, who enjoyed their sightseeing vicariously, and for Dina, who, in the tide of their enthusiasm, rediscovered something of her own school-days.
Halfway through the vacation a late monsoon surge darkened the skies. Heavy rain kept the boys indoors. Bored and restless, Maneck remembered the chessmen. Om had never seen a set, and the plastic figures captivated his imagination. He demanded to learn the game.
Maneck began naming the pieces for him: “King, queen, bishop, knight, rook, pawn.” The sculpted words fell with a familiar caress upon his own ears. He took pleasure in feeling the pieces between his fingers again after so long, resurrecting them from their maroon plywood coffin in their customary squares, ready for battle.
Then, abruptly, the sound of his voice became the faraway echo of another — a voice that had once named the chessmen thus, for him, in the college hostel. He stopped, unable to proceed with explaining the game. The voice began disinterring the bones of his recent past, the ones he was trying to forget, had half-forgotten, had never wanted to see again. Now they were suddenly surfacing with grotesque alacrity.
He stared at the chessboard, where every piece harboured a ghost within its square. Thirty-two ghosts began their own moves, a dancing, colliding, taunting army of memories willing to do battle with his will to forget. Then the dancing chessmen changed partners, and it was the face of Avinash smiling at him from all sixty-four squares.
With an effort, Maneck abandoned the board and went to the window. Rain was pounding the street. Someone’s motorcycle lay covered under a loudly thrumming tarpaulin. The puddles around it were muddy and uninviting. There were no children playing or splashing, the street joyless in this rain that had stayed too long and was too torrential. He wished he had never opened the box of chessmen.
“What’s wrong?” asked Om.
“Nothing.”
“Come on, then. Stop wasting time, show me how to play.”
“It’s a stupid game. Forget it.”
“Why do you have it, if it’s stupid?”
“Someone lent it to me. I have to return it soon.” He watched the sewer’s whirlpool swallow empty cigarette packs and soft-drink bottlecaps. Kohlah’s Cola would not be among them. Not while Daddy continued in his stubborn ways. What a success the business could have been. And he would never have had to come to this bloody college. Must have made a wrong move somewhere in life, he thought, to walk into this check.
“You just don’t want to teach me,” said Om, sweeping the pieces into the box. They fell with an accusing clatter. Maneck looked, and opened his mouth as though he would speak. Om did not notice, sliding on the lid.
Maneck lingered at the window a little longer before returning to the chessboard. “I don’t want to give you any trouble,” said Om sarcastically. “Are you sure you want to teach me?”
He said nothing, set the board up and began to explain the rules. The rain was beating hard on the motorcycle’s tarpaulin.
Over the next two days, Om learned how the pieces were moved and captured but the concept of checkmate continued to elude him. If Maneck constructed an example on the board, he grasped it perfectly, feeling the trapped king’s helplessness with a visceral anguish. But to reach a similar denouement on his own during play was beyond him, and he became impatient.
Maneck felt the failure was his — he was just not as good a teacher as Avinash. The corollaries of stalemate and draw were equally difficult. “Sometimes there aren’t enough pieces left on either side, so the king keeps endlessly moving out of check,” he explained over and over.
Again, Om understood when it was illustrated on the board; but the metaphor of kings and armies was not sustained to his satisfaction, and he refused to proceed beyond it. “Makes no sense,” he argued. “Look, your army and my army are battling, and all our men are dead. That leaves the two of us. Now one of us has to win, the stronger will kill the other, right?”
“Maybe. But the rules are different in chess.”
“The rules should always allow someone to win,” Om insisted. The logical breakdown troubled him.
“Sometimes, no one wins,” said Maneck.
“You were right, it
After five days of rain the skies did not let up, and the two were a thorough nuisance in the flat. They amused themselves watching Ishvar and Dina at work. “Look,” whispered Maneck. “His tongue always pokes into his cheek when he starts the machine.” And they found hilarious her habit of hiding both lips between her teeth when measuring something.
“That’s too slow, yaar,” observed Om, as his uncle paused to load a bobbin from the spool. “I can wind it in thirty seconds.”
“You are young, I am old,” said Ishvar good-humouredly. He slipped the fresh bobbin into the shuttle and slid the metal plate over it.
“I always keep six bobbins ready,” said Om. “Then I can change them phuta-phut, without stopping in the middle of a dress.”
