Part Four — The Ground · Chapter 32 of 40

Nikhil Leaves

He told them on a Thursday in March, at dinner, in about eleven words.

He had applied in November. He had sat the paper in January in a hall in Vashi, having said he was going to Omkar’s. He had the letter in his bag, folded once, and he put it on the table between the dishes and said that he had got a place and that he was going, and that it started in the third week of June.

It was a five-year course in a city two days’ travel away by train and it was not in engineering and it was not in commerce and it was not, by any reading anybody in that family could apply, a subject that led back to Dombivli.

Meera picked up the letter and read it twice.

“You sat this in January.”

“Yes.”

“And you said you were at Omkar’s.”

“Yes.”

Sumati, from the end of the table, said, “It’s a good college,” which was the only thing anybody said that evening that was of any use to anybody, and Nikhil looked at his grandmother with an expression his father spent the next fifteen years trying to describe to himself and never managed.

Jagdish did not shout.

He would have said afterwards that he handled it well, and by the standards of that house in that decade he did. He asked what it cost. He asked about the hostel. He asked, twice, why the January paper had been a secret, and got, twice, “I didn’t want to talk about it before I knew,” which is an answer a seventeen-year-old is entitled to give and which he accepted both times.

He said the money was not a difficulty. He said it in a way he thought was generous and which Meera told him a year later had sounded like a man closing a file.

And at about ten o’clock, in the passage, outside the boy’s room, he asked the question.

“Nikhil. Is it something here?”

“No.”

“Because if it’s the firm — nobody has ever said to you that you have to—”

“I know nobody said it.”

“Then what is it?”

Nikhil Wagh, seventeen years old, standing in a passage in a flat in Dombivli in March 2008, said: “I just want to go.”

He was asked four times in all and gave four answers, and here they are, because the record is the whole of what exists.

To his father, in the passage: I just want to go.

To his mother, in April, in the kitchen, when she asked him directly whether anything had happened: Nothing happened, Aai. And when she said she did not believe him: Nothing happened that you don’t know about. Meera, who was better at this than anybody in the family, understood that the second sentence was not the same as the first and did not push, and told her husband neither of them.

To Aditi, on the telephone from Pune, at some length, in a conversation of about forty minutes of which she has never repeated a word to anybody: something. She was asked in 2009 by her father, once, in a kitchen, and said, “He talked about the course,” and did not elaborate, and her father did not ask again, and whether that was loyalty or accuracy has never been established.

And to Kelkar the tailor, of all people, in the lane in Kopar, in May, when the old man stopped him and said he heard the boy was going far: There’s nothing here I’m good at.

Kelkar repeated that one to Jagdish in 2011, three years later, over tea on a step, believing he was passing on something harmless and rather charming.

He went on the nineteenth of June 2008.

They took him to the station, all of them, including Sumati, who should not have been on a platform in June and who insisted. Aditi came from Pune for two days. There is a photograph, and in it Nikhil is taller than his father by about an inch, which nobody in the family had registered until they saw it.

He came back for eleven days in December, and for three weeks the following summer, and for the funeral in 2009, and after that at intervals that were not unusual for a young man on a five-year course two days’ travel away.

He telephoned every Sunday. He has never missed one. In 2014 he took a job in the same distant city and stayed, and married in 2017, and his father has been to that flat four times and likes it.

It is not an estrangement. That is the thing this chapter has to establish clearly, because the shape of a story like this makes the reader reach for a rupture, and there was no rupture. There was a boy who got a place at a college and went to it, which several hundred thousand seventeen-year-olds did that June, and who telephones on Sundays.

In the September after he left, Jagdish tried to reconstruct 2004.

He did it deliberately and at a desk, in the eleven-by-nine room, on a Saturday evening, with a sheet of paper, in the way he would have reconstructed a sequence of pours from a site diary. He had decided — and he could not have said when he decided it, or in response to what — that 2004 was the year to look at, and it may well have been the wrong year, and he had no method for choosing it beyond the fact that it was the middle.

What he had was this.

The trousers, let down twice by the tailor at the corner, which he had paid for without being asked twice.

The coriander, stopped and then started again, and nobody in the house able to say when.

The report card signed at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning in the office because it had been in the bag since Friday: good at mathematics, bad at Marathi, an odd shape for a boy in that house, which he had intended to ask about.

Omkar, who came on Saturdays, and whose mother telephoned once about a cricket bat.

And twenty minutes of mensuration in November, at the dining table, at half past ten at night, in which the boy had taken the diameter for the radius and had done it again and got it right, and which was the best twenty minutes of that year.

Five things. He wrote them on the sheet in a column and looked at them for a long time and could not get a sixth.

He had noticed everything he noticed. That is the sentence, and it was already true in November 2004, and this book set it down then. What the sheet of paper established, on a Saturday evening in September 2008, was that the two facts — this is all I have and this is all there was — had been the same fact for four years, and that there was no operation he could perform on the column to make it produce a reason.

He did not throw the sheet away. It was in the drawer with the eleven pages from the school hall until at least 2014.