Ib's Endless Search for Satisfaction Read online

  One such person was Sanjeet, the senior boy who smiled at me. He was tall and had a large nose, which he said came from Afghanistan. He spoke to me often, but not for long. He would say ‘hi’ or ‘how are you?’, things like that and pass by in the corridor. This was rare because seniors rarely said hi to the juniors, whom they considered bugs and insects unworthy of their time.

  But Sanjeet was a different sort. He walked separately and not in a group and his head was always turned slightly down, as if he was thinking sadly about something while the others near him were laughing and screaming and jumping about. He was quieter too, and rarely spoke in assembly when questions were asked. I was told he was from a rich family from some huge city, but he didn’t show it. One day we met in the garden. He was examining a spiderweb that was stretched between the leaves of a water lily like a delicate silk rainbow. The spider squatted in the middle waiting; patient and sinister. Sanjeet crouched on the lip of the pond. I sat next to him and he said ‘hi’ like he usually did and went back to observing.

  ‘Which is that spider?’ I asked.

  ‘Common garden spider,’ he said, and began to explain some facts about them; their strengths, their interests—the males were smaller than the females, who ate them after mating. ‘They are a unique species, spiders, because of this.’

  I sniggered when he said mate and he laughed too. These were sensitive, forbidden topics.

  ‘Do you like animals?’ he asked. I nodded. He began to talk more about pond ecosystems. He was doing a project about it, he said. Soon a bell rang and he got up. ‘Take care of the spider, Ib,’ he said, ‘the birds come sometimes.’

  I nodded determinedly and took my position by the web. Nothing would get the spider while I was there.

  In the evening I was still there when Sanjeet came back. ‘You’re still here?’ he exclaimed. He was with four boys and a girl. He began to tell them how I had protected the spider for four hours. The boys said ‘cool, man’ and ‘that’s cool, bro’, and began to talk among themselves of something the teacher said in class, but the girl smiled and pushed her dark hair behind her ear. ‘Which class are you in?’ she asked gently, and her voice was smooth and deep. ‘Seventh,’ I mumbled. She seemed to see straight through my face into my mind, and my face began to turn red. The girl giggled and looked at Sanjeet who was smiling. ‘Thanks, Ib,’ he said, ‘she’ll be fine at night.’ I got up and mumbled something and ran till my legs began to hurt.

  * * *

  Sports were meant to be fun, but I never had fun. The hardness of them, the violence, the speed: these things were uncomfortable to me, and didn’t suit my small body. And the competition, the winning attitude, was something I could never kindle within myself. Some boys were really up and running for football or cricket. But I would walk slowly, reluctantly, hoping that something would happen—rain, hail, snow, tornado, a death in the family, a fracture—anything that would pull me away from the terror of dust and flying balls, and big guys who shouted.

  But mostly none of these things happened and it was compulsory to play a sport in the evening, even if sport to you was not really a sport but a chore that hurt the next day. Sport was the benchmark, by which you were known in a school like that, and nobody remembered the boy who didn’t play a sport.

  And so I would trudge to the field, and be the last to be picked, and the captain who picked me always looked around to see if he’d missed anyone. When the game began, I would run about like a mad hen, making up for lack of skill, vision, ambition, competition by sheer speed, so nobody thought I wasn’t doing anything. Mostly this worked out, but the ball sometimes, despite the wishes of everyone on my team, would come hurtling towards me out of the dust. It was a hard large ball and stung my legs. I would hear a voice through the clouds of dust (or the clouds in my head) say, ‘Pass, pass, pass, here.’ And another voice, ‘Pass the ball, Ib, PASS!’ But it was too late. I would be staggering around, trying to kick the ball that was already in someone else’s possession, running through the dust towards our goal. And someone else, running past me, towards the attacker threatening our goal, would say, ‘Just pass the ball, Ib, that’s all.’

  This lack of presence of mind was my trademark in these games. But when the ball was still, I wasn’t too bad and could think about what to do with it. Often, I would take corners because of this luxury of time and thought that they provided. Yet, this was a skill not valuable enough for me to be picked enthusiastically.

  This applied in other aspects of life as well. When there was time to think, I was pretty good, but street smartness wasn’t my talent. Girls were all about street smartness; the ones who could whip a line out, swish and dance, were the ones the girls liked, and the quiet ones, who barely spoke, were thought to be losers. In the corridors when a pretty girl passed I always panicked and never even looked towards her face, and don’t know to this day if one of them smiled at me, or frowned. The game of young love was all about smartness and surface things, and there was no room for time and space. Not that the girls would have lined up if I was street smart. Even with a good head about me, I was still a small, unsportsmanlike, quiet loser and this never worked to my advantage.

  Later my face grew OK, straightened out, filled in. After college I was suddenly introduced to the thrilling, confusing and terrifying phenomena of attention from girls, but in school, I was probably invisible to them.

  And when this wasn’t the case, for example, by some strange twist of fate, a girl did look at me, a pretty girl, my face burnt and turned red, and courage failed me. Every time this happened, it weakened my confidence until by the time school was over, I was terrified of pretty girls, and avoided them like a sexy plague.

  Between classes I hung out with a few others, odd fellows like myself, who were quiet and skirted around happenings. A plump boy—dark and oily faced—who was constantly pulling his trousers up, whose name I cannot remember, had many questions about girls and boobs and vaginas, and I never had any answers. The few who did know never hung around with us.

  The plump boy, troubled constantly and frowning, tried many times to flip to the ‘vagina’ section in the Encyclopaedia Britannica but he was always too nervous and all he could do was catch a glimpse of a technical drawing of one, flower-like, but strangely flat and unappealing. He complained to us that it looked boring and asked himself what the big deal was and why everyone was running around behind girls when all they had was that thing. Sanjeet helped us out when he could but Sanjeet was an honourable sort and it was tricky bringing up these subjects with him. Yet some desperation, perhaps biological, or something deeper, pushed me one day while we were going back home, by the park and without thinking I stopped in front of him and asked him, ‘What is sex? Is it vagina?’ He laughed and looked embarrassed and pushed me aside. But encouraged by his laugh I persisted and finally he explained the process and it was the worst thing I’d ever heard in my life. I shuddered and promised him that I would never think about girls again. ‘No wonder I can’t talk to girls,’ I said as he dropped me near my house. ‘They’re so disgusting.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he said smiling. ‘So why did you run from Simran that day near the pond?’

  ‘I felt so disgusted, that’s why.’

  He laughed again and patted my shoulder and said bye.

  But they were strange, girls, and confusing, and I found I was constantly thinking about their faces and bodies, even though they were so disgusting and I didn’t want to go anywhere near them and yet when I saw them I felt scared and embarrassed and conscious as if it mattered a lot what they thought of me.

  I wanted to explain to that plump boy the whole sex thing and hoped he would join me in thinking it was sick and gross but when I found him one afternoon he said he had looked on the Internet and it felt good to see women and men having sex. The concept made me shudder again.

  ‘Check the Internet, Ib,’ he whispered, ‘It’s amazing to see.’

  The Internet? I had no way of checking i
t because we didn’t even own a computer, and technology wasn’t welcome in my mother’s house. ‘It’s too much of everything,’ she said, when I asked her about the Internet.

  ‘But everyone has it, Ma,’ I pleaded.

  She turned around and said firmly, ‘Not under my roof. If you want, go the cyber cafe or wherever you young people go to waste time these days but not here.’

  What a strange day it was as I made my way to the internet cafe full of adult men who looked at me suspiciously as if I was doing something wrong. Inside the room, it was hot and smelled sour like a sweaty T-shirt.

  ‘How old are you?’ asked the man at the counter. I told him and he shrugged and pointed me towards the far cubicle.

  ‘You know how to use?’ he asked mockingly. I shook my head.

  He took the mouse in his hand and pushed an icon on the screen.

  ‘This is web browser. In this you can find websites.’

  I thanked him and he left grumbling.

  Where would I find sex? I followed his instructions and typed in the bar on top of the screen a single word—‘sex’—and my heart thumping, I waited.

  It took a while but finally the screen began to fill up with words and pictures. ‘What is sex?’ ‘How to prevent sexually transmitted diseases?’ And right at the bottom of the page, below all the knowledge and the science, there was a short, blue sentence claiming, ‘Hottest sex videos’. Nervously, looking around to see if anyone was watching, I clicked and suddenly the screen filled up full of photographs of naked men and women in various positions, like nude acrobats, doing impossible things with their legs and faces.

  It was a strange feeling and I felt it in places that till then had never felt much. Transfixed, I clicked through, clicking and clicking, more and more photographs of beautiful women with large breasts, legs wide open, faces in expressions of ecstasy, moaning and panting and biting and licking. And as I stared at the screen, a pressure grew inside me, growing and growing as I delved deeper and deeper into that strange, naked world, and finally a short video began to play: a woman’s face as a man pushed his huge penis (how could it grow that huge and what kind of underwear would you need?) into her vagina, eyes rolled up into her sockets in deep and infinite pleasure and suddenly the pressure released and something down in my pants exploded and the front of my pants were wet. It wasn’t urine because there wasn’t enough and there was no smell and I never felt such a deep sense of satisfaction after pissing—and my pants weren’t even that wet. So, confused, I quickly paid and left, feeling exhausted and elated at the same time.

  Later I learnt about things, the fluids and pressures involved, the plumbing that made children, and I looked back at that incident with embarrassment and relief—embarrassment about how easily I was brought to the edge and relief that nobody had walked in and caught me watching pornography.

  That was the beginning. After that my dreams were filled to the brim with women’s bodies; the fluids, the violence of sex, their orgasming faces and for years I thought about nothing else.

  * * *

  That year, there was a storm one evening, and everyone was caught in class and couldn’t go back home because storms were rare there and nobody knew what to do. Ranjit’s father came in a huge Mercedes and drove off with a few boys. The sky was dark with clouds and the lights were growing dim, flickering, the sun and the few artificial ones that lined the street outside. Anjali, a girl who lived near my house, stood shivering near the door because she was caught in the rain and had to run back inside. ‘How are you going home?’ she asked me. I shrugged and kept looking out into the hard rain. Finally she came and stood next to me. ‘We can call an auto,’ she said. Awkward as I was, I said OK, and she went inside the classroom to make a call from the teacher’s phone. She was back in a few minutes, her hair undone, and I noticed her breasts under the wet shirt. ‘He’s coming in a few minutes.’ She began to throw her hair about with her hands, slapping it on her back, and with every swish, her scent, mixed with the wetness of rain, rushed over my face.

  We waited and waited. Now there was nobody there but us and Ms Sheila who sat inside at her desk, waiting for us to leave. Finally she couldn’t take it any more and came rushing to the door. ‘Anjali, I’m leaving, sweety,’ she said, opening out her umbrella and speeding past us. ‘Lock the door when you go.’ We watched as her red umbrella disappeared into the thick rain lit by a yellow street lamp.

  ‘Maybe we should walk back,’ she said after a while. ‘It’s not so bad any more.’

  I agreed. We began to walk. There was a light rain, and the distant sound of thunder. Puddles and streams covered the road, and it was impossible to keep one’s feet dry.

  Soon she turned towards me as we walked and asked, ‘Why are you so quiet, Ib? It’s not normal.’

  I laughed and shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.

  ‘Anything. It’s better than this weird silence.’

  ‘I don’t find it weird at all. I like listening to the rain. It muffles the other dirty city sounds.’

  She listened for a moment and agreed.

  We walked in silence but soon she turned again as we went past a bright building with a large neon red sign that said City Market.

  ‘What do your parents do?’ she asked.

  It had been a long time since anyone had asked me that question and I had lost the touch to answer cleverly with artifice and so spoke plainly.

  ‘My father is schizophrenic, and my mother takes care of him,’ I said.

  ‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘It’s fine. Nobody knows really.’

  She was quiet for the rest of the walk, afraid perhaps of asking an awkward question. Awkwardness for some people is the greatest evil.

  When we reached her house she hugged me and thanked me. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at school,’ she said. I waved when she was at her door and when she was inside began to walk, now at a much quicker pace, my mind occupied as usual by fantasies of what might have happened if I had the courage to hold her hand as we crossed the wet roads, her breasts under her wet shirt, her thick hair, her skin the colour of a dark afternoon.

  * * *

  Those days when the moon grew full and swelled up like an ivory balloon and the nights were molten silver, I would sneak out at midnight and meet some of the boys. They were bored too at night, because when the days are regular and plain, with no pops or cracks, the nights become the time to explore and feel something. Nights were always mysterious and lit by the deep orange of old street lamps. We met in a few different places prearranged by one of the big boys, and his word was final, generally, unless there was valid reason to be otherwise. One night was the bridge, one night the park by the city centre, all quite close to our homes and quite safe, or so we thought. Safety isn’t always teenage boys’ top priority, and we were more concerned with not being seen by the police rather than by the criminal element.

  We were under the bridge one night and drinking beer from cans that one of the big boys had brought. Everyone was grinning nervously at each other and laughing. Sanjeet was quiet as he usually was and stood sentry while we stood in a loose circle passing cans amongst ourselves. Sanjeet didn’t want to drink because he was nervous and didn’t like losing control.

  We weren’t the only ones under the bridge. A few beggars and tramps moved about slowly mumbling, clattering their sacks of bottles and cans. One old man waited for us to finish our beer so he could collect his livelihood. He stood in the dark, where the light couldn’t reach him and watched us attentively. When another beggar approached, he threw a pebble and shouted something till the other one shuffled away. Rohit laughed and I thought it was quite a cruel thing to laugh in the face of a miserable man. Sanjeet seemed annoyed too and frowned at Rohit who paid no attention. The other boys were involved in some talk of football and movies. John, a tall, dark fellow, was talking about a club called Manchester United; and the others were confused because here there were cou
ntries and apparently in Europe there were clubs. ‘No, man,’ he said, ‘there are countries there too. But they play football in clubs. Like there is Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool. And in Spain there is Barcelona, Real Madrid. I’m a Liverpool supporter.’ He smiled proudly and showed everyone his red T-shirt that said the name of some player, Gerry, or some such.

  Rohit was done with his beer and threw it down on the ground. The beggar shuffled out from the shadows, on his face a curious mix of gratitude and hate. Why did he have to throw it down? Everyone knew the beggar was waiting for the can. A decent person would have given it to him. Rohit said, ‘Filthy fuck, these beggars.’ ‘Go get a job,’ he shouted at the beggar’s bent, grimy back. Sanjeet turned suddenly. ‘Stop that,’ he said, and his face was red in the dark of the night and his eyes glistened with anger and fear. Rohit was a big guy after all and Sanjeet was never into fights. But Rohit mumbled something and was quiet. All conversation had stopped and everyone looked at each other and sighed. It was getting as if somebody had diverted a stream of cold wind into the space beneath the bridge. ‘Shall we go?’ asked John, his fingers fiddling with an empty can. It was late and everyone agreed. Rohit was still mumbling and avoided Sanjeet as best he could. On our way back there was a policeman hitting a beggar with his cane. Rohit was about to say something but decided against it. The group split and there was only Sanjeet and me for the last stretch. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back like an old man. ‘I hate that Rohit,’ he said at last, as we turned into our street. He turned to me. ‘Don’t go hang out with that guy, OK?’ I nodded and he punched me gently in the shoulder. ‘See you at school.’ I entered the garden over the wall, silently, and he stood under the street light until I was inside. From the window I watched as he made sure nobody was around. Then he turned and went home.