Stair House
Sheel bent down and picked up a couple of his paintings. “I prefer to sit here and paint. When I go to Sai’s house, his mother asks me to share my colors with him. He uses more of mine than his own. And he doesn’t have Lobster Red.”
Sheel wasn’t sure whether she was just ignoring him or did not understand what he was saying or if she was hard of hearing. But she couldn’t be deaf; she had heard him when he spoke about his ball.
Maybe she can’t talk. Maybe she didn’t like young boys. Mr. Shah on the first floor openly screamed at his friends. I hate stupid boys. He would fly into a rage when their ball crashed into his kitchen windowpane.
The woman drew a shabby green packet from somewhere under her sari and pulled out a few black and white pictures; she stroked its uneven edges and gazed at them for a while.
“Are those pictures of your family?” asked Sheel. “We have a large one hanging on a wall in the house. That is in color. I don’t like my shirt in that picture. But Dad wanted it enlarged and framed because he said he looked good in it. He keeps complaining that he looks much older than Mom. The next time, I will bring some of my — .”
“Bittu.”
Sheel turned towards the woman. Her right hand outstretched, she held a photograph between her frail fingers. “Bittu.” She hunched forward and gestured to him to take it from her hand.
The startled boy leaned in hesitantly and plucked the piece of paper.
An angelic teenager smiled in the photograph, his hair oiled and neatly combed, exposing a deep partition that ran through the middle of his pate. From its sepia tone and the background, the decrepit portrait looked several decades old; freckles of brown and crisscrossing fold-marks diminished, Sheel thought, a picture worth enlarging. The features of the boy seemed familiar.
It feels like someone I know. The eyes, the stubby nose.
“Very nice,” remarked Sheel.
There was a hint of smile on the woman’s face. “My son,” she said, “Bittu.” There was an unusual accent in her Hindi; it was not something Sheel had heard before.
She doled out some more pictures. “Quite old,” she said. Her fingers quivered again.
Sheel couldn’t recognize any of the other faces; her son figured in all of them. Except in the last one, another portrait; the photograph was tiny, a degenerating rectangular piece of paper, as badly smudged as the one before. But he could easily identify the young, grinning subject. It was her. There was some barely visible writing on the back of the photograph. Scribbled in Hindi in pencil, was the name Chaya.
“This is you, right?”
To Sheel, the difference in the looks was stark, almost dejecting. The great conflict between past and present was bitter.
He heard Tanvi call out his name. “Are you up there, chotu?”
Sheel looked at the old woman with alarm in his eyes. “Coming, Mom,” he cried. Before she could walk up to find him, he darted down and slipped into his house.