Jasoda: A Novel by Kiran Nagarkar

Author:Kiran Nagarkar [Nagarkar, Kiran]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2017-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

The lid of the wheeled bin had been thrown all the way back on its hinges and the garbage rose up like a miniature mountain. Himmat was tall for his age but his hands couldn’t reach all the way to the top. He had been attempting to tilt the big trolley towards himself to start separating the plastic from the other stuff when the pyramid came crashing down and fell all over him. He was in a state of shock when someone smacked him on the head.

‘Stupid fool, look what you’ve gone and done.’ The lid of the plastic container had fallen off and its ghastly blue-green, smelly goo had fanned out on the road and on the white pair of trousers of the bespectacled man who had hit him. ‘Is your father going to clean this mess on my trousers?’

Himmat didn’t understand English but he got the drift of what the man was saying and wouldn’t look up. He knew he had been in the wrong but he was seething since he didn’t think there was any need for physical chastisement.

A couple of weeks later, he was sitting in the garden behind his roadside home, trying to read the storybook he had picked up some weeks ago, but he was not making much progress. The teacher in the school back home had taught his class the English alphabet and Himmat had learnt to spell thirty-seven words and then the school had closed down.

‘This is the third day you’ve been on the same page.’ It was that man who had knocked him on the head. ‘Aren’t you the boy who dirtied my trousers?’

Himmat did not look up but folded the book and got up to leave.

‘Sit down.’ The man whisked the book from Himmat’s hand and started to read. ‘Once upon a time…’

He was in the garden every evening. He took his ten rounds and then sat with Himmat. In time, Himmat would learn that the bespectacled man was a Parsi named Cawas Batliwala. Himmat had heard him speak Hindi and Gujarati though he conversed with Himmat only in English.

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