The Blue Bar by Biswas Damyanti

Author:Biswas, Damyanti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2023-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

He sat up and looked out the window. Dad had inherited this place and a fair bit of money. He spent most of it on the Item Number, but left this farmhouse bungalow to him. The one good deed in his entire cursed life.

An hour’s drive from downtown Mumbai, the farmhouse was an eerie place at night. The sounds of the mangrove jungle filtered up to him: the chirping of crickets, the hoot of owls, the howling of hungry stray dogs. The bungalow held all his memories, the best and the worst. On some evenings, he didn’t know one from the other.

Wandering over to his study, he locked the door and pulled open his cabinet. His diaries. Who was Bilal to ask him to end it all? He’d paid that man lakhs of rupees in salary over the years. He spotted Bilal’s name in a diary entry.

Today Bilal isn’t around, and I don’t know why Dad’s home early. On his good days, Dad and I play cricket in the overgrown backyard, but sometimes the air changes. When I hear the swish of his belt, I try my best to hide. I often succeed, like today, curling up in the basement under a large table where we butcher the meat Dad brings in after a hunt. Wild boar. Deer. One side of the basement opens up to skylight windows that show the green outside. We rarely open those unless the place gets stinky after a night of chopping meat and Bilal ends up using too much bleach.

He’s left them open today, and while I write these words, I want to curl up and disappear, or fly out of those windows and never return.

He flung the notebook across the room, and picked another.

I don’t like Dad’s green camouflage fatigues, but he made me wear one today. I hid my laugh—we were wearing the uniform of the protectors while going on a hunting safari.

I’ll wear a uniform someday. Maybe the khaki—good camouflage, more power. We’ll see. When I told Dad about choosing the khaki uniform of a policeman, he called me a fattu, a pussy. I’m not man enough.

I didn’t say it, but I’m not the pussy in this household, the one who can’t control his wife.

He doesn’t notice that even when I stay away, when I act like I have a headache and stay in bed, she brings me soup. She touches my forehead to check for fever, then my throat and chest, and lower and lower, stroking me all over, all the while crooning straightforward advice, like I should eat well. I’m growing too weak, she says, I should go for workouts. I’m fifteen. She’s twenty-three. Dad is forty-seven. Who should know better?

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