The Sacred Grove

By Daman Singh

He may be only thirteen, but Ashwin knows that he is going to be a superstar. Specially with the arrival of his new cricket coach, Rafiq the driver. As the son of the district collector in a small town in central India, Ashwin has little to worry about, except for his mother's annoying pregnancy and his father's alarming principles. Smart, funny and highly resourceful, he manages to steer his way through fierce turf battles between friends, a powerful crush on his history teacher and the bossy ways of a nosy aunt. But it is only a matter of time before he stumbles upon the world of prejudice hidden behind the veneer of the idyllic small town, from which nobody is immune, not even his best friend Ravi. Fast and fun, but with an edge that can hurt, The Sacred Grove is a story about growing up in troubled times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jul 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9789350292556

Daman Singh

Daman Singh graduated in mathematics from St Stephen's College, Delhi, in 1984. She went to the Institute of Rural Management, Anand, for further studies and worked in the field of rural development for twenty years. In 1996, she wrote The Last Frontier: People and Forests in Mizoram. Since then she has written two novels: Nine by Nine (2008) and The Sacred Grove (2010).

Book preview

1

It all started with the reproductive system. Monty saw it coming. He always checked out all the textbooks in the holidays before his mother covered them with plastic. But I had no clue. So when Sarita ma’am said turn to page 63, I got the shock of my life. There was a slice of a man, completely naked, with his thing hanging sadly down for all of us to study. Nothing private about it at all. In the beginning reproduction was about a fat amoeba squeezing itself into two daughter cells. Then bread mould sending up antennae which burst into millions of spores. And flowers, which were okay too. Sarita ma’am showed us how to peel them open and poke their male and female organs with tweezers. Now it was the turn of humans. Our turn. Luckily there were no practicals. Naturally Varun was disappointed. He was just a kid, not like the rest of us. He couldn’t get over page 63. Actually, neither could we, until we turned the page. Page 64 had a diagram of a squashed, upside-down apple with thick tubes sticking out on either side. Except that they weren’t tubes. They were legs. I wondered how the textbook writer got a view like that. Between the thick legs were slug-like things circled by a neat ring of hairs. It was disgusting. But real. It had to be. I should have believed Bubu. He was my cousin, sort of. I didn’t because he was a total liar. Everyone was nudging each other and giggling. Especially Snigdha Malik. Everyone except me. I didn’t find it funny at all.

Things changed after that. I liked Sarita ma’am. But now I couldn’t look her in the eye without thinking of those slugs. One good thing was that our vocabulary definitely improved. Like Ravi told me that there was a vas deferens between my Playstation 1 and his Playstation 3. He was laughing so hard that he didn’t even notice when I took the Shoaib Malik poster out of his Sportstar and hid it under my pullover. Then, when Ganesh misjudged a rising inswinger and toppled over with a yowl, we told Nurse ma’am that it was just a glans. I don’t think she knew what we meant, because she gave him some Digene and sent him back to class. And if we really wanted to bug someone, we called him Hairy. It always worked.

Another good thing was that page 63 and page 64 inspired a sort of revolution in art. Till then we were mostly drawing mountains with half a sun stuck between them, and V-shaped birds flying in the sky. Now we knew better. Frances sir said he was very impressed with our creative representation of the human form, and our attention to detail. He gave us a lot of encouragement. Unfortunately the principal didn’t. We had put up our sketches on the display board near her office. Lots of juniors hopped up and down with their mouths open to study them. Many of them got educated before she had them taken down.

But once the new season of Dragonballz started, all we cared about was how Goku was going to beat Freiza. There was only one person who remained obsessed with sex. Snigdha Malik. Of course I had nothing to do with her. Personally, I believed that the reproductive system had nothing to do with me.

I was wrong.

That day, I was sitting at the dining table doing my homework. Ma was there too, flipping through one of her magazines. She was always reading magazines. I don’t think she had ever read a single book in her whole life. Dham Singh came in with a plate of pakoras. Ma told me to finish my work first, or my copy would get oily. So I raced through the exercise on direct and indirect proportions. But I never had a chance. By the time I finished the third sum, the pakoras were all gone. Ma was still flipping. I shouted for Dham Singh and told him to make more, lots more, only for me. He slunk off to the kitchen and shouted at Ram Singh to go buy some potatoes. In the meantime, he gave me a glass of hot milk. As I glugged it down, I caught Ma looking at me in a strange way. Hungrily. Now that I thought about it, she always seemed hungry. We had to wait for ages for her to finish eating. The fridge was always empty by the time I got home from school. That wasn’t all. She would even check my tiffin box and gobble up whatever scraps were left behind.

In a jokey sort of way I said that maybe she was pregnant.

Her hand was reaching out for a crumb on the table. It stopped midway. ‘What did you say?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing,’ I mumbled hastily.

She froze. Thinking that maybe there was a lizard on the wall behind me, I turned to check. Ma was petrified of lizards. Otherwise she wasn’t scared of anything at all. But there was nothing on the wall. Meanwhile her face had gone sort of purple.

Thinking quickly, I said, ‘How do I do this… Balai and Kanai together can plough a field in six days, Kanai and Madhav together can do it in nine days, whereas Madhav and Balai together can do it in twelve days. If all of them start together, in how many days can they plough a field three times as big?’

Ma stood up and left the room. Balai, Kanai and Madhav had saved me.

Then I knew. Another egg had been fertilized. Another zygote had been formed.

When Papa came home, Ma stayed in the bedroom. That was the first sign of danger. Usually she made his evening tea. It was the only thing she ever did in the kitchen. When I was young she used to make everything. Chholey bhature, pao bhaji, gulab jamun, everything. The cooks used to be useless. So was everyone else. In our first posting she even stitched the curtains herself because the local tailor had made a mess of them. But now she said she had had enough. If she did all the work then what would the servants do. Just gossip. It was her duty to keep them busy. So she did. But that didn’t stop them from gossiping anyway. I liked it when they gossiped. They knew all sorts of things about everyone.

Anyway, Dham Singh was very happy that he got to make the evening tea for a change. He was always trying to please Papa. Like by cooking parval, which Ma and I hated. Serving him sweets which he wasn’t supposed to have. Telling callers that he was in the bathroom when he was actually stretched out on the sofa watching TV. With Ma out of the way, Dham Singh quickly sent Ram Singh to buy jalebis. When Ma finally got lonely and came out and saw us eating jalebis, she pursed her lips, but said nothing. Dham Singh scurried off in triumph. Of course Papa didn’t notice anything. He was on the phone as usual.

There was parval for dinner. Ma didn’t say anything to Dham Singh. She put three pieces in her plate, three in mine, and passed the bowl to Papa. He happily took the whole lot. Somehow I managed to swallow two pieces with a lot of water. But the third one still lay there. Carefully, I cut it up into lots of tiny bits. Then I drowned them in a spoonful of dal. I could easily get away with leaving behind some dal. One tiny parval bit bobbed up. As I patted it down, I happened to look at Ma. She was watching me with one of her strange expressions. It could have meant anything. Like aha, caught you in the act. Or, my, how cold it is today. I couldn’t take a chance. Holding my breath, I poured the mixture down my throat. It was ghastly. Especially the seeds. I threw up almost immediately.

Papa leapt out of his chair and called me a silly fool. Bits of my vomit were splattered all over the table, especially all over his plate. Ma glared at him like he was the silly fool, not me. At least not this time. That made me feel a bit better. I was trying to get rid of a seed up my nose as she hurried me to the bathroom.

Later that night I heard voices from their room. Hers, loud and hysterical. Saying it was all his fault. His, low and calm. Then silence. Then his, loud and hysterical. Saying for God’s sake how could you not know. Then hers, low and calm. Then both of them loud and hysterical. I couldn’t make out anything. Silence again. Dead silence. It was always like that. Then I fell asleep with the quilt over my head and had a complicated dream of Balai and Kanai yoked to a plough, while Madhav cracked his whip to make them go faster.

For the next few days Ma went about like she had been dropped from the Indian cricket team. I didn’t see Papa. He was asleep when I left for school. I was asleep when he came home from office. Dham Singh was having a wonderful time. So was I. Ravi’s parents gave him the latest version of Counter Strike as a Children’s Day present. Naturally my parents gave me nothing. Anyway, Ravi needed me to crack the game. Since it wasn’t safe for him to come over, I told Ma we would do our homework together in his house. I went there straight from school and stayed till dinner time. She didn’t seem to mind at all.

In Counter Strike, either we could choose to be terrorists who planted bombs, or counter-terrorists who disabled them and rescued hostages. Of course we decided to be terrorists. To warm up, we tried out our weapons on glass bottles, petrol drums and windows. Windows were the best. They shattered at first shot, and then two seconds later all the broken pieces came tumbling to the ground. The graphics were awesome. And I just couldn’t believe the sound effects. Each and every weapon sounded different. Ravi loved the whine of the CV-47, but I preferred the ratatatatat of the submachine gun. In the beginning we sprayed the whole scene with bullets, but then we figured that it was better to aim for the head. It was much harder but that way we got more points.

We were somewhere in an office building, creeping around among tables and chairs and computers and phones. The anti-terrorist squad was behind us somewhere. We could hear them coming. Ravi wasn’t very good at this. He was soon out of ammunition. I took out my spare gun, dropped it on the floor, and slid it over to him. Before he could pick it up, a sniper got him. His body slumped against the wall, but not before he tossed a grenade. My ears exploded. Smoke filled the cabin. For a moment I was totally blinded. I had to think fast, super fast. To create a diversion, I chucked a grenade onto a pile of corpses. The bodies flew around the room before flopping down in all sorts of crazy positions. That was when I noticed Ravi’s mother peering at the screen. I hadn’t seen her come in. Ma would have taken the CD away and hidden it along with the other confiscated things in her cupboard. But Ravi’s mother was really nice. She brought us some Pepsi and popcorn and even encouraged Ravi to learn to play as well as I did.

It took me about three hours to crack the game. No one else in our class had cracked it. Now I was the Counter Strike champion. This was breaking news. By the time I got home the phone had already started ringing.

First it was Sidharth. He wanted to know if it was true.

Then Jain asked for advice on how to get out of the pyramid. I told him my father needed the phone. There was no point telling everyone everything. At least not yet.

Ganesh invited me over the next day. I said I was busy but I’d try. Ganesh’s mother made great kababs.

After dinner the phone calls continued. Papa was hovering around with an irritated face. He probably wanted me to get off the phone and go study. It was impossible to talk. I hung up and announced that I definitely needed a mobile. After all, Ravi had one.

I got the same old answer. ‘You don’t need a mobile, Ashu. You’ll get one when you need it.’

‘But when?’

‘When you’re old enough.’

‘When will I be old enough?’ I persisted.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll let you know.’

Papa was like that. He always acted like he was the boss. I hoped he wasn’t going to give one of his speeches now. He was. He had that look. I wondered what I had done this time. Maybe he had noticed that I used up his aftershave to clean my bat. Now it looked brand new. And smelt rather nice too.

‘Sit down, Ashu, not so far away.’ Since I didn’t budge, he came and sat next to me on the sofa. ‘Your mother told me to tell you that she is expecting a baby.’ He said this slowly and carefully, like I was a moron.

I wished he would hurry up. I had forgotten to top up his aftershave with water. There wasn’t much time.

When I didn’t say anything, he went on, ‘I’m sure it will be nice for you to have a baby brother or sister.’

I wasn’t too sure. I’d have to share things with a brother. At least a sister would have her own things. Like Barbies.

‘You know, it’s nice to have a brother –’

That was funny. He never even spoke to his brother. Ma said this was because my grandfather had sold most of his land to pay for Papa’s education. That bugged Chacha and he ran away to the city and became a mechanic. Now he had his own garage. I saw him only once, when Dadaji died. There was grease under his nails, just like Ma had said. Ma was right about that. She was usually right about things.

‘Or a sister. Look at your mother and Masi, they are such good friends.’

That was true. And Masi gave me fabulous presents. But I noticed she didn’t give Ma anything.

‘Sometimes,’ he paused as I looked at my watch, ‘sometimes a child feels left out when a baby comes. But it shouldn’t.’ Papa was very firm about this. ‘It shouldn’t, because all children are special for their parents.’

I agreed and sneaked a look at the mute TV. The highlights of the Sri Lanka–England cricket match were almost over.

‘There must be many questions in your mind,’ he said seriously. He was a very serious person.

There were. Like how long was the speech going to be. Muralitharan was grinning fiendishly on the screen.

He was in form now. ‘You see, when two people get married, they are close, very close, and when a man and a woman, I mean, a husband and a wife, are very, very close –’

Muralitharan came round the wicket and let loose one of his doosras. Kevin Pietersen took a swipe at it, turned his head, and watched the bails somersault in the air. All the fielders jumped on Muralitharan. There was a close-up of him grinning at Pietersen’s sweaty back. I waited to see the replay, but they didn’t show it. Just the anchor’s mouth opening and closing. Then the credits came on.

Papa was still at it. ‘There is, you see, a male cell and a female cell –’

By this time I was totally fed up. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said as I turned up the volume, ‘I already know about all that.’

It was really disgusting. All he could think about was sex.

2

Ravi was my best friend. That’s why I always kept him in my team even though he dropped a lot of catches. He was big, really big. He looked like he could beat up anyone, even Vikas sir. But actually he couldn’t. He was a mouse. Even his voice was mousy. Nobody got to know because he generally kept his mouth shut.

We had got transferred here last year. PPS was my third school. Its proper name was Progress Public School, but nobody called it that. PPS had a cricket field. My last school just had some rusty swings. The one before that didn’t even have those. It had awful bathrooms too. I never went. If I had to go, I’d tell the teacher I was sick, went straight home and didn’t come back. I did that a lot when I was young. We were in a bigger town now. Not as big as Mumbai, which was where Masi lived. It didn’t have red lights. Only some policemen who held up a sign saying STOP in one hand, and another sign saying GO in the other. Not everywhere though. Only on Station Road. MG Road and College Road didn’t have much traffic, so it would be silly to make policemen stand there. Other roads didn’t have names. If they did, nobody knew them. They didn’t need to. If you knew the three main roads, the bus stand, the nalla, Sapna Talkies and Sanghi Circle, you could reach any place in town without a problem. Not like Mumbai where Masi kept getting lost even after living there for ten years.

During the lunch break the boys would rush out for a couple of overs of cricket. I never saw the girls. Sometimes I wondered where they went. But I never had the time to find out. When I was new I took my bat to school every single day. Even when we didn’t have games period. It was an Rbk size five with English tape. None of the boys even knew what English tape was. I offered to let them use my bat, but they wouldn’t let me play. One day I was standing there as usual holding my bat just in case, when Ravi came up to me. First I thought he was going to kick me or something. He didn’t say a word. Just pointed to the crease. So I walked to the crease. He walked behind me. Nobody said anything. I was 26 not out by the time the bell rang. After that I had lots of friends. But Ravi was the best.

Papa asked me what his father did. He always asked silly questions like that. I had no idea. I asked Ravi one day, just for general knowledge. He said he exported gems and jewellery. I told Papa.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘a businessman.’

He said it like it was a bad thing. But I liked Ravi’s father. Once he took Ravi and me to Maharaja Hotel, the only proper hotel in town. Ma said the rest were seedy places where no decent lady would be seen dead or alive. Actually there weren’t any decent ladies at Maharaja Hotel either, but I didn’t tell her that. We had tandoori chicken and ice cream.

When I told Papa, he snorted.

‘I don’t want you going to hotels.’

Basically he didn’t want me going anywhere. Studies studies studies, that’s all he cared about.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘You won’t understand.’

‘Why not?’

‘These hotels are for rich people.’

‘No they’re not.’

‘Yes they are.’

Maybe they were, but who cared. ‘Ravi isn’t rich,’ I said.

‘Yes he is, Ashu, his father is one of the richest businessmen here. We can’t compete with their standards.’

‘I’m not competing.’ Papa was so stupid. ‘Ravi is my best friend.’

He sighed noisily and his nose hair quivered. I hated it when he did that. He did it a lot. ‘They are different, they are not like us.’

‘But their house is much smaller than ours,’ I pointed out.

We lived in a huge bungalow with six rooms and four western-style bathrooms. One drawing room was for guests, and the other was for watching TV. We had a lawn with a fountain. And a statue of a lady wearing very few clothes. Dham Singh said that the people before us lugged it across from some old temple in