The Spectacular Miss

By Sonia Bahl

I learned that I am, despite my early years spent as a swaggering boy, at heart just a middle-class, hard-working, risk-averse, un-creative, strait-laced, routine-obsessed conformist. In case I forgot to mention it, I' m also prudish to the point of being puritanical. But at eight, Nira had only one over-powering wish— to pee standing up like a boy. In fact, to be a boy. Join Nira as she steps into her brother' s clothes and becomes the self-appointed Al Caponesque gang leader of the neighbourhood boys. Her oddball yet madly loving family shapes her personality and a poignant relationship with her brother' s best friend shapes her life. She uses uninhibited candour to detail her coming-of-age journey from Calcutta to London, from tomboy to reluctant woman-in-progress always trying to fit in, but always failing. She' s a laugh a minute and yet she breaks your heart with her subconscious, percussive yearning for the one person who is always too old, too far, too married to be hers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Feb 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9788175993747

Book preview

At eight, I had just one overpowering, all-consuming, won’t-back-down wish. To pee standing up. Like a boy.

To be allowed the liberation of spraying in any direction I pleased, make pee rings if I chose to, or aim straight for the pot, toilet seat up—you know, like good boys do, that’s what kept me up in the nights. But it didn’t happen. For a good reason. I was born with a vagina, not a penis.

Biology can be a bummer. But not if you studiously ignore it. I had chosen to turn a deaf ear, a blind eye, and sometimes even a foul mouth to its unreasonable boundaries, right from the time I learned to dress myself.

Until age five, I suffered all my mother’s sartorial confections. Lacy apparitions, stiff skirts that housed even stiffer, starchy-scratchy can-cans underneath, frills, ruffles, layers, lace, pink—death!

Age six was a time of liberation. Hold on, before I go any further, it’s imperative you channel your inner iPod and hear the first haunting strains of the iconic The Good The Bad and The Ugly background score. Enter skinny kid, oversized collared shirt tucked into clingy nylon short shorts. Today they’re made with almost as much science that goes into launching a rocket and have some fancy-shmancy name like Spanx and are worn mostly under skirts during sports (I ask, what’s the point? Nobody would dream of wearing them as a stand-alone option unless they’re looking for a verbal beheading by the fashion police). In their prehistoric, elasticity-challenged avatar, when mere bending could slit them in half, they were my favoured choice of garment.

Turn on that fashion photographer’s camera and allow it to pan down so you can see the skeletal, slightly knock-kneed legs ending in white canvas shoes (the ubiquitous PT shoes of the era) and black socks. Not exactly sure why black—a subliminal nod to macho, if I have to hazard a guess. Let’s not get distracted, important detail coming up: hair. The mother-braided neat girlie locks had been replaced by an Elvis-meetsurchin do—the result of scissors in the hands of a six-year-old girl desperate for sideburns. The rest was achieved after a visit to her dad’s barbershop. Best day yet.

So I’m ready. Boy meets world—arguably minus one essential component. Did that stop me from becoming the ringleader of the neighbourhood boys aged six to ten? No. Did it stop me from believing I could outplay, outshout, outcurse any boy worth his slingshot? Fuck no! Did I become the kind of sister an older brother—let’s call him Nikhil (Nick)—thinks he can wish away by blatantly ignoring in public? Resounding yes. Except, I was as easy to ignore as the flaming orange-red Mercurochrome on my perpetually scraped and cut knees.

Here’s the irony for Nick. Being just three years younger than him, I was snapping much too close to his Bata Naughty Boy shoes for him to delve into his pre-teen heart for any scraps of generosity or affection. Ignoring me, while I was passing off as a cross-dressing miniature Mafiosi, was his tortured and wary coping mechanism. Which is why he found it completely horrifying that our brother Rahil (Ra), ten years older than me, found my odd behaviour endearing. Even bragworthy.

It was on one such evening when I was making an idiot of myself in public, something I did with reliable frequency, that Ra brought home a friend. Someone who was expressly sent into my life to change how I lived in it.

I was with the usual gang of boys, lounging on the stairs all set to make history. The Mongolians needed to master bareback horseback riding. The Jedi must earn his light sabre. The Monk his spirituality. This was my goal, test, Holy Grail. It was the ultimate badge of honour, to be earned at the cost of undone homework, undrunk milk, and unwashed hands. I just had to master it. The-two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle. It wasn’t a gender thing; I didn’t buy that. It was more an egregious error of judgment on the part of fate, to allow six of the seven boys in the group to effortlessly master this aspirational skill. While I struggled haplessly.

I stood blowing, with laser focus and quiet desperation, waiting for the magical sound to emerge through my bent index finger, nestled as instructed, against the tip of my exhausted tongue. What emerged were only harsh spurts of air and if that wasn’t humiliating enough, some uncalled for spit missiles!

And then without warning the whole world fell into place. I blew and the sound that could outshine Beethoven’s 5th, 7th, and 9th filled the stairwell. I tried again. Once more a sharp, clear whistle stabbed the air! The boys were impressed. I was shocked. Was this what mastering this majestic feat felt like? Because I could have sworn it never felt like it was coming from my mouth.

Before I could think more about it, I spotted my favourite brother walking towards me, along with another tall person. Ra came up to me, messed up my hair, lifted me off the ground and messed up my hair some more. It was our equivalent of Eskimos rubbing noses. Only we were off the charts in toughness.

Tall Guy just stood there looking down at me. I still haven’t found an appropriate word for the look. Curiosity? Fascination? Affection? Or perhaps it was a whole sentence like are-youkidding-me. Up close, he was even taller than he looked at first, and he wouldn’t stop smiling. The type of smile like he’s known me all his life and I’m really funny. The type of smile that says you can do any stupid-hideous-dumb stuff and I will always love you. The type of smile that says I know we’re already friends and will be for the rest of our lives.

I disentangled myself from Ra’s messing up and tried to stand tall. Even on my toes I was at best waist-high for Tall Guy. Ra looked at me with the kind of pride owners have for their big, drooling dogs. Hey kiddo, this is my friend Bir. Bir, this is my baby sis Nero. The toughest kid on the block! Bir smiled even more. I noticed his eyes almost crinkled and closed when he did that. Yeah I can see that—well done with that whistle, and then he winked. It was gone, literally in a blink. Because keep in mind, his eyes were at least ninety-ish per cent shut to begin with. A funny little thing happened. That one fraction of a muscle movement made me feel like I had been invited into a special world.

They were climbing the stairs, two at a time. Ra, hyper-energetic. Bir, slow, easy, almost lazy, and yet he was keeping pace. I could hear them talking because everything echoed in the wooden staircase, even two floors up.

You mean your kid brother, Bir said. Didn’t ask. Just said. I loved him already.

Then Ra had to go spoil it. Sis, man. Ra’s voice was getting less coherent.

You’re shitting me, right? Nero? A girl? Bir wasn’t buying this cheap stunt.

Nikhil + Rahil so NI-RA—don’t know what weird shit my parents were thinking. But she prefers to be called Nero— especially when she’s down with her gang.

Bir looked two floors down over the balustrade—I knew he would. I was looking up; I had hitched my thumbs into the waistband of my shorts, my much-practiced cool and tough stance. He brought his fingers to his head and did a salute-and-wave kind of thing. Then he disappeared. I heard him say, Don’t mess with me, Ra, that’s your brother.

I put my fingers in my mouth and blew. Nothing. I tried again. This time some drool trickled out.

So, was Bir Narayan the whistle beneath my wings?

Bir Narayan is eighteen, fifty, and sometimes ten years old.

His chronological age is eighteen. Only one decade older than me. And what’s a decade between best friends-for-life (FFL became our man-code for the same)?

Fifty. Just look into his eyes. A Sensei will look back at you. Don’t be alarmed if you feel compelled to bend forward and bow—and don’t bother resisting, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to the whole wisdom-patience-Zen deal going on in there. Impossible to achieve by someone who hasn’t roamed our planet for at least half a century.

Ten is what you have to be when you can make an eight-year-old feel like every day is a sudden holiday. Like the prized ones that are announced early in the morning because there’s a natural calamity like a cyclone or a national situation like the death of a senior political leader. No offence, but at 8 a.m. before school, when the lottery of a sudden holiday falls into your lap, you really don’t care if there’s a plague in the apartment block next door. Your heart does the Twist and your feet have an uncoordinated life of their own. It was something like that every time Bir Narayan came home. Which was almost every single day after the whistle day.

Ra had lots of friends. But none of them were like Bir. It was the seventies and nobody had divorced parents. Well, nobody we knew, except Bir. Even better, Bir’s father was this young, swashbuckling royal from Cooch Behar who was just twenty-one years older than Bir and had a second wife who was fifteen years younger than himself. Do the math to work out why all of this gave hormonally charged college boys like my brother such a thrill.

Bir’s stepmother was just twenty-four and unsettlingly hot. Here’s a fun fact that ought to discourage you from being too judgmental about Bir’s friends who routinely fantasised about her. She’s twenty-four, her step son is eighteen, she’s called Pam, is of Anglo-Indian origin, and has imaginary blurbs popping up above her head that say, ‘ex-crooner’, ‘ex-model’, and regrettably ‘fortune hunter’. If you were eighteen and male, you’d be downright stupid to harness in any inappropriate thoughts you had about her.

So, while it was unbearably scintillating for Ra and the rest of the gang to accidentally bump into her, Bir maintained a monk-like stoic and respectful silence about her. In fact, Bir was silent about most things concerning family.

His parents had separated when he was eight, an incident that turned him into a reluctant wayfarer, shuttling between her whims and his fancies. He lived with his real mother in London until his father decided it was time for him to man up and head to boarding school—which of course had to be Mayo College, because that’s where his father went and his father before him. And now, here he was in Calcutta because it was time to help with the family business and, of course, if possible and/or convenient, continue studying commerce at St. Xavier’s College. If possible was, without any debate, the main clause in the unwritten contract. Not kidding. That’s how things worked in his family.

Bir lived in a sprawling bungalow. Nobody was quite sure where it started and where, if at all, it ended. It was the sort of house that had a lot of old paintings, dusty furniture, and rooms that nobody lived in. The rooms that were used were all perpetually air-conditioned and never sunlit. Bir’s room was tucked away on the first floor at the end of a long, badly lit corridor. Bir’s father and Pam had a huge bedroom that opened into a garden on the ground floor. The kitchen smelled like the back of the restaurants on Park Street. Food was cooking all day even when nobody was eating. The exciting thing for Bir’s friends was they could order practically anything (chicken sandwiches, Chindian noodles, kaathi-kebab rolls . . . Michelin star fare for this group) and the kitchen would send it up. Exactly like hotel room service!

Surprisingly, this culinary luxury wasn’t the aspect of Bir’s domestic life that his friends coveted most. It was the presence of four foreign cars in the garage and the rumoured stash of dope in one of the guest bedrooms, that had each and every one of them praying fervently to wake up as him one day. Preferably ASAP.

By all accounts, Bir lived in late-teen haven. Which is why his unimaginable compulsion to spend little or no time in his home, and most of his time in ours, was mystifying. He showed up every day, ostensibly to be with Ra. To my delight, even if Ra was out with other friends, Bir was happy to hang around at home with Ma, Dad, and me. Sometimes with just me.

In fact, Ajju—our cook—soon slipped into the routine of setting a permanent place for him at dinner. It just happened that way. My parents accepted most events and people into their lives with the lavish generosity of professional royals or Mother Theresa, with considerably less space and funding than either. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment that was straining at the seams. If you were really quiet, you were likely to hear the creaking—Nick insisted it was brick and mortar parting ways. Ra, Nick, and I shared one bedroom. Need I say more?

After a few years, I developed a number of conclusive theories on why Bir instinctively headed to our home each day after work or college. Theory number one: Ma was the best fastcook in the world. One minute the kitchen would be clean, quiet, and dark. Next minute, she’d be walking out with freshly fried onion pakoras, extra-spicy aloochaat, and the best omelette sandwiches that money couldn’t buy. Theory number two: every inch of our sixteen hundred square feet of space was taken up with things, noise, people—a passing neighbour or a visiting relative, or my friend, Ra’s friend, Nick’s friend, or even Ajju’s friend. Sometimes, all of the above at exactly the same time. There was no space to be lonely.

In less than two months, Bir’s presence in our home had become as natural as button fly shorts on me.

Iwill only say this once because I need to say it, write it, and read it to remind myself that I survived it. I wore home-stitched undies.

To understand what it feels like, it’s imperative to find a tattoo artist who can use Arial Black font (all caps) extra bold 144-point size to write the word LOSER on your face. That’s the kind of comfort fit a mother-stitched underwear guarantees.

Why a mother thinks her child might need the soothing reassurance of such humiliation is not exactly clear to me. I can only hazard a weary guess why mine felt compelled to cover my privates in pink floral cotton with a tape (also known as nala in the vernacular) to knot, but mostly to waste precious minutes trying to unknot, while crossing one’s legs furiously to stop from peeing before the said underpants could be pulled down.

Maybe Ma was doing the deflected pain thing. Stomach hurts, kick the butt and you forget the stomach. Since my body naturally repelled anything that looked like a dress she might have thought swaddling my insides in fabric and colours that I wouldn’t be seen wearing on the outside would magically transform me into the girl next door. Quite literally. The one who lived across the landing and had dainty, shiny, pointy shoes with bows to match every wall-to-wall lace-inflicted dress she wore. Hated that prissy bitch.

The innerwear phenomenon might have abrogated with nothing more than a healthy dose of self-loathing and peer mockery, had it not been for one seismic incident that permanently highlighted their existence and scarred mine.

I hated school. I had a primal fear of math and skirts. There was an affluence of both in my Catholic all-girls school. There was no option but to plod through one and put up with the other. Think of me as a hostage with snipers aiming at my head with little or no chance of escape. The minute I entered the large green gates of school, a familiar percussive chant in my head would take over: RUN RUN RUN RUN . . . till it would get loud enough to drown out all the silly girlie chatter and the unreasonable idea of trying to solve algebraic fractions.

It also had a metaphysical impact on my body. I began to run . . . winning any race in any category—so intense was my desire to escape this daily confinement. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t really daily. Saturday and Sunday were officially off. And for me, it was also either Monday or Thursday, or sometimes both. I had learned to will myself into fever, nausea, loose stools, or on-call hysteria exactly fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure for school each morning. It worked like a charm. Ma just threw up her hands with a lame warning, Last time I am going to listen to you, okay? and succumbed at least once, if not twice a week. Just like that, it was down to a three-day workweek.

I was ready to head a labour union at the age of eight and yet there were some things even I couldn’t negotiate—Sports Day. That one day when the girls almost noticed my reluctant