The Virgins

By Siddharth Tripathi

How does one become a man? Three young friends are about to find out. With six unmarried sisters and a perennially drunk father, Pinku, a 19-year-old school dropout, has only one dream left: to marry the plump girl who'd caught him stealing flowerpots. His friend and confidant, 17-year-old Bhandu, is not faring any better his parents are divorcing, his father has abandoned him and the American tourist he is infatuated with doesn't even know he exists. Bhandu and Pinku seek solace in the distracting shenanigans of their friend Guggi a pampered rich brat who can do anything for a thrill. Guggi's reckless hedonism lands the threesome in a series of 'sexpot' escapades each adventure weirder than the one before. But their seemingly innocuous joyride is about to end. With their Class 12 exams around the corner, Guggi, restless to leave a mark, takes over the school's notorious protection racket in a violent coup. The fallout drags the trio into a murky world of heartbreak, betrayal and bloody vengeance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789358561364

Book preview

Pinku gaped at the fused tail-light of Guggi’s Bajaj Chetak as it raced away. He cried, ‘Stop, stop, take me with you!’ His eyes desperately clung to the red plastic till it disappeared behind Madan Mohan Malviya’s statue. They will come back. They’ll turn around. The scooter’s sputter couldn’t be heard anymore. They are not coming back, you idiot! He spat and cursed himself. I’m a big chutiya! That’s what I am.

He was trapped. To his left, blocking one possible exit, were the girls. They stood together in a stunned huddle. Guggi’s command to ‘reveal all’ had frozen them. But, now that Guggi was gone, they came out of the trance to find Pinku standing there motionless, his thick spectacles foggy with fear. They glared at him. For them he was Guggi, a vermin fit for extermination. To his right, rushing at him like a rhinoceros in heat, was Constable Barsaatu Singh, his thick baton outstretched in his hairy, podgy hand. Pinku’s back was to the hostel wall. The road stretched ahead. Pinku ran.

His Bata chappals, worn out at the ends, revealed the dull-blue rubber beneath; his heels rubbed against the cold, grey road. The road seemed to slant up, making it harder for him to stay ahead. The streetlights shone ominously, ready to crash on his head. Trees rustled loudly, threatening an ambush.

Barsaatu huffed and coughed in hot pursuit, his potbelly colliding repeatedly with his tattered khaki belt’s buckle. Every few seconds he screamed to let Pinku know that he was a dirty motherfucker and that his thick baton was keen on piercing his tiny asshole. Pinku felt the constable’s growls on his tender back. Trying to pacify an angry bull while running from it is difficult, but Pinku tried. For every dire threat, he squealed back an apology: ‘Sorry, Uncleji, s-s-s-sorry! Sorry, Uncle. I didn’t d-d-do anything. Sorry!’

He passed Malviya Bhawan. He could see the garden inside; it was red, yellow, and green. When he was seven, Pinku had come here with his sisters to see the annual flower exhibition. He had gaped at the big and colourful blooms. A magenta chrysanthemum fascinated him, so he gently touched it with his index finger. Whack! An old gardener with big warts on his forehead slapped him for ‘trying to pluck the big flower.’ Others looked at him with suspicion. Everybody was sure Pinku was up to no good; he was a useless fool who deserved to be whacked. Nothing much had changed since; just that the warty gardener had now been replaced by a fat constable.

Barsaatu was catching up. Pinku’s feet felt cold and hot and numb; his lungs were heaving, pleading him to stop. He was beginning to accept that his paper heart wouldn’t last long. This chase was about to end.

If caught, Pinku would be going to the police station the second time. SECOND TIME! As if the first visit wasn’t terrible enough! Policemen had beaten him at the station; Papa had beaten him on the way back and then had thrashed him proper at home, each drubbing worse than the previous. And as if the beating hadn’t been enough, the incident had turned him into an object of ridicule around the compound. His elder sisters started it. They used their ‘funny version’ of the story as bait to get more gossip from the neighbours. The story went around like a powerful, smelly fart. Soon even children in the alleyway had caught a whiff of it. When he passed by, they would stop playing, whisper to each other, and laugh.

There was no way he could let that happen to him again. Pinku leaped across a side drain and picked up pace. He reached the turn that led to the proctor’s office. He could see a police jeep parked at the office gate. The constable would raise an alarm and this would turn uglier. He was left with no option but to deploy his least favourite tactic. He stopped, turned around, and fell to the ground; his body became one with the dusty road; his outstretched fingers waited for the constable’s feet.

‘Uncleji, Uncleji, will never ever do it again . . . first and last mistake, Uncleji. Please, Uncle, please, please, please, Uncle, Papa will kill me, Uncle.’

Barsaatu braked and his thick-soled leather shoes screeched to a halt. Pinku’s eager hands engulfed his feet. He bent over and whooped. Pinku lay prostrate, like a stray dog waiting to be kicked. Barsaatu grabbed Pinku’s neck; his thick fingers circled its periphery before they caught hold of Pinku’s collar bone. It jutted out like a stick from under his thin skin and was easy to grab. The constable pulled on the bone. Pinku rose, screaming in pain. Barsaatu shifted his baton to his left hand and swung his right at Pinku’s cheek. PATAK! The conquering was done. It was time to pillage and rape.

The first hard slap put Pinku in a daze. Blows followed. With each hit, Pinku grew calmer; his breathing slowed, and, although his cheeks stung, he got a feeling that the constable may just let him go after a proper thrashing—much better than being taken to the police chowki and then being taken back home by his father.

Barsaatu Singh growled, ’Motherfucker, son of a pig! Will you come near the ladiej hoshtel ever again?’ PATAK! PATAK! PATAK! ‘Will you? Motherfucker!’

‘Never! Uncleji . . . never ever! I swear by my poor dead mother. Swear!’

Barsaatu Singh slapped Pinku a lot more than he should have. Pinku reminded him of his son—they were the same age—his latent rage for his son came out and then, with a final, emphatic blow, he stopped. He could have broken Pinku’s face if he had continued. He recalled what his superiors had taught him: Break bones, but no blood, Barsaatu. Remember, no blood.

‘And tell your scooter friends I’ve seen those motherfuckers, and I’m going to kill them if I ever see them again.’

‘Yessir, will do, sir. God bless you, sir. Thank you, sir!’ Pinku ran again.

The evening was turning to night; the street lamps were making muffled, buzzing sounds, trying to come alive. Pinku didn’t turn towards the girls’ hostel. He took the longer route to Lanka Market through the hospital back gate. The hospital was dimly lit; family members of patients sat by the building, cooking, sleeping, and sheepishly peeing on the hospital walls. Pinku had never noticed them the way he did today. He picked his nose in slow motion; his face broke into a vacuous smile. The rush was over, and there was only one loser—him. Nothing surprising about that, he thought. He saw a young woman feeding her infant rice and dal and singing him a song. Pinku tried hard to hear but couldn’t get the words. It sounded like a wail. Just beside the rear exit, there lay a body swathed in white. Some men shrouded in blankets sat around it smoking beedis and waiting; there were no women around to cry. He thought about the dead man’s wife. Where is she? Still in the village, waiting for him to be back? Maybe. Or maybe she knows he isn’t coming, or maybe he isn’t married. Maybe he was an old man, very old, so it’s okay for him to go. Ah! that’s why no one seems to be grieving . . .

He went through the gate and entered the market through one of its many arterial roads.

Why do I hang out with Guggi and Bhandu? They aren’t even my age! I’m going to be twenty. Why did I lose touch with all my friends? They’re all doing something now, but here I am: jobless, with no future, a complete nogood idiot! What good comes out of anything at all? Father is a drunken bastard, Mother doesn’t even try to understand me, my so-called friends ditch me when I need them, my sisters don’t care a fart about me. No, sorry, Mimmi, the youngest one loves me, but, for the rest, I’m better off dead.

Stop this self-pity, you idiot . . . doesn’t work! Remember the last time when your bastard father beat you up and you resolved to be a rebel and refused to do any work for your mother just to spite her? What did you get by making your mother unhappy? What did you get by hanging out with Guggi and Bhandu? You got just a little bit more of what you had got last time around. That time it was your father; this time it was the bloody constable.

Pinku, time to make hard decisions, he told himself.

First things first. You must avoid Guggi’s company at all costs. And, yes, fuck Bhandu too. The bastard could have stopped Guggi today. And, tomorrow, you’re going to Cheeni Chacha for that job at his shop. Yes, I know it is a pittance—what can anyone do with five hundred rupees a month?—but at least you’ll be doing something. That’s what you need. Yes. That’s what you’ll do. Also, get a sweater. Ask Ammaji for one. This jacket hardly does anything; you feel cold all the time.

It was Guggi’s fault.

Constable Barsaatu Singh had spotted them outside the girls’ hostel. ‘They were trying to touch the girls; very suspicious kind’ is how he described it later. But Barsaatu wouldn’t have bothered if it wasn’t for Guggi.

Guggi’s latest ‘sexpot’ plan was to loiter around the girls’ hostel in the evening. He called it ‘fishing.’

Bhandu was on the back seat of Guggi’s scooter. He felt close to a breakthrough: one of the chicks, a big-toothed girl, was definitely not ignoring him entirely like the others were. She had looked in his general direction at least once. That was something to brag about. Pinku, as usual, was busy chewing gutkha and observing, with benign blankness, the faces of people passing by. Pinku considered everyone worth looking at; any multi-cellular living being, irrespective of class, age, or gender, received his attention. He even found the sight of piglets gorging on a garbage dump an engaging visual. Unfortunately, everyone he stared at, including the piglets, responded by looking through him.

Guggi believed his good looks would draw the girls out of their rooms, like fish to a fat worm. He would be on his scooter, nonchalantly lighting a cigarette, when a sexy girl in a red velvet mini would walk up to him. She would say, ‘Hey, handsome! Not a day goes by when I don’t wait for you by my window. I think I’m in love with you.’ To that Guggi would say, ‘Sure, no problem SEXXXXXY girl,’ kick-start his papa’s green Bajaj, and vroom her to At-Ease Cafe for some chow mein, samosas and chai! That it had not happened till now was disappointing, so Guggi did what he could do best. He saw a group of girls coming out of the gate and screamed at the top of his voice, ‘Hey, GIRLS, OPEN EVERYTHING . . . NOW!’

Bhandu and Pinku froze. Pinku stopped chewing, his jaw hung loose like a cow that had spotted her calf jump over the fence. Bhandu, who had been analyzing the grease on the scooter’s gear and glancing furtively at the big-toothed chick, couldn’t find his voice; his body refused to budge. After a full fifteen seconds of impenetrable despair, he could just emit ‘SHIT-YAAR-FUCK-FUCK-FUCK,’ which, in proper English, meant: Oh Almighty God, my balls have been trampled by a giant, drunk elephant.

‘OPEN IT, OPEN IT, OPEN IT, OPEN IT!’ Guggi chanted merrily.

Pinku and Bhandu turned to Guggi. He stood grinning beside the electric pole, his tongue protruding in anticipation. Yes, I got their attention! Now they know who Guggi is!

Pinku spotted the constable charging at them. ‘POLICE, POLICE!’ he yelped. Guggi stopped picking his nose, pounced on his scooter, and started it in one kick. With Bhandu clinging desperately to its stepney, the scooter bolted like a sleeping goat kicked in the butt.

Pinku kept screaming, ‘Stop, stop! Take me with you! ME TOO, ME TOO!’ but Guggi was too busy escaping, and Bhandu was too stunned to see, hear, or feel anything, except the blood rushing through his ears.

The scooter vroomed past the large Banaras Hindu University gates and entered Lanka Market, the long stretch of road lined with shops, thelas and tube-lit signboards. Guggi was laughing like a hyena; this was his excited-and-nervous laugh.

The market was crowded: pedestrians abused rickshaw pullers, rickshaw pullers grumbled and elbowed their way through a maze of rundown cars, cars blared at jumpy black-andyellow autos, autos fumed and shrilly peeped at cows, and cows mooed at street urchins who beat them with thin sticks. Guggi’s scooter careened through, its horn continuously beeping. The vehicle swayed, making his legs brush against the asphalt. The crowd made way only for the loudest or the brashest. Guggi’s scooter was both.

Bhandu could make out only a few landmarks zooming past on either side. To his right were magazine stands decorated with pink-and-yellow fliers that advertised the latest updates on IAS, IFS, UPSC, IERTS, JEE, REC, MET, etc. Most of these acronyms Bhandu knew; his father used to throw them at him every time they talked. If you continue this way, you won’t even make it to an REC, let alone an IIT. Do you want to run a grocery shop when you grow up? To his left ran a line of medical stores for the university hospital patients. A second later, on the right, stationery shops. Now on the left, Guggi’s dream dating destination: At-Ease Cafe. The rest of the stretch went by quickly as the crowd thinned to dodge Guggi’s juggernaut. The mammoth gate that led to Guggi’s compound flew by; Guggi was headed elsewhere.

At the end of the stretch, the road diverged. One led to the ghats and the river, the other to Godowlia, the main town market. Budhau’s tea stall was on the road leading to the river, around two hundred metres after the fork. It was their secret smoking place, hidden from the road by a rickshaw stand which bustled with tired rickshaw pullers and pushers hawking small pouches of homemade ganja.

The stall was a 5 ft x 5 ft tin cuboid perched on wooden clogs. A stove and some utensils were dispersed on its floor; on the shelves were biscuit and cigarette packets. Budhau’s fifteenyear-old daughter, Sunita, was crouched on the floor boiling tea, while Budhau made small talk with customers seated on the greasy-brown wooden benches. Budhau was thirty-six; he got his name because of his shiny white mane. As he often recounted, ‘Arre bhaiyya, it happened ten years ago . . . a dark day in all our lives. My bauji told me when I woke up that Indira Didi was no more. We gathered under the village banyan tree and everyone cried for hours. Women, children, men, really old men, everyone, bhaiyya, including me. I must have cried a bucket. After the crying was over, I went to the farm to ask Makkhi, the landlord, if there was any work. Makkhi took one look at me, screamed, and ran inside his house. He closed the doors and windows and then shouted, Nandu, your hair is turning white. The front and back are white, white as cow milk. Take the day off and show yourself to the doctor. Go, go now! The nearest doctor was three villages away, and I didn’t have money to pay the chap. I was a daily wage labourer, bhaiyya. By the end of that month all my hair had turned white, even the one down under, bhaiyya, believe me! Everyone thought I had some terrible disease, and I stopped getting work . . .’ The story ended with Budhau taking a bus to the city, with two hundred rupees his bauji had lent him. His only child Sunita was with him. His wife had died three years ago. Budhau and Sunita had not returned to their village.

Guggi manoeuvred his scooter through the chaos of parked rickshaws and, just for effect, accelerated towards Budhau’s stall, braking hard at the last second. The scooter came to a screeching halt inches from the stall. Budhau was horrified but kept mum. Guggi’s father could get Budhau’s illegal shop razed whenever he wanted. Budhau shelled out a small monthly fee for safety and everlasting peace. Unknown to his father, Guggi had also opened an account at Budhau’s shop; he smoked cigarettes and drank oodles of tea on ‘credit.’

The halt nearly toppled Bhandu. He gingerly alighted from the scooter and quickly found himself a tiny corner on a bench from where he could, without any distractions, stare at the kerosene containers Budhau had kept for sale in black as a side business.

Guggi parked behind the shop, looked around for policemen, and, then, with a swagger which hid a bit of nervousness—it had been a close shave—came and sat beside Bhandu. He could feel his feet tingling. This was fun.

‘How’s your bat and ball, Budhau?’ he grinned. Guggi never asked people how they were, instead he enquired after their genitals, which he called ‘bat’ and ‘ball.’

‘Everything is good, bhaiyya, all your grace,’ Budhau replied meekly. Budhau didn’t understand what ‘bat’ and ‘ball’ meant but was too afraid to ask.

‘A Wills and strong tea, fast,’ Guggi ordered.

He lit the cigarette, and, as he was turning to speak to Bhandu, heard a familiar voice.

‘Arre, Chhote Thakur, you seem happy. What have you been up to, eh?’

It was Chacchu, reclining on a plastic chair a few metres away, his feet propped on a wooden bench that no one could occupy as long as he was there. Guggi’s father was kind when it came to his relatives; a host of Guggi’s cousins lived in his compound. Chacchu was one of them, and, although he was in his mid-twenties, eight years older than Guggi, he addressed Guggi as Chhote Thakur and talked to him as if they were peers. He was unemployed, like everyone else in Guggi’s extended family, and spent most of his day on the terrace of his home, chewing paan and trying to catch a glimpse of any of the tenants’ daughters old enough to have even a slight hint of a boob. Chacchu dressed up in the evenings—today it was a redand-yellow checked shirt tucked into beige trousers—he drank his regular pouch of hooch, and headed to Budhau’s, to stare at Sunita and make advances at her. Budhau’s tea stall attracted a great many visitors; only a few came for the terrible, lukewarm tea, however. Most came to warm their eyes—Sunita was the prettiest thing to make tea in Lanka, ever.

‘Nothing, Chacchu Bhaiyya, just enjoying the sights.’ Guggi smiled and winked. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Can’t you see? I’m here to be with my one true love!’ he said loudly, making sure Sunita heard. Chacchu’s eyes were red and vacant. Hooch burnt holes through him, it made his mouth dry. Sunita ignored him with studied indifference and pushed the kerosene pump; the flame got bigger. Her father had taught her that this was the only way to deal with Chacchu and others like him.

‘Yes, yes. Of course you should spend time with her. My sister-in-law seems quiet today . . . Is she still upset with you, Chacchu Bhaiyya?’ Guggi asked grinning.

Chacchu wasn’t listening. He sighed loudly, ‘Hai, hai, I will die someday. . . . Look at her. Isn’t she a beauty?’ and went back to watching Sunita make tea. Chacchu was waiting for Sunita to turn sixteen. He had been advised by Guggi’s grandpa that sixteen was the right age. He planned to sweep her away from Budhau and make her his first wife.

Guggi turned to Bhandu. ‘Sexpot! wasn’t it? Too much fun, yaar! Do you think Pinku is in the police station?’ He grinned at the thought.

‘Guggi, what were you doing there, you ass?’ burst out Bhandu. ‘What was the ass-tingling need to scream, yaar! What were you thinking? Hey, girls, open everything. What the fuck does that even mean?’

Guggi smiled. ‘I had a plan. It was sexpot, man. Some of these girls must be pretty desperate, just like us. So I tested my theory. If it was not for the constable, we would be doing it right now!’

Bhandu shook his head in disbelief. ‘Fuck! You’re such a big chutiya.’

‘You are calling Chhote Thakur a chutiya? Why, I would break your legs if you were not his friend!’ Chacchu appeared visibly hurt. His nose twitched; a fly flew off his chapped lips.

Guggi waved his hands in the air as if to appease Chacchu. ‘Chacchu Bhaiyya, stay out of this, please. Friends can call each other names.’ He turned to Bhandu. ‘You’re a coward. Your ass has no juice. It’s a Brahmin’s ass—dry, shrivelled, and full of shit!’

‘Okay, okay.’ Bhandu could see this turning into caste slagging; he was sure to lose. Chacchu had become more attentive when Guggi had mentioned Brahmins. So, more calmly, he said, ‘Guggi, tell me something: should I be in the police station because your pea-sized brain is fitted into your dick? I hope Pinku is all right. The poor chap was beaten up by the police just a