She goes into the inside room and lies down next to her son. She feels scared in the dark. The last time she felt so scared was in school, when the bell went for Mrs Bakshi’s class and she hadn’t finished her assignment. At the same time she feels free, as if she is going on vacation. As if tomorrow morning she is going to wake up in a cool hotel room with lime green curtains and a clear view of the hills. But tonight Manisha floats in a world lacking in gravity. She is a weightless astronaut inhabiting a private fragment of time. It is a fragment with no past and no future, the extended split second that will forever elude the constant chasing of clock-hands.

Bloody and the Friendship Club

Bloody was in first year college. His friends called him Bloody because he was fond of the word, using it freely in conversation. For example, if he wanted to watch a film at Priya, if he was unsure about the show timings, if he didn’t know how to get back to the university from south Delhi, then Bloody would say, ‘It’s so bloody far and I am not even sure if they are bloody showing The Client. You can’t trust these newspapers—always giving the wrong bloody listings. Khanna, do you know what time the bloody afternoon show begins? 2.30 or 3.30? I can never bloody remember. If I go to Arabian Nights after the movie and have chicken then I’ll miss the last bloody bus home. What’s the bloody point of going that far when you can’t even have bloody chicken?’

Bloody was a devotee of bodybuilding. Every morning, in breaks between lectures, Bloody would spend quality time in the college canteen showing off his muscles. In the college hierarchy, the cool students gathered under a banyan tree outside the canteen, the moderately cool frequented the smoking section inside, while the full-on losers took refuge in the white-tiled monstrosity that was the non-smoking zone.

Bloody was studying for a BA in mathematics. No one had quite figured how Bloody had managed to clear his entrance exam, but having overcome that first obstacle, he had immediately run into problems. He found he couldn’t handle maths at the higher level. Finding lectures a waste of time he began bunking classes. He failed to meet his attendance requirement and was barred from taking the year-end exams.

But all this happens later. Bloody stopped attending classes for another, more urgent reason. He had fallen in love. Or, to be more accurate, this was the first time a girl had reciprocated his advances.

In the middle of the first year Bloody is still in and out of class and hasn’t given up on maths completely. In between lectures he hangs out under the banyan tree, flexing his muscles. The girls are impressed. The girls who are not impressed by muscle flexing are in the non-smoking section, a section that Bloody avoids on most days. Which is odd in a way because Bloody doesn’t smoke himself. At night, in the hostel, when he drops by his neighbour’s room, it is to read the newspaper and to listen to whatever’s playing on the stereo. Bloody, it should be clarified, does not subscribe to any newspaper nor does he possess a music system.