Mixtape A collection of short stories

VRINDA BALIGA

NOTION PRESS

NOTION PRESS India. Singapore. Malaysia. ISBN: 9798885555555 This book has been published with all reasonable efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. No part of this book shall be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events and places portrayed in the book are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Some of the stories in this collection have been previously published, in slightly different forms: ‘Mixtape’ in The Bombay Review (February 2021); ‘Girls and Boys’ in The Bengaluru Review (July 2020); ‘Heavenly Abode’ in Third Lane Magazine (June 2021); ‘The Beached Whale’ in The Hopper (November 2021); ‘Kings and Sons’ in New Asian Writing (August 2014); ‘The City’ in Usawa Literary Review (December 2021); ‘Roots’ in And Lately, The Sun (Calyx Press, Australia, 2020); and ‘Forgotten’ in NewMyths Literary Magazine (December 2021). ‘The Stories We Tell’ won The Written Circle Short Story Prize 2021 and is included in The Written Circle’s anthology of prize-winning and shortlisted stories (forthcoming in 2022).

Cover art: Manoj Vijayan http://www.vrindabaliga.com

To my husband, Prasad, and my children, Prahlad and Aniket.

Contents 1. Mixtape .................................................................... 1 2. The Stories We Tell ............................................... 31 3. Girls and Boys........................................................ 53 4. Heavenly Abode..................................................... 67 5. Broken .................................................................... 77 6. The Beached Whale ............................................. 109 7. Kings and Sons .................................................... 121 8. The City ............................................................... 135 9. Roots .................................................................... 139 10. Forgotten .............................................................. 163 Other Books by Vrinda Baliga.................................... 191

Mixtape “Here Chotu, xerox everything up to the folded page. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Keep it ready.” The student slapped the notebook down on the counter without as much as looking at Sunil and rushed out of the shop to catch up with his friends. Sunil frowned at the pages full of sloppy, spidery handwriting. The student had obviously skipped class, but couldn’t he have at least got some better notes to copy? He opened the lid of the photocopier, pressed the notebook flat on the glass and pressed the copy button. With a click and a whirr, the machine came to life. With practiced ease, Sunil offered A4 sheets into its maw, and the machine regurgitated them covered with mathematical formulae and equations. A popular Hindi track played in the background: “Dil hai ke maanta nahin…Mushkil badi hai rasm-e-mohabbat yeh jaantaa hi nahi…” It was a slow melodious number, but one would never have guessed, playing as it was at comic speed on the shop’s dual-deck tape recorder. The shop was L-shaped, and at the back was an alcove whose walls were lined with audio cassettes—Bollywood movie songs, ghazals, bhajans, some international pop and rock. There was always music playing in the shop, except you couldn’t

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actually listen to it, since it was always running in highspeed dubbing mode, being copied to the blank tape in the other deck. Up front, along the side wall was a row of benches leading up to a small glass-panelled phone booth, where every evening, students lined up to make STD calls back home. The STD booth, the photocopy machine, the cassette alcove, and the milkshake counter manned by his mother near the entrance—these formed the four branches of their family business, all run from within the confines of the 800-square-foot shop. His father had planned the enterprise well, with each branch of the business complementing the others. The students coming to photocopy notes or call home would inevitably order a milkshake or be tempted into buying the latest audio cassette. And vice versa. At twelve years, Sunil was already as adept at handling all four businesses as his parents. He enjoyed working in the shop after his school hours, helping his father so his mother could return home to complete the household chores. Through the long summer months, the university campus had lain silent and deserted but for the occasional elderly resident professor riding along on his bicycle at a glacial pace that seemed to suit the mood of the slumbering campus. But now at last, a new semester had begun, the students were back, and the campus was alive with chatter and laughter and all manners of activity once again.

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“Excuse me, can you please copy the first chapter of this book?” Sunil glanced up at the slightly accented Hindi. A South Indian. And the polite tone only meant one thing. “First year?” he asked. It never lasted, that tone. Soon, the first-years too would be calling him ‘Chotu’ and ordering him about with proprietorial tones. The bespectacled boy who stood at the counter nodded absently, glancing around nervously. New students often wore that hunted look born out of the need to keep a wary eye out for seniors, whose main recreation during the first months of the new academic year was ragging juniors. Sunil took the book from him. “Microprocessors. This is fourth year, no? Why do you want to copy it?” The boy looked at him in surprise, and Sunil felt a twinge of smug satisfaction. His memory trick always took them by surprise. Now he had the fellow’s full attention. “It’s not for me,” the boy said, then added, “You know this book?” “I know them all,” Sunil said grandly. “First-year or fourth-year, every book on campus comes here at least once in its lifetime to be Xeroxed.” The boy smiled and held out his hand. “I’m Vikas. I’m studying Computer Engineering here.” 3

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Sunil shook his hand, feeling important. “Sunil,” he said. He wondered how long the boy would bother to remember the name. Most didn’t. ‘Chotu,’ the all-purpose name for any kid his age, sufficed for them. He hated that name. He finished with the notebook and began photocopying the first chapter of the thick Microprocessors textbook. Vikas strolled over to the back of the shop and gazed at the stacks of audiotapes in the wall racks in the alcove. “Quite a collection you’ve got here,” he said. “They’re all for sale,” Sunil called from the photocopy machine. “Or you can choose songs, and we can record a mixtape also for you.” “Nice…” Vikas said, busy browsing through the cassettes and plucking out a few to check the songs listed on the back cover. “Hey, there he is! Fresher, come here!” Vikas spun around and Sunil saw him visibly blanching. He turned and sighed inwardly when he saw Siddharth and his cronies, Rishi and Purab. Over the past three years, the trio had earned themselves quite a notoriety on campus. They liked nothing better than to pick on nerdy toppers, easily identifiable from their ID numbers which were based on their ranks in the university entrance exam. Other seniors soon tired of ragging and often became good friends with the juniors they had 4

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ragged, guiding them with their course schedules and helping them navigate their way around campus life. But with these three it was different—they hooked onto some poor soul and hounded him all year just for laughs, until the next year when some other unfortunate newcomer would replace their victim. The older boys went over to the back and surrounded Vikas. Rishi smacked Vikas on back of his head, knocking his spectacles awry. “Hey Sid, didn’t you give the boy some work to do?” “Sure, I did. And here he is, loitering around like a useless duffer.” “So, what should we do with him?” “I…,” Vikas stuttered, pointing vaguely at the photocopier. “I came for that only…” “So, you’re saying we’re wrong?” Siddharth knocked him on the head again. “You’re not a useless duffer?” Vikas kept his eyes on the ground. “Okay, I suppose we should remind you once again about the three golden rules of this great institution?” “I r-remember.” “Good! Recite them for us, fresher. Let’s hear them. Rule number one?” “Seniors are always right,” Vikas mumbled. “Louder, please. I can’t hear you.” 5

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“Seniors are always right,” Vikas repeated. “That’s better. Rule number 2?” “Juniors are always wrong.” “Correct. And rule number three?” “What’s going on here?” Sunil’s father had entered the shop. He approached the alcove, looking at the boys warily. “I’ve told you before. I want no trouble in here.” “Yes, sir, Sharmaji!” Sid said, giving him a mock salute. “No trouble, Sharmaji! We’re just having a friendly chat here.” “Then take your ‘friendly chat’ out of my shop,” Sunil’s father said. Sid sighed dramatically, then stood aside and swept his arm towards the entrance of the shop with a flourish. “After you, fresher.” They followed a terrified-looking Vikas to the entrance of the shop. “I didn’t quite catch Rule number 3,” Sid said, prodding him from behind. “When in doubt, refer to Rules 1 and 2,” Vikas muttered. “Good!” Sid plucked a glass of milkshake from the counter and upended it on Vikas’s head. “Remember not to answer back next time.”

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Sunil had always been told that the year of his birth— 1982—had been lucky for the town. This, in his opinion, should have made him the most important person in town. That position, however, belonged to A.K. Agarwal, the late multi-millionaire industrialist whose traced his humble origins to the town. For a long time, however, all that had existed of that connection had been the Purani Haveli, the family mansion, on a sprawling estate, both going to ruin from neglect because the Agarwal family was now spread all over the globe and rarely visited their ancestral village. But the year Sunil was born, the family had decided to donate the estate to a deemed university they wished to start in their patriarch’s name. The foundations of the university buildings had been laid when Sunil was a suckling infant, and by the time he was a toddler, several department blocks had come up and the first students were starting to trickle in. Over the last decade, the university and its prestige had grown by leaps and bounds, the most popular being its affiliated engineering college that had always managed to stay at the cutting edge of technological advances. It had been one of the first in the country to introduce a new undergraduate degree course in the foundling field of Computer Engineering a couple of years ago, and students flocked to it from all over the country. The university had changed the fortunes of the modest agricultural village, transforming it into a bustling town that grew around the university and catered to its myriad needs. Sunil’s family had benefited too. The university marketplace was just coming up—a dozen or so shops in 7

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a corner of the campus that catered to the food, tailoring, grocery, stationery, and other needs of the students in the university hostels. Sunil’s father, who had hitherto eked out a living from a few rocky acres of land, had sold the unproductive land and with the money from the sale, he had taken up the lease on a shop in the market square. He had been running the shop successfully for more than eight years now, and Sunil had been helping for the last four. After school, Sunil set out for the university campus to help his parents out at the shop. As he walked along a narrow lane that wound its way between vast, yellow fields of mustard, he whistled a tune from the latest Bollywood hit Baazigar. The cassette had arrived at the shop a few weeks back with the latest stock his father had ordered. And Sunil had listened to it incessantly till the movie itself had finally arrived in town to be screened at the small makeshift theatre rather grandly called Sri Hanuman Talkies. The theatre essentially consisted of a projection screen and a few rows of plastic chairs and was run in a pretty ad hoc manner by its owner, Surajchand chacha. Tickets were priced at Rs.15 each (The usual price was ten rupees, but this movie commanded a premium because it was a box-office hit). Sunil had been delighted to have bagged front-row seats for the movie, but minutes before the movie started, people started streaming in, bringing their own chairs. Surajchand chacha was happy to let them in as long as they bought a ticket, and by the time the movie had started, there were

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three new rows of seats in front of Sunil, blocking his view of his favourite star, Shahrukh Khan. Sunil was shaking his head at the memory of this grave injustice, when he spotted a familiar figure wheeling a cycle up on the road ahead. He hurried to catch up. “Vikas bhaiyya, what are you doing here?” “Sunil!” Vikas said. “You gave me a start!” Sunil was happy to note Vikas still remembered his name. “I had just come up here to do some reading,” Vikas said. “But then, it looks like my cycle tyre had a puncture. All the air’s gone.” Sunil wondered why he had to come all the way out here to the fields to read when he had the entire campus to do it. But he kept silent. “Are you going to your shop?” Vikas asked. “Then, you’re just the person I wanted to meet.” With his free hand, he pulled out a sheet of paper. “I’d been planning to come to the shop for a mixtape, but now that you’re here, can I just give you the list?” Sunil took the list and looked at it. “Forty rupees for an empty cassette, and fifteen rupees for recording,” he said. “The forty rupees for the cassette have to be paid in advance.”

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