There is a particular kind of change that happens to children in a lane like that one — not the sudden change of a single dramatic afternoon, but the slow, accumulating change of a hundred ordinary ones, so gradual that nobody inside the household notices it happening until, one day, they look up from some small task and realize the child they remember has quietly gone somewhere and been replaced by someone taller, graver, and considerably more complicated.
By the time three more years had folded themselves into the lane’s unhurried calendar of pujas and monsoons and school terms, Debabrata Basu was eighteen and enrolled at Presidency College, a fact his father mentioned to every visitor within the first five minutes of any conversation with a pride he made no effort whatsoever to disguise.
Kamala Sengupta was fifteen, and had grown into precisely the kind of quiet, observant young woman her childhood self had promised — a girl who still preferred watching a room to being watched by it, but who had begun, in the last year or so, to notice that being watched by one particular person in that room was not, in fact, an entirely unwelcome development.
Arun, at thirteen, remained recognizably himself in every essential particular — still constitutionally incapable of an afternoon nap, still able to talk a sweet-seller out of a free sandesh with alarming reliability, still the loudest and most enthusiastically wrong voice in any argument he had not adequately researched.
But something in him, too, had begun, almost without his own notice, to shift.
He noticed it first, oddly enough, on an ordinary Tuesday in the middle of the school term, over something as unremarkable as a spelling test.
“You got a hundred,” Uma said, staring at the paper in her hands with an expression of profound betrayal.
She was eleven now, sharp-tongued and sharper still in temper, and had spent the entire walk home from school composing a speech about the injustice of Miss Bhattacharya’s marking scheme, a speech that had been entirely derailed by the discovery, five minutes earlier, that Arun had achieved the single perfect score in a class of thirty-one.
“I told you I studied.”
“You never study.
You copy things out loud until you remember them by accident and call it studying.”
“That is studying, Uma.
It has always been studying.
You simply refuse to believe anything counts as effort unless it looks miserable.”
She scowled at him, and he found himself — not for the first time in recent months, though he had not yet paused to examine the pattern — unaccountably pleased by the scowl, in a way that made no particular sense given that it was, by any reasonable measure, directed squarely at him.
“Show me,” she said finally, thrusting her own paper at him — a respectable eighty-four, nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing that would have troubled her in the slightest a year earlier, when losing to Arun at anything had simply been the ordinary texture of being his friend, unremarkable as losing a race to Debabrata or an argument to Kamala.
“Show me how you remember the ones that trip everyone up.”
They sat together on the low wall by the tank for the better part of an hour, Arun explaining his private, chaotic system of remembering spellings by attaching absurd little stories to each troublesome word, Uma listening with far more patience than she generally extended to anyone, occasionally laughing outright at the sheer nonsense of his mnemonics, and it was somewhere in the middle of that hour — he could never afterward pinpoint the exact moment — that Arun became aware, with a small, startled internal lurch, that he had stopped thinking about spelling entirely and had begun, instead, simply watching the particular way sunlight moved through the loose strands of hair that had escaped Uma’s plait while she leaned over her paper, frowning in concentration.
He looked away immediately, disturbed by the thought in a way he did not yet have any vocabulary to explain even to himself, and spent the rest of the afternoon talking rather more than usual about nothing much at all, as boys of thirteen tend to do when they have stumbled, entirely by accident, onto a feeling several years ahead of their readiness to hold it.
Uma, for her part, noticed the shift too, though she processed it with considerably more irritation than Arun managed.
“He’s being strange,” she informed Kamala that evening, with the flat, accusatory certainty of a girl reporting a crime.
Kamala, who was fifteen and had recently begun to develop a rather more sophisticated theory about exactly why boys occasionally looked at girls as though they’d grown second heads, kept her expression admirably neutral.
“Strange how?”
“I don’t know.
Strange.
He used to just say whatever he was thinking.
Now he stops and thinks about it first, which is worse, because at least before I always knew exactly what nonsense was coming.”
“Maybe he’s simply growing up.”
“He’s not growing up, he’s thirteen, that’s not old enough to be anything except annoying.”
Kamala, who privately suspected that “thirteen” and “beginning to notice a particular girl in a way that made a boy self-conscious for the first time in his life” were rather more closely related than Uma currently understood, said nothing further on the subject, though she did smile, briefly and to herself, over the mending in her lap.
She had her own reasons, that particular season, to understand exactly what it felt like to notice someone differently than she had noticed them the year before.
Debabrata had begun coming home from Presidency College in the evenings with his shirt collar slightly askew and his satchel full of books whose weight visibly strained his shoulder, full of new opinions about everything from constitutional law to the correct pronunciation of Latin phrases he had only that week learned to use, and Kamala had begun — she could not have said exactly when it started — waiting for the particular hour of the evening when the rust-coloured gate would open and he would come through it, tired and talking too fast and utterly, entirely himself.
It was not, she told herself firmly, anything so foolish as the sort of thing that happened in the Bengali novels her mother disapproved of her reading.
Debabrata was Deba-da.
He had taught her to skip stones and covered for her when she broke a vase at nine years old and once, memorably, carried her home on his back for a full mile when she’d sprained her ankle chasing Arun and Uma through the maidan.
He was, by every measure that had ever mattered before this year, simply family.
And yet.
There was a particular evening, in the last golden light before the monsoon broke, when Debabrata came through the gate later than usual, flushed with the pleasure of having won some minor debate at college, and found Kamala sitting alone on the veranda steps with a book she was not reading, and instead of continuing past her into the house, as he would have done without a second thought a year earlier, he stopped.
“You’re not reading that,” he said, dropping down onto the step beside her with the easy, unthinking closeness that had never once, in eighteen years, required a second thought from either of them — and yet, this particular evening, required rather more of one than usual, from both.
“I’m resting my eyes.”
“You’ve been resting your eyes on the same page for the last twenty minutes.
I watched you not turn it from the gate.”
“Were you watching me from the gate, Deba-da, or were you simply standing there for twenty minutes composing your entrance?”
He laughed — a real, unguarded laugh, the kind that had, over the years, become one of Kamala’s favourite sounds in the entire lane — and told her, in considerable and self-mocking detail, about the debate he’d won that afternoon, and she listened with the particular attention she reserved only for him, and neither of them said anything at all about the fact that he had sat rather closer than strictly necessary, or that she had not moved away, or that when Saroj Bala called them both in for the evening meal a half hour later, both of them started slightly, as though surfacing from somewhere they had not quite realized they’d gone. Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
It was Saroj Bala, in fact, who first said the thing aloud that had been forming, unspoken, in both households for some time.
“They would suit each other,” she said to Bidhu Ma one evening, the two women sitting together on the low platform under the mango tree while the men argued, as they always did, about something in the newspaper, and the four children’s voices drifted from somewhere near the tank.
“Kamala and Debabrata.
I have thought it for some time now, and I think you have thought it too, and I think we have both been too cautious to say it plainly.”
Bidhu Ma, who was rarely accused of excessive caution about anything, allowed herself a small, satisfied smile.
“I have thought it since they were children skipping stones together, Saroj-di.
I simply assumed you would be the one to say it first, being the more sensible of the two of us.”
“They are still young.”
“Kamala is fifteen.
Girls are married at fifteen in half the households in this city, and half of those marriages are considerably worse matches than a boy who has known her since she was born and has never once, in eighteen years, given anyone a single reason for concern.”
“Two more years,” Saroj Bala said, with the particular firmness she brought to any decision she had already made and simply preferred to announce slowly.
“Let him finish enough of his studies to be settled in some direction.
Let her grow a little more before we ask her to run a household.
But yes — I think, when the time comes, we will find that neither family needs to look very far at all.”
It was, when it finally reached the ears of the household through the entirely unreliable but generally accurate channel of servants’ gossip, news that surprised precisely nobody — least of all Debabrata and Kamala themselves, who had each independently begun, in the quiet of their own thoughts, to suspect exactly the same thing, and who received the confirmation, when it eventually came, not with the shock of discovery but with the settled, grateful relief of two people being told, at last, that a thing they had both been hoping for was also a thing they were finally, formally, allowed to hope for.
Arun and Uma, for their part, remained blissfully, obliviously behind both sets of parents in matters of self-understanding, as thirteen and eleven generally are behind fifteen and eighteen — though the shift between them continued its slow, invisible work all the same, in a hundred small moments neither of them yet had the vocabulary to name.
In the way Arun had begun, without quite deciding to, saving her the last piece of any sweet he was given.
In the way Uma had begun, without quite admitting it even to herself, to feel a small, sharp flicker of something unpleasant whenever a boy from the neighbouring lane lingered too long near their group at the maidan, a flicker she would have angrily denied was jealousy if anyone had been unwise enough to suggest it.
Kamala, watching the two of them from the vantage point of her own newly-permitted courtship, thought sometimes that she could see, with the clarity of someone standing just slightly further down a road, exactly where the two of them were headed — and said nothing about it to either, understanding, with the particular wisdom that comes from having very recently walked the same stretch of road herself, that some things could not be hurried, and were, in any case, entirely lovelier for being allowed to arrive in their own unhurried time.
She was right, as it happened, about almost everything except the timing.
She could not have known, watching Arun save Uma the last piece of sandesh on an ordinary evening under the mango tree, exactly how much time the two of them would eventually be given — nor how much of it, one day, would be taken away.