The December breeze swept up Taran’s muffler. He shrank inwardly, the chill creeping up his fingertips. He trudged on with his school bag towards his Building IV of Prestige Howitzer, a township in the heart of Bangalore.
The elevator button was stiff-cold. It chimed up, then he entered a cocoon of humid human breath. It was full of noisy children of his neighbourhood – dressed up as elves for the Christmas season. Amid the jostling, someone called out to him – “Hey Taran, come with us to the terrace, we are having an Elves Day party!” Taran did not respond. He slid out at the fifteenth floor.
He was greeted with a Christmas tree that wore red and blue streamers, baubles and tassels with little Santas hanging from their branches for dear life. Even the doors in the hallway had caught the infectious festive season. Taran kept his head low, then stopped short in front of 1509 – a door which was as bare as the notebooks in his bag.
The door opened. Mom appeared for a brief moment – her hair awry and a bluetooth headset clasped to her head: she was in a meeting.
Taran shut the door. Mom was already back at her home office desk, anxiously gesticulating about ‘a database migration’ into the void in front of her.
Taran heaved the bag onto his bed. As if on cue, his intestines gave a rumble. He tiptoed to the refrigerator and took out the bread and the butter. Deftly he sliced the thick butter with the knife, and plastered meaty flakes on the bread. He put another slice on top and chewed a big hunk off its corner. His tongue loved finding the cold salty butter hidden in the depths of the soft crumb. He wolfed it down within a few seconds. Mom’s voice still floated from down the hall. The same fate met another pair of slices. A muted voice at the back of his mind pleaded for him to stop now, but his tongue was having too much fun. He could not stop. His hands had taken over.
Mom’s voice teetered to a stop. He frantically pushed the crate back into the fridge, and sped back into his room. Then he spread on the bed with a guilty stomach.
Mom dragged her feet into his room; eyes peeled on her phone. She tapped on its screen, and said, “Oh no, your PTM’s tomorrow afternoon, but I have a work meeting at that time – it is a release day.”
Taran was familiar with that term. She would be away in meetings for hours.
She called Dad, who was in Mumbai at a work event. “Dhruv, can you make it tomorrow by three for Taran’s PTM?”
He knew the answer would be a no, as it always was.
“That is simply great,” Taran said matter-of-factly.
His class teacher would single him out again – everyone would know that his parents hadn’t come.
She read the upturned smile on his face. “It is not that I don’t want to, I just can’t Taran. We need this job of mine – maintenance, school fees have just been hiked. I am sorry...”
Her eyes peeked tiredly from above hollows with streaks of white discoloration. Wrinkles flared outward from her temples, her pencil-thin brows knit together. Their gazes met.
He averted her eyes then, and a hint of redness suffused her cheeks. When he looked up again, she had gone.
The room had grown smaller. He looked around instinctively to latch onto something, anything – and found his bag. He took out the library paperback he had issued: A Brief History of Time – From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking. He started from ‘The Acknowledgements’.
Read chapter 2 in this series:
[Chapter 2] The Telescope
![[Chapter 2] The Telescope](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!pRLA!,w_280,h_280,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F59ab19d0-d693-4ac8-b0da-8ae13fdc18e8_1536x1024.png)
Saturday sun sneaked in, waking Taran up. His yawning hands found the paperback under the quilt where he had been reading it with a torch, and instinctively tossed it into the narrow recess between the wall and the back of his bed. Mom better not find it.