[Chapter 2] The Telescope

What was hidden in the loft?

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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.

He opened one eye weakly, and the calendar of his room zoomed in. A red circle flickered uncomfortably on 21st of January. Something burst in his stomach. His exams were due in less than a month.

He groaned, shutting his eyes tight. He pulled the quilt over his face, blocking the sun. Ten subjects’ unwritten assignments had waited in his schoolbag for a week. If only he could lie like this forever – no school, no PTMs, no homework, no exams…

“Taran, it is ten already – I am leaving for D-Mart, otherwise all the good veggies will be gone. It is the only place where the prices are still reasonable. My release meeting will start at one, I have to get back before that—”

She was at the door – good that he had hidden the book.

“I have already ordered a replacement for the mixer-grinder from the Amazon Big Billion Days sale. No use getting it repaired again. Use the foldable ladder and clear your room’s loft; there is no more space left in the kitchen to keep that old thing. Get this done by the time I am back, okay?”

Taran nodded groggily, though he was neither tired nor sleepy. A secret excitement had flared at the invocation of ‘release meeting’ – nobody would disturb him today. She had apparently forgotten about his looming exams. And now so had he.

The main door slammed.

Taran felt his blood rush. Free at last. He looked up at the loft once. The silver door handle hung riddled with spiderweb from the slightly ajar rectangular door. Darkness lived inside. It might not be the worst idea to find what lay beyond.

After a hurried trip to the bathroom and gorging on bread-butter in the kitchen, Taran lugged the foldable ladder from the store-room. He opened it swiftly; the lock clicked in place - anchoring its legs firmly in an inverted V.

The room grew smaller as he escaped away to the silver handle. The door flung open with a whirl of dust which left him coughing. He started going through the hoard – dismembered toys, canvas bags, broken cassettes, old comic books… Whose stuff is all this? He adjusted the broken mixer-grinder in the junk, and tossed a couple of interesting looking comics to his bed down below like frisbees – this is fun.

A large rectangular box lay below the comics. He pulled, but it didn’t budge. He had to use both his hands and put his back into it for it to give in. It was a khaki carton box taped at the edges and centre carefully. A hand-written note with a black sketch-pen said:

ES 127mm/1900mm Maksutov OTA

Taran pulled it down, letting gravity do its work. The tape was sliced through with a kitchen knife. Among the white Styrofoam props, lay metal tubes and lenses. A user manual declared that it was a telescope!

Back in the stash behind his bed, on the cover of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking smiled.

Taran read through the manual. Step by step, he assembled the machine. The clock scurried round as he understood where the focuser, the eyepiece and the finderscope went. The parts were not new. They had been well-cared for by someone once. He shifted it to the balcony of his room.

The city below him lay forgotten in smog. A cerulean sky waited. The black optical tube sat ready on the top of an EQ3 mount standing on lanky tripod legs. He pointed the optical tube to the top of the far building of Tundra Towers. Then he immersed his head into the eyepiece; a circle of blurry shapes flickered at his retina. He fiddled with the focuser until the world came into clarity. A lone eagle sharpened his curved beak on the pediment. He felt like an intruder. The eagle didn’t know he existed; it was unaware of the majesty of its black and white crest shimmering in the December sun, miles away in a boy’s keen eye. The eagle just existed, owning its moment in the sun.

He was shaken out of his reverie by a ding in the background. Mom was at the front door. He quickly hid the telescope under the covers of the unused cross trainer in the balcony. With a well-aimed dart, he shoved the crumpled box back in the loft and rushed out to the door. Mom left the grocery bags in the foyer and went into her room to join her meeting. She was late.

Taran could not take the risk with Mom present in the house. He took out the paperback and waited for night to fall.

Mom had gone to sleep exhausted. He stole to the balcony, and looked out. The north breeze hugged him tightly, flattening his pyjamas against his skin. Taran let it ruffle his hair, sing in his ear its cold song. He was busy uncovering the telescope.

He watched some more buildings for a while. Then the teeming city below beckoned to him.

From a hundred and fifty feet, the Mahatma Gandhi Road always seemed slow. Taran had often looked at the tiny bikes and cars and imagined their lives. Stuck perennially in jams, unaware of his interest, they had existed. He pointed the telescope to the road and focused.

A delivery boy waited in jam. A gaunt face, a red safety helmet, a blue uniform – he sat lower than most on his rented electric Yulu bike. Behind him sat a food order in a heat-insulated box. His lips were stretched in an incessant grin, his cheeks hollowed out. Taran realised why delivery boys always looked so similar. They had all worn the same expression.

The traffic started to move, and Taran frantically moved his optical tube manually but the distance was too great and the magnification too high. He could not find him again.

Taran felt a wave of anger, but remembered something about fine motion controls in the user manual. Flicking on his faithful torch, he combed it again. He turned the black flexible shafts of the fine motion controls but nothing moved. He tried locking the coarse motion controls, and voila, the fine motion controls started to work!

His eyelids started to get heavy with the strain. Taran stowed away the telescope, yawned and tucked himself to bed. The calendar stared at him impassively. He felt a pang of guilt. Then he hid into the depths of the quilt, exhausted with his labor, and shut his eyes. He fell asleep with faces of delivery men floating in a montage, all wearing the same pain as that boy.

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