Chapter 4: Hrithik

# Chapter 4: Hrithik

## The Misal Became a Habit

I went back the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.

The excuse was the misal. The misal was, objectively, excellent — Saudagar-kaka's tarri had the specific heat profile that distinguished a Satara misal from a Pune misal, which was the heat that built slowly, that started at the back of the tongue and moved forward over thirty seconds until the entire mouth was in a state of controlled emergency, the kind of heat that did not attack but persuaded, that did not burn but convinced. A Pune misal punched you. A Satara misal had a conversation with you. The conversation ended with your forehead sweating and your hand reaching for the buttermilk, but it was a conversation nonetheless.

The excuse was the misal, but the reason was the counter. The counter was where Tanvi stood. The counter was where the three feet of Formica-edged distance existed — the distance that was too far for touching and too close for pretending, the distance that produced a specific quality of interaction that was different from the interaction you had with someone across a room or across a phone line or across a compound wall. Three feet was intimate without being intimate. Three feet was close enough to see the small scar on her left eyebrow — the scar from Standard 7, when she had fallen from the mango tree we were not supposed to climb and had hit the compound wall on the way down and had cried, not from pain but from the frustration of a twelve-year-old girl whose body had betrayed her at the exact moment when she was trying to prove that she could climb higher than me.

I had not known what to do when she cried. I was twelve. Twelve-year-old boys in Satara did not have a protocol for girls crying — the protocol that existed was the protocol that boys learned from Bollywood, which was to offer a handkerchief, except that I did not carry a handkerchief because I was twelve and the concept of handkerchief-readiness was approximately five years away from entering my consciousness. So I had done the thing that twelve-year-old boys did when they had no protocol: I had stood there, paralysed, useless, while Tanvi's mother ran from the Kulkarni house with Dettol and cotton and the specific urgency of a woman whose daughter was bleeding and whose fury at the mango tree was expressed in a stream of Marathi that included the words zhad, buddi, and a suggestion about what she would do to the mango tree that was anatomically impossible but emotionally satisfying.

The scar had healed. The scar was a thin white line now, barely visible, the kind of scar that you would not notice unless you had been present for its creation and unless you had spent the subsequent eleven years cataloguing the face it lived on with the attention to detail of a man compiling an encyclopaedia of a single subject.

Day four of the misal habit. Tuesday again. The gap-period lull. The retired teacher with the Pudhari. The counter. Three feet.

"Same order?" Tanvi asked.

"Same order."

She wrote it on the pad. The writing was unnecessary and we both knew it was unnecessary and neither of us mentioned its unnecessariness because the writing was a ritual and rituals were not judged by their efficiency but by their function, and the function of the writing was to give Tanvi's hand something to do while we stood three feet apart and attempted to have a conversation that was not about misal.

"How are the boys?" she asked. The boys were my cricket students. Tanvi asked about the boys every day, and I reported on the boys every day, and the boys had become the safe channel through which we communicated — the neutral territory that allowed us to talk without talking about the thing we were not talking about.

"Raju's cover drive is getting consistent. He's got the district U-16 trials next month."

"Raju — the left-handed one?"

"You remember."

"You mentioned him. Yesterday. And the day before." She looked up from the pad. The look was the look that contained the thing that the words did not contain — the acknowledgment that she was paying attention, that she was storing the details I provided, that the boys and the cricket and the cover drive were not just conversation but information that she was collecting about my life, the life that existed ten feet from hers across a compound wall but that she knew only through the compound wall broadcasting network and the misal counter.

"He's talented," I said. "Really talented. But the equipment situation is..."

"Bad?"

"Creative. The pads are held together with electrical tape. The batting gloves are from 2018. The stumps are aluminium because the wooden ones kept getting stolen."

"What do you need?"

The question was practical, not sympathetic. Tanvi's voice when she asked what do you need was the voice of a hotel management graduate who had spent three years learning that problems were not things to feel about but things to solve, and that the distance between a problem and a solution was usually a budget and a plan.

"A proper kit. Balls — not tennis balls, proper leather balls. The SG ones cost ₹900 each. We go through six a month. Pads, gloves, a proper batting helmet — one of the boys was playing without a helmet last week and the ball hit his ear. No injury, but..."

"But next time."

"Next time."

She was quiet for a moment. The quietness was not empty — it was full, the way a pot of water is full before the boil, the surface still but the interior in motion.

"How much? Total."

"For a basic kit? For twelve boys? Maybe forty, forty-five thousand."

"And you have?"

"The Zilla Parishad gives us eight thousand a year for sports. That covers the ground booking and the stumps. The rest comes from..." I paused. The rest came from my salary. The rest came from the ₹28,000-per-month assistant clerk salary that was supposed to cover my contribution to the household and my phone bill and my petrol and the occasional luxury of a shirt that was not the Zilla Parishad uniform. The rest came from the margins, from the gap between what I earned and what I needed, a gap that was not large enough for forty-five thousand rupees of cricket equipment.

"From you," Tanvi said. She did not say it as a question.

"Some of it."

"How much is some?"

I did not answer. The answer was an amount that would reveal the math of my life — the math that showed that a twenty-three-year-old assistant clerk in a district town spent a portion of his salary on cricket balls for boys who were not his sons and helmets for boys who were not his responsibility and that this spending was not rational by any accounting standard but was rational by the only standard that mattered, which was that Raju's cover drive deserved a proper ball and Manoj's head deserved a helmet and the gap between what these boys needed and what the system provided was a gap that I had decided, privately and without announcement, to stand in.

Tanvi looked at me across the three feet. The look lasted longer than the previous looks — three seconds, four seconds, the duration of a look that had moved past casual and into the territory of assessment, the territory where one person was measuring another against a standard that only they knew.

"The misal is coming," she said, and went to the kitchen.

I sat at the table by the window. The highway traffic moved. Shinde-kaka's goats were visible in the distance, beyond the petrol pump, grazing with the commitment of creatures whose daily schedule had not changed since before the highway existed.

Tanvi returned with the misal. Extra tarri, again. Saudagar-kaka's standing order.

She placed the plate. She did not leave immediately. She stood at the table, the pad in one hand, the other hand on the back of the chair across from me — the chair that was empty, the chair whose emptiness was a question.

"Hrithik."

"Yes?"

"My Baba." She paused. The pause was the kind of pause that preceded a sentence that had been rehearsed. "He's been collecting things. You know how he is. The garage is..." She stopped. Started again. "The garage is full. Not full like normal full. Full like you can't open the door full. Full like the neighbours are starting to talk full."

I knew Kulkarni-kaka was a collector. Everyone in Saraswati Colony knew. The collection had started as a hobby — old tools, mechanical parts, things from the hardware shops that closed when the big stores opened on the highway. But the collection had grown in the way that collections grew when the collecting was not about the objects but about the collecting itself — when the act of acquisition had become a need rather than a choice, when the garage had filled and the shed had filled and the extra room that used to be a guest room had filled and the filling had become the thing that Kulkarni-kaka did instead of the thing he used to do, which was talk and laugh and sit in the evening on the compound wall with Baba and discuss the cricket scores with the specific passion of two men for whom cricket was not a sport but a language.

"How bad?" I asked.

"He got trapped yesterday. In the garage. Went in to find something, and the pile shifted, and he couldn't get the door open. Aai found him after two hours. He was sitting on a broken washing machine, eating the biscuits he keeps in his shirt pocket."

The image — Kulkarni-kaka sitting on a broken washing machine in a garage so full of collected things that he could not exit, eating Parle-G biscuits from his shirt pocket with the calm acceptance of a man who had been swallowed by his own accumulation — was simultaneously funny and not funny, the way things were when they were close to the edge of something but had not yet crossed it.

"Is he okay?"

"Physically, yes. But Aai is scared. And Sachin..." She stopped at Sachin's name. The stop was brief but detectable — the momentary hesitation of a person who was about to say something about a family member and who was calculating how much to say. "Sachin doesn't want to deal with it. He says Baba is fine, it's just a hobby, leave him alone."

"And you think?"

"I think the garage door won't open. I think the neighbour aunties are counting the number of autorickshaws that Baba has parked in the yard — it's three, by the way, three autorickshaws that don't run and that he bought for the engines. I think Aai cried last Tuesday when she couldn't find the pressure cooker because it was under a pile of car batteries."

The pressure cooker. The pressure cooker whose whistles I heard through the compound wall every morning — three for tur dal, five for chana, seven for rajma. The pressure cooker that had gone missing under car batteries.

"What do you need?" I asked. The question was the same question she had asked me about the cricket kit — practical, not sympathetic.

"I need to clean out the garage. But it's not just the garage. It's the shed. And the guest room. And the yard. There's... Hrithik, there's a lot. Like, a van-load lot. Maybe two vans."

"And Kulkarni-kaka?"

"He doesn't want to let go of anything. He says everything has value. Everything can be fixed. Everything will be useful someday."

The someday. The someday that collectors lived in — the future tense that justified the present accumulation, the promise that the broken washing machine and the three non-functional autorickshaws and the car batteries under the pressure cooker would, at some unspecified future date, transform from junk into treasure, from burden into utility. The someday that never arrived because the definition of someday was that it was always one day away.

"I can help," I said.

The words were out before the internal committee had approved them. The committee — the committee that managed my interactions with Tanvi, the committee that had spent six years producing recommendations of caution and distance and the specific avoidance of any action that could be interpreted by Sachin Kulkarni as proximity — had not been consulted. The words had bypassed the committee entirely, emerging from the part of me that was not the cautious Hrithik, not the committee-governed Hrithik, but the Hrithik who had held out a mango and a salt shaker to a six-year-old girl and who had not consulted any committee before doing so.

"You'd do that?"

"It's a garage. I grew up in a hardware store. I know what things are worth and what things are..."

"Junk?"

"I was going to say surplus to current requirements."

She almost laughed. The almost-laugh was the cousin of my almost-smile — the expression that occurred when amusement surfaced but that stopped short of the full eruption because the full eruption required a surrender of control that neither of us was ready to make, not here, not at the misal counter, not with the retired teacher and the Pudhari as witnesses.

"When?" she asked.

"Saturday? I don't have practice on Saturday afternoons."

"Saturday." She said it like she was testing the word. Tasting it. Measuring whether the word could hold the weight of what Saturday would mean — Hrithik Patil in the Kulkarni garage, sorting through Kulkarni-kaka's collection, standing in the space where the compound wall's prohibition did not apply because the garage was on the other side of the house from the compound wall and because helping was different from visiting and because even Sachin, even Sachin with his Innova and his Ray-Bans and his talent for prohibition, could not object to a neighbour helping clean a garage.

Could he?

"Saturday," she confirmed. "I'll tell Aai. She'll make extra chai."

"I'm bringing my own gloves. Work gloves. The leather ones from the shop."

"You think you'll need them?"

"Your Baba has three non-functional autorickshaws and a pressure cooker buried under car batteries. I'm bringing the gloves."

She smiled. The full smile — not the almost-smile, not the controlled version, but the full, unedited, unmanaged smile that used her entire face and that I had not seen in six years because six years of compound-wall distance had limited our interactions to the edited versions of ourselves and the edited version of Tanvi's smile was a subset of the real thing, a photograph of a photograph, a reproduction that carried the shape but not the warmth.

The warmth was there now. In the smile. In the restaurant. In the three feet between us that had become, in the span of a Tuesday lunchtime conversation, something less than a distance and something more than an invitation.

The misal was getting cold. I ate the misal. The misal was, as always, excellent.

On Saturday, I would be in the Kulkarni garage with leather gloves and a twenty-three-year history of wanting to be wherever Tanvi was and a committee that had been overruled and a boy's resolve that had, for the first time in six years, been stronger than his shyness.

The extra tarri was perfect. Saudagar-kaka understood things.