'No? I hope you know the name of the planet we are living on.'
The audience laughs.
'Earth,' I reply sullenly.
'Good. So you do know the name of a planet. OK, are you ready for question number three?'
'Ready,' I reply.
'OK. Here is question number three. Which is the smallest planet in our solar system? Is it a) Pluto, b) Mars, c) Neptune or d) Mercury?'
A sound escapes my lips even before the music can commence, and it is 'Meow!'
'Excuse me?' says Prem Kumar in astonishment. 'What did you say? For a moment I thought I heard a meow.'
'What I said was "A".'
'A?'
'Yes. The answer is A. Pluto.'
'Are you absolutely, one hundred per cent sure that it is A?'
'Yes.'
There is a crescendo of drums. The correct answer flashes.
'Absolutely, one hundred per cent correct! Pluto is indeed the smallest planet in our solar system.
Mr Thomas, you have just won five thousand rupees!'
The audience are impressed with my general knowledge. Some people stand up and clap.
But Smita is still silent.
A THOUGHT FOR THE CRIPPLED
The sun seems weaker, the birds less chirpy, the air more polluted, the sky a shade darker.
When you have been plucked from a beautiful big bungalow, with a lovely sunlit garden, and dumped in a crumbling house where you are forced to live in a crowded dormitory with dozens of other kids, I suppose you do acquire a somewhat jaundiced view of life.
And it doesn't help if you actually have jaundice. Jaundice is a pretty uncomfortable disease, but it has one very good outcome. You are removed from the stuffy dormitory and put in a room all by yourself. It is a huge room with a metal bed and green curtains. It is called the isolation ward.
I have been confined to bed for the last two weeks. But it seems as if I have been sick ever since they picked me up from the church after Father Timothy's death. They didn't come for me in a jeep with a flashing red light. They came in a blue van with wire-meshed windows. Like the type they use to round up stray dogs. Except this one was for rounding up stray boys. If I had been younger they would probably have sent me to an adoption home and promptly put me up for sale. But since I was eight years old, I was sent to the Delhi Juvenile Home for Boys, in Turkman Gate.
The Juvenile Home has a capacity of seventy-five, and a juvenile population of one hundred and fifty. It is cramped, noisy and dirty. It has just two toilets with leaky washbasins and filthy latrines. Rats scurry through its hallways and kitchen. It has a classroom with ramshackle desks and a cracked blackboard. And teachers who haven't taught in years. It has a sports ground where grass grows as tall as wickets and where, if you are not careful, you can graze yourself against stones the size of footballs. There is a sports instructor in crisp white cotton bush shirt and knife-edge pressed trousers. He keeps cricket and badminton equipment in a nice glass case, but never allows us to touch it. The mess hall is a large room with cheap flooring and long wooden tables.
But the surly head cook sells the meat and chicken that is meant for us to restaurants, and feeds us a daily diet of vegetable stew and thick, blackened chapattis. He picks his nose constantly and scolds anyone who asks for more. The warden, Mr Agnihotri, is a kind, elderly man who wears starched kurta pyjamas made of khadi cotton cloth, but we all know that the real power is wielded by his deputy, Mr Gupta, nicknamed the Terror of Turkman Gate. He is the worst of the lot, a short, hairy man who smells of leather and chews paan all day. He wears two thick gold chains around his neck which jangle when he walks, and carries a short bamboo cane with which he whacks us whenever he feels like it. There are dark rumours that he calls boys to his room late at night, but nobody will discuss it. We want to talk about the good things. Like being allowed to watch television in the common room for two hours every evening. We huddle around the twenty-one-inch Dyanora TV and watch Hindi film songs on Channel V and middle-class soaps on Doordarshan. We especially like watching the films on Sunday.
These films are about a fantasy world. A world in which kids have mothers and fathers, and birthdays. A world in which they live in huge houses, drive in huge cars and get huge presents.
We saw this fantasy world, but we never got carried away by it. We knew we could never have a life like Amitabh Bachchan's or Shahrukh Khan's. The most we could aspire to was to become one of those who held power over us. So whenever the teacher asked us, 'What do you want to become when you grow up?' no one said pilot or prime minister or banker or actor. We said cook or cleaner or sports teacher or, at the very best, warden. The Juvenile Home diminished us in our own eyes.
