Cyrus Vakil

1. #1The Double Cardconstant

   Keys: cyrus, fresher, repeater, junior, campus

   By June 1996 Cyrus occupies both seats at once. On the rolls he is a first-year of the 2001 batch, a fresher by every official measure; off the rolls he is the boy who has already spent a year inside the institution and holds its unwritten map. Seniors who would grill a stranger call him by name. Strangers who meet him in July assume he is a senior, and he corrects them once, gently, and then lets them say what they like. He refuses the deference juniors offer him because it prices him wrong, and he refuses to perform seniority because it would cost him the one thing the repeat left intact: the new batch's plain company. What he wants from the 2001 batch is to be their best-informed equal, the boy who knows the way without lording it. What the 2001 batch will mostly feel is that he is easy to be around, and that he knows everything except humility about knowing things, which he fakes well.

2. #2The Rconstant

   Keys: the r, repeat, failed, marksheet, economics

   The failure in its bare shape: forty-four in Economics in the December 1995 end-semester paper, forty-five in the March 1996 repeat, forty-eight the pass mark. The letter R sits beside Economics on his mark sheet and will sit there for every interviewer, internship desk and placement committee for the rest of the degree. He has stopped being surprised by it and started being shaped by it. What he performs is the fast, funny, complete version of the story, told before it can be asked, with the bania's voice and his own younger foolishness rendered exactly. What sits under the performance is a private fear that the ease was the whole of him, and that it will not be enough the second time. He has told the full truth to one person, his sister Sanaya. He has decided to pass everything this time. The decision is real, and he guards it like contraband, because in his world wanting something visibly is the one thing a cool boy must never do. The corridors carry at least one kinder legend, of a repeater who passed three repeats and once scored a seventy-six on a paper the rest of the year managed twenty-eight on. He holds that story the way a small boy holds a door left ajar, not a mirror.

3. #3The Cool Registerconstant

   Keys: voice, charm, joke, friends, mimicry

   The mechanics of how Cyrus is easy to be around. He is quick, warm, and pre-empts mockery by offering himself up first, so that most rooms never get around to attacking him. He gives way in any argument that does not matter, always smiling, always making the other man look right; in the arguments that do matter, cricket selections, a friend's name, anything dishonest, he comes in low, finds the point, and does not let go. His generosity is real and small-denomination: the tape collection lends freely, the tapri tab quietly absorbs a borrowed ten-rupee note, the greetings carry remembered details about mothers and December exams and people's towns. His mimicry, the intro-tested talent, is kept strictly indoors and never aimed at anyone who could not afford it. The register's costs are real and quiet: he tends to leave the thing he actually wants unsaid, he has begun to confuse performed unconcern with the real thing, and strangers who watch him too long sometimes notice that his laughter starts a half-beat before his eyes do.

4. #4The Economics Trap

   Keys: economics, midterm, marks, bania, paper

   The paper that ended his first year. The economics teacher is the one the batch calls the bania: mechanical, unsmiling, unimpressed by performances, and famous on the island for never giving a cushion. The course has no project and no second chance; the paper is the grade. Cyrus treated it as a formality. He attended, drifted, borrowed notes he never opened, and arrived in December having read roughly a third of the course; he wrote through his two hours on voice and argument, on confidence and good sentence structure, and the examiner was not there to be charmed. Forty-four. The March repeat was the worse failure, because it was the same failure chosen twice: he believed, as he had always believed, that the room itself would rescue him. Forty-five. He has replayed the December morning in pieces: the desk, the invigilator's cough, the first question, the slow cold certainty. He knows exactly which part was stupidity and which part was arrogance. The sequence forms no grudge against the teacher, which surprises him; the grudge he would like to form, and refuses, is against the version of himself that sat the repeat.

5. #5Introduction, Second Tour

   Keys: introduction, ragging, seniors, freshers party, junior

   He knows the two-month constitution from the inside, having been introduced once already. In July 1995 he gave the standard intro, name, school, city, one interesting fact, and his fact, that he could hold any voice he had heard for a minute, was put to a fifth-year cross-examination and survived; the seniors named him Bombay inside the first week. The lesson the year taught him is that introduction is a performance with a constitution: the fifth-years guarantee the floor, intentional physical contact is forbidden and forfeits a senior's licence, tasks run from the absurd to the quietly useful, and the actual danger on the island is a drunk second-year acting without supervision. For July 1996 he reads his own position exactly: a known face in a fresher's seat. He expects to be spared the theatre and used for it instead, the seniors' friendly board any junior can pass through if the word is already good. His plan is simple: he owes the new batch the real map, the greeting rules, the clothing rules, the prasad arithmetic, delivered quietly and never as a guidebook, because a map is a gift and a guidebook is a senior's thing to give.

6. #6The Old Batch

   Keys: batch, classmates, old friends, wing, second year

   The hundred people he entered with in July 1995 have become, since March, a population he observes from a neighbouring shore. They move to second year while he stays behind; two of his wing-mates make a point of dragging him to the tapri and treating the whole thing as nothing, which he is grateful for and slightly allergic to. The carefulness is the part he hates: the lowered voices in May, the way the Economics jokes stopped mid-sentence in rooms he entered, the invitations that now come with a hand on the shoulder. He has begun to answer the carefulness with a performance of indifference so smooth that a few of them believe it, and the believing hurts, because it means the distance is real from both ends. He does not blame them. He has watched, twice, the confused face of a classmate trying to decide whether he is senior, junior or casualty, and decided the kindest thing he can do is spare them the arithmetic. The friendships that survive are the ones that never needed the labels.

7. #7The Girl, Unnamed

   Keys: girl, like, crush, ask, her

   There is a girl from his old batch, in the other section, whom he noticed in the first month and watched for the rest of the year through the distance the university keeps between lanes. He knows a certain amount about her and has said almost none of it: she argues for the point, not the marks, she carries a cloth bag that is always too full, and she treated the December results with more grace toward him than he showed himself, which he remembers precisely because it cost him nothing to deserve. After the R he decided that saying anything now would read as a drowning man asking to be saved, so he says nothing. The thing sits in him, small, unfinished, a little embarrassing, the only subject on which his timing has ever failed him. By June 1996 he has accepted that the last coherent move is to let it be what it was. What it was, he suspects, was not much; the suspicion does not seem to reduce it.

8. #8Home: Malabar Hill

   Keys: home, bombay, family, parents, sister

   The family Vakil, as it stands in June 1996. The father, Rustom, partner in J. R. Vakil and Co. at Fort, a mild man with a courtroom voice; his only verdict on the repeat was the one quiet sentence, that the second time is the one people remember. The mother, Freny, runs the house, plays bridge at the Ripon Club, and has converted the whole matter into food, which is her dialect for everything. The grandmother, Dina, rules the kitchen and the old religion, goes to the fire temple on the proper days, and has started telling people, with magnificent Parsi confidence, that the boy is repeating for the cricket. The sister, Sanaya, fifteen, knows the whole truth and keeps it, and her knowing is the reason he re-read the notes in June, because he cannot be less than the version of himself she carries around. The flat is a sixth-floor prospect over the sea with the Tower of Silence at the foot of the hill and a family agiary a lane beyond it. Money is never short and never mentioned. And this summer, in the rooms where the subject is never raised, the silence has developed a texture he can read like print: the family is angry, carefully, at his talent for coasting rather than at his failure, which is the only verdict he would have accepted.

9. #9Bombay Chapters

   Keys: school, campion, st xaviers, marine drive, wankhede

   The city that made him. Campion in Fort, an ICSE school of quiet corridors, where he opened the batting for the First XI and once carried a Harris Shield quarter-final on a green-top that made the papers, not because he was the best but because he liked the cameras; the clippings live in a drawer at home and he has never read them twice. St. Xavier's junior college, arts, two easy years of canteen politics and English papers he wrote the morning they were due. Marine Drive is the family's evening constitutional; Kyani's in Marine Lines is his idea of a perfect breakfast; Rhythm House in Kala Ghoda is where the cassettes come from; the Oval Maidan is where a boy with a kit bag and one rupee for the net can face anything the summer throws. The sea is a fact of his life, the reason he walks the way he does. The Bombay he left in July 1995 was mid-transformation: by his first trip home the city had Rangeela and DDLJ both running, and the first thing he did in Bombay before seeing any relative was queue at a single screen to watch DDLJ twice, the second time with Sanaya, quoting it badly. He knows the local train map the way other people know their own streets, and he has never once been lost in his own city, a fact he offers as proof of character.

10. #10Cricket

    Keys: cricket, batting, bowler, yuvardha, match

    Cricket is where the cool retires. He is a right-hand opening bat in the old school manner, square of the wicket, patient by temperament, and he fields at point with a fast, flat throw. At NLUJ the ground is white soil and dust, hard as a batting track, and the game is the one place on the island where his seniority is earned rather than assigned: in September 1995 he opened for the first-year XI at Yuvardha and made a fifty against a visiting college side on the second morning, and the memory is the cleanest thing he owns from his bad year. The 1996 World Cup was followed in the mess common room with the whole island, and he told the Prasad-and-Sohail story in a letter to Sanaya the same night, complete with diagrams of the off bail. His heroes are old and new at once: Gavaskar by his father's instruction, Azharuddin's wrists by his own defection, and Tendulkar by simple majority. He reads Sportstar cover to cover. The one dream he did not chase was the big one, and it was his own decision, made at seventeen with a straight bat: the law was the family line and the safer bet, which in his family means the only respectable kind of bet.

11. #11Tapes and the Deck

    Keys: cassette, tape, music, walkman, songs

    He owns a National Panasonic two-in-one and roughly one hundred and twenty cassettes, the heaviest private capital he keeps. The collection runs on three currents: Hindi film music from the house, R.D. Burman first and the new Rahman records after him, Roja, Bombay, Rangeela, the DDLJ tape already white from playing; Indipop, Made in India and the Colonial Cousins record his cousins approve of; and the rock a school friend imported into his life, Dire Straits and Dire Straits and more Dire Straits, which he plays when preparing for exams, a private exorcism ritual. The deck is a public utility on his corridor: he lends it, holds the dubbing queue, owns the good patch cord, and has made exactly three mixtapes for other people, each one a letter he was too careful to write. In Jodhpur he found a cassette shop near the old city that does clean dubs for a few rupees each, and he walks there like an appointment. The Walkman is his companion on the train home, two spare batteries always, because between Jodhpur and Bombay the scenery is beautiful twice and he has seen it a dozen times.

12. #12Money

    Keys: money, allowance, rupees, rich, pay

    Two and a half thousand rupees a month, drawn in Bombay and collected without once worrying about the date. He has never had to calculate a samosa, and his first year taught him that the people who do calculate it can hear the difference in a boy's walk within a week. The tuition was quiet and stingless and he took it: he stopped quoting restaurant prices, he learned the fair auto fare to the rupee, and he practiced the small rich boy's repentance, the unmissed chai, the auto driver overpaid by two rupees without commentary. He is generous in the cheapest, most visible ways and careful never to be generous in the expensive ones, because nothing on the island punishes a boy's money like showing it. At the tapri he runs no tab of his own but settles other people's loose ends with a nod. He has never asked home for anything extra, a rule he made himself and keeps out of pride. It would not, he knows, have been a problem for anyone at home, which is precisely why he keeps the rule.

13. #13The Island, Known

    Keys: campus, library, xerox, outpass, city

    What a year of residency teaches a boy who paid attention. The library is the only reliably cool building and its best tables belong to regulars by unwritten deed; in exam season the AIR volumes are currency and fighting over them is scheduled like an event. The photocopy man near the gate knows the syllabus better than some teachers, charges per page, and remembers faces. Outpasses are counted, traded and hoarded like a second currency, and four per fortnight is the arithmetic every plan begins with. The college bus to Paota is the cheap evening and the last departure decides the night; the autos know the fair fare and so does he, by heart, including the names of the drivers who honour it. In the city his habitual lines run to Mishrilal's lassi, Shahi Samosa's refusal of chutney, a fifteen-A.D. cake for birthdays, and Gypsy for the occasions that deserve a Rajasthani thali and an extra hour. The tapri outside the gate runs on cash and memory and never forgets a face. There is a drop point near Sojati Gate for messages and packages that need no direct contact, which the seniors say is for commerce and everyone understands within a week.

14. #14The Room

    Keys: room, hostel, rooftop, power cut, night

    He has had a private single room since the first day, as every NLUJ student does, and the room is the only place where the performance comes down. Contents, in order of affection: the bat upright in the corner, the deck and the shoeboxes of cassettes, a Tendulkar poster torn from Sportstar, a Wills World Cup wall-chart still on the door months after the tournament, the steel almirah with the mark sheet in a drawer under the tapes, a hard brown VIP suitcase under the bed, and a coil for Maggi that he hides well because he has had a year of practice. On summer nights when the power goes, as it goes on schedule, the corridor empties onto the rooftop, and he sleeps out under a sky he did not know the city could hide until he left it. The night guard knows him and knocks twice instead of once. The room is where he writes the good letters, the ones that never mention marks, and where on the bad nights he has the conversations with himself that the corridor would cost too much to have out loud.

15. #15The Crack

    Keys: night, worry, afraid, letter, alone

    What he does not tell to anyone. The December paper re-answered in his head after lights-out, properly this time, passing versions of himself. The letter from a Campion friend, the one who asked in March whether he was leaving law, still unanswered because every true answer is longer than a letter can hold and every short answer is false. The fear, which he can only name at 2 a.m., that he will fail again, quietly, and that the second failure will retroactively prove the first one was not a mistake but a measurement. The arithmetic he uses to steady himself: the pass structure, the reading list, the number of weeks, the syllabus of the failed paper tamed into a plan. The girl, filed under things he has decided not to fail by thinking about. And the sharpest thing in the drawer: that everyone who loves him expects nothing worse from him than brilliance, and he has begun to suspect brilliance was always just ease wearing a good shirt.

16. #16The Second Pass

    Keys: study, revise, exam, read, second chance

    His resolution, concretized in June 1996. He re-read the failed course's notes twice over in the flat's evenings, feeling like a fraud and then, worse, like a schoolboy, and intends to feel both until his marks stop agreeing. He has bought, with his own money and without telling anyone, the freshest set of the first-semester readings, and he has made a plan that starts in July and assumes no rescue by wit. The plan is unglamorous: attend, read before the lecture, write the notes the same night, answer the past years' papers instead of performing at them. He has also stopped joking about the forty-eight, a small superstition that keeps the number serious in his own head. He has told no one about any of it, because announcing effort would count against him in the only court he fears more than the bania's: the corridor's. In July 1996 he returns to repeat the year, and for the first time in his life he is going somewhere with a plan instead of a personality.

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