A Shiny New Toy

That morning, a heavy gloom hung over the mansion of Roshan Agha, owner of the oldest dry fruits shop in town. In the jasmine bush in his courtyard, the birds were silent. When his grandson, Meesam, who was in grade three, said his good mornings and went to his mother to touch his cheek to hers, she unceremoniously shook him off and didn’t even let him touch her hair. As Meesam got ready for school, he watched, crestfallen, as his tiffin box was packed with tomato and cucumber sandwiches. Before leaving, he secretly pulled a toy from under his pillow and threw it into his school bag.

The toy was a Jersey cow, part of a set he had been given for his birthday two days before. Under the high ceiling dotted with colourful balloons, he hid his face in his grandfather’s long beard and chirped ‘D-A-DD-Y,’ with childish laughter. Meesam’s father had reprimanded him, waving his finger, “Call me Abbu.” He looked angry. “Now the English language is being used for disobedience,” his father had said. As always his grandfather took his side, “This nation is a mortar and pestle in which all the communities will be crushed to something else over time. If he likes saying Daddy, let him. It means the same thing anyway.”

The moment he got on the bus, Meesam flung the sandwiches out the window and put the cow inside his tiffin box. He hated the smell of bread and the slimy hard skin of imported tomatoes.

At lunch break, he opened his tiffin box and started playing with the cow. It had a button; when pressed, the cow closed its eyes and rotated its neck round and round in a state of ecstasy. With every turn of the neck, reddish-brown patches appeared on its back. But the moment the button was pressed again, the cow turned back to white and opened its black eyes with long lashes. It pleased him to see a mix of wonder, jealousy and mockery on the faces of the children gathered around him. Somebody tried to snatch the cow but he was ready for it. He immediately closed the box and ran.

By evening, the rumour had spread throughout the town and beyond: a Muslim student at the Holy Cross School eats beef at lunchtime. The next day a crowd of parents gathered outside, demanding that the child be thrown out.

On the third day, elderly men and women, all prominent citizens, gathered outside the school. They frothed at the mouth, intoxicated with their poisonous puritanism. They started shouting slogans and waving flags and placards. They blew on conches. The police had to be called. The principal summoned the class teacher.

“What a student eats is their personal matter,” she said. “I only care about their health.”

When the transfer applications of five students reached the principal’s desk at once, she called Meesam to her office and presented him to a committee of parents.

The school had also summoned Meesam’s parents, but they didn’t come. His daddy felt angry standing in front of those talkative women whose fluent English scared him. His mother was the same. The more they nodded in agreement while being dragged over the coals for not being attentive or responsible enough, the more angry and frustrated they felt. That morning, they had not been able to decide which one of them would face the school’s English-spewing cannons.

Cursing the guards, the crowd forced its way into the office. “Do you bring cow in your lunch box?” scores of booming voices asked Meesam.

Meesam was sitting in a chair. He looked over at the Principal, who was spinning a globe. He was delighted by his scheme’s success. He hid his broken tooth, looked down and said “Yesss!”

At that moment, the charming cow lay inside his pocket, its eyes wide open. He would’ve shown it to Principal Madam but he was scared of all these angry strangers whose eyes were popping out of their skulls. “Aren’t you given anything else to eat?” they shouted, banging on the glass doors of the bookshelves.

Thinking of his mother’s silky hair with its curls, his eyes suddenly welled up with tears. His tear-soaked eyelashes shone in the light as he looked up and said, “No.”

Their collective breath and the stench of their sweat hit him like hot gusts of air. He slid down from the chair and started walking. Angry hands reached out to grab his neck. Somebody at the back shouted, “Stop this sisterfucking green snakelet, what does he eat with his beef?”

Older students stood on their toes at the office windows, jostling for space, trying to peer in. They ran after Meesam. His tiny feet thumped down the corridor. A boy tried to trip him, but he jumped. Another, who was running beside him, bent down and elbowed him in the stomach. He slid down the corridor like a wounded bird and collided with a pillar where a vigilant peon stood near the school bell.

He wrapped himself around the peon’s feet. But the peon reacted as though the boy were a wild animal that could bite him if threatened. Gritting his teeth, he freed himself and walked towards the school gate, wiping the sweat from his face.

Meesam’s heart sank. His mouth felt dry. The older boys didn’t just want to steal his cow. They were backed by adults. Free to do all those things they heard about on their televisions every night.

Shouting in panic, he ran towards the staircase which led to his classroom. Every day he used to slide down the railing, but today it was occupied by wide-eyed children staring at him. Some of them jumped down to catch him. He turned around and ran. He hid under a slide in the playground and panted for breath.

He looked around tearfully. The school looked unfamiliar. Everywhere he could hear people shouting, “Walk faster”. Children had spilled out of their classrooms like floodwaters and now ran about in search of him. Their diligence was astounding. The nuns shouted at the top of their lungs, calling out the names of the children who were high on the crowd’s infinite power. The students simply stomped by. The nuns stood to a side and shrugged. A teacher on the second floor raised her hands towards the sky and cried, “Only you can save them from this mind-poisoning!”

He ran towards the back of the school, escaping the students who were kicking at the toy horses, ducks and giraffes, and the dustbins strewn on the floor. He had to cross the large playground. The school’s dilapidated boundary wall was past the football goal post, beyond which flowed a dirty water canal. A mad woman, who wore a dress made out of plastic bags, lived there. She would bare her teeth and dance, waving her overgrown fingernails at the students. Everyone was scared of her.

He could smell the grass. His heart was ready to jump out of his throat. He swallowed and looked around. The peacocks in the playground screeched and ran. A kite, entangled in the branches of a semal tree that stood near the canal, fluttered in the wind. Knocked over by the long feathers of a peacock, he collided with a pitch roller and collapsed.

The students ran over him in a blur of white and blue. They punched him and hit him with their shoes. Girls clawed at him over a dim hubbub of “Cow-eater! Cow-eater!” He could barely hear anything over their laboured breaths and growls. Dark patches floated in and out of his blurred vision.

A quivering teenage boy opened his geometry box and placed it atop the roller. Kicking away the younger kids, he pulled Meesam by the hair and propped him up in a sitting position. He bit his lower lip and started attacking Meesam’s face with a compass. With every blow, the older boy looked more and more like a man.

Many children ran back to get their geometry boxes. Some unbuckled their belts. Some climbed the gulmohar and ashok trees to break branches off.

Soon he had vanished under a three-foot-tall pile of children.

A heavily built moustachioed man with a fresh tripund gracing his forehead and an advocate’s collar circling his neck had been shouting since morning in front of the school gate, claiming he could shut down both this anti-Hindu school and cow-trafficking in a matter of seconds if the people only supported him. His sense of justice was fundamentalist above the whiskers and British below. He straightened his coat and walked up to the principal. Like an Englishman asking for the next dance, he stretched out a beringed hand, decked out with colourful threads. When the principal stepped back, he grabbed her hand and raised it in the air.

“Bhande…” he shouted.

“…Mataram!” responded a few voices from the crowd.

“Arey, these people eat it themselves and feed it to the kids as well,” someone shouted.

“Bhande…!”

“…Mataram!”

This time the principal joined in as well. She looked comically startled.

People started approaching them. The slogans grew louder. Clapping their hands on and off the beat, people in sunglasses shimmied and grooved. It looked like a dance party. Shirts were straightened and pallus were tucked into waists. Phones attached to selfie sticks recorded everything. Many teachers and other staff members came running and started dancing.

The police stood by in a display of power, looking relaxed, like they had been ordered to stand outside the house at a family wedding. The spectacle that was unfolding, even someone blind could…well, actually, only someone visually challenged could tell that these people weren’t worshipping anyone but simply translating the pure animal noises coming from inside the school into dance and music. Some new adult voices could also be heard from inside now, roaring with abuse.

Some guardians still stood there, their arms crossed and mouths shut. A woman cried hysterically, requesting people to take their children home. The crowd gazed at her with disgust, as her shrill voice hindered the dance.

A rich, famous jeweller stepped out of a lavish car. He opened the back door swiftly and yelled at two young boys in colourful turbans, asking them to step out. They immediately entered the crowd and started playing their drums. His driver handed out plates of khasta chaat from a famous shop in town, along with bottles of chilled water. Afterwards, he pulled a paper out of his pocket and read in a shaky voice, “I cordially thank you for accepting this small gift in service to all the patriots and protectors of our religion.” Bowing humbly and smiling victoriously, he departed, turning back to wave again and again.

The police finally entered the school premises after fifty minutes, behind the teachers and guardians, to sort out the “boys’ squabble”. People from nearby colonies and settlements had forcibly entered the premises and were busy at work inside.

The laboratory was on fire. The swirling smoke reminded one of the wigged judges from the judiciary’s golden era engaged in a heated discussion over important matters. People were lugging out teak bookshelves—the books now strewn on the library floor—ebony tables, televisions and computers out of the library. A sickly old man lying under a water cooler was spitting up blood. The statue of Jesus Christ inside the chapel had lost both its hands, and the walls were covered with the red spit of the paan masala.

Youths bathed in the swimming pool. Impoverished children with orange hair fought over the swings and slides in the school’s junior section. Air conditioners had been pulled off classroom walls. The sports store had been robbed. Cycles were gone and several students had their phones stolen. Three girls, who were raped in the changing rooms and toilets of the swimming pool, now sat in a corner of the teachers’ room and cried silently, half-naked and traumatised.

Meesam lay face down in blood-soaked mud near the dirty canal. Blood leaked out of every orifice of his body. His skin had peeled off and his clothes were gone. His face and body were so swollen that it was impossible to imagine that a little while ago this very boy was running around like a fawn.

Frightened little kids cried in the playground. Some sat near the shrubs whispering to each other. Others tried hard to move the pitch roller. The mad woman screamed her head off and tore at her hair.

After Meesam had fallen unconscious, the students had divided into gangs and started fighting. One group started pelting stones at the windows. Another set the laboratory on fire. At first, the girls had their own group but after some heated debates, they broke up and assimilated with the boys.

Amidst the stone pelting, outsiders had climbed over the boundary wall and the school started to look like a country in civil war.

Most parents were scared when they couldn’t find their children. They started hurling abuses at the principal and the police. Amidst displays of power and threats of getting everyone fired, they finally agreed at fresh-wrought unity and spread out to all corners of the school in search of their children. The police called an ambulance and took Meesam and the three girls to the government hospital.

The bell was rung for the assembly. Only a few students from the junior section who couldn’t go back home on their own appeared. All of them were weeping. The air was laden with the smell of urine wafting off of their clothes. The school was closed indefinitely.

The three girls were taken home by their parents. Their medical reports mentioned nausea, fever and scratches because one day they would have to get married. Meesam was declared “dead on arrival.” The post-mortem report stated excessive loss of blood and asphyxiation as the reasons for the death. Six steel shards, which must have appeared out of thin air, were found in his skull. Perhaps they still shine in the darkness of his tiny grave.

His mother is heartbroken. She sits in the kitchen, crushing her fingers one by one in the mortar and pestle, and lists: engineer, scientist, CEO, doctor, policeman, lawyer, sportsman, pilot… even before the old wounds can heal, she is struck with another bout of hysteria.

Oh, did this story shock you?

It’s alright. Now take a look at Roshan Agha’s condition. When no one’s around, he sits in his shop and mumbles: “Whatever happened, happened for the best. You had to go one day. There are those cows that die in the middle of the roads, and huge balls of plastic are found inside their stomachs, what do you think of that? …they’ve all turned to plastic from the inside. And one day their outsides will turn to plastic too. Then there will be no difference between rumour and reality.”