An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma Page A

world and began to cry. The more I cried, the more I needed to cry. The first tears of the day would be from sorrow and despair, but these excavated a greater anguish. By wishing for my punishment to occur, by thinking on my way home that Ma had died, I had incited God to kill my mother. I could not say these words, even though I knew them, because saying them would make the guilt ridiculous and so end it, and therefore perhaps end the hole which kept my mother with me. I wept and wept. It was as if the tears were my flesh's attempt to grow and cover the neat, round hole my mother's death had punched in me. But every time the hole was camouflaged, the skin twitched and broke and the hole revealed itself Sometimes my brothers grew tired of my weeping. "Go cry in the fields and scare away some crows with your noise," one said. The indifference they had shown to our mother's death (neither had wept) made my unhappiness denser and made me think sometimes that I was the one good person in the world. I would walk crying through the fields and hills until I passed into hysteria. Then I became so exhausted that I lay down wherever I was, next to a well, in the middle of some farmer's crops, and slept.
    During this period, India became independent. One afternoon everyone in Beri was gathered on a flat field by the local Congress worker. Someone from a nearby town was there and gave a speech. Then the children lined up and the Congress worker passed out balloons and copper coins with Mahatma Gandhi's face stamped on them. People began to eat. The village women had prepared sweets and filled large clay pots with sweet drinks. After a little while, the larger children tried to steal the smaller children's coins and balloons. As the balloons were knocked out of hands and went floating up, I thought of my mother not seeing this day and not receiving the saris that she had imagined the government would give. I wandered away sobbing.
    When I returned to higher secondary, the town was nearly as it had been before the violence. Hindu families were living in the houses the Muslims had owned. Classes started and I took up wrestling once more. But it was as if I had been sick a long time and had become easy to confuse. I had also developed a fear of pain. The idea of being slammed into the ground and maybe cracking my head panicked me, and so, when I was in a difficult position, I found myself giving in, hoping to make my fall easier.
    The only thing that took me out of myself was my first woman. Two friends and I hired a prostitute. I paid fifty paisas and they paid ten each to watch through a window. The idea of being watched did not bother me, since my entire family had lived in one room and I had often seen my parents having sex. We didn't tell the woman about the watching, because then she might have wanted to charge extra. I met her outside the school one Sunday afternoon and led her around the back to a hut used by the groundskeeper. The prostitute wore a sari, which I had asked her to wear, and men's thick rubber slippers. I found their inappropriateness erotic, but her feet were cracked and yellow. I was anxious and sad as I led her to the hut. Whatever excitement I had felt in arranging for the woman had been replaced by the sense that I was being forced to admit some deep wrongness in myself I began to apologize to the prostitute.

Once she was in the hut, I told the woman to remove her clothes. I took off mine and sat on a cot. After she finished stripping, she stood before me. The only light was from the small barred window. She was short and deep brown, with long black hair and large breasts. Her waist and thighs were in the dark. I made her walk back and forth in the narrow aisle between the cot and the sacks of cement which were leaning against the wall. I weighed her breasts in my hands. My shame vanished. No matter what I felt about myself, this was the actual world. We were only bodies and I had more power than this woman. I