ADREYO SEN - VGay

Adreyo Sen is a first year PhD student at the University at Albany.  He combines an interest in social realism with an interest in fantasy.

VGay
​

 I was the third in my family to go to Ravenshall. 
            The evening before I took the train to Dehra Dun, my father and uncle sat me down.
           Boarding school, my father and uncle told me, their bleary faces momentarily haloed by the wisdom of old boys, was all balls.  Footballs, basketballs, tennis balls, ping pong balls. 
            The balls they didn’t tell me of.  Thursday dinner meatballs, meatballs your seniors hurled at you from the terrace after they’d herded you into the courtyard to do press-ups and sit-ups.  Balls of wadded stale underwear taped to your chest before you were forced into a cocktail dress and made to sashay like the leading Hollywood actress.  Balls you were invited to examine in the communal shower.  Balls of history text your seniors force fed you, telling you it was the best way to prepare for the test.  Balls of paper stuffed with nails they shot at your crotch with hockey sticks.
            Yep, boarding school was ballsed-up.  Pretty ballsy.
            Our first evening in the house, they herded us into the common room.  We were all there – brave, mettlesome Johnny, scholarly Chintu with his Calculus text, womanly Beverly of soft sagging flesh whom seniors would soon invite to their rooms to alternately fondle and slap, and me.
            And VGay, small and mute and tremendously pink, his enormous eyes inviting violation.  We stood at attention.  The sixth form sat before us on the decayed sofas, in poses of fashionable ease.
            KK threw his basketball at me.
            “Oye,” he said, in his sinister drawl, “give me your Intro. Oye.”
            I still dream of KK.  Fair and red-lipped, his middle-parting reminiscent of Di Caprio’s emotive locks in Titanic, he could have been an angel broke free from a stained-glass window. He certainly stained many faces with tears.
            “Ok,” I said, proud of my English, confident I was the most articulate in the batch I was just getting to know, “I am from Calcutta, India.  My father is an engineer and my mother a…”
            “Sisterfucker,” snarled KK, “give us the jism, the juice.  What do you like, huh, boys or girls?”
            “Boys!” I smiled.
            Hadn’t my heroes, the Tom Sawyers and Just Williams of my childhood reading, disdained the petticoated wiles of girls?
            “What?” said KK slowly, “you mean you’re a fag?  Faggy boy?”
            “Fag,” smiled the Porpoise, his Coke perched precariously on his enormous belly.
            “Fag,” said Rohan.
            “Fucking faggot,” said Thud, his spiderly legs stretching to infinity in all directions.
            If KK was an angel of light given to occasional perversity, Thud was an avenging angel, his angular face eternally furious.  Crossing the main hall of school one morning, lost in a reverie, I woke up to find him glaring at me high up on the stairs, his palely fearsome face shining in the darkness.
             “Ok, forget,” said KK, taking off one non-regulation Caterpillar shoe and aiming it at VGay, “You, faggot.  Give us your intro.”
            “SIR! YES SIR!” screamed VGay.
            We were stunned into silence, not having expected such passion from the hitherto monosyllabic boy.
            “Ass taker,” said KK, “This isn’t the army, you sisterfucker.”
            “NO, SIR!” screamed VGay.
            He seemed unsure of himself.
            “I mean, no,” he said.
            Then he squared his pitiful back and looked KK in the eye.
            “I AM VARUN GUPTA!” he screamed, “AND ONE DAY I WILL BE A SOLDIER!”
            We burst into laughter, confident our divergence from pants-shitting respect would be tolerated in the wake of VGay’s hilarity.  But the Sixth Form didn’t crack a smile.
            Deven’s Coke paused at his great maw and he looked at VGay round-eyed.
            “What do you know?” said KK.
            It was soon clear that VGay had no soldierly qualities.  He was too weak then to play any sports.  Unlike the rest of us, he couldn’t speak passable English.  And his voice alternated between a raped whisper and a high-pitched squeak.
            We resented VGay.  He shared a room with Johnny, Chintu and me.  He seemed incapable of polishing his shoes, or making his bed.  And this meant all of us would have to do Extra P.T.
            Worst of all, VGay was spineless.  When the Sixth Formers yelled at him, he would burst into great shuddering sobs.  His pink face wracked with remorse, he would squeak out his promise to turn over a new leaf.  Once, Deven hung him on his clothes peg.  He hung like a whipped dog, his feet three feet from the ground.   When Deven left, we stared at VGay.  He stared back.  We didn’t let him down till it was time for prep.
            And so VGay was late for prep.  Long before he scurried in, his plastered hair dripping water into his soaked whites, KK had glided in, palely pretty and pleasantly malicious, ethereal in his long tunic and pajamas.
            “What this?” he said, pointing his hockey stick at VGay’s mud-stained evening shoes, “Give me five push-ups.”
            When VGay was done, KK pulled him up by his collar.
            “Bloody virgin cunt,” he said, “And you, you’re going to be a soldier?”
            “SIR! YES SIR!” screamed VGay, “I WILL GIVE MY LIFE FOR THIS COUNTRY.”
            “Dumb arse-taker,” said KK, “Why are you in such a hurry to die? Live a little, you stupid shit.”
            The next evening, surprise of surprises, when I dropped into the prep room to retrieve a piece I was writing for the school magazine, I found VGay reading a book.
            “What’s this?” I said, snatching it from him.  It was a collection of poems by Rupert Brooke, a poet I’d eventually read in college.
            “KK gave me,” said VGay proudly.  His face lit up.
            “Sure, asshole,” I scoffed, “You must have stolen it from his room.”
            KK was infamous for his literary proclivities, his blue-stocking ways protected by his savage skill on our sun-kissed sports fields.  Later that year, aware Johnny wasn’t fazed by physical punishment, he would punish him for cheekiness by having him write in the voice of Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair.
            After VGay’s debut on the clothes peg, we rode him pretty hard.  We said to ourselves it was for his own good.  He had to man up.  Plus, he was letting the form down. What would the seniors think if he continued to be this miserable little shit?
            And so we stole his statues of Ganesha and Shiva.  We hid his pictures of his astonishingly ugly family.  We threw his clothes into the gutter.  And the day Johnny scored two goals in his first hockey match, he took a shit on VGay’s bed.  But we couldn’t make VGay cry.  The boneless little bitch wasn’t scared of us.  And this infuriated me.
            One prep, VGay returned KK’s book to him.  He stood shyly before that glorious angel, whose face gleamed as he read the article I’d written for the school magazine.
            And when I thought he’d returned to his seat, he tugged at KK’s sleeve.
            “One day,” he said, looking benevolently at KK, “I will be India on some foreign field.”
            “Go fuck yourself,” said KK coldly.
            The second Saturday of October, our third month in boarding school, was the day our house would accept us as bonafide members, as worthy receptacles of house spirit, soldiers of its destiny to be the best house in the damned school.  But the night before that, the second formers told us with the air of veterans who’d seen it all, would be the worst night of our life.
            So that Friday, when VGay slid into breakfast next to me, he was unusually solemn.
            “Eat your eggs,” I told him, feeling like a young Cheeryble brother, “they’ll grow cold.”
            “I must not fail tonight,” he told me grimly.
            “Oye, virgin cunt, nothing will happen,” I told him, feeling a contemptuous kindness for VGay.
            “You know,” I said, “some people are not cut out for boarding school.  But you are still special.”
            “No,” he scowled, “If I’m not boarding school, I’m not army.  I to see this through.”
            He squared his chest, looking ridiculous.
            “For honor,” he said.
            I was somewhat in the nature of being VGay’s confidant.  Unlike my father and uncle, I was no good at sports.  And so when I wasn’t writing, I would seek VGay out, usually discovering him in the prep room buried in a book KK had given him.  And so I knew VGay’s family, once poor, had risen to riches through his father’s import-export business.  His parents didn’t speak English and his sister, only twenty, was already married with children.
            VGay’s pathetic family was very proud of him.  But when I told Chintu and Johnny about his background, they agreed he’d no right to be at Ravenshall.
            “Bloody dog,” lisped Chintu, “let’s get him out of here.”
            That evening, KK called us to his room. 
            Our form went along in trepidation, pierced by the grins of the second formers who passed us by.
            They were all there.  KK.  Rohan.  Evil and poisonously beautiful Thud, sniffing eraser fluid and marking up a copy of Playboy with a fat red pen.  The Porpoise stuffing himself with Chocopies, one paw buried in his pants.
            KK brandished before us a large pink box of chicken pasties.
            And so we knew he’d broken bounds that evening and gone in mufti to the local bakery.  Our respect for him made us sway.
            “Help yourselves, boys,” he cooed, slender and pretty, “You too, VGay.  Don’t be shy.”
            “What about tonight?” I asked, taking one of the larger pasties.
            “What about tonight?” said KK, while Thud studied me evilly, “Nothing.  Nothing.  It’s an urban myth, a fantasy.  Sleep, my little cocksuckers.  Sleep.”
            But his smile disappeared when he looked at VGay’s adoring face.
            “Nothing to worry about,” he repeated.
           
            They came for us that night.  The sixth formers and the fifth formers.  They barged into our dreams and overturned our beds and slammed our heads into the wall.  They unloaded their shaving cream and ketchup bottles on the floor and had us lick the mess up.
            “Give us five push-ups, asshole!”
            “Your mom’s so hot, bitch.  Tell me about your mom!”
            “Ten squats, pussy ass bitch!”
            “Are you deaf, Nancy Drew?  I said ten sit-ups!  Make them twenty!”
            They were laughing and yelling in the darkness, while our housemaster snored in a cheap whiskey stupor, and all we could see of them was their gleaming teeth and their frenzied eyes and the terror they flooded our faces with when they shone their torches at us.
            And then there was silence.  And a sharp pungent smell I sometimes now mistake as the lingering traces of courage. VGay had pissed himself.
            Someone turned on the lights.  We all stared at VGay and he stared back, his face crumpling, his large eyes spraying water like a garden hose.  He began to shake.
            “Come here,” said KK, unsmiling.
            He took VGay by the hand and led him out.
            “Bloody pussies,” growled Thud when KK was gone.  He picked up KK’s hockey stick and the fifth formers and sixth formers filed out.  VGay had ruined their evening.
            “Dumb bastard,” said Chintu, putting his bed to order, “spoiled everyone’s fun.”
            He was still shaking.
            We got our beds in order and wiped the floor of ketchup and shaving cream and restored our clothes to their pegs.
            But it was long after we’d turned off the lights that VGay slid in.  He made his bed in the dark and slipped inside.  And then he buried his face in his pillow and began to sob, the bed sheets shaking above his little body.
            “Pussy,” I whispered, “Bloody homo. I’m trying to sleep.”
            But Johnny of all people swung out of his bed.  He sat on VGay’s pillow and held his head.  Johnny had always scorned singing as feminine and faggy.  But now he began to sing, “Sleep, little piece-of-the-moon, sleep, tomorrow’s dreams will be your palaces, sleep little moon-prince.”
            And VGay grew calmer.
            “He kissed me,” he told Johnny as he fell asleep, “he kissed me!”
            And I wondered what this nonsense meant.
            Some of my form mates really went in for VGay after that.  We wanted him to quit, to leave boarding school.  He was a fucking disgrace.  We yelled at him in the showers, got him into corners and slapped him and beat him.  Chintu imitated his broken English and I described, in front of VGay’s blank face, how the great VGay was a member of a unique species that had wandered into our midst.  Beverly spat at him whenever he saw him.
            Johnny took no part in this. 
            “He has no place in this school,” I told him once, watching Johnny strip off his shirt.  Johnny flexed his taut muscles.
            “And do you, bitch?” he said.
            He threw his shirt at me.
            “I might not play sports,” I stammered, “But I write for the magazine.”
            “Ok, homo,” he said, swaggering off to the shower.
            We only got VGay to piss himself once again, some of the second-formers and the first-formers.  But it was not as much fun as we thought it would be.  I felt blank and strangely dirty.  Bloody VGay just stared at the puddle he’d made.  And then he toddled away and returned with a washcloth.
            “Don’t bother,” said Johnny, and I realized he’d been with us all that while, “give me that.”
            He shoved past me and snatched the washcloth out of VGay’s hand.
            “Go and clean yourself,” he said.  And then he bent down and began to clean VGay’s mess.
            Unlike us, the sixth formers left VGay alone now.  KK didn’t yell at him for his badly-made bed and dirty clothes.  Thud never tripped him over when VGay toddled past him – Thud was in the habit of splaying himself against the corridor walls and reading Playboy and Penthouse upside down.  And the Porpoise actually gave him food, chips and chocolates he’d confiscated from the rest of us.
            Ungrateful little VGay didn’t seem pleased by any of this.
            And one prep, when KK sashayed in, soft and girlish, perfumed by a complete absence of the Axe “deo” the rest of us OD’d on, VGay got up and toddled unsteadily over to him.
            He stood inches from KK and looked up at him.
            “What’s this?” said KK, smiling.  He looked down at VGay from his awful height.
            I would be shocked, grown-up, to discover KK really wasn’t that tall.
            “Unpolished shoes, I see,” he said.
            “SIR! YES SIR!” screamed VGay.
            “Well,” said KK, grinning widely, “that means ten push-ups, doesn’t it, bitch?”
            “SIR! YES SIR!” screamed VGay.
            “What a dumbass,” said KK, sashaying off, as VGay got on the floor, grinning like a madman,  “I trust you to finish up yourself, my all right fellow.”
            And the laughter in his voice, softened by something strangely beautiful, made me fall in love with KK all over again.
            We all survived boarding school.  Johnny, tall and broad, became our house captain and the school hockey captain.  Chintu became known for his academic prowess and chess skill.  He topped the school in the school-leaving exams.  Beverly’s girlishness transformed into charming sophistication and at our first socials with our sister school in our sixth form, all the girls were over him.  He was the school’s champion debater.  I became the editor of the school magazine.  And VGay?  Well, he achieved nothing.  Well, not exactly nothing.  He was in the second or third string for most sports.  And returning home in the evening from the magazine office, Beverly and I would be reduced to helpless hilarity when we saw him sitting with the juniors on the sports field adding his monstrous squeak to the house cheers.  But the juniors loved VGay in a way they never loved me.
            The last day I spent at Ravenshall, I idled through the house in a strange sadness, stopping every now and then to parley with the juniors.  I came across VGay in the room he shared with two fifth-formers.
            He was packing.
            He looked up at me, unsmiling.
            “Glad to leave?” I asked.
            “Yes,” he said.
            “Wait!” I said, “Are you really taking all that nonsense?”
            KK’s hockey stick and Thud’s porn stash lay next to folded clothes and the little gifts our juniors had given him.
            “Yes,” said VGay.
            “And you’re going to the army,” I joked.
            I thought he’d given up that stupid dream of his.
            “Yes,” said VGay. 
            And I walked away from the contempt in his eyes.
           
            Johnny didn’t live up to his promise.  He became an analyst for a media firm.  Obese and happy, he is content to be bullied by his radiant wife and two young daughters.  Chintu went to business school and now runs a division of his father’s company.  Beverly is on television most days, a debonair news anchor, but his long-time girlfriend seems the only woman impervious to his charm.  The Porpoise is the owner of a little shack in Goa that lures passers-by every evening to fried prawns and pomfret.  And KK and Thud, austerely beautiful still, prowl university libraries, charging out of the darkness every now and then to loom over terrified undergraduates and inspire those fascinated souls to senior theses in majors they’d never thought of.  They are good friends, as are their wives, tiny women captivated by their husbands’ serpentine magic. 
            I am happy too.
            And VGay?  Four months after we graduated, he joined the Indian Army.  And six months later, on the world’s highest battlefield, in a frozen harshness where the rudest wildflower cannot thrive, an ugly expanse of blinding snow that India and Pakistan have fought over for what seems like centuries, VGay died.  Of pneumonia.
            I come to school every now and then, peering into the faces of my former masters and into the faces of the busy, feckless new schoolboys to see traces of the boy I’d once been, trying to relearn the lessons I’d failed to imbibe.  And so I know that VGay’s teddy bear still sits in the flowerbed outside my boarding house, dour and earnest, believing, believing that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
            KK placed it there.