“Prof. Sen!”

Siddhartha had just stepped out of Guptas’ residence and was surprised that Karishma should choose to stop him there on the pavement.

“Karishma? What happened?” Her usually smiling face was contorted with distress. She appeared to be holding back her tears with difficulty.

“You have been arranging for my wedding? With someone else?”

Someone else? “You mean Vikram?”

“You have been arranging this?”

He brows furrowed. Had she realized only now? It had been three weeks since he had been mediating between the Jains and Guptas. Vikram’s father, Aditya Nath Jain, had been in the US with his wife and hence had been unable to carry out the conversations himself. Vikram himself was on Europe tour with his friends. Both were expected back in Kolkata shortly, though.

“You didn’t know?” he asked.

“You thought I did?” He saw a flash of anger in her eyes, but she immediately looked away. “Right. Sorry,” she mumbled and turned on her heels.

He stood frozen to his place his worried eyes following her until she disappeared inside the gate.

Could her ‘someone else’ really mean what he was now thinking? Was she expecting him to…

Siddhartha kept looking back until he reached his car which he had parked on the side street. Even after climbing in the car he didn’t start driving for a long time. He recalled the first time he had come to Guptas’ house with Kanishk and Samrat, his friends at the university. He was doing his masters then. It had taken him some time to get a hang of relationships in the huge, joint family. But on the very first day he had seen the then thirteen year-old Karishma. following and begging Aaradhya, one of the older girls in the family, for her doll. The older girl didn’t seem interested in the doll itself, but only in teasing Karishma.

“Aru Jiji, please. Please give me the doll back.”

“It’s such a tattered doll. Why are you so obsessed with it?”

After watching them for a while, and seeing Karishma close to tears, Siddhartha had been unable to hold back. His friends had gone in to change their clothes and he had been sitting by himself in the hall. “What is a tattered doll to you?” he had told the older girl, “Why don’t you give it back to her if she wants it?”

Aaradhya was surprised to a see a stranger and a guest intervening. More from shock than understanding she had shrugged, tossed the doll at Karishma and left. Karishma had clutched the doll tight and had eyed him curiously, but had left without saying anything.

“Oh, this is a madhouse,” Kanishk had told him later, when he had told him about the incident, feeling that he needed to confess his intervention, “You don’t want to fix quarrels in this house, whether of the children or of the adults. But I think it was good you helped Karishma. Poor child is having a tough time adjusting here.”

“Who is she?”

She was the only child of one of Kanishk’s aunts – his father’s sister. Her parents had died in a car accident a few months back. In the ensuing family politics her lot was thrown with her mother’s family rather than her father’s.

“They didn’t live with my uncle’s family. There was some quarrel going on. Karishma is not used to staying with so many people. She is shy and gets bullied.”

Siddhartha had sighed! He knew something about getting bullied, even if he was not shy. His father had died when his mother was pregnant with him. She didn’t get any support from either her own or her husband’s family. The Jain family, also a huge, joint business family like Guptas, had given her shelter and work. His upbringing and education had been sponsored by them. A maid’s son studying with them and going to their school did not sit well with some of the older kids. They had outgrown it by the time he had first witnessed Karishma’s predicament, but his childhood had been rough on him.

As a college student he had started giving tuitions to school-children to start earning some money and ease his mother’s burden. He had managed to get a scholarship and his tuition fee was waived. But there were still other expenses and he wanted to lessen his dependence on the Jains’ charity as far as possible.

That was why he was visiting Guptas that day. Kanishk had asked him to meet his father as many kids in the household could use a good Maths tutor. It might as well be him who they knew to be a brilliant student of Mathematics.

It was ten years ago. Since then he had taught several children in the house, many who lived there, and many others who were either relatives or neighbors to the Guptas. They all usually gathered in that house so that he didn’t have to visit all of them separately. Over the years he had become such a permanent fixture in that house that he was almost a part of the family.

Karishma had refused to take tuitions though. “I can study on my own,” she had declared.

“But you will be going to class eighth now, Karishma. Things can become difficult,” Kanishk’s father, Mr. Gupta, had tried to reason with her.

“Papa used to say that tuitions are not needed.”

“Let her be, Uncle,” Siddhartha had taken her side, “I myself never took tuitions. If she thinks she doesn’t need it, I don’t think you should force her.”

“’Papa used to say’ is anyway the end of any argument with her,” Mr. Gupta had sighed and left it at that.

She did become his student eventually though. But it was at the university. He had taken up a job there as an assistant professor by the time she had joined the university. And she had chosen to study Maths which was his department. It was in the last three years of university that she had started opening up to him. Siddhartha had immediately realized that she was more intelligent and level-headed than the average child growing in that household. Perhaps an early loss or hardship made you wise and hard-working. He still continued to give tuitions to those kids who wanted it in that house, although he did not need to do so for money now. And tutoring college students was a better bet for getting some extra income outside of his salary. But he was grateful for all the money that came to him from them when he needed it the most.

—

To be continued