The Virgin of Defense Colony

“Sticks and Stones” by Jennifer S. Lange

He is the new boy in class, the odd one out who doesn’t speak with a Punjabi accent, who moved here last summer with his family from Delhi. Chandigarh is newer than Delhi, designed by a French architect, its roads wider and cleaner, the neighborhoods and parks greener and leafier. He likes the openness of its grid-like squares, its fountains that flash red and green at night, the blocky feel of its architecture. Each area of the city is called a “sector” and given a number so that people who live there say things like “let’s meet up in 17 for coffee” or “she lives over in 9.” This makes the city feel modern, shorn of any poetry or history, swept clean of any distinctive character or sentiment that might attach to a place.  

For the first time in his life, he must attend school. His classmates eye him as warily as if he were a gypsy.  He must wear a school uniform. A navy blazer over a light blue shirt, open at the collar, over gray knee-high shorts and ankle high socks. The insignia of Sacred Heart Academy – a red heart enveloped in yellow flames with a giant cross behind them - is stitched on the breast pocket of the blazer. He carries a lunch tiffin and a book bag, both of which must be clearly marked with his name or initials.

English is the only language allowed in school. Though he finds it alien, with its blunt words and narrow range of feeling, he masters it without difficulty. Hindi, the language of his own people, is not permitted except on the schoolyard. He does not know how this foreign tongue came to occupy the place that it does in his world. Like the uniform, it is just another unpleasant fact about school that he accepts without questioning. 

Each teacher at Sacred Heart must be called “Sister.” They wear long, flowing gowns with head coverings that conceal their hair but leave their faces exposed. He is repelled by them, with their wrinkled flesh and quavering voices, by the odor of ointment and hair oil that emanates from them. He works hard to conceal his revulsion but is not sure if he succeeds.

If he had a real sister – an older one; no other kind is possible – she would be young and pretty, like the girls from his previous neighborhood in Delhi who used to pass him around from lap to lap as a boy, fawning and cooing over him. All this talk of sisters at the school has made the idea of having one invade his dreams and become an object of fervid, if abstract, fantasy, the desire existing formlessly as it were, without an object.

He must stay at his desk through the day, toiling hour after hour except for a brief respite for lunch and to play outside in the schoolyard, while the sisters take turns coming and going from the classroom with each subject. If you forget to do your homework, the sister calls you up to the front of the class and you must hold your hands out like so, while she strikes you on the palm three times with a ruler or short cane. You can hear the cane whistle as it slices the air.  

The boys who have endured this procedure at the school never tire of speaking about it. The pain is excruciating, they say, unbearable. They say these words in hushed tones, with a bravado thinly concealed under their breath.

The thought of being beaten with a cane in front of the whole class fills him with fear. What if he cries out?  Or pleads for mercy? He can think of nothing more shameful than being found out for the coward he almost certainly is. One is either brave or a coward. Among the boys, this is the elemental divide now, preceding all others. Already he understands he cannot afford to fall on the wrong side.

He is not exactly what you might call popular among the other boys in the class. He chalks this up to his being an outsider but as the days and weeks pass it becomes clear that there must be some other reason, some reason that remains obscure to him, for his social failure.             

He spends most of his time in the schoolyard with a Sikh boy, the only one in the class, whose long hair is tied in a neat topknot on his head. The Sikh boy tells him that, on the last day of class, those who pass the grade are given a golden-scaled fish to take home and keep for themselves. He chooses to disbelieve this story, though he has no real reason to. Perhaps he does so because that is the kind of person he wants to become: a skeptical, distrustful one. Besides, the idea of a golden fish strikes him as obviously made up.

The other boys from the class either kick around a ball at one end of the schoolyard or sit together in small groups near the benches outside school eating their lunches. The girls speak only to one another and will have nothing to do with them. He is irritated by the self-segregation of the girls without really knowing why. 

He has a sense that the Sikh boy is picked on by others and that their friendship, if it can be called that, is based on little more than being excluded by their fellow classmates. But this is only an intuition on his part. He never sees any evidence of this. He wonders how he would react if he saw proof of what he suspects.  Would he follow the horde of boys and turn on his only friend? The thought of doing so makes him feel queasy, as if he were standing at the edge of a tall roof or balcony and looking down, fighting the urge to fall or to jump. Or would he have the courage to stand with his friend against the horde? He never gets the chance to find out. The opportunity never presents itself.   

“If I ever have a brother,” he says to the Sikh boy one day as they stand on the swings, their shoes on the flat rubber seats, their arms roping around the metal link chain that suspends the swing in the air, “I would name him after you.” He does not know why he says this. Perhaps he says it only to make up for an imagined betrayal that never took place. The Sikh boy smiles back at him and continues swaying. They never speak of it again.

Other than his Sikh classmate, there is another boy who visits the two-story flat where he lives with his parents. That boy is smaller and frailer than he is, and always accompanied by his father. They play games of cops and robbers, soldiers and outlaws, on a small, green square of lawn in front of the flat, next to the driveway and the steel gate where his father’s scooter is parked. Roses, pink and scarlet, are planted around the lawn, some in pots near the driveway, with petals whose color is so sumptuous that he and the boy cannot resist trying to eat some, only to discover that the petals leave an acrid, grassy taste in the mouth. 

He believes that the two of them have a connection that transcends words, never quarreling or disagreeing on any aspect of their games. He does not find this unusual. So fond is he of this other friend that he insists on sharing everything with him. If his mother asks him to eat a cold cucumber sandwich, his friend must get one as well. If he must drink a glass of warm, sweetened buffalo’s milk – a thick, sleep-inducing concoction with a pungent odor which always makes him to retch slightly before the first sip – then his friend must drink a glass as well.

After some time, the boy’s visits end as abruptly as they had begun. He asks his father for an explanation. 

“He was the gardener’s son,” his father says, smiling. “We changed gardeners.  You only liked him because he played along with you and did everything you asked.” He stands there, unsure of what to say, looking up at his father. How could he be so oblivious? Perhaps there is something wrong with him.

Every morning, at school, while the children sit at their desks in rows, the morning sun glinting from the windows at just the right angle to make their eyes water, the sisters invoke the name of a being they call the “Virgin” or “Virgin Mary,” going on about her purity and the immaculateness of her something or other. He has no idea what any of this means or who this person might be. No one ever explains anything to him. He feels he is always having to piece things together for himself in this life. It is the bane of his existence. 

A portrait of her hangs above the blackboard. An olive-skinned woman, with aquiline features, gazing serenely down at the classroom from above. He imagines her soulful glance fixed impassively on the spot near the sisters’ desk where the children are beaten. To his eye, she looks every inch like the familiar image of the demure Indian woman that he has seen in countless comic books and religious calendars, her head covered the same way an Indian woman would cover hers with the free length of her sari. Somewhat incongruously, she holds a naked blonde infant in her arms. He is not sure what to make of this aspect. Perhaps the foreign baby is supposed to represent the foreignness of the religion, or of English, the foreign language that accompanies it.

The cult of the Virgin suggests to his mind the central role that carnality must play in their faith, even if only through its renunciation. Though he has little understanding at his age of what takes place between men and women, this idea of virginity, the Christian idea, begins to take hold in his imagination, confusing in his prepubescent mind an ideal of unattainable purity with the thrill of the illicit.

Nothing similar exists in his own religion so far as he can tell. It is disquieting, on the one hand, to think that touching or kissing a girl could amount to a kind of defilement. Filth, as his mother might say. On the other, it lends a touch of sadness to what might otherwise be an entirely satisfying consummation, imparting an air of tragedy to one’s deepest, most inchoate desires. Making them poetic even. For that reason alone, whatever his misgivings, he is not prepared to abandon the idea, not entirely.

On a day that arrives sooner than expected, he is unable to produce his homework from the night before and the sister summons him to the front of the class. Though he has to stifle an overwhelming urge to run from the room, he manages to make it to the sister’s desk and to receive his caning in silence, without crying out. Afterwards, he feels a sense of pride at having comported himself reasonably well in the whole matter. The pain is more bearable, it turns out, than he had been led to believe.

The only mark against him, his only shame, if it can be called that, is that he lets the tears fall afterwards, the runnels flowing down his hot cheeks before he wipes them away with his sleeve. This too would only have been a minor disgrace were it not for the fact that the girls in the class saw it. He feels that it violates some immutable norm or unspoken law between the sexes for a boy to cry in front of a girl. He does not know how he knows this. He just does.

He resents the other boys in the class at first for having exaggerated the pain, for what he only now realizes was just empty boasting on their part. They have much to answer for, he feels. 

But later, when they tacitly invite him to join in their deception, he finds himself unable to resist. He lies about it just as they did, even though there is no one left to deceive, or almost no one. Still, they feel the need to keep up the charade amongst themselves, the shared untruth creating a bond between them, if only for a time. It is a game. A stupid game. He must learn how to lie, to play along with countless such deceptions, for him to win acceptance, to fit in with the others. He finds it galling.  

Father is a tall, affable man; an engineer in the Air Force, whose clothes sometimes smell of cigarette smoke. Mother is a delicate woman who only wears saris and has long, flowing hair that cascades down below her waist. They live in a two-story flat in the defense colony along with other Air Force personnel from the nearby air base.

Their neighbor in the next flat over is a fighter pilot with the dashing, devil-may-care personality of someone whose profession calls on him to risk his life with some regularity. Sometimes, when his parents go to the neighbor’s flat for dinner with the pilot and his young wife, the neighbor summons him, slurring his words, and pinches his cheek playfully, letting him take little sips from the crystal tumbler in his hand filled with a liquid that does not smell like water.  The little sips are bitter but cause him to feel a pleasant warmth as if he were glowing from within. He cannot wait to grow up so that he can smoke like a grownup and drink whatever it is the adult men drink in crystal tumblers. It is a necessary part, he feels, of the dashing, devil-may-care personality that he would like to have for himself someday. For now, he can only watch and learn, biding his time.

He wishes his father was a fighter pilot instead of an engineer. He would like to be one himself someday.  There is nothing he can think of that could be more romantic or glorious. Already he feels that it would be more glorious to die as a fighter pilot, in a fiery crash, than to triumph over his foes. In his room, by himself, he solemnly acts out the aerial dogfights in his imagination, staying true enough to reality to allow himself to lose on occasion and watching from outside himself as his plane falls out of the cloudless blue sky, its wings glinting metallic in the sun. It is the best kind of death, he feels. An untimely, romantic one. He tries to imagine what it might be like to be dead but his mind quails before the thought. He can only picture the world with everyone in it, going on without him, endlessly. He gives up trying to imagine what it might be like to be dead but never stops thinking about it.

He wishes his father didn’t dote on him so much. Father thinks the world of him, believes that he is somehow chosen or marked for greatness or genius. He cannot bear to disappoint his father. He must carry his father’s expectations with him for the rest of his life and find some way to live up to them. Mother does not place such expectations on him. For that much at least, he is grateful.

Now that he is older, his parents feel he must have a governess to watch over him during the day when they are busy or in the evenings sometimes when they go to dinner or parties at the Officer’s Club. His grandmother who visits and watches him sometimes is no longer able to make the journey to Chandigarh as often.

Grandmother is an old woman who wears a sweater beneath her white sari to keep out the cold. With her words, she is able to invoke another world, a parallel reality of sacred stories. It is a kind of magic. The religion into which he has been born, that does not appear to have a name or at least not one that he has been told, seems comprised of these tales which seem to take place in a dimension that is somehow at once an immemorial past and an eternal present.

He is transfixed by the dream-like and otherworldly imagery of these stories with their blue-skinned gods, talking vultures and flying monkey armies. A whole world of gods, kings and sages is summoned up by his grandmother’s words, one which seems every bit as vivid and real as the mundane, everyday world to which he has been consigned. He lives in the primeval forest world of the Ramayana, and the timeless world of Krishna’s boyhood on the banks of the Yamuna. This other, conjured world must be real because, all around him, he can see the proof of its reality in the altars and temples where the grownups perform their worship.

Because of her wrinkles and bad teeth, he sometimes asks his grandmother to pretend to be an ogress from the Ramayana. She indulges him, wheeling around with her arms up in the air while he rains a hail of makeshift arrows down upon her from the toy bow his father bought him for Diwali. She falls, groaning, stricken, in front of him. “I’ve slain Taraka,” he says, exulting over her supine body on the rope bed on the upstairs courtyard of their flat.

He would much prefer to live in that world, with its satisfying moral order and clear idea of what each person is supposed to represent. In the everyday world, he has no idea what he or anyone else is supposed to represent. If only the moral of his story were given to him as it is to those in his grandmother’s tales. He fears that his own life, his own conduct, might be judged against these moral exemplars and found wanting. Why else would these tales have been passed down like a burden from generation to generation? 

When the time comes, his parents introduce him to the governess hired to mind him who, it turns out, is Christian as well, although unlike the sisters at Sacred Heart, she is slim and, if not exactly pretty, then attractive enough in the freshness and sheer splendor of her youth. She smiles at him with an unreserved warmth, her dark eyes and hair stark in contrast to her smooth, lambent skin. His mother wastes no time in Indianizing her unpronounceable Christian name to the familiar “Anjali.”

She reminds him unmistakably of the older, and somewhat plainer, Christian heroine in a film he has seen at the theater with his parents. The film, Julie, is about a Christian girl who becomes pregnant after falling in love with a boy who is not Christian.    

He recalls being oddly stirred by the film, moved nearly to tears by the music and lyrics of its title song as he watched the end credits roll in the dark of the theater, amid the smell of stale popcorn, his shoes sticking to the grimy floor of the movie hall back in Delhi. He remembers the already formulaic lyrics of the song in Hindi about the conventions of society being like impossibly high walls. By now, he knows enough to understand that this cliche refers to the separation of the two lovers in the film but, despite that knowledge, the words take on an unexpected, personal significance. He thinks of his isolation at school and what others might see in him that he cannot see in himself, that puts them off. Perhaps there is some incapacity in his nature that they can discern but which remains concealed to him, the way you can’t see your own eyes except in a reflection, the only difference here being that there is no mirror, no surface, that can reflect his flaw back to him. He recalls sitting in the inky dark of the theater, wallowing in feelings he has not yet learned to distrust as maudlin or self-indulgent, until his parents tell him it's time to go home.

The movie leaves him with an impression that the Christians are more permissive and romantic than his own people, something about their religion gives them a latitude that his own people are not allowed. He cannot make out exactly what it is that makes this difference possible but the message is unmistakable. Christians appear to be unconstrained by the social rules and conventions that his own people must follow for some reason. For example, they are allowed to wear bikinis and skirts or dresses that reveal their legs. 

He struggles to reconcile the depiction of Christianity from the film with what he knows of the cult of virginity and severity at Sacred Heart. Perhaps it is a religion grounded in feeling alone, based on love, containing within itself all the contradictions of that emotion. Perhaps it is as simple as that.

Though he has little sympathy for their absurd religion, there is no doubt in his mind that, when it comes to matters of the heart and of love, he is on the side of the Christians and against his own people, with their arbitrary distinctions of class and community that thwart the movements of the heart, of authentic feeling and desire. Watching Julie, he can feel a sense of righteous indignation at the injustice of it all, anger on behalf of the hapless individual and for individual feeling, against the weight of society and its compulsions. For the first time, he feels a hint of pride at the depth and nobility of his own sentiments, which he did not suspect he had in him until that very moment. 

Disappointingly, Anjali favors the traditional salwar worn by the women of his own people rather than the daring skirts or bikinis allowed her by her Christian faith. She handles him with a bemused sisterly patience, coaxing him out of his petulance, disarming his sullen moods with her easy charm. 

“Baba,” she calls him, as she picks him up and holds him close to her, so close that he can inhale the heady feminine aroma from the damp cotton beneath her underarms. He marvels at the soft, barely visible down on her arms and the nape of her neck, the soft curve of her forearm as it tapers into a delicate wrist, the slenderness and length of her fingers. He has a vague, fleeting impression of her as the virgin, without the halo and blonde infant. But her gaze is more inward, her eyes larger, with heavier lids, her countenance graced with a smile that is warmer, more tropical.

As the weeks and months pass, the tepid light of winter converting into the warmer suns of spring, their idyll remains unbroken. It is as if an endless river of undiluted emotion flows from her, one in which he wants to swim for as long as possible. Anjali works the days, helping his mother in the kitchen and watches him in the afternoons, but leaves for her own home in the evenings. On school days, the few hours he gets to spend with her seem even more precious. They seem to spend as much time as they can in each other’s presence. 

His mother tells him that Anjali will be watching over him for an entire evening next Thursday when she and father will go to a party at the Officer’s Club. The prospect of having her to himself for this length of time fills him with excitement but he is careful to reveal no outward signs of anticipation in his demeanor.

When Thursday comes, he can hardly wait for school and the bus ride home to be over. His parents leave early, reminding him to behave himself and not be a bother. After a few words with Anjali, they leave. He hears his father kickstart the scooter below and pull out from their driveway, driving off with mother riding pillion, closing the steel gate behind him.

At last, wearing a dark, floral print dress that falls just above her knees, Anjali takes him to the drawing room and leaves him there, locking the door behind her. He sits on the sofa for a while, feeling bored and listless, as time passes glacially. The minutes seem to tick by slower, as if time itself needed the permission of grownups to keep its intended pace.   

When the door opens again, Anjali is standing in the entrance, poised at the threshold without entering, the handle of the door in her hand. Behind her, a gaunt young man is standing, with heavy-framed, dark spectacles and a thin, patchy beard. She turns to whisper something to the young man that he is unable to hear. When she turns back to face him sitting there on the couch, they exchange glances, their eyes meeting for an instant. He feels the blood rush to his face. A sudden pang of something runs through him like a shiver.

She turns away and leaves, closing the door behind her, leaving the room feeling empty, bereft. He senses the approaching horizon of an anarchy roiling within him from which the only escape he can imagine is to embody that chaos in some action outside himself, reducing it to a concrete thing existing out in the world, distancing it from himself.

He walks over to his father’s new record player and pulls out an LP, carefully removing the sleek, black disc from its sleeve. On the red label in the middle of the LP, he can see the picture of a little dog with a dark patch of fur over one eye and its head turned quizzically to a gramophone beneath the legend “His Master’ Voice.” He wonders if the voice the dog hears speaks in Hindi like the songs on the album or in English like the words on the label. 

He wonders now, as he never has before, how English and Christianity have come unmoored from their place at school and somehow managed to reach so far into his world. He wonders how everyone seems to share an instinctive knowledge of the social mummery that eludes him, as if they had imbibed it with their mother’s milk. He can imitate them, wearing a mask, but something about him always gives him away. It makes him feel marooned within himself, an unreachable island surrounded by a vast sea of difference.

He puts the LP record on the turntable the way his father had shown him, gently placing the arm on it so that the needle scratches first, then falls into a groove and music begins to play. Lifting the glass lid up again, he slaps his hand down on the arm so that the needle scratches hard the record’s surface emitting a pained screech. He does this again and again until he is sure the needle is broken. 

Then he pulls out the small red box that his father had shown him, where the replacement needles for the record player are kept. He takes one out and lifts the arm, taking out the old broken one and throwing it away, replacing it with a fresh needle. Then he places the turntable arm back on the record so that it begins to play. He lets it play for a while before slapping his hand on the arm again until he is sure that this needle, too, is broken.

By the time his parents come back late at night, he has broken several dozen needles and the sleek black surface of the LP is unplayable, its once sleek surface scored with an incoherent filigree.

When his father asks him why he did this, he answers only that he doesn’t know why. He is not punished, even though his father scolds him for the damage that his boyish mischief, as he calls it, has caused. But at night, before falling asleep, he overhears his father asking his mother what she thinks might be wrong with him.

Anjali does not come to the flat anymore. He is not told why. When he presses his mother on the question, she tells him Anjali has been let go for bringing her boyfriend to their home instead of minding him as she was supposed to. He wonders if the boyfriend was the gaunt, bespectacled young man was, the one who seemed so unexceptional in every other regard. His mother’s words recast the events of last week in a different light. He thinks now about whether Anjali has now been defiled somehow, fallen from the state of grace she once enjoyed. Then the thought comes to him, unbidden, that perhaps she had never been in that state to begin with, had never been what he imagined her to be.

His mind comes back to the moment. Everything within him wants to speak out on Anjali’s behalf. It is not her fault, he wants to say, it is a peculiarity of her religion, the religion of love. Though he wants to argue on her behalf, and for her sake, he does not. Even if she is right for following the laws of the heart and though his parents are wrong for siding with arbitrary social convention, he feels he must side with them, and his own people, on this matter. He chooses to say nothing, to stay silent, without betraying any outward sign that he has taken their side against her, but the silence weighs heavily on him like a stone.

In the days and weeks that follow, he does not think about what happened to Anjali, where she went and what happened with her boyfriend. He does not wonder if she married the boy she brought with her that night or if she had her heart broken. He no longer thinks about whether she is alive or dead. Tries to forget all about her.

On the last day of class at Sacred Heart, it is as his Sikh friend had said. The sisters hand out a goldfish to each of the students in a small plastic pouch half-filled with water. He can scarcely believe it. As the pouches pass from student to student down the line, each with its own individual golden fish, he wonders which one will end up as his, vouchsafed to him alone by destiny. 

On the bus ride home, all the boys keep comparing their own fish to each other’s for size and speed, color and luster. The joy in their voices is palpable, even to him. In their current mood, they seem to have forgotten whatever it is about him that sets him apart from them. For the duration of the bus ride, he works hard to match their enthusiasm, to sustain the pretense that he too belongs.

He races up the stairs as soon as he gets home to the flat, the half-filled pouch in one hand. Upstairs, his mother is in the kitchen, her back towards him. “Look, mother,” he says, “They gave us a golden fish at school to take home and keep.” 

Without turning, his mother tells him to go put the fish in the bathtub until she can find a clean bowl for it.  He runs across the open courtyard towards the bathroom, the afternoon sun so bright that it takes a second for his eyes to adjust to the dark of the bathroom.

He empties out the pouch into the bathtub and watches as the goldfish swirls around the white ceramic of the tub briefly in its own small stream of water from the pouch before it disappears, swallowed up, down the drain. Too late he realizes that he had forgotten to close the drain with its plastic cap.

His mother comes running from the kitchen at the sound of his wailing. 

“You didn’t tell me,” he says, through a curtain of tears. “You didn’t tell me to do it.” His protests fall on deaf ears. “Common sense,” his mother repeats coolly.

“I hate you. You’re a terrible mother,” he yells, tightening his fists so hard that the nails dig into the soft flesh of his palms. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, “it’s only a goldfish. We can always buy another from the market.” 

He begins to fly into a rage, an anger so incandescent and out of his control that, for the first time, he frightens himself Then the fever suddenly breaks, as if spent from having to ascend to such heights, followed by a remorseful calm. 

After these incidents, he feels changed somehow. He finds it more difficult now to believe in his daydreams, in his games of pretend. The world of his grandmother’s tales is there still, preserved in memory, but it feels more distant now, the images drained of their color and vibrancy. He never takes up his mother’s offer to replace what was lost. She never asks him why.

About the Author

Rajan Sharma (he/him) is a writer and attorney.   He graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy from University of Texas at Austin and obtained his law degree from American University's Washington College of Law.  He lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and two children.

About the Artist

Jennifer S. Lange is a self-taught artist creating illustrations for books, games, posters, and worldbuilding projects. Her work has been shown internationally and in online exhibitions. Jennifer lives in northern Germany with her partner, and a lot of cats.