That’s how I became friends with Osama. He was the other boy who often stayed inside during sports period to study for exams or to amble around the school, to buy snacks from the canteen and eat them on the swings. Sometimes he went to chat with teachers in the female staffroom. Osama wasn’t even that smart: he consistently came in fifth place in a class of thirty-five, but somehow he was the face of studious diligence, a “hard worker,” as our teachers called him. He was also the class snitch and the class gossip.
After we hung out in sports period a few times, he took my number and started calling me daily. We’d match answers to math homework or compare notes for the history test, then chitchat about whatever nonsense children with staticky landlines used to chitchat about in those days. Osama’s major talent was that he could memorize textbooks. He always tried to impress me with how perfectly he could recite entire chapters and regurgitate them in exams, which was also precisely how I could tell he wasn’t intelligent. Our school prided itself on emphasizing “concepts” over “rote learning” in its approach to both religion and academics— Osama must have known that he was “conceptually weak.” In my competition to come first, I never paused to consider that being of mediocre intelligence may not have been devastating news to him.
The more conspicuous thing about Osama was not his intelligence but his wealth—though he was from the same neighborhood in Walton and must have woken up every morning of his life to the sound of buffaloes mooing from the milkman’s house. When I asked once why I’d never seen him in the three years I lived in Walton, he said that he had seen me. Osama and I might have bonded over visiting the same barber or buying fish from the one-eyed man, but even in seventh grade I could tell he didn’t like revealing that he lived there. For his twelfth birthday, instead of holding a party at his house, he invited a group of us to Pizza Hut, where his father had reserved a room. Osama’s father was a large, bearded Sui Gas employee who often wore an immaculately white shalwar kameez starched to perfection. “To hide his sins,” Ammi sneered when I gave her details about the lavish birthday. According to her, Osama’s father, a “common meter reader,” was “corrupt.” Proof of this was that Osama’s daily lunch allowance was far beyond the paygrade of a meter reader’s son—fifty rupees on some days—so much money that frequently he’d buy his favorites a packet of chips or, if we were lucky, a bottle of Coke. With his lunch money and his strategic toadying, Osama managed to make more friends than was his due.
But what was Osama’s due? He snitched on us. He was dark. He was fat and effeminate. No, Osama was gay. I should be able to say that now. In fact, it should’ve been the first thing to mention—that is the reason I remember him. My avoidance around such, yes, facts originates from my teenage habit of carefully convoluting or denying my own secret signals to retain a boundaryless existence for myself. I didn’t create any label of conviction for Osama because in doing so I would’ve also damned myself a “gandu,” not that I understood the meaning of that word back then. But I felt the shadow of that word on my back—every boy that age does—and I knew that it meant disaster. Still, I thought there was hope for me. But for poor Osama the sentence was clear. He was as marked as a twin-headed calf or a witch with backward-facing feet. Worse still, he seemed uninterested or unable to hide all the evidence that spelled his doom. While I bade my time—waited for the day I’d hit a sixer and win our school the cricket tournament or at least defeat everyone in our final exams—Osama stood outside the playground with his limp wrist, his girly voice, his pudgy hairless body, not even trying to correct anything, just making complaints to the class teacher, sucking up to the principal, sucking on a box of Shezan mango juice like the sissy he was. If people called him such names, he swatted at them or ignored them, cut off their ration of chips until they relented.
Oh, I must be missing something. He was my first friend! Perhaps there were injustices and cruelties I was unaware of that he couldn’t confide to me over our phone calls. Maybe they even laid the path for the fiasco that he found himself in that final summer of our friendship. What can I say? I didn’t even learn that funny word, “gay,” until I was fourteen or fifteen years old.