The Orchard Wall

Chapter 1: The Wall

The wall ran along the back of the Sharma orchard like a scar the earth had tried to hide. It was old—older than anyone in the village could say for certain—built from bricks that had once been the color of rust but had faded over the decades to the pale gray of bone. In places, the mortar had crumbled entirely, leaving gaps wide enough for a boy to push his arm through, or to pass a rolled-up comic from one side to the other.

Ravi Sharma was nine years old the first time he heard a voice from the other side.

It was March, the tail end of a Punjab winter that had been mild even by local standards. The mustard fields around the village of Dohlpur had already erupted into their annual blaze of yellow, and the air carried that particular sweetness—part blossom, part woodsmoke, part the damp earth warming under a climbing sun—that Ravi would spend the rest of his life trying to recall in exact detail. He had been sent to the back of the orchard by his mother, Kamla, to collect fallen guavas. It was not a task that required sending a boy, and Ravi understood, even at nine, that his mother was simply clearing him from the house. His father, Vikram Sharma, was entertaining men from the district office, and when those men came, the household arranged itself around their comfort. Kamla oversaw the cooking. The servants moved with extra precision. And Ravi was dispatched somewhere he could neither be seen nor heard.

He didn't mind. The orchard was his favorite place on the property, and the back wall his favorite place in the orchard. It was the boundary between the Sharma land and the narrow lane that led to the cluster of low houses where the Dalit families lived—the laborers, the field workers, the people who picked the guavas Ravi was now collecting. His father referred to them collectively as "the workers," a term that managed to be both accurate and dismissive. Ravi's grandmother, when she was alive, had used older words. Words Ravi's school in the nearby town of Mohali had taught him were wrong.

He was crouching beside the wall, pulling a guava from where it had rolled against the base of the bricks, when the voice came through one of the gaps.

"Is that a Champak?"

Ravi startled, nearly dropping the fruit. He looked at the gap in the wall—a space about the width of his two fists together, at the height of his knee—and saw, on the other side, a pair of dark eyes.

"What?" Ravi said.

"The comic. In your back pocket. Is it Champak?"

Ravi reached behind him and pulled out the rolled magazine. He had forgotten it was there. He often carried reading material to the orchard, tucking it into the waistband of his shorts.

"It's Tinkle," he said.

"Which issue?"

"Thirty-seven. The one with Shikari Shambu on the cover."

There was a pause. Then: "I've read thirty-one through thirty-five. My cousin in Jalandhar sends them. But he skipped thirty-six and thirty-seven."

Ravi looked at the gap, then at the comic, then at the gap again. He crouched down and pushed the magazine through the opening. A hand appeared on the other side—small, brown, with dirt under the fingernails—and took it.

"I'm Preet," the voice said.

"Ravi."

"I know who you are."

Of course he did. Everyone in Dohlpur knew the Sharmas. The family owned the orchard, the adjacent wheat fields, a rice paddy on the other side of the main road, and several commercial properties in Mohali. Vikram Sharma sat on the village panchayat and had connections to the district administration that made him, in the local ecosystem, something between a landlord and a minor king. The Sharma house—not the old ancestral one, but the newer construction Vikram had built in 1978—was the largest in Dohlpur, with a concrete second story, a television antenna, and a driveway wide enough for the Ambassador car that Vikram drove to Chandigarh when business required it.

Preet Singh was the son of Harbans Singh, who worked the Sharma orchard. Harbans had been working the land since before Ravi was born, and Harbans's father had worked it before that. The arrangement was understood by everyone involved to be both voluntary and inescapable, a paradox that the village had long stopped examining.

"You can keep it for a few days," Ravi said, meaning the comic. "I've read it twice already."

"I'll bring it back tomorrow."

"Same time?"

"Same time."

That was how it began.

Over the following weeks, the gap in the wall became a portal. Ravi would come to the orchard in the late afternoon, after school and before dinner, and Preet would appear on the other side. They passed comics back and forth—Ravi's collection was larger, but Preet had access to Punjabi-language magazines that Ravi found exotic, their pages filled with illustrations of folk heroes and Sikh warriors. They talked about school. Preet attended the government school on the edge of the village; Ravi went to a private institution in Mohali where the instruction was in English and the fees were more than Harbans Singh earned in a year. They discovered a shared obsession with cricket. Preet could name every member of the Indian squad. Ravi had a bat—a real Kashmir willow bat, not the plank-shaped boards most village boys used—and one afternoon he pushed it through a wider gap in the wall, handle first, so Preet could feel the weight of it.

"It's beautiful," Preet said, his voice reverent.

"We should play sometime," Ravi said. "Properly. Not through a wall."

Preet was quiet for a moment. "Where?"

"The field behind the canal. Nobody goes there after four."

They met the next day. Ravi brought the bat and a scuffed leather ball he'd taken from his older cousin's room. Preet brought a set of stumps he'd fashioned from bamboo. They played until the light failed, and then they sat on the canal bank and shared the parathas Ravi had smuggled from the kitchen, wrapped in a cloth napkin embroidered with his mother's initials.

It was the first time Ravi had eaten a meal with someone from outside his family or his school. It was the first time Preet had eaten food that had come from the Sharma kitchen, rather than food he or his mother had prepared for the Sharmas.

Neither boy remarked on this. They were nine and ten years old. The significance of a shared meal—who prepared it, who served it, who ate first, whose hands were considered clean—was something they had absorbed from the air around them but had not yet learned to articulate. What they knew was simpler: the parathas were good, the cricket had been excellent, and they would do this again tomorrow.

They did. And the day after. And the day after that.

By April, the friendship had developed its own infrastructure. They had established three meeting spots: the wall (for quick exchanges), the canal field (for cricket), and a banyan tree halfway between the two, whose roots created a kind of natural room where they could sit unseen. They had developed signals—Ravi would leave a small stone on top of the wall if he could meet that day; Preet would leave a twig if he could not. They had shared enough comics to have developed a joint critical vocabulary. ("Chacha Chaudhary is getting boring." "Agreed. But Sabu is still good.")

They had also developed, without discussing it, an understanding of secrecy.

Ravi had not told his parents about Preet. He had not told anyone. This was not because he had been explicitly warned against such a friendship—not yet—but because he possessed, even at nine, a child's intuitive understanding of which truths were safe to speak and which were not. He knew that his father's world operated on a set of unspoken rules about who belonged where, who sat in which chair, who entered through which door. He knew that Harbans Singh, when he came to the main house to discuss the orchard's yield, stood in the courtyard and did not sit down. He knew that the glasses from which the laborers drank water were kept separate from the family's glasses, in a cabinet in the back kitchen that his grandmother had always called "theirs."

Ravi had once asked his mother why the glasses were separate. Kamla had looked at him with an expression he would later identify as discomfort masquerading as patience.

"It's how things are done," she said.

"But why?"

"Because some things are the way they are, Ravi. Now go wash your hands for dinner."

Preet, for his part, had told his mother, Jaswinder, about the friendship, because Preet told his mother everything. Jaswinder had listened, her face careful, and then she had said, "Be careful, puttar. The Sharma boy may be kind. But the Sharmas are the Sharmas."

"What does that mean?"

"It means enjoy the cricket. But don't forget which side of the wall you live on."

Preet had not fully understood this at the time. He would come to understand it with a completeness that would mark every day of his adult life.

The explicit prohibition came in June.

Vikram Sharma had been informed—by a field worker, or a neighbor, or the particular village grapevine that transmitted information about caste transgressions with the speed and reliability of a telegraph—that his son had been seen playing cricket with Harbans Singh's boy. The source didn't matter. What mattered was that Vikram called Ravi into his study after dinner on a Tuesday evening and closed the door.

The study was the room in the house that most clearly belonged to Vikram alone. It contained a heavy wooden desk, a rotating bookshelf filled with law books and agricultural manuals, a framed photograph of Vikram with the local MLA, and a calendar from a Chandigarh insurance company featuring a portrait of Guru Nanak that Vikram, a Hindu, kept because the insurance agent was a useful contact. The room smelled of the particular brand of cigarettes Vikram smoked—Gold Flake—and of the hair oil he applied each morning with the precision of a ritual.

Ravi stood in front of the desk. His father sat behind it.

"You've been spending time with the Singh boy," Vikram said. It was not a question.

Ravi said nothing. His throat had constricted in the way it always did when his father used that particular tone—level, unhurried, certain.

"I don't object to you being kind to the workers' children," Vikram continued. "Kindness is appropriate. It's expected. But there is a difference between kindness and familiarity. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Papaji."

"You are a Sharma. Your grandfather built this house. His father built the orchard. We have a position in this village. A position requires boundaries. When you sit and eat with a laborer's son, you erase those boundaries. And when boundaries are erased, everything falls apart. The workers stop respecting us. The village stops respecting us. Do you want that?"

"No, Papaji."

"Good." Vikram opened a drawer, took out a Gold Flake, and lit it. The match flared in the dim room. "I'm not angry with you. You're a boy. Boys don't think about these things. But you're old enough now to start. You'll go to the orchard when your mother asks you to. You'll collect what needs collecting. But you will not play with the Singh boy. You will not share your things with him. You will not eat with him. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Papaji."

"You may go."

Ravi went. He walked through the house, past his mother in the kitchen, past his younger sister Meena playing with dolls on the veranda, past the servant who was sweeping the front steps, and out into the yard. He walked to the orchard. He walked to the back wall. He sat with his back against the bricks and looked at the sky, which was the deep purple-blue of a Punjab summer evening, and he felt something he could not name but which sat in his chest like a stone.

The next afternoon, he left a stone on the wall.

Preet left a twig.

Two days later, both stones.

They met at the banyan tree. Ravi told Preet what his father had said. Preet listened without expression.

"So we stop?" Preet asked.

"No," Ravi said. "We just have to be more careful."

Preet studied him for a long moment. Then he nodded.

They were more careful. They met less frequently—twice a week instead of daily. They avoided the canal field, which was too exposed, and played cricket in a clearing deep in the orchard where the trees were old and dense and the canopy blocked the view from the house. They communicated through the wall, which remained their safest point of contact, the crumbling bricks serving as both barrier and bridge.

The friendship deepened in the way that secret friendships do. Shared secrecy creates its own intimacy, a sense of being allied against a world that wouldn't understand. Ravi brought Preet books from his school library—adventure stories, mostly, about boys who sailed ships and explored islands and lived lives of uncomplicated freedom. Preet brought Ravi stories of a different kind: accounts his grandfather had told him, about the village before the Sharmas owned so much of it, about a time when the land had been distributed differently, about disputes and agreements and betrayals that had shaped the current arrangement.

"My grandfather says this orchard used to belong to everyone," Preet said once.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it was common land. Before the British came and drew their lines. Before the zamindars took what they wanted."

Ravi didn't know what to do with this information. It sat alongside what his father had told him—that the Sharmas had built everything, earned everything, deserved everything—and the two accounts did not fit together. He was ten years old. He filed the contradiction away and did not examine it.

The months passed. The friendship held. Summer became monsoon became autumn became the cool, clear days of a Punjab winter. Ravi turned ten, then eleven. Preet turned eleven, then twelve. They grew taller, their voices began to shift, and the gap in the wall that had once been wide enough for a comic book now seemed, somehow, smaller.

But they kept coming back to it.

They kept coming back.