Read an excerpt from DA, a tender coming-of-age novel by Arathi Menon!

Somebody has placed a bright yellow cake under my eyelids. It smells of toasted light. A gnawing hunger opens my eyes. Da has left the curtains open, and the sunlight is fierce and squatting on my face. Da never wakes me up for school, always insisting that my rest is more important than equations. After getting D minus in attendance, I have learnt to wake up in time to shower and catch the school bus.

I scrub the smells from my armpits, in case I lift my arms in front of a girl at the bus-stop. I bend down to wash under my toes (that’s where all the bacteria lie) and remember the blue file. According to Da, most humans miss washing the backs of their ears, elbows, knees, the butt crack and between the toes. Till I was nine, I had to tick my scrubbed parts after every shower on a waterproof board. Even now, I mentally do a checklist while wiping myself down.

I sit down at the table (seafoam distressed wood) and swirl the fruit loops in my chestnut-coloured clay bowl. Da has the paper open and is eating his muesli. Should I switch to his cereal, now that I am thirteen? Naaah. The soggy brown clumps in his bowl look like tasteless pieces of cardboard, which even a goat would reject. I will migrate to grown-up muesli next year, when I hopefully won’t be worried about things like how my Mama died. 

I look again at Da. A chant begins to form in my head. ‘He lied to me, what’s for lunch? He lied to me, what’s for lunch? He lied to me, what’s for lunch?’

I step out of the door and Da yells, ‘We have to go to Achamma’s tonight.’ I make a face and run; the bus is coming in two minutes. Going to my grandparents’ house is the most annoying thing in the world, worse than doing somebody else’s homework.

I hate visiting them, because Da completely changes when he is in their presence. He becomes volcanic, erupting for both real and imagined reasons. We have never come back from their house without a fight.

Achachan doesn’t feel like a father, a grandfather or even a husband. He is a short man, who buys vegetables every Wednesday and sits silently in a corner sofa the rest of the time. Achamma never smiles. She is skin, bones and an endless muttering of words, which don’t always make sense. The sweep of her pallu often falls off and lands on the crook of her elbow, exposing her blouse. Even when this happens, she doesn’t stop mumbling her shlokas. She scoops up the fallen cloth messily and throws it over her shoulder again, but by then everybody has seen that she has no breasts. Her chest looks like mine – flat. 

Da says his parents have the flavour of water. Neither good nor bad. He has a concept about them. They are wooden pieces who sleep on separate beds. One day, they decided to come together and have him. Two years later, they made the same mistake and his sister arrived. After that, they never touched, kissed or showed love, to each other or to anybody. 

When Da was young, there were no hugs. He would shake hands with his father every birthday and Achamma would occasionally rub his back if he was very sick. They never hit him. Neither were they intentionally cruel. They just fed, watered and schooled both kids. Da says he learned all his emotions, even how to smile, from the outside world. And from Mama who, in Da’s opinion, gave the best hugs in the world. 

I don’t dislike Achachan and Achamma, but I’d hate to live with them. Once, when I was eight, Da had left me with them for a few hours. Neither of them seemed to realise I was there. Achachan was silent and Achamma was chanting Shiva’s name (it was Monday) under her breath while cleaning the kitchen counter. I felt that if I didn’t say something, I would explode and all the tiny bits of me would disappear and nobody would know I was ever there. I showed them my math paper, boasting loudly about how difficult the sums had been. I was proud – I had scored 97%. They looked at my paper, blinked and handed it back. They didn’t say a word. I knew that when I showed it to Da, he would whoop all over the house and call me his little genius. I sat still till Da came. I remember running towards him, hugging his waist (I was short those days) and howling. It hurt to not exist.

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Inquisitive 13-year-old Ved’s entire universe is his adoptive father, Da. From cooking him the perfect biryani to helping him navigate his first school dance and his first girlfriend, Da lets Ved be himself.

Fiercely loving and fiercely protective, their relationship harbours a secret that could destroy them both: Da is gay at a time when Section 377, a colonial law, labels homosexuality a crime. Beyond the law, vigilante gangs prowl the shadows, targeting those they deem ‘unnatural’ as Da and Ved’s happy existence grows ever more fragile.

Set in an Indian city in 2013, Da is a tender story of a boy caught between devotion and fear, chronicling the everyday courage it takes to love someone the world refuses to accept.

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