The Boy Who Borrowed

There were four floors, one tap in the yard, a wall you could sit on, and a gate that every bicycle in the building got chained to.

Nobody could tell you exactly when it started.

Sahil borrowed the badminton racket in March. It was the good one, with the blue string and the white handle. He gave it back nine days later. The grip tape had come unwound at the top and hung down in a long grey curl.

“It was already like that,” said Sahil, and he probably believed it, and it probably was, a bit.

He borrowed the torch in April, for the power cut. The whole lane went dark and every door on the stairs came open at once. He gave it back the same night, which was good, except that the batteries were not in it. Nobody asked about the batteries. It seemed a small thing to ask about.

In May he borrowed Meera’s comic. It came back in June. It had been out in the rain at some point, so all the pages had gone wavy, and the cover would not lie flat any more.

“Sorry,” said Sahil. “My cousin.”

Meera said it was fine. She put the comic at the bottom of the pile on her shelf, under the books, where the wavy ones went.

In July, Sahil borrowed the football pump.

He helped Meera’s grandmother up the stairs with her bags, twice, without being asked. He was the one who caught the small girl from the second floor when she went over on the wet tiles by the tap. He got her bucket too, before it went down the steps.

The pump came back in August, with the little needle bent.

By September, something had happened that nobody had decided.

When Sahil asked for the cricket ball, Ishaan said they were using it. They were using it. That was true.

When he asked for the skipping rope, Meera said it was upstairs, which it was. It was on the hook behind her door.

None of this was a plan. Nobody talked about it. Nobody had decided anything.

Then, in October, Sahil asked Dhruv for the bicycle.

He asked properly and he asked well. One afternoon only, to go to the shop by the temple for bread and come straight back. He said it in front of everybody, on the steps, in a completely ordinary voice.

Dhruv looked at the bicycle. It was blue, with a bell on the handlebar and a basket on the front. It was chained to the iron railing at the bottom of the stairs, where it always was.

“Ah,” said Dhruv. “My father’s a bit particular about the cycle.”

And that was all.

It was said kindly. Dhruv was not being clever, and he was not lying either, exactly. His father was particular about the cycle. His father had also let Ishaan take it to the ground in September and had said nothing whatsoever about it.

Nobody on the steps said anything. A scooter went past the gate. Somebody’s mother called down the stairs about dinner. The conversation went off somewhere else, to a match, and then to a teacher.

Sahil said, “Sure, sure,” and got up and went in past the slippers by the door.

He sat on the step outside his own door for a long time, with his back against the wall, and did not work out anything at all. There was nothing to work out. Nobody had said a single word he could pick up and look at.

The next evening he came down before anybody else was out. The steps were still wet from somebody’s bucket.

The bicycle was on its chain by the railing. The chain on the back wheel was orange with rust in three places and made a dry scraping noise when he turned the pedal with his hand.

Sahil went back up and got the oil tin from under his kitchen sink.

He crouched down and did the whole chain, link by link, turning the pedal round and round with one finger until the scraping went quiet.

Then he wiped his hands on the inside of his shorts. He put the tin back under the sink and went in for his dinner. There was rice, and there was a boiled egg.

He did not tell Dhruv. Dhruv did not notice for eleven days, and when he did notice, he thought his father had done it.