Friday games

Fridays bore their own peculiar rhythm.

On ordinary days, the boys were ferried to and from school by their fathers, neat rituals of suburban routine. But Fridays belonged to an interstice — fathers preoccupied, duties handed to Mishra Uncle, who hovered at the bus station with a perfunctory guardianship. More important to Prayag and Tanay was the crisp allowance folded into their pockets, fragrant with the faint scent of their mothers’ hands. That note was never safe.

For Friday meant wagers.

The rules were simple: the victor commandeered both purses, the vanquished made do with limp parathas and a sour pickle. Their covenant was clandestine, a game-world invented and discarded with the caprice of childhood: spotting the first red car, predicting whether the pigtailed girl would weep, tallying the stray dogs that barked before the bus lumbered into sight.

And then there was her.

She boarded two stops beyond, always shrouded in the same wan saree, as if cloth itself had grown weary of her weight. She carried herself with the furtive agitation of a fugitive, seeking seats only beside other women, shrinking from inadvertent touch. Her eyes — dilated, unsettled — belonged more to a startled doe than to a passenger in a crowded bus.

The boys did not see unease. They saw marks.

Dusky constellations stippled across her skin: on her hands, her neck, her temples. At times veiled beneath a shawl, at others imperfectly eclipsed by powder, and on certain mornings, flaunted in stark relief against pallid flesh. Their game was to enumerate them. Prayag against Tanay, with Aniket — the third — enthroned as arbiter, exacting his quarter-share with smug solemnity.

It became their finest invention. Strange, illicit, inexhaustible. Until it waned.

For lately, she did not appear. Entire Fridays unfolded without her presence, leaving the game dismembered. When she did arrive, the reckoning was facile, the blemishes too flagrant, the sport too hollow. The exhilaration dissipated like steam.

One Friday, just as the bus exhaled its wheeze, she emerged again — deposited by a man astride a gleaming bullet motorbike. He waved with the theatrical ease of a matinée idol. The boys waved back. She kept her gaze elsewhere.

That day, the constellations were abundant: bruised galaxies upon her lips, her hands, her brow. Prayag’s tally triumphed with laughable ease. Aniket pronounced judgment. Coins exchanged hands. Yet the usual jubilation fell curiously flat.

On the bus, Prayag whispered, almost apologetically, “Next week, something else.”

Tanay nodded. “Yes. Something amusing.”

And so the decree was made.

The following Friday, when neither woman nor bullet appeared, the boys were gratified by their prescience. They concocted a fresh contest — spitting between the fissures in the station’s stone flooring, awarding points for precision. Their laughter ricocheted across the platform, louder than the wheels that ground upon the tracks.

The woman never returned. Nor the man.

Years later, should memory attempt to conjure her, perhaps only fragments would surface: a blurred profile, an averted face, eyes too large for comfort. What would remain, however, with a curious tenacity, was the recollection of a game — a game so simple in its arithmetic, yet so unfathomable in its design.