It was a warm, sticky, slow-moving afternoon when our father first brought him home. A short, stout-looking man with curly hair and a confused expression, holding a plastic bag in his hand. That's the day my brother and I met our tutor, Madhavan Sir.
He introduced him with a kind of formal seriousness, explaining that Sir had visited his chamber the day before, not for tuition, but to hand over a case - an old grievance about unlawful dismissal from his last company. Father had agreed to take the case, and in exchange, Madhavan Sir would tutor us a few times a week.
He started the very next day.
It didn't take long to realize that while he was intelligent - maybe even brilliant, in his odd way - he wasn't exactly built for teaching.
Lessons would start out well enough - a few minutes of math or grammar - before drifting, almost inevitably, into long, winding stories... about his childhood in Madras, his college days in Saharanpur, his time sweating in a paper factory in Orissa.
Sometimes, when the evening air grew soft and the ceiling fan hummed sleepily overhead, he would linger past his time, staying for dinner, talking deep into the night.
He would start his stories with a familiar line ---
"So, when I was in Madras, my father was a manager in a cigarette factory..." --
and then delve deep into how his father died of excess smoking, how his relatives ended up taking all their property, how some aunt had cast black magic on his family, or how his landlord was manipulating his mother with dark spells.
At ten years old, my mind could only comprehend so much, but I was fascinated and we would indulged in his stories, offering him wild ways to escape that house. Yet he would always make some excuse for why he couldn't leave.
One time my father offered, half-serious, "I will visit your landlord and talk to him. Maybe give him a warning."
Another time, my mother said - with all seriousness, but not really - "You must bring your mother one day! We'll convince her to listen to you."
He would just smile politely, shake his head, and murmur,
"She doesn't go out anymore. She wouldn't listen to you. She's in their control... because of the black magic."
A couple of months later, my parents realized he wasn't cut out for tutoring, especially after he obsessively demanded my brother to complete an exercise and, in frustration, hit him as punishment.
The formal tutoring stopped.
But Madhavan Sir still visited us often, sometimes with the same old stories, sometimes with new ones that were even stranger.
Whenever we stumbled upon him, we always saw him carrying a blue plastic bag with him, clutched tightly in one hand, as if it contained something precious - though we never knew what.
One time, on the road we saw him with a bag so large it looked ridiculous against his small frame. Naturally, we concocted another wild story: that he might be carrying a dead body, hidden in that oversized bag. Why else, we reasoned with the absolute certainty, would someone need a bag that huge?
Then one day, he simply stopped coming.
For years, we didn't see him.
My father spotted him once across the street - but Madhavan Sir turned away sharply, almost as if he hadn't seen him, and practically ran.
Over time, we began spinning theories among ourselves.
Maybe he lived alone.
Maybe he had no mother at all.
Maybe he wasn't real either.
Maybe he was a ghost.
Maybe....Just maybe something was a little off in his head.
A screw loose.
And then, a few years later, he stumbled back to our door.
He looked much older, weaker, and tired - like he hadn't eaten in days.
My mother invited him in, offering him food. It saddened us to see the ghost of the man he once was.
He looked shorter too... or maybe I had simply grown taller.
Yet again, he had a story to tell -
this one sadder than all the others, as if the final rope he had been holding onto had snapped.
"I lost my Mother at the railway station," he said.
"Lost her... as in?" we asked, surprised.
"Lost her... and never saw her again."
We didn't know how to react.
There was a kind of silence that stretched between us, one we didn't know how to fill.
My mother served him more food, which he ate hungrily, like someone who hadn't seen a proper meal in months.
She invited him to come back anytime.
But that was the last we ever saw of him.
Years have passed now.
We still sometimes mention him in our conversations - Madhavan Sir - each of us spinning our old theories again, wondering which one might have been closest to the truth.
Madhavan wasn't even his real name. We had learned his real name a few days after we met him - but by then "Madhavan" had already stuck. None of us ever corrected it. And neither did he.
That, too, became part of the strange, disturbing stories he left behind - a life made of half-told memories, lost things, and names that didn't quite belong.
