Seahorse Read online

  I bought a samosa from the makeshift snack stall nearby, one that also dispensed lemon juice, and didn’t stray far, keeping them within eavesdropping distance.

  “He’s British, but of Greek ancestry,” said Titania. “That’s what he told Priya, apparently.”

  I hadn’t known, but it explained the olive skin, the dark hair.

  “Talk about a Greek god,” giggled her friend.

  “You think? He’s tall and all that… but not really my type…”

  “Yes, because you prefer skinny struggling artists.”

  They both laughed.

  I bit into the samosa—the shell came away in my hands, loosening the soft potato and peas filling. It steamed gently on the paper plate, while the tamarind sauce pooled darkly around the edges.

  “You should invite him to a house party…” said Titania. “I’m sure someone’s planning one soon.”

  Her friend lifted a dainty eyebrow. “Why not? I don’t think he teaches here. Maybe we can get him drunk… although, I’m not sure he’d come.”

  “We could ask Adheer to invite him.”

  “Adheer?”

  “They spend a lot of time together… don’t you think?”

  “What are you saying?” laughed her friend.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Lari, you know what I mean.”

  “What do you mean?” She sounded genuinely confused.

  “I think they’re… you know…” She must have mouthed the word for I couldn’t hear her. What I did catch was Lari’s cry of repulsion.

  “That’s disgusting… you really think so? It’s so gross.”

  Titania sipped her drink, and stayed silent.

  What I observed, over the weeks, was that Nicholas didn’t pay special attention to anyone in particular. He was indiscriminately charming. When in the mood. Or resolutely cool. He remembered people’s names, or at least had a way of requesting them to remind him so they weren’t slighted. He appeared attentive, if not deeply interested. Mostly, I think, he enjoyed the attention. And tired of it just as easily.

  People have fickle memories though. And often they mainly remember the agreeable, latching on to the winsome details. A wave across the lawn. At the café, a round of tea at his insistence and expense. A recommended book. His smile. Rare, precious gesture—that in an instant swept you into his closest, most secret circle.

  Yet the lines were drawn long before we imagined, who would be allowed in, how much, how far, always keeping, inevitably, to himself. Intact. In his own hands, he was porcelain.

  I see that now.

  If he spent more time with Adheer, it was because Adheer sought him out more persistently, and successfully, than all the others. Hurrying after him in the corridors, waiting, nonchalantly, by the gates, reading on the lawns. Accompanying him to university talks and seminars. And while Nicholas escaped unscathed, for it didn’t strike anyone to mock him, people called Adheer a “bender” behind his back. Others employed their words more delicately: “Look at him,” they whispered, “that poo pusher.”

  In college everything was sexualized.

  And looking back now, I realize, that was one thread that stitched us into some kind of collective. The mystery of sex, and (mostly) its lack.

  Living in residence halls fueled by male camaraderie, regarding the close co-existence of girls, their mighty distance. In there, we were swamped by complex hierarchies and communal fissures, trapped in an intricate system of jurisdiction—where the Jats were feared, the Punjus scorned, the northeasterners ignored, the Gujjus mocked, the Tam Brams held in mild amusement, the Bongs quietly tolerated, the Mallus generally liked by all and sundry. Then came the broader divisions of sports quota folk and special reservations, the slackers and endless Civil Service sloggers, the cool and uncool, the artsies and sciencees.

  All entwined in the general joyful wastefulness of youth. And something else.

  We’d move from room to room, swapping cigarettes, alcohol and lies. Talking, skirting the issue, the act of, plucking euphemisms from insecurity—do it, bang, beat, bone, bugger, screw, bonk, go all the way, home run, old in-out, pound, bed, shag, slay, mount, boff, bugger, cut, dance, dip, doink, scuff, fire, fubb, fuck, fug, do the nasty, get any, get it on, get lucky, give it up, hit it raw, hit skins, have a go, grease, hose, knock, make the beast with two backs, woopie, nail, ram, rock and roll, score, shine it, slap and tickle, smack, smash, lay, hump, plow, quickie, romp, ride, roger, you know what.

  It was endless, and language the sheet with which we all hid our nakedness, and longing.

  On most weekends, the residence halls emptied, as students headed out to South Delhi or Connaught Place—the ones who could afford to drink at newly opened bars or watch movies at shiny multiplex cinemas. I’d been to South Delhi a few times, traveling there on a long bus ride from the Inter State Bus Terminal at Kashmiri Gate, filled with vehicles spewing smoke, roaring like metallic monsters. Past the green expanse of Raj Ghat alongside Mahatma Gandhi Road, the perpetually chaotic ITO, and the gated distance of Pragati Maidan. Slowing down once the bus cut into the city, passing through Lajpat Nagar with its labyrinthine market, the calmer environs of Siri Fort, Delhi’s second city, bourgeoisly concealing its brutal origins—founded by Ala-ud-din Khilji on the severed heads of eight thousand Mongol soldiers. From there, it wasn’t far to our destination, to Saket Complex, lined with air-conditioned shops, a colorful new McDonalds and TGIF, and, its crowning glory, a royal blue-gold PVR cinema.

  Others made their way to neighborhoods clustered around the college campus, to flats and apartments rented by their outstation friends, for parties fueled by cheap booze and marijuana. There were some, who stayed in, from not having been invited, or propeled by the fear of an unfinished assignment.

  A Sunday night spent mustering inspiration to discuss Waiting For Godot as an existentialist text. The essence of existentialism focuses on the concept of the individual’s freedom of choice, as opposed to the belief that humans are controlled by a pre-existing omnipotent being, such as God. Estragon and Vladimir have made the choice of waiting, without instruction or guidance…

  After a few insipid attempts, I’d usually sneak down to the common room in the residence hall. In the dark, the television screen burned tense and bright. Muted souls sat on the ground; one close enough to change channels expertly with an outstretched leg. The set had recently been hooked to Star TV and moved effortlessly from one channel to the next. Music followed by sport followed by the news, by movies and back again, in a dizzying circle. A ring of sacred, ancient rocks, surrounded by solstice worshippers. Often, I’d sit at the back while the others argued over what to watch—highlights of a tennis match between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, last year’s Bollywood blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, or endless MTV, where Nirvana and Pearl Jam displayed incredible angst and apathy.

  Invariably, the dissent ceased at eleven. When the adult films aired.

  Movies for which no one cared about the plot. A psychiatrist who fell in love with his troubled patient. A professor with his student. A young boy with his older neighbor.

  Hisses and whistles broke out each time the girl’s dress dropped, or the lead ran his hand up her thigh. The images unfolded in a montage of flesh and desire. Nobody bothered to follow dialogue, waiting mostly for the scenes in the pool, the shower. In a room that looked like a picture from a magazine, filled with plush leather sofas and pristine glass tables (did people really live like that?), where they (always a man and woman) fell in a heap on a spongy grey carpet. And then moved seamlessly to a wooden bed with rumpled blue sheets. Her bare breasts shiny and heaving under his hand. With a twist he’d grind into her from the back, while she clung loosely to the head board. Another time, in a Jacuzzi, lathered and wet, the water soapy in strategic places. She’d climb on top and arch against him. Scene change. And they’d be in a room filled with light streaming in from tall windows. On a table, he’d cradle her back and lean in towards her. Then the image splintere
d—caught in a kaleidoscopic reflection of bodies writhing in pleasure. When the credits rolled, few would leave. We waited, breathless, to watch the next offering.

  In college, everything was sexualized, yet it was impossible to talk about sex.

  On rare occasion, though, they took place, those conversations that cut cleanly through the euphemisms. When I returned to Delhi in mid-July for my second year at university, I found I’d been shifted into a room with someone new. A spindly long-limbed Tibetan. Kalsang, I was relieved to find, was minimally intrusive. He didn’t talk all that much, he didn’t pry, or ask me questions about my life in my hometown, or why I wrote letters to Lenny. We shared joints and lives of mutual exclusivity.

  Yet sometimes, late at night, when it was marginally cooler, we’d keep the window open, our room filling with the fragrance of something sweet, a distant flowering saptaparni. The pathways outside cobbled and vacant, bathed in yellow lamplight. We had conversations that, at that hour, people usually only held with themselves. Entirely plausible, of course, that this was intimacy occasioned by weed or alcohol, but I like to think it a special exclusion.

  “I lost my virginity to my cousin,” Kalsang once told me. “I was fourteen, she was seventeen. We were visiting them in Kathmandu… I was sleeping on a mattress in the sitting room and she came downstairs… I was so scared someone would walk in. You know, my parents were sleeping in the next room… if they’d caught me…”

  “What would’ve happened?”

  “I don’t know… they would’ve killed me.”

  “Do you still see her?”

  A long, errant silence. “Sometimes.”

  On another night, even though I was terrified, I admitted, “I’ve never, you know…”

  “What?”

  “You know…”

  I could see him, in the darkness, his outline upright on the bed.

  “Never done anything?” he asked.

  It didn’t count, I suppose, the boy from my class in school, who I’d “accidentally” meet in the toilets or a corner of the empty library. The one in Math tuition, who sat beside me, his hand below the table, on my thigh, unconcerned by the mysteries of trigonometry. In my hometown, I’d hang out with Lenny, and he hardly talked about girls, or to girls. So I didn’t tell him about my sister’s friend, how she’d lean over while I was at my study table… “Such a good boy, always reading”… her neckline dropping low and open. How she’d casually brush against my arm, my shoulder, if we happened to cross paths in the kitchen, the corridor.

  In college, I stayed away. Uneasy. Apprehensive. Unsure. There were too many invisible, unspoken rules to navigate. I thought of Adheer. Poo pusher. What would Kalsang do? If I told him. Would he shift out of our room too?

  “So… nothing?” he reiterated.

  “No.”

  The silence lay rich and deep.

  His voice broke through the darkness. “That’s okay, man. They say the longer you wait, the better it feels.”

  This wasn’t, couldn’t be, true, not in this world or the next, but that’s the reason I was fond of Kalsang. He was exceptionally cheerful.

  He began inviting me to parties outside college, probably in a bid to alter my chaste circumstances. But in vain. These were mostly large gatherings—immense crowds of strangers, friends of friends of friends—and I shied away. I could see, though, that it was a liberation. Outstation students who lived in the city harnessing a new, unbridled freedom. It couldn’t have always been this way, but the country was changing. Opening its arms—multiple, like pictures of all those Hindu goddesses hanging in auto rickshaws and shops—to the world, embracing the policies of tomorrow. The ones that had brought Coca Cola and Hallmark into our markets, MTV into our homes, and stamped Levi’s across our asses. Allegedly, this was “freedom of choice”. And it filtered to us, in our student room, with its wobbly wooden tables and bare lamps, rumpled sheets and uncushioned chairs, all coated in a layer of undisputed dust. We could head elsewhere, if we preferred, somewhere brighter, more glittery. Where everyone dressed like the people on TV, and danced to the latest music, and believed that somehow, because of all this, they were unbelievably lucky.

  “Want to come?” Kalsang would ask.

  “Alright, let’s go.”

  The night awaited, brimming with possibility.

  I never did find out whether anything happened between Nicholas and Adheer.

  Despite the rumors.

  In all our time together, I hesitated to ask.

  (In all our time together, I hardly needed to think of Adheer.)

  They made me think of Adheer.

  I suppose it’s an alliance that calls for some explanation.

  One morning, in late September, I headed out the college campus into the Ridge Forest. Trying, fervently, to avoid thinking of a news item from a few weeks ago—a corpse had been found, hastily hidden in the undergrowth. For days, newspapers plied their choicest headlines: “Mystery Body”; “Mutilated beyond recognition”; “Advanced stages of putrefaction.”

  Apparently, this happened here with disconcerting frequency.

  And if it wasn’t the discovery of a corpse, the Ridge, as with most ancient places, seethed with other stories. Of unhappy spirits that lived in its trees. Of a strange creature, similar to a white horse with a very long neck, which could often be sighted at night. Of a ghostly woman and child weeping. It was well known too that amorous couples found shelter here behind the cover of shadow and leaves.

  In all honesty, I might have preferred coming across a ghost.

  My journey through the forest proved quiet, and disappointingly, uneventful.

  Beneath my feet, the ground squelched, softened by months of monsoon rain, and the air carried the smell of damp, decaying things. Here and there, a high-rising gulmohar, now green and unblooming, and the sparse babul with yellow summer blossoms. Hidden amid the others, the petite ber, with drooping, glossy leaves, and, of which I was fondest, the golden amaltash, when it was radiant against a blue April sky. I hadn’t ever spotted any yet, but the forest was inhabited by gentle chinkara and blue-coated nilgai. Once or twice, I thought I’d glimpsed a tiny leaf warbler, and the sudden scarlet of a rose finch. Over the years, this place had remained unaltered while the landscape around its fringes transformed rapidly—on one side the university buildings, on the other, the Civil Lines neighborhood, demarcated from imperial-era military zones, a remnant of the British Raj. In comparison to the south of the city, though, the north was relatively static.

  The South, if you’ll forgive the hyperbole, was our generation’s brave new world.

  Heaving with suddenly wealthy neighborhoods, its roads peeling under the speed of foreign cars. Everywhere the fresh scent of money, the incredible hum of movement.

  It all seemed terrifically heady and exciting, but here, in the north, beyond the Dantian circles of Connaught Place, the tangle of crowded markets in the old walled city, the hulking sandstone loneliness of the Red Fort, life was still somewhat slow and untouched.

  And that afternoon, as I tread on a slushy dirt track, listening to the sounds of a forest, I could have been miles away from a city of many millions.

  “In a forest,” Lenny once told me, “all time is trapped.”

  Admittedly, tramping through the Ridge wasn’t a preferred pastime. I was on a journalistic mission. In my first year in college, I’d been accosted by Santanu, a lanky Bengali with the (still) faint beginnings of a mustache and wispy long hair.

  “Would you like to write an article?” he asked.

  “For?”

  “The college newsletter.” Of which Santanu was the often despairing, yet resilient, student editor.

  “I’m not sure I’m the best person for this.”

  “You’re in English Lit, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Everyone in the Lit department can write. Or at least has some secret ambition to be the next Rushdie or something.”

  Accustomed
to persuading reluctant contributors, Santanu wasn’t one to give up easily—“I’ll give you plenty of time”; “You’ll see your name in print”, and finally, “I’ll buy you beer.”

  Okay, I said, suddenly convinced.

  Since then, I often wrote for the newsletter—a piece on the oldest academic bookstore in Kamla Nagar, a commercial area near the University, interviews with visiting lecturers, a book review as though penned by Chaucer: But thilke text held he nat worth an oistre.

  That day, I was trudging through the forest looking for a story.

  Soon, I came to a clearing. And there stood a four-tiered tower, atop a stepped platform, built of fire-red sandstone, capped by a Celtic cross.

  Santanu wanted me to write on the Mutiny Memorial.

  Apart from solemn, elegiac monument to the dead, it also served, for years now, as a frequent nocturnal hangout for university students. For gatherings of the least expensive and un-glamorous kind. Usually, the birthday boy spent the money his parents sent him to buy “something nice” on a neat half dozen bottles of whisky. Now, though, the place was vacant, strewn with the remnants of revelry, cigarette butts, broken bottles and greasy bits of newspaper.

  The tower glowed warm and fiery against the sky. Over a century ago, it had been built by the British to commemorate the soldiers who died in the Mutiny of 1857. (Or as Santanu explained, more appropriately “India’s First War of Independence.”) It rose above the trees in solid, symmetrical lines, tipped by elaborate Gothic adornments. On the walls, white plaques carried the indecipherable names of the dead. An arched doorway led to the upper tiers, although a thick, rusty chain was slung across the entrance and a signboard, in English and Hindi, warned against using the stairs. I peered inside; the rubble floor was choked with weeds and plastic bags. It was moving and absurd all at once—this promethean bid for remembrance. Its faithfully distilled recording of history. I looked around wondering if this was the only one in the forest. What other monuments were there, rising from the ground like giant tombstones?