Seahorse Read online

  Kalsang and I rattled along the potholed road on a cycle rickshaw.

  “Bas,” he said. We stopped in front of a biscuit-colored house, with a narrow unlit staircase. We climbed, stumbling over sleeping dogs and garbage bags, to a flat on the fifth floor. From behind the door came the dull leaden thud of music. Even now, before I enter a party, when I’m standing outside the entrance, listening, I wish, for an instant, I hadn’t come. I feel I’m intruding on some secret ritualistic practice of a tribe I don’t belong to.

  We stepped into a large terrace space, dotted with people sitting in dark corners, standing with glasses against the railings. It seemed everyone, apart from my roommate, was a stranger. People called out to Kalsang, saying hello, asking him if he had any “maal”.

  A stereo in the corner spilled tunes into the warm night air—But it’s just a sweet, sweet fantasy, baby… several voices sang out, rising from a mesh of bodies swaying to the beat… When I close my eyes you come and you take me.

  I stood by the bar—a rickety wooden table strewn with glasses and bottle tops—and watched the others dancing. There’s no beginning and there is no end.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Kalsang, and disappeared for the rest of the evening.

  I poured myself a drink. Cold, frothy beer. Behind me, the lights of the city flickered between tree tops and wires. I wondered whether I could see the mutiny memorial from here. Rising above the treetops. Far below, bathed in orange-yellow lamplight, the road was beginning to empty. A few couples marched by, intent on an evening walk. A man selling chuskies did brisk business. Stray dogs circled each other in suspicion.

  “Hey, do you have a light?”

  “What?”

  “Got a light?” She swiped her forehead with the back of her hand; her bracelets tinkled.

  “No, sorry.” But I wished I did.

  Someone close by threw her a lighter.

  “Thanks,” she yeled. I could smell her perfume mingling sweetly with sweat.

  “You were very good…” I blurted.

  “I was?” She exhaled, and her face was lost behind plumes of smoke.

  “In Midsummer Night’s Dream…”

  I expected her to be pleased, but she rolled her eyes. “I’m beginning to think that’s the only theatrical role I’ll ever be remembered for…”

  Of course, I should have known. What a ridiculous thing to say! Haltingly, I apologised.

  She waved it away, with a cool, careless hand.

  What should I do next? Perhaps offer her a drink…

  Our conversation, aborted as it already was, swiftly came to an end as Lari danced up to her, skirt swirling. She pulled Titania, laughing, back to the dance floor.

  It was almost a relief. I wondered whether they’d ever invited the art historian to a house party. They probably didn’t have the nerve. And this wasn’t the kind of place where we were likely to find Adheer either. I poured myself another beer; it would be, I was certain, a long evening.

  After several pints, I stumbled indoors, looking for the bathroom. The flat was mostly empty, probably because it was uncomfortably hot inside, and ceiling fans swirled around warm, sticky air thick as soup. I walked through, what was presumably, the drawing room, strewn with thin, folded mattresses, a battered TV set, dirty cushions, slippers, and tottering bamboo shelves holding brimming ashtrays and old magazines.

  Eventually, I found a bedroom. The mattress placed on a rickety foldout bed, with a sheet tugged hurriedly around it. A pile of clothes spilled over a chair. The posters on the wall—Scorpions, Guns “n” Roses and Mr Big—reminded me of the ones in Lenny’s room. The first door I tried, hidden behind a curtain, led not to the loo but a small covered balcony strung with washing lines and littered with old newspapers and empty bottles. I liked it there; it was quiet, away from the crowd.

  Suddenly, I heard the bedroom door open.

  “Here, just lie down for a while…”

  I recognized the voice.

  I peered inside, through a small dusty grilled window.

  Lari held her head in her hands, giggling about how the world was spinning, while Titania helped her across the room to the bed. She pushed some clothes off, and smoothed it out.

  Her friend lay down, placing her arm over her face. “Ooh, that’s so bright.”

  Titania switched off the tube light and turned on a lamp in the corner. The light spilled out in a soft, golden glow.

  “Better.”

  “Would you like some water?”

  The girl shook her head.

  Titania knelt on the floor, beside her. They spoke in whispers; I caught fragments, they were talking about the party—drink, who was that… the music… strong joint…

  Until Lari asked, “Will you do that? What you did the other day?”

  Titania reached out, stroking her friend’s forehead.

  “This?”

  Her friend nodded, smiled.

  Titania began with her face, caressing the contours in slow, delicate swirls. Through her long, silky hair. Untangling. Unknotting. Her fingers found Lari’s neck, the ridge of her shoulders. The girl closed her eyes. She traced her way down her arms, interlaced their fingers. Then slowly over her chest, over the flimsy chiffon top. Around the curve of her breasts, cupped in a black bra.

  All the way across the flat, smooth plane of her stomach, to the top of her skirt. Her fingers ran over her waist, her thighs, the dip in between, down the length of her legs. She did this over and over again, making her way down, then back up to the top. Lari stirred, turning her face slightly towards Titania. Their faces moved closer, meeting in silence.

  I waited behind the wall of glass.

  There’s no beginning and there is no end.

  When I left, the neighborhood was empty and quiet; interrupted only by the watchman’s beat, his walking stick rapping the ground. Somewhere, a gong sounded. It was three o’clock. Too late to find a rickshaw. I had no choice but to walk back to the residence hall. The roads emptied of all vehicles, save for some night creatures. The homeless, the stray, the forgotten, the lost. I hadn’t intended to stay out so long, but I couldn’t get away until Titania and Lari had left the room. They’d touched, and swept, and caressed, lying side by side, until they fell into a silence that I thought was sleep. Eventually, they’d risen, switched off the lamp, and stumbled out in the darkness. Now, the knot in my stomach, that hot, dense mass of desire, was slowly unraveling; I was tired, and sleep pressed heavily against my eyes. The walk took almost twenty minutes, down broken sidewalks and stretches where there was none. When I reached, the campus seemed haunted. Emptier than I’d ever seen it. The cross and tower outlined in a dark silhouette. I switched on the lights in my room. Kalsang hadn’t returned. Someone had slipped a note under the door. A phone call. From Joyce. “Please call back.”

  The next day, at noon, I walked to the PCO on the main road, outside campus. It had rained earlier, for the air carried a rare freshness, and the dust had settled on the sidewalk. It was odd that my sister had called, for no apparent reason. We wished each other on birthdays and Easter, were usually home together for Christmas, posing for an annual family photograph in front of the tree. But apart from that, we didn’t usually reach out and make contact. I hoped all was well with my parents. No, I was quite sure about that; they weren’t the type to shy away from telling me they were ill, or that I should come home. This was sudden and strange.

  At the PCO, I waited for a bulky gentleman in a striped shirt to finish a call. Outside, a man with a parked cart dispensed banta from a thermocol container filled with ice.

  “Special,” I requested.

  The man plucked out a thick, squat bottle and popped the stopper. It fizzed gently as he poured it into a glass, and stirred in a teaspoon of rock salt and a squeeze of lime. The drink tingled at the back of my throat, washing cold down my chest. Finally, I wedged myself into the stuffy booth, and dialed the number—this too was a common phone at the hostel where my s
ister was staying. I hoped she was in.

  “Hello,” answered a young female voice.

  “May I speak to Joyce, please?”

  “Hold on, let me check if she’s there.”

  The line beeped, and the machine numbers climbed higher. After what seemed ages, my sister came on the line.

  “Joyce, you called?”

  “Hello Nem.” Her voice sounded strange and distant, as though she was very far and very small.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “It’s Lenny,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I heard… actually, mama and papa rang me… they said they didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  The line beeped, like a heartbeat.

  “Lenny passed away.”

  The words hung on an invisible thread, stretching from her to me.

  “I’m sorry… there were some complications with his medication, Nem. He went to sleep and didn’t wake up.” After a moment’s silence, she added, “It would have been painless.”

  I placed the phone back on the receiver—my sister’s voice sounding sympathies into the air—and leaned against the door. Someone rapped against the glass, hard and impatient. It was the same man in the striped shirt. He’d returned to make another call. I paid and fumbled out. On the road, a DTC bus passed by exhaling a thick plume of grey smoke—it hit my face and burned my eyes, the sick, unhealthy smell of exhaust.

  I lurched towards the uncovered gutter, and threw up. The liquid sweet and empty in my mouth. When I straightened up, it didn’t return. The breath we ease into and out of, the rise and fall of our chest. That unnoticed, that necessary. It remained in some dark tunneled space in my chest. Filling with the stench of decay.

  A week before, someone had come to my room with mail. A glance at the handwriting, long and looping. Lenny’s. I hadn’t heard from him in a while. Lately, he didn’t write often, and even when he did, his letters were brief, sketchy, responding to mine in an oddly absent way. The last thing he sent me was not a letter.

  The envelope sat thick and secretive in my hand as I carried it to the lawn. I wanted to open it outdoors, as though whatever it may conjure could not be contained within walls. It was sealed neatly with cello tape; I opened it carefully. The paper inside was folded to a compact square. A sketch, a pencil drawing and a scribbled line—As I remember you.

  It was remarkably good, even if I felt Lenny had been rather generous by gently proportioning out my features—the eyes a tad larger, the longer, straighter nose, the slimmer, more chiseled face. In his strokes, Lenny had infused something I hadn’t ever seen before in the mirror. It was a myth of me.

  Nicholas found it once.

  He was rummaging through a pile of books—his and mine, gloriously mixed together, like our lives over the past few months—and a folded paper fell to the floor.

  He picked it up.

  “We should have this framed…” he said, holding it out, smiling.

  “No.” I tried to snatch it back.

  “Why? It’s marvellous…”

  I plucked it from his fingers and tucked it into my pocket.

  The sketch was the only thing I denied him.

  “It’s from Lenny.”

  I remember Nicholas watching me, his eyes, dark and attentive, taking in my gestures.

  We were in the study, lounging on the sofa.

  “You told me somebody had killed him…” he said softly. “Why did you say that? What did you mean?”

  The stranger with the coal-dust eyes, and sun-darkened skin. Who carried the scent of cold nights and bonfires. Lenny took him for bike rides out of town, to all the secret tea shops he’d shown me. To the pine forest. One afternoon, Lenny took him to his room, when everyone was out. But his father happened to return early and, for some reason, did something out of the usual. He walked downstairs to the basement.

  “He found them there…” I told Nicholas.

  In bed, entwined, skin on skin.

  And while I have spent many years thinking about that, conjuring endless scenarios, this is one moment I cannot bring myself to imagine.

  It is merely darkness. A blank spot. An open grave.

  Did his father shout? Did he retch? Did he storm up to Lenny and slap him across the face? Pull him away in his nakedness and shame? Did he stare at his son in the stranger’s arms and walk out silently?

  “They would’ve killed me…”

  Everything else remains pristinely clear in my mind—the oddly-angled room, the air tinged with the smell of cheap tobacco and old books. The map on the wall. The bed. The bed. Lenny’s family tried to keep it quiet.

  “Can you imagine,” I asked Nicholas, “how fast news spreads in a small town?”

  Where everyone knew everyone else. And whispers grew as tangled gardens, abandoned in their wildness, words flitting like butterflies from tongue to tongue.

  “Did you see him again?” asked Nicholas.

  I shook my head. “I only wrote him letters.”

  At the time this happened, I had just finished high school. My final exams a week behind me. I had no clear plans for after, the thing everyone called the future. And so I thought that’s what my father wanted to discuss, one evening, when he called me to his study. Except, when I walked in, there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before—embarrassment.

  “I wanted to talk to you about…” He stopped. Hesitant. He needn’t have said any more. I knew that the words about Lenny, whirling around town, had reached his ears too. I expected clamor and curses, rebukes and reprimands. I told you… I told you… I told you… I told you… he was a disgusting boy. To stay away. Instead he spoke with surprisingly timidity.

  “Did he do anything to you?”

  I was much too taken aback to reply.

  “Tell me, did he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  It grew, the look in his eyes. Twisting on his tongue.

  “Did he… touch you?”

  His words hung in the air, cleaving the space between us.

  I shook my head.

  Perhaps then it changed to relief. He sat back in his chair.

  “It’s better you don’t see him again.”

  “But why?”

  “It is better.”

  I had my hands on the table, clenched, my knuckles white.

  “Right now he needs to be left alone with his family. You see, Lenny is suffering from—a disease. Your mother and I don’t want you around him…” It’s contagious.

  I held my silence.

  My father was done. “I think I’ve made myself clear.”

  It wasn’t enough to keep me from seeing him.

  My parents sent me away to Delhi. They thought it for the best. They’d heard of a college there, founded on good, wholesome Christian principles, where students lived on campus, which had special seat allocations for people like me who came from places and communities far from the capital, marked as underprivileged and marginalized. I was sent away. I was offered to Nicholas on a plate. Something like fate.

  If time is measured in a god’s blink, I didn’t emerge from my room for a million years. I don’t know if it was the next day, or the next week—or had a month passed?—after I heard about Lenny. At some point, on some day, before dawn, when the murmuring voices were silenced, and darkness glowed with a light that seemed to come from nowhere, I walked out of the residence hall, down the brick-lined path, away from the campus and into the forest. I picked my way through stone and undergrowth, the leaves glistening with dampness. Somewhere, perhaps, a moon. Ancient, watching through the branches of charcoal trees. The air still and silent, pulsing with unknown things.

  I came to a tower. A tall sandstone tower, which I entered, and climbed, because from the top I’d be able to see all the reasons why. The air would be fresher, and filled with promise. From there, I’d be distant, removed from the clutches of this great and quartering heaviness. I’d almost
reached the end when suddenly there was no ground to stand on. Like stepping on water. Falling through the air.

  I lay curled at the bottom of the spiral staircase, the floor stone-cold and grainy against my skin. Hours later, a figure appeared at the doorway, and stood in a pale rectangle of light. His brows furrowed, his hands hesitantly reaching out to stop a fall that had already happened.

  I didn’t look up, didn’t ask why or where, as I was half-carried and led out into the forest, the trees green and reverent around us. Something ached but I couldn’t tell where the pain arose from, it seemed to surround me, dense as the humid late summer air.

  After a while, we reached a wide road lined by Gulmohar trees, bathed in a rich and luxurious silence. The slow, persistent purr of a passing car. The faint jingle of bells. We stopped at a gate where a man rushed out to help us. The exchange of words between them was brief and muted. Soon, I sensed we were indoors, in a cool and high-ceilinged corridor, the creak of doors, the slap of footfall, the voice of a woman. Hands, gentle as cotton, lifted me over, suspended me for a second in mid-air like I’d been only just before, while falling, and then a sudden release onto a soft, smooth plane that stretched endlessly like a field of snow. The unmistakable smell of fresh linen. Of something sharp and lemony. The warmth of wind and sunshine. A heated touch swept over me, a cloth struck at my skin, rough, spongy and damp. Something peeled, layer after infinitesimal layer. And then the deep, dark mercy of sleep.

  II

  IN ALL THESE YEARS, I’VE come to learn that the greatest lie is the face of a clock.

  Time doesn’t hang on a wall. It doesn’t tick by on a wrist. It’s infinitely more secretive and intimate. Time, contrary to all notions, does not flow. It’s not beautifully fluid, a murmuring river passing under a bridge. In our heads, it hastens and halts and stumbles. On occasion, it dissolves. It ceases to exist.

  Nicholas disappeared in the last century.

  (Ni. Cho. Las. How easily his name trips off my tongue even after all this time, when I’d broken up the syllables and stashed them like three shells in a box).