Antiman

by Rajiv Mohabir

  The rain fell in April, blotting out the sun for twenty-one days. Back home in Florida, in the late summer, the rains would fall for an intense twenty minutes—fat raindrops the size of ikura: salmon eggs. In New York, it rained like this, but mostly the rain was a spitting mist that blocked out the sun for weeks at a time. The collected trash heaped on the curbs baked in the humidity. The gutters turned into charging rivers. What I would have given for some lightning. I took to drinking Jameson. At least I could feel the heat inside my chest if the sun refused to kiss me.

  Sef came over but my buzzer was broken, so I took the elevator to the ground floor. With him was his friend, Dilip. He wore wire frame glasses and was shorter than me. His skin was darker than mine. We hugged and I pressed my hands into his back. As we stepped inside, the two stone lions that had previously glared at me seemed to smile with open mouths. I winked at them. The three of us stepped into the elevator. I pressed 6 repeatedly until the silver doors shut.

  Once in my apartment, I made chai and counted each ingredient I put into the boiling pot. It felt like something was lodged in my throat. I counted: one, two, three, four cloves, one whole stick of cinnamon. One, two, three, four, five cardamom pods and about an inch of grated ginger to one-and-a-half cups of water. I shook my head like a school child in a Bollywood film: tilt left, tilt right. Two naked men at once. I counted: one Coolie from Orlando, one Pakistani from Flushing, and one South Indian from Great Neck. We were about to stew in our own pot: dark tea and light milk.

  I said, nervous, “New York City water is the best municipal water in the world.”

  “For sure, and did you know Dilip, that Rajiv is so shy?” They both laughed. Sef looked down at his shoes and then up at me in a private smile. It was true. They knew each other long before I knew Sef. I fluttered about like a pigeon shaken in a cage. This wasn’t only today, but always. I’d only ever been shy initially.

  I laid out sweets and salty snacks for our chai—spicy sev and chocolate katli, a specialty of one of the mithai shops on 74th Street.

  “Your name is from the South,” I said to Dilip.

  “Yes. I’ve only ever been to India once,” Dilip replied. “Where’s your family from?”

  “We are Coolie—Guyanese. My father’s side is North Indian as is my mother’s father’s family. My Nani was Tamilian, so I am a mix of North and South Indian. She may have been Muslim. It’s the Coolie way. I have family that are Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist.”

  “That’s like if Sef and I made a child—it would be like you,” Dilip mused.

  “My body is like a landmass where borders don’t really make sense. I mean if my left ear is Ganga, and my right is Jamuna, then where is Saraswati?” I touched his ears starting with his left and then his right. My hand lingered on Dilip’s right ear and I could see him flush. He raised his skinny hands to mine.

  Dilip and Sef laughed. Dilip said, “It’s in there somewhere. Let’s find out.” He got up and pushed in his chair and took my hand. He led me to the bed where he pushed me against the wall and started kissing me. Sef followed. As Dilip and I kissed, Sef undid my pants and put me in his mouth.

  Sef kissed my mouth and I unzipped Dilip’s pants. By then, Sef had taken off all of his clothes. His hair had been freshly cut for today. He must have been so excited for this moment, I thought, for his two lovers to meet. I was impressed and wanted him even more than before.

  Outside the rain swelled. It was a fat rain. Yet another reason I was glad to be inside. We moved to the bed. Sef and Dilip were body to body and I saw a tender look in Sef’s eyes. I wasn’t supposed to see that look between them. I thought that our brown bodies would transcend petty jealousies. Outside, the distant peal of thunder.

  Gopal writes a letter to Radha. Cut to fantasy: It’s spring, and they are in the Swiss Alps, as Bollywood logic goes. Dream times happen far from the reality of India.

  Gopal:

  Don’t be angry if you read my letter. …

  I would call you the moon

  but it’s pocked.

  I would call you the sun

  but it’s fire.

  I will understand you as Ganga

  I will understand you to be Jamuna

  You are inside me, I will

  understand you to be my own.

  The two frolic in the exotic European countryside.

  I didn’t want to do it again. Sef was sorry.

  “How come?”

  “I think I just want to have you to myself. …” I paused. “At least when we are hooking up. I’ve tried the polyamory thing before, and it didn’t really work out for me.” It was true. Tom was a great person, but I didn’t think that I could stay with him. He was white and from a world of pastors and Protestants. I wanted something browner, something siltier. I wanted to be with Sef, and I didn’t—though I was lying to him.

  “I think that I’m not really that ethical—I tend to hurt people.” I was bruised and torn. I fiddled with a button on my shirt until it popped off. I didn’t want to fuck only Sef, yet I didn’t want to watch Sef fuck someone else in front of me. I thought about this as a boundary for now. Sometimes rivers divide countries and states. Guyana and Suriname are carved like this by the Courantyne’s brown water. Bangladesh and India are separated by the Ganga. But these are human demarcations mapped onto the geological. Cultural divides are not so exact.

  Sef shrugged. Clouds rolled off his shoulders, crawled across the floor, and entered my throat. His apathy choked me. “That’s so sweet.” He smiled, taking off his sweater.

  The Lover and the Chapbook

  I PICKED UP my cell; its blue glow pricked my eyes. I tossed the sheets away and stood up, dizzy.

  “It’s 2 a.m.” I could smell my own breath. It was Ryan.

  “Rajiv? I don’t know what to do.” Silence. Then a sob. I was used to the occasional phone call and check in, but never at this time of night.

  I turned on the kitchen light. I sat at the breakfast nook table and gazed out of the window. The courtyard of my apartment building glowed in the night. Rats scurried from the sewers into the garbage piles. I lit a cigarette.

  “Are you okay? Are you safe?” Ryan was fragile—his alienation in Baltimore was jarring after the promise of a South Asian community of activists in the city. The organizers promised us that we would always have space with them, that we would be welcomed into their circles if we moved to New York. I had moved to New York and no one wanted to hang out. So much for promises.

  “Steven and I broke up.”

  “Isn’t this a good thing? Ryan—haven’t you wanted to break up with Steven for some time now?” I rubbed my eyes and shook my head. Why was he waking me up on a school night?

  “I am just so frustrated right now—I told him to leave my apartment.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I wrote him a letter that said, ‘I don’t have the emotional strength to continue this relationship anymore. I need you out.’”

  Ryan broke up with his boyfriend of two years with a letter he left on the mantle.

  “Is there anything I can do?” I asked, understanding his grief and relief. He finally had the courage to let this fucker go and he was overwhelmed with fear of being alone and manic joy.

  “Can you come here?”

  It was Thursday, I had to teach in the morning. “I will come tomorrow for the weekend,” I said, and we hung up.

  Several months earlier, Ryan had come to visit me in my studio for the weekend. Ryan’s hazel eyes and long frame lumbered toward me. The city had assembled guardrails on either side of the street.

  “What’s going on?” Ryan asked the waiter at Seba Seba.

  “The gays march,” he replied and scurried back into the store.

  Ryan’s eyes met mine. “Queens Pride!” we both said and laughed.

  Jackson Heights was a swirl of brown bodies and brown
languages. C’était possible quitter la maison sans parlant anglais. Bahut log vaha rehete the jinko Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, Fransisi, aur Spanish ati thin. On 74th Street between Roosevelt Ave and 37th Ave, the vendors came out. Hot jalebis, perfumed with rose, oranged the stalls. Samosas, fresh fresh and hot-hot, piped their steam into the mix of people. By Roosevelt Ave the LGBTQ Center set up a stage. There would be performances. I bought samosas.

  “Fuck, dude. You live here.” Ryan bit into his samosa.

  “It’s so familiar yet not at all.” When my mom made samosas, it was with egg roll wrappers and ground beef. Not this potato and pea mix.

  “I totally get it,” Ryan smiled with cumin in his teeth.

  I rubbed my head to pat down my hair. Shit. My bald spot was starting to grow from its quarter-size disk.

  Ryan probably had it harder than I did—I had a community, or at least there were other Guyanese people about. Ryan was born in Kolkata and orphaned. A white American family adopted him, hoping to do good, and they did for the most part. But it’s impossible not to feel alienated as the only different one in the room. I looked at him. He wore a yellow T-shirt, a fluorescent pink belt, and blue jeans that made his ass pop. I had my brother and sister to complain about racist white people with.

  The parade started, as did the rain. The marchers held their banners as glitter and eyeliner ran streaks down their cheeks. The sky did not relent. It had something to say, too. The group called SALGA—South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association—passed by and we cheered extra hard. I felt like I belonged when I was with Ryan. I cheered for him and me. I cheered for our friendship—our queer familial bond.

  The rain relented and the sun shone bright. A rainbow broke out and danced its wet body across the sky.

  I boarded a Chinatown bus from Midtown to Baltimore. In my notebook I kept a record of my thoughts. I was thinking of Aji and her songs—translating them into a language that I could use. I carried a cassette player with me and transcribed the lyrics to one of Aji’s songs as I sat on the bus. I stopped the tape and wrote down one word at a time. There was one particular Kabir poem that she sang when I saw her last. It was a chutney song that she said had a deeper kind of meaning than just dancing.

  Chunariya pehenke piya se milbe

  Saiya, tum ho chatur saiyana

  sasur ghare jaana

  I tie my veil to meet my love.

  Love, no matter how clever

  you will have to leave for your home

  This kind of song was a nirgun: a song about death—but really about living. I had heard these kinds of songs in Varanasi. The overarching metaphor of the body as a veil permeated my thoughts. My body is a veil that I wear and discard. Or at least this was the philosophy behind this kind of poem. New Jersey raced by the window as I considered impermanence.

  I liked teaching, but I wanted to leave it before I became a bitter teacher. The students deserved better than that. The department of education was a mess. Funding issues. Racism. All of the things to put the onus of making children learn on the shoulders of individuals instead of the system. I just didn’t know what I wanted to do. When I moved to the city I only wanted to live in New York for several years. There was somewhere else I could be.

  My cell phone buzzed. It was Sef. I silenced it. I’ll call him later, I thought.

  Outside, Jersey rushed past. I thought of the road trips that I had taken with my parents and siblings in the past. This was different.

  The bus was peopled by travelers like me: those who wanted to save a dime and those who wanted to bring on old-school boomboxes to blast the latest Chinese hits for our long crawl down the Eastern Seaboard—those who were finally meeting themselves in a big city. The road lasted the length of this translation and I began to write my own nirgun poems.

  The bus dropped me in the parking lot of an abandoned grocery store. Ryan came with his friend Shayna. We hugged and crawled into Shayna’s car and sped off to Ryan’s apartment. She dropped us off and went home to get ready for the evening. Ryan’s two-bedroom was dark and smelled like grief. He went to the kitchen without kicking off his shoes and poured us both whiskey gingers.

  I walked from the living room to the bedroom. The brightly colored furniture helped to alleviate the sense of mold and despair that crept in the shadows, poised for descent the moment the lights switched off. The queen-size bed was stuffed with pillows. Ryan walked in and handed me my glass.

  “On the other side of the wall,” he motioned to the other side of the room, “was where Steven slept before he left. I could feel his evil emanate from the wall.” Ryan took a sip. “Drink up,” he continued, “we have a lot of work to do.”

  I sipped and looked at the photos on his dresser. Steven was a white hipster with blond-brown hair, blue eyes, and stretched earlobes that fit blue plugs.

  “He could make me cum real fast,” Ryan admitted as he turned the photos down. “Now he’s gone.”

  “Are you going to stay here? Why don’t you move to New York?” I was hopeful—it would be great to be able to stumble home drunk with him after nights of dancing.

  “No, I’m going to stay in Baltimore. I gotta get the hell out of this place, though.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m great.”

  “No. Really. Are you really okay?”

  Ryan bowed his head. Sweat collected at his temples. With a laugh he flung his head back and shot the rest of his drink down his throat.

  “You know, Rajiv, I’ve started to write poems about him.” He pointed to the bookshelf that housed a dusty stereo and five books. Under a figurine of an elephant a pile of papers gleamed. Ryan walked over and pulled them out. “I have about thirteen done,” he said.

  “You have to read them! Invite your friends and you should have a reading in your living room.” My excitement grew at the prospect of Ryan writing poems.

  “I am hoping to make them into a book—like a small book that can fit in my back pocket.”

  “I would definitely buy that book.” I took out my own journal. “I’ve been jotting things down, but they’re only scribbles for now. I wish that I could make them more a part of my life.”

  “Rajiv—you totally can. No one is in control of what you want to do.” Ryan opened his eyes wide; it was his serious face. “You already are a poet.” He picked up my journal and read for a few seconds that felt as though he was looking into my ears to examine my head.

  “You will have to leave for your home …” he mouthed. I knew what he was reading. He closed the journal and put it on the table. “Yep. Just as I thought. What’s the hesitation though?”

  I looked at the floor. “I’m not sure. I’ve been teaching for a while now and I don’t know. … I don’t even know who will read it.”

  Ryan grabbed my hand. “I will read it,” he looked into my eyes with his serious face again. He meant business. “Write for people like you and me.”

  I thought of the present that Leila had sent me three years before. There was a queer Guyanese poet who wrote. I could do this, maybe. I said, “But I want to hear your poems first!”

  “Yes—but after I read, we are going out because I need to dance,” Ryan said.

  Jonathan and Shayna arrived at the apartment within minutes. Jonathan greeted Ryan with a firm hug and offered me his lily-white hand in greeting. Shayna’s hair was aflame with red and orange and her very presence scalded me.

  “Hey there. You both look a little dry,” Ryan said and slipped into the kitchen to prepare more drinks. He had changed into a short, pink T-shirt and a darker pair of Levi’s. I wrung my hands and my palms started to sweat whiskey.

  “Hi, guys,” I said.

  “You’re Rajiv from Queens. I’ve heard so much about you,” Jonathan whined and passed by me to sit on the couch. His thin frame looked like his shirt could break his shoulders. His milky skin betrayed his blue veins hard at work.

  “Rajiv!” Shayna said and slapped my hand, palm to outside hand to palm to outsi
de hand to fist bump. I fumbled and did the handshake wrong, confounded by her beauty. “Do you also write poems?”

  “I do, but I definitely don’t show them to anyone.” I looked down at my silver-and-black sneakers.

  “So how exactly do you know Ryan?” asked Jonathan from the couch, one leg crossed over the other. “I mean I know that Ryan goes to visit you in New York and that you’re a second-grade teacher—but I never heard the story of how you met.” He narrowed his ice-blue eyes.

  “We met at a conference for South Asian activists in New York a couple of years ago. Our being outside the ‘South Asian’ norm brought us together and since then we’ve been connected.”

  Ryan emerged. The ice clinked a song in the whiskey gingers he handed to his guests: the promise of fresh condensation and a dulling of sadness.

  “We were both on the outside, not really fitting the mold of who we should be or what people think we are, you know? You don’t lose a connection like that when you make one,” Ryan said with a grin and a laugh.

  It’s true, I thought—in some way we saved each other from expectation and disappointment. Ryan must have felt like a three-headed green monster who wore a mask. What could this white Jonathan know of being on the outside?

  “That’s very nice,” he said. Nice. He could have also said the word quaint or exotic. I glared at him and then at Ryan. I could feel veins erupt on my forehead and my eyes redden.

  “Nice?” Ryan laughed. “It was more than just nice.” Ryan loved this boy as a friend for some reason and maybe I should give him a chance. I was reading meaning into his words—call it a post-traumatic response or the wild bird of jealousy beating against my throat.

  “Psht—” Shayna said and put her hand on Jonathan’s knee. “You know that being outside of the norm makes you close to others that are freaks like you.” She went in for a hug. Jonathan tightened, then loosened his posture. These three were a unit. Shayna and Jonathan took care of Ryan while he was going through this breakup and I loved them for it, despite myself.