“Have you seen Emily?” I asked him through the din.
“Yes, come with me,” Justin said in my ear and took my hand and led me into another room where there was a stage with go-go dancers winding their hips on the bar top. I looked back and Zane was trailing us. Justin smiled, his teeth, his perfect jawline, his six-pack under his button-down sparkled more than any disco light.
Emily glowed like a ruby, ruddy from dancing and gin. Zane grabbed my hand and led me to the corner. He pushed me against the wall, hands choking my throat.
“Don’t you ever let another man fucking touch you in front of me,” he hissed. The club music beat like a pulse. I could feel the blood flow slowing and my veins pounding around where his hands grabbed my neck.
I didn’t know what to do. “Let go of me!” I screamed. “Don’t you ever fucking touch me like that again!” I hit his arms away from my neck in the one defensive move I’d learned from television.
“If you ever let someone touch you like that …”
His hands were in my face and he frothed at the lips, drunk.
“Let someone touch me? Justin grabbed my hand to bring us to Emily.” Why did I need to justify anything?
In the corner table my cousin Clara sat. She was the daughter of my aunt whose husband died of alcoholism. He used to beat Clara’s mother when he drank. Her eyes were two glassy orbs in which I could see my face. My eyes, half-closed, sweat staining my collar. My phone pulsed against my thigh. Sef was calling. I sent it straight to voicemail.
On the way home Emily was silent, glaring at Zane in the backseat from the rearview mirror. She played Babla & Kanchan and Zane wept in my lap.
“I never meant to put my hands on you.”
Lexington Ave/53rd St (Transfer Here for the 4 & 6, Making All Local Stops)
Thanksgiving: Zane’s mother’s house. I was in disbelief that Zane said his mother wanted me to come for this holiday. Zane’s aunts and uncles and cousins crowded Zane’s childhood home, each family packing Tupperware to bring home what food they could. His uncles and father snuck off somewhere to snort coke.
I didn’t want to answer anyone’s questions about who I was since Zane was not out to many in his extended family. I busied myself washing dishes while his mother entertained.
“But who is this, Dolly, washing all the time? I hope he’s getting paid!” one of Zane’s aunts said. Zane laughed along and returned to his drink, making straight-acting comments to his cousins like, “Remember Elisha from Adams? She was hot.”
The water was so hot it scalded my skin. I peeled blisters off my hands for the next week.
“I don’t know who he is,” Dolly began. Her upturned nose and short squat frame made everything she said sound hostile. “He must be one of the boys’ friends.”
The steam rose from the stainless steel basin. I looked at Zane who laughed along, pretending that he hadn’t just swallowed my cum an hour before we got there.
Court Sq–23 St (Transfer Here for the G, M, 7)
Two weeks later. The steady pulse of the water from the showerhead matched my step as I crossed the oak floorboards to get the guitar. I pulled out my acoustic Ibanez and sat on my bed, feet on the cool floor. The bathroom door slowly creaked open on Zane, drying his left ear with a faded blue towel and staring at himself in the mirror.
I sang an old Bhojpuri tune written by Sundar Popo and sung by Babla & Kanchan, a song every Coolie from Crabwood Creek to Kingston knows.
Chadar bechao balma,
chadariya, chadar bechao balma
nind lage chal soi rehena
The guitar strings stung my fingertips. My words: ocean and backdam.
“We dance to this song all the time at the cookouts in my parents’ backyard,” Zane said.
I continued to sing.
“I don’t think I can remember hearing this song for the first time,” he said as he joined me on the bed. “When you play it slow like that, it feels like it has another kind of meaning.”
“Yeah,” I said. I thought about his mother and how Zane’s father was an addict. I thought of her disavowal of me on Thanksgiving, how it was really a denying of her son. “I like it because it’s about a daughter-in-law singing about her lover.”
“Oh, god,” Zane said and sang along.
“Do you think your mother will ever learn to love the people you love?” I asked.
“She had a hard life. She wants us to be successful.” Zane put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling, “She used to like this song.”
“But not anymore?”
Zane sighed and got up. He walked back over to the bathroom.
My phone rang. It was Sef again. He wouldn’t understand this song in the same way that Zane did.
Zane could understand the color of this memory: stained boards of the SS Jura in 1890 bound for New Amsterdam from the Kolkata port just after the monsoon rains. Singing, my body was a ship swaying on the Kalapani that separated families from one another.
“What do the words mean?” Zane shouted from the sink’s mirror where he beat his face.
“A woman is asking her lover to lay a sheet down on the grass so that when they’re tired they can lie together,” I said. That they could find rest in each other.
Zane pulled me down onto the bed, smiling.
Queens Plaza (Transfer Here for the M, R, Making All Local Stops in Queens)
It was Zane’s dream to perform onstage at Stonewall Inn in the West Village. The black-and-white chessboard floor in the downstairs was sticky as we walked up to the second floor where Chutney Pride had arranged a drag show and party. Zane and his friend had been organizing the West Indian parties in the city under the banner of Caribbean unity—a different and more personal aim than the Sholay parties for South Asian subcontinental and second gen queers.
Zane asked, “Wouldn’t it be nice to dance to our own music like ‘Chadar Bichao Balma’ without the subcons calling us darkies?” The Stonewall Inn not only had historical significance, it was a space in the city that had embraced queers of color. Zane and his co-organizers knew the perfect DJs to request: queer, brown, and Black. Black, Indian, Chinese, and white West Indian queers from all boroughs came out and marched into the pink and purple lights to watch three Caribbean drag performers.
Lights flashed and Lotay climbed onto the stage. Lotay’s Tina Turner wig was a wild forest of light brown flame atop her head. Her stiletto boots climbed to her knees. Fishnets, panties, and a bustier. Lotay had mastered the tuck.
“And now for the main event of this evening: Lotay!” a woman’s voice cried into a microphone. A cheer arose from the crowd at the Stonewall Inn. Black and brown hands clapped and turned pink and yellow in time with the music and strobe lights.
Lotay came out on the stage as Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” blared from the speakers. She did the Trini wine and dropped low. It was if Gaga herself were West Indian.
36th St
“You spend too much time writing. Who are you writing to?” Zane reached over and grabbed my phone and scrolled through the messages first, then my call log.
“I am writing for school,” I lied. I was writing because if I didn’t I would dry up and turn into sand.
“Who the fuck is Hoyt?” he asked.
“Hoyt? He’s a guy in my MFA. We are both poetry editors for the school’s journal,” I said.
“Don’t make me fuck you up,” Zane threatened, narrowing his eyes.
I had just published a chapbook of poetry—I was called a “poet of note” by the editors at Pudding House Press. It was about removing the evil eye. In the acknowledgments section I thanked Zane for buying me my first broom, the special one that maijis and pandits use to jhare—to banish evil.
“That’s all you wrote for me? How are people going to know that I’m the inspiration for this book?” he demanded.
He wasn’t the inspiration for the book at all. The only thing he inspired was anxiety and my dropping all my friends. He didn�
�t want me to talk to anyone. Not Jegga. Not Autumn. Not Ryan. Not Sef. Not even my classmates. If I didn’t mention Zane in my chapbook it would have meant more fighting. Another empty rum bottle thrown at my foot.
To Zane, writing took me away from time with him. He saw it as a selfish act. He threatened to steal my hard drive and computer, to smash them when I wasn’t home—he wanted to destroy my writing if he couldn’t control it.
I hid my hard drive at Mae’s apartment.
Steinway St
In the fall, my mother wanted to have a party to celebrate my brother’s birthday and my sister’s graduation from her master’s program. My sister witnessed our father beat both me and my brother with his walking cane and belt when we were children. Our purple welts were dark butterflies on our dark skins. She was never hit. This made her want to heal those with this kind of familial trauma. Zane and I packed our bags and went to Orlando.
Zane had just started doing drag and I bought him his first sewing machine—a Singer. I liked my gifts to him to inspire creativity.
My brother Emile invited his Lutheran pastor to our house for this party. Pastor Pete came in, all Central Florida with frosted tips and a ball-chain choker. His bleached blonde wife followed close behind.
“You are from New York, Emile tells us! When I visited New York,” the pastor’s wife began, “we stayed in the Radisson in Maintown.”
“Maintown?” Zane repeated.
“You know, where the Met is! I just love museums! Especially the mock Egyptian temple there! It’s definitely a place that makes me proud to be American—if it were in other A-rab countries God knows what would have happened to it. I heard they hate art.”
“Oh, MID-town!” I interjected, straining for politeness for my brother’s sake. “But the Met is more like Upper East Side.” The foundational base of her face paint was starting to bubble with slight perspiration.
“Yeah, you should go and see it! I mean, I haven’t seen anything like their idol collection before. You’d absolutely love it! They have all of the Hindu gods, too.” Zane glared at me. I smiled meekly into my drink. It was bitter and warm like piss.
These kinds of tourists are usually terrified of Queens. Queens was brown, Midtown was white, and the Upper East Side was where the money was. Queens was where the working-class immigrant people lived and Midtown was where they worked for a mainly middle-class population who still squeezed their bitter melon and drank the juice to prevent diabetes.
The song “Ham Na Jaibe” by Babla & Kanchan began to play.
Ham na jaibe sasur ghar me baba
I will not go to my father-in-law’s house
The “chune” played and wound itself around my hips and feet like kudzu. What a good escape, I thought. That woman is as awful as her husband’s hair. The windows in the room where we danced began to steam.
The pastor’s wife wore a rouge tank top and a pair of blue jeans. Her lips were painted with mandarin orange lipstick. Stumbling to the dance floor with a pineapple in her fist, she shouted in a bawdy Southern accent, “You know, I can’t tell the difference between Indian dancing and Persian dancing!”
At this, Emily looked at me and then exclaimed, “Then don’t dance, just watch!”
The pastor’s wife rolled her eyes, then lifted the pineapple she’d taken from the kitchen and placed it on her head and started to snake her arms. The pineapple held in place while her alternating hands grazed the ceiling fan.
“Is this really happening?” Zane asked.
“Welcome to Orlando,” I said.
“And who are you?” she screeched at Zane.
“I’m Rajiv’s lover,” he said. She opened her eyes wide. Globs of black mascara clumped beneath her waterline.
“Oh,” she replied, turning and walking away from the Florida room where the music played. I could see her whispering to my sister-in-law in the kitchen.
Zane looked at me. “I’m glad I witnessed what you escaped,” he said. Zane was an escape. I reassured myself that our life together was a reason for me not to be in Florida.
46th St
Zane and I had a whirlwind relationship. He was all fire and alcohol; I was brooding. He was the faggot-child of drug abusers and learned to defend himself when threatened. Our apartment echoed with shouts.
I didn’t talk to Sef for about a year and a half. At first, he tried to call at least once a week. Once I picked up the call and answered in Hindi, “Haan kya haal hai yaar—what’s up?” I was casual, as Zane sat next to me.
“Just wondering where the fuck you’ve been.”
Sef’s hurt reached its tendrils out and choked me. “Yes, fine. Talk to you later then.”
I kept ignoring Sef’s calls and deleting his messages before Zane could see. Sef called when Zane and I were at dinner, when we went to the movies in Forest Hills, when I was at poetry readings in Manhattan. His calls came when I was in class and when I went to Orlando to visit my mother. He called when I slept and when Zane and I fought. I never picked up.
Eventually his calls dried like a creek, slowing down to once a month and then to silence. There were no traces of where this river once flowed. He sent me several emails about his confusion. Why don’t you write to me Rajiv and tell me if I did something wrong. I read his letter with clouds in my eyes. I wanted so much to reach out but didn’t because Zane promised me that I would be his only. I wanted to be someone’s only—someone’s favorite. I wasn’t Sef’s. I’d seen it in his eyes that day in my studio two years before with Dilip.
Three months had passed since I’d left my studio to move into a flat with Zane. He dodged questions about paying half of the rent, saying that his mother needed the money and that he would take care of it soon.
“It’s not fair, Zane. Why am I paying for our entire life together when all of your money is tied up in your house? It’s like you’re paying for your brother’s girlfriend to live in all five bedrooms.” I was angry. The pipes in our one bedroom ran with rust-colored water. The windowpanes shook with each passing car.
“Why do you get to have a financial investment when I don’t?” I asked.
“I always felt as though this apartment and our life together was your investment and my house was my investment,” he said.
“We need to come up with a plan. I can’t afford this one bedroom and if you don’t want to pay for shit then I am moving back into a studio.” I was shaking.
“I don’t compromise,” was all he would say.
Northern Blvd
“No.”
“You have to.”
“I said no.”
“Don’t be such a tease.”
“I said no.”
“I’m going to find someone else and you’re not going to know about it. Someone better who will put out more.”
He pushed his dry fingers inside. “Stop! I said …”
Zane laughed.
DELAY: WE ARE BEING HELD AT THE STATION MOMENTARILY
Lotay screamed at me all the way down Roosevelt Avenue. Past the blueand-red flashing lights. As we walked Lotay picked up her skirt and undid her belt. Past Lydia’s Bar. She took off her right heel and then her left. Past Friends Tavern. She pulled off her scarf. Down 81st Street. Until I crossed 37th Avenue and entered the corner building. The checkered linoleum on the flooring of the building gave it the look of a David Lynch film—surreal and haunted. Inside our apartment Lotay pulled off her foot-high blonde lace-front and revealed her sweat-soaked, bobby-pinned hair.
She cluttered our apartment with baubles: old Chinese-style vases, figurines, fans, and Playboy paraphernalia special-ordered from magazines. Mementoes of an old life where she hid from sight pretending to be someone else. In the light, the scene played out on a vase front, inverted, white and blue, cold as winter. I looked at my ghost.
Another bottle flew from the counter. Its glass now colorless, its black already sucked out. It hit my right foot.
I fell over to clutch my pain. This was not the first
time Lotay pelted me with something. There were good times that I shelved deep inside myself.
“You want me to dash things you fucking muddaskunt?” Her eyelashes were falling off of her face. Her eyeliner once curved up at the ends now streaked down her cheeks. Lipstick only colored the cracks in her dry lips. She was drunk again. Fucked up. She had fucked up. I stood up but my foot could not bear any weight.
Looking up at Lotay I knew that our relationship was disheveled and knotted like the pile of Yaqui frizz on her white Italian leather couches. Our connection had the velocity of a porcelain doll on the shelf collecting dust.
“I’m going to leave you and you will never find anyone like me,” she screamed at the top of her voice. You are nothing. No one will ever love you. You are fat and hairy. You are good-for-nothing.
I felt something break inside me. I am something. I will love myself. I am beautiful. I am worthy. It was the smallest bone in my body. The bone that tapped the imprint of her voice on my internal timpani. I had heard enough. It was time to clean the hoard. And I thought, Good. I don’t want to find anyone like you.
65th St
Mae was going to India to visit her in-laws. She had married Atin, our other Hindi teacher’s son, and moved to New York to pursue her master’s degree at Columbia University. Atin was a student in the New York Film Academy. They lived in a one-bedroom walk-up on the Upper West Side. Mae and Atin were my last remaining friends, the only ones who Zane had let me keep in close contact with. He liked their connection to India and the potential silks they could bring him from Varanasi. This time, Zane wanted to ask her to bring back glass churiyaan—bangles that he could wear for his drag costumes.
“I think that might be asking for too much from Mae and Atin, they don’t really have very much,” I told him.
Antiman Page 23