by Abha Dawesar
His little cousin Rinku, whom Prem had adored second only to Meher, was now simply an impediment. By nightfall Prem found himself resenting everyone because they were obstructing his natural path to Meher, separating her from him, and him from her, one more agonizing night. Meher tried to keep her spirits up, but she was not used to sleeping without her brother’s touch and started to look more and more sullen as the vacation went by.
The days passed torturously for Prem and his sister. One afternoon their aunt decided to visit a relative, leaving the kids by themselves. Rinku wanted to play with Meher. Sattu wanted to watch an adult film. Prem and Meher recognized the desperation on each other’s faces. It was now or never. Prem picked up his book in Sattu’s room and feigned deep concentration. Meher feigned a headache. Their cousins, unable to entertain themselves, fell asleep. Meher tiptoed out of the room on hearing Rinku’s first snore. Prem stole off to the kitchen where, he was sure, Meher was headed. Meher put on a saucepan of water to boil in case anyone should walk in. Then she fell into Prem’s chest.
“I thought we’d never be able to hold each other.” Meher’s hands trembled.
“I can’t take any more. Let’s go back home.”
“We have two more weeks. We won’t come again. We’ll find an excuse next time.”
“I can’t do it, Meher.” Prem let go of his tight grip on her and fell to his knees burying his face in her stomach. She ran her fingers through his hair, tugging at his curls. He looked up into her face, his eyes imploring her for something he did not understand himself. She stroked his face and his eyes that burned from lack of sleep. Her cool fingertips in the summer heat felt like ice. She cradled his chin and then pulled him up by his shoulders till he was standing. They were painfully aware of their bodies in a way that had never happened before the ten-day separation. Meher moved Prem’s torso till he was leaning against the kitchen shelves and pulled his face toward her own to kiss his lips.
“What is so unbearable, Prem? You’re suffering.”
“Not being able to hold you. To touch you.”
“To touch me where?” she said.
All of Prem’s love for his sister and the yearning that had had his heart beating so hard for ten days moved itself in a concentrated motion southward. The lump in his throat pushed into his chest, swelling his heart, and then farther down to his belly, which clenched like never before into his pants. He closed his eyes.
Meher slid her body down past his. Her face grazed past the buttons of his shirt and her forehead came to rest on his belt.
“I’m going to die,” he whispered.
“No, sweetheart, I would never let you.” She unzipped his pants and took his adolescent anatomy in the soothing skin of her hands.
That night Prem risked going to Meher’s room at night. She slept on the top bunk of Rinku’s bed. Prem moved close to the bed and put his finger on Meher’s lip to shush her. Standing with his feet rooted to the ground, he pulled up her nightie and stroked the skin of her shoulders, her breasts, her sex. He let his thumb rest there momentarily before starting to stroke the sensitive skin on the inside of her thighs. He had known then, as he had always since, exactly when she could take no more.
“We need to go back to Bombay,” Prem declared over breakfast the next morning.
Meher almost choked on her tea. She wished she could retract what he had spoken. The tone of his voice made his motives sound highly suspect.
“But your return ticket is not for another two weeks,” their aunt said.
“I’ve decided to build a helicopter for my physics project. I have to go back.”
“In that case Meher can stay and you can go back,” Sattu said.
Meher saw the murderous look on Prem’s face and was sure they had been exposed.
“I’m going to go back with him,” she said firmly.
“Well, I’ll look into changing the tickets,” their uncle said.
“We have to ask your parents first,” their aunt said. “In any case, Meher, you should stay here for the full time. Sattu is right.”
“Yes. Sattu can take the train back to Bombay with Meher. She won’t have to return alone.” Their uncle looked at Sattu, who seemed more than willing to do so.
“I will only go back with Prem.” Meher’s voice was hard and low.
“Let’s place a call to your parents tonight from the post office,” their aunt said.
“I might as well change the tickets first so that we don’t have to call them again and again. When do you want to leave?” their uncle asked.
“As soon as possible. Thank you, Uncle.”
In two days they were on the train to Bombay. Their parents were told that the kids were just a bit strange. The brief separation they had suffered made them more mercenary of their time together. Almost no day passed when they did not find a tactile expression for their love or a release for the tension in their young bodies. What they had done only with their hands they now started to do routinely with their lips, their tongues, and the hollows of their mouths. Any outside observer watching the four people in the Rustum household would have been sure that Meher and Prem Rustum were a young couple happily in love at the pinnacle of their harmonious lives together.
When Meher was doing her premedical, the parents revealed that they had received a proposal for her marriage.
“Did you ask her if she wants to get married?” Prem shouted, getting up from the dinner table.
“Calm down. You’re not the only one who loves Meher!” his father shouted back.
“I can’t eat,” Meher said, pushing her plate aside, complete misery washing over her.
“I told you they would never agree,” Meher’s mother said, looking at her father.
“She’s already twenty—this is an excellent match,” the father said, his voice calmer.
“At least meet him,” their mother pleaded.
“I guess you’re not even going to ask her if she wants to go to medical school and become a doctor first,” Prem said, his voice quivering. “What happened to you, Ma? All your education and your modernity. We were always so proud to say we had a working mother.”
“He wants Meher to study further. He promises she can study as long as she likes,” the mother said, then added, “In any case, I would never have made it to nursing school without your dad. I did it for him and only with his support.”
Meher stood up and carried her plate and Prem’s to the kitchen.
“Are you going to throw away everything I cooked?” the mother called after her.
They heard her dumping the half-eaten rotis in the garbage can and rinsing the dishes.
“I am going for a walk,” Prem said, getting up.
“I am going to go with you,” Meher said, hurrying out of the kitchen and wiping her hands on her pants.
“No, Meher, you’re not going anywhere,” the mother said.
“I am coming with you, son,” the father said. He pushed away his plate.
“You’re not going to eat more either?” the mother asked.
“Later,” he said, rising to the sink in the corner to wash his hands.
For the next few weeks the parents worked on their children relentlessly. Life has to go on. You can’t just live here forever with your parents and brother. Why don’t you want what’s best for your sister? You will be off in another year or two to pursue your own dreams and then what will happen to her?
The lectures left them in different moods. For a few nights they continued to seek each other out, but eventually the things they heard from their parents made them unsure. Prem was hurt but angry, sure at times that Meher really wanted to go off with this eligible bachelor their parents had chosen. Meher told herself that it would be best for Prem if she went away. Why should I be a burden on him when he has his full life ahead of him?
In the afternoons when they got back from school, they kept out of each other’s way. On one or two occasions they found themselves in terrible pain at the same ti
me, his anger and her resignation having evaporated in the face of their mutual desire. At such moments Prem would turn totally rigid and Meher, longing for her brother, would reach out to him. She would stroke his face and neck for as long as it took to draw him out. And then, all of a sudden, they would be in each other’s arms, kissing and clinging. As the date of the marriage got closer, this happened with increasing frequency. Their physical appetite for each other was like a burning fire. It spread from Prem’s heart to his groin. Meher felt her insides turn hollow. They had sex.
Several months later, in Oxford for his education, Prem received a letter from his mother. Meher was expecting. Prem wrote Meher immediately. He would put through a trunk call for her in three weeks at such-and-such time.
“Are you sure it’s not mine?” he whispered across Europe, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and divided Punjab, where the blood had not yet dried, all the way to Meher’s ear.
“Yes.”
“Certain. You wouldn’t lie to me?”
“Never.”
Much later, when Meher was dying, he had asked again. Repeatedly. The answer was still no.
“But how can you be so certain?”
“I counted, Prem.”
“I’ve counted too.”
“You’re a week off.”
DNA tests could now answer the question without a fragment of doubt: Do I, Prem Rustum, want to die not knowing whether he, Homi, is my son? Of my flesh and blood? Wasn’t that uncertainty the sentiment he needed to evacuate most from his insides before dying? But what difference could it make? Would he love Homi more? He already loved him as much as he would a son. He loved him as Meher’s son. Meher, Meher, Meher. At least he could join her when he died.
And Homi—so normal, happy, adjusted, having unquestioningly accepted all of Prem’s books as products of genius—did he want to throw him into turmoil at this late age?
Prem’s mind was churning before he even got out of bed. Were these early-morning reminiscences a sign that death was closer? Or was this the price a man his age had to pay for having meditated on Maya’s vulva as he abused himself? Was it like an orchid? An iris? A tulip? A carnation? A lily? Her juices thick? Creamy? Milky? Her taste acidic? Feral? Her lips closed in, modest, like those of Manet’s Olympia, hidden from view by her hand? Or more like O’Keeffe’s oriental poppies? The clitoris—stiff as a sheath, its ten hidden centimeters so erect that the tip was like that of a fountain pen with a gold nib? Or a slippery button, the size of a tiny diamond, that one could never locate for more than a moment here and there? Under his blue-and-white-striped flannel pajamas, he had a boner. He couldn’t begin to remember when that had last happened.
Prem undid the tie of his pajamas and pulled them down his hips. He opened the buttons on the front of his pajama top and brushed his left hand over his chest thinking of Valérie, of Julie, of the swimming pool in Provence where the two girls had come running to his beach chair and drawn sensuous circles over his nipples. Angie was gyrating suggestively an inch above his cock as the pungent odor of her insides filled the room. Vedika was telling him she loved him so much that he had taken up all her mind and soul. Without him she was empty, and she would die if he didn’t fill every space in her body with his semen, his cock, his fingers, his toes, his tongue, his words, his words, his words.
“I’m filling you,” he shouted senselessly as he came.
He recovered his senses soon enough. Meher, do you think I’m going crazy? Was it like this for you when you were dying? I thought I shared it with you. I thought it was about sadness, grief, occasionally a determination to fight against it tooth and nail. Am I not dying? Is that my problem? Seventy-five and jerking off before bed and on waking up. What am I going to do with Maya? I can’t go through one more manufactured feeling. I want to love so much that just the loving hurts. I think she has the potential to rouse that in me. But if I’m not allowed to seduce her, how to go about it? Am I going to write another book before I join you, Meher?
Prem went through his morning as usual. A shit, a shave, a shower, a café at the bar by the carrefour with the morning newspaper, a few niceties with the waiter, a shot of Paris in his veins. The day was brisk and clean. The sunlight warmed his legs where it fell from the side of the table. Prem ordered a second coffee and opened his blank notebook. He caressed the whiteness of its sheets and pulled out his pen. Why not tell Maya’s vulva what I think?
The day had begun well. On waking up Maya had gone straight to her yoga mat and practiced for an hour. Then she took two of her notebooks from her trip to India, to find a way of weaving a story around the pages, and headed to find a café. When she was down in the courtyard, she heard her name being called and looked up.
“Where are you off to?”
“Au Rendez-vous des Amis for a coffee. Do you want to come?”
“Go ahead, I’ll join you soon,” Nadine said.
A few rays of sun were hitting the corner table outside. The waiter brought Maya a coffee. A few minutes later a woman took the next table, brought out her sewing, and started to stitch what looked like a skirt. Apart from the occasional tourist walking uphill past them, the street was empty. Maya thought of the audacious things she had said to Rustum, but with the sun falling on her shoulders and her body in a state of post-yogic calm, it didn’t seem all that grave. It was all true. And how could one regret having spoken the truth?
“Are you sure I’m not disturbing your work?” Nadine asked, sitting down beside her.
“No, not at all. I’m in paralysis, remember.”
Nadine ordered a coffee for herself and played with one of Maya’s notebooks.
“Can I look, or is it private?”
“Go ahead.”
Nadine opened a page from the middle and read for a few minutes. She seemed to have trouble with Maya’s handwriting. Then she turned a page and frowned.
“What is this?”
“This is the problem I was talking about. The influence problem. I saw my trip to India through the lens of the old writer’s writing.”
“Did you do your photo project with him?”
“It didn’t go well, and I was afraid I wouldn’t see him again, but then it worked out.”
Nadine was already engrossed in Maya’s notes again.
“But you have your solution right here, Maya.”
“What do you mean? I can’t find a way of separating any of the interesting observations from his books and characters.”
“Precisely. You shouldn’t. Just write it as it is. Keep his lens, use it like a filter as you would while taking photos. I promise it will free you.”
“Free myself by putting myself in chains?”
“Try it once. Tell me, what happened with him?”
“I told him I’d already imagined sleeping with him. A mistake?”
“It’s good. You have to make the first move. Have you been with an older man before?”
“No. I never thought about it. But now I look at all the men in the street who look his age just to see if it’s only him or the whole category that I’ve fallen for.”
“I was in love with an old man, a choreographer. He was only sixty, but he wasn’t in good health.”
“And what did you do?”
“I hung around the cafés where people had seen him and went to shows by his students. I saw him once at a party but didn’t talk to him there. Then something happened.”
“Did he influence your dance?”
“Yes, it was like the problem you are having. He got AIDS. I knew he was gay, but I still should have approached him when he was in good health.”
“What happened? Did you manage to meet him?”
“I will tell you that story, but only after you try the formula I just gave you.”
“I should never have complained to you. Now you’ve found an effective way to stop me from whining in the future.”
“You can complain all you want, but only if you try out the solution.”
“F
air enough.”
Maya went back to her apartment and, despite every contrary instinct in her body, pulled out the first of her India notebooks and sat down to type. She embellished the facts, enlarged the scenes, and provided context, but not once did she cheat on Nadine’s suggestion. Prem Rustum’s books and his characters intertwined unedited with her experience of India. It was exhilarating to see words on the screen and to hit page preview and find ten pages by the time the afternoon sky had turned ominous. A few minutes later it started to pour.
Maya had been reading Paris a Halfway House in Delhi, where she stayed for a week with one of her college friends. The two of them had been drenched in a thunderstorm. When they got home, her friend’s mother had greeted them with what seemed a strange welcome: “It’s the perfect weather for pakoras and some strong tea. What timing!”
Maya had wanted to curl up with Paris, but instead, after she and her friend dried themselves, they sat in the covered front porch watching the rain fall as they ate hot pakoras and drank tea. In her notebook Maya had written that her friend’s mother’s remark had made total sense.
The rain now in Paris reminded her of the rain in India. The sight of the black Parisian sky emptying itself out in the absence of pakoras made Maya restless. She felt like munching something salty. There was nothing in the kitchen. Pulling on her cargo pants, she left her apartment, umbrella in hand. Rain was coming down furiously, horizontally. The streets had cleared out. Clumps of people were huddled together under the awnings of shops waiting for the storm to abate. Maya’s umbrella swayed in the wind, and rain invaded from the front. She went into the local Arab’s and bought a packet of chips. She walked back home knowing that chips would not suffice for her restlessness. The meteorological turbulence had pulled it out from inside her and brought it to the surface. She wondered if it was having the same effect on Prem. She wished she were sitting in Prem’s plush apartment in the sixth sipping a cup of hot Indian tea. She called him.