A stifling noon, a pale sky, flat as a bedsheet. The glare seemed to bounce from the whitewashed stone houses. Papa was at work, Ma at her lunch. From my window, while waiting, I saw a blue and white slipper melt into the surface of the road. The phone was ringing. It was Riz. ‘Just made it,’ he whispered. ‘For a second there …’
‘What did they say?’
‘Fuckin’ assholes. Your Repeaters are really hardcore, man. The worst.’
Riz explained on the phone. As I’d been waiting by the window, he and his brother Naseer were driving up to the main gate. Naz was one year younger but liked to say that his brother was the one who needed protection. ‘Bhai is not a fighter. He’s built for love.’ Riz told amusing stories of his younger brother’s gang, eight or nine hulking bodybuilders in skullcaps he’d gathered up from one of the low-income gyms in Nizam’s Abode. Naz called them ‘his back’. He would say to me, with a small boy’s earnestness, in his slingshot sentences, ‘If any guy, annny guy, says or does anything to you. Inside your sector even. I don’t care. You just tell me. I’ll take care of them. I can do anything for Riz. Means I’ll do anything for you.’
At the gate, the Repeaters had circled their father’s new blue-grey BMW sedan. One Repeater stuck his head in Riz’s window. ‘Get out.’
Riz and Naz emerged from the car into a hard, high sun. The two-and three-storey homes in the distance jiggled from the heat vapours climbing into the air. The parks were empty at this hour, a row of aluminium slides glinting with venom.
‘ID,’ the Repeater said. Riz handed over the ID he’d bought, willing his brother to remain calm.
‘Kushagra Arora,’ the man read, his face wrinkled up. ‘But how is it I haven’t seen either of you before?’
Perhaps it was only the young ones, wilful about love, who faced this problem. The best schools had not yet been transplanted, fields, auditoriums, all, to whichever sector that could afford to buy them. Boys and girls from different sectors were thrown together all day. Students devised all sorts of ways to deal with the Repeaters. Yellowstone had a peon named Raju whose job it was to ring the bell between classes. One of the senior boys discovered that Raju knew how to forge. For twelve hundred rupees he would give, in three days, a workable rendition of the ID you needed, your photograph on it. Each sector had its own caste insignia, distinctive edges, signatures, backgrounds. The tricky part must’ve been the watermark: the pyramid and, underneath that, ‘Purity for All’.
‘We usually come in from Gate 4,’ Riz said. ‘Our house is that side.’
‘How come we’ve never seen you before?’ Naz said, forever belligerent. ‘How long have you been working here?’
A worried look crept onto the Repeater’s face. ‘I’ve been here almost six months.’ He raised the ID cards to examine them better. ‘You both are living in the Crescent?’
‘Yes,’ Naz said, taking a couple of steps forward. ‘Are you even allowed there? Or do you have to hang around out here, by the wall?’
The Repeater handed them their identification. ‘I’m sorry about this. I didn’t know you were in the Crescent.’
‘We’re one of the first families,’ Naz went on, enjoying himself now, even as the Repeater began walking away. ‘What do you think? Our Abbu is on the committee.’
The Repeater stopped short. He whirled around, confused. ‘Abbu? Did you say Abbu?’ he called out. Another from the gang came up to him now. ‘You heard, Rakesh? What this boy said? Can a boy from our community call his father such a thing?’
Naz looked from side to side, unable to move. Riz ran around the car to his brother, standing between Naz and the advancing Repeaters.
Riz put on his biggest smile. ‘Look, boys, what’re you saying? You want my brother to show you?’ He opened his belt buckle and jammed his right hand in his jeans, taking grip of himself. He laughed now, with the men, back to his brother. Riz knew how to use his shoulders, his smile, the physicality of his charm. ‘Or you want me to show? I can also. But if my mother found out you had checked her boys at the gate to see if they were cut like … like some boys from a madrasa … We would have to call her an ambulance, my friends.’
The second man was laughing. The first still looked suspicious. He closed in on Riz until there were inches between them, hovered, took a nearly imperceptible whiff.
‘Look, boss,’ Riz went on, ‘I’ll tell you the truth. I took this one out to teach him to drive. He thinks he’s old enough. Maybe. Now I’m not sure he’s smart enough.’ A smile cracked the second man’s face. ‘We didn’t tell our father we were taking his new car. I don’t want to tell him like this, calling from the gate. You understand, don’t you? Papa has a really bad temper. First he’d be angry with you, then we would face his full anger. Here, let me give you something for tea. Don’t say no, take it, take it. We’re brothers, after all. Just don’t tell our parents, okay?’
Riz’s phone call disturbed me deeply, touched a nerve that I knew would be twanged again. Even at that age I could sense it. By the time Riz reached my house I was in tears. The servants were asleep in their quarters so I went to the door myself. A blast of heat took my breath away. I pulled him inside and quickly shut the door behind us.
‘Why are you crying?’ he asked, annoyed, but he wiped my cheeks with tender fingers.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault. Don’t cry.’ He was staring hard at the ground as he paced around the coffee table in our small living room. ‘I’ll sort that guard out,’ he muttered. ‘Smelling me. Like I’m an animal. Who the fuck does he think he is?’
‘Smelling you?’
‘You know it wasn’t even that.’ He stopped walking and looked right at me. ‘It wasn’t what he said. I had to lie today about who I am, where I’m from. It’s humiliating. I’m not ashamed! But I had to lie just so that … just for …’
‘Just for me!’ I shouted, dismayed. Hot tears again. ‘You can say it. Just for me.’
He came to the doorway, where I still stood, wrapped his arms around me. I put my arms around his neck. He thrust me against the wall. For minutes we kissed in the living room. Suddenly the realisation that a servant could walk in any time. ‘Do you want to see my room?’ I asked. ‘But where is Naz? We can’t make him wait outside. Let him come in.’
‘Don’t worry. He’s gone roaming with the car. He’s never been inside a sector like this. He wanted to see what goes on.’
When we walked up the stairs Riz pinched me through my Daisy Dukes. My room was dark and still cool from the morning’s AC. With a toe I flicked the heavy, green switch, then a couple of lights. ‘So much pink!’ he laughed. ‘It even smells pink.’
Too much for us at first, that sense of open possibility. Hands clasped behind him like an inspecting sergeant, Riz walked around the room looking at the assortment of posters and photo-spreads from rock and Hollywood glossies. I used to double-tape them to the walls. He took three or four circles of my room as I sat on my bed, shifting my legs from under me to the floor time and again. It suddenly dawned that he’d gripped his own hands to keep them from shaking. The next time he came close I caressed his forearm. The hairs stood on end. Then he was by my side on the bed and we were kissing. Then he was on top. A servant walks in now and Papa will never speak to me again. The heat and weight of his thighs felt good around my waist, lips roamed my neck, his teeth strained at the collar of my T-shirt. My room was suddenly a different place, the metal-frame headboard looking strange upside down, the sweeps of brass between the corner posts now like a ship’s railing, the pink curtains and walls with a deeper, fuller, velvet cast. Every inch of me – the girl who would cut Sellotape into little rounds and carefully attach six pieces to each photograph – someone else entirely. The bra came off. I let out a long, low moan. Would he tell his friends how I moaned? His brother, on the way back, how smoothly he slipped my bra out from under my shirt? Riz shuddered in response. He was tugging at my shirt with his teeth, teasing it off so he could c
oncentrate on my breasts. Panic. I grabbed his wrist and said no. He looked up with a big grin, eyes wide and hungry. Then he went back to inching it up and off. My fingers were wrapped around his wrist. I tightened my grip, smiled and shook my head again. Don’t do that. I watched his powerful shoulders. He looked at me again, smile gone, confused. Nothing’s wrong, I said, I just can’t take my shirt off. He laughed and wanted to know why. For many minutes I refused to explain, as he nibbled at my breasts and my ribs, sure that I would yield. When he didn’t stop asking I had to explain. Innocent of where this afternoon would lead, I’d forgotten to shave my underarms. Very sweetly, Riz spent the next two hours in my bed with his tongue and mouth wandering between the hem of my shirt, which was pushed up around my neck, and the waistband of my shorts. He kissed me for a long time through my denim shorts, making me spin, roiling my sense of control over my own body. Later, when we spoke on the phone, Riz laughed that I’d moaned and thrashed like a fish out of water. I made fun of the look on his face when he first saw my breasts. By then both of us were nervous about how needy we’d been.
In school we saw each other during breakfast and lunch breaks. Once in a while we found an empty room. Most of the time it was footsie under a library table, holding hands. On the bus we took the back seat, tucked away by one window while another couple occupied the other. I sent him home every day swollen to burst. Sometimes I could feel wetness surrounding the bump in his pants. I masturbated as soon as I got back from school. That second year together passed quickly. Riz, in his final year, had permission to take his car out late. I’d spend the night at a friend’s place. Just before he graduated we began to have sex. We went in big groups to dingy bars where smoke hung in torpid swirls by the ceiling and the management didn’t care about sector rules or the drinking age. We went to nightclubs, long rooms with green lasers arrowing through blackness and bathrooms made entirely from mirror and granite.
We nearly made it through the four years Riz was away in Oberlin, but he stayed on campus his last summer, asking for ‘some independence’. I wondered why his emphasis was on the first word when in truth the second was operative. One year, he said, then he’d be back. I was angry but decided to wait. I had a sense from movies of what college in America was like. Sitting in my room, at my new computer, seeing his username brighten when he popped online; determined not to initiate contact; losing patience, affecting a casual tone in some unnecessary message, simmering, a few minutes later sending a link to a song I’d been listening to – is he there? No response. Watching his name fade to grey as he went away without saying hello.
I graduated from college that year, English honours. A couple of weeks after graduation I got drunk one night with some friends and slept with a long-haired design student called Jethro, real name Jaiveer Arora. He’d given me a ride home on his motorbike. An awful experience, sneaking through his parents’ bedroom, his own room stale with smoke. I avoided him all summer. A rumour spread in our sector that I was a slut.
That September my father died. A year before we were told he’d contracted emphysema, which they diagnosed as linked to COPD. He wasn’t able to work. This made him shrink further into himself. My mother gave English tuitions to young kids who lived around us. Papa sat on a rocking chair. Even that sometimes was too much and he’d become short of breath, wheezing as if his ribs had collapsed, his chest sunken in on itself, then gasping furiously. He coughed up a grey-green mucus throughout the day, sometimes with such force that a blob would land a few feet away in front of him. Clear liquid slowly spreading across the tile, separating from the viscidity at its heart. Ma so distraught. I cleaned up after.
Ma had been lonely for a long time. Me too, without realising it. Then Riz came back. He had just returned from America. He’d never met my father but he rushed to our house as soon as the news spread. Riz talked quietly for half an hour with my mother as she sat glaze-eyed on a long straw mat someone had placed on the floor of our living room. He left right after with a thin smile in my direction. When he returned he had a framed, enlarged passport photograph of my father under his arm. My mother started howling. As it went up on the wall she insisted no one would garland it with marigolds.
Riz came every day, served tea and snacks to the visitors. In the evening we’d go for a walk. This was the only time I could cry. His shirt would be soaked at the shoulder. For the first two weeks an aunt and two cousins slept with my mother and me on mattresses in the living room. Riz stayed every day until bedtime. He would tell my cousins silly jokes as they helped him spread the bedsheets across each mattress. Later he told me he had to bribe the Repeaters week by week to allow him into the sector, that they were more understanding because there’d been a death.
I wonder what Papa would’ve made of my wedding. The nikaah was on a January morning in the family haveli in Riz’s ancestral village, surrounded by the family’s mango orchards, two years after Papa died. Mummy and Dipanita, my best friend, came. We left at dawn in our old light-blue Fiat. The driver couldn’t keep up with the convoy and soon we had turned down a village road with low whitewashed houses and grocery stores and tiny photo studios on either side, as men sitting by the side with white beards and orange hair tucked under skullcaps stared into our vehicle, curious about the city women. Mummy and I were getting angrier. The driver’s brain seemed to have suddenly switched off. The road narrowing all the time. I was afraid, though I couldn’t bring myself to say it, that one of the front wheels would suddenly descend into a gutter, making us even later. A village autorickshaw, the kind that can squeeze in eight or ten passengers, came down the opposite way. We tried to go around but neither could advance. I started shouting, mad at Ma, at the driver. Dipanita making soothing sounds from the front seat. Finally I called Riz. As soon as I heard his voice I started crying. He gave precise instructions. We reversed down that narrow road, coming to a small roundabout. Naz appeared fifteen minutes later, by which time I was so furious at our stupidity I was ready to go home. He was in a 4×4, one of his cousins beside him. He scrunched up from the wrong side of the road, wheels spinning out an orange cloud of dust, flipped his Oakleys to his forehead.
‘Shall we, ladies?’ A huge smile as he looked around. ‘Nice spot you’ve found. But maulvi-sahab is waiting.’ When he saw my expression his face changed. ‘Why so upset, Shal? Ammi, Abbu, everyone is relaxing at the house. The maulvi’s having a great time. He’s drunk three cups of tea, straight from the saucer. Quite a sight. Quite a sound too.’ He grinned when I laughed. Then he turned to my driver. ‘And you. Keep up this time. I’m watching you.’
The haveli got no sun that day. After our apologies were dismissed I was rushed to a narrow tube-lit room where my mother helped me change. Riz was in the living room with the men of his family and the maulvi. The open-air corridor that led to them was filmed with ice-crunchy-dew. Ma hissed at me to hitch up the jaal gharara they’d given: don’t let it get spoilt. We were led to an adjacent room with thin white mattresses spread over every inch of floor. Silently I repeated the name I’d chosen, ‘Yasmeen, Yasmeen, Yasmeen,’ after the Disney princess.
Ma seemed to like Riz. She didn’t make a fuss about his father’s insistence on a nikaah. They found a maulvi who would look the other way on conversion. She enjoyed herself in the haveli. After I assented to the maulvi’s two or three questions, mumbled in Urdu, Mummy, Dips and I were suddenly in the centre of a gaggle of women, Riz’s aunts and cousins. Riz walked in and they all started squealing. He seemed different in this house, more confident, though I’d never felt that lack in him before, broad and strong in a maroon salwar-kameez, hair leaking from the snug knitted white topi. He put his arm around my waist, which led to prodding and teasing, Mummy and Dipanita quick to join in. Photographs with a carousel of cousins, the younger ones shy. From the way they stared, maybe one or two had a crush on Riz.
Riz’s uncle entered. Chachoo managed the family’s land. Without saying much he took Riz’s hand, escorting the two of us to t
he upper floor and down a veranda-hall that overlooked the gardens. The morning had refused to warm and I was shivering by the time we got there. He lifted a narrow wooden block that latched the low doorway at the end of the hall. Once he’d got us in the room, he pointed to the bed, eyes firmly to the floor. ‘Take rest here,’ he mumbled. ‘Someone will come up in half an hour.’
We were in a damp room where high, shuttered windows let in slits of grey sky, the wooden bars on the windows so worn out they rattled in their grooves. I found a box of yellowing switches tacked to the wall. A tube-light sputtered above a steel almirah. The thought of fucking in this eighty-year-old haveli while my mother and his parents drank thick, milky tea below us. Dipanita sitting with them. I laughed silently. Carefully, I removed two layers, laid them on a chair, stretched out on the bed. Riz tossed off his kurta and joined me, both of us smiling at the way our families would treat us now.
Riz was fidgety on his back so he laid his head on my breast. His breathing got heavier. I was dropping off myself when he said, ‘You know, my parents must’ve done it in this bed.’
‘Well, yes. That’s why we’re here. Time to ravish Jasmine, Aladdin.’
‘Really? You have the energy?’
‘This room is freezing. And I have no idea how to get the rest of this thing off.’
‘Abbu was probably too embarrassed to tell Chachoo about us. That we’ve been together.’
‘Why on earth does your dad know that?’ I asked, hitting Riz gently on the back of his head. There were cracks in the ceiling that looked like the nostrils and eyes of a small, crooked face. ‘I wish Papa was here,’ I said.
‘How’s your mum? Is she taking all of this okay?’
‘Yeah. Lot of excitement. She looks pretty happy.’
‘I’m glad. I was worried it would be too much.’
‘No, no, she liked all of this. She was worried before.’
Leila Page 5