It was hard to understand now how he’d been so drawn to Anjum when he’d known nothing about her at all at the time, not that she was from Bangalore, not her financial situation or her political views, not that she didn’t like having her picture taken, that she slept without a pillow, or that she showered with cold water in the mornings, not even whether she was attracted to men. He’d become obsessed after that initial encounter with not so much a person as the image of a person, an image lacking a caption containing even the most basic details, had begun to long and pine for someone he knew nothing about but who, nevertheless, he imagined could somehow save him. In a sense his response to Anjum was no different from that of so many people, men especially but women too, who seeing someone whose external appearance could sustain all their fantasies, proceeded to project everything they desired onto this person, acting surprised when they realized, weeks or months or years later, that the actual person was different from the image they’d formed, that the actual person had a history and an identity of their own that would not remain silent, responding to this discovery with indignation, as if they’d been lied to or misled, sometimes using persuasion, manipulation or force to compel the unsuspecting person to conform to that initial mental image. And yet his obsession with Anjum could not have been simply an idealization, Krishan knew, for how else could it have turned out, if the image in his mind had been nothing but the blind projection of his own desires, that the more he got to know Anjum the more his desire for her seemed to intensify, how could it have turned out that everything he learned about her subsequently served to expand and elaborate the image in his mind rather than contradict it, filling it out, giving it dimensions and solidity, adding to his desire rather than undercutting it? There must have been more to it than mere projection or mere idealization, even if he’d known nothing concrete about Anjum after that first encounter, for a lot could be said after all on the basis of a single image, a lot could be learned about a person even on first glance, from the composition of the face, which was shaped not just by bone structure but also by the muscles around the cheeks, eyes, and jaw, each of them sculpted in different ways and to different degrees by the ways they were used, each mood and expression requiring a different combination of flexion and relaxation in the different parts of the face, so that one could learn, if one was perceptive enough, to tell whether a person spent most of their time in a state of attentiveness or indifference, melancholy or exuberance, skepticism or hopelessness or earnestness. One could tell by observing the movement of their eyes whether a person spent most of their time feeling shame or self-assuredness or desire or yearning or self-containment, one could tell from the readiness of the smile how vulnerable a person was and from the furrows above the brows how much they were plagued by anger or anxiety, could tell by the posture and the gait and the movement of the hands how lively they were, how open to the influence of others and how ready to influence others, so that perhaps his longing for this person he did not know was due not so much to projection or idealization as to the sometimes almost prophetic nature of a glance, which under the right light and the right circumstances could reveal so many of the possibilities and tendencies of a person’s character, which was also why, perhaps, when everything finally ended between them, this too, in retrospect, had seemed like something he’d known about right from the very start, something he’d already glimpsed in that first, silent, one-sided encounter but chosen, subsequently, to ignore.
5
Two months after that first encounter, when he learned about a screening organized by a group that Rajiv knew, Krishan had waited all week with anticipation, knowing there was a chance he might encounter Anjum there. Queer events occurred in Delhi with greater frequency than they did in other big Indian cities, but they were still relatively rare, lacking places to host them and money to fund them, as a result of which when they did occur they functioned as a kind of meeting point, a gathering place where people could show their faces and reassure each other that they continued to exist. The event was at a small office space in South Delhi used by a wedding photography business during working hours, and entering the space Krishan had looked around for Anjum almost immediately, despite having told himself he wouldn’t. He loitered near the entrance chatting with people he knew, his eyes returning to the door whenever someone walked in, and when the event began with still no sign of her he went reluctantly to find a place to sit with Rajiv, chastising himself for his foolishness as he tried to prepare himself for the screening. The film was an independent documentary about the long marginalized community of transwomen in Hyderabad, hijras, as they were usually referred to in India. It depicted the community’s preparations for one of their year’s most important festivals, touching also on the relationship between the hijra community and the small but relatively new and more mobile community of queer activists in the city. Krishan found himself being drawn slowly into the film, into the perhaps misleading intimacy with which it showed lives he would otherwise have no access to, and it was only toward the end of the film, after the thought of her had long disappeared from his mind, that he noticed Anjum sitting on the floor close to the front of the room, not far from the door, the light from the screen playing on the slant of her attentive face. Despite doing his best to continue paying attention he found himself unable to concentrate on the film, his heart beginning to beat faster, a tension beginning to spread through his arms and legs. Something inside his chest or stomach seemed to lunge each time he noticed her shift her weight from left to right or cross and uncross her legs, each time she smiled or shook her head in response to something in the film, and feeling that he wouldn’t be able to wait another two months to see her again he began to wonder whether he should find a way to talk to her afterward or whether, rather, it was better to wait, there was something inappropriate, he knew, in him showing overt interest in a woman in such a situation, one of the few spaces in Delhi explicitly intended to support less normalized modes of desire.
It turned out, to Krishan’s scarcely containable joy, that Rajiv knew some of the people that Anjum had come with, and chatting outside in a group of nine or ten afterward it was suggested, to his even greater joy, that they go to someone’s flat nearby to hang out and smoke weed. Trying not to show too much excitement, though in the privacy of his mind he was unable to believe how effortlessly their paths were converging, Krishan nodded his assent to the plan, too hopeful and nervous to really talk to anyone as they walked toward the flat, which was only fifteen or twenty minutes away by foot. He did his best, over the course of the evening, to avoid looking at Anjum more than was appropriate, not wanting to impose himself on her, on the one hand, but also not wanting to alert anybody in the room to his interest in her. He was unable to shake the sense, whenever he was looking elsewhere, that she was looking at him, but each time he glanced up her gaze was in fact directed elsewhere, usually toward whoever was speaking, her long, thick eyebrows furrowed in a kind of skeptical curiosity, her eyes darting tirelessly from one person to another as the conversation shifted from political matters to personal updates to lighthearted teasing to gossip, breaking up from time to time into smaller conversations before coalescing back into a larger one. There was something about Anjum’s gaze that elevated its object above everything else in the environment, he felt, so that whatever her eyes were resting on seemed more important than anything else in the room, whichever person she was listening or speaking to more interesting or attractive than anyone else, as if her gaze bestowed not merely significance upon what it was directed toward but existence itself, as if while she was present nothing existed except what she was looking at. She would smile generously and sometimes laugh in response to what the others were saying, occasionally making her own comments or jokes or qualifications or rejoinders, all of which she expressed with a kind of irony, a skepticism not so much about the particular subject matter of her speech, he felt, as about whether speech in general was worth the effort of speaking.
He used every occasion she spoke to study her, grateful to have an excuse to look at her without seeming conspicuous, and he tried too to participate in the conversation, not just so she might pay attention to him but also so he didn’t seem out of place in that room full of mostly unknown people. As the evening wore on, as the group slowly grew smaller and those remaining grew progressively more stoned, their eyes did begin to meet more frequently, he sensed, perhaps because he was glancing at her a little more boldly as he grew more intoxicated, perhaps because sooner or later a person always came to know when they were the object of another person’s gaze, the eyes had a strange power of attracting the attention of whoever they were looking at, after all, whether the person looking was immediately in front of you or on the other side of a large room, as if simply to look at another human, to recognize them, was also to ask or demand silently to be acknowledged back. On the first occasions they both looked away somewhat quickly—not too quickly, since looking away too quickly gives the impression of having something to hide or some ulterior motive—but after a while Anjum began holding her gaze for longer periods of time, in what felt like an intentional way, as though challenging him to make clear the intent of his own. There was something excruciating about the way her dark brown eyes bore into his at these points, something impenetrable about her own face that made these moments of recognition doubly difficult to withstand, even though they could have lasted at most a second or two, and looking away from her each time he would scold himself immediately for his cowardice, increasingly hopeful, at the same time, that these extended moments of contact were not just accidental, that some kind of silent communication was unfolding between them, that it wasn’t just his desire leading their eyes to meet but hers too.
The two boys who Anjum seemed to know best in the group left after a couple of hours, and not long afterward Rajiv made an excuse and took his leave too, leaving only him, Anjum, and the two girls who shared the flat, one of whom immediately began rolling another joint. Anjum didn’t seem to know either of them particularly well, which gave Krishan the hope that maybe she was staying behind because of him, and when the joint was finished and Anjum indicated that she needed to leave, that it was getting late, he took the initiative and asked whether she too was planning to take the metro. She was, it turned out, she was heading in the same direction that he was, both of them living in the north of the city, and it was decided that they would make their way to the station together. Taking leave of their hosts, they went downstairs, she first and he following, opened the gate and headed in the direction of the main road. It was only a week after Diwali, as most North Indians referred to the festival, and the air was thick and smoggy, still heavy with fumes from the firecrackers and fireworks of the week before. The only light came from the mute sodium glow of occasional streetlamps, which served more to underscore the lack of visibility than to improve it, and there was a postapocalyptic quality in everything they passed, in the empty roads, devoid of life, the closed shops and lightless buildings, everything around them coated in dust, even the leaves of the plants and trees, as if the city had been abandoned for years. Making their way through this desolation they found themselves talking about the differences between north and south, a subject Krishan had wanted to bring up since learning earlier in the night that Anjum was from Bangalore, sensing it would be a way of bringing them closer together, of giving the two of them some kind of shared racial or mythical origin that would put them in league against the city around them. She’d left Bangalore when she was nineteen to come to university in Delhi, Anjum told him, hadn’t lived there or anywhere else in the south since then. For several years she’d hardly visited either, though she’d gone back twice in the year before last, a situation that had to do, as Krishan learned later, with the end of the three-year relationship with her ex-girlfriend, a relationship she’d told her parents about and that had compelled her to break ties with them for some time. The physical distance between them seemed to lessen as they walked, their arms brushing lightly against each other as they negotiated their way through the unlit, uneven roads and pavements, physical contact that momentarily obliterated Krishan’s consciousness and which he had to try hard not to be overwhelmed by. Reaching the station they descended the long, steep staircase into the gleaming interior, where slowing down for a moment in uncertainty, stunned by the fluorescent brightness after walking so long in near darkness, they made their way through the long corridor that led to the main lobby, their movements suddenly stiff, almost embarrassed, keeping more distance between their bodies as they walked, their footsteps resounding behind them in the silence. They kept their gazes fixed ahead or on the floor in front of them, as though they couldn’t look at each other, as though the brightness of the station exposed a vulnerability that they’d managed till then to keep hidden from their faces, for it was only in the darkness, after all, that you could look at a person you desired without fear of exposing yourself, which was why parties and liaisons and intimacies and sexual transactions were almost always reserved for the night, the lights kept to a minimum or even turned off completely, so you could see well enough for eye contact to be made but not for your need to be revealed. It was only in the darkness that you could approach another person and let your desire be known without allowing the sense of insufficiency or abjection that is so often part of desire to become visible, those desperate, vulnerable parts of the self you always had to skirt or sidestep during flirtation and which, when flirtation failed, when the veneer of coolness or nonchalance suddenly fell away, were painfully betrayed on your face. Krishan tried to find something to say to ward off this possibility, making a silly comment about how clean and well-lit all the metro stations in Delhi were compared to the deserted city above, a comment Anjum responded to almost immediately, to his gratefulness, saying that in a way she found them both similar, especially at night when the metro stations were largely empty, the large echoing halls and long underground corridors a strange futuristic mirror of the city above.
Entering the lobby the two of them went through security, he through the men’s queue and she through the women’s, putting their bags through the machines, walking through the purely ornamental metal detectors, letting themselves be frisked carelessly by the listless soldiers on duty. They went down the staircase to the mostly empty platform, the flow of their conversation back to normal, the moment of danger successfully averted, and no sooner had they stopped near the middle of the platform than they saw the lights of a train within the tunnel to the left, its twin circles becoming larger and more distinct as it entered the station almost silently, slowing to a soundlessly smooth stop in perfect alignment with the markings on the floor. They entered the carriage, surprisingly crowded given the emptiness of the station, and carving a space to stand just in front of the doors, fell silent as the train began to move. Several of the men in their section of the carriage were looking at them, Krishan could tell, a few of them studying him out of a kind of secondary interest, but most of them looking at Anjum, who was, he noted with discomfort, the only woman in the carriage. They looked at her not with that gaze with which men so often looked at women in Delhi, eyes reaching out like hands about to take hold of inert everyday objects, a glass of water or a remote control, but with a slightly more subdued, slightly more respectful gaze, a respect they gave only begrudgingly, Krishan knew, because of his presence beside her. Anjum had told him at length much later about what it was like for women to move through public spaces in Delhi, about how the gaze of men in Delhi seemed to lack a kind of shame, there was no other explanation, she felt, for the persistence with which men of all classes would try, simply by staring, to pull the inner life out from inside the woman who was their object of interest. You could feel the gaze of men in cities like Chennai and Trivandrum and Bangalore too, she had told him, but men’s gazes in most other parts of the country, in most parts of the south, for example, felt somehow less relentless, less direct, and less violent, more likely to
falter when they were responded to or challenged, as if the gazer, upon being gazed back at, could feel he was doing something wrong and withdrew. In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely unrelenting, so that even when you weren’t being harassed in more explicit verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter the privacy of your house without permission and without even bothering to take off their shoes. You had to employ these psychological resources so constantly over the course of the day, losing even the freedom to think autonomously in your own mind, that by the time you returned home you were always utterly exhausted. The cumulative effect of years of being subject to these gazes was that women who lived in the capital had learned to curb the movement of their own eyes to remarkable degrees, restricting their gazes in public spaces to areas where their eyes couldn’t be intercepted, toward their feet or their laps or into the screen of their phones, though she herself made a conscious effort not to constrain her vision, Anjum added, to let her eyes move as freely as she wanted, which was also why she made a point of never using the women-only carriages at the front of the train, no matter how crowded the other carriages were.
A Passage North Page 10