He’d thought many times since that conversation about what Anjum had said and the words and images she’d used, not just because it was one of the first examples he’d had of her striking eloquence, the sharpness and intelligence of which he hadn’t encountered anywhere in his university, despite having just begun coursework for his PhD. What she’d said had helped him understand not just the entitlement with which men in Delhi used their eyes on women but also the amorphous tension that lay over interactions between men in Delhi too, the vague and omnipresent air of threat that sometimes seemed to hover like an electric charge over the entire city, a charge you felt that at any given time and in any given place might coalesce and then explode without warning into a sudden eruption of physical violence. He remembered sitting opposite a man on the metro one night, relatively light-skinned, strong jawed, a roughness about his face emphasized by the small scar above his right eye that cut into his brow. He was in his mid- to late twenties probably, wore the uniform of mutely colored shirt, sleeveless sweater, trousers, and sandals so common among men in the city, and was sitting beside two friends who seemed a little more well off than him, one of whom had his arm slung around his shoulder, though the man who’d caught Krishan’s eye wasn’t really paying attention to either of them, was simply staring at the floor in front of him, listening to music with earphones on. Sensing perhaps that he was being watched the man had looked up at Krishan, his face devoid of expression, causing Krishan to look away immediately with embarrassment, as if he’d been caught doing something wrong. After a while, when he felt sure the man had forgotten about him, Krishan looked at him again, why exactly he wasn’t sure, there was something intriguing about his presence, about his rough handsomeness and the way he seemed totally absorbed in his thoughts. Again the man looked up, holding his gaze this time, causing Krishan, after one or two seconds in which neither of them gave any indication what they were thinking, to look away. Staring down at the floor he could feel the man continuing to look at him, his gaze like a physical weight forcing his eyes down, and he felt suddenly not curiosity or embarrassment but fear mixed with shame, fear for what the man might to do to him, shame for having looked away and for continuing to avert his gaze from this stranger who was, he felt, now intentionally staring him down. There was always something so unbearable when two strangers looked at each other for an extended amount of time without obvious reason or purpose, a kind of tension that built up from each person’s sense that the other person could see inside them, into everything you wanted to keep hidden and out of sight, a tension that soon became so uncomfortable you felt compelled to smile or frown or speak, to do anything, whatever it was, to distract the other person from what they might see through your eyes. Looking at a person in such a way was an act of great intimacy, which was also why it could give rise so easily to violence between men who didn’t know each other, each man interpreting the other as attempting to penetrate him, to make him vulnerable and to possess whatever these vulnerabilities offered. It was for this reason too that there was, so often before these sudden eruptions of violence, a kind of staring contest that took place between the men involved, as if each was trying to challenge the other to enter him with his eyes while also trying to enter the other with his own, a contest that had become standard fare during televised boxing matches, when the two boxers stared at each other during weigh-ins or right before the fight began, a staring contest that starts out as a performance but soon becomes very real, a contest that was actually less about peering into another than showing one’s willingness to be peered into, about showing that there was nothing one was ashamed of or afraid of exposing, nothing one would not put on the line.
Krishan chastised himself for looking away, which was beginning to feel like an unacceptable act of cowardice, for though he was looking down he could feel the man continuing to stare at him, almost gloating. He kept his eyes averted for the next couple of stops, trying to work up the courage to look up at the man, not out of curiosity now but out of self-respect, despite his fear, as if to prove to himself that he had nothing to be ashamed of, that he too could own himself in the way that was required to withstand another person’s gaze. He looked up finally, and the man, who had returned to looking at the floor, looked back up almost immediately with the same expressionless gaze as before, though now there was something menacing about his look, which had become almost a leer. Krishan forced himself to keep looking but the longer the two of them stared at each other the more nervous he grew, the man seemed tough, he was with his friends, they could beat him up easily if they wanted, nor would he be able to defend himself in an argument, his Hindi was too poor to come to his aid in such situations and would give him away as an outsider, which would of course only embolden them. Unable to bear the weight of the man’s eyes but not wanting to concede and look away, he had tried finally simply to smile, to give, at the last minute, a nonviolent direction or interpretation to their staring, a smile that the man responded to by leaning forward and continuing to stare at him for a few seconds longer before suddenly, to Krishan’s surprise, himself breaking out into a smile, a wide, friendly smile devoid of aggression, after which he called the attention of his friends, stood up, and pushed his way through the crowd—they had just arrived at a station—out through the doors of the train. It was a response that had left him confused at the time but also greatly relieved, acutely aware, as he breathed out heavily and rested back against his seat, of the power that human eyes had, their power not just to beckon other people silently from the distance but their power also to inquire, assert presence, and threaten, to enter another person with or without their will, the way they were used, by so many men, almost as a sexual organ, a tool of penetration and reception. There was an intense vulnerability that the gaze of another could make you feel, for the eyes were, as was so often said, a window into the soul, though what a gaze meant, he had realized that day, whether it meant intimacy or violence, was also dependent on the features of the face that surrounded the eyes, on the meaning given to the gaze by the lips and cheeks and eyebrows, so that when two people looked at each other it was a moment both of total knowledge and of total indeterminacy, a way of acknowledging another person that was open to the most radical of interpretations, so that when the meeting of eyes was unaccompanied by a determinate expression on the face or a determinate purpose or context it was one of the few moments in ordinary life when it seemed, somehow, that the rules that governed normal interaction between humans were suspended, as though for a moment at least, within the slender line that existed between their gazes, anything at all was possible between strangers.
Krishan was pretending to look at the little electronic signboard above the door that indicated the stops on the train’s route, and realizing after a moment that Anjum was looking straight at him he lowered his head and tried to return her gaze. She was standing with her back to the doors, one hand holding the grip that hung from the ceiling and the other folded behind her back, her body loose and relaxed as she swayed gently with the movement of the train. Her expression was difficult to read, the dark brown of her irises thinned to a rim around her dilated pupils, and she was gazing at him as though totally oblivious to the fact that the two of them, especially she, were the center of attention in the carriage. He waited for her to speak but she remained silent—anything they said would be immediately audible to the people around them, even if they kept their voices low—and realizing that she’d been looking at him for some time, that this looking was, moreover, intentional, Krishan felt even more uncomfortable in the crowded, brightly lit carriage, not just because he once more felt exposed but also because Anjum’s gaze was intended now, he couldn’t help feeling, as a provocation to the men staring at her, as a kind of demonstration that she refused to curb the movement of her eyes and the desire it contained, a demonstration not just for the sake of the men staring at her but also, he felt, for him, as if she could tell he felt threatened by these gazes and wanted him to
know that she, unlike him, was not. Not wanting to show his discomfort he forced himself to respond to her gaze, doing his best to avoid her eyes and look instead at the other parts of her face, at her dark, curved forehead, fully visible because of her short hair, the light furrows between her eyebrows, which contributed to the sternness of her gaze, the stud on her left nostril, and her lips, though each of her features always led him back to her eyes, large and dark and insistent, or perhaps it was her eyes themselves, staring earnestly at his, which constantly drew his gaze back to hers. They were almost the same height, he only an inch or two taller, and standing opposite her he noticed how perfectly aligned their bodies were, that if he moved just a short distance forward his chest would be pressed against her chest, his waist against her waist, his groin against hers. He’d been aware since the beginning of Anjum’s physical presence, both her stature and also the way she had of moving, but standing in front of her now—he was careful to keep his eyes on her face, not to look down at the rest of her—he felt newly alert to her body, as if realizing for the first time that it existed in the same space and time as his body, a body that could come into contact with his, that could rock and press and shift and push with and against his own. He still didn’t know whether she was attracted to men, everything he’d interpreted till then as possible interest could just as well be disinterested friendliness, and even if she was attracted to men in general it didn’t, of course, imply that she was attracted to him. Her gaze, though, was gradually becoming gentler, more open and more suggestive, no longer seeming to challenge or interrogate him so much as to be making a kind of invitation, and the longer he looked at her the more everything else seemed to fade away, the gazes of the men around them diminishing in force, becoming almost mute, the sounds around them too becoming fainter, the announcer’s voice as they approached various stations, the whoosh of the doors sliding apart, the shuffling of feet as people entered and left the train, as if only the two of them existed on the train as it wound its way through the subterranean city, everything else reduced to a faint echo from a distant world. He felt their bodies moving closer together, their foreheads almost but not quite touching, as if they were about to share a secret with each other though neither of them said a thing, no longer because they feared being heard by the people around them, none of whom existed anymore, but because it seemed there was no more need now to speak, because conversation was no longer required to distract from or conceal what each was feeling, because it was somehow becoming clear, standing opposite each other in the heavy, rhythmic clarity of their intoxication, that they were interested in one and the same thing.
Krishan didn’t know how long they stood there looking at each other, stoned but with total lucidity, their bodies rocking gently with the movement of the train but never touching, but at some point Anjum leaned toward him so that her mouth was near his ear and asked whether he had to sleep early that night, whether he wanted to smoke a little more before he went his own way, a question that even if Krishan wasn’t exactly expecting didn’t exactly surprise him, and to which he’d responded with a silent nod of his head. Getting off at her station, which was only two stops past his, they took a three-wheeler in silence to her flat, their knees pressing against each other over the course of the bumpy ten-minute journey, she looking out on her side at the pavement cascading under the wheels of the three-wheeler, he looking out on his side at the passing streets, desolate as a moonscape, their hands covertly making their way toward each other so that they could clasp each other while continuing to look out their respective sides. When they arrived Anjum whispered that they needed to be quiet, and leading him up several flights of stairs, unlocking her door, she took his hand and guided him through the darkness of the flat. He waited by the door as she went in and turned on a light, a small bedside lamp on the floor that lit up the room with a soft yellow glow. The room was small and bare, empty of furniture except for a wooden desk in the corner and a thin mattress on the floor along the wall. The walls were lined with folded clothes piled on sheets of old newspaper and several stacks of books in English and Kannada, the English ones mainly political or historical, as he came to learn later, the Kannada ones mainly poetry. Anjum put her things in a corner and sat down cross-legged on the mattress, her back against the wall. Krishan sat down next to her, not against the wall but facing her at an angle, watched as she took from beside the mattress an engraved metal box, a small clay lamp containing the butts of several old cigarettes, and a slender volume of Kannada poetry. She took out from the box a small, marble-sized ball of hash, which, she told him as if by way of explanation, she’d been gifted by a friend, hash being too expensive for her to buy herself, then heating the hash up gently under the flame of a lighter, she began to break the softened ball up with her fingernails into tiny crumbs that she deposited onto the cover of the book. Not quite able to believe that he was alone with this person he’d spent the previous two months fantasizing about constantly, Krishan watched as she mixed the little shreds of hash with tobacco from a cigarette and then rolled the joint with elegant, practiced fingers. She put the book away, dusted off the mattress, and lit up the joint, and he asked as she took her first drag whether she read a lot in Kannada, to which she responded that it was mainly poetry she read in Kannada, most of it from a slightly older generation of female poets in Karnataka. She didn’t really enjoy poetry in English or Hindi, the other two languages she spoke, the emotional valences of the words and images not resonating as much with her as they did in her mother tongue. She wrote in Kannada too, in her journal or notebook—she preferred not calling it a diary—but that had been a relatively recent development, something she’d begun doing only in the last two or three years. When she lived in Bangalore she’d preferred writing in English, probably because in Bangalore, where she spoke mainly Kannada, English had been a way for her to remove herself from her environment, to feel, when she was alone with herself, that she was far from everything around her. It was for this same reason probably that she’d started writing in Kannada again now, because in Delhi of course she communicated primarily in Hindi and English, so that now writing in Kannada rather than English had become her primary mode of being elsewhere, not necessarily a way for her to be back in Bangalore or back in Karnataka, places she felt quite ambivalent about, but a way for her to feel elsewhere at least than Delhi.
Their fingertips came into quiet contact each time the joint passed between them, each of them taking long, indulgent drags before passing it on. It shortened quickly, faster than Krishan would have liked, and taking the last drag, stubbing the joint out firmly in the clay lamp, Anjum looked up at him silently, a shy but assured smile on her lips. There was nothing in their hands to distract them now, nothing to help them pretend they weren’t sitting next to each other, alone and unhindered, free to do what they wanted. Both of them shifted slightly where they sat, and Anjum put her hand lightly on the inside of his knee, tracing it upward across his thigh. Krishan brought his face forward to kiss her but leaning to the side she skirted his mouth and kissed him not on the lips but on the side of his jaw, near his ear, then down toward his neck, only gradually making her way up toward his lips. In the soft, effortless sequence of movements that followed almost instinctively, as if the ground beneath them was giving way and holding each other they’d begun falling downward through space, their clothes came off and she sat astride him, her movement slow at first, then more voracious. He lay beneath her, contributing to this movement and supporting it with his hips, his hands moving from her thighs to her waist to her sternum just as hers moved from his chest to his shoulders to his neck, occasionally becoming conscious of what was happening, regarding the woman on top of him with quiet amazement before becoming submerged again in their deep motion, clutching her body more tightly in their increasing momentum as though to prove to himself that she really existed, that the image he’d carried of her in his mind was in fact more than an image, something solid, not fleeting, made o
f flesh and skin that he could hold and clasp, which gave off smells he could breathe in and sweat he could feel his hands slide over. Her breathing was becoming faster, her groin pressing harder and more intently against his, and sensing what was happening he did his best to hold himself in check, to focus his mind as he tried to accommodate her increasing urgency, though soon he felt himself being overwhelmed and joined her in reaching, unexpectedly, a breathless, briefly overlapping peak. When it was over Anjum leaned forward, still astride him, and buried her face between his neck and head, her chest pressing against his as she breathed heavily in and out. She stretched out her legs so she was lying flat on top of him, her feet upon his, each of them listening as the quick beating of their hearts against their chests became slower and more measured. They lay there in silence, each of them buried in the quiet exhaustion of their bodies, watching as their intoxication surfaced slowly from the ruins of their urgency, neither of them feeling any desire to speak, as though swathed in the warm afterglow of exertion and pleasure they were fully suspended in the present moment, without thought of past or future, a present that like a womb seemed sufficient to contain everything they needed so long as their bodies remained in contact.
A Passage North Page 11