by Ashok Banker
chapter twenty-one
‘There must be something you can do.’
He watches bubbles rise to the top of a soda bottle. Meera sips her Thums Up. The cleaning woman hasn't come for the last three days—
since the day Jay left her home with his mother— so Jay has been washing only the most essential dishes, hence no clean glasses. He drinks a little soda.
‘Can't you speak to her parents?’
He sighs, stretches his feet, pulls them back again, crosses them, uncrosses them: ‘I don't want to get her in trouble, Meera.’
She makes a sound: disgust. ‘Come on, Jay. She's ditched you without saying a word, when she knows your mother isn't well, when you need her more than ever. If she loves you, this is a strange way to show it.‘
‘Love is strange.‘
‘Bullshit.’
‘She does, Meera. She loves me.’
‘Then why is she marrying someone else? Why is she turning her back on you? Why didn't she even look at you when you saw her in her car?’
‘Her parents are orthodox. They wouldn't have understood. It would have made them even more determined to get her married quickly.‘
‘How the hell can they marry her off if she doesn't want to?’
‘She doesn’t want to hurt her parents. She’s scared of her father and brother.’
‘Fuck her father and brother. They aren’t getting married, she is.’
‘To them, a marriage is an alliance of two families, not two individuals. You should know that, Meera.’
‘Bullshit.’
She finishes her Thums Up, looks at her watch. Jay puts his soda on the table, precisely in the same wet circle, gets up: ‘You’re getting late for work. Carry on.’
‘It’s okay. I have time.’
‘You have a 10.30 meeting with Fortham’s. You told me.’
She gets up reluctantly. Even in a churidar kurta, her figure can’t be concealed. She looks around the room, noticing it for the first time. ‘This place needs painting.’ She points to a jagged crack on a beam set in one corner: ‘And plasterwork.’
‘And money,’ he adds, then regrets it. She looks at him sharply:
‘Jay?
‘You’re late, Meera.’
‘I found the ten grands you put back in my purse. You could have kept some of the money at least, just in case.’
‘I have money.’
‘The twenty thousand you got from DM? How long can that last?’
‘He doesn’t tell her that the twenty thousand went straight to Nagaraj for a flat he hasn’t spent an hour in since he rented it two weeks ago, and that he has only about three hundred rupees left. He’s glad that he applied to get his provident fund back two weeks ago, but even that will take at least another month or two. Still he says simply, I can always ask you if I need any. Right now, I can manage.’
She stops at the door, turns to him. Her eyes search his face. She starts to say something, stops, bites her lip. He waits. She shakes her head, her eyes brimming. He stares at the inexplicable tears, confused.
‘Meera?’
She moves before he can stop her, kisses him full on the lips, turns away, unlatches the door, runs out, goes down the stairs without waiting for the lift. He goes to his bedroom, looks out from the balcony, sees her reversing her yellow Volkswagen and driving away fast enough to get an earful of curses from an approaching autorickshaw.
He looks up at the clear blue winter sky. Two kites are tangled in a cutting contest. They entwine around each other, both plummeting to the ground, crash into a banyan tree, are hopelessly entangled in its ageless branches. Their lines snap with an audible twang.
A day or two later, he makes sure Mama's sleeping and rifles her cupboard. He looks for the rest of the money he had seen that morning before he went to Lokhandwala with Tuli. There is about fifteen hundred rupees left. He takes five hundred and starts to put the rest back, then takes another five hundred. That day he pays the building society taxes and the grocer's bill. He has less than three hundred left after that, but he doesn't go back for the remaining five hundred. He doesn't know how he'll manage until the provident fund rebate cheque comes, but it doesn't seem to matter much. Nothing seems to matter much.
Tolstoy bores him, but he is able to see that this is subjective: a week ago, this same chapter thrilled and elevated him. He browses through the best-seller rack at Ensign Book Stores, next to Open House at Linking Road; even the simplest thrillers seem impossibly wrought, outlandish, unreal.
Walking back home to save money on the autorickshaw fare: the bright lights, chic-clad nouveau riche pavement stall shoppers bargaining about sandals and chappals, families consuming dozens of pani puris and chole bhature at the roadside stalls, the blaring smoke-puffing press of vehicles ... everything fills him with a crushing sense of his own loneliness. The string of video libraries on Ambed.kar Road, their walls covered with endless rows of covers of pirated foreign films, depress him further. All these pleasures are to be shared. But with whom?
Seeing the bhelpuri-wallah on the corner, he remembers that Mama loves sev batata puri; he buys two plates, one spicy for himself, and one without spice for her. He shows them to her, hoping beyond hope for the slightest shadow of a smile. She looks momentarily at the sev-coated little puris bearing their enticing mounds of potatoes and onions, wrapped in art paper pages from an old issue of Fortune, then she looks away. She doesn't eat, even when he tries to feed her.
He is angry, but controls himself. Still, he is unable to eat more than one puri alone. The next morning, he throws both ‘plates’ into the trash bucket.
He keeps trying Tuli's number, but her mother or brother always pick up, and if he speaks, they listen to his earnest queries silently, then say curtly: ‘Tuli not home. 'When he calls again, they hang up at the sound of his voice. On one occasion, maddened by frustration, he makes six calls one after another; is hung up on each time. On the sixth, her father comes on the line, speaking rapid-fire Gujarati that makes absolutely no sense to Jay, then abruptly bangs the receiver down. He bangs the receiver down at his end too, which results in a yell from the grocer. He walks out without replying and goes for a walk by the sea, hands trembling with anger and frustration. He steps into a slippery cake of cow dung and has to hunt around for paper to clean his feet and rubber bedroom slippers. A trio of fat sisters who stay in the building next to his notice his mishap and laugh at his futile attempts. Finally, he starts out over the rocks left bare by the receding tide, intending to find a pool of trapped sea water in which to wash his foot. He hears strange sounds coming from behind a large clump of barnacle-encrusted rocks and peers behind them innocently. He is shocked at the sight that meets his eyes: a girl with her skirt bunched up around her waist, blouse and bra pushed down to reveal two huge dark breasts, is being furiously fucked from behind by a fully dressed boy whose eyes are tightly shut. From this angle, Jay gets a too-clear view of the girl's nether parts, red and gaping to receive the black shiny organ of the boy. Both are silent; it is their coupling which is responsible for the strange sucking-slapping noises Jay heard. He stares at the grotesque sight, attracted by the jelly-like quivering of the girl's large flanks and the swinging of her pendulous mamaries.
He retreats quietly, pulse racing, and is halfway back to the road before he remembers the soiled slippers. He returns by a route that avoids the coupling couple, finds a murky but unpolluted pool, sighs with relief as he uses an underwater rock as a rubbing-spot, and turns to go. Something draws him inexorably back to the site of the mating and this time he conceals himself and watches the frantic fucking which comes to a close very quickly, the boy moaning and grunting loudly as he climaxes, the girl emitting a thin long moan as he falls across her back. Jay has a throbbing erection, and shivers with excitement when his hand accidently brushes against the front of his trousers.
Everything—the smell of the salty sea, the wind on his sweating temples, the lingering stink of the cow dung, the ho
t rough texture of the rocks—excites and provokes. He wants to step before the orgasming pair, release his own turgid cock, and insert it in the girl’s vagina to achieve relief. Shaken yet thrilled by the fantasy, he backs away as the boy detaches himself and opens his eyes. Jay stumbles back quickly over the slippery rocks, scraping his arm once, and makes his way back to the sea-face road again. He walks stiffly, bending until the erection subsides a little, unable to look directly at any of the girls he passes.
Once home, he shuts the front door softly, so as not to disturb his mother who sleeps by 7 or 8 these days. He glances into her bedroom; she is awake and sitting in her usual place on the bed, staring mutely out the window at the twilight. She doesn't seem to have heard him come home. He goes into the bathroom adjoining his bedroom—at the opposite end of the flat—and locks the door. He has stopped briefly to remove the magazines and books he keeps under his mattress: one Debonair, one well-thumbed Hustler, two Penthouse Forums, and a Human Digest. All bought off the pavement book stalls at Flora Fountain.
He turns two buckets upside down, closes the lid of the toilet bowl, and sets up his own art gallery of nude glossies. Unzipping his jeans, he takes out his half-erect penis, shaking with pleasure at the first touch, and masturbates over the silent row of naked women. At the penultimate moment, the image of the dark fat girl behind the rocks flashes through his mind and he closes his eyes to the blue-tiled bathroom, reliving the voyeuristic experience. Only, the girl turns her face to him this time—and her face is Meera's. He comes copiously, jackknifing, hot slick semen spurting into his palms, and moans ecstatically: ‘ Tulitulitulituli!'
Immediately after this, he is filled with a black despair, a certain knowledge that he will never see Tuli again as long as he lives, that she has already married someone else, and that he is condemned to live like this forever.
His forays into the outside world become a habit. Every morning at around 11 and every evening at 6, he walks the streets, watching people shop, eat, argue, get in and out of cars, and do whatever it is that people in the suburbs do. In the evenings, he is treated to infinite numbers of teenage girls out in pairs, trios and groups, apparently for no other purpose than to stroll along the traffic-jammed streets, obstructing the madly weaving autorickshaws, dressed in the latest fashions, jabbing each other in the ribs when they see a group of teenage boys approaching. Jay is tremendously attracted to some of these girls; the recent encounters with Meera have awakened new areas of sexuality in his post-adolescent libido. He has fantasies of flirting with one of these local girls, persuading her to come home with him, somehow getting her into his bedroom, locking the door and doing with her what he pleases. He never acts on these impulses, nor intends to, but he likes watching some particular girl as she banters with her girlfriends over burgers and shakes in Open House, thinking of how he would remove whatever fashionable outfit she happens to have on. Sometimes, when masturbating at night, lying on his back in bed, he thinks of Meera in the back seat of her yellowVolkswagen, on the diving board, in the swimming pool pawing his trunks, in this very room talking to him. A ghost of her memory sits on the chair which she usually occupies when she visits, and watches him masturbate. But when he is with her, he never even broaches the subject of sex. To him, the thought of being unfaithful to Tuli is tantamount to committing suicide. But fantasies are acceptable. Even if they aren't, he can 't help it. As the days turn into weeks and, finally, into an entire month, his loneliness becomes a part of his face. Looking at the washbasin mirror, he sees how much thinner he has become—partly because he's been eating less—and how haunted his eyes look. Even Meera comments on this. And he grows painfully aware of his own inability to avoid staring at parts of anatomy of girls on the street. He spends hours drinking coffee at Open House, the only thing he can afford, knows the titles of every paperback and magazine at Ensign Book Stall by heart, starts recognizing most of the teenagers who stroll the streets in the evenings, the faces of the vendors on Linking Road, the prices of vegetables and fruits and groceries, the books worth reading at Bharat Circulating Library, the names of the videotapes he would rent if he had a video, and the layout of the numbered streets in Bandra and Khar, even the approximate number of dosas a dosa-wallah sells on Linking Road—about 500 in a single evening—and the number a dosa-wallah sells on the corner of Ambedkar Road and 19th Road in an evening—about 350. He eats vadapao until he is sick of fried potatoes and bread, drinks sugar cane juice in litres, sniffs assorted fast food vapours like a cocaine addict, and glances jealously at the restaurants beyond his reach.
He uses up the last five hundred in Mama's cupboard, sells off the old newspapers and bottles to raise a few rupees, and is beginning to grow desperate when he discovers another thousand rupees on another shelf of Mama's cupboard. He searches the entire cupboard thoroughly, looking not only under the newspapers on which the clothes are arranged, but between the clothes too. He finds fifteen hundred more in addition to the thousand: a total of two and a half thousand. He is overwhelmed at the sight of so much money; tears well up in his eyes. Mama doesn't seem to have noticed the loss of any of this cash, and he is careful not to let her see how much he has. The night he finds this treasure trove, he smuggles in two bottles of beer and half a pack of cigarettes, waits until she's asleep, and locks the door; he drinks, smokes, and reads War and Peace for a while before switching to pornography.
The next morning, one month and three days after the day he brought his mother home from the police station, he opens the door at 10.07 a.m., expecting the cleaningbai, and finds Tuli on his threshold.
chapter twenty-two
She’s beautiful. God, so beautiful. Looking at her—hair caught in a ponytail, dressed in a white churidar kurta, skin so clean, complexion so clear he can see the pores of her face—he feels his love/lust well up like fresh blood in an old wound.What do you do with a girl like this? How do you tell her that you would do anything to make her happy? All those books, movies, songs—an entire industry marketing romance, recycling the same exhausted cliches, trite tripe, and yet at moments like this all those shopworn truisms shine anew, rush up with a roaring frenzy, overwhelm, render you speechless. Tuli. Sooner or later, it all comes down to that anyway. Names spoken softly in darkness, at the beginning, all through the middle, and at the very end, when nothing else remains to be said, when any other word means too much or too little;Tuli. Tuli. Oh god, is it really you?
He stares at her, holding the door open, glued. She clears her throat, grins brightly and bobs her head: ‘Hi.’
Speechless.
‘Aren't you going to let me in?’ She rises on her toes, looks over his shoulders. Harried, he pulls the door open, nods vigorously. ‘Sorry.
Sorry. I was just so—'
She comes in, her face falling as she views the state of atrophy of the flat; the peeling paint, cracked walls, seepage spreading like ink stains from one corner to the other, electric wires dangling, fan rusted and scarred, light bulbs naked of lamps, odd unmatched furniture in decay. Seeing it through her eyes, he shrinks in embarrassment, brought face to face with the stark realization: this is a dump. She looks around, sees the sofa oozing foam stuffing, the armchair bent at a precarious angle. She looks at him, laughs nervously. ‘Wow.’
He comes to her, reaches out: ‘Tuli, what happened? I’ve been out of my mind with—’ She dances out of reach, wagging a finger, eyebrow cocked, ‘No touching!’
He tries once more to hold her, feel her, make sure she’s real, not another phantom of his fantasies. She stays out of reach, moving to the door: ‘Or I’ll leave.’
He drops his hands helplessly. How can he convey what he feels with words alone?‘Tuli, what’s going on?’
She shakes her head, frowning as if she has no idea what he’s talking about. ‘Nothing.’
‘Tuli, please.’
‘Don’t get excited.’
‘I heard you were engaged. To somebody else. I tried to see you.
You sa
w me that day, in your car. Why didn’t you say something?’
She stands with her hands folded behind her back, rising on her toes. ‘Nice view from here. How many rooms?’
‘I’ve been going crazy. I’ve tried calling you a thousand times.’ He can’t understand her nonchalant stance, finds her casual avoidance maddening and provocative at the same time, grows steadily angrier: You still remember me, don’t you?’ he asks sarcastically, desperate to evoke some response from her, anything but this looking-out-the-window-what-nice-weather-we’re-having pose she’s putting on. At his sharp tone, she turns, smiles. ‘No.Who are you?’
He sits down in a chair; slumps, actually. Holding his head in his hands, staring at the mismatched square tiles between his bare feet.
Absurdly, he observes that his toe nails need clipping. He waits, that maybe she just needs a moment to collect her thoughts, then she’ll speak, explain herself. He waits. And waits. Finally, when he looks up, she’s not there.