Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  “It looks good on you, what you’re wearing.” Gabriel’s voice is sweet, yet sharp, pointed in a way. “Don’t mess it up.”

  “I won’t,” says the Bear.

  Ferang rubs his eyes. He knows he’s making them red. He looks away from the fragment of the city visible from the window. He observes the bed. Observes the shape of the mattress wrapped in the sheets, and the body, both young and wise, lying between them. The room smells like nothing. Ferang looks up to meet Gabriel’s face but he can’t meet his eyes. Then he meets them, and looks away, and meets them again. Do him.

  Gabriel seems about to speak but only a smile surfaces.

  “I’ll miss you, Gabs,” says Ferang.

  “I know,” Gabriel goes. “You should.”

  “There was no other way.”

  “Is it a question?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ferang clenches his fists. Now kiss him and trash everything. Ferang stands up and starts toward the door.

  “I’ll miss you too,” Gabriel says. “Take care of the child. Protect him.”

  Ferang lingers at the door. He knows he can’t turn around. He knows he doesn’t want to. “May the earth rest lightly on you, old sport,” he says.

  “It’s not the earth that gives me pain,” says Gabriel, “but those who trample upon it.” He smiles a faint smile. “I hope one day you can breathe free, my brother.”

  But Ferang is already gone.

  Outside the hospital, Ferang sits in the middle of a flower bed. He looks at the sky, bright and devoid of stars. He waits for the inspiration that usually follows the most intense moments in people’s lives, but nothing comes. Ferang hears nothing.

  Opening the door of the Mercedes, he sits close to Nil. Strangely, he feels invigorated. “He’s fine,” he says, but Nil doesn’t reply.

  Manuj guns the engine. Nil lights a cigarette. The Beatles fill the cabin.

  Once in Old Ayodhya, every trace of sadness has abandoned the mind of Ferang. He feels euphoric. Manuj pulls over before the alley to his house. Ferang awaits, sitting as if there is something to say at all. Nobody talks. Nil stares out of the window without seeing anything. Ferang reaches for him again, placing

  NIL

  his hand on his thigh, and there is something wrong with his touch. Nil can feel him smile, his eyes focused on him, but that smile has a sharpness to it, and he can’t return the goodbye. Like a spider nestled in the corner of a large attic full of junk, Nil perceives the Whole lurking and now, perhaps, he understands the cause behind its existence.

  “We need to fill that hospital with security,” Nil says.

  “You got it, old sport,” goes Ferang. “It’s your hospital after all.”

  Ferang grips his thigh and backs off and closes the door behind him and with that loping gait of his he disappears into the shadows of the alley. Nil listens to the relaxing sound of the engine. It’s a million three hundred thousand rupees, 950 horsepower engine, and the sound it makes always has the power to appease him a little.

  Nil lights up a Benson and the taste on his lips is horrendous and his throat burns. Seeing Nothing outside the window fills him with a nameless sadness. The driver looks in the rearview mirror once too often with his retardedly worried gaze, and Nil, he swears to himself, is ready to pick a fight with him if he doesn’t stop.

  The sight of home approaching, rather than infusing a sense of security, boosts his dismay, and Nil knows he can’t deal with that glittering elevator and the access code and the scintillating wax floors and the wicker balls on the table and the National Geographic in the jumbotron in the livingroom and the paintings chosen by his mother and the designer pants and the shirts ironed and hung in the closet.

  “Stop,” he tells the driver, but the driver shows no signs of stopping and, indeed, accelerates as if, once crossed the gates of the complex, there would be no way of getting out, and Nil jumps onto the front seats and shakes his fist before his face. He doesn’t touch him, not even close.

  “Let’s go back to the hospital,” he says.

  The driver takes a U-turn and Nil catches him glancing at him again through the rearview mirror and so he opens the refrigerator and pours himself a glass of Old Monk and downs it, but it’s not enough and it’s too sweet, too watery and it’s not enough, and the packet of dope Imal sold him at the Dome is eager to get out of his wallet and Nil has to concentrate to prevent himself from giving in and taking it out and snort a line, here and now, on the back seats.

  Outside the window, Nothing is dense and unanimous, and Nil smokes trying to distract himself, and then something emerging from the black mass out there captures his attention. Threateningly, a pair of bulldozers, the kind on which he has read so much about, are ready to dismantle the huts of the poor from whom the Mafia has sucked every last penny.

  In the parking lot of the hospital, NIl hops out of the Mercedes before it comes to a complete halt and gets in through the main entrance, hearing a shrill voice calling him from behind.

  “Sir,” goes a woman, probably a receptionist.

  Nil turns around hoping that this semi-maid isn’t thinking of stopping him to tell him the hospital’s rules or ask him to identify himself.

  “Sir, this is not a hotel. You can’t enter at will.”

  Nil feels awestruck. He laughs, or rather, he tries to, but what comes out of his mouth is a guttural groan. He takes three steps toward the nurse so to give her the opportunity of looking at him in the face, but the slut doesn’t seem to recognize him. Indeed, her haughty expression looks like reproach. Nil pushes his glasses up his septum.

  “Do you know who my father is?”

  At first the nurse is able to maintain that cocksucking look of hers, but then something in her gives in, and brief spasms cross her right eyelid, and her face slides down along the bones and tendons and cartilage hidden below. It melts before him. Good.

  Nil starts walking and no one else lets a squeak out. He shuts himself in the first toilet he can find and does a nice line that hits the base of his neck and from there radiates throughout his body like the spring sun on London. He feels better, more in control. Nil feels himself again.

  The sense of uneasiness has not only ceased but it seems to have become his friend and walks with him down the empty corridors, which belong to him and make him feel at home.

  In the surgical ward, Nil asks the nurse on duty to show him the room and when she, a bored expression on her face, points it out with her greasy finger, he feels the anxiety knock back on the doors of his consciousness, but he knows it’s not here to stay, and he can now choose whether or not to open the door. Again, he’s in control.

  Before the room door, Nil can’t bring himself to enter and so he stays on the threshold, glimpsing at the body lying on the bed and listening to the intermittent sound of the machines. He waits for almost a minute thinking about what to say and when to say it, and how.

  “Come in,” says a voice from under the covers.

  Nil hesitates. He takes a step and is about to enter but something stops him on the doorway, where the aseptic fluorescent light bathes his thirty thousand rupees Cavalli loafers.

  “Nice room, isn’t it?” goes the Hijra, still hidden by blankets. “I’m planning to decorate it a little. Maybe a flowered curtain will make the place more welcoming. In case I receive visits, you know.” The Hijra emerges from the sheets and props himself up on his elbows and settles a pillow behind his back and his voice is strong and doesn’t sound like that of an ill man, and yet something in his words makes Nil uncomfortable—something like a grating sound that reminds him of the noise crack makes as it burns into the pipette.

  “All the nurses treat me well,” adds the Hijra. “I guess I should get sick more often.”

  Sick—quite a curious way of referring to the chopping off of his cock. Nil would like to say something but of all the sentences he has prepared, none comes to mind.

  “Come in, I won’t eat you.”


  “I’m fine where I am.” Distrust and aversion. He regrets his own tone right away. He wanted to express discretion and respect for his pain, but words always fail him.

  “I know you don’t like me.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Of course it is, I was a man, now I’m a woman but at the same time I’m not. I was a boy and a girl at the same time, and at the same time I was neither. I was poor and then flush with gold like a king, and now I am not the one nor the other. I am both the opposites and the same, and like everything unregulated, I’m an aberration at the eyes of the onlookers.”

  “It’s not that. I—”

  “I know, you’re sorry. But why?”

  Once again, words flee Nil and he retracts from the light of the room and he’s glad he didn’t enter so that he can gaze out into the hall and enjoy a moment of relief from the sight of him.

  “I’m sorry for what we did to you.”

  “Well, I must admit I wouldn’t mind a larger room.” The Hijra grins.

  Nil frowns and eyes the empty corridor and, despite himself, enters the room, the eyes of the Hijra on him, investigating, touching him.

  “Open your eyes,” says the Hijra after a moment. He licks his lips. “After all that’s why you’re here.”

  “Who are we chasing?”

  The Hijra closes his eyes and smiles to himself and shakes his head a little.

  “Who are we chasing?” Nil repeats.

  “Who do you think is paying for all this?”

  “Mel,” says Nil, his brain wild with that name, “she said she would if anything went—”

  The Hijra smiles an even wider smile and plunges his head in the pillows, enjoying the softness. “Yes, we can say she is, in a way, paying for my care, but the money doesn’t come from her personal account.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You,” he says. “You’re paying for this, too.” Tick-tock, the sound fills the air. You can hear it but you can’t. “It’s not Mel who’s paying for this. Worlds United prepared this room long before my surgery in the Pit failed.”

  Nil shakes his head, staring at the floor, looking for an answer, in vain. When he fails to respond, the Hijra speaks again, his voice calm. “Don’t be sorry for me,” says the Hijra.

  “Please,” sighs Nil, almost overwhelmed. “Gabriel, tell me how to get him. Tell me who he really is.”

  “Who?”

  “Ameen.”

  The Hijra looks into his eyes, and Nil can see the glimmer of disappointment behind them.

  “His name is Rupesh, and he sells you the best drugs.” The Hijra is chanting the words out one by one. “His name is Spandan, and he’s the broker to half of the city’s rental agreements. His name is Hrishi, the most trusted middleman of Val the Madame. His name’s Ameen, and he’s purging the Pit. But none of these names really matter.”

  “He has his fingers in everything, yet I couldn’t find a single fingerprint. This is absurd.”

  “Again, you’re looking at the wrong man.”

  Nil holds his breath and the room starts dancing slow around him, but only for a moment.

  “I can help you,” he pleads, “Just tell me how to stop him before he gets to you.”

  The Hijra stares at him. “I can’t let you,” he says. “I can’t let you stop this, or it will be all for nothing.”

  Silence. Nil closes his eyes. He wouldn’t want to lose sight of the Hijra but he has to take a break from the light, which is all too strong, and the beeping, which is all too loud, and his skin, which is all too young.

  “I’m sorry we killed you,” he says, opening his eyes. Nil and Gabriel are all acquaintances, after all.

  The Hijra touches the spoon resting on the supper tray, a flame in his eyes, the light of the life that permeates his body at once too new and too worn out.

  “I am happy to die for my people,” he says, piercing Nil eye to eye. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  The way he says that, it makes Nil feel like falling. His cheekbones turn heavy and his cheeks turn heavy and his shoulders turn heavy and his hands swell with blood and turn heavy and his balls turn heavy and stretch the scrotum containing them and his knees threaten to bend under all that weight and Nil feels like falling in an endless well. He feels the urge to cry and kill and die, but can’t do any of this. He can’t even move.

  “You should go now,” goes the Hijra, his voice miles away. “It’s getting late.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” whispers Nil. “Worlds United owns half of this place.”

  The Hijra says nothing and returns his gaze and his face is not exactly devoid of emotion, but Nil can’t decipher any of it and would like to move but can’t, and he’s waiting for some parting words of wisdom from him, but the Hijra says nothing. Those eyes, those eyes, those eyes.

  “I’ll give your love to my father.” Nil covers his mouth, shocked by his own words.

  The Hijra smiles, but then he looks off in the distance.

  “Thank you,” mumbles Nil. In a corner of his mind, something huge falls.

  Nil walks through the corridors, greeting the entrance nurse who responds with a submissive look, and then gets out and in the car and closes the door and speaks.

  “Manuj,” he says.

  The driver casts the same worried look in the rearview mirror and what he sees must scare him as his face contorts into a mask of terror, and Nil would scream but the Whole inside him is roaring, preparing to explode.

  “Nothing,” goes Nil. “Let’s go home.”

  Once in the kitchen, pouring himself a glass of Old Monk on the rocks, a random episode of Friends on in the background to keep him company, Nil finds a missed call from Mom, and despite the late hour decides to call back and, though he knows she can’t see him drinking, he hides the glass of rum in the cupboard and smells his own breath.

  “Honey,” Mom says, jovial.

  “Hello—”

  “What are you doing still awake, are you studying?”

  “Yes,” goes Nil, “I’m going through the last lesson about the Maratha empire.”

  “What’s that noise in the background?”

  Nil glances at his MacBook. On the screen, Chandler and Ross are making out. Or maybe they aren’t. Nil takes his specs off.

  “What noise?” A pause. “Oh, it must be Kamat, the neighbor, quite the party animal—”

  “I know his parents, good people. Shareholders.”

  “Yeah.

  Silence.

  “Then,” says Mom, cheerful, “what did you want to ask me?”

  Nil hesitates. “Mom, you’ve called me.”

  “So? You have nothing to tell your poor mother?”

  “Of course, I—”

  “In any case, I spoke to Jiya today.” Nil’s heart misses a beat. “She says you don’t reply to her messages. Now, I know you’re busy and you have to concentrate on your studies, but you shouldn’t ignore someone who loves you so much.”

  Nil feels short of breath. “I’m trying to—” he starts saying but can find no words to continue. “You know I’m not the kind to—to talk via WhatsApp. I prefer... Skype.” A lump in his throat.

  Mom says nothing, she always expects him to explain himself. Her silence is worth more than a thousand judgments.

  “Anyway,” he changes the subject, “how’s the merger coming along?”

  “You know, honey,” she says, ignoring his question, “marriage is never easy, it’s not a goal but the beginning of a process, a long and sometimes painful journey toward love.”

  “I know, and I am glad to—”

  “Think of all those poor people in this country who don’t have this privilege, and whose rights we must fight for. You know what they would give to be in you place.”

  Nil runs a hand over his face and opens the cupboard enjoying the view of the Old Monk glass. He closes the cupboard door again, leaning on the kitchen counter.

  “Sorry, mum. I’ll do better from
now on.”

  “I know you can. You have it within you, my darling.”

  The Whole rises in his throat. Nil tries to suppress it.

  “The merger is proceeding according to plan,” Mom goes, the tingling sound of her bracelets filling the receiver. “But as you can imagine, it’s a pretty stressful time for us. Your father with logistical and bureaucratic headaches, and I with the company’s image. Vogue is yet to announce the new date of my interview. Can you believe it?”

  “You can’t ask one of your friends’ friend to find you a place in the next issue?”

  “I could, beta, but I have no intention of receiving favoritism. No, certain things are achieved only through personal ethics.”

  Hearing these words, Nil feels calmer, more serene. “Anything I can do to help?” He says. “Anything, mom.”

  “You just have to study, sweetie. Study and be ready to join us, when the time comes.”

  Nil feels a spasm crossing his hands and he has to grab the iPhone with all his might.

  “You know what?” Mom continues. “You could do a puja for your father, and for the difficult days ahead.”

  “Mom—”

  “Yes?”

  Nil sighs. “Okay.”

  “Tonight.”

  He hesitates. “Okay.”

  “Very well,” she says. “I’ll see you soon, study hard and know that we love you.”

  “Sure, Mom, and when—” But Mom has hung up.

  Nil opens the cupboard and grabs the glass and downs the Old Monk and, pouring some more, says, “Damned if I do any freaking puja.”

  Lighting a Benson, he drops on the couch with a bottle under his arm and the glass on the armrest and tries to focus on the show, only that he knows the episode by heart, and the smell of the hospital keeps on haunting him and he can’t help but to keep on checking the window as if fearing that the Nothing would overflow from the Pit and submerge Candil like a tsunami.

  Nil gets up and goes to the toilet, but before he can get there, he glances at the dressing room. He shakes his head and sighing he opens the doors and drawers until he finds the candles and the incense and the statue of the Goddess Kali, and so he places them on the carpet and kneeling down he opens the prayer book and, reading in Hindi, starts the puja. The small room is filled with fragrant smoke and Nil feels good, for once he feels no fatigue, almost as if he were relaxed enough to sleep.