by Akhil Sharma
I said, “In a little while. Comedy hour is starting.” We sat down on our chairs with Gopi Ram’s whiny voice between us. This week he had gotten involved with criminals who wanted to go to jail to collect the reward on themselves. The canned laughter gusted from several flats. When the music of the racing horses marked the close of the show, I felt hopeful again. Rajinder looked very handsome in his kurta pajama.
I bathed carefully, pouring mug after mug of cold water over myself till my fingertips were wrinkled. The candlelight turned the bathroom orange. My skin appeared copper. I washed my pubis carefully so no smell remained from urinating. Rubbing myself dry, I became aroused. I thought how abject all this was. I put on the red sari again. I wore no bra so my nipples showed through the blouse. As I dressed, a strange emotion began filling me. I was clenching and unclenching my hands. As I noticed I was doing this, I started shaking. The feeling was close to panic, but not exactly that. I wanted to run toward instead of away. It was not some form of love either. Even one afternoon of loving let me know that. The emotion was like anger.
After a few minutes, I went out. I stood beside Rajinder. My arm brushed against his kurta sleeve. Periodically a raindrop fell, but these were so intermittent I might have been imagining them. On the roofs all around us, on the street, were the dim figures of men, women, and children waiting for the first rain. “You look pretty,” he said. Somewhere Lata Mangeshkar sang with a static-induced huskiness. The street was silent. Even the children were hushed. As the wind picked up, Rajinder said, “Let’s close the windows.”
The wind coursed along the floor, upsetting newspapers, climbing the walls to swing on curtains. There was a candle on the refrigerator. As I leaned over to pull a window shut, Rajinder pressed against me. He cupped my right breast. I felt a shock of desire pass through me. As I walked around the rooms shutting windows, he followed behind, touching my buttocks, pubis, stomach.
When the last window was closed, I waited for a moment before turning around, because I knew he wanted me to turn around quickly. He pulled me close, with his hands on my buttocks. I took his tongue in my mouth. We kissed like this for a long time.
The rain began falling. There was a roar from the people on the roofs nearby. “The clothes,” Rajinder said. He pulled away.
We ran out. It was hard to see each other. Lightning bursts illuminated an eye, an arm, some teeth. Then there was darkness again. We jerked the clothes off, letting the pins fall to the ground. We deliberately brushed roughly against each other. The raindrops were like thorns. We began laughing. Rajinder’s shirt had wrapped itself around and around the clothesline. Wiping his face, he knocked his glasses off. As I saw him crouched and fumbling around helplessly for them, I felt such tenderness that I knew I would never love him as much as I did at that moment. “The wind in the trees,” I said, “it sounds like the sea.”
We slowly moved back inside, kissing all the while. When he entered me, it was like a sigh. He suckled on me and moved back and forth and side to side, and I felt myself growing warm and loose. He held my waist with both hands. We made love gently at first, but as we both neared climax, Rajinder began stabbing me with his penis. I came in waves so strong that I wanted to say, Make me invisible; make me the sky. When Rajinder sank on top of me, I said, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he answered.
The candle had gone out. Rajinder got up to light it. He drank some water, then lay down beside me. I wanted some water, too, but did not want to say anything to suggest thoughtlessness. “I’ll be getting promoted soon. Minaji loves me,” Rajinder said. I rolled onto my side to look at him. He had his arms folded across his chest. “Yesterday he said, ‘Come, Rajinderji, let us write your confidential report.’” I put my hand on his stomach. Rajinder said, “Don’t.” He pushed my hand away. “I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know whether that’s good, sir.’ He laughed. What a nincompoop. If it weren’t for the quotas he’d never be manager.” Rajinder chuckled. “I’ll be the youngest bank manager in Delhi.” I tugged a sheet over our legs. “In college I had a schedule for where I wanted to be by the time I was thirty. By twenty-two I became an officer, soon I’ll be a manager. I wanted a car. We’ll have that in a year. I wanted a wife. I have that.”
“You are so smart.”
“There were smarter people than I in college. But I knew exactly what I wanted. A life is like a house. One has to plan carefully where all the furniture will go.”
“Did you plan me as your wife?” I asked, smiling.
“No, I had wanted at least an M.A. and someone who worked, but Mummy didn’t approve of a daughter-in-law who worked. I was willing to change my requirements. It’s because I believe in moderation that I am successful. Everything in its place. Also, pay for everything. Other people got caught up in love and friendship. I’ve always thought that these things only became important because of the movies.”
After a moment I asked, “You love me and your mother, don’t you?”
Rajinder considered how to answer me. “There are so many people in the world that it is hard not to think that there are others you can love more.” Seeing the shock on my face, he quickly added, “Of course I love you. I just try not to be too emotional about it.” The candle’s shadows on the wall were like the wavy bands formed by light reflected off water. “We might even be able to get a foreign car.”
The second time he took me that night, it was from behind. He pressed down heavily on my back and grabbed my breasts.
I woke at four or five. The rain scratched against the windows and there was a light like blue milk along the edges of the door. I was cold and tried wrapping myself in the sheet, but it was not large enough.
THREE
Sleep was there immediately. The fear was so great, I could not stay conscious. I closed my eyes and was gone. The sleep lasted only minutes. I roused when Anita snapped off the common-room light on her way to bed, but I kept my eyes closed and hoped to faint again.
Asha moving past Anita into the common room and Anita staying in the doorway; Asha moving past Anita into the common room and Anita staying in the doorway. I dreamed this all night, and each time I did, my heart started wildly and I woke. Then the alcohol and fear dragged me into sleep again. I woke and passed out so many times that I grew confused and began doubting whether Anita had stood in my doorway and called Asha away from me.
Around three that morning, the alcohol thinned to the point that I no longer passed out automatically. My bladder started to ache, but I did not want to get up. Walking to the bathroom would make it harder to believe that I had imagined everything. I stayed on the cot with the sheet pulled over my face and thought, Anita couldn’t remember; what happened with her was so long ago. If she couldn’t remember, why would she be suspicious? Besides, from where she stood, how could she see I had my penis against Asha’s back? When she told Asha to brush her teeth, there was nothing on Anita’s face to show that she knew.
As my certainties kept changing, there were moments of complete calm and moments of overwhelming terror. I tried to imagine my life if Anita confronted me over her childhood. I could not. Not only would the future end, but everything I had been would also be erased.
A little before five, the pain in my bladder forced me up. My room had become packed with fears, and leaving it for the common room felt like stepping off a crowded bus into wind. The balcony door and the kitchen shutters were closed, but enough light slipped through them to tint the darkness blue. I could hear the whoosh of my own blood. My fears were joined by horror.
As I urinated in the dank darkness of the latrine, I thought that my fifty-seven years had not only not taught me decency, they had not even taught me caution. The recklessness of caressing Asha while Anita was in the common room was the same as when I had fondled Anita in the storage room on the roof while Radha and the other children could be heard moving about downstairs. My penis’s smoothness reminded me of when it was slick with blood and sperm. I began crying. There wa
s something fatal in repeating my crime so exactly. The preciseness had the same inevitability as death. I sobbed so strongly I had to put a hand against the wall for support.
Weeping was comforting. A part of me reasoned that because I was crying and penitent, God could not have let Anita see what I was doing. Besides, if God allowed the discovery, who would be helped? Whatever happened, Anita needed to stay with me because she had no money. Her poverty should keep her from confronting me. Then I noticed how my mind was working, and shame filled me. I thought of Asha speaking in Urdu when she thanked me for the badminton rackets, and I cringed at what I had done with someone so small.
From the shame came the idea of going to my village and finding the pundit to make sure he was in Delhi tomorrow. This way Radha would be prayed for by someone who knew her. I would be doing something good and God would protect me because of this. Going to Beri also meant one day of not having to see Anita.
Misery often makes me want to look away from the present and leads me to nostalgia. As I swallowed my heart medicine in the blue dark of the common room, I imagined walking through Beri’s sugarcane fields and sitting beneath a mango tree. I wanted to be a child again, with the future a wide, still river in the afternoon.
When I passed through Anita and Asha’s bedroom on my way out of the flat, I heard one of them roll over. The room was completely dark and I could not see who had turned and whether either was awake. The door chain clacked as I unhooked it, but no one spoke.
The dark sky was beginning to fade in streaks, and night’s mildness was still in the air. I found a bicycle rickshaw where the Malka Ganj and Ghanta Ghar roads meet in a V. The streets to the InterState Bus Terminal were mostly empty. A few old men were out for strolls, and there was an occasional mysterious person: a woman dressed for a party talking with herself on the sidewalk: “Don’t worry about me. I’m a queen. I’m a governor”; or a teenage boy with a suitcase, barefoot and walking with his head tilted up and a rag to his nose to stanch a nosebleed. But mostly there was just the creak of the rickshaw as the driver’s feet slowly rose and fell on the pedals.
When I settled back in the seat, memories of my childhood came to me. I remembered that when my mother and I waited by the side of the road for a bus, I would tell my mother to move back, not because I was worried about her safety, but because this was one of the few ways I had to show my love. The sense of loss for the boy I once was made shame settle in my chest like a clot. Asha was so small that if one looked at only her hand or foot, it seemed unreal.
The bus terminal was roaring with the enormous noise of thousands of people arriving and departing and of the buses which brought them and took them away. There were villagers; there were men and women dressed in pants and shirts; there were foreigners. There were carts selling everything from pieces of fresh coconut, to water and lemonade, to hot food, to plastic toys. There was such a sense of energy that everything appeared possible. All this confirmed the rightness of my decision to go in search of the pundit.
Beneath the heaviness in my chest, I felt a pulse of excitement.
I found the Haryana Roadways ticket booth and bought a ticket to Beri. The bus was parked in a corner of the compound that surrounds the ISBT. I stepped over suitcases and small bundles to move down the aisle toward a window seat in the back. The seat was torn, and straw showed through the rips in the green plastic. My belly almost touched the seat in front of me. The bus smelled of manure and sweat and rang with the quick dialects of the villagers who filled it. A wedding party of red-turbaned men sat singing in the front.
My mind hurtled from one thought to the other. There was my shame, my eagerness for the trip, and now that I was in the bus, a worry that in Beri I would meet one of my brothers or their children, whom I had not seen for five years, since we quarreled over a piece of land my father left us. But I would not have a problem remaining unrecognized. I began planning what I would do once I got to the village. I would find the ice-cream factory the pundit’s wife had told me he was blessing; then I would walk along the river which I had liked so much as a child; and then, while waiting for the next bus to Delhi, I might have lunch at a dhaba. Thinking of food made me drool.
I was disgusted with myself.
I looked out the window. Buses and people crowded the ISBT compound. Along a wall I saw three old women, their faces covered with folds of their saris, squatting and urinating. I imagined the darkening dust beneath them and I felt again the inevitability of my nature. My mind was attracted to what is loathsome and humiliating. Although I was not sexually attracted to men, I sometimes imagined sucking the penises of the rich and powerful, like Mr. Gupta or Mr. Maurya, and I would feel humiliation and delight at currying favor.
I turned away from the women. On top of the wall next to which they crouched was a billboard with Nehru’s handsome smiling face and some quotation about the nature of generosity.
The bus started and we rattled onto the road. We went past the Red Fort and Chandni Chowk and into New Delhi. The crowded roads eased into bright boulevards. No one remembers, I thought, that Nehru had wanted to show how modern he had made India and decided to expand New Delhi while thousands were starving in Calcutta and there were no sewers in Old Delhi.
By the time I woke, the buildings bordering the road had shrunk to one and two stories and the spaces between them had begun expanding. So much dust was coming in through the open windows and the loose metal floorboards that there was a haze inside the bus.
Sleep had clarified my emotions, and the horror and shame were stronger than fear. I remembered twelve-year-old Anita beneath me, far beneath me, as if I were looking down from a great height, and me enormous and sweating and snorting above her. In order to diminish the pressure in my chest, I took shallow breaths. Money would make everything negotiable. The crime against Anita was decades old. Since then I had not repeated the crime with any other child. Asha did not count, because I was drunk and had been caught before anything occurred.
We shot through the ring of small towns which surround Delhi. The white markers that look like gravestones appeared, calling the road a highway even though it was still barely able to contain two buses passing each other. Farms lined the road. Most were only an acre or two, unadorned even by a well or a waterwheel, and separated by well-worn paths. Occasionally we passed large fields, divided by irrigation ditches and edged with neem trees for green fertilizer. I wondered whether, if someone else had lived my life, he would have committed the same sins that I had. The weight in my chest got heavier and I began to worry I might have another heart attack. I clenched and unclenched my hands to see if my fingers tingled. I lifted my arms up to the seat before me to see if they ached. As the pressure increased, I grew restless. My mouth opened on its own, although my mind was not forming any words.
There were times when the highway became the main street of small towns and I could have reached out and pulled drying laundry off people’s balconies. We passed women in veils and bright clothes walking down the side of the highway with bundles of wood, which nearly doubled their height, rocking gently on their heads.
In my childhood, when a man and a woman wanted a ride from a passing bus or truck, they simply sat by the side of the road and waited. The men had long, curled mustaches and some held a sword over their knees. They might stand up as the bus or truck approached, but not attempt to hail it, to avoid the shame of rejection. The women wore long, loose shirts and skirts of red, gold, and purple. As the bus or truck neared, they veiled themselves with a scarf and looked away. These women had always made me think of flowers that turn their heads and track the sun across the sky.
Before Independence and before the five-year plans brought irrigation and electricity, Beri was a village of a hundred, mostly Brahmin families living in one-room mud homes that were scattered over several small hills. The only shops were either far away or in the trunk of some entrepreneur who went to town regularly and brought back everything from rose syrup to needles.
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br /> My father was the village teacher. I had two older brothers who were, even then, so exactly as they are now—inward, always planning, ready to hate—that I believe some people are born nearly complete and life provides just the details of their personalities.
My mother was the only person I loved, and I think she loved only me. Because she believed peas were very good for you, Ma would take them out of my brothers’ food and put them in mine. Ma was short and fat and, as if she were a child, always walked around barefoot. At some point when I was very young, she began to claim that there were ghosts in the dark corners of our house. Later, she was possessed by them. She might claim to be a Brahmin from a hundred years ago or a princess who had taken poison to protect her honor. Several times she buried all our plates and pots in different parts of the farm, claiming that they were treasure. When she went crazy, we tied her hands and feet to a cot or the millstone. One moonless summer night she escaped from the binds and my father, my brothers, and I chased her till dawn over Beri’s hills. We could not see her, but we followed her high, giddy laughter. Her laughter was like smoke, filling the night and taking away my breath.
Though I was lonely enough that in my dreams I sometimes fell in love and woke up with my heart aching, I was aggressive and talkative. No matter what games we children organized, I was the captain of one of the teams. I had a gang of five or six boys who called me “Grandfather” and with whom I terrorized the other children. As an assertion of power, if I ran into a younger boy who didn’t act properly obsequious before me, I made him run a useless errand, such as going to a particular tree and getting a specific leaf If the boy refused to do this, or if he did it but I did not like him, I beat him.