by Roshan Ali
I left the week after. It was a warm day, and the bus stank of sweat and rotten vegetables. Sitting in that bus, nose full of the fumes of poverty, I hated not having money, having to suffer the ill-health and heat of the poor, while luxury buses swished past, enveloping their fat and sleepy passengers in cool conditioning and soft music. In my bus, babies cried out of disbelief for the transport that their parents had chosen, and their parents chatted amongst themselves of the new temple in their village. They would donate half their measly income to that temple and forego that doctor’s visit for the baby. Outside, there were two kinds of things that people paid attention to: temples and restaurants. Both sucked you dry of money, but at least the restaurants filled your stomach and strengthened your blood. The temples were colourful, loud leeches attached permanently to that spot of earth where they stood and to the grimy money of the poor (and the leather wallets of the rich), but much worse than leeches, because burning down a leech as it searches for blood, reaching out into the air, sensing your blood, is uncontroversial.
The road was newly built, it seemed, for it was smooth. Some money had slipped through the dirty grasp of bathed politicians and had managed to do something, despite their best efforts. Red earth rushed by, punctuated by tamarind trees that looked like small dark mushroom clouds. And banyan trees, with their snake-like roots tickling the earth (under the vast shade sat locals selling coconut water).
Then came the forest—I could see the green sheet in the distance. From red earth, we entered dark-green trees and the scratchy sounds of men and women fell away and were replaced by the mechanical drone of crickets and cicadas. That sound drowned out everything else and the babies cried no longer. I felt immensely grateful to the cicadas who had no idea what they were doing.
In the silence of that jungle, many animals roamed. I longed to see a tiger swaggering across the road, or elephants protecting their young and trumpeting angrily at us pesky humans. I kept my eyes peeled, barely blinking as the bus groaned noisily up the twists and turns of the road, but no animals were mobile that day. Major had seen a tiger here once and he couldn’t stop talking about its heavenly stature, its unearthly beauty. ‘There’s nothing like seeing a tiger in the wild,’ he had said breathing heavily, just the memory giving him great excitement.
A little boy with oiled hair plastered to the side, dark-skinned, with large slow eyes had sidled up to the side of my seat and stood staring at me. I stared back till he left.
Finally, the bus shuddered to a halt at our destination—a hill station to the south—and the conductor shouted that it was the last stop, but he didn’t have to, because everyone was already off the bus. Here, even though it was summer, mist hung low and people hurried about in shawls. Immediately, the auto drivers coagulated around the alighting passengers, forming impenetrable circles, which broke up only if you told them that somebody was picking you up. Then they muttered in disgust and wandered back to the back of the autos where they smoked and gambled.
Nobody cared enough to hassle me. I walked out of the bus station and down the main road, pulling my sweater tight around my chest. In the distance, I could see the hills.
A small smiling man asked me if I needed a room. I told him I had already booked one; where? And when I told him, he directed me. ‘You won’t see it easily. Just go straight. Dead end, turn left. But nice place, sir. Good luck.’
I thanked him and carried on past busy markets with cheap plastic toys and tiny medical shops. One man’s holiday destination was another’s permanent place of residence, where one had to go about their daily life buying onions and things.
The resort, called thus because groups of young people resorted to their most wasteful qualities here, had tents. In front of each tent was a fireplace. At night there were no lights but the yellow light from small fires flickered on the faces of the guests who sat around and drank and smoked.
From the darkness beyond the circle of light, a young man with dreadlocked hair sauntered towards me. He sat down uninvited and asked if I wanted drugs: The mushrooms were great there, he said. The weed was great, too, he said. The hash was great there, he said. Sure, I said, and he removed various small wrapped packets. ‘Which?’ he asked. ‘Hash,’ I said. He smiled approvingly, creepily, swayed in his seat, and performed the transaction slowly, till money and product was exchanged. ‘Great, bro,’ he said, standing up unsteadily, ‘great product, bro. Enjoy.’ Slowly he disappeared into the darkness.
The group in the tent beside mine shuffled uncomfortably and whispered things to each other. Then a girl came over, and I saw from the corner of my eyes, as she disappeared from the light of their fire and entered mine, how naturally natural she looked and elegant. Her hair was loose and dark and she wore dark-green pants that clung to her strong legs and a dark-green sweatshirt that was thick but could not hide the unmistakable bulge of considerable breasts. Immediately I was nervous but the hope that she couldn’t see I was nervous made me confident. I sat still pretending to not see her till she said softly, ‘Excuse me?’ I turned and acted surprised. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ she said, pushing her hair behind her left ear with dainty, strong fingers. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I was wondering if we can buy some of that stuff off you?’
In the primitive light of that orange fire her eyes were dark, but the centres glowed bright with hungry flames. Her face was covered in the most even skin, tight, and her lips seemed sculpted on to her face.
‘I don’t like selling drugs to people,’ I said and she stiffened slightly and turned around.
But when she turned, the mists seemed to swirl, and the night and the darkness said to me, ‘You fool.’ And a switch flicked on in my soul and before I knew it I was mumbling, hesitating. She turned back to me. ‘Sorry, did you say something?’ she asked.
‘You guys can come here and smoke.’
She smiled with relief. ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘you don’t know how much this means to me. Those guys have been after drugs since the moment we landed. Let me go get them.’
I watched as she walked back with a spring in her step and explained the situation. There was some discussion and then the three others got up and came over.
They introduced themselves. Except the girl who had come over earlier, whose name was Meera, the two men and another girl were software engineers. ‘What do you do?’ asked one of the men, a tall and weak-looking chap who couldn’t keep his eyes off Meera.
‘Nothing yet,’ I said.
We sat around the fire, five strangers, united by the illegality of some certain substances that provided unearthly experiences. Meera was closest, and I could smell her faint musty perfume. She had that quality about her, of calmness and reticence that I liked, and spoke only when she had something to say. Generally she sat silent looking up at the spotted sky. Soon, everyone was very stoned, and we were laughing at silly things.
‘I’m a writer,’ she said suddenly. We sat close.
‘What kind?’ I asked.
‘Poet.’
‘What kind?’
‘Unstructured, unpublished.’
I was so close I could feel her aura on my skin.
‘Tell me a poem you wrote,’ I said.
‘Feather fall gently/the salmon are going home/why do I fall so gently/why do I long for home?/The leaves turn sad/the sky turns sour/the men turn bad/the women go far./Come close friend/come from afar/let’s anticipate the end/in some smoky bar./Let’s discuss the world/from our tiny drunk spot/and be angrily hurled/into a confused lot.’
She sat quietly and stared up at the prickly darkness of the sky.
‘That’s beautiful,’ I said. If she had turned she would have seen my eyes glisten.
‘That’s called “Smallness”,’ she said.
I sat very still, not daring to disturb the universe, and the universe was kind enough to reciprocate. The wind lay still between the trees.
She turned to me. ‘What do you do?’ she asked.
I stopp
ed my mind and looked into her eyes. There, in the dark flickering of her eyes I saw something calm and soothing like a mother’s voice. All my life something had bothered me, but her eyes seemed to tell me that it was OK, and that there was nothing to worry about.
I didn’t want to speak because words were irritating and noisy. All I wanted to do was hold her face. And at once the past and the future seemed to make sense, and all my worries, all the discomfort stuck just beneath my thin skin, came loose and dissolved in the smoke of the fire and was gone into the darkness.
I tried to reply but no words passed my choking throat and a great pressure grew in my head. She looked at me strangely and cocked her head, drew her eyebrows together, and then she too seemed to understand, and she smiled and held my hand. Her touch was warm, and the warmth spread through every limb and organ, and I was on fire and I was alive.
Time was still; it did not pass any more. I was inside and outside at the same time. One second I was deep within myself looking into the eyes of my dark saviour, and the next I was witness to the scene from outside that circle of fire, observing my distant body doing automatic things, my faraway lips saying automatic words. Where was I? I was lost in a strange land, and only her hand guided me from falling into the precipice of madness. The ground fell away, and the sky cut loose and floated beyond space. Now there was only us and the darkness of the stuff in between, the dark matter. We floated somewhere between the ticking of time and the whoosh of space, held aloft by the rainbow-coloured strings of ten-dimensional space.
Then we danced and danced until the fire went out and the birds emerged and the first light of the day lit a small flame to the east that spread gently in the sky. She held me by the waist and took me inside the tent. Laying me down on the bed she slowly undressed, her body still swaying to some unheard tune. One by one she removed the rags of men till she stood there, clean, brown, smooth, multi-dimensional. And when she swayed now, her breasts swayed gently, and she raised her arms to her head, pushing her fingers into her hair, pushing her thick hair back, then pulling it down over her face till it was hidden, till the tips of her night hair brushed against her breasts.
She went down on her knees and crawled towards me and our bodies met in the first daylight. Birds erupted in joyous song.
The next afternoon I awoke with a heavy head, but a light inside, a lightness I had never felt before. It was a strange feeling, as if some primitive tar that had so far occupied a hard and tight place in my stomach was suddenly released, and in had come the universe, spacey, light, free.
She was sitting outside by the smouldering remains of the fire, hugging her knees, with her hair open, touching the earth behind her.
‘When are you leaving?’ she asked when I lit a cigarette and sat.
‘Tonight.’
‘Stay another day,’ she said. ‘My friends are leaving too. We can have a nice day alone. There’s a lake we can go to at night.’
She didn’t have to utter another word to make the case. Although school was supposed to start, this was a remote and unnecessary thought in my mind which I quickly shooed away like a stray cat. I didn’t say anything but she understood and smiled to herself.
Evening came and she waved at her friends. ‘See you at work,’ said the other girl, then she looked at me and added in a threatening tone, ‘take care.’
But Meera hugged her and said, ‘Don’t worry, Jo, I can take care of myself.’
When they left, she grabbed my hair and led me to the tent where we fucked again like crazed animals. And when we were done, I said, ‘That was my second time.’
She looked surprised, then said, ‘My fifth.’
When it grew dark, she pulled out a torch from her bag and we started up a hill. The fire boy had explained the route and any doubts in my mind were extinguished by her confidence and the way she led the way.
It was nine when we reached the top. She laughed when she heard me huffing and wheezing and coughing and fell suddenly silent as both of us caught sight of the lake and the stars in the water.
‘Star Lake,’ she said in a whisper, ‘they ought to call it Star Lake.’
I found a rock and sat down. The night was thick with the sounds of cicadas and the occasional owl and by the shore of the lake, the quite plop, plop, plopping of water dripping and frogs on their nightly expedition for food.
She sat beside me and for a few minutes neither of us said a word because once again words felt useless and inadequate and completely unnecessary.
She rose from her seat by my rock. It was cold and a dip in the lake was impossible. ‘Just my feet,’ she said, reading my thoughts, and in a kind of trance she walked towards the water and rolled up her trousers and entered, melting and breaking up stars and galaxies, shifting and liquidating entire worlds and their suns, and with just her feet. One could only imagine what would happen to my world if she undressed completely. Did I say my world? I meant the world.
The lake, container of the night sky, shuddered at the presence of this angel, but as soon as she stood still, it froze once again and the stars returned to their positions and the sky was back to normal.
‘Come here, Ib,’ she said, ‘it’s so nice and cold.’
‘No way, I’ll ruin everything.’ And I whispered under my breath, ‘Everything is perfect.’
The wind heard and answered.
She dried her feet and came back to the rock. ‘Roll one?’ she asked, but with those eyes and lips, it wasn’t a question, it was an order. The one with real power, they are the ones who order without ordering. She had great power over me, that was clear.
With the drug in our blood, and among other things, love, she pushed me down on the rock and again we joined in the middle, met, melded, melted, and were done in a furious few minutes. Her mouth was still on mine when the wind suddenly became much colder and her back shivered under my fingers.
‘We should go,’ I said. She chewed my bottom lip gently and her hair was on my face.
‘Going as soon as we come?’ she said and laughed.
The walk down was shorter but more thorny somehow.
When we reached the tent, she stopped me. ‘I’m going to sit out here for a while,’ she said, gazing at the fire.
I said, ‘OK, see you in the morning.’
She clutched my hand suddenly. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Ib.’
‘Nice to meet you, Ib.’
As I lay in bed listening to the crackling of the fire, the strange feeling of lightness was once again in my stomach. And in my dreams that night I wandered green fields and saw the mountains and the sky and the snow, and the woods were thick and silent, and all the time my right hand clutched the left hand of a woman, and everything was deep and good.
I slept the whole day. When I awoke, it was dark again and Meera was gone. Outside, the wind was chilly and the fires were already lit. But the fire in front of Meera’s tent lay dark and smouldering. The boy, the lighter of fires, hung about and I asked him about them. ‘Check out, sir,’ he said, smiling. ‘Here, she told to give this.’ He held out a piece of paper.
‘Dear Ib,
All I know is your name. Some things will never go away. Last night was one of those things. Thank you.’
Unpublished poet,
Meera
I returned to the busy city with a thousand thoughts. Why had Meera left? Why didn’t she leave her number? And with every answer I gave myself, I had a rebuttal. Perhaps she didn’t like me enough to want to stay. But why would she leave a letter, why not just leave? Did she not want to ruin the perfection of that night by getting to know me better? But that was a terrible idea and not one that Meera would have entertained. Did she see my nose when she woke up the next morning? These were answers I would probably never get and I wondered, in the context of my life, how long I would ponder these things.
At once the mystery and the unpredictability of life struck me. How strange for this woman to enter my life and give me
such pleasure, what a blessing, and how cruel for her to disappear again, back into her own life, and me into mine.
I had assumed an unconscious mission to try and find this raw and fresh woman, because every thought of her firm flesh, her forests of hair, was surrounded by a halo-like glow, and assumed the unmistakable impression of being the light at the end of something long and treacherous. I had barely lived a short life, but there was something conclusive about her, ending-like, as if even this sliver of time that my life had used up, could be meaningfully stitched up by this angel who came from the dark one night.
And so I made it my purpose to ask around casually—casually so as to not reveal my hopeless and romantic intentions—about her whereabouts, her life. Sometimes I swear I caught her scent when rounding an unfamiliar corner, and my eyes searched the landscape of ugly, uncoordinated buildings, and lunatic traffic, and dirt and dogs, hoping for a glimpse of her dark greenness, her dark shadow, her shadowy eyes, with fire in the centre. But there was nothing. Never was there anything but the hopeless city and its unthinking thousands.
Perhaps, it struck me around this time, that the thousands in the city, hollow and empty, were unthinking precisely because they were older and had had that experience, similar to the one by the fire, that had reduced their life to the pursuit of just one thing—love, money, fame, muscles—and it was no more necessary to think than to perform a dance, and everything was permitted in the pursuit of this one thing. Or maybe two things, who knew. In my case, the lack of the one thing, the two things, the three things, nothing, had infused my life with a kind of thoughtful aimlessness, an intellectual unemployment. And I found many times that time and effort aimed at one thing reduced the width and depth of my mind, the broadness of my thoughts, as if all my brain’s energy was spent on that certain task.
With this in mind, this emptiness mocking me, I joined the school. Soon, I found that the school, despite its geography and trees, was like any other school—where the brightest of humanity are crushed and pressed into the dullest of circumstances. But a job is a job, I told myself, but the thought rang hollow and bounced around the emptiness of my skull.