Seahorse (3 page)

Inside, a low smoke-cloud hung over the room. The clientele, middle-aged and solely male, dotted the tables, seated with their drinks and plates of glistening murg tikka masala and seekh kebabs. I don't remember what we were drinking, but it was different from the usual stuff we swilled in college—foul Haywards 10,000 for a cheap, quick high or a blindingly acidic whisky called Binnie Scot. It wasn't long before I lost count of the refills. The bar transformed into a warm cocoon. A small planet spiraling into free fall, plummeting through space. The lights were brighter and dimmer all at once, the air pulsing with a musical beat that arose from all corners.

I know who killed Lenny.

I thought I heard myself say those words; I wasn't certain.

Nicholas placed his hand on my arm. He wasn't killed, he said.

He was.

“Your sister explained… there were complications…”

No, he was killed.

In my head, I was adamant.

“Why do you say so, Nehemiah?”

I stayed silent.

He asked me again.

Much as I wanted to confide in him, at the time I couldn't bring myself to explain.

If art is preservation, it is also confession.

Few lectures stay with me from my university days—a class on DH Lawrence's language of synesthesia, Woolf's complex layering of time, Ismat Chughtai's seething denouncement of the world—and those that do were mostly delivered by Doctor Mahesar. A professor of petite yet rotund build and razor-sharp articulation. His tutorial room was atop the college building, on the open, flat roof, overlooking the lawns and
trees, where in the evening, squawking parrots came to roost. In the summer, it was unbearable, a compact, vicious furnace, with only the rare, welcome visitation of a breeze.

One morning, we discussed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

We watched beads of sweat form on Doctor Mahesar's forehead, and stream gently down the contours of his face. Before him, bent over our
Annotated T. S. Eliot,
we similarly perspired—the smell of sweat, pungent as a sliced onion, hung in the air. Last year, under identical sweltering conditions, Doctor Mahesar had thrown his text on the table. “I give up.” He said he couldn't teach “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day” without crumbling under the weight of irony.

Naturally, he was everyone's favorite professor.

That day, everyone in the room hoped for a similar tirade, seeing there was mention of fog and cool winter evenings, but no such shenanigans took place.

“How does the poem begin?” he asked, holding the text up to us like a mirror.

There was a mumble of voices—
Let us go then, you and I… when the evening is spread out against the sky…

“That is incorrect.”

Small circles of confusion spun around the room. Finally, a girl in the front row spoke up, “It begins with an epigraph.”

“Thank you, Ameya. Yes, it begins with an epigraph.”

“You mean the part we can't understand,” said someone from the back.

“Yes, Noel. The part in Italian, which,
if
you've heard of it, is a Neo-Latin Romance language spoken mainly in Europe.”

The class sniggered.

“
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse, a persona che mai tornasse al mondo
… Now, I'm sure there's someone here who can recite it for us word for word in translation.”

There was deep and resolute silence.

The professor spoke the lines softly.

“If I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker… But since, up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed.
So you see, the poem begins with the promise of a secret between the soul of the dead… and you.”

He placed the book on the table and mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief.

“Why do you think this is poised as a confession?” The class stared back, blank as the blackboard behind him. “Because that's the psychology of secrets,” he explained. “People have a primitive or compelling need to divulge their emotional experiences to others. Confessions can be written as letters, notes, diaries, or in this case, an entire poem…”

For a long time I couldn't tell Nicholas about who'd killed Lenny.

I felt it was the promise of a secret between the soul of the dead and me.

It may have been a coincidence, as these things usually are, but after the talk in the conference hall, I frequently noticed Nicholas around campus. It wasn't all too difficult to spot him, since he was one of few Caucasians around, although admittedly Delhi University had seen its fair share of white folk, most of whom eccentric. A French sociologist who cycled around wearing a Vietnamese nón lá (some say that's how he'd traveled to India from Paris), an Anglo-Indian professor of literature who couldn't ever remember who'd written what, “Shelley's Ode to a Nightingale”, and a visiting biologist from Germany who brewed his coffee in intricate laboratory apparatus. Nicholas, though, was more object of fervent curiosity.

Often, he'd visit the senior member's common room, mingling with the other professors, obtrusive for his youth—the rest were mostly grey-haired gentlemen and a few prim salwar or sari-clad ladies—and
attire. Pale shirts of impossibly fine cotton, pressed and pristine, sharp-cut trousers, stylish loafers. Simple yet hard to imitate; everything I could afford in the market looked—there's no other way to say this—cheap. Sometimes, he'd lounge in the college café, drinking endless cups of tea, writing in a black notebook, picking at a serving of mince cutlets and buttered toast. Or he'd read, on the fringes of the lawn, under the generous canopy of peepal trees.

I'd watch him, follow his movements, keep a lookout for when he'd visit the campus.

As, I suspect, did many of the other students.

It wasn't only because he was a white stranger.

There was something thrillingly mysterious about him.

Or so everyone liked to believe.

From here and there, I caught snatches of rumor.

That he was a new lecturer who'd recently joined the faculty, that he was a visiting scholar from Cambridge. Someone else said he was here on fieldwork, conducting research at the National Museum.

Among the students, the girls in particular, he was of special interest; they sought him out and jostled for his attention. Some claimed to have befriended “Nick”, saying he'd paid keen attention to their theories on the earliest figurative representations of the Buddha.

Occasionally, in the corridors and lawns, I saw him with Adheer.

And strange as it may sound, I was stung by jealousy. That Adheer was marked out from the rest. That it wasn't me. Although then it seemed impossible, unthinkable even, that I could be similarly acquainted with the art historian.

I was in most ways unremarkable.

I'd always felt so. Once, I read about Italo Svevo, a nineteenth-century Italian writer whose characters are often referred to as
uomini senza qualità…
men without qualities… people whose qualities are ambiguous, dilute… perhaps in some ways even inept with the world.

And I thought that could be me.

When I looked in the mirror, I always wished I occupied more space, that my reflection was less inconsequential. In college I wasn't painfully thin, or scrawny—I played football often—just… slight. And I'd examine my face, in the time it took for me to splash it at the sink, knowing they were there to stay—the eyes, a shade slanted, that diminutive nose, a full stop rather than an exclamation mark. My mouth. Like squashed fruit.

Above all this, I had no reason to approach the art historian. Even if I did, I was certain I'd be unable to muster up the courage. And why shouldn't it be Adheer? Marked out from the rest. From a royal family in Indore, I'd heard. With his elegantly tailored kurtas, long and light, flowing like a breeze around him. Adheer was the most sophisticated of us all (though, at the time, we preferred “pretentious”). While we listened to Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, rich and tragic ragas drifted out of his room. While we thumbed through Salinger and Camus—like every generation before us we held
Catcher in the Rye
and
The Outsider
intimately and preciously our own—he claimed to have read all of Krishnamurti, all of Kabir.

“Perhaps,” I'd offer, “they didn't get along.”

I'd be met by incredulity. And a look.
You're an idiot.

One thing I was certain of, though, was that Adheer wasn't unremarkable.

A month into term, I tried to let my interest slip. Although it was difficult to ignore the whispers and hushed discussions swarming around Nicholas, alighting on him like bees. Once, outside the college café, where students usually gathered to smoke, I caught his name in conversation. Two girls, chatting, holding glasses of nimbu paani. I'd seen the one with short hair and a nose ring in last term's college production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She'd played Titania, the fairy queen, and scandalized the senior members, and thrilled the rest, with her Biblical choice of costume—little more than flowers and
leaves. Her companion, a willowy girl with sleek, straight hair and a pale almond-shaped face, came from my part of the country. A “chinky,” as they called us here in the north. She was studying English in the year below mine, and even though I hadn't ever spoken to her, I knew her name was Larisa.

I bought a samosa from the makeshift snack stall nearby, one that also dispensed lemon juice, and didn't stray far, keeping them within eavesdropping distance.

“He's British, but of Greek ancestry,” said Titania. “That's what he told Priya, apparently.”

I hadn't known, but it explained the olive skin, the dark hair.

“Talk about a Greek god,” giggled her friend.

“You think? He's tall and all that… but not really my type…”

“Yes, because you prefer skinny struggling artists.”

They both laughed.

I bit into the samosa—the shell came away in my hands, loosening the soft potato and peas filling. It steamed gently on the paper plate, while the tamarind sauce pooled darkly around the edges.

“You should invite him to a house party…” said Titania. “I'm sure someone's planning one soon.”

Her friend lifted a dainty eyebrow. “Why not? I don't think he teaches here. Maybe we can get him drunk… although, I'm not sure he'd come.”

“We could ask Adheer to invite him.”

“Adheer?”

“They spend a lot of time together… don't you think?”

“What are you saying?” laughed her friend.

“Don't be an idiot, Lari, you know what I mean.”

“What do you mean?” She sounded genuinely confused.

“I think they're… you know…” She must have mouthed the word for I couldn't hear her. What I did catch was Lari's cry of repulsion.

“That's disgusting… you really think so? It's so
gross
.”

Titania sipped her drink, and stayed silent.

What I observed, over the weeks, was that Nicholas didn't pay special attention to anyone in particular. He was indiscriminately charming. When in the mood. Or resolutely cool. He remembered people's names, or at least had a way of requesting them to remind him so they weren't slighted. He appeared attentive, if not deeply interested. Mostly, I think, he enjoyed the attention. And tired of it just as easily.

People have fickle memories though. And often they mainly remember the agreeable, latching on to the winsome details. A wave across the lawn. At the café, a round of tea at his insistence and expense. A recommended book. His smile. Rare, precious gesture—that in an instant swept you into his closest, most secret circle.

Yet the lines were drawn long before we imagined, who would be allowed in, how much, how far, always keeping, inevitably, to himself. Intact. In his own hands, he was porcelain.