Seahorse (6 page)

For a while, it was alive, the map hanging on the wall, glowing with promise.

Yet living is all loss.

And time, or rather the passage of time, doesn't bring understanding. Only invention, appropriation. A wild attempt to prop up the past before it slides out of sight. Often, I feel I haven't truly left the forest. That I'm still there, astray on an endless evening. Stumbling around in the darkness, looking for a clearing, where anything is possible.

If Kalsang's parents would have “killed him” if they discovered he was sleeping with his cousin, mine would have done the same if they suspected the slightest deviance. So I was careful, making sure I was in my room every second Sunday when they called on the common telephone in the corridor. It rang loudly and often, when it worked, that is, or hadn't been set on fire for fun, or stolen by someone looking to make some quick, easy money.

On any given day, it was difficult to carry on a conversation with my father.

I remember once, when I was still in school, he brought home a sapling from the market, a delicate green thing wrapped in plastic and soil. He planted it in our garden thinking it was a flowering hydrangea, but it grew into something else. A great tangling creeper with dark leaves and rare orange blossoms. And he'd stand in front of it bewildered.

What is this?

Sometimes, he looked at me the same way.

It didn't help that, more often than not, the corridor erupted in riotous distraction. At the far end, boys played “indoor cricket” with a tennis ball, someone else danced around in a towel and little else. Music blared from many rooms, spanning various eras and genres. Kishore Kumar from one, Black Sabbath from the other.

Our conversations proceeded the same way each time, as though we were working meticulously through a checklist.

“Hello.”

“Hello… can you hear me?” My father always asked.

“Yes… hello pa.”

I can still imagine him now, walking out the house, down the sloping road to the market, to a PCO round the corner, a small shop with a telephone booth attached to it like an afterthought. A black and yellow signboard dangling over its door. Nine o'clock was late for my hometown. Its streets would be empty, filled only with a flimsy mist
and nippy breeze. My father would be tired, after a day's work at the hospital, but he'd wait until the crowds were gone to escape the queue at the PCO.

“Howwwzzzaaaaatttttt!” the cricketers would shout.

“What's that?” My father's voice would ripple, like he was speaking underwater.

“Nothing, pa.”

“What was that noise?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay. How's everything?”

“Fine.”

Conversations were a staccato recital—short, abrupt, awkward.

“How's ma?”

“She's here… she wants to speak to you.”

“And Joyce? How is she?”

“She's fine… busy with her work.”

My elder sister was a nurse in Calcutta. We wrote each other occasional letters, but moved in different worlds, which barely touched apart from when we both happened to be home.

At times, with my father, I'd feel more expansive.

“I'm writing an article for the college magazine.”

“Is it part of your course work?”

“No… I'm just writing it…”

“When are your next holidays?”

And I'd tell him. Pujas. Diwali. Christmas.

“For how long?”

“About two weeks… I think.”

“It's better you stay in Delhi then… it's too short…”

“Yes.” There were other reasons my father preferred that I stay away from my hometown.

“Here, speak to your mother…”

This would be a relief. My mother was easier, more affectionate.

She'd run through all her concerns—food, cleanliness and the heat.

“I'm fine, ma, don't worry.”

“Your sister is thin as a stick; I told her how can she nurse other people if she won't look after herself.”

I could imagine Joyce's face, the way she'd click her tongue in exasperation.

I smiled. “I'm sure she's fine.”

I'd allow my mother to chatter on—a cousin having a baby, a grand-uncle in hospital, an aunt visiting over the weekend. The news was as distant as I felt about my hometown, standing in the corridor, cradling the receiver against my cheek.

“Alright, dear… we'll speak to you again soon…”

Sometimes, I'd slip it in. “Ma, what news of Lenny?”

A sharp breath, the beep of the machine. Beep. And then a few seconds more.

“Nothing, as yet. He's still there…”

“For how long, ma?”

“Until he's cured.”

And there was nothing left for me to say but good night.

Sometimes, I tried to imagine Lenny.

From the hints in his letters, the tiny details he slipped in without noticing, or assuming them to be of importance. In the room next to his, a young boy drew picture after picture of a black sun. Over and over, in infinite, untiring circles. “Why don't you draw something else?” they'd tell the boy. And he would. A forest, a house, a line of mountains. Then he'd finish with a black circle, coloring it in until the crayon broke. On the other side, the room to his right, a girl would silently play with stones—five pebbles that she'd toss in the air and scatter on the ground. Picking up each one carefully as though they were jewels.

Nem, I am wedged between the earth and sky.

In the evenings, if he looked out the window, through the patterned grill, he'd see the silvery gleam of pine trees, and far away, the uneven shape of hills, the brittle disc of the moon, precariously balanced.
From where I am, the town lights are too distant to be visible.
Night after night sleep would not come. For sleep, he said, was pressed into small white pellets, chipped away from the moon. Arranged neatly, like his night clothes, in a row, washed with clear, spring water, in which it dissolved like star dust, and swam to the tips of his fingers, his toes, somewhere to the crown of his head.

I wondered when he started gathering sleep—the pellets dispensed after dinner. The lady in white was meant to watch him swallow, but she was careless, a little impatient. She had many sleeps to give away. He stored them in a pen he'd hollowed, throwing away the cartridge. He'd have collected enough when it was full. Enough sleep, so he wouldn't need to wake up to the brightness of this room. This square cell. The world that was too green and hurt his eyes. So he wouldn't need to see the way they looked at him. Wracked with this sickness. Under his breath, he murmured lines from memory. He'd read somewhere that when an earthquake buried an entire city, people underground kept themselves alive reciting poetry.

But now all these heavy books are no use to me any more, for

Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best

Then, I surrender their fascinating counsel

to the silent dissolution of the sea

which misuses nothing because it values nothing.

He too would do the same. Recite from memory, each syllable marking the passage of time.

But for how long? And why?

How slowly time passed in the dark.

See, barely a minute.

Here we are, still waiting.

For something to drop.

In his hand, I imagined, sleep lay in neat clusters, in the centre of his palm. He unscrewed the pen cap and filled it up, a boy collecting treasure.

Did he remember dark skin, how it quivered below him? Hair a thousand shades of dusk and light.
It was a thing of shame.

Out the window, the moon would be wakeful. The trees hushed in the breeze. How he longed to be beneath them, to curl his hand into the earth. He said he often thought of all the times we'd done that, him and I, his young friend. Going to the forest behind his house, smoking cheap cigarettes, lost among the trees.

Once, in the deepest part of night, when darkness had unfurled to its full, long length, he stepped out of bed, and moved to his desk. A small table by the window. In the light of a milky pre-dawn, mingled with the last sprinklings of the stars, he drew faces. His mother, when she was most vulnerable, when she checked on him at night in his room and thought he was asleep and couldn't see her face as she looked into his and tried to fathom what she had brought into the world. His father, always twisted with rage. Such a deep and secret anger. The stranger. But this one he crumpled. Then he smoothed it out and filed it away.

Me. His friend, with a face that looked to him with love.

He sketched each portrait with care and precision. Emptying his memory of them on to paper. Marking his name at the edge of the page, over and again—
Lenny, Lenny, Lenny.
He would send them away, his memories. So he was lighter. So sleep would take him easily and lay him down with her in a dark and hollow place where he could rest for all time.

Of all the parties I attended in my years in university, there's one I remember in particular.

For many reasons.

The venue was in Hudson Lines, a neighborhood of tottering multi-story houses, packed tightly together, close to a wide, sluggish canal choked with garbage. On still evenings, the air was ripe with the sickly-sweet stench of decay. No one seemed to mind. The kids playing badminton on the sidewalk, the aunties wedged around the vegetable cart, prodding papayas-cucumbers-tomatoes, the pot-bellied men lounging in their vests and lungis, demurely dressed young ladies walking home from tuition. Living with the perpetual smell of decay. Perhaps it is possible to get used to anything.

Kalsang and I rattled along the potholed road on a cycle rickshaw.

“Bas,” he said. We stopped in front of a biscuit-colored house, with a narrow unlit staircase. We climbed, stumbling over sleeping dogs and garbage bags, to a flat on the fifth floor. From behind the door came the dull leaden thud of music. Even now, before I enter a party, when I'm standing outside the entrance, listening, I wish, for an instant, I hadn't come. I feel I'm intruding on some secret ritualistic practice of a tribe I don't belong to.

We stepped into a large terrace space, dotted with people sitting in dark corners, standing with glasses against the railings. It seemed everyone, apart from my roommate, was a stranger. People called out to Kalsang, saying hello, asking him if he had any “maal”.

A stereo in the corner spilled tunes into the warm night air—But
it's just a sweet, sweet fantasy, baby…
several voices sang out, rising from a mesh of bodies swaying to the beat…
When I close my eyes you come and you take me.

I stood by the bar—a rickety wooden table strewn with glasses and bottle tops—and watched the others dancing.
There's no beginning and there is no end.

“I'll be right back,” said Kalsang, and disappeared for the rest of the evening.

I poured myself a drink. Cold, frothy beer. Behind me, the lights of the city flickered between tree tops and wires. I wondered whether I could see the mutiny memorial from here. Rising above the treetops. Far below, bathed in orange-yellow lamplight, the road was beginning to empty. A few couples marched by, intent on an evening walk. A man selling chuskies did brisk business. Stray dogs circled each other in suspicion.

“Hey, do you have a light?”

“What?”

“Got a light?” She swiped her forehead with the back of her hand; her bracelets tinkled.

“No, sorry.” But I wished I did.

Someone close by threw her a lighter.

“Thanks,” she yeled. I could smell her perfume mingling sweetly with sweat.

“You were very good…” I blurted.

“I was?” She exhaled, and her face was lost behind plumes of smoke.

“In Midsummer Night's Dream…”

I expected her to be pleased, but she rolled her eyes. “I'm beginning to think that's the only theatrical role I'll ever be remembered for…”

Of course, I should have known. What a ridiculous thing to say! Haltingly, I apologised.