Page 14 of All Our Evenings

She looked at me sadly and said, “What’s the last thing you remember? There isn’t anyone else who remembers.”

The last thing I remember? Suddenly Ganesh flashed in my mind, the memory more clear and brilliant than anything else I recalled. Ganesh jumping into the water tank on Gita Miss’ terrace, coming up briefly for air, to take off his sopping shirt. Going back into the water again, aware that I was watching him, and letting me, brilliant water foaming the surface of the water tank.

“Just being around you, Arjun, it … it brings up all this stuff…” Ruhee dug her fingers into her hair, pulled lightly at the roots.

She said, “Arjun, I want to be honest with you. I want you to have the chance to say walk away from me. It is important that you know that I can never be … normal? Whatever that means. I understand that about myself. Whole? You cannot have me whole.”

I went to Ruhee. I touched her cheek. I knelt in front of her.

“I don’t want all of you,” I said.

She slid down from the bed. “Make no noise,” she said. And in a minute it became clear what she meant by that.

The whole time, I was thinking about the cricket bat, still leaning against the window, exactly where it was when my father came in and told me to break things off. It was a different bat, surely I was not stupid enough to keep it. After all, why would I? All I had to do was walk down to the trash yard and toss it inside. Who’d come asking after it? Who came asking after Ganesh? Nobody. He was a nobody. What did his life matter? Flashes. It came in flashes. Why did I go to the Red House that night? Surely I was jealous. Jealousy was the right word, after all I loved Ruhee, and they were having sex at the Red House. I couldn’t let him have her. I went there to protect Ruhee. That’s what I told him.

When Ruhee sank into me, I gasped. “Make no noise, Arjun,” Ruhee whispered, putting her face against mine. I felt her teeth graze my lips, just for a second. She was biting down on her lip, the effort it was taking her to make no noise herself. I reached up and held her hair away from her face. I wanted to see her face, the only girl I ever loved, whom I wished to marry, what her face looked like with all the weight of her body resting on mine, what did she look like with such unbearable desire, pleasure, pain on her face? She pulled my hand away. She held it and slid it underneath her skirt. Here, she whispered. I sensed the place where she wanted me to push my fingers. She wouldn’t let me see her face, but what she wanted, the pleasure or pain; is this what you want? I said; is this what you want? Anything, Ruhee. Anything you want. Now, she said. Now, Arjun.

Afterwards, I took the shaving kit and went to the Hospital.

I don’t know if Priya suspected what happened in my room. We had been quiet. We had made conversation in the aftermath. She asked me, looking at my windowsill, if it was the same cricket bat from when we were children.

I said no.

When I arrived at the Hospital, I went in the gate, traced the same route I’d been tracing for―how many years now?―a decade? since college? My father had only managed to keep it from me for a few years. I counted the cracked cement steps of the long-term ward as I climbed. Twenty-eight, the same as before. I repeated the number to myself. Twenty-eight. Twenty-eight. What was I reassuring myself of? No, the world hadn’t split down the middle―twenty-eight, twenty-eight―no, the world hadn’t split down the middle and swallowed me whole simply because Ruhee and I had sex in my childhood bedroom. At the top stair, I heaved and threw up over the balcony railing.

I shut my eyes, breathed through my nose until the nausea ebbed. Twenty-eight. Twenty-eight. Twenty-eight. There were still twenty-eight steps to Ganesh’s room at the hospital, I told myself. Same as before.

V

Mirrors, Their Faces

Ruhee. Ru-hee. She always made us place emphasis on the u so that the syllables afterwards fell forwards lightly. Once, Gita Miss had asked me who my closest friend was. It was the first time I went to her flat. And it wasn’t Ru-hee’s name I took then, it was Ganesh’s.

About three months after my father left, we were leaving the gymkhana when I spotted my father standing underneath the awning of the closed stationery store, about halfway up the road from the gates. I ran towards him so fast that my legs hurt. I crashed into him. It was the only occasion in my life that I remember hugging my father, and he hugged me back.

What was strange about that first time wasn’t that my father brought me to Gita Miss’ apartment. It was that when she answered the door, he left. I did not see them together in domestic surroundings: the fridge humming, the building watchman going up and down the stairs, a knife-sharpener on the street outside calling out loudly, the sparks chipping off his metal wheel. This was a newer place in a newer part of the neighborhood. The outskirts. It had light-colored ceramic tiles on the floors; not stone, the way ours had. The walls were all the same color, white; not pale pink laid over blue; the way ours did, because my mother had the interiors repainted every few years for Diwali, and she always picked a color that wasn’t white. Gita Miss stood up and went to the fridge. There was barely anything in it, and everything was in its place, neatly organized, clean; not like ours, stuffed with fruits and vegetables and leftovers and pickles and eggs and milk. There was a neat row of Vijaya Dairy almond-flavored milk on the inside door. Gita Miss brought a bottle to the table but did not pour it into a glass for me, the way my mother would have. She put the straw into the bottle and handed it to me. She said it was okay if I didn’t like it.

I remembered my mother telling me gleefully that Sugunakar Rao, who ran our local kirana shop, refused to sell groceries to Gita Miss. That she had to go all the way to the supermarket on the other side of the city to get her groceries. Though he didn’t tell me, I supposed my father intervened when her flat owner wanted to evict her.

I’d thought that outside school, without the glamour of being different from everyone else, fallen from grace, unemployed, Gita Miss had to be less in some visible, tangible way.

She wasn’t dressed in ‘going-out clothes’―as my mother called them. She was wearing an old chocolate-colored sweater and blue jeans. She wore her long hair pushed back, with an elastic headband; the kind Priya wore to school―wide, black, worn just far back enough that a section of her hair was visible around her face, spilling around her ears, falling around her shoulders, all the way to her waist. She looked so beautiful and sweet I wanted to hug her.

“Ganesh … not from our school?” Gita Miss asked. I shook my head. And what did it matter if I told her the truth? She had no society. It was only Gita Miss, who used to be my Sanskrit teacher, who was removed from her job, who went all the way across the city on the bus and lugged back heavy jute bags of groceries, never forgetting to bring the glass bottles of almond-flavored milk I liked even though her palms turned red from carrying it up all those flights of stairs.

“Didn’t she feed you?” my mother said when I returned. “The whore cooks, does she not? Or does she only know how to let him lie on top of her?”

Priya was at the dining table, having dinner. She was watching television, not paying attention. I thought it would all be over that day. That it was in this way that my father chose to end things with Gita Miss―taking me to her apartment while he worked it out with my mother, apologized, made reparations. It was okay that Priya could overhear them, she was too young to understand anyway, only I had to be kept somewhere else.

But no. My father did not stay. After bringing me home, he went back to Gita Miss’ apartment. I wondered, seeing all that anger on my mother’s face, if she was as disappointed as I was. It was painful to miss someone who rejected you, and my mother and I, we understood that about each other.

“What did you eat? Did you eat in her house?” my mother demanded.

The almond milk was sweet. Cloyingly sweet and cloyingly rich. There was a quarter inch of milk fat on the surface, and because Gita Miss did not shake the bottle before she opened it, it was the rich cream that filled my mouth first. And the bottom of the bottle was coated in powdered almonds, I pushed with my straw but they did not budge. The fridge hummed all the time I was there. “Come again,” Gita Miss said. “Bring your friends.”

I said no. I ate nothing.

“Did she offer you anything?” she asked.