Viduthalai Climbing Up The Staircase Left Him Breathless. When He

Viduthalai Climbing up the staircase left him breathless. When he reached his room, he flung open the doors and tore away his clothes, stepping seminaked into the shower, and then tipping over the toilet commode to vomit. He remembered the drinking but nothing more; his head throbbed, pounding his temples with faceless people, red and yellow lights. He didn’t know where it had begun and where it had ended. He put his hands to his hips and tipped forward, vomit dripping down his chin into the sink. The chill of the water soothed his headache, and the first prayers at the mosque stirred his senses from the nausea. Then, wrapping a towel around himself, he lay down on his bed listening to the whirr of the ceiling fan, and the beating of his heart as he waited for the familiar warmth of the golden rays that fell through the cracks in the window and against his skin. At eight, when he heard the knocking on his door get louder, he slipped into an old pair of shorts an opened the door. ‘Ah. Sir…Yenna Solunga’, he said, running his fingers through his hair, half-relieved it was just

the warden enquiring about the leaking tap in the bathroom. After the warden left, he got the pack of Kings Light lying on the table, and walked onto the terrace. The city was still stirring from sleep under the sullen clouds. He imagined the darkened clouds he inhaled with every breath he took, and he wished that the smoke would fill his lungs and choke him. The sense of shame was worse than anything he had ever felt in his entire life. He watched them all below, unfazed by feeling; cyclists dodging their way through crowds of bystanders watching the sky, running towards auto rickshaws to get home before the downpour. Women yelling at the top of their voices to get a bargain at the market before shops drew their shutters down, and men sharing smokes and laughed secretly at the jokes near the guttural tea shops that stifled the lanes. He took it all in. A part of him wanted to tell Oviya the truth immediately, but part of him held him back. This morning she had called while he was asleep to tell him goodbye. He hadn’t asked her where she was going. Where was she going?

Everything about last night seemed wrong. Vague scenes from last night flashed through his memory. Trisha. Yes, that was her name. Was she a girl from the club? He couldn’t remember that. He clenched his teeth when he could feel blood gush through his veins and to his groin. What was he so scared of? Are you a Virgin? She had asked, laughing, drunk. ‘Huh?’ Kamal had been so taken aback that he choked. Then the two of them had laughed and walked out of the room onto the terrace to get some air. When they got back, the smoke from their cigarettes hung heavy in the room.

Almost

immediately he felt no sense of pride. He wasn’t proud of what he was or who he was. He wanted to become different, someone who people would laugh with and admire. He wanted money, and he wanted women. He wanted the power they would give him. The yearning had gnawed at him treacherously. He inhaled deeply. The overwhelming rush of the wind in his hair made him feel hollow. In the first few days, when he sat up on the terrace looking at the city below, all he had seen was the future.

From here, every woman below belonged to him; oily haired schoolgirls in self shortened skirts and skinny legs. Voluptuous women whose saris clung to their sagging, heavy chests. Pubescent girls with blooming breasts, hidden behind cotton dupattas and Salwar Kameez’. They were all his. But last night, the tryst of three years had ended; all he remembered now is the bobbing of the girl’s head against his crotch, his hands reeking of the oil from her hair till she was done. Fifteen minutes later, he had watched as she rose and spat into a thin plastic bag she was carrying. Then she stood up, found her way to the bathroom and gargled her mouth loudly, each time spitting with a force as it she wanted to wash all of him away before she could taste someone else. When she came out, she straightened her hair in front of the stained mirror in my room and said, ‘ I’m tired, I’m going to sleep’, and had lain down in the farthest side of his bed. When he was sure she had fallen asleep, he stepped into the shower, changed into a clean pair of shorts and lay on his bed looking at the ceiling fan turn in endless circles. He twisted and turned in

the steel cot taking in the pungent scent of the damp clothes that hung on the line outside his door and the distant laughter coming from the other

rooms

in

the

corridor,

but

it

seemed

impossible to lay his mind at rest; for the first time as he lay there he remembered feeling dirty. As if there was now a stain inside him he couldn’t wipe out even if he wanted to. Standing on the terrace today, he wondered if the only way he could forgive himself for doing this was to jump into the rising tide of traffic, four stories below. 2 When Kamal came back downstairs, he found the warden stepping out of his room. ‘Sir?’ he began, in surprise, ‘ Neenga?’ ‘Illa pa, some police inspectors came to the guesthouse a while ago. Ore tension. These boys will never learn. Did you know about that boy who drowned yesterday pa? Apparently there were some boys from our hostel involved. Routine check in everyone’s rooms. Karmam! Only rowdies breed here’.

‘No Sir, Entha paiyyan?’, Kamal shuddered, sweat beading his forehead. When the warden left, he looked around. Suddenly, his room felt strange to him, as if it belonged to another world, another person. He picked up the empty bottles from beneath his bed and stared at the torn labels, then he stacked them all one by one into the corner by the desk. He dusted the sheets and put some out to dry on the line outside his door. When he got back inside, he flipped through his books and found the page he had been looking for. In small circles, cut out, and pasted in concentric circles was her face. Cut out from the many photographs they had taken together in college. He liked doing this to photographs that were close to his heart, it was a strange habit he had inherited from his father, and he didn’t know it until later in life. But he disliked photographs reminding him of a time long gone, so he cut out people and arranged them into books, pasting them in corners here and there so that a face would surprise him here and there. ‘Oviya,’ he muttered softly, rubbing the tip of his fingers on the face on the photograph ‘Ov-i-ya’.

Of the three years of college that had passed, Kamal didn’t recall a day that he didn’t think of her. He thought of the first time he had seen her, quiet and indifferent, in a world of her own; he had watched her silently from the back row, not making conversation with her until the day he saw her step into the lift alone. He smiled, thinking of her making polite, nervous conversation that day. Oviya had changed his life, slowly and steadily. In ways that he still didn’t realize he had been affected. Kamal had taken it all, suppressing his feelings. His feelings for Oviya scared him. On the hot sweaty nights that he closed his eyes and thought of her, he slid his hand inside his boxers and pleasured himself. He waited for the burst of energy, and tried imagining how she would look beneath the dupattas that she carefully hid behind. But he could never gather the courage to tell her that he loved her. The first time he had wanted to kiss her, he had stood close to her taking in the faint scent of lavender powder she used. So arousing had it been that it scared him to even try putting his arm around her waist. ‘Excuse me?, she had said flustered visibly.

‘Oh,’ he had said, embarrassed that he had let himself get carried away. After that he had always made sure that he was careful.

3 At one point, he remembered he loved her mercilessly.

He

had

watched

her

from

the

backbench. The way she would talk to her friends in the canteen, the way she wore her purple coloured Salwar every Tuesday, the way he frowned each time she pored over a problem she couldn’t solve. Each day, Kamal was witnessing magic. How much did he love her? He did not know. Over their first year in college, He managed a few words with her nearly everyday after hours. Sometime in the library, sometimes in the college canteen. On Tuesdays, he waited an extra hour for her to finish her commerce classes, and on Fridays, he didn’t wait until six to finish cricket practice. The few days that college declared leave, Kamal waited for the days to get over so that they could get back to class. The boys had been apprehensive

when he mentioned her, so Kamal played along never mentioning Oviya to anyone. He lied to them about the way he felt about her. No one sensed the discomfort Kamal felt, when they routinely spoke about their girlfriends’ breasts, and the girls they had slept with. To him, their world was transient, his world was an a free place, yet he knew as much as he loved her, being with her constantly reminded him of being chained to a wall. When it made three years of meeting her, Kamal celebrated in silence by gulping a few full glasses of Old Monk. His life flashed before him, each memory more meaningless than the other. The guesthouse seemed like a dirty shack, the smell of beer and urine nauseated him, and the trees that lined G.K colony seemed bare. They no longer smelt of their sweat after cricket practice, the air was no longer filled with cries of bargaining housewives, children and milkmen. It seemed as if the colours of Madras had dissolved into solitary greys. The days felt more humid and languorous, the heat and perspiration grating on his nerves and making him irritable. Oviya’s pictures felt as if they

had been taken long ago, as if she had dissolved into his memory. It was the last day of their final semester yesterday, Kamal recollected. It had slipped his mind. Her aloofness yesterday had not troubled him; it was how she had always been. But now he wondered if there was anything she wanted to tell him. Something felt amiss. She didn’t seem like the girl he had known for years; she drifted in and out of college without an explanation, and without a word. She seemed almost always flustered, as if she was in a hurry to get anywhere. There were moments when she spoke that Kamal felt that secretly she despised him. Even when he had asked, she seemed cold and distant. He wondered if he ought to have asked her yesterday what she wanted to see him about, but he realized that he didn’t want to. Everything about her troubled him, and it made him feel incessantly hopeless. He laughed each time he watched a Tamil movie – the way love was so easy, the way that love was formidable, the way love was all encompassing, the way that love existed no matter what befell the world. In his dreams, he laughed the way he

played the hero and Oviya was the heroine. But in Kamal never knew how he wanted these dreams to end, thinking of Oviya made him feel good. In his dreams, he could adorn women and punish women any way they wanted. But a girl, a real breathing girl to love and take care of – Kamal was not sure he wanted that. On

that

thought,

he

had

put

away

her

photographs, he pushed the door to his cupboard and reached for a bottle. His supply was getting over, and he wondered whether it would be a good time to buy some in the night. Then he checked his watch, pulled up his sheets and lay on his bed listening to the raindrops drum on the rooftop. It reminded him of the clinking of ice cubes in a glass of gin. 4 The knocking on the door woke him up at eight in the evening. He remained in bed, listening whether the knocker would leave if there was no answer but afterwards when a voice called out to him urgently he threw aside the bed sheets and reached for the door.

Shek stepped inside, drenched from the rain, water running from him and forming a puddle on the floor. Kamal threw him the unwashed towel on his bed stand and slammed the door behind him. ‘Fuck. Yenna da aachu?’, he asked, his heart beating each passing moment. ‘Did they find out?’. His mind was wandering. If the police had come to enquire about their whereabouts last night, they would have to think of ways out of the city. Shek’s words went past his head, slurring with the patter of raindrops on the roof. ‘We’re safe da Machaan. I mean seriously, they’ve rounded up two other guys by Arcot roadside. They think its them’ Shek said, shaking Kamal to attention. Kamal flicked on the light switch, and closed the open window to stop the drizzle coming in. His heart still hammered against his chest.

He was

unable to concentrate on anything; his mind kept envisaging

the

girl

he

from

last

night,

and

wondering who she was. Had she gone through any of his stuff? He didn’t know. Had Oviya tried calling him while he was asleep? He felt the urge to call her. But maybe she would try again.

‘Kamal…’ ‘Yes da, what?’, Kamal said lightly, brushing his hair back, and taking the towel from Shek to dry it out on the line in the far end of his room. Shek wrung his hair with his hand, and whisked it back throwing specks of water across the window. ‘It seems that girl from your class left off to England da. You know, that one with the nice tits?’ He smirked, and then added, ‘Damn, nowadays everyone wants only white guys, not one of these bitches will look at us’. Kamal listened half-heartedly, his thoughts going back and forth from the scene last evening near the bridge. He wished he had stayed in his room and watched television instead of hanging out with the boys drinking. He had three arrears to clear, and he silently dreaded breaking the news to his father. If his father found out from the principal about his lack of attendance, he was sure that he would be belted black and blue and sent back to Chidambaram. He had tried avoiding them; he had watched television all throughout the weekend, thrown packs of Marlboro lights over the bridge, and emptied bottles of Kingfisher into the toilet.

But something strange bristled in him, he found himself bound by an energy that he couldn’t contain – the need to break open from inside. He no longer wished for the friends he had, he looked around and found that everything that he had ever done throughout college had no meaning. ‘Things alright or what? You look like you have fever or something’, Shek interrupted, looking through Kamal’s cupboard for the bottles. Kamal pushed him aside and pointed to his cot at the far corner, ‘ I took them out, it began stinking of fuckin’ vomit’. ‘Cool. Cool. Seri, Karthik, Vignesh and all are coming over to score in my room tonight. You’ll be here right?’. Shek spoke as if there was no such strain in between them, as if they had nothing to worry about. ‘I don’t know…’ ‘Heh? You ‘don’t know’ ah? Where are you going to go out in this rain anyway?’ ‘Some work da, my father wanted me to check that there’s enough money in the ATM to pay off my phone bill tomorrow.’

‘Ada! That’s tomorrow only no…’ Shek started. ‘I have to go.’ Kamal said matter-of-factly, his mood darkening with each minute. Shek sighed and got up from the chair. Then he walked to Kamal’s bed and shoved the empty bottle of Kingfisher underneath it, stacking it neatly along with other bottles. Kamal watched him silently, not knowing what to say to the only proper friend he had in the city. He knew that he had failed him, and he knew that they would never be the same once they were done with college, yet something about him made Kamal want to hold on to these last few minutes of college life he felt dear to his heart. ‘Fuck, I think I’m really screwed in my head man after last night, all these bottles are shaped like women’, Shek laughed slapping his forehead, and making his way to the door. ‘You are insane man, I think you’re caught up thinking about Shalini too much…’ ‘Heh? Shalini who?’, Shek said, slipping on his sandals, and searching his pockets for a cigarette. ‘That girl from my class fucker, you had your eyes

on her ever since you saw her first on campus. The one who left to England you said’. ‘Thu! Watha, even I have some taste da Machaan. I was talking about that other chick. Oviya.’ With that he stepped out and slammed the door. Kamal stood in the silence of his room, suddenly feeling a sense of emptiness envelop him. The rain outside had subsided to a drizzle, and a strange chill crept into his room bring along with it the intoxicating scent of wet earth and the dusty summer. Then he lay down on the edge of his cot, and stared up at the ceiling. There were a great many cracks that had appeared in the wall he noticed, something that had missed his eye over the years. The fan blades were caked with dust and funnily didn’t bother him either. When he closed his eyes, he could hear the faint pitterpatter of the rain outside his windows. It didn’t remind him of gin and tonic this time, it reminded him or a garden of silver needles.

5 His lack of sleep blurred his vision. The drizzle

sprayed across his face light, and soft, yet, his head throbbed. He wished the day would dissolve into night soon so that he could take some comfort in the darkness. Now she had gone, leaving him behind. He walked passed passersby hovering under bus-stands taking shelter from the rain; a couple of college girls waited anxiously for the bus, drenched to the bone in the rain, their clothes sticking to their skin, accentuating their figures. A year ago, Shek and him would have stood at the footboard and whistled as they went by, now those desires had vanished. Kamal didn’t think that she would leave. She usually kept her word, unlike him. Suddenly the pinch of all the lies he had told her weighed him down. The world was wet; his clothes clung to his skin, and he thought of the boy yesterday. He was a small boy. He was innocent. He didn’t deserve to die. Walking down the road, he felt like he was in the shoes of a different person. He had no idea where he wanted to go; there was no place he wanted to be right now, so he walked aimlessly down the street passing stained complexes and crossing the road apathetic to the traffic.

After an hour, Kamal realized he was back where he started last night. He could not recollect if the place where he stood was the exact same place where they had pushed the boy. But the emptiness of the stretch, and the detectable smell assured him that it was here where it had happened. He sighed and sat on the parapet that searched for familiar faces. When he saw none, he pulled out a cigarette and tried to light it. The wind whistled slowly through the dry trees that surrounded the area. And in the distance, he watched bloodthirsty crows as they circled the heaps of garbage along the river bend. Kamal could not help lying to her about his life. It relieved him of the reality he was living. The first few months he had moved into Ramoji guesthouse, made do with the environment there, knowing that each day spent within its dirty walls would be an escape from his father, that made him want to live a life. Yet, each time that he spoke to her, he was relieved that he never had to show her this part of him. He was nothing like Oviya; her scholarly, orderly life was a mystery to him, her silence and interest in books impressed him no end but he

never encouraged talk about it. He knew he could never think of studying further than college, that his

father

would

expect

him

to

return

to

Chidambaram and take over accounts in their third generation rice mill. Oviya would step ahead of him, and earn herself multiple degrees, and soon, her parents would arrange for her to be married to one of those American educated men Kamal hated. Each time she called, all she spoke to him was about college, and her disapproval of everything he did. Kamal loved her desperately, as if she was the only hope he had to help him become a better person. But he was wrong, he knew that now. He could never bring himself to tell her how he felt because he was too scared it might be true. 6 Shek had been the only witness to Kamal’s life. As much as he could not understand why Oviya disliked him, he knew that he could never have made it in the city without Shek. It was Shek who first introduced him to alcohol – they had shared his first drink in the darkness of Kamal’s room in the guesthouse, amidst mosquitoes, cockroaches and the putrid smell of urine from the nearby

toilets. Over time, he learnt the art of hiding bottles of Kingfisher underneath his cot, or in the last cabinet in his cupboard. It had given him a sense of ingenuity, and he continued doing so throughout college. Each time he snuck away a bottle in the corner, he reveled in the strange satisfaction that it gave him. Especially to think of what his father would have had to say if he were here and not in Chidambaram. When he thought of his childhood, he didn’t remember

chasing

neighbourhoods,

tyres

playing

down

cricket

dusty

or

stolen

cigarettes or gazing through porn magazines after school – he remembered being closely watched by Annadurai, his father’s personal clerk, to and fro from

school,

long

strenuous

hours

of

being

watched over homework, his mother feeding him vegetables that he hated and she loved, his grandmother singing him lullabies that irritated him and his father hovering over him until he went to bed. It was Love that was the first irritant of childhood. All that he had ever dreamed of in those long days in Chidambaram was an escape from this suffocating, love.

Kamal’s father had decided everything in the house; what was to be eaten, what school he went to, the games he was to play. He’s doing it out of his love for you, his mother would proclaim, each time he lashed the cane against Kamal’s back, legs and bottom when he came home late or if he got a lower mark. At nights, he stayed awake dreaming of the city and its lights. He dreamed of the movies he saw and played the scenes over and over in his head. In his dreams, he lived without his parents, with beautiful women and a lavish lifestyle, and he cried himself to sleep listening to the faint sound of crickets in the garden. If at all, being at home had squashed a part of him, and made him hate his family. But now, Chennai didn’t smell of a freedom he had longed for so much, and the price he had paid didn’t seem like an iota of worth his father was paying. From where he sat, the dingy decrepit, sickeningly claustrophobic stench of the river below reminded him of the life he was living. 7 On Sunday, the day before their farewell party, Shek announced that he had found that Krishna, the grocer’s son had tipped off their warden on

their exploits. Kamal knew that they were in trouble. The grocer’s shop was a minute away from their quarters, and in the course of the many times they had asked Krishna to bring in the alcohol onto the premises, Shek had tipped him a few rupees for the errands. They knew well that they should have stopped with the alcohol, but it was Shek who said that he would manage. He had arranged for the marijuana he smoked in his room to be brought in at night, delivered at the gate along with a bag of chips. Then, Salim, the next-door watchman approached Shek. ‘So enjoying in your room ah?’, he smirked. Kamal felt

restless,

knowing

that

they

were

being

watched. Day after day, when as Krishna brought in the bottles and the tiny sachets that fit well into his trouser pockets, Kamal watched. ‘Watch it da,’ he told Shek once, ‘ They are watching us’. Shek had not heeded his advice. He had sat in his frayed jeans, flicking his hair while Kamal spoke to

him. ‘Hey, chill da, nothing will happen. Fine and all, we’ll pay’. Kamal had been sitting on the balcony smoking, poring over an article in The Hindu. Shek had run into his room, panting for breath, his voice cracking. ‘I’m going to kill that bastard, little son of a bitch!’, he screamed, throwing all the books stacked on the table onto the ground. He kicked the chair, swearing in Tamil. Kamal held him, trying to seethe his anger, and get him to stop shaking. From the look in his eyes, he knew that they were in trouble. ‘That fucking mother-fucker needs his dick cut,’ he screamed, throwing his fist in the air, punching into the clothes on Kamal’s bed. ‘He told the warden man, he tipped off the warden, you know what they’ll fucking do now?’ ‘Listen, relax da,’ Kamal said, desperate, ‘ tell me what happened’. ‘What’s there to say, you remember we gave that fucker some money for the booze and the weed? He took the money and gave it to that dick-head Saravanan telling him that it was what we had

been giving him for over three years’. Saravanan had been the only warden in the guesthouse that Kamal and the boys feared. They knew that he had previously been in prison thrice; he had attacked his brothers with a kitchen knife over a property dispute twenty years ago. The scars on his face gave away a lot of history that none of the boys ever wanted to find out, or come to face. They had all been warned of Saravanan, and they tried to stay out of his way as much as possible. ‘We’ve got to make him regret da, come’, Shek said suddenly, interrupting Kamal’s thoughts, ‘ I’m going to call Vignesh, and the guys, this guy needs to be taught a lesson’ ‘This is so fucking stupid’, Kamal wanted to tell Shek, ‘we are in our final year of college, not in kindergarten’. But he didn’t, instead he followed Shek, and dashed out into the hallway, and onto the road. In no time, they were speeding on Shek’s bike down the street, weaving through the traffic to Vignesh’s house. When they had reached, Kamal stopped Shek. His

thoughts clouded in his head, and suddenly, his mind felt blank. Had they all listened to him, they wouldn’t have been in trouble, he thought to himself. Now, he felt hopeless. He imagined his father reacting to the news if he were expelled from here. Where would he go? ‘Let’s wait out a few minutes, I really need to catch my breath’, he told Shek. He wanted to be free of this, free of the mess that he felt himself being pulled into. He thought of Oviya, each minute as he lit a cigarette and tried to think of a way they could keep out of Saravanan’s way. He hated that her face never left his mind. ‘Seri, come da, let’s go get Vignesh’, he said, pushing the gate open and reaching for the doorbell. Vignesh had opened the door, and stepped out almost as if he had been waiting for them to make a move. ‘Dude?’, Shek exclaimed, ‘ You scared the shit out of me man, fuck!’. ‘I heard.’ Vignesh said, promptly, ‘We are so fuckin’ screwed’. Shek kicked the wheel of the car parked outside

the gate, ‘ Ok now, what the fuck do we do? I mean seriously Machaan, You know people man, if that bastard calls my parents I’m dead.’ Vignesh smiled and dialed a few numbers from his phone. Kamal watched silently, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say. If he had known then that this was to lead to trouble, he knew he would have stopped them. That he would have shaken Shek and rattled him out of such a crazy idea. But he didn’t do anything, he just stood there and watched. Ok, let’s go, Vignesh said after he hung up. Where? Kamal had enquired. But the next minute, they were speeding down lanes in their bikes down the narrow lanes he was so familiar with. They twisted through the congested pathways of flower women and teashops. Women and children sat in the porches of the tiny hutments they past. Shek swore time and time again, each time a child chasing tyres or a street mongrel barked in front of the wheel. The world as it sped by suddenly reminded him of home, speeding down the lane with Annadurai, sitting at the back of his scooter, the stars screaming in the sky above him, and the

ground beneath him shaking with laughter. He imagined Oviya, running ahead of him with the wind blowing in her hair, turning back and looking at him every now and then. 8 Half and hour later, Kamal found himself staring at the grocer’s son in the eye. He counted his friends standing around him. Six of them - Shek, Vignesh, Sree, Baig, David and himself. He shouldn’t have been there – it felt wrong. And he knew it. He had never hit anyone in his life, tailed or encouraged rowdies, deceived or perpetrated. Others did that. He simply watched. He neither encouraged nor discouraged. Was this a major flaw in him? Kamal did not know. But he felt different. This business of standing in between, being the one by-stander witnessing the most horrific of injustices meted out by people who he thought were friends suddenly felt wrong. Suddenly he felt as if he was a stranger to himself: Was he everything he had not wanted to become? Was he a coward? A fraud? A boy stuck within the shell of his consciousness? He did not know. But these questions conveyed an indelicate truth – he was a part of all these things. Behind

this particular confrontation, he knew he had one choice when they began beating him – either he was to help the poor boy, or he was to watch. Kamal watched. The boy had screamed. No one heard his cries, they were standing atop a bridge at ten at night in the furthest end of the gully. At first Kamal had feared that they would be found out. He had urged them to stop beating him. His mind was a haze. He screamed at Shek to stop. That it was enough, that it more than necessary, that would get caught. But they hadn’t stopped.

Shek, Vignesh and Baig

struck the boy with blows, kicking him each time he cried. ‘Bastard, you thought you’ll get away with this? How much money did you get off us?’ David tried pulling off Shek, Sree tried pulling off Vignesh, and Kamal tried pulling off Baig. They screamed, pulled and kicked. The grocer boy had begun running, in an instant, Vignesh, the tallest of his friends made after him. Kamal had followed, his head throbbing, screaming to Shek, and asking him to stop. Vignesh had caught up with the boy, grabbing him by his throat, leaning him over the bridge – his face twisted with an anger that

reminded Kamal of his father. In an instant, before they caught up with him, Vignesh slipped and the boy tipped over the bridge. ‘Machaan, Leave him!’ Kamal heard Shek cry. But it was too late, Vignesh’s grip had slipped, and the boy fell into the dark waters before. For twenty minutes, they had called out his name. but the darkness rung with a deafening silence. Kamal and Baig had run towards the other end, climbing down the bank near the river trying to see if they could hear the faintest sound. After a minute, they ran back towards the bridge and found Shek, Vignesh and David on their bikes, the engine. They raced through alleys, green and blue lights blurring themselves into handlebars of light along the way. Teashops. Drunken partygoers. Shops. Police booths. They sped past them in a blurry of light. Shek, he had yelled, Pull over. He could nausea rising within him and suffocated his senses. Shek sped through the alley without a care in the world, in a few minutes, they stopped in front of Vignesh’s house. Panting. ‘Machaan, listen, none of us were there tonight ok. I’m telling you’ll we are so fucked. We are FUCKED

if they find out.’ Vignesh leaned over to the nearby bush and vomited. ‘I didn’t mean dude. Shit, I didn’t mean it. I hope he swam man.’ Kamal could sense his voice choke, and suddenly longed to see him cry. He wanted to beat Shek for bringing him here. ‘None of us are going to breathe a word. Guys, we’re in on this right?’, Sree panted. Baig bent down to catch his breath. ‘ I need a cigarette. Fuck. Fuck.’ ‘Shek give me your bike. I need to get some fresh air.’ Kamal said, his voice barely audible. Shek shifted, ‘You want my bike? What the fuck for Machaan? At this time? After this? Are you mad?’ ‘I need to fucking clear my head. Give me the fucking keys’. Shek threw the keys over from near Vignesh. Sree, Baig and David looked on. ‘Fine da, I’ll drop you back. We are going to go now’, Sree said, turning to Vignesh. ‘Motherfucker, You are so fucking dead if you breathe a word of what happened to any of those

girls’ Baig said. Kamal didn’t bother to reply. His head pounded. His temples throbbed with voices, with screams. He saddled over Shek’s bike, noticing that his hands shook as he tried to fit the key into the ignition. Fuck, he screamed inside his head, Why the fuck is this happening right now. He wanted to hold Shek and shake the daylights out of him. He wanted to punch Vignesh’s face and watch him bleed. And laugh. ‘Dude, are you ok da Machaan?’ Shek reiterated, ‘It’s alright man, nothing will happen. That fucker’ll live man, you don’t worry. He has the balls the go tell on us, you think you won’t use it to swim out of that ditch?’ The boys laughed feebly, not so much for the sake of the joke rather than finding it witty. Right then, the ignition fired and Kamal looked up at them. He didn’t know what to say, so he turned the bike around, and nodded to them as he sped away. 9 He pulled up fifteen minutes later, at a small tea stall near the Grand Orient. This was his favourite

tea stall in all of Madras. Each time, Shek and he came here, they made sure they came past ten thirty, when the road deprived of traffic resembled a long, forgotten track stretched for thirteen kilometres into the night. They would smoke their cigarettes slowly, watching as a stream of college girls in tank tops and high heels trotted through the back entrance to the night club – usually accompanied by boys who seemed much older to them or who seemed ugly enough to woo them. Today, Kamal didn’t want to look at anyone. He wanted to lose himself and not come to terms with who he was. Parking the bike in the far corner, he edged his way into the crowd of drunken girls, giggling and falling over each other. Excuse me Sir, stag entry full, sir. The guy at the counter said. Kamal looked around, ‘ Dude, I’m not alone. I’m with them.’ He pointed to two girls and a guy sipping a beer by the window discussing something seriously. ‘We just stepped out for a drink’. When he stepped inside, he felt as though he had stepped into a red-green aquarium. The light suffused the music that filtered through his pores

and his senses, making him want to sway. There were women – girls of all ages wearing clothes like he had never seen before – everywhere. Today, they are all mine, he thought, laughing to himself. Today, they are all mine. He walked up to the counter and asked for a beer. Right then, before he knew it, he bumped into the shoulder of a girl standing close to him, making her spill her cosmopolitan all over the person near her. ‘Hey’, the other girl screamed, at the girl near Kamal, ‘ can’t you watch it?’. She swore under her breath and took a tissue to dab her chest quickly. Kamal noticed her chest as he sipped his beer. He wanted to hold them. His head was throbbing with the cries of a little boy and he wished he could replace it with the cries of a woman. The girl near him turned to him after profusely apologizing to the other girl. ‘Seriously, don’t you owe an apology?’, she asked, visibly flustered. Then she shook her head from side to side, sipping on her cosmopolitan. She smelled faintly of perfumed water, as if she had stepped out of an ocean. Her accent reminded him of rich, red wine. Her words flowed smoothly

around the corners of his head, each time making him

pause

and

watch

her

adjust

her

bra

uncomfortably beneath her dress strap. ‘I don’t owe anyone an apology,’ he said, looking at her. He tried to concentrate on her as much as he could, tried to steer his thoughts away from what had happened. ‘Oh the cheek!’ Kamal laughed lightly. Her face flushed with anger. The redness of the room accentuated the softness of her skin. He closed his eyes and tried to lose himself in the music. But when he closed his eyes, all he could see were rivulets of red, and sparkling goblets of red wine. He tried to worry about something – anything else – to get his mind off the image of Vignesh and the boy. He thought of his pending arrears in college, the fines he would have to pay for his lost identity card, the way Oviya had been behaving towards him of late. Oviya. Yes, he wanted to worry about her now. He wanted to think about her. He tried to envision Oviya standing near him but he could almost sense the rigid sense of disapproval and distaste etched on her face.

‘Hey,’ it was the girl near him again. ‘Yeah,’ Kamal said, carelessly standing his bottle of Kingfisher at the tip of the counter. ‘Your elbow is on my scarf. Mind moving it?’. Her tone was cold and lucid. Kamal moved his elbow, and she slid a thin cloth from beneath his arm. Irritably, she wrapped it around herself and asked the bartender for another cosmopolitan. ‘Are you here alone?’, Kamal enquired. He saw that she stood alone; with her back to the crowd he had thought she belonged to. She looked around and looked back at Kamal, sipping on her drink without replying. ‘I thought you were with your friends,’ he stated, looking away from her and to the crowd of girls and guys in the far corner, kissing and swaying to the music. ‘This place is so fucked-up’, the girl said suddenly, taking Kamal aback by surprise. ‘ I suppose if it just takes a fucked up conversation to add to an everso-splendid ending’. She reached for her wallet, drew out a couple of notes, placed the notes on the

table and called out to the bartender. ‘Hello. Mister, could you please come here?’ ‘Hey, you’re not the only one having a fucked up day alright?’ Kamal followed her to the car park in a daze. They stood of Mount Road, well past midnight, the wind blowing her hair lightly over her shoulders. She looked frantically up and down the road searching for an auto rickshaw. You won’t get one, Kamal laughed, half-drunk. His mind in a haze of images. He knew he was standing right behind her, and that she was ignoring him. The more she pretended to ignore him, the more he felt his yearning to hold this strange girl close. There are no autos, he said again, inhaling another cigarette deeply. And why would you care? The girl asked irritably, turning suddenly and staring at him. Because, he said, ‘what’s your name?’

I have a bike and I’m the only option you have to

get back home. 10 She stood in front of him, the moonlight lighting up the corners of her eyes, looking at him longingly. He turned the fan on and kept the speed at two, then walked over and opened the windows. A cool breeze wafted in, bringing in the scent of the wet earth, and fresh flowers discarded in the garbage below. He didn’t know what the time was, but he knew that it was well past midnight. His temples throbbed each time he looked at her, sometimes she seemed to him like a haze, a shadowy ethereal form of red and gold. As if she could sense his discomfort, the girl walked up to him and stood closer. Then, slowly and gently, she riddled her fingers over his shirt. Kamal looked at her face; slight, tender and beautiful. He bent down and let her perfume wash over her. Her kohl-lined eyes seemed like dark spaces of nothingness as he pulled down her zipper and loosened her bra. Don’t do this, he could hear himself say, don’t do this. But a part of him wanted to be in her arms. It was

Oviya standing before him, Oviya in red and gold, with arms wide open. He knew his kisses were rough, and that his breath smelled of beer. The softness of her skin troubled him each time he held her close, tightly locked between his legs. Inbetween moments he paused to look intently at her face, to look into her eyes once again, to reassure himself that this was not a dream. He didn’t want it to end. His long dreams of nights with Oviya seemed to erupt within his body – heat pulsating at every joint, through every muscle, through all his senses. The girl’s hands quivered each time he rocked her back and forth thrusting himself into her. Her childlike, slight fingers dug into his back, and her breath punctuated with small gasps. Through the webs of solidarity that hung between them, Kamal felt he had slipped into another part of himself. As if he had tasted how it was to be the person he dreamed of being. Bittersweet, he thought. Bitter – the sounds of the boy screaming inside his head. Sweet- the sounds of the girl moaning into ear. What was it that had passed in between them? He didn’t know. For a moment, he felt the truism in Shek’s constant prodding that all that was worth having in this

world was sex. Then, he rolled over to the side and gently pushed the hair away from her face. ‘hey, I don’t know you but that was fucking great’. She was half-asleep, curled into a foetal position. Kamal sat up, sweating, stepping into his boxers. He couldn’t

sleep.

Everything

about

this

perfect

picture suddenly seemed wrong when she said that. This wasn’t Oviya he realized. It would never be. Again, he tried to reconstruct his thoughts -the entirety of the day. Alcohol. Death. Oviya. Sex. Rain. He hummed Thendrale Yennai Pole, his favourite Illaiyaraja song in his head. It still didn’t put his mind at rest. Carefully, he knelt on the floor and edged a bottle from beneath his bed. The girl moved slightly, and Kamal pulled the sheet over her endless, long legs. He sat on the chair beside her where he had hung his clothes dry. Each time

he sipped at his beer, he glanced at the girl. Her slight body, curving at her hips, rising at her waist as she breathed, reminded him of a scene from an old

English

movie

he

had

seen.

There

was

something exquisite about her, he noticed, the way her hair seemed tinged with shades of brown and red, and her skin shone in the moonlight in an unearthly luminance. Her lipstick smeared all around her mouth, and her Kohl, smudged around her eyes from the light perspiration. Outside, the wind echoed memories of his past. Kamal rocked back and forth, telling himself that this was a dream and that soon he will wake up from it and laugh about it. 11 In the morning, he awoke to the sound of constant shifting. The girl was sitting on his windowsill smoking a cigarette, wearing the dress from last night and a thin light scarf around her shoulders. What are you doing? He asked. The time on this watch said four-thirty. It’s five, he heard her reply. She looked fresh as a blossom, was she for real? Kamal sat up limp and drowsy, trying to collect his thoughts.

I have to get home, she said. There was distant drumming in his ears, but the screaming had stopped. He heaved, and then sighed. Then he threw over his shirt, his head throbbing, and silently made his way downstairs to the parking lot. After an hour, he returned and fell back exhausted on his bed. It was when the warden knocked on his door in the morning that Kamal sensed that a strange floral scent filled the room.

Now looking back, he realized that it wasn’t love he was running away from, it was himself. He had never before felt as if the only person he wanted to be was someone else. He had failed Oviya, failed his father and failed himself. ‘You were right Ovi,’ he wanted to tell her, ‘ you were right all the time.

Now come back to me’. But his voice was feeble, and fell flat in the pouring rain.