Neel Mukherjee - A Life Apart

The hot air dispensers are a stale joke, a cliché: everyone in the trade knows that if the button is pressed more than two times the last thing that is happening is hand-drying. Yet it is allowed, almost lovingly indulged, its loud, whirry drone providing a reassuring matrix of meaning to the game. It is so transparent a guise that it is not a guise any more but a tattered, old, understood code. Ritwik loves it; the sound sends a little surge of camaraderie coursing through him: he knows he is in the company of familiar strangers.

The other reasons he prefers this particular cubicle to the others is because it is so roomy. There is space enough for someone to sleep in there comfortably in a sleeping bag. Three people could fit inside without finding it a squish. This aspect is readily exploited as and when the opportunities and inclinations arise.

There is graffiti on the walls, the door, even some on the ceiling. Most of it seems to be written with marker pens, some with pencil or biro, and some etched and scratched on to the paint of the metal door and the one metal wall with sharp objects. There are the usual ones: ‘For cock action call 865974’, ‘Any horny 18–21y old around looking for 9” cock here every Friday and Saturday evening. Show hard at the urinals’, ‘8 in cock, cut, for sucking fucking Sunday afternoon. Genuine. Leave message below with date and time.’

There is one that can only be described as super-efficient: ‘I love to suck young juicy cocks and swallow your creamy spunk. Make date’. And then, below, five columns: name, age, size, date, time. The writer has even taken the trouble of drawing vertical and horizontal lines, so the whole thing looks like a statistical table. There are two entries as well in the columns. The age is always under twenty-one, the size never below seven inches. ‘Genuine’ seems to be a desirable quality: more than half the messages have that word as its final note. Occasionally, they get cleaned or painted away but some are too stubbornly written with invincible ink, they just fade a bit. Soon others appear and before long it is thick with these urgent, hot words again.

Every night he takes some time to read them: they ease him into the swing of things and even get him aroused. His favourite one is:

Batter my arse, three persons at the door

Who but knock, breathe, rub, and seeke to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend

On knees, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

The changes to the sonnet are minimal and not especially clever but seeing it in that context reconfigures it for Ritwik in such a way that there is no other way to look at it any longer but as a feverish request for a trinitarian gang-bang. The metaphors, the desire behind the writing, all seem to fall into place with such ease it is as if he has at last unlocked a room to which he has been denied complete access for a long time. He laughs silently for some time at the aptness of the whole thing. He wonders if in his essay on the metaphysicals he could get away with saying that the seventeenthcentury religious poet loiters with intent in his prayer closet, cruising god. The final three lines — ‘Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I / Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee’ — when they come, are exact and inevitable. Some marginalia have been added to the sonnet: ‘Doesn’t scan any more you poof wanker’ and ‘Posh turd burglar fuck off to your AIDS.’

This is a true laboratory of the senses: all of them are stretched to their experiential limits — the eye at the door hinge; the ears pricked to catch footsteps entering or exiting, the flush of the cistern, the hissing drum of a jet of urine hitting the metal pissoir, running water and gurgling sink, the slightest movement and shift of feet; the nose acclimatized to the acrid bite of ammonia, disinfectant and sometimes the wafting stench of shit.

The way everything is registered on impeccably tuned keys of sight, sound and smell here, he could easily be a hunter in the wild; either that or a beast of prey, sensing out danger even in the slightest change of wind direction.

There are infinite ways in which this game is played out, all set but all indeterminate at the same time. The unchanging basis for all, however, is the checking out of goods, an unillusioned appraisal. The concept of ‘goods’ varies, of course.

A standard procedure for Ritwik is to stay inside his cubicle if the fleeting slit-view of a man entering the toilets does not appeal. If it does, he still remains locked in; after all, the man could have come in for an innocent piss only. This is either confirmed or negated in the next few minutes by one or more of various signals — not exiting after the standard time taken for a pee, washing hands at the sink for a long time (though this could be any other person in the toilets, but chances are it is the new arrival), that telling handdryer business, entering a cubicle after his piss and locking himself in. . it is like a problem in logic: if p, then not q, but only after a finite set of conditions, ∑ {a, b, c. . n}, has been satisfied.

And yet, and yet, it lacks the fixity of logic because the elements of the set to be satisfied have margins of uncertainty themselves. For example, how can entering a cubicle after a reasonable time spent at the urinal be taken as a certain sign of cruising? But even if in these cases the laws of probability work to the advantage of the cruiser, everything could come down like a house of cards if the final checking out doesn’t lead to the neat snuggling of two desires fitting each other like identical spoons.

Everything is predicated on that meeting. There are a number of ways leading to it:

1. Standing at the pissoir, his cock out, massaged to erection. He hides it and pretends he has just finished peeing, shaking the last dribble off it if some kosher pisser enters the toilet. Sometimes he just buttons up and enters his cubicle. If it isn’t a genuine pisser, and he likes the look of the man, he stands there, making obvious what he’s doing. Chances of a hit on this one: 50–50, 50 for his liking the man, 50 the other way around.

2. If the view from his spystrip really dazzles, and chances of this are low anyway, he rushes out after three or four seconds, making sure he has flushed noisily — just another casual public toilet user emerging from a cubicle to wash and dry his hands zealously. Chances of the dazzling one being a cottager: low. Chances of that click of reciprocal desire: still lower.

3. On some occasions, 2 leads to 1, if he’s convinced the newcomer at the urinal is doing anything but urinating, or urinating AND.

4. Then there is the possibility of Ritwik’s favourite cubicle being occupied by someone else. In this event, which irritates him immensely, as if he has some proprietary right over that one, he reluctantly confines himself to one of the smaller, inferior ones. Their disadvantages are many, not having a view being the most crippling; he has to depend solely on his ears then. But there is one thing working for them: being adjacent to another cubicle, a possible pick-up might happen without having to go through 1, 2, and 3. After a while it becomes obvious why the man in the next cubicle has entered it. Once that is confirmed, another little game of advancing feet, inch by inch, to the gap under the partition wall begins. Often this is preceded by noises, such as low moaning, or letting out heavy breaths in an overdone I’m-really-horny way. Once the feet touch, at least one certainty has been established. This could be followed by notes written on loo paper and passed on under the gap: ‘Do you have a place?’, usually, to start off with. Or just standing on the toilet seat and peeping over the wall into the next cubicle to see what he’s letting himself in for. No. 4 is a more prolonged game with elements of a blind date to it. It’s more exciting, sometimes, than 2 or 3, or even 1.