Manil Suri - The City of Devi

“Why are you whispering?” I demanded loudly.

He shut the door behind him. “My roommate’s inside. What do you want?”

“I want to know what you were doing yesterday in the park.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, I just want to talk.”

He began to say something, then decided against it. “Wait here.” He went in and emerged a moment later with his crutches. “There’s a Barista café around the corner—we can go there.”

The crutches were useless on the stairs. He hopped awkwardly down the first flight, then gave in and took the arm I offered. Within seconds, the predator centers in my brain shot into high alert. I instinctively scanned the stairwell for cubbyholes suitable for a quick drag-and-plunge.

Relinquishing him to his crutches downstairs came with an unexpected consolation. Each time he bore down on the handles, his body tensed to reveal the location of underlying muscles. They were modest but endearing—a 6.8 on the Jazter scale. His buttocks arced through the air as he swiveled, inviting me to follow them. I felt a primeval satisfaction knowing he couldn’t make a run for it.

“Ijaz,” I said at the café. “That’s my name, though everyone calls me Jaz. I thought I’d tell you since I saw yours at the hospital sign-in. Do you go to college?”

He nodded, then became studiously absorbed in his coffee when I asked him where. To put him at ease, I talked about my bachelor’s in commerce at HR College. As I prattled on about the Sensex’s stupendous rise on the Mumbai stock exchange, he stopped me. “What exactly do you want?”

“To get into international finance, I guess. To really understand how the world works.”

“No, I mean what do you want from me ? Why did you bring me here?” His eyes darted as he spoke, an agitated smile stretched over his lips.

That’s where I muffed it. The Jazter code of conduct is quite explicit in such situations: Be direct. Don’t risk being misunderstood with subtlety—bring out, so to speak, the ol’ battering ram. Except my lust had been adulterated by an unaccustomed sense of responsibility, perhaps even tenderness. “I just thought we could be friends,” I responded, aghast at my own sappiness.

His expression didn’t relax. My usual fallbacks of cricket and the movies also fell flat. “Would you like to return?” I finally asked, and he said yes.

I followed him back to the building, my taste buds bitter with defeat. This time, his buttocks swung away not in invitation, but in declaration of their unavailability. The fact that I had failed to connect, that I wouldn’t be able to have him, left me even more charged with desire. As he pitifully poked along, the tender thoughts grew stronger too, into an overwhelming feeling of protectiveness. I wanted to mother him as well as molest him.

Just as I prepared to wish him a final goodbye at his hostel, he turned around. “Jai Hind,” he declared.

“What?” I had been given the brush-off before, but never with a patriotic slogan.

“Jai Hind College—didn’t you want to know where I study? I’m free Friday evening—we could meet near there.”

WE COME TO A HALT. The scenery outside remains desolate. What has happened to the people? Where has the war hidden them? It’s good the Jazter has renounced his pastime of shikar, since park pickings must be exceedingly slim these days.

Then again, it’s hard to tell. The population has taken to ebbing and flowing in waves. Perhaps it’s the moon that drives them, exerting mass gravitational pulls on their brains. More plausibly, they’re motivated by safety in numbers, given the unpredictability of each day. I feel the stares of wary eyes from distant buildings, imagine bodies carefully concealed behind drapes. Any moment now, they will realize their collective power and surge down upon us in an invincible spate. I’ve seen this firsthand through my days of surveillance—human tides pouring through neighborhoods, their abrupt rise, their unpredictable wane.

I hear people outside—only a few rather than a flood, but I draw back just the same. I cannot make out the argument they seem involved in. Have we arrived close enough to my prey? Is it time to stealthily slip away? I peep through the window, but do not see that one recognizable face. Which tells me we’re not there yet, I need to hunker down again.

Footsteps near, doors slam shut, and we start to move once more. I check my watch—it’s five p.m.—the day will start fading soon. There’s nothing to do but brace for the return of the annoying clickety-clack. And lose myself in memories of my checkered courtship of Karun again.

ALL WEEK, I WAITED for Friday. Only one desire, surely, could have prompted Karun’s suggestion of another meeting. I half expected him to chicken out, but he didn’t. We had tea in the outdoor patio of Gaylord’s—a venue I suspected was a tad expensive for him.

He came across as very different from our last meeting—so forthcoming he practically drowned me with information. How he loved science as a kid, how his widowed mother lived a few hours from Delhi, in Karnal, how his hostel roommate from the tiny state of Tripura had an unusual hobby (embroidery, I think). “It was difficult leaving my mother to come and study in Bombay, but we both agreed I needed to spread my wings a bit.” He’d visited all the museums in town and attended two concerts of carnatic vocal music (“the wailing,” as I called it—I tried not to grimace). He still practiced yoga every morning despite his cast, though he’d have to wait until it came off before he could go swimming again.

At first, he almost fooled me. I despaired he had taken me at my word about just wanting to be friends. Then I began to detect the cracks in his cover-up. The nervousness behind his chattering, the energy channeled into avoiding the one question he knew I would raise again. Why had he gone to the park? A question whose answer he must be intimately familiar with, no matter how hard he tried to suppress it. Had he come today hoping I would pry the issue free despite his fear of facing it?

Ordinarily, I would have lost no time obliging. But he worked his subterfuge so earnestly, it felt boorish not to play along. Besides, why not let him stew a bit—didn’t even the most unyielding meat tenderize that way? So I talked about my parents—how they met at a Muslim student mixer in the U.S. “My father was in comparative religion, my mother in Asian studies—not only did they get married, but they even worked together. They returned to India some years later to have me, but when I was six, they went back to America.” I told him I was a globalization victim, an international mutt, having grown up in so many different countries. “Singapore, Indonesia, Germany, in one year alone, followed by fourteen months in Switzerland.” I showed off my French and my German: “Tu as un beau cul,” “Und ich hoffe, Sie erlauben mir es zu erforschen,” after making sure he didn’t understand either language (I refused to translate). Although our backgrounds differed so much, we were both only children—at twenty, we were even the same age! By the time we emptied our cups, it seemed plausible we could be friends.

About to deliver my coup—the question he both dreaded and craved—I saw I had a problem. Say I persuaded Karun into revisiting our unconsummated shikar—where, exactly, did I propose to take him? One needed two feet, both in good working order, to negotiate the bushes in the park or the lonelier stretches of Chowpatty beach. Karun’s hostel came with a roommate infestation, our flat suffered similarly from a live-in servant. Would we have to wait until Karun walked before I could carnally inaugurate him?

So I didn’t bring up the park—since I couldn’t act on it, why scare him off? Instead I paid for tea, and when he protested, said we had to have a next time so he could reciprocate. That’s how the Jazter (blushing even now at the smudge on his hard-boiled reputation) embarked on the unfamiliar custom of dating . We started meeting Tuesdays and Fridays, then Mondays as well, when classes ended early for both of us. Usually at a cheap place like Samrat, though sometimes for an ice cream splurge at the nearby Baskin-Robbins. (Watching the pink of his tongue shyly scoop up a taste of my Rocky Road made me hunger to share more than just dairy products with him.) Afterwards, I took a cab home so I could drop him off—a gesture he appreciated, since he had such difficulty battling the bus crowds on his crutches.