Manil Suri - The City of Devi

“It’s hardly like that. I just don’t want to blare out such a private matter to strangers at a party.”

“What you really don’t want to do is admit you’re just like them.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Which part? That your report card is stamped H for Homo or that it’s a label you just can’t accept?”

“If you feel that way, maybe you should go to Rahim’s yourself. I’m sure you’ll find someone more to your standards amongst all those other men.”

I stalked out of the tea shop, incredulous Karun would pass up such an opportunity in the middle of a drought. What was he, a camel, that he had used his hump to store up the sex we’d had? Why couldn’t he have a normal libido, be a slave to unseemly urges like everyone else? The Jazter jewels had turned so blue that they’d be a pair of twisted ice bonbons soon. I needed massive quantities of immediate action to restore them to their natural state.

Walking to the bus stop, I realized I’d become too fixated on Karun in the past few months. Release was release, with whomever one found it—that’s what the Jazter had always said. Hadn’t another wise man, the Buddha himself, warned about the evils of attachment?

So I spent the next few days frequenting old haunts again—the alleys near the Gateway, the facilities at Bandra, even the Oval in the rain. I rode the “gandu car,” the notorious last compartment named after all the backdoor action it saw, on late-night suburban trains. I got lucky with a cashier wearing a McDonald’s uniform in the sparkling tiled toilet of a newly opened shopping mall. But as I entered him, as my body heaved and strained, I found myself conjuring up Karun’s face. Guilt flooded in—as if I’d been unfaithful, as if I’d strayed.

It became an aversion therapy program, the way this guilt tainted every encounter. My favorite pastime lost its luster—the chase no longer thrilling, the prey too coarse, too anonymous, too un-Karun-like. How could this have happened? I felt like railing. Such crippling fallout from just a few innocent months of dating?

“You look completely lovelorn,” Rahim declared at his party, after admonishing me for not having kept in better touch. “Will I have to torture it out of you or will you tell me who he is?” He had developed a sashay to his walk—more matronly than nubile, and discovered mascara to somewhat alarming results. “Mum’s the word, I see—but that’s OK since I have a number of people here who’ll make my little Jazmine forget him.”

The “wedding” involved Rahim’s friend Akbar, who appeared in ceremonial drag—a red sari complete with ankle bracelets adorned with tiny bells. “She believes in married life, just to a different husband each month,” Rahim explained. “She’s tired of repeating the nikah, so tonight we’re going Hindu for a change.” Sure enough, the bride and groom (wearing the traditional headgear of jasmine buds) did their seven circles around a floor lamp representing the fire, after which Akbar swirled a platter with flowers and a lit oil lamp in ritual circles in front of his betrothed’s face. “Now kneel down and repeat them around the part that really counts,” Rahim instructed, and to hoots and claps, Akbar obeyed.

Afterwards, the crowd gave a collective yank on Akbar’s sari, unwinding it in a long swirl of fabric that sent him spinning across the room like a top. Watching Akbar prance around in his bikini briefs, I felt glad I hadn’t brought Karun—who by now would have probably stalked out. The game of musical laps that followed took forever to play because of all the poking it prompted, after which Rahim herded us into the study he had converted into a pitch-black back room. “This is the way to fight back the respectability drowning our poor deluded sisters in the West. Long live masti, long live mischievousness.”

Wisps of sunlight seeping around the papering on the windows woke me in the morning. I extricated myself from under the arm across my chest and got up from the floor—it took me a half hour to find my clothes. By the time I reached home, my mind pounded with the thought of Karun. I had not talked to him for days—what if I had let him slip away? I longed to coax out his smile again, yearned for his steadfastness—even his scientific prattle seemed so charming in retrospect. I had to see him despite the absence of fleshly prospects. Would I have to finally yield ground to his pontifications about life being more than sex?

Gathering up my courage, I dialed his number. “Where have you been? I’ve missed you,” he said.

BY SEPTEMBER, WITH THE RAIN still keeping us chaste, I wondered if the monsoons would ever end. Just as I prepared to splurge on a hotel room in desperation, my luck turned. My parents announced their departure for a week-long conference in Jakarta. I declined their invitation to come along, which puzzled them. “I suppose it should be OK with Nazir here to look after you.” I had to pay him the entire five hundred saved up for the hotel room to coax him into taking a vacation of his own.

I got down to the first order of business with Karun right away. I fucked him in every room of the flat, in my parents’ bed and on the kitchen floor. When he tired, I revived him with a bubble bath, then fucked him some more. He locked himself in the toilet, not emerging until I promised to stop. I made a good-faith effort to keep my hands (and other parts) off, but lasted only an hour. By the third day, though, even I was too sore.

Fortunately, we had college to attend. I came back at five, worried he might not return, wishing I hadn’t wielded my wicket to such excess. At six, the bell rang. Karun must have recovered as well, because when I herded him through my bedroom door, he didn’t protest.

Eventually, there arose the pesky problem of food. Nazir had demanded too much money for biryani this time, and we’d already devoured the refrigerator scraps down to the stalks of coriander. “I used to cook while my mother worked evenings,” Karun said, so we went shopping in the nearby outdoor market.

Except neither of us knew how to haggle. Vegetable hawkers saw us treading carefully through the monsoon muck in our sneakers and raised their prices two- and threefold. “I know your mother,” a fisherwoman purred. “She always buys pomfret here because she knows I never cheat.” Chicken sellers, egg grocers, even a samosa-vending tout, all smiled widely in welcome with the glint of rupee coins in their eyes.

“They can smell our inexperience. We need a strategy,” Karun said. “How about if I act willing to buy, and you pretend to pull me away because the price isn’t right?”

So I tried to channel my inner diva to play the shrewish wife. I accused the cauliflower seller of eating the good parts and trying to palm off the leaves, ordered Karun to return a bag of plums because they’d be all pit inside. I overplayed my role with the fish, voicing so many suspicions about its freshness that I provoked the fisherwoman into a fight. We fled to the chicken shop, trailed by a hail of curses in Marathi.

Unfortunately, the hen we bought remained tough even after three hours of cooking. Karun made various attempts to tenderize it—adding vinegar and yoghurt and pungent powders he found in the cabinets, even stabbing at the pieces in frustration with a knife. At midnight, I suggested we just dip bread into the gravy. Karun’s eyes widened as he tasted it. “I think I added too many chilies.”

“It’s nice,” I told him, trying not to choke. I discreetly got up and brought us some water. By the end of the meal, we were using chunks of raw cauliflower to buffer each bite.

“I can wash off the chilies and try again tomorrow,” Karun said. “I guess it’s been a while since I cooked.”