Manil Suri - The City of Devi

They began to grab at his clothes, but he broke free and ran up the steps. For a while, they banged on the door, even ramming it a few times, but the bolts held. I found him huddled in bed, his shirt torn, scratches on his arms and face. “We have to go to the police,” I said, unsure, even as I made the suggestion, as to what reception we could expect.

“I can’t. I have to return tonight. The operation is tomorrow.”

I kissed his face and held him close. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something while you’re away.”

“The things he said about my mother. I don’t think I want to stay here any longer.”

We had sex before he left. It was more comforting than passionate, and I held him in my arms afterwards as long as I could. “I love you,” I said, and he whispered the words back to me. I imagined the two of us living in a new flat somewhere, perhaps even back in Bombay. His mother, Harjeet, my indiscretions, left floating behind in a different universe far away. “I love you,” I said again, and not knowing it then, kissed him for the final time in the home we’d built. Then I took him to the station to catch his train.

SATURDAY MORNING, I knocked on Harjeet’s door. No other option remained but to talk to him, since Mrs. Singh wouldn’t help and I didn’t have any evidence to file a police report. (I could have threatened him with physical violence, but the thirty kilos he had on me gave me pause.)

He answered the door in his undershirt, with a handkerchief over his knot of hair. “What do you want?” He looked more surprised to see me than irked.

“I want your harassment to stop. What you did to my friend last evening—stop bothering us. Just stop.”

He stretched lazily. “Or else you’ll do what?”

“I’ll go to the police.”

“And you think they’ll listen to a gandu like you?” He laughed. “To you and your sweetie friend? Where is he anyway? We must have really scared him if he didn’t even have the courage to come down.”

“His mother has cancer, so he’s in Karnal for a few months.”

Something shifted in Harjeet’s eyes, but it wasn’t the remorse I hoped to elicit. “Well, tell Sweetie we’re very, very sorry. We’ll all be waiting on the steps to greet him when he returns.” He slammed the door in my face.

That evening, the motorcycle friends burst into one of their sessions even before getting fully drunk. They sang all sorts of Bollywood numbers about separation and longing. They even performed “My sweetie lies over Karnal, my sweetie lies over the sea”—given their deep Punjabi vernacular, I hadn’t expected them to be conversant with English ditties. They finally stopped when neighbors from the adjoining house threatened to call the police.

At two a.m., someone knocked loudly on the door. For an instant, I had the irrational thought it might be Karun—I’d been trying to reach him all day to ask about the second operation they’d performed on his mother. Instead, I found Harjeet, so drunk that he held on to the doorjamb for support. “I just thought—” he said, and stumbled into the room.

For the next few minutes, he stared at the walls, trying to condense a coherent thought. “I sleep right beneath you now, in my mother’s room,” he finally said. “I can hear you go to the toilet.”

He planted himself on a chair, then slid off over the side. He mumbled vague apologies (or perhaps they were threats?) while sprawled out on the floor. At one point, he caught my leg and tried to pull me down next to him. It took me the better part of an hour to drag him out the door. I left him on the landing softly singing one of his homo songs to himself.

The Jazter had sometimes wondered about the reason behind Harjeet’s belligerence—the ensuing week left no doubt. It was like watching a fairy-tale battle, a personal jihad—the entire gamut of reactions compressed and played out. One day he tried to push me aside on the steps, the next, he stared lasciviously as he let me pass; in the evenings he sang insulting songs with his friends, then staggered up to my door drunk. Most bizarrely, he resumed his exercises on my landing, wearing a thong (and matching head knot) so electric yellow it made even the Jazter blush.

At first, I simply ignored him—when he knocked, I kept my door shut. Then—purely in an abstract sense—I started wondering how he would be to fuck. I peeped through my window as he strained at his barbells—the muscles on his chest bulged and popped. In body type, he would have to get an A-minus in terms of what the Jazter usually looked for. There was the added bonus of doing it for the first time with a Sikh—another species of prey checked off. The bottom-line question: What would be the harm? After all, the Jazter had already cheated so many times in the park.

So I decided I’d forge ahead. Give the Sikh my very own seekh kebab. With home delivery an option, why go foraging in the park? I slipped a note in his mailbox. Lose your friends for an evening and come up as soon as it gets dark.

He was very nervous, so I made him go back downstairs and get some rum. We didn’t talk much as we sat on the sofa and passed the bottle between us. I took the liquor away to the kitchen before he got too drunk. The bed I shared with Karun seemed too much of a betrayal, so I spread a mat on the floor. “Why don’t you take your clothes off?”

His body looked even bigger naked. The way he arranged himself on the mat with a pillow under his stomach made it clear what he’d come for. So dispensing with the niceties I put on a condom. All this economy pleased me, made me feel back in the park.

He cursed in Punjabi as he contorted and bucked under me. It felt like riding a whale, like harpooning a sea monster. He wanted it again after we’d rested, so I summoned up the energy to lift his massive legs and do him faceup. When he asked for a third helping, I passed.

At the door, he hugged me awkwardly, but we didn’t kiss. The next evening, we dispensed with the embrace as well. He began coming up regularly, with an extra afternoon visit on the weekend. He still got boisterous when his motorcycle buddies were around, but the homo songs had long ceased to offend.

For a while, I felt quite happy with the arrangement—Harjeet’s body nicely fit the bill, plus it was so readily available. Then I realized the problem I’d created for myself. How would I extricate myself once I tired of Harjeet, or even more pressingly, once Karun came back? I racked my brain, but couldn’t come up with a solution, other than moving out. Hadn’t Karun said he didn’t want to live in the same building as Harjeet when he returned? Should I be looking for another landlord who would rent to us?

I needn’t have worried. The door opened one evening as I fucked Harjeet on the mat. With Harjeet’s usual noisiness, neither of us heard, and I continued all the way to climax. As I slumped forward, my gaze alit on Karun’s figure, standing with a bag still in his hand. Even in my fuzzy state, his shock came through clearly, I felt his horrified stare. “My mother died last night. I cremated her this morning,” he said.

KARUN RETURNED AFTER I LEFT FOR WORK THE NEXT DAY AND moved his belongings out. I tried calling him on his cell phone, but he didn’t answer—the number got disconnected soon. I sat down to write him a letter of apology but quickly found myself bogged down—my behavior with Harjeet looked even more outrageous on paper, especially when juxtaposed against the loss of his mother. Besides, I didn’t have his mailing address in Karnal even though I’d been in person to the flat. One day, I took the train there, but a padlocked door greeted me. The shopkeeper downstairs who gave me the street number told me nobody had stayed in the flat since the death. I even tried Karun’s university, but they had no idea of his whereabouts.