by Parvati Sharma
YOU CAN START A STORY any which way. At the beginning, so I might say: we met in a classroom when we were nineteen, and four years later we were trapped in a horrible love. Or I might say: this was the end of it all, this scene —
There’s me at, twenty-three, working hard at slumming it, now I have the resources to live the kind of ramshackle life my parents couldn’t give me. There’s Preeti, the girl I have been drawn to compulsively, because she has parents who’ve thrown her out of the house, because she lives on credit, because she has a way of laughing and saying outrageous things, a habit, already, of drinking too much when I have just started to drink. Around us, we have the people who matter: artists, filmmakers, men and women who wear the fancy dress of their occupation as if it were quite natural, the long hair and fitted shirts, the good shoes, the radical thoughts.
It was amongst them that Preeti exclaimed — for her, it was no different, she was only doing it to charm, she said things for enticement, she was honest in the way you’re meant to be in writing workshops. I suppose.
She said, and I suppose she might as well have said, You know, honestly, I love the smell of my farts!… or she might have said, Honestly, I don’t understand monogamy! — but instead, what she said was, “Honestly,” she crinkled up her nose, it was a cute nose, “honestly, Muslims smell weird, don’t they?”
The chatter fell down to a pause. We looked, as if with one eye, at the lone Muslim in the room. She smiled.
I picked up a glass and went to the kitchen. Preeti followed, she whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I said, “Sorry.”
It wasn’t really like that, though, was it? She would never have said, for example, I love the smell of my farts! — the idea was to seduce, to be a woman of mystery not an eight-year-old boy. The idea was to tie people up in a secret, a giggling confession. She would never have said, I don’t understand monogamy either; that was too banal, too literal for this group. They would have smiled indulgently and thought she was trying too hard. The trick was to say things that carried a smudge of earthy honesty upon them, things they could neither fully accept nor fully deny: You can keep your German lagers, I really like oily Indian beer — something that would puncture pretentions just a bit, but not damage the ego in any permanent way.
It was a hard balance to maintain, but Preeti had a knack for it, most times. And if she slipped now, at least she remained consistent in this one thing: she blamed me.
“Sorry,” I said, but I shook my head.
That still isn’t exactly right, though, is it? Was I surprised by what she said, as I seem to be suggesting? No. For one thing, she’d said it before. For another, ever since she slept with her boss in our living room, I wasn’t surprised by anything she did, or said. And finally…
But wait. Sometimes, whether you like it or not, you have to start a story with a broad stroke. It was a muggy night. Or, her smell was always a little almond. A sweet fragrance, but within it the possibility of bitterness. And I had enough reason to doubt her; hadn’t she, after all, slept with her boss in our living room? When I woke up from my drunkenness — it wasn’t the noise, but a suspicion piercing through the heaviness in my head — when I woke up and walked out, her eyes flickered, and our gazes locked. I could tell she hadn’t been carried away; and that, if anything, is what hurt the most.
Her boss continued, oblivious, eyes closed no doubt, closed tight with feeling. Such is the blindness of the good-hearted. Her eyes were awake, though, as wide as her thighs; tinged, even, with a little ironic humour at her situation. She knew I knew she was uncomfortable on that rug: we’d bought it together. It was one of those plush affairs, all curls, and when we bought it we thought, won’t it be nice to lie on this, one winter afternoon, wrapped in arms and kisses, melting in luxury?
But, in the manner of glossy brochures and incredible deals, the rug promised more than it could deliver. The soft spring of its curls camouflaged a paper-thin base, through which the cold floor pressed upon our shoulder-blades, painfully. So we left it to lie on the floor and took ourselves to bed.
The look she gave me held a rueful acceptance of her fate, inviting me to smile — the joke was on her! She was good at this kind of thing, turning tables upon herself; nullifying my fury with a conspiratorial wink. Now, somehow, she stopped me from grabbing a bottle and throwing it at her head. Instead, I turned and returned barefoot to our bedroom, where I stood at the window and smoked cigarettes until my throat was raw and my eyes watered. It was dawn when I fell into bed; and when the heat woke me after noon, I found she had left me a bowl of warm kadi, with soft white rice and a plateful of crisp kakdis slit along their curving green lengths, oozing lemon juice and salt.
I ate the kakdis first, crunch-crunch, the astringent lime spreading like rain upon my tongue, clearing the phlegm in my throat. Then I ate the kadi, like soup, from the bowl. It was warm and just a little sour; I sucked at a dry red chilli, and felt its heat coursing through my palate, up the bridge of my nose, into my temples. I sniffed and wiped at my nostrils with the back of my hand, and continued eating the kadi, spoon after spoon, until finally I just lifted the bowl and poured the little liquid that remained down my gullet.
To end, I spooned a bit of rice into one hand, cupped it close and held it to my nose, breathing in its warm scent. I flicked my tongue out and gathered a few grains upon it, soft and almost sweet.
Having eaten, I returned to bed, and slept soundly until it was dark and I could go out and buy myself something to drink.
She came home just as I had finished my first beer. If she’d come an hour earlier, I’d have been groggy and depressed; an hour later, drunk and vengeful. But after that first beer, and the promise of plenty more in the fridge, I was loose-limbed, clear-headed and expansive. I told her to help herself, and she cleaned up the room on her way to the kitchen, dusting a bit here, rearranging some books there. She returned with a bottle in one hand, and a vase of flowers in the other. She’d brought home an armful of rajnigandha, their perfume spread through the room. Walking in on us then, you’d have thought, what a lovely young couple, and how tasteful, how serene!
That’s how she was, how she could be: a blue sky. A spring day. You’d never guess what squalls were hidden down her back.
No, really, I’ll have to rephrase. I mean, recant. Of course I could guess. Yes, she could be cheerful, so cheerful and so willing to please. But didn’t she say, one time, early in our acquaintance, “Muslims have a funny smell!”
It was hardly an unheard of thing for people to say, then or now. Is that why I didn’t react? She said it with such mirth, such little malice, and I said only, “What?” as if I hadn’t really understood — and we moved on to other things. I should have paused to think about it then; prejudice reveals a person — an emptiness of mind, a meanness of spirit. And I knew from the day we met she wasn’t empty-headed.
Besides, as the weeks of our love turned to months, and as the months piled upon each other, like worn clothes upon a chair, a kind of rankness did begin to seep through. Small things. If we were at a party, for example, she would say, afterwards “Why did you talk to so-and-so?” — she meant, for such a long time, in such a close way, at any rate inordinately?
She might grow cold, not speak to me for days on end, while I hovered in and out of her sight, pleading for a smile, a word. Then, big things. She might grow enraged. Once, she leaped upon me from behind a door, plucked the glasses from my nose and broke them. I replied in kind: she didn’t wear spectacles, so I tried to break her face. A moment later, some strange force flung us apart: we sat panting on the cement floor. I had vomit at the back of my throat. She? She sat looking at the floor with a snarl in her eyes.
Was it after this or before that she began cheating on me? I’d like to say after, just to give us a little time, a little prelapsarian purity — and who’s to stop me? I will. In any case, that night of slapstick violence changed something between us. Before, I had been cowed, afraid of her accusations, anticipating reprimands. I might even have developed a kind of hunch when I walked; I squeezed at my blackheads compulsively until the skin puckered and peeled. I found it harder and harder to speak without mumbling.
After, once my knuckles had landed on her jaw, I began to draw myself up, erect. I learned to keep my gaze blank, to simulate indifference so that it felt true, and to her, threatening. So she flirted and cajoled, she bought sweet-smelling flowers by the armful. This was how it was with her: she was as desperate to belong as she was to destroy. She cheated on me, then, to draw my attention back to her, to make me plead again. And I did the one thing I knew would hurt her most: I made new friends.
My best new friend was called Seema Devji.
Seema was foreign. Not an NRI, but properly foreign, third-generation, from Africa, England and America, three continents of foreign, but here she was, looking for her Indian roots. She laughed about it herself: “My mother and the mosque-ladies — ugh! All my teens, they were like, Seema, be part of your community… and you should’ve seen their faces when I said I’m going to India. No Seema, it’s dangerous, why do you want to waste your degree? Yeah, but it’s my community, I said. They were so mad!”
Ah! It’s not a very Muslim-sounding name, is it? Not Seema, certainly not Devji — her religion barely registered, really, though she spoke not only of her mosque-ladies, but also of her research in Muslim ghettos, and her plans to study Farsi in Iran. All of it struck me as incredibly sophisticated, as grown-up as renting a real flat (which she did), with balconies, not a shabby barsati with damp patches on its walls.
What I mean to say is, I can claim quite truthfully that I did not know, as you know now, where this was going. All I knew was that to Seema I might, one day, admit that I was miserable, that I had ambitions that extended beyond recovering from hangovers, that I preferred the quiet of routine to the (undoubtedly energising) agony of heartache and jealousy.
Back in our shabby barsati, meanwhile, we continued our negotiations through stealth and nonchalance. She was always on the phone, flirting just loud enough for me to hear; she let slip that her boss had propositioned her; she came home late or not at all. I pretended I hadn’t heard or didn’t care, lying with my legs crossed at the ankle and my eyes fixed on any page of any book.
Eventually, there was nothing else for it, I suppose, than for her to bring the boss home, to let me find him outside our bedroom, on our rug, like a dog’s dead offering and as putrid.
And then, after the storm, the clean, clear air. We sat in our fragrant living room, sipping silently on our cold beers, like pensioners in a club with high ceilings and avuncular waiters. Watching her, cross-legged on the old sofa, cheerfully repentant, I realised I might never be able to leave. The idea sent a shiver down my arms.
It was then that Seema called and invited me home the next day, for a party. I couldn’t wipe the excitement from my face, my jaw hurt from trying.
“Who was that? Was that your friend?” she said, as if I were six and she my mother — but really, I did feel like I’d been called to an audition. I didn’t want anything to go wrong.
“Even I want to go! Won’t you take me for your fancy party? Pretty please?” she was being funny, but I knew where this was going. I didn’t want her to come, but how could I say it? And to say, No, of course I want you to come, that was even worse, that was weak — she’d stop laughing. “You think you’re better than me,” she’d say, “you and your rich friends and your perfect little Mummies and Daddies. Do you know what it’s like to not eat a whole day?”
I would be drowning in remorse.
I said, without meeting her eyes, “Eight o’clock, tomorrow night.”
It is hard to explain now what happened next. We went to the party, of course, that’s easy: we got dressed and caught an auto and hurtled through a warm night to a house full of people, spilling onto the balcony, helping themselves to rum and whisky and sweating bottles of beer. Preeti had only to circle the room to become everyone’s favourite interlocutor. Lurking in my corner with my glass always too empty, I told myself: Go! Talk to people! — but every time I took a step, I heard her voice, and I retreated.
Eventually, I made the full escape, to the roof. It was a muggy night and the sweat lay still upon my skin, gathering on my neck, my back, my upper lip. I stood there a long while, until I was sick with alcohol and dehydration, and it was there, leaning over the wall, watching the balcony below, that I saw Preeti and Seema come out together, arm-in-arm, as if they’d been best friends since pre-school. My heart became a boil, angry and tender and willing to burst.
When I went down, desperate for water, the party had changed. Many people had left, and the smaller group that remained sat in a cordial circle. Preeti and Seema were side by side. I joined them, clumsily, and when there was a lull in the conversation, I called out, too loud, “How’s the research going, Seema?”
Why did I ask? It wasn’t really party talk. She replied, though, without hesitation, “You mean in my ghetto? Well it’s like I’ve just started, you know, but it’s… intriguing,” she laughed at her own choice of word. “You know the neighbouring colony, it has a high Sikh population, it was attacked during the 1984 riots. But what you see now… it’s the other nagar that’s become a ghetto.”
“A Muslim ghetto.”
“Well exactly. You have a site of anti-Sikh riots, and next to it a Muslim ghetto. Which is strange, right? Why would only Muslims live in ghettos?”
“You mean intriguing,” I said, and she smiled.
I couldn’t help it, I glanced at Preeti.
“You work in Jamia?” said Preeti, touching Seema’s shoulder with one hand and laughing, conspiratorial, “But isn’t it true,” I heard it coming, and I could have intervened, “don’t Muslims have a funny smell?”
The room turned, as if with one eye, to look at Seema Devji. She smiled. “People can’t always tell I’m Muslim,” she said, “maybe because of all the deodorant I use?”
The laugh had frozen on Preeti’s face; it gave her, now, a distorted expression, like a child’s angry drawing. I took my glass and went to the kitchen for more water; she followed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said.
Her embarrassment was so acute, I said “Sorry,” but I shook my head. I said, “You should go home now.”
“Me? What about you?” She had a crack in her voice; if I looked at her now, I’d never say no. I stared into the fridge, though it was empty of water bottles. If I looked at her now, I’d see the fear in her eyes, her pitiful need to be told, it’s alright.
Outside, there was the sound of conversation resuming after a crisis, there was the nervous release of laughter, all of it draped in the calm of Seema’s voice. I could smell my own escape. It filled my blood with power; I felt I might explode with it, the joy of knowing my mind — and, anyway, I couldn’t keep staring into the fridge all night. The story would follow my will: all I had to do was decide.
“Sorry,” I said, and I shook my head.
Parvati Sharma is the author of The Dead Camel and Other Stories of Love, Close to Home and a book for children, The Story of Babur.