The City of Devi: A Novel (14 page)

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.

I called it my “February of Frustration.” I came no closer to his butt despite cataloguing all the enchanting ways it turned and twisted (the half-swivel when he used only one crutch, the bump and grind when he tried climbing steps, the free swing when he used his body weight to go fast). The park glimmered in the background through all our conversations, endowing them with possibilities I did not articulate. I wondered if my efforts were worth it, if I stuck around only as expiation for his handicapped state. After all, the future did not guarantee gratification, March promised no plunge picnic.

Except a part of me
enjoyed
these vegetarian trysts. I rushed home for relief in the bathroom afterwards—the Right-Hand Express departed regularly by eight. (Sometimes I needed to catch multiple trains.) I wondered if Karun shared this torment—if to enhance it, he even exaggerated his helplessness. Dating, I realized, might have its merits—it wasn’t just for suckers and sissies as the Jazter had always dismissed it.

Warning bells not only rang, they pealed, they pounded. Had guilt and sympathy combined unhealthily to form affection? What if this metastasized into something even more dangerous? The Jazter had always prided himself on steering rigorously clean of such marshlands. His dharma revolved around noodling and little else. No emotional ties, no lingering attachments—these were his bible’s most basic tenets.

Yet here I sat starry-eyed, listening to Karun describe his afternoon chemistry experiments. Not a scintillating topic exactly, but I could imagine the mischief we could get into as partners in the lab. Especially after hearing of his past transgressions. “I used to take empty medicine bottles to high school to bring back samples from chemistry lab. Nitrates, chlorides, sulfates—I’m embarrassed to say I pilfered them all. I wanted my own mini-lab at home—I couldn’t get enough of the colorful coppers and cobalts.”

“So not so innocent as you look, eh? And are you still stealing?—perhaps setting up a lab in your hostel?”

Karun laughed. I realized I’d never actually got a good look before at his teeth—they sparkled, all sunlight and Colgate, like in a TV ad. “Is that why your pockets look so full today?” I continued, hoping to catch another glimpse.

But he turned solemn, as if he’d allowed out too much mirth and needed to compensate. “My mother worked two jobs after my father died, so in the evenings, I’d perform experiments to entertain myself. I read a lot too, buried myself in books. I suppose I must have been lonely—though I didn’t realize it back then.”

I remembered returning from school to an empty flat myself on evenings when my parents lectured late. The long, stark weekends I spent left to my own devices, padding around at home, craving the company of a sibling or friend. “It’s hard not to feel alone as an only child,” I said.

That evening, I sat closer to Karun in the taxi than usual, our thighs touching even though the back seat had ample space. I wanted to hold hands the way working-class men, unspoiled by Western mores, did all over the city in innocent friendship. Instead I playfully kneaded Karun’s neck, then eased my arm over his shoulder and let it rest there—he didn’t draw away. At one point, I leaned across to lower his window, and our mouths came so close I could barely restrain myself from a kiss (he felt the pull too, I think). An outside observer might comment how the mighty Jazter had fallen if he’d been reduced to this for his quota of thrills. But I only wanted to be close, to express my fondness for Karun, to quietly bask in the camaraderie emanating from him.

7

PERHAPS IT
’
S A
FIN DU MONDE
THING, BUT I HAVE THIS SUDDEN
overwhelming urge to begin drafting my memoirs. The heartwarming saga of little Jaz who came of age around the globe. Our story begins way back in
1581
, when the Mughal emperor Akbar simmered together equal parts of Islam and Hinduism (with a pinch of Christianity thrown in) to rustle up his own curry religion, “Din-i-Ilahi,” or “Divine Faith.” The concoction didn’t quite take—at least not until centuries later, when my parents had the brainwave of updating the recipe for modern tastes. They used Akbar’s principles to formulate a version of Islam that could peacefully co-exist with other religions (or so they claimed).
An Emperor’s Bequest to Islam
, their joint
1
,
300
-page doorstopper, spent twenty weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list in hardcover alone. The fact that they remained practicing Muslims (albeit the liberal, wine-guzzling kind) put their message in high international demand. Here was Yale luring them back to America with the promise of dual professorships on my sixth birthday. Two years later, the king of Bahrain offering pots of money to come shore up his liberal credentials. An instant appointment in the latest European country (Germany, Holland, Switzerland) wanting to prove its open-mindedness after passing some blatantly discriminatory law against Muslims. And after the Arab Spring, even Qatar and Saudi Arabia stood in line to have their blemishes airbrushed, their repressive images tamed.

Inflamed with the desire to change the world, my parents moved so much that I felt I lived in a washing machine. Each time I tried to fit in with a new culture or skin tone at school, the spin cycle came on. Human connections seemed pointless, lasting only as long as we remained in town. My sense of estrangement was the only constant, following me like a dependable pet across the years and continents. I felt so hopeless, so in thrall of a mushrooming interior darkness, that my company turned even the most misfit of my fellow students off.

At the time, I didn’t realize that a deeper reason for my malaise lay hidden, something more incendiary than just our frequent relocation. My mother and father remained oblivious—beyond food, shelter, and clothing, they possessed only a hazy awareness of what other nurturing parenthood might involve. The fact that I found it impossible to get bad grades meant my school performance never cued them in on how little I worked or how despondent I became.

In Geneva, on my fourteenth birthday, I straightened out a paper clip and stuck it through my tongue. Then I tried to pierce the end back through again to form a ring, but couldn’t, because of all the blood. I wiped my lips clean and returned to the dining table, where my parents waited, editing book proofs and sipping gamay. Mouth closed until the last instant so nothing dribbled out prematurely, I blew out the candles on my birthday cake.

That finally got their attention. The white of the whipped cream icing provided just the right foil to give the red I contributed a breezily decorative effect. Once we returned from the emergency room, my parents began to notice other things as well—the anti-Arab posters nailed to my wall, the swastika imprinted on my neck, the razor blade by my bed. I listened to them talk late into the night, their shock permeating through the wall. What an amazing notion that all that jetting around may have fucked me up!

Their solution was to move once more. To Mother India this time, which would unscramble my identity, fill my heart with pride in who I was, where I came from. That’s how the young and still impressionable Jaz found himself sitting in the green-walled annex to the Byculla mosque in Bombay, fitted with a skullcap and equipped with a Koran. Each evening, as the adults prayed upstairs, I stared at the paint peeling off the benches, trying to tune out the hadiths being explained by the imam. Could I escape again by piercing some other body part?

Fortunately, my cousin Rahim, who attended the same class, had alternative plans for my edification. My parents, ever pressed for time, arranged for me to spend the evenings at his home afterwards. At sixteen, Rahim not only exceeded me in age but also in girth—I experienced his weight firsthand, each time he sat on me at the end of our wrestling bouts. He insisted we strip down to our underwear like Sumo wrestlers—his sweat marked my body, smelling of whatever spice lingered most dominantly from lunch.

Rahim’s mother had died a decade ago, and his father worked late, so we didn’t have to worry about anyone supervising us. Soon we were undressing completely and wrestling in the buff. I’m not sure if my technique improved or if Rahim simply let me, but I started ending up on top more often than not. My thighs straddling his hips, my seat pressed into his crotch—even though I left his hands free, he never pushed me off. One evening, I had the bright idea of slapping him in the face with my penis as we horsed around. He looked at me strangely, then leaned forward and took me in his mouth.

For an instant, I hung there, suspended over him in alarm. Then I felt someone older, more experienced, take over. This person seemed conversant with the geography of Rahim’s mouth, seemed to know just how fast and how deep to thrust, and how much to pull out. I found my neck arching back, my hands grabbing Rahim’s head as he made soft grunting sounds. Perhaps the person was not as experienced as I thought—before I could stop myself, I had transacted my first orgasm, with my cousin’s mouth.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, survivors of the coming October
19
holocaust or future alien voyagers: this is where my journey takes its most dramatic turn! The before and after, the
B.C.
and the
C.E.
, the divine revelation that swept away all my baggage from the past. Suddenly I didn’t feel hopeless, suddenly I found myself in control, suddenly the answers to all my questions popped and burst like fireworks. My identity flashed on, my confidence powered up, the path to my fulfillment in life blazed in the sun.

Over the next few weeks, Rahim and I poked and probed and plumbed. We matched appendages to orifices in every combination that sprang to our fevered minds. Dispensing with the wrestling, we dove directly each evening into racking up the notches on the bedpost (not to mention the sofa, the dining table, the kitchen stool, even the telephone stand, before it broke). The arduousness of some of our experiments eased appreciably when we discovered the lubrication properties of pantry ingredients. (Jam was too sticky, butter worked better than mayonnaise, but nothing rivaled the
glissance
of pure ghee.)

My parents couldn’t stop beaming—how eagerly I trotted off to class every evening, how well their mosque experiment seemed to be working. (They even published a paper on this, “Therapeutic self-affirmative effects of religious instruction on troubled youth,” soon after.) The fact that I’d begun paying attention to my physique was an added bonus. “Healthy mind, healthy body—just like the Book says,” my father remarked, each morning he saw me performing calisthenics. In reality, roles had begun to emerge in my after-curricular activity—clearly, I was the boinker, Rahim the eternal boinkee. If I wanted to fit my emerging self-image, it behooved me to start pumping up.

A year and a half later, little remained of the boy from Geneva with the paper clip in his tongue—in his place stood the Jazter, virile, self-assured, buff (not yet, but working on it). Buoyed by my recovery, my parents again succumbed to wanderlust. Rahim had become too attached, boinking him too rote, so I felt ready to move on as well. What better place to complete my education than the great cruising expanses of America?

We ended up in Chicago. It didn’t take long for me to notice the line of men lounging in their cars (all potential teachers) as I skateboarded past after school in Lincoln Park. Some of them took me along to the baths near the Loop, where I tried out threesomes and foursomes, to see how high I could go. The conspicuousness of my skin tone (which, while never debilitating, had often made me self-conscious in school) worked wonders for the trick count—I even switched
v
’s and
w
’s to accentuate my South Asian origins. Occasionally, high on Quaaludes, I spent a Sunday afternoon romping with the runaways at the bird sanctuary (even at my most stoned, though, I took care to protectively glove the Jaz-in-the-box). On a trip to San Francisco with my parents, I sneaked out to an all-night orgy in the Castro, making them wonder the next morning what had tired me so. As a side benefit to all these extracurricular opportunities, I felt easier and more relaxed around my classmates—in fact, I even initiated a few.

The two years I spent in the U.S. were like finishing school. I learnt etiquette and protocol, the right amount of sauna small-talk (both before and after), the polite way to guide a pelvis into the position I preferred. More importantly than picking up such lifetime skills, I liberated myself from doubt or shame. Sex was my true calling, my
raison d’être
—as guilt-free as yoghurt, as natural as rain. Such was the self-affirming sweetness of those days that looking back, even my most brazen exploits seem choreographed by Norman Rockwell himself. There I stand, above the mantle, in adorable congress with someone picked up at the baths, and on the wall of the dining room, the kitschy tableau, “Jaz gets blown in the park.”

To my shock, my parents abruptly decided to return to India—to pursue the best opportunities for “true change,” they vaguely explained. What about
my
opportunities? I felt like screaming—the fledgling recruits at school, the network of park contacts, the sauna niche I’d carved out for myself? Back in Mumbai, though, I found more shikar than I could have ever imagined—in gardens, on streets, aboard buses and trains. My training served me well—I now knew what signs to look for, which approach to take (the trick of affecting an accent, American instead of Indian now, worked once more to give me that foreign allure). The sheer diversity of fauna amazed me—closeted bania merchants in dhotis, hotshot executives on their cell phones, migrants teeming into the city from every state. Malayalis, Gujaratis, Bengalis, even an Assamese once!—the Jazter sampled them all to create his own desi melting-pot experience.

Ah, the stories I could relate. How unfortunate the bomb’s made it too late to start a blog.

ONCE KARUN
’
S CAST
came off, I sensed I had to act fast, or risk losing my prey. Before my seduction plans could unravel completely, my mother’s ninety-year-old Habib uncle gave them an unexpected fillip by peacefully passing away. As soon as my parents left for the funeral in Lucknow, I assured our servant Nazir that my lips would be sealed in case he wanted to slip off himself to secretly visit his village. This resulted in an empty flat, a phenomenon rarer than a lunar eclipse.

My dinner invitation seemed to catch Karun off guard: “Your liberation from the cast—we have to celebrate.” We lived at one of the fancier addresses in Worli, in a fourteen-floor building rising by the sea. Karun looked flustered when he glanced around the flat upon entering, so I hastened to ascribe the poshness to my parents, not myself. “They’re those rare people who’ve figured out how to spin philosophy into money, scholarship into wealth.”

But his discomfort stemmed from something else. “I thought we’d be eating with your parents—I didn’t realize even your cook was away.”

Sitting on the couch, his entire body, from fidgeting hands to restless feet, thrummed with nervousness. He declined the Scotch I’d figured on plying him with, so I suggested we eat. “I managed to cajole Nazir into making his famous chicken biryani before he left.”

It helped—ballasted by the food, Karun became a bit more placid. I knew I had to lure him into my room before the sluggishness wore off and he bolted. “Would you like to hear some of my qawwali disco?” I asked, and proceeded to explain the synthesis of Sufi religious music and old dance hits I’d been experimenting with. “The new fusion wave—it’ll storm the music world once I set it loose on the internet.”

He followed me unsurely into the Jazter sanctum, where, truth be told, no shikar had ever entered before. I immediately closed the door and tethered him to the computer with a pair of headphones. I proceeded to play excerpts from several of my concoctions—Fareed Ayaz and the Bee Gees, Donna Summer and Mubarak Ali Khan, finally arriving at my pièce de résistance. “Ready for some ‘Dancing Queen’ like you’ve never heard it before?”

“I’m sure it’s very nice. It’s just that I’m not so familiar with these songs.”

We lapsed into silence. I wanted to rub Karun’s back or slide my hand around his shoulder, but couldn’t think of a way to feign the right spontaneity. But then he gave me an opening. “I thought you didn’t swim.” He pointed to the picture of a group of men in bathing suits on my wall (the one right next to my vintage posters of Ricky Martin and RuPaul, neither of which apparently had lit any lightbulbs).

“I don’t. That’s the U.S. Olympic diving team.” Seeing his confusion, I clarified. “Not that I can dive, either. I just enjoy looking at them.”

He showed no reaction, as if my last sentence had magically dissipated on its journey through the air. So I pressed in a bit. “Who would you say is the most handsome? If you had one to pick?”

This made him redden. “I wouldn’t know.” He looked pointedly away from the picture.

“Come, come, surely that’s not such a hard question to answer. I like the dark one on the left myself. His chest, especially—the way the water beads on his skin.” I decided to go ahead and rub Karun between the shoulder blades—playfully, I thought, though perhaps it appeared manifestly suggestive. “It’s OK, there’s no need to be so uptight about it. Believe me, Karun, I know you better than you think.” I placed my other palm on his thigh—for some reason, I felt the need to punctuate.

In the postmortem, my behavior amazed me. How could the Jazter have plugged through months of painstaking pursuit, then risked it all in a moment of such indelicacy? For an instant, Karun simply stared at my hand, as if calculating whether he could possibly ignore it. Then he sprang up from the bed. “I have to leave,” he said.