No one in the house intervened to save him. It was necessary disciplining, the rod that taught and educated. Without this just measure of pain, how would a child ever learn to be diligent about his studies? It was an unspoken law of the Bengali household that whatever a mother meted out to her children, it was right and motivated by unconditional love. It couldn’t be questioned: everything worked for the greater good of the child.
It was the sight of blood on Ritwik’s face that made her stop, or the sense that he was nearly choking, able only to inhale or to exhale but not both, one following the other. Perhaps it was because she had welled herself out empty for the moment. She left the room to go to the kitchen, only returning when the sobbing had given way to an exhausted panting of snot, tears and some blood. There was a very faint air of the truce behind her commands, ever so slightly gentle now — ‘Stop crying. Get up, go to the bathroom and wash your face with cold water. I will give you your dinner after that, all right? Go, get up now.’
All of a sudden Dida appeared at the door and whispered, ‘So, enjoyed the fun, did you? How did it feel?’ From where did the leaking excitement in her voice come? Which bit of it appeared as ‘fun’ to her? She seemed to be keeping herself on a leash, a little girl trying very hard not to be giddy. Ritwik was convinced that had she, or could she have, let herself go, she would have broken into handstands and cartwheels there and then on the floor.
He whimpered away to the bathroom, washed his face, blew his nose and returned to his books. His eyes scanned the underlined words in “The Cook and the Crane”. He did not feel any fear. He noted the cunning twists in the spelling of some English words — ‘humour’ had two U’s but ‘humorous’ omitted the second ‘u’ of ‘humour’ and added an ‘—ous’; ‘receive’, he must remember, had an ‘e’ before ‘i’ and not the other way around. When his mother came back from the kitchen and gave him the spelling test, he got all the words correct. He had the uncomfortable feeling that she was somewhat disappointed.
If the cottaging business started off as an unsought adventure and surprised Ritwik by its very existence and possibilities, now, seventeen months down the line, it is a habit. An addiction even. He braves the bonecutter of the February wind to get to St Giles. No intensity of rain lashing across Catte Street and Broad Street in slanting spears can deter him. In fact, these extremes of weather he constructs as challenges — let’s see who’s hunting tonight — knowing well that he might be the only one, waiting for hour after sleepless hour, listening to the rain and wind, and hoping and waiting for a kind of ashen deliverance.
He gets impatient on summer evenings because the light stays till so late, the darkening blue of the sky never quite reaching the perfect black he thinks is necessary for going out on the prowl. It is a last vestige of some inhibition, this reluctance to go cruising with the residue of daylight stubbornly lingering in the air. He is sure in time it will go although he doesn’t know whether that is going to be a good or a bad thing.
He has started questioning himself about why he feels this urge to sit or stand in his cubicle for sometimes three to four hours on wet, icy evenings even when there is no action going on nor any reasonable chance of it. There are more pressing things that need his attention: Miss Gilby has only just made her first appearance at Nikhilesh and Bimala’s, Prometheus Unbound remains untouched. All those areas in which he thought he had imposed some order and method — books, essays, Miss Gilby — are beginning to escape control. All because, he thinks in a moment of trying to find one monolithic enemy, of that addiction to the adrenaline rush as he steps down the wet stairs into the underworld of St Giles, his heart a slow percussive fist, opening closing, opening closing. There is no denying it is a thrill. And he is hooked to it in the same way a big cat is after its first taste of saltblood. No amount of getting used to it, as he is by now (one of the other regulars calls him ‘our Indian chair’, he’s so much a fixture now in this place), no amount of it totally removes the slight loosening of the sphincter, the vague, peripheral urge to shit, as he makes his way into the toilets. Adrenaline, he notes every time; fight, flight, or fright.
The elements of danger and fear were at the forefront before. Will he get caught by the police? Will anyone who knows him see him in there or going down the stairs? What are the chances of picking up a psycho? What about AIDS? They have all moved back to the shadows, some more, some less. He is now so inured to any sense of danger that if it is there, it is as some complex spicing, present only in the bass notes, resistant to isolation and pinning down.
A particular incident in the toilets one day, at around two in the morning, sticks in his mind. No one there except Ritwik, who had been hanging around, utterly bored yet free and in his element, and another man: short, chubby, small shifty eyes, his skin the colour of bacon fat, tiny scratches on his nose and face, the kind one would see in an infant who has been scratching itself. The man hadn’t betrayed any interest in Ritwik at all but it was getting late and all they were going to get that night was each other. So, reluctantly, Ritwik had been making the moves, his mind not really on it, just to tease, just to see if the man was interested. Either way, he probably wouldn’t go through with it, he would just tease a bit and leave. The man had suddenly taken down his trousers, flicked out his penis and said, ‘If you don’t suck my cock, I’ll beat you up.’ Ritwik had thought how easy it would have been to spit at him and run out of the toilet to the safety of the open public streets above. Instead, though, he had kneeled down and sucked him with greed and had even got the stranger to jerk him off. In the post-ejaculation illusion of rapprochement, Ritwik, a few steps already on his way out while the man was washing his hands, hadn’t been able to resist shouting out, ‘I have a bigger cock than yours.’ Cheap, but it was going to hit home, he was that sort of man. He had shouted back at a hastily retreating Ritwik, ‘That’s coz you’re fuckin’ black, that’s why.’
It’s different tonight. He had had to leave the bar, it was getting too smoky and close in there. In his room, his work had outstared him into defeat. So he’s been left with no choice but trace his invariable tracks to the cottage. Or so he tries to reason with himself. 328665, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, from 9 p.m. till 6 a.m. That information won’t leave him alone.
The toilets are fairly busy tonight. Just entering it gives him a temporary reprieve from 328665 328665 328665. His cubicle is occupied. He waits for the occupant to leave and then practically pounces on the door, lets himself in and locks it. He’ll have a tough time keeping this for himself tonight, there are other loiterers like him who want to use it as a base too. There’s no option but to stay put in here until the trade thins out a bit. Unlike other evenings, tonight he is not buzzing with the need for action, rushing in and out of the cubicle to check out new arrivals, heading for the viewcrack at the sound of shuffling feet. Tonight he stands with his back against one of the walls and realizes after what seems like a considerable while that he has read all the graffiti many times over without any of it sinking in.