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.