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.
I caught up with him as he fumbled with the door at the entryway to the flat. “It’s locked. I have the key.”
“I really have to go.”
“I’ll open it, and you can go, but first you have to answer one question. Tell me, truthfully, why you came.”
“What? You’re the one who invited me. For dinner. Have you forgotten?”
“Not today. Why you came to the park. What you were searching for. All these weeks, the question you’ve evaded.”
He glared at me. “The children. I came to watch them play. Someday I hope to have my own. Satisfied?” His voice had a defiant tone. “Not for this, not for what you were thinking, what you were trying. It’s outrageous.”
“OK, fair enough. You’ve obviously had enough time to cook up a response. But you must be crazy if you expect me to believe it. Even crazier if you believe it yourself.”
“You’re the one who’s crazy—”
“I know the way you were staring at the park. The way you’ve been carrying on with me. Tea and ice cream, what crap. Why don’t you just be honest and admit it?”
“Open this door.” He began pounding on it. “Open this door at once. Somebody help.”
“No need for such drama. Here’s the key.” I threw it at him. “There are taxis around the corner—I hope this time you have enough money in your wallet to pay the fare yourself.”
HE CALLED ABOUT an hour later on his cell. “I have to tell you something.” I didn’t answer. “About your question.” Again, I kept silent. “Are you there?”
“Go on, I’m listening.”
“Not like that. I’m downstairs.”
He had found the path that circled around to the small strip of beach behind the building. As I approached, he rose from the fallen palm trunk on which he sat. “Jaz?”
“Yes, it’s me.” I stepped carefully toward him across the debris-littered sand. The moon shone down through the palm fronds, covering him in a delicate crisscross of light. He looked insubstantial, lace-like, like a spirit that had lost its way and been captured in this lunar mesh.
For a few minutes we stood in silence, watching the bay. The tide was the furthest I’d ever seen, the waves streaks of silver that appeared almost stationary. “I’d read about the park,” he finally said. “On the internet, while still in Karnal.”
It all came tumbling out—how after junior college in Karnal, he knew he had to spend his three senior years somewhere else, how he’d found postings for similar parks in Delhi, but it still seemed too close to his mother and his family. “I felt dreadful applying for the scholarship, but I knew I had to go far away to survive. It still took me a year and a half in Bombay before I got together the courage to do anything.”