He began telling me more—about grappling with his inner feelings, the doubts he had. Too much information smothers passion every time, I wanted to warn him. Before the moment could drift away in a flow of words, I leaned forward and locked his lips in a kiss.
His mouth felt small, perhaps because his tongue didn’t know how to respond. I held his head and pressed my body into his. He sighed—a sound that emanated from deep within his throat and didn’t fully escape. The moon’s filigree covered my person as well, its rays now engulfed us both in their net.
Upstairs, I led him by the hand to my room. His skin tasted salty but fresh. He cried out when I took him in my mouth, grabbing my head and finishing before I could slow him down. Afterwards, he buried his head in my chest and shyly asked if he could reciprocate.
We slept curled up together. I offered to get us a second pillow, but Karun said no. “I want to be as close as we can—I’ve never spent the night with someone else.” It occurred to me that this was the first time for me as well. For all these years, I’d been used to shikar, in which one doesn’t need a bed.
THE SUN HAS SUNK LOWER, but dusk hasn’t arrived yet. It looks like we’re passing through one of the shabbier tracts of Matunga or Mahim, but I can’t be sure. It’s easier to tell at night, when the poor areas are the only ones without light. The rich have their own generators, prompted by the past year’s power cuts.
What will I do once the sun sets? The bulbs and switches in my compartment surely don’t work. Boxes of incense and candles lie stacked next to a pile of saris in a corner, but the Jazter, a non-smoker, is matchless. I pull the tarpaulin off a row of crates running along a wall and discover a weapons cache. Gingerly, I sort through the rifles, the ammunition, the hand grenades, wary of triggering off my own private October 19. I find nothing to illuminate my surroundings—at least not without a bit of a blast.
Wrapped in a cloth is a handgun. It looks as cute and compact as a toy—surely it fires nothing more potent than caps. I’ve never handled a gun before—I’m startled by how much it weighs. I look for the safety catch, such a frequent hiccup in the novels I’ve read, but cannot locate it. Dare I squeeze the trigger to see if it’s loaded? I place it back atop the pile, then pick it up again. Ever since the war started, I’ve felt unsafe—all the people out to get me, as in this morning’s close shave. So I stash the gun in my side trouser pocket. Immediately, I worry about accidental discharges. I try to corral the Jazter jewels out of harm’s way but they keep swinging back.
This all seems so unreal that I feel like laughing. To think I need a gun to protect against those who’d kill me for being Muslim. The joke is on them—the last time I prayed was with Rahim, in the mosque annex. It’s too bad they don’t know about my true religion of noodling—a reason to really get their nuts in a snit.
THE NEXT DAY, Karun seemed to slip rapidly into morning-after regret. “What time is it? My roommate must be wondering where I went.”
“It’s only ten, and it’s a Saturday, so just relax. I’ll freshen up a bit and then whip us up some omelets.” He looked at me wide-eyed, as if stricken at the thought of eggs. “Of course, if you like, I could make you something else—”
“No, it’s not that. I just have to go.” He fished out his shirt from the jumble on the floor and put it on, then hopped around on one foot as he tried to get the other through a trouser leg. “I’m sorry—I just need to be by myself.”
My shikari reflexes kicked in with full force, juices astir at my prey’s escape attempt. “Wait,” I said, struck by déjà vu as he scuttled to the entryway, shoes in hand. “I won’t let you leave just like that.”
The locked door stopped him as before. “Could you give me the key, please. Please?”
“Or what? You’ll threaten to cry for help again? Go ahead, scream all you want, be my guest. I’m not opening the door until after breakfast.”
“I’ll come back, I promise. Some other time, believe me. Right now, just let me go.” Tears sprang to his eyes, panic to his face.
“No, Karun. It’s always scary in the beginning. You can’t just keep running away like that.”
He let me take his shoes and set them down, then lead him back to my room. I tried to steer him to the bed again, but he slumped in a chair instead. Minutes ticked by without him speaking. Finally, I prompted him. “Why don’t you finish telling me what you started last night on the beach? What made you go looking in the first place on the web.”
He must have been waiting for encouragement, because he opened up at once. It began with an innocent question at a family gathering—his cousin Sheila asked him why he didn’t have a girlfriend. “Everyone stopped talking just then, and in the silence, I turned absolutely red. I mumbled something about waiting to finish my studies, that not all my college mates were paired. ‘Yes, but you don’t ever even talk about women,’ Sheila said. ‘Not to you, he doesn’t,’ my mother shot back in my defense. People laughed, and the conversation went on, but Sheila’s remark stayed with me. One of those thoughts that keeps burrowing deeper, once it gains entry into your head.
“Why didn’t I take any interest in the opposite sex? My mother, I knew, kept waiting for me to say something about a girlfriend. The boys in junior college, just like the ones in high school, talked about nothing else—it was all I could do to tune them out. I wondered if I might be different—could I prefer men? A purely intellectual hypothesis, mind you, like one might make in physics or mathematics—I’d never detected any actual such feelings in myself. But it quickly became an obsession—I started reading everything I could find about it on the internet. The only scientific way to answer the question, I realized, was to put it to an experimental test.”
“But you’d never even tried it with a woman.”
“I thought about it. Going to a brothel or something sordid like that. I couldn’t get up the courage. Just like I circled the park so many times, too scared to go in, before the evening we met.”
“The evening you ran away.”
“I panicked, as I did each time I thought about explaining myself at tea afterwards. It’s hard to bridge the gap between theory and experiment. As you can see, even sitting here talking to you now takes an effort.”
“I’m honored, I guess. To be your science experiment.” The Jazter had been called many other things after sex, but never that. “And what have you discovered from this experiment?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
I was. After last night, I knew which band he played in—down to the exact instrument. But who was I to argue if he felt he needed to research an encore concert? “I’ll be glad to help any way I can.”
We had breakfast, and then I prepared the bathtub, using a bubble solution my mother had got from France. At first, Karun wouldn’t get in with me, despite my promise of only vegetarian fun. But then curiosity got the better of him. “Nobody I’ve known has ever owned a bathtub—I suppose you must see them all the time in the West.” He put a foot in tentatively, as if mindful of popping the bubbles, then lowered himself to face me in the water. “I always imagined from the photos that they would feel like small personal swimming pools. But actually, this is so much tinier.”
He dodged his body out of the way when I tried to soap him up. So I splashed him, and tickled him with my toes, to which he did respond. Before long, other parts of our anatomy inescapably got involved. And yet, the Jazter scrupulously restrained himself—not so much to honor his gentlemanly word as to preserve Karun’s stamina for afternoon research.