Читать книгу Seahorse - Janice Pariat - Страница 6

I

AND SO I BEGIN WITH NICHOLAS’ DISAPPEARANCE.

The moment I discovered he was missing. I remember like it was yesterday.

Although perhaps that isn’t an accurate way to phrase it.

Yesterday may be further away than two years past, than seven, or ten. I can’t recall my supper a week ago, but that morning remains palpable in my memory—like the touch of sudden heat or tremendous cold. It’s a wine I’ve sipped, and sipped so long it colors everything else on my palate.

It was July, but early enough in the day for the air to still be mild, sunshine glimmering white around the edges, warning of the warmth to come. I’d arrived at the New Delhi railway station at dawn; even at that time clamorously crowded, with hustling coolies and families recumbent on the platforms. I hurried back to my room in the north of the city in a taxi, the roads clear and quiet. Through Old Darya Ganj, along the wide length of Raj Ghat, the pale fury of the Red Fort. Everything, I felt, was touched by unimaginable beauty. After only a quick shower to wash away the grime of a two-day train journey, I headed to the bungalow on Rajpur Road. I was in a hurry, I took the shortcut through the forest. When I reached, the security guard wasn’t at the gate, and the wicker chairs and table on the lawn nowhere in sight. Around the fringes of the garden, flower beds glowed with early-blooming African daisies and hardy summer zinnias.

I remember, as I walked up the porch, dusty and littered with leaves, how it crept into my heart, a rush of something like love.

When I tried the door, it opened easily. The bungalow lay still and silent, everything in its place. The dining table set, as though for ghosts, with plates and cutlery, the drawing room tidy with cushions, neatly brushed carpets, an arrangement of dried flowers. I headed straight for the bedroom, expecting to find Nicholas sleeping, tangled in a sheet, dream-heavy. Above him, the patient creak of the fan, swirling. The smell of him in the air, sweet and salty, the tang of sweat.

He wasn’t there.

The bed was made in neat, geometric precision. His things—an extra pair of glasses, a fountain pen, a comb—missing from the bedside table. I walked down the corridor to the study; in all my months at the bungalow I hadn’t ever seen it so uncluttered, loose papers swept off the floor, the table relieved of tottering piles of books. I looked for a painting, the one that had stood on the table, of a woman holding a mirror, and it was gone.

Only when I reached the veranda did something splinter, and it rushed in, the fear that had been waiting in the wings. In the corner, the aquarium, that bright and complete universe, was empty.

Nicholas disappeared in the summer of 1999, when I was twenty, and in my second year at university. Although perhaps I need to rephrase that as well. He didn’t disappear.

He left.

Who’s to say they’re not the same?

At first, I searched wildly for a note, some sort of written explanation—taped to mirrors, or doors, or walls. Weighted down by books or bric-a-brac so it wouldn’t be blown away.

Behind me, a shelf bearing a small seashell and stone collection, to my right, a spacious divan covered in a densely embroidered bedspread. Next to it, a tall areca palm, its leaves sharp as knives, quietly wilting. The day’s heat seeped ferociously through the jaali screen, the light turned bleached and blinding. I didn’t switch on the fan, or retire inside for shelter and shade.

Later, around mid-day, when the silence grew deep and thick around me, I left.

This time, I took the long way round, back to my room in a student residence hall in Delhi University, along the main road, willing the noise and traffic to somehow jolt me back to life. That this, as clichéd as it may sound, had all been a dream.

At first, it felt similar to the time I heard about Lenny. Many months ago, my sister’s voice faint and grasping on the phone. I’m sorry… there were some complications…

Yet this was not death.

For death leaves behind modest belongings, the accumulated possessions of people’s lives, their books and jewelry, a hairbrush, an umbrella. Lenny had been my friend, I had his letters, his VHS tapes, his cassettes, and folded away in the recesses of my cupboard back home, his faded leather jacket.

With Nicholas it was as though he had never existed.

No life can be traceless, and leave behind scarcely any imprints. Yet his hadn’t. A great rushing tide had swallowed the shore and wiped it clean.

That day passed as all others do. In my room, I worked through my unpacking slowly—socks in the drawer, books on the shelf, slippers under the bed—filled not with anger or despair, but faint, lingering anticipation. Something else had to happen, this couldn’t be all. This wasn’t the end. I’d receive a letter. Nicholas would return. Someone would come knocking on my door, saying there was a phone call.

A message. An explanation.

That night I went to bed in hope.

And even now, I sometimes awaken with it wrapped around my heart.

We are shaped by absence. The places that escape our travels, the things we choose not to do, the people we’ve lost. They are spaces in the trellis on which we trail from season to season.

Perhaps this is why people write.

And this careful arrangement of lines is a way of saying “Let it always be there.”

Everything held still and held together—radiant, everlasting.

A way of defying memory, shifting slide-slippery thing, that refills as much as it empties. When I lay down these words, this is what I’ll remember.

I first saw Nicholas in a room that reminded me of an aquarium.

The lights dimmed, a projector flickering like an old movie reel. Sunshine seeping through the curtains into green semi-darkness. The air cold and muted; somewhere the hum of an air conditioner serving as the underlying rhythm of breath and life.

A talk was underway.

“What are the possible consequences?” asked the speaker. “If Alexander had succeeded? If he had swept unchallenged across the Indian subcontinent in the fourth century BC? Huge social and political ramifications, to be sure. But I’d say the most spectacular influence would lie elsewhere…”

I was struck by the shape of him. The shapes of him. A figure carved in light, growing as he walked nearer, diminishing when he edged away.

He smiled. “In art.”

I attended the talk by slim coincidence.

It was one of those drifting days on campus, the afternoon mirroring the sky—vast and empty. I’d left my roommate Kalsang, standing by the window, smoking a joint. Like the trees outside, he too was all twigs and arms and branches. A long-limbed Tibetan with a slow languorous voice that sounded like lazy Sundays. Around college, he was called “Rock”, an abbreviation of Rock of Gibraltar, a title he’d earned after repeatedly attempting, and failing, his undergraduate exams in Chemistry. It made him oddly out of sync with the world, and considerably older than me.

“Are you sure you don’t want?” He held out an elegantly slender spliff.

I was certain. I had a lecture to attend. On Samuel Beckett and symbolism.

That, he demurred, offered even greater pretext to join him.

For reasons I cannot remember—perhaps the class was canceled?—I found myself aimlessly wandering the college building. Through redbrick corridors divided by slabs of sunlight and shadow, passing rooms desolate as churches, their wooden benches and tables drawn and empty. To my left, through the arches, unfurled a length of grassy lawn, speckled, in winter, with sitting, sloping figures. Occasionally, squirrels scurried across to the stone-path edges, or mynas alighted for a quick walk-about, but now it lay empty, shimmering cleanly in the sunlight. I curved against the length of a pillar. If I leaned out and glanced up, I’d see a cubical tower rising into the sky, bearing, at the top, a cross and a star. On both sides, the wings of the building spread long and low, like a bird in flight. Beyond the hedged borders of the college campus, past the road trilling with rickshaw bells, stood the Ridge Forest, growing on gentle hills running all the way to Rajasthan. The lifeline of Delhi, its rainy, gasping lungs, its last remaining secret.

“In a forest,” Lenny once told me, “all time is trapped.”

In retrospect, I should have taken up Kalsang’s offer. He was usually in possession of stellar weed, not the kind that drove people crazy. I’d heard the stories, of course, about various drug-fueled antics in the residence halls. Oral folklore shared year after year among students, old and new, amounting to a grand collegiate archive, embellished by time and generous imaginations. The one about a boy who uttered his name, persistently, for three days—Karma Karma Karma—for if he stopped, he believed, he’d cease to exist. Or how a lethal blend of the green stuff, cheap glue and cheaper alcohol, convinced a certain economist he could fly. He flung himself off a balcony and landed in a flowerbed, emerging more mud-slain than maimed. Another ate three dozen omelettes at a nearby roadside dhaba. (The owner, Mohanji, said the rascal still owed him money.) More recently, a particularly potent brand of Manali cream had persuaded a historian on the floor above mine that he could see ghosts. “They hang around at the foot of our beds,” he said, “watching us as we sleep.”

Against my arm, the stone pillar burned gently. As respite from the weather, I usually slipped into the library, a cool basement level space where I’d find a corner, read, or more often, nap. That afternoon, when I checked, the library was “Closed for Maintenance”—although there didn’t seem to be any work being done inside. I walked away, mildly disappointed, but further down the corridor, the door to the ambitiously named Conference Hall was slightly ajar, acquiescing a stream of startlingly cold air.

The speaker’s voice was low yet clear—a strange, deep birdsong—carrying the clipped crispness of a British accent.

“For centuries, the Buddha was represented through aniconic symbols… his footprints, a Bodhi tree, a riderless horse, the dharma wheel, an empty throne… how could the infinite, the boundless, be apprehended? Early Buddhist art was shaped by non-presence. Devotees were face to face with a “no-thing”. Certain scholarship states it wasn’t until the Greek presence in South Asia that anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha emerged…”

The speaker gestured at a map projected on the wall, a rectangular window glowing white and unearthly.

“In essence, the art created in the Gandhara region during the Hellenistic period derived its content from Indian mysticism while the form was that of Greek realism. It could have been purely for economic reasons, of course. Gandhara was ruled by the Kushan kings and it was a wealthy region, thanks to its position on the Silk Road… So with the luxury goods traveled the monks and missionaries, and with them the Buddha, in human form, perhaps because an image aids in teaching across language barriers. Yet is that all? What is this desire to humanize our gods? To make them in our own image…”

In the shimmering darkness, I watched him closely.

He had a face I wanted to reach out and touch.

Broad, yet not indelicate, with long, chiseled cheeks shaded by stubble. A nose that sloped straight and high between deeply-set eyes. I leaned forward, hoping to decipher their color—but with his glasses, and from that distance, it was impossible to tell. Only his hair gleamed dense and dark, framing his forehead, his temples, his ears, in waves.

He was never still.

A ripple here, a touch there, a step forward, a few back.

With anyone else this might be a mark of anxiety, of nervous, undispeled energy, but his movements were—I can think of no better word—silent. Seamless. Precisely elegant, a tall, sinewy man on a wire, whose gestures swept gracefully through the air.

I had never seen anyone like him.

Or dressed like him.

In a mandarin collar shirt of lightest grey, rolled up at the sleeves, and tailored hazel trousers, belted smartly in black leather. I was certain he’d never set foot outside an air-conditioned room; otherwise impossible to appear, in Delhi, in summer, that immaculate.

The map on the wall flickered, replaced by the image of a stone figure, fractured and antique. “One of many works that French historian Alfred Foucher acquired on his expeditions to Shahbazgarhi between 1895 and 1897…”

The figure was decked in the accoutrements of religious ritual—robes, fluid as real cloth, twisted around a slender waist, falling to slippered feet. Carved ornaments crossed its bare torso, and its turbaned head was framed by a full-moon halo.

“We tend to decipher figurative sculpture instinctively… employing a tool we use everyday… subconsciously perhaps, but, in fact, almost all the time in our waking lives.”

The speaker stepped closer to his audience. “Can anyone tell me what it’s called? The study of body language…”

“Kinesthetics.” It was Adheer, a final-year history student. With a pale, artistic face, and, even though he was no more than twenty, peppery grey hair.

“That’s right… you may have heard this before, that figurative sculpture aspires to one thing—to arrest the body and capture life. True, but not always.”

He turned, appraising the image.

“Scientifically, we may determine Foucher’s bodhisattava is over a thousand years old… carved in light grey-blue schist, from an area now in northern Pakistan… But how would you read him?”

A few observations were proffered—the figure was serene, princely, in prayer, the right hand raised in blessing.

“All accurate, no doubt, but at the heart of it, the key to truly unlocking an image is iconography… it comes from the Greek eikón, “image” and grafein, “to write”. If literature depends on the slower rhythm of the word, iconography relies on the swifter rhythm of the eye. The artist takes an elaborate temporal succession of events, and condenses them into an image… it holds everything.”

Each element, from the flaming halo down to the carved base, served as a clue.

“The bodhisattva’s hand, for instance, is fixed in abhaya mudra, a gesture of fearlessness. And this,” he pointed to the fingers, which—I hadn’t noticed—were webbed, “is not an amphibian motif, but an indication, some say, of supernatural power. If you look carefully at his turban, you’ll see it contains a small figurine… of Garuda, a mythical bird-like creature, carrying a naga.”

“Why is that?” asked Adheer.

The speaker shrugged. “The motif is most likely related to a Greek myth… the abduction of Ganymede by Zeus in the form of an eagle. It appears widely in ancient south Asian art, but in this context its significance remains a mystery.”

I remember, at the end of the talk, I waited while the hall emptied, flooded with stark-white tube light. The speaker glanced around the room and I wondered whether he saw me—slouching in the corner in my faded jeans and t-shirt. He stashed away his papers in an old-fashioned briefcase, and joined a professor waiting by the door. They headed out. I caught snatches of conversation. Laughter. Someone flicked the lights off and once again the room sank back into watery darkness.

Later, I saw a poster pinned on the college notice board announcing—like a prophet of the past—the event I’d accidentally attended. Organized by the Department of History. A talk by art historian Doctor Nicholas Petrou.

While Nicholas was an art historian, Lenny was the artist.

Or so I like to believe, even if it probably isn’t a label he’d have claimed for himself. In our hometown, as in hundreds of small towns in India in the late 1980s, there was little room for the imaginative and abstract. The elusive and intangible. Our options indelectably confined to medicine, engineering, or government service—safe, sturdy careers, long, narrow ladders leading to a future ostensibly improved. A quest always for security, hardly for meaning—or what the Greeks called eudaimonia, a human flourishing—and, especially within the puritanical Christian circles our families moved in, rarely for enjoyment. Lenny wasn’t devoted to an artistic profession, but I remember how effortlessly creativity alighted on him, the startling deftness of his hands. He’d sketch portraits of strangers while sitting at roadside teashops, on scraps of paper and napkins. A quick, light touch, each one taking him less than a minute. Or fold paper into birds, which he’d place along his window sill, longing for the sky. Strum the guitar, casual and easy, singing low and tuneful.

A month ago, I was at the National Portrait Gallery in London, for a retrospective on Lucian Freud. The man who only painted portraits. Room after room of faces, distraught, humiliated, indifferent, tenderly in love. A lifetime spent in attempting to capture all of humanity—its myths and frailties—with unrelenting intensity. I followed the eyes, and the eyes followed me. Paintings are always once removed, but not on this occasion. Each canvas raw and visceral. Turned to skin, loose, marked and scarred.

The people he painted, he took their soul.

There’s a sketch Lenny sent me before he died that looks as though it could have been drawn by Lucian Freud. That’s why I like to believe he’s an artist, and that if he’d lived longer, perhaps he’d have come to realize it too.

Instead, he was enrolled, through his parents’ persistent coercion, in a science degree—zoology? biology?—in a college in our hometown. Except, I never saw him attend class, or complete assignments, or venture near an academic building of any sort. He did what all parents found impossibly infuriating—he drifted.

I knew Lenny all my life. We grew up in the same neighborhood, although he was older and we became friends much later, when I was fourteen. Unexpectedly, at the side of a basketball court. One of those dilapidated public sports grounds where youngsters congregated in the evening for lack of anything else to do. Mostly, I hovered around the edges, invisible, pretending to follow the match, watching the big boys play, the ones who jumped like they had wings on their feet.

One day, Lenny showed up and declared it the silliest game he’d ever seen.

“Is this what you do?” he asked. “Sit around watching these guys fight over an orange ball?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you play?”

I thought it pointless to lie. “No.”

He lit a cigarette, and threw his head back. His face pieced together by an irreverent sculptor—an uneven nose, slanting eyes, a rough chin, and sharp plane cheeks. He smelled of smoke and pine forests, of something wild and unexplored.

He said nothing until he’d finished the cigarette, until he threw it to the ground and it flickered and died, burning itself out.

“Come.”

And I followed.

Before Lenny, I was unattuned to much else apart from my parents’ precise clockwork regime. Weekdays stretched taut between school and homework, punctuated by weekend visits to my grandparents, and church service on Sunday. When I was with him, though, time dissolved into insignificance. It lost its grasp, and loosened, unfurling endlessly as the sea. He’d rent VHS tapes from a movie parlor in town, and watch one after another—it didn’t occur to him to stop if it was late, or dawn. Or he’d walk, for hours, winding his way to unfamiliar neighborhoods on the other side of town. Often, he’d ride his old motorbike out into the countryside, beyond the furthest suburban sprinkle. He ate when he was hungry, slept whenever he happened to be tired, awoke at odd hours between early afternoon and evening. He was out of time. Removed from it like a modern-day Tithonus, existing at the quiet limit of the world.

I’d hurry over to Lenny’s room after school, or on weekend afternoons. It was a basement level space, down a narrow flight of steps accessible only from the outside of the house. Dimly-lit, oddly shaped, with jutting walls and sudden corners, and quite bare apart from a single bed, a writing table, and cupboard. In the corner stood a wooden shelf sinking under the weight of books, some so old they’d turned brittle, riddled by silverfish. They once belonged to a tenant upstairs, an elderly Bengali gentleman who died on a cold winter’s night, leaving Lenny’s family in the awkward position of having to pack up his belongings and giving them away to charity—for he had no family, here or elsewhere, that they knew of. Lenny persuaded his parents to let him keep the library—an eclectic collection, ranging from the obscure (The Collected Letters of Henry J Wintercastle) to the mildly collectable (an 1895 edition of A Tale of Two Cities). I remember how they lay thick and heavy in my hands, slightly musty, the smell that makes me think of Lenny when I walk into a secondhand bookshop.

In the afternoons, we’d go for walks in the pine forest behind his house, and smoke cheap cigarettes, seated on mossy rocks or, if it was a dry month, lying on the ground.

In between the roots of trees, the spines of the earth. Everything suddenly inverted, an upturned silence, grass behind my neck, a tilted view of patchy sky through crazy tangle of twigs and needle-leaves. We’d talk, or rather he’d talk and I’d listen. His voice murmuring like a stream. A book he’d read. This movie he’d seen, about a man wrongly sent to prison. A line he liked. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. A poem by Auden. His favorite. All we are not stares back at what we are. Or we’d be quiet. And if we were quiet and unmoving long enough, the forest would flourish over us. They would return, like slivers of sky, a pair of long-tailed blue jays. Elsewhere, a cluster of playful sparrows ventured closer. The clouds seemed to stop and linger. I’d feel heavier and lighter, quieted by the fall of pine needles, feeling their smooth silkiness under my hands. The prickle of tiny black ants clambering over my fingers. For them, I was tree root and stone. Here and there, the sudden fickle flit of yellow butterflies. We were woven, all at once, into the fabric of a spring afternoon.

On other days, colder and shorter, Lenny would take me to tea shops, scattered around town, near bustling markets, on busy main roads. We’d dip slabs of rice cake into small chipped cups of bitter tea, and watch the crowd swell and thin around us. Folk who dressed rough and spoke rough, butchers and builders who worked with their hands. (Of whom my parents would have disapproved, saying they were not “our type.”) Sometimes, we headed away from the clamor of the centre, past the car parks and newsstands, the bakeries and pharmacies, and slipped into a narrow lane flanked by a sludgy canal and the bricked back of a building. Its smoothness interrupted by a chink, an opening that led into a triangular one-room tea shop manned by a lady with an aged face and young eyes. She served us heaped plates of food, brimful cups of tea and called Lenny “my butterfly.” I couldn’t quite follow their banter—their language wrapped in lively innuendo.

“How many plums have you eaten recently?” she once asked Lenny.

I reminded them it wasn’t yet the season.

But it pleased me to be with them, to feel part of something adult and amorous.

More often, deterred by relentless rain, we’d stay indoors, in Lenny’s room. Reading, or playing our own version of darts on an enormous map of the world on the wall—a patchwork of colors amid posters of longhaired musicians in white vests and tight leather pants. Lenny would aim for South America—because he said he loved that vision of wildness—and land mostly in the Pacific or Atlantic. I’d aim for England—he’d call me boring—and end up in North Africa, or the deep blue Mediterranean.

We’d fling the darts from across the room, lazily lying on his bed, and then I’d scurry over to gather them.

“I have to get out of here, Nem,” he’d tell me, as he aimed for Brazil.

“You will,” I’d say loyally, because I truly believed he could achieve anything.

For the longest time, I placed it there—the reason for Lenny’s restlessness. His plummeting moods and sudden disappearances. Those afternoons when he wouldn’t permit me to accompany him out. “But where are you going?” I’d ask and he wouldn’t reply, sending me home instead. “Go finish your homework.” Those evenings when he didn’t return to his room at all. Later, the unexplained mud on his motorcycle wheels, his shoes, the frayed edges of his jeans.

I placed it there.

The smallness of our small town, its bland familiarity and quiet, terrifying dullness.

Yet how are we to truly map others? To fully navigate the rooms they carve in their hearts. The whispers they alone understand. What is love to their ear? The crevice it fits into is different for each of us. We are separate worlds illuminated by strange suns, casting unrecognizable shadows.

In the end, we follow spirits only our eyes can spy.

I have to get out of here, Nem.

Eventually, I suppose, that’s what Lenny did. In a way that left him with no hope of return.

A few weeks after I found out about Lenny, Nicholas and I went to a bar in Model Town, a neighborhood near the university, comprising circles of apartment blocks built around a lake. We took an autorickshaw, weaving through the traffic, between lumbering DTC buses, honking cars and pedestrians who’d spilled onto the road from sidewalks choked with garbage and abandoned construction material. In certain places, Delhi swayed in a perpetual state of chaos, and that night I was glad for the tumult. The bar was located in the unsavoury side of Model Town, just off the imaginatively named 2^nd Main Road. Clusters of men loitered around, hovering close to a paan and cigarette stall. How they stared at us—this strange duo, a tall white foreigner and his small-built companion who looked as much an outsider.

Inside, a low smoke-cloud hung over the room. The clientele, middle-aged and solely male, dotted the tables, seated with their drinks and plates of glistening murg tikka masala and seekh kebabs. I don’t remember what we were drinking, but it was different from the usual stuff we swilled in college—foul Haywards 10,000 for a cheap, quick high or a blindingly acidic whisky called Binnie Scot. It wasn’t long before I lost count of the refills. The bar transformed into a warm cocoon. A small planet spiraling into free fall, plummeting through space. The lights were brighter and dimmer all at once, the air pulsing with a musical beat that arose from all corners.

I know who killed Lenny.

I thought I heard myself say those words; I wasn’t certain.

Nicholas placed his hand on my arm. He wasn’t killed, he said.

He was.

“Your sister explained… there were complications…”

No, he was killed.

In my head, I was adamant.

“Why do you say so, Nehemiah?”

I stayed silent.

He asked me again.

Much as I wanted to confide in him, at the time I couldn’t bring myself to explain.

If art is preservation, it is also confession.

Few lectures stay with me from my university days—a class on DH Lawrence’s language of synesthesia, Woolf’s complex layering of time, Ismat Chughtai’s seething denouncement of the world—and those that do were mostly delivered by Doctor Mahesar. A professor of petite yet rotund build and razor-sharp articulation. His tutorial room was atop the college building, on the open, flat roof, overlooking the lawns and trees, where in the evening, squawking parrots came to roost. In the summer, it was unbearable, a compact, vicious furnace, with only the rare, welcome visitation of a breeze.

One morning, we discussed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

We watched beads of sweat form on Doctor Mahesar’s forehead, and stream gently down the contours of his face. Before him, bent over our Annotated T. S. Eliot, we similarly perspired—the smell of sweat, pungent as a sliced onion, hung in the air. Last year, under identical sweltering conditions, Doctor Mahesar had thrown his text on the table. “I give up.” He said he couldn’t teach “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” without crumbling under the weight of irony.

Naturally, he was everyone’s favorite professor.

That day, everyone in the room hoped for a similar tirade, seeing there was mention of fog and cool winter evenings, but no such shenanigans took place.

“How does the poem begin?” he asked, holding the text up to us like a mirror.

There was a mumble of voices—Let us go then, you and I… when the evening is spread out against the sky…

“That is incorrect.”

Small circles of confusion spun around the room. Finally, a girl in the front row spoke up, “It begins with an epigraph.”

“Thank you, Ameya. Yes, it begins with an epigraph.”

“You mean the part we can’t understand,” said someone from the back.

“Yes, Noel. The part in Italian, which, if you’ve heard of it, is a Neo-Latin Romance language spoken mainly in Europe.”

The class sniggered.

“S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse, a persona che mai tornasse al mondo… Now, I’m sure there’s someone here who can recite it for us word for word in translation.”

There was deep and resolute silence.

The professor spoke the lines softly.

“If I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker… But since, up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed. So you see, the poem begins with the promise of a secret between the soul of the dead… and you.”

He placed the book on the table and mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief.

“Why do you think this is poised as a confession?” The class stared back, blank as the blackboard behind him. “Because that’s the psychology of secrets,” he explained. “People have a primitive or compelling need to divulge their emotional experiences to others. Confessions can be written as letters, notes, diaries, or in this case, an entire poem…”

For a long time I couldn’t tell Nicholas about who’d killed Lenny.

I felt it was the promise of a secret between the soul of the dead and me.

It may have been a coincidence, as these things usually are, but after the talk in the conference hall, I frequently noticed Nicholas around campus. It wasn’t all too difficult to spot him, since he was one of few Caucasians around, although admittedly Delhi University had seen its fair share of white folk, most of whom eccentric. A French sociologist who cycled around wearing a Vietnamese nón lá (some say that’s how he’d traveled to India from Paris), an Anglo-Indian professor of literature who couldn’t ever remember who’d written what, “Shelley’s Ode to a Nightingale”, and a visiting biologist from Germany who brewed his coffee in intricate laboratory apparatus. Nicholas, though, was more object of fervent curiosity.

Often, he’d visit the senior member’s common room, mingling with the other professors, obtrusive for his youth—the rest were mostly grey-haired gentlemen and a few prim salwar or sari-clad ladies—and attire. Pale shirts of impossibly fine cotton, pressed and pristine, sharp-cut trousers, stylish loafers. Simple yet hard to imitate; everything I could afford in the market looked—there’s no other way to say this—cheap. Sometimes, he’d lounge in the college café, drinking endless cups of tea, writing in a black notebook, picking at a serving of mince cutlets and buttered toast. Or he’d read, on the fringes of the lawn, under the generous canopy of peepal trees.

I’d watch him, follow his movements, keep a lookout for when he’d visit the campus.

As, I suspect, did many of the other students.

It wasn’t only because he was a white stranger.

There was something thrillingly mysterious about him.

Or so everyone liked to believe.

From here and there, I caught snatches of rumor.

That he was a new lecturer who’d recently joined the faculty, that he was a visiting scholar from Cambridge. Someone else said he was here on fieldwork, conducting research at the National Museum.

Among the students, the girls in particular, he was of special interest; they sought him out and jostled for his attention. Some claimed to have befriended “Nick”, saying he’d paid keen attention to their theories on the earliest figurative representations of the Buddha.

Occasionally, in the corridors and lawns, I saw him with Adheer.

And strange as it may sound, I was stung by jealousy. That Adheer was marked out from the rest. That it wasn’t me. Although then it seemed impossible, unthinkable even, that I could be similarly acquainted with the art historian.

I was in most ways unremarkable.

I’d always felt so. Once, I read about Italo Svevo, a nineteenth-century Italian writer whose characters are often referred to as uomini senza qualità… men without qualities… people whose qualities are ambiguous, dilute… perhaps in some ways even inept with the world.

And I thought that could be me.

When I looked in the mirror, I always wished I occupied more space, that my reflection was less inconsequential. In college I wasn’t painfully thin, or scrawny—I played football often—just… slight. And I’d examine my face, in the time it took for me to splash it at the sink, knowing they were there to stay—the eyes, a shade slanted, that diminutive nose, a full stop rather than an exclamation mark. My mouth. Like squashed fruit.

Above all this, I had no reason to approach the art historian. Even if I did, I was certain I’d be unable to muster up the courage. And why shouldn’t it be Adheer? Marked out from the rest. From a royal family in Indore, I’d heard. With his elegantly tailored kurtas, long and light, flowing like a breeze around him. Adheer was the most sophisticated of us all (though, at the time, we preferred “pretentious”). While we listened to Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, rich and tragic ragas drifted out of his room. While we thumbed through Salinger and Camus—like every generation before us we held Catcher in the Rye and The Outsider intimately and preciously our own—he claimed to have read all of Krishnamurti, all of Kabir.

“Perhaps,” I’d offer, “they didn’t get along.”

I’d be met by incredulity. And a look. You’re an idiot.

One thing I was certain of, though, was that Adheer wasn’t unremarkable.

A month into term, I tried to let my interest slip. Although it was difficult to ignore the whispers and hushed discussions swarming around Nicholas, alighting on him like bees. Once, outside the college café, where students usually gathered to smoke, I caught his name in conversation. Two girls, chatting, holding glasses of nimbu paani. I’d seen the one with short hair and a nose ring in last term’s college production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’d played Titania, the fairy queen, and scandalized the senior members, and thrilled the rest, with her Biblical choice of costume—little more than flowers and leaves. Her companion, a willowy girl with sleek, straight hair and a pale almond-shaped face, came from my part of the country. A “chinky,” as they called us here in the north. She was studying English in the year below mine, and even though I hadn’t ever spoken to her, I knew her name was Larisa.

I bought a samosa from the makeshift snack stall nearby, one that also dispensed lemon juice, and didn’t stray far, keeping them within eavesdropping distance.

“He’s British, but of Greek ancestry,” said Titania. “That’s what he told Priya, apparently.”

I hadn’t known, but it explained the olive skin, the dark hair.

“Talk about a Greek god,” giggled her friend.

“You think? He’s tall and all that… but not really my type…”

“Yes, because you prefer skinny struggling artists.”

They both laughed.

I bit into the samosa—the shell came away in my hands, loosening the soft potato and peas filling. It steamed gently on the paper plate, while the tamarind sauce pooled darkly around the edges.

“You should invite him to a house party…” said Titania. “I’m sure someone’s planning one soon.”

Her friend lifted a dainty eyebrow. “Why not? I don’t think he teaches here. Maybe we can get him drunk… although, I’m not sure he’d come.”

“We could ask Adheer to invite him.”

“Adheer?”

“They spend a lot of time together… don’t you think?”

“What are you saying?” laughed her friend.

“Don’t be an idiot, Lari, you know what I mean.”

“What do you mean?” She sounded genuinely confused.

“I think they’re… you know…” She must have mouthed the word for I couldn’t hear her. What I did catch was Lari’s cry of repulsion.

“That’s disgusting… you really think so? It’s so gross.”

Titania sipped her drink, and stayed silent.

What I observed, over the weeks, was that Nicholas didn’t pay special attention to anyone in particular. He was indiscriminately charming. When in the mood. Or resolutely cool. He remembered people’s names, or at least had a way of requesting them to remind him so they weren’t slighted. He appeared attentive, if not deeply interested. Mostly, I think, he enjoyed the attention. And tired of it just as easily.

People have fickle memories though. And often they mainly remember the agreeable, latching on to the winsome details. A wave across the lawn. At the café, a round of tea at his insistence and expense. A recommended book. His smile. Rare, precious gesture—that in an instant swept you into his closest, most secret circle.

Yet the lines were drawn long before we imagined, who would be allowed in, how much, how far, always keeping, inevitably, to himself. Intact. In his own hands, he was porcelain.

I see that now.

If he spent more time with Adheer, it was because Adheer sought him out more persistently, and successfully, than all the others. Hurrying after him in the corridors, waiting, nonchalantly, by the gates, reading on the lawns. Accompanying him to university talks and seminars. And while Nicholas escaped unscathed, for it didn’t strike anyone to mock him, people called Adheer a “bender” behind his back. Others employed their words more delicately: “Look at him,” they whispered, “that poo pusher.”

In college everything was sexualized.

And looking back now, I realize, that was one thread that stitched us into some kind of collective. The mystery of sex, and (mostly) its lack.

Living in residence halls fueled by male camaraderie, regarding the close co-existence of girls, their mighty distance. In there, we were swamped by complex hierarchies and communal fissures, trapped in an intricate system of jurisdiction—where the Jats were feared, the Punjus scorned, the northeasterners ignored, the Gujjus mocked, the Tam Brams held in mild amusement, the Bongs quietly tolerated, the Mallus generally liked by all and sundry. Then came the broader divisions of sports quota folk and special reservations, the slackers and endless Civil Service sloggers, the cool and uncool, the artsies and sciencees.

All entwined in the general joyful wastefulness of youth. And something else.

We’d move from room to room, swapping cigarettes, alcohol and lies. Talking, skirting the issue, the act of, plucking euphemisms from insecurity—do it, bang, beat, bone, bugger, screw, bonk, go all the way, home run, old in-out, pound, bed, shag, slay, mount, boff, bugger, cut, dance, dip, doink, scuff, fire, fubb, fuck, fug, do the nasty, get any, get it on, get lucky, give it up, hit it raw, hit skins, have a go, grease, hose, knock, make the beast with two backs, woopie, nail, ram, rock and roll, score, shine it, slap and tickle, smack, smash, lay, hump, plow, quickie, romp, ride, roger, you know what.

It was endless, and language the sheet with which we all hid our nakedness, and longing.

On most weekends, the residence halls emptied, as students headed out to South Delhi or Connaught Place—the ones who could afford to drink at newly opened bars or watch movies at shiny multiplex cinemas. I’d been to South Delhi a few times, traveling there on a long bus ride from the Inter State Bus Terminal at Kashmiri Gate, filled with vehicles spewing smoke, roaring like metallic monsters. Past the green expanse of Raj Ghat alongside Mahatma Gandhi Road, the perpetually chaotic ITO, and the gated distance of Pragati Maidan. Slowing down once the bus cut into the city, passing through Lajpat Nagar with its labyrinthine market, the calmer environs of Siri Fort, Delhi’s second city, bourgeoisly concealing its brutal origins—founded by Ala-ud-din Khilji on the severed heads of eight thousand Mongol soldiers. From there, it wasn’t far to our destination, to Saket Complex, lined with air-conditioned shops, a colorful new McDonalds and TGIF, and, its crowning glory, a royal blue-gold PVR cinema.

Others made their way to neighborhoods clustered around the college campus, to flats and apartments rented by their outstation friends, for parties fueled by cheap booze and marijuana. There were some, who stayed in, from not having been invited, or propeled by the fear of an unfinished assignment.

A Sunday night spent mustering inspiration to discuss Waiting For Godot as an existentialist text. The essence of existentialism focuses on the concept of the individual’s freedom of choice, as opposed to the belief that humans are controlled by a pre-existing omnipotent being, such as God. Estragon and Vladimir have made the choice of waiting, without instruction or guidance…

After a few insipid attempts, I’d usually sneak down to the common room in the residence hall. In the dark, the television screen burned tense and bright. Muted souls sat on the ground; one close enough to change channels expertly with an outstretched leg. The set had recently been hooked to Star TV and moved effortlessly from one channel to the next. Music followed by sport followed by the news, by movies and back again, in a dizzying circle. A ring of sacred, ancient rocks, surrounded by solstice worshippers. Often, I’d sit at the back while the others argued over what to watch—highlights of a tennis match between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, last year’s Bollywood blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, or endless MTV, where Nirvana and Pearl Jam displayed incredible angst and apathy.

Invariably, the dissent ceased at eleven. When the adult films aired.

Movies for which no one cared about the plot. A psychiatrist who fell in love with his troubled patient. A professor with his student. A young boy with his older neighbor.

Hisses and whistles broke out each time the girl’s dress dropped, or the lead ran his hand up her thigh. The images unfolded in a montage of flesh and desire. Nobody bothered to follow dialogue, waiting mostly for the scenes in the pool, the shower. In a room that looked like a picture from a magazine, filled with plush leather sofas and pristine glass tables (did people really live like that?), where they (always a man and woman) fell in a heap on a spongy grey carpet. And then moved seamlessly to a wooden bed with rumpled blue sheets. Her bare breasts shiny and heaving under his hand. With a twist he’d grind into her from the back, while she clung loosely to the head board. Another time, in a Jacuzzi, lathered and wet, the water soapy in strategic places. She’d climb on top and arch against him. Scene change. And they’d be in a room filled with light streaming in from tall windows. On a table, he’d cradle her back and lean in towards her. Then the image splintered—caught in a kaleidoscopic reflection of bodies writhing in pleasure. When the credits rolled, few would leave. We waited, breathless, to watch the next offering.

In college, everything was sexualized, yet it was impossible to talk about sex.

On rare occasion, though, they took place, those conversations that cut cleanly through the euphemisms. When I returned to Delhi in mid-July for my second year at university, I found I’d been shifted into a room with someone new. A spindly long-limbed Tibetan. Kalsang, I was relieved to find, was minimally intrusive. He didn’t talk all that much, he didn’t pry, or ask me questions about my life in my hometown, or why I wrote letters to Lenny. We shared joints and lives of mutual exclusivity.

Yet sometimes, late at night, when it was marginally cooler, we’d keep the window open, our room filling with the fragrance of something sweet, a distant flowering saptaparni. The pathways outside cobbled and vacant, bathed in yellow lamplight. We had conversations that, at that hour, people usually only held with themselves. Entirely plausible, of course, that this was intimacy occasioned by weed or alcohol, but I like to think it a special exclusion.

“I lost my virginity to my cousin,” Kalsang once told me. “I was fourteen, she was seventeen. We were visiting them in Kathmandu… I was sleeping on a mattress in the sitting room and she came downstairs… I was so scared someone would walk in. You know, my parents were sleeping in the next room… if they’d caught me…”

“What would’ve happened?”

“I don’t know… they would’ve killed me.”

“Do you still see her?”

A long, errant silence. “Sometimes.”

On another night, even though I was terrified, I admitted, “I’ve never, you know…”

“What?”

“You know…”

I could see him, in the darkness, his outline upright on the bed.

“Never done anything?” he asked.

It didn’t count, I suppose, the boy from my class in school, who I’d “accidentally” meet in the toilets or a corner of the empty library. The one in Math tuition, who sat beside me, his hand below the table, on my thigh, unconcerned by the mysteries of trigonometry. In my hometown, I’d hang out with Lenny, and he hardly talked about girls, or to girls. So I didn’t tell him about my sister’s friend, how she’d lean over while I was at my study table… “Such a good boy, always reading”… her neckline dropping low and open. How she’d casually brush against my arm, my shoulder, if we happened to cross paths in the kitchen, the corridor.

In college, I stayed away. Uneasy. Apprehensive. Unsure. There were too many invisible, unspoken rules to navigate. I thought of Adheer. Poo pusher. What would Kalsang do? If I told him. Would he shift out of our room too?

“So… nothing?” he reiterated.

“No.”

The silence lay rich and deep.

His voice broke through the darkness. “That’s okay, man. They say the longer you wait, the better it feels.”

This wasn’t, couldn’t be, true, not in this world or the next, but that’s the reason I was fond of Kalsang. He was exceptionally cheerful.

He began inviting me to parties outside college, probably in a bid to alter my chaste circumstances. But in vain. These were mostly large gatherings—immense crowds of strangers, friends of friends of friends—and I shied away. I could see, though, that it was a liberation. Outstation students who lived in the city harnessing a new, unbridled freedom. It couldn’t have always been this way, but the country was changing. Opening its arms—multiple, like pictures of all those Hindu goddesses hanging in auto rickshaws and shops—to the world, embracing the policies of tomorrow. The ones that had brought Coca Cola and Hallmark into our markets, MTV into our homes, and stamped Levi’s across our asses. Allegedly, this was “freedom of choice”. And it filtered to us, in our student room, with its wobbly wooden tables and bare lamps, rumpled sheets and uncushioned chairs, all coated in a layer of undisputed dust. We could head elsewhere, if we preferred, somewhere brighter, more glittery. Where everyone dressed like the people on TV, and danced to the latest music, and believed that somehow, because of all this, they were unbelievably lucky.

“Want to come?” Kalsang would ask.

“Alright, let’s go.”

The night awaited, brimming with possibility.

I never did find out whether anything happened between Nicholas and Adheer.

Despite the rumors.

In all our time together, I hesitated to ask.

(In all our time together, I hardly needed to think of Adheer.)

They made me think of Adheer.

I suppose it’s an alliance that calls for some explanation.

One morning, in late September, I headed out the college campus into the Ridge Forest. Trying, fervently, to avoid thinking of a news item from a few weeks ago—a corpse had been found, hastily hidden in the undergrowth. For days, newspapers plied their choicest headlines: “Mystery Body”; “Mutilated beyond recognition”; “Advanced stages of putrefaction.”

Apparently, this happened here with disconcerting frequency.

And if it wasn’t the discovery of a corpse, the Ridge, as with most ancient places, seethed with other stories. Of unhappy spirits that lived in its trees. Of a strange creature, similar to a white horse with a very long neck, which could often be sighted at night. Of a ghostly woman and child weeping. It was well known too that amorous couples found shelter here behind the cover of shadow and leaves.

In all honesty, I might have preferred coming across a ghost.

My journey through the forest proved quiet, and disappointingly, uneventful.

Beneath my feet, the ground squelched, softened by months of monsoon rain, and the air carried the smell of damp, decaying things. Here and there, a high-rising gulmohar, now green and unblooming, and the sparse babul with yellow summer blossoms. Hidden amid the others, the petite ber, with drooping, glossy leaves, and, of which I was fondest, the golden amaltash, when it was radiant against a blue April sky. I hadn’t ever spotted any yet, but the forest was inhabited by gentle chinkara and blue-coated nilgai. Once or twice, I thought I’d glimpsed a tiny leaf warbler, and the sudden scarlet of a rose finch. Over the years, this place had remained unaltered while the landscape around its fringes transformed rapidly—on one side the university buildings, on the other, the Civil Lines neighborhood, demarcated from imperial-era military zones, a remnant of the British Raj. In comparison to the south of the city, though, the north was relatively static.

The South, if you’ll forgive the hyperbole, was our generation’s brave new world.

Heaving with suddenly wealthy neighborhoods, its roads peeling under the speed of foreign cars. Everywhere the fresh scent of money, the incredible hum of movement.

It all seemed terrifically heady and exciting, but here, in the north, beyond the Dantian circles of Connaught Place, the tangle of crowded markets in the old walled city, the hulking sandstone loneliness of the Red Fort, life was still somewhat slow and untouched.

And that afternoon, as I tread on a slushy dirt track, listening to the sounds of a forest, I could have been miles away from a city of many millions.

“In a forest,” Lenny once told me, “all time is trapped.”

Admittedly, tramping through the Ridge wasn’t a preferred pastime. I was on a journalistic mission. In my first year in college, I’d been accosted by Santanu, a lanky Bengali with the (still) faint beginnings of a mustache and wispy long hair.

“Would you like to write an article?” he asked.

“For?”

“The college newsletter.” Of which Santanu was the often despairing, yet resilient, student editor.

“I’m not sure I’m the best person for this.”

“You’re in English Lit, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“Everyone in the Lit department can write. Or at least has some secret ambition to be the next Rushdie or something.”

Accustomed to persuading reluctant contributors, Santanu wasn’t one to give up easily—“I’ll give you plenty of time”; “You’ll see your name in print”, and finally, “I’ll buy you beer.”

Okay, I said, suddenly convinced.

Since then, I often wrote for the newsletter—a piece on the oldest academic bookstore in Kamla Nagar, a commercial area near the University, interviews with visiting lecturers, a book review as though penned by Chaucer: But thilke text held he nat worth an oistre.

That day, I was trudging through the forest looking for a story.

Soon, I came to a clearing. And there stood a four-tiered tower, atop a stepped platform, built of fire-red sandstone, capped by a Celtic cross.

Santanu wanted me to write on the Mutiny Memorial.

Apart from solemn, elegiac monument to the dead, it also served, for years now, as a frequent nocturnal hangout for university students. For gatherings of the least expensive and un-glamorous kind. Usually, the birthday boy spent the money his parents sent him to buy “something nice” on a neat half dozen bottles of whisky. Now, though, the place was vacant, strewn with the remnants of revelry, cigarette butts, broken bottles and greasy bits of newspaper.

The tower glowed warm and fiery against the sky. Over a century ago, it had been built by the British to commemorate the soldiers who died in the Mutiny of 1857. (Or as Santanu explained, more appropriately “India’s First War of Independence.”) It rose above the trees in solid, symmetrical lines, tipped by elaborate Gothic adornments. On the walls, white plaques carried the indecipherable names of the dead. An arched doorway led to the upper tiers, although a thick, rusty chain was slung across the entrance and a signboard, in English and Hindi, warned against using the stairs. I peered inside; the rubble floor was choked with weeds and plastic bags. It was moving and absurd all at once—this promethean bid for remembrance. Its faithfully distilled recording of history. I looked around wondering if this was the only one in the forest. What other monuments were there, rising from the ground like giant tombstones?

In the stillness of the evening, I heard a distant echo of voices, the slap of footfall. It might have been students, gathering to drink or smoke weed. Perhaps a courting couple, looking for some privacy. Through the trees, I caught a glimpse of two figures. One in a long blue kurta. Peppery grey hair. The other in a pastel shirt. In his hand, an old-fashioned briefcase.

I was caught in inexplicable panic.

In that instant, I could have jumped into the shrubbery—but the noise might alert them. What would I say if I were seen? It was too late to flee down the path leading out of the forest to the main road.

Perhaps it was better to stay where I was.

Unless, it suddenly struck me, they’d come here to be on their own.

They were getting closer; I could hear laughter, the sharp crack of undergrowth.

On impulse, I jumped over the chain strung across the doorway and ducked inside, fumbling up the stairs that spiraled into darkness. Loose rubble scattered from under my feet, and a queer stench clung to the air, a mixture of urine and moldy dampness.

Their footsteps grew louder, hitting stone. I could hear the art historian’s voice.

I imagined them gazing at the tower.

From here, his could be the only voice in the world.

“Architecturally, there’s nothing quite like it in Delhi.” Adheer was speaking. “It’s built in a high Victorian Gothic style…”

Did he really need to explain this to an art historian?

“Why this particular place, though?”

I didn’t know, but Adheer hazarded a guess. “It was the site of a British army camp, I think, during the rebellion… Of course, back then, this whole area was forest and marshland…”

They were circling the tower slowly. The art historian pieced together the few still-visible names into a curious mantra—DelamainChesterNicholsonRussellBrooks. He pronounced them carefully, as though the chant would somehow keep their memory alive.

Adheer went on to explain how in 1972, the twenty-fifth year of India’s independence, the monument was renamed Ajitgarh, Place of the Unvanquished, and the government had a plaque put up with corrections—“That the “enemy” mentioned on the memorial were immortal martyrs for freedom…”

The art historian stopped by the doorway. Blocking the patch of light pooling on the floor. Would he hear me breathing? Or somehow sense I was there.

“Does this go all the way to the top?”

I was tempted to inch up further, but was afraid I’d dislodge some rubble, or worse, have a stair give way under my feet. For now, where I was, they couldn’t see me.

“I don’t think so… it’s like at the Qutub Minar. They’ve closed the stairway for safety reasons.”

In the silence that followed, I could hear the art historian deliberating. The stench around me grew stronger.

“See…” I imagined Adheer pointing at the signboard. “It says it’s unsafe. Better not risk it…”

I was thankful for his caution. The art historian stepped aside.

The pool of light emerged whole, intact.

I shifted imperceptibly, in relief, and wished they’d walk back into the forest, leave me with my ruin.

“It doesn’t smell very inviting.” I could hear their laughter, then as though in obedience, their voices and footsteps faded.

At first, I couldn’t move. My limbs caught in a grip, still tight and motionless. Above me rose a strange, secret rustling. Was it an owl? A squirrel? Perhaps I’d disturbed the creatures that inhabited the tower. Under my feet, a silver-green masala-flavoured chips packet glistened, long empty. I wondered who else had strayed there, and when, and dropped it at that spot. And why?

I began descending. I should leave. It was getting late. I’d prefer to be out of the forest before dark. When I’d almost reached the bottom, Adheer and the art historian drifted back. They’d probably only moved to the edge of the platform. I stopped short, pressing myself against the curved stone wall.

Even though they hadn’t been gone long, something had shifted, their voices oddly tense.

“I know what it is,” the art historian was saying, his voice clear, ringing through the air. “I know why… that’s why we’re here… and it’s alright.”

I was uncertain what Adheer said, if he said anything at all.

“I don’t see how it could happen…”

“Of course… I-I don’t know what… I mean… I didn’t mean…” It was the first time I’d heard Adheer stumble over his words.

“It’s not like I don’t understand.”

“I know… I didn’t mean…”

“It’s alright.” There was a brief, tight pause, before he continued. “Why don’t you show me where the plaque is?”

“Yes… yes, it’s here. This way…”

Again, their voices, and footfall, died away. This time they didn’t return.

In our time together, I thought this was one of few details hidden from me about Nicholas. The strangeness of love is it tempts you to feel you haven’t met a person at a particular moment in their life, a mere sliver of time, but that somehow you’ve embraced it all. Their laden pasts, their abundant present, and (you hope so much) their undiscovered future. I did try and enquire, occasionally, as elliptically as I could—whether he’d been for many walks in the Ridge, if he’d heard some of the stories about the place, the ghosts, the strange creatures, the couples and parties at the monument.

He’d furrow his brow. “Yes… Myra and I explored it a few times too…”

Myra was his step-sister, who’d visited him in Delhi over Christmas that year. I wasn’t keen to discuss her, bring her into our conversation; while she was around, I hardly stayed at the bungalow, and Nicholas and I were never alone.

Had anything odd ever happened? In the Ridge.

I had to leave it at that; I wouldn’t like to try his patience.

I never confessed what I’d overheard, him and Adheer, and how.

Once, though, I asked if he knew about the pond.

“In the forest? Are you sure?”

I was certain.

When he asked me where, I couldn’t explain its exact location.

I found it the afternoon I ducked into the tower.

By the time I emerged, it was early evening, and in the twilight, the forest had thickened, hiding its paths under leafy shadow. Suddenly, it wasn’t a place to be alone. I tried to retrace my steps, but must’ve taken a wrong turn. The track disappeared and the ground hollowed into a pond. The water green and solid, clogged with lotus roots and leaves. I stood at the edge, the woods around me glistening with hidden light. I turned back, my breath heavy, a trace of fear on my tongue. Something struck at my shoulder, a dead, heavyweight branch. As panic rose like a dark thing from my chest, I caught a glimpse of the mud track leading out to the main road.

When people leave unexpectedly… Nicholas, Lenny… you are left only with unanswered questions; they travel long with you, looping their way into your thoughts, becoming your intimate companions.

“But where are you going?” I’d ask Lenny, and he’d offer no reply. On those afternoons he wouldn’t permit me to accompany him, on those evenings he didn’t return to his room. The mud, unexplained, splattered on his motorbike wheels.

Maybe on one of those excursions he met Mihir.

The stranger.

The solitary backpacker who drifted into our hometown, winding his way from the northern tip of the country, down the wild mountains, across wide rivers and into our sloping streets. He had coal-dust eyes, and mercilessly sun-darkened skin. I remember he carried the scent of bonfires, of nights spent out in the open, of old wood-bone. He spoke softly, hesitant for you to hear what he had to say.

While I was working on somehow getting through my final exams in my last year in school, Lenny took Mihir for bike rides out of town, to all the secret tea stalls he’d shown me. To the forest. The lady at the one-room tea shop called them her butterflies.

I met them infrequently—between tuition, extra classes, and paranoid parents, I had little time—yet when I did, I could sense Lenny was secretly, silently reanimated. They would travel together, it was planned.

“Where?” I asked in wonder.

And Mihir, in his twilight voice would tell us where he’d been. To Varanasi, sitting at Assi Ghat at dawn, to Sandakphu from where you could see the Himalayas, and four of the highest peaks in the world. To a hidden, abandoned fort along the Konkan coast.

For a while, it was alive, the map hanging on the wall, glowing with promise.

Yet living is all loss.

And time, or rather the passage of time, doesn’t bring understanding. Only invention, appropriation. A wild attempt to prop up the past before it slides out of sight. Often, I feel I haven’t truly left the forest. That I’m still there, astray on an endless evening. Stumbling around in the darkness, looking for a clearing, where anything is possible.

If Kalsang’s parents would have “killed him” if they discovered he was sleeping with his cousin, mine would have done the same if they suspected the slightest deviance. So I was careful, making sure I was in my room every second Sunday when they called on the common telephone in the corridor. It rang loudly and often, when it worked, that is, or hadn’t been set on fire for fun, or stolen by someone looking to make some quick, easy money.

On any given day, it was difficult to carry on a conversation with my father.

I remember once, when I was still in school, he brought home a sapling from the market, a delicate green thing wrapped in plastic and soil. He planted it in our garden thinking it was a flowering hydrangea, but it grew into something else. A great tangling creeper with dark leaves and rare orange blossoms. And he’d stand in front of it bewildered.

What is this?

Sometimes, he looked at me the same way.

It didn’t help that, more often than not, the corridor erupted in riotous distraction. At the far end, boys played “indoor cricket” with a tennis ball, someone else danced around in a towel and little else. Music blared from many rooms, spanning various eras and genres. Kishore Kumar from one, Black Sabbath from the other.

Our conversations proceeded the same way each time, as though we were working meticulously through a checklist.

“Hello.”

“Hello… can you hear me?” My father always asked.

“Yes… hello pa.”

I can still imagine him now, walking out the house, down the sloping road to the market, to a PCO round the corner, a small shop with a telephone booth attached to it like an afterthought. A black and yellow signboard dangling over its door. Nine o’clock was late for my hometown. Its streets would be empty, filled only with a flimsy mist and nippy breeze. My father would be tired, after a day’s work at the hospital, but he’d wait until the crowds were gone to escape the queue at the PCO.

“Howwwzzzaaaaatttttt!” the cricketers would shout.

“What’s that?” My father’s voice would ripple, like he was speaking underwater.

“Nothing, pa.”

“What was that noise?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay. How’s everything?”

“Fine.”

Conversations were a staccato recital—short, abrupt, awkward.

“How’s ma?”

“She’s here… she wants to speak to you.”

“And Joyce? How is she?”

“She’s fine… busy with her work.”

My elder sister was a nurse in Calcutta. We wrote each other occasional letters, but moved in different worlds, which barely touched apart from when we both happened to be home.

At times, with my father, I’d feel more expansive.

“I’m writing an article for the college magazine.”

“Is it part of your course work?”

“No… I’m just writing it…”

“When are your next holidays?”

And I’d tell him. Pujas. Diwali. Christmas.

“For how long?”

“About two weeks… I think.”

“It’s better you stay in Delhi then… it’s too short…”

“Yes.” There were other reasons my father preferred that I stay away from my hometown.

“Here, speak to your mother…”

This would be a relief. My mother was easier, more affectionate.

She’d run through all her concerns—food, cleanliness and the heat.

“I’m fine, ma, don’t worry.”

“Your sister is thin as a stick; I told her how can she nurse other people if she won’t look after herself.”

I could imagine Joyce’s face, the way she’d click her tongue in exasperation.

I smiled. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

I’d allow my mother to chatter on—a cousin having a baby, a grand-uncle in hospital, an aunt visiting over the weekend. The news was as distant as I felt about my hometown, standing in the corridor, cradling the receiver against my cheek.

“Alright, dear… we’ll speak to you again soon…”

Sometimes, I’d slip it in. “Ma, what news of Lenny?”

A sharp breath, the beep of the machine. Beep. And then a few seconds more.

“Nothing, as yet. He’s still there…”

“For how long, ma?”

“Until he’s cured.”

And there was nothing left for me to say but good night.

Sometimes, I tried to imagine Lenny.

From the hints in his letters, the tiny details he slipped in without noticing, or assuming them to be of importance. In the room next to his, a young boy drew picture after picture of a black sun. Over and over, in infinite, untiring circles. “Why don’t you draw something else?” they’d tell the boy. And he would. A forest, a house, a line of mountains. Then he’d finish with a black circle, coloring it in until the crayon broke. On the other side, the room to his right, a girl would silently play with stones—five pebbles that she’d toss in the air and scatter on the ground. Picking up each one carefully as though they were jewels.

Nem, I am wedged between the earth and sky.

In the evenings, if he looked out the window, through the patterned grill, he’d see the silvery gleam of pine trees, and far away, the uneven shape of hills, the brittle disc of the moon, precariously balanced. From where I am, the town lights are too distant to be visible. Night after night sleep would not come. For sleep, he said, was pressed into small white pellets, chipped away from the moon. Arranged neatly, like his night clothes, in a row, washed with clear, spring water, in which it dissolved like star dust, and swam to the tips of his fingers, his toes, somewhere to the crown of his head.

I wondered when he started gathering sleep—the pellets dispensed after dinner. The lady in white was meant to watch him swallow, but she was careless, a little impatient. She had many sleeps to give away. He stored them in a pen he’d hollowed, throwing away the cartridge. He’d have collected enough when it was full. Enough sleep, so he wouldn’t need to wake up to the brightness of this room. This square cell. The world that was too green and hurt his eyes. So he wouldn’t need to see the way they looked at him. Wracked with this sickness. Under his breath, he murmured lines from memory. He’d read somewhere that when an earthquake buried an entire city, people underground kept themselves alive reciting poetry.

But now all these heavy books are no use to me any more, for

Where I go, words carry no weight: it is best

Then, I surrender their fascinating counsel

to the silent dissolution of the sea

which misuses nothing because it values nothing.

He too would do the same. Recite from memory, each syllable marking the passage of time.

But for how long? And why?

How slowly time passed in the dark.

See, barely a minute.

Here we are, still waiting.

For something to drop.

In his hand, I imagined, sleep lay in neat clusters, in the centre of his palm. He unscrewed the pen cap and filled it up, a boy collecting treasure.

Did he remember dark skin, how it quivered below him? Hair a thousand shades of dusk and light. It was a thing of shame.

Out the window, the moon would be wakeful. The trees hushed in the breeze. How he longed to be beneath them, to curl his hand into the earth. He said he often thought of all the times we’d done that, him and I, his young friend. Going to the forest behind his house, smoking cheap cigarettes, lost among the trees.

Once, in the deepest part of night, when darkness had unfurled to its full, long length, he stepped out of bed, and moved to his desk. A small table by the window. In the light of a milky pre-dawn, mingled with the last sprinklings of the stars, he drew faces. His mother, when she was most vulnerable, when she checked on him at night in his room and thought he was asleep and couldn’t see her face as she looked into his and tried to fathom what she had brought into the world. His father, always twisted with rage. Such a deep and secret anger. The stranger. But this one he crumpled. Then he smoothed it out and filed it away.

Me. His friend, with a face that looked to him with love.

He sketched each portrait with care and precision. Emptying his memory of them on to paper. Marking his name at the edge of the page, over and again—Lenny, Lenny, Lenny. He would send them away, his memories. So he was lighter. So sleep would take him easily and lay him down with her in a dark and hollow place where he could rest for all time.

Of all the parties I attended in my years in university, there’s one I remember in particular.

For many reasons.

The venue was in Hudson Lines, a neighborhood of tottering multi-story houses, packed tightly together, close to a wide, sluggish canal choked with garbage. On still evenings, the air was ripe with the sickly-sweet stench of decay. No one seemed to mind. The kids playing badminton on the sidewalk, the aunties wedged around the vegetable cart, prodding papayas-cucumbers-tomatoes, the pot-bellied men lounging in their vests and lungis, demurely dressed young ladies walking home from tuition. Living with the perpetual smell of decay. Perhaps it is possible to get used to anything.

Kalsang and I rattled along the potholed road on a cycle rickshaw.

“Bas,” he said. We stopped in front of a biscuit-colored house, with a narrow unlit staircase. We climbed, stumbling over sleeping dogs and garbage bags, to a flat on the fifth floor. From behind the door came the dull leaden thud of music. Even now, before I enter a party, when I’m standing outside the entrance, listening, I wish, for an instant, I hadn’t come. I feel I’m intruding on some secret ritualistic practice of a tribe I don’t belong to.

We stepped into a large terrace space, dotted with people sitting in dark corners, standing with glasses against the railings. It seemed everyone, apart from my roommate, was a stranger. People called out to Kalsang, saying hello, asking him if he had any “maal”.

A stereo in the corner spilled tunes into the warm night air—But it’s just a sweet, sweet fantasy, baby… several voices sang out, rising from a mesh of bodies swaying to the beat… When I close my eyes you come and you take me.

I stood by the bar—a rickety wooden table strewn with glasses and bottle tops—and watched the others dancing. There’s no beginning and there is no end.

“I’ll be right back,” said Kalsang, and disappeared for the rest of the evening.

I poured myself a drink. Cold, frothy beer. Behind me, the lights of the city flickered between tree tops and wires. I wondered whether I could see the mutiny memorial from here. Rising above the treetops. Far below, bathed in orange-yellow lamplight, the road was beginning to empty. A few couples marched by, intent on an evening walk. A man selling chuskies did brisk business. Stray dogs circled each other in suspicion.

“Hey, do you have a light?”

“What?”

“Got a light?” She swiped her forehead with the back of her hand; her bracelets tinkled.

“No, sorry.” But I wished I did.

Someone close by threw her a lighter.

“Thanks,” she yeled. I could smell her perfume mingling sweetly with sweat.

“You were very good…” I blurted.

“I was?” She exhaled, and her face was lost behind plumes of smoke.

“In Midsummer Night’s Dream…”

I expected her to be pleased, but she rolled her eyes. “I’m beginning to think that’s the only theatrical role I’ll ever be remembered for…”

Of course, I should have known. What a ridiculous thing to say! Haltingly, I apologised.

She waved it away, with a cool, careless hand.

What should I do next? Perhaps offer her a drink…

Our conversation, aborted as it already was, swiftly came to an end as Lari danced up to her, skirt swirling. She pulled Titania, laughing, back to the dance floor.

It was almost a relief. I wondered whether they’d ever invited the art historian to a house party. They probably didn’t have the nerve. And this wasn’t the kind of place where we were likely to find Adheer either. I poured myself another beer; it would be, I was certain, a long evening.

After several pints, I stumbled indoors, looking for the bathroom. The flat was mostly empty, probably because it was uncomfortably hot inside, and ceiling fans swirled around warm, sticky air thick as soup. I walked through, what was presumably, the drawing room, strewn with thin, folded mattresses, a battered TV set, dirty cushions, slippers, and tottering bamboo shelves holding brimming ashtrays and old magazines.

Eventually, I found a bedroom. The mattress placed on a rickety foldout bed, with a sheet tugged hurriedly around it. A pile of clothes spilled over a chair. The posters on the wall—Scorpions, Guns “n” Roses and Mr Big—reminded me of the ones in Lenny’s room. The first door I tried, hidden behind a curtain, led not to the loo but a small covered balcony strung with washing lines and littered with old newspapers and empty bottles. I liked it there; it was quiet, away from the crowd.

Suddenly, I heard the bedroom door open.

“Here, just lie down for a while…”

I recognized the voice.

I peered inside, through a small dusty grilled window.

Lari held her head in her hands, giggling about how the world was spinning, while Titania helped her across the room to the bed. She pushed some clothes off, and smoothed it out.

Her friend lay down, placing her arm over her face. “Ooh, that’s so bright.”

Titania switched off the tube light and turned on a lamp in the corner. The light spilled out in a soft, golden glow.

“Better.”

“Would you like some water?”

The girl shook her head.

Titania knelt on the floor, beside her. They spoke in whispers; I caught fragments, they were talking about the party—drink, who was that… the music… strong joint…

Until Lari asked, “Will you do that? What you did the other day?”

Titania reached out, stroking her friend’s forehead.

“This?”

Her friend nodded, smiled.

Titania began with her face, caressing the contours in slow, delicate swirls. Through her long, silky hair. Untangling. Unknotting. Her fingers found Lari’s neck, the ridge of her shoulders. The girl closed her eyes. She traced her way down her arms, interlaced their fingers. Then slowly over her chest, over the flimsy chiffon top. Around the curve of her breasts, cupped in a black bra.

All the way across the flat, smooth plane of her stomach, to the top of her skirt. Her fingers ran over her waist, her thighs, the dip in between, down the length of her legs. She did this over and over again, making her way down, then back up to the top. Lari stirred, turning her face slightly towards Titania. Their faces moved closer, meeting in silence.

I waited behind the wall of glass.

There’s no beginning and there is no end.

When I left, the neighborhood was empty and quiet; interrupted only by the watchman’s beat, his walking stick rapping the ground. Somewhere, a gong sounded. It was three o’clock. Too late to find a rickshaw. I had no choice but to walk back to the residence hall. The roads emptied of all vehicles, save for some night creatures. The homeless, the stray, the forgotten, the lost. I hadn’t intended to stay out so long, but I couldn’t get away until Titania and Lari had left the room. They’d touched, and swept, and caressed, lying side by side, until they fell into a silence that I thought was sleep. Eventually, they’d risen, switched off the lamp, and stumbled out in the darkness. Now, the knot in my stomach, that hot, dense mass of desire, was slowly unraveling; I was tired, and sleep pressed heavily against my eyes. The walk took almost twenty minutes, down broken sidewalks and stretches where there was none. When I reached, the campus seemed haunted. Emptier than I’d ever seen it. The cross and tower outlined in a dark silhouette. I switched on the lights in my room. Kalsang hadn’t returned. Someone had slipped a note under the door. A phone call. From Joyce. “Please call back.”

The next day, at noon, I walked to the PCO on the main road, outside campus. It had rained earlier, for the air carried a rare freshness, and the dust had settled on the sidewalk. It was odd that my sister had called, for no apparent reason. We wished each other on birthdays and Easter, were usually home together for Christmas, posing for an annual family photograph in front of the tree. But apart from that, we didn’t usually reach out and make contact. I hoped all was well with my parents. No, I was quite sure about that; they weren’t the type to shy away from telling me they were ill, or that I should come home. This was sudden and strange.

At the PCO, I waited for a bulky gentleman in a striped shirt to finish a call. Outside, a man with a parked cart dispensed banta from a thermocol container filled with ice.

“Special,” I requested.

The man plucked out a thick, squat bottle and popped the stopper. It fizzed gently as he poured it into a glass, and stirred in a teaspoon of rock salt and a squeeze of lime. The drink tingled at the back of my throat, washing cold down my chest. Finally, I wedged myself into the stuffy booth, and dialed the number—this too was a common phone at the hostel where my sister was staying. I hoped she was in.

“Hello,” answered a young female voice.

“May I speak to Joyce, please?”

“Hold on, let me check if she’s there.”

The line beeped, and the machine numbers climbed higher. After what seemed ages, my sister came on the line.

“Joyce, you called?”

“Hello Nem.” Her voice sounded strange and distant, as though she was very far and very small.

“Is everything okay?”

“It’s Lenny,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I heard… actually, mama and papa rang me… they said they didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

The line beeped, like a heartbeat.

“Lenny passed away.”

The words hung on an invisible thread, stretching from her to me.

“I’m sorry… there were some complications with his medication, Nem. He went to sleep and didn’t wake up.” After a moment’s silence, she added, “It would have been painless.”

I placed the phone back on the receiver—my sister’s voice sounding sympathies into the air—and leaned against the door. Someone rapped against the glass, hard and impatient. It was the same man in the striped shirt. He’d returned to make another call. I paid and fumbled out. On the road, a DTC bus passed by exhaling a thick plume of grey smoke—it hit my face and burned my eyes, the sick, unhealthy smell of exhaust.

I lurched towards the uncovered gutter, and threw up. The liquid sweet and empty in my mouth. When I straightened up, it didn’t return. The breath we ease into and out of, the rise and fall of our chest. That unnoticed, that necessary. It remained in some dark tunneled space in my chest. Filling with the stench of decay.

A week before, someone had come to my room with mail. A glance at the handwriting, long and looping. Lenny’s. I hadn’t heard from him in a while. Lately, he didn’t write often, and even when he did, his letters were brief, sketchy, responding to mine in an oddly absent way. The last thing he sent me was not a letter.

The envelope sat thick and secretive in my hand as I carried it to the lawn. I wanted to open it outdoors, as though whatever it may conjure could not be contained within walls. It was sealed neatly with cello tape; I opened it carefully. The paper inside was folded to a compact square. A sketch, a pencil drawing and a scribbled line—As I remember you.

It was remarkably good, even if I felt Lenny had been rather generous by gently proportioning out my features—the eyes a tad larger, the longer, straighter nose, the slimmer, more chiseled face. In his strokes, Lenny had infused something I hadn’t ever seen before in the mirror. It was a myth of me.

Nicholas found it once.

He was rummaging through a pile of books—his and mine, gloriously mixed together, like our lives over the past few months—and a folded paper fell to the floor.

He picked it up.

“We should have this framed…” he said, holding it out, smiling.

“No.” I tried to snatch it back.

“Why? It’s marvellous…”

I plucked it from his fingers and tucked it into my pocket.

The sketch was the only thing I denied him.

“It’s from Lenny.”

I remember Nicholas watching me, his eyes, dark and attentive, taking in my gestures.

We were in the study, lounging on the sofa.

“You told me somebody had killed him…” he said softly. “Why did you say that? What did you mean?”

The stranger with the coal-dust eyes, and sun-darkened skin. Who carried the scent of cold nights and bonfires. Lenny took him for bike rides out of town, to all the secret tea shops he’d shown me. To the pine forest. One afternoon, Lenny took him to his room, when everyone was out. But his father happened to return early and, for some reason, did something out of the usual. He walked downstairs to the basement.

“He found them there…” I told Nicholas.

In bed, entwined, skin on skin.

And while I have spent many years thinking about that, conjuring endless scenarios, this is one moment I cannot bring myself to imagine.

It is merely darkness. A blank spot. An open grave.

Did his father shout? Did he retch? Did he storm up to Lenny and slap him across the face? Pull him away in his nakedness and shame? Did he stare at his son in the stranger’s arms and walk out silently?

“They would’ve killed me…”

Everything else remains pristinely clear in my mind—the oddly-angled room, the air tinged with the smell of cheap tobacco and old books. The map on the wall. The bed. The bed. Lenny’s family tried to keep it quiet.

“Can you imagine,” I asked Nicholas, “how fast news spreads in a small town?”

Where everyone knew everyone else. And whispers grew as tangled gardens, abandoned in their wildness, words flitting like butterflies from tongue to tongue.

“Did you see him again?” asked Nicholas.

I shook my head. “I only wrote him letters.”

At the time this happened, I had just finished high school. My final exams a week behind me. I had no clear plans for after, the thing everyone called the future. And so I thought that’s what my father wanted to discuss, one evening, when he called me to his study. Except, when I walked in, there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before—embarrassment.

“I wanted to talk to you about…” He stopped. Hesitant. He needn’t have said any more. I knew that the words about Lenny, whirling around town, had reached his ears too. I expected clamor and curses, rebukes and reprimands. I told you… I told you… I told you… I told you… he was a disgusting boy. To stay away. Instead he spoke with surprisingly timidity.

“Did he do anything to you?”

I was much too taken aback to reply.

“Tell me, did he?”

“What do you mean?”

It grew, the look in his eyes. Twisting on his tongue.

“Did he… touch you?”

His words hung in the air, cleaving the space between us.

I shook my head.

Perhaps then it changed to relief. He sat back in his chair.

“It’s better you don’t see him again.”

“But why?”

“It is better.”

I had my hands on the table, clenched, my knuckles white.

“Right now he needs to be left alone with his family. You see, Lenny is suffering from—a disease. Your mother and I don’t want you around him…” It’s contagious.

I held my silence.

My father was done. “I think I’ve made myself clear.”

It wasn’t enough to keep me from seeing him.

My parents sent me away to Delhi. They thought it for the best. They’d heard of a college there, founded on good, wholesome Christian principles, where students lived on campus, which had special seat allocations for people like me who came from places and communities far from the capital, marked as underprivileged and marginalized. I was sent away. I was offered to Nicholas on a plate. Something like fate.

If time is measured in a god’s blink, I didn’t emerge from my room for a million years. I don’t know if it was the next day, or the next week—or had a month passed?—after I heard about Lenny. At some point, on some day, before dawn, when the murmuring voices were silenced, and darkness glowed with a light that seemed to come from nowhere, I walked out of the residence hall, down the brick-lined path, away from the campus and into the forest. I picked my way through stone and undergrowth, the leaves glistening with dampness. Somewhere, perhaps, a moon. Ancient, watching through the branches of charcoal trees. The air still and silent, pulsing with unknown things.

I came to a tower. A tall sandstone tower, which I entered, and climbed, because from the top I’d be able to see all the reasons why. The air would be fresher, and filled with promise. From there, I’d be distant, removed from the clutches of this great and quartering heaviness. I’d almost reached the end when suddenly there was no ground to stand on. Like stepping on water. Falling through the air.

I lay curled at the bottom of the spiral staircase, the floor stone-cold and grainy against my skin. Hours later, a figure appeared at the doorway, and stood in a pale rectangle of light. His brows furrowed, his hands hesitantly reaching out to stop a fall that had already happened.

I didn’t look up, didn’t ask why or where, as I was half-carried and led out into the forest, the trees green and reverent around us. Something ached but I couldn’t tell where the pain arose from, it seemed to surround me, dense as the humid late summer air.

After a while, we reached a wide road lined by Gulmohar trees, bathed in a rich and luxurious silence. The slow, persistent purr of a passing car. The faint jingle of bells. We stopped at a gate where a man rushed out to help us. The exchange of words between them was brief and muted. Soon, I sensed we were indoors, in a cool and high-ceilinged corridor, the creak of doors, the slap of footfall, the voice of a woman. Hands, gentle as cotton, lifted me over, suspended me for a second in mid-air like I’d been only just before, while falling, and then a sudden release onto a soft, smooth plane that stretched endlessly like a field of snow. The unmistakable smell of fresh linen. Of something sharp and lemony. The warmth of wind and sunshine. A heated touch swept over me, a cloth struck at my skin, rough, spongy and damp. Something peeled, layer after infinitesimal layer. And then the deep, dark mercy of sleep.