Quarantine: Stories (8 page)

Listening to my relatives’ hushed conversations, I wondered whether there was, in their language, a word for homosexuality. I doubted it. I doubted, even, that the English word was used. For them, the concept was unspeakable.

W
hen I finally leave work and go home, Frank is gone. The apartment smells like Pine-Sol. The floor is mopped, the toilet scrubbed, the clothes washed and folded. The kitchen sink is empty, the dishes stacked in the cupboard. The apartment feels strange and new.

Taped to the fridge is a note: “You’ll probably be asleep by the time I get home,” it says. “We should talk soon.”

Walking around the clean, empty apartment, I have images of a red chair here, a floor lamp there, a poster on that wall. This apartment could be someone’s home. Maybe someone else’s, a couple more like Jack and Carly, holding hands in the kitchen, clinging to one another on the couch. Or maybe a couple like us.

I’m exhausted. It’s been almost two days since I’ve slept. In the bedroom, I remove my clothes, careful to fold them and stack them neatly in the corner. I pull back the comforter on the futon. There are fresh sheets, I realize, as I climb in.

W
hen I told Thomas about my experience—“transcendent” I called it—he was skeptical. I had only been studying yoga for three weeks. Thomas, on the other hand, had been practicing yoga and meditation for eight years. In all that time, he hadn’t felt anything even close to what I was describing.

I told him maybe I had an edge, being an Indian and currently in India.

We were on the phone, but I had originally mentioned the experience to him in a greeting card. Here’s what I described: I was on a city bus, traveling from Opera House to Breach Candy. I had just been to class at Kaivalya Dam—the same place my father had studied, reluctantly, half a century earlier, because a doctor had prescribed yoga to his mother, and she’d refused to go alone. The bus was loud and crowded, so, to escape, I decided to practice the meditation techniques I had learned in class. I chanted my mantra silently. I followed my breath. I closed my outer eyes and opened my inner ones.

That’s when I transcended. My proof? I was supposed to alight near Parsi General Hospital, where I was meeting an old family friend. Instead I ended up at a shopping mall in Bandra hours later with an overwhelming sense of contentment and no memory of how I’d gotten there.

On the phone, I could tell Thomas was avoiding giving any reaction to my story. When I pressed him, he said, “I’m not sure it was what you think it was.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sunil,” he said, “are you sure you didn’t just fall asleep?”

“I know what I felt,” I said. “You don’t believe me?”

“It’s not that. It’s just that, as you deepen your practice, you’ll understand how naïve your claim sounds.”

Naïve.
I remembered the card I had sent him: A sheep on the front dabbed at its tears with a Kleenex wedged in its hoof. Inside it said, “I miss ewe.” I thought he’d think it was funny.

“Someday,” he said, “you’ll reread what you wrote and laugh.”

“How will I reread it?” I asked. “Haven’t you thrown it in the trash?”

The previous fall, a few days after Thomas’s birthday, I’d found the birthday card I had given him in the wastebasket by his bed. When I asked him how it had gotten there, he said something about “avoiding clutter” and “just because I don’t keep things doesn’t mean they mean any less to me.” I reminded him now of that conversation.

“I’ll keep this one,” he said. “I’ll show it to you when I visit in May.”

“Keep this up, and you may want to consider canceling.”

I
had come to Bombay three months earlier, leaving Thomas, my boyfriend of less than a year, in New York. Parting was difficult. He brought me to the airport, accompanied me through the long line at the Air India counter, kissed me good-bye before I made my way toward security. I told him I would return as soon as I could, though I wasn’t sure when that would be. Thomas promised to visit.

My parents thought that, as the eldest grandson, I had come to Bombay to take care of my grandmother, since all her children lived in America, and she was increasingly unwell. I thought I had come mostly to learn Hindi and its close cousin Marathi, so I could translate some little-known eighteenth-century Indian poetry and finally finish my dissertation. Thomas thought I had come because I didn’t know what I wanted—in life or in love—and it was easier to run away than stay and sort it out.

As for my grandmother, I wasn’t sure what she thought. She looked at me suspiciously. Late at night, I could hear her rummaging in cupboards she kept locked. I was living with her in the same flat in which my father had grown up, on the third story of a well-appointed building in Breach Candy. She had windows facing the sea and marble floors everywhere, but she had let the place deteriorate since her husband had died. The couch in the living room had lost its legs and was now fit only for dwarfs. The drapes were dingy. She couldn’t bother shooing the crows that flew in the window, so she let them come and go as they pleased. They hopped on her kitchen counters, picking at lentils and taking chapatis to go.

Worst of all, when I picked up the phone upon my arrival, I found the line dead. In my grandmother’s bedroom, I discovered a desk drawer full of unopened bills.

At the telephone office the next day, none of the clerks spoke English, and my Hindi failed me. We honked at each other and flapped our wings but got nowhere. A few days later, my grandmother’s upstairs neighbor intervened on our behalf. Afterward he said to me, “It could be weeks—maybe months. Who knows? This is
India
.”

So I would make my calls to America from one of the expensive international pay phones scattered about the neighborhood. I had two nearby from which to choose. One was attached to an open-air tobacco stand abutting a busy boulevard and lacked the benefit of even a booth to dampen the sounds of scooters and cars. Men hung around it in a cloud of smoke and exhaust fumes, bidis pinched between their fingers. Some chewed betel nut; their red spit stained the sidewalk like paint splatters.

I preferred the phone at the laundry across the street. The shiny, heavily air-conditioned shop catered to a wealthy clientele. The shopkeeper was pleasant and always wore a clean white shirt with a Western collar. But even here, privacy was a problem. The small phone, an urgent red, was on the same counter across which business was conducted. As I talked, customers would come and go, looking at me curiously as they waited for their clothes or change. The phone was wired to a digital readout that hung on the wall, displaying the charges as they accrued at an alarming rate. The shopkeeper, when he wasn’t busy, would listen to my conversations, chin in hands, elbows propped on counter, eyes on the red numbers as they raced higher. I thought he’d be thrilled by his profits, but he looked concerned, perhaps wondering if this would be the time I couldn’t pay. He appeared relieved only when my money was in his palm. Then he slapped me on the shoulder and shook my hand vigorously.

As I entered and exited the store, two raggedy boys loitering on a low stone wall tried to sell me American products I didn’t want: one day a package of Schick disposable razors, another day a travel-size bottle of Shower to Shower deodorant powder. They held the items in their small fists, which opened before me like dirty lilies.

Once, one of the boys showed me a single Marlboro menthol.

I said, “I don’t smoke.”

He looked baffled and said sternly, “You should.”

N
ot long after my conversation with Thomas about my “transcendent” experience, I phoned him from the laundry. After we’d discussed our mutual friends in New York, my grandmother’s idiosyncrasies, and Thomas’s impending visit to India (“You will see things that will haunt you for the rest of your life,” I said, refusing to elaborate), Thomas told me unceremoniously that he had cheated. At first I thought
taxes
. Then I understood.

“I’m so, so sorry,” he said. “I love you.”

In some ways, I wasn’t surprised. We’d promised to try to be faithful to one another while I was away, but I’m not sure either of us really believed it.

“How did it happen?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

“I meant to go straight home after yoga, but I had overdone it. My body ached. I stopped for a beer.”

“Where?”

“The Works.”

I knew the bar. I had been there once, before I’d met Thomas. That night I had gone home with a stranger—tall, muscled, blond—who would realize the next morning, in the stark fluorescent light of his building’s elevator, that I wasn’t cute enough for him. His realization would be so visceral, so obvious that, upon reaching the lobby, I would know without having to be told that we would not eat brunch as planned, would not linger alfresco over eggs Florentine and mimosas, would not exchange phone numbers or promises to call. I pictured Thomas with such a man, but because Thomas is much more handsome than I am, the outcome in the elevator would be different.

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“What does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“This isn’t going to help,” Thomas said. When I didn’t respond, he said, reluctantly, “Medium build. Average height. Nice smile.”

“Was he cuter than me?”

“No.”

Before, I hadn’t been sure I wanted to know the details. Now I couldn’t seem to stop. “What did the two of you do? Did you do the things we do? Or did you do something new?”

“I was lonely,” he said. “I miss you so much. I only wanted to be touched.”

“Did you suck his dick?”

I looked at the shop owner, who was looking straight at me and biting a hangnail. His English was good, but how good? Did he know
dick
? Did he know
suck
?

“What did it look like?” I said more quietly.

“I don’t remember.”

Thomas probably thought his lack of attention to detail would prove to me that the incident had meant nothing, that he hadn’t lingered. Instead, it made me think that he didn’t notice anything, not even what was right in front of him.

“I’m the one who got hurt,” I said. “You owe me at least this. What did his dick look like? Big, small? Hooded, cut? Thin, thick?”

Thomas sighed. We were both silent.

After a moment, he said, “Bent.”

I hung up on him.

Much later, walking along the rocky seashore toward Mahalaxmi Race Track, fixating not on Thomas’s infidelity but, more specifically, on how Thomas had described the man’s dick, I thought,
Like a finger, beckoning.

I
waited a week and a half before calling him back. I had meant to say something funny—perhaps “How’s my little adulterer doing?” I had hoped we could laugh and move on. Instead I started crying and couldn’t stop.

Thomas stuttered syllables that sounded like “Sorry”; I interrupted him with sobs. The laundry man watched the numbers on the digital display shoot upward. I watched, too. Finally, after a very long time, I hung up. I paid the laundry man one thousand rupees—about thirty dollars, a small fortune.

He asked me if I wanted my clothes now. I said I did, and he said, “Thirty rupees,” and I gave him that, too. He brought me my bundle, and I left.

Outside, the boys stared at me as I walked past them. They must have seen I had been crying, was still crying. One of them offered to sell me a saltshaker shaped like the Empire State Building, and I waved it away.

T
homas arrived in Bombay a few weeks later, as originally planned, except a day late, and in the morning instead of at night. There had been a delay in Kuwait, and he and the other passengers had spent the night in a hotel. Thomas was cranky because the officials had confiscated the bottle of Grey Goose vodka he had brought for my grandmother. I’d told him she would like it, even though she didn’t drink, because foreign liquor was a status symbol, and she could serve it to guests. The officials hadn’t returned the bottle, although they had promised they would.

I said to him right away I wasn’t sure this was going to work. We were in a taxi, driving through the slums that surrounded the airport. “Maybe I shouldn’t have let you come.”

“I would have come anyway,” he said, smiling. He pulled at my earlobe, and I brushed his hand away.

At my grandmother’s flat, Thomas sat on the dwarf couch, drinking tea and looking small. My grandmother hovered above him, patting the key ring hanging from her waist, the one that unlocked the cupboards. Thomas wanted to sleep, but I convinced him he’d get over his jet lag more quickly if he stayed awake until bedtime. I suggested we take a walk to a nearby temple. I had been translating a poem about the temple at Walkeshwar and its famous Banganga water tank, but I had never visited, even though it was only a short distance away.

As we walked, Thomas asked about the poem.

I told him it was about the origins of the water, based on a famous tale from the Ramayana about Rama’s quest to find his beloved Sita, who had been abducted by the demon Ravana. Along the way Rama stopped at Walkeshwar. He had been traveling for years and was tired and thirsty, but he couldn’t find anything to drink. So Rama shot an arrow into the ground, and the holy river Ganga spurted forth.

“Speaking of tired and thirsty,” Thomas said, “I think I’m getting heatstroke. Shoot me an arrow, will ya?”

“The reason the poem is remarkable,” I said, “is that the poet argues that Ravana gets a bad rap in the Ramayana. He points out that Ravana held Sita captive for many years, but he never violated her, even though he could have. Ravana is actually a model of masculinity, because he protected Sita in a way that Rama, who let her get abducted, couldn’t. In the poet’s opinion, Ravana should be honored in the pantheon of gods, not demons.”

“I’m not sure that
not
raping someone you’ve kidnapped is reason for canonization,” Thomas said.

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “He restrained himself despite his desires.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“All I’m saying is I’m saying,” I said.