The Two Krishnas (11 page)

The band returned and struck up “Watch What Happens.” A couple got up and started dancing to the side of the tables. They looked tipsy and enamored with each other. Atif looked at them and smiled. The woman, probably in her fifties, had a mane of silver hair and was draped in a dark shawl. Every now and then she lost her balance, spinning in the arms of the younger man, and giggled like a teenager as she nestled in his shoulder. Silence came and went between Atif and Rahul as they sat across from each other, drinking, exchanging glances, watching the couple, smiling awkwardly at times and still waiting for something.
That must be it,
thought Rahul,
the source of this attraction is that we are both, in our own different ways, exiles.

“Were you surprised?” Rahul asked.

“Not surprised.”

“Then what?”

“Afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid,” Atif said, smiling sadly, his eyes shifting from Rahul’s intense gaze, his fingers rubbing the beads of condensation on his depleted glass. “Afraid that you wouldn’t show up and then nothing would’ve changed.” Their eyes met. “Afraid that you would show up and there would be reason to hope things will.”

By the time they walked back out in the cold night, the streets were deserted. Atif could feel Rahul’s gaze upon him, as tangible as a touch, and promptly averted when Atif looked back at him. He could feel the familiar tingling of intoxication in his legs. This was the moment at which, had he been the old Atif, carousing with his pack at a club, he would have induced the high further by chasing down a hefty shot or two so that, just a few minutes later, he would enter an amnesic zone, the shocking details of which would have to be related to him by a friend the day after.

I wish I could do that shot right now,
he thought as they headed for Rahul’s car parked across the street.
Something to make me bolder, to take consequence away.

They got into the Mercedes and Rahul hesitated starting it up, his fingers poised over the keys in the ignition. Quickly, without a single word and barely a glance, their bodies came together and they started to kiss, awkwardly at first, then hungrily. Rahul leaned over, sinking Atif back into the black leather seat, holding his face tight in his hands. It was one of those moments when it became impossible to remember whose lips had found whose, who had made the first move, a moment which, in recollection, would lack transition, the seconds leading up to it forever shrouded.

Suddenly, Rahul pulled back, wiping his mouth with his hand. “I’m sorry…I don’t know what I’m doing here.” His body constricted and Rahul leaned over the steering wheel, unable to look at Atif.

Atif turned away from him and looked out the window, brokenhearted. If they were to pursue this, there would be many obstacles. Regret, Atif knew, could not be one of them. In the distance, he could see a man was pushing a supermarket cart, loaded with his belongings, searching for a warm alcove between the shiny patina of a spa and designer boutique.

“Please, just take me back,” he said, his eyes on the lone vagrant.

Rahul started the car and they drove back to Elton’s.

This time the silence was deafening.

* * *

On the short but desolate drive home on San Vicente Boulevard, lined with expensive homes, coral trees, and peppered even at this time of night with joggers, Atif’s first impulse surprised him—to plug in a cassette of romantic Bollywood duets and visualize Rahul and himself together. The face that had eluded him for the past week was now so freshly imprinted on his mind that he could fuel any Bollywood-esque fantasy. They could unfurl on a bed of marigolds, run to each other, arms wide open, across tulip fields, or embrace on snow-capped mountains to a melody of triumphant love.
Good beginnings can end in disasters,
he thought.
So why can’t the opposite be true?

But he resisted. Fantasies may allow you to skip the degradation, the hopelessness of the situation for the time being, but ultimately nothing had really changed. Instead he reached out for
Sajda
in the glove compartment, a collection of poignant
ghazals
by Lata Mangeshkar and Jagjit Singh, but then, realizing this would only lure him into a swamp of despair, pulled back his hand. The key, he knew, was to find equilibrium between the states of hope and despair.

Even in the silence, there was nothing he could do to keep his last moments with Rahul from playing in his mind—Rahul unable to look at him and apologizing in Elton’s deserted parking lot; Atif, despite reeling from the rejection and fighting the urge to touch him, saying, “Look, there’s no need for this. Thanks for the drink.”

Something within Atif was welling up like a great big tide. He began speeding. If he could only get to his apartment before it erupted. Surrounded by the comfort of his books, music, the serene Buddha statue, potted plants, even Nona’s incessant yakking from next door, everything would be okay. You can’t mourn what you’ve never had, he told himself. It was never yours to lose.

At the door he found Anaïs, the neighbor’s kitten, waiting for him as she often did late at night. She mewed upon seeing him and curled around his leg. He picked her up, settled down on the staircase. She splayed herself out over his lap, her paws clawing the air as he rubbed her gray coat.

“Well, at least I have you,” he said, “but then even you don’t really belong to me, do you?”

Anaïs belonged to Phyllis, an American teenager living in the complex across the way, and it was not unusual to find the feline during one her many unsupervised forays, lurking behind the communal dumpster, terrorizing even dogs. By the time Anaïs hunched up in attack mode and growled menacingly, the poor canine, sometimes twice her size, would be scampering behind his bewildered, embarrassed owner.

To ensure that Anaïs returned home to her second story apartment overlooking the alleyway where she carried out her acts of terrorism, Phyllis had requested all neighbors not to let the kitten into their homes. Atif and Phyllis had never met, but Nona, who detested cats, had conveyed the message for her. “She doesn’t want you spoiling it. Don’t get too attached.”

He played with Anaïs for some time, letting the animal’s unconditional love soothe his pain, then he walked her down to the alley, hung around for a couple of minutes, and when she was looking away and least suspecting it, ran back up the staircase. Anaïs sprinted behind him but wasn’t fast enough. The deception saddened him every time because he knew the cat would wait for a little while on the other side of the shut door, brushing up against it.

He went to the answering machine. One message. He could barely breathe. When he pressed the button, a telemarketer pitched him the virtues of refinancing his home. Atif hit a button, erased him.

Why did it always have to be so immediate with him?
he wondered. One chance meeting, a simple glance, and there he went—ready to throw his life away, beating heart in open hands, fantasies freed from congested vaults. Why couldn’t it be gradual, restrained, Victorian? Like Gaskell or Austen? He smiled wryly. Because he wasn’t Miss Matty or Emma. No, he was Indian. And not the kind of Indian that aspired to be like the refined yet repressed characters he so liked to read about but in whose lives there was never any room for people of his kind or color.

He was an Indian throbbing with blood and mud; one who believed love should be riotous, unbridled, passionate. Love had always struck him like a bolt of lightning, leaving him a bit scorched in the end. Subtle nuances and complexities may be the stuff of Western literary classics, but for him, the stories of Anarkali and Salim, of Laila and Majnooh, of Shah Mahmoud and his slave Ayaz were the standard; where thrones were abdicated, heads prostrated on the bascule, timeless monuments erected to immortalize love. He saw love as epic.

Atif carried out his nightly ritual—flossing, brushing, and washing his face and feet. With one foot propped in the sink, tepid water gushing over it, a towel slung over his shoulder, he looked in the mirror and noticed how sallow his complexion looked. As he raised a hand up to his face, he saw the glinting band again, as if on his own finger. It was better this way, he thought. That the episode with Rahul Kapoor was over, quick and reasonably clean. They will never see each other again. Then, in just a matter of days, his mind would play that merciful trick, blotting out Rahul’s face from his mind, one feature at a time. Time is the perfect balm.

He couldn’t have been further from the truth.

* * *

After Rahul pulled up in his garage, he emptied a canister of green mint Tic Tacs in the palm of his hand and chewed them vigorously, his eyes moistening.

The drug had been ingested. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest, his body tingling all over, every nerve ending alive. Images of him and Atif, their bodies entwined, tongues forging deep into each other’s mouths, flashed through his mind. The silence assumed a sound and he could watch the air move around him, smell the musk of their contact. Something that had lain undetected, dormant, prodded outward from within, cracking his shell.

He knew what was waiting for him inside the dimly lit house. Pooja always left the kitchen light on for him and there, on the table bare but for a single place setting, he would find a covered plate of food that he would pick through just to please her. It was not what he hungered for. If Ajay was at home, he would be locked up in his room as boys his age, hankering for privacy, were known to be; Pooja always retired by nine-thirty.

He opened the car door and stuck out his hand, poured some bottled water over it and then patted his face, neck, lips with it. He went into the house and ignoring the covered plate on the table, headed straight up to their bedroom. In the nightlight she always left on for him, he could see her reclining figure under the down comforter she liked to use even in the peak of summer, her head of thick black hair neatly tied into a bun. She was sleeping on her side, her back to him, snoring lightly. He stood over her for some time, hearing their discordant breathing—how out of sync—while trying to supplant the boy with her.

It would be one of the last times he would touch her.

* * *

Atif normally awoke by six A.M., after which he prepared breakfast leisurely—an egg fried in butter, sourdough toast (always bakery-bought), French-pressed, dark roast coffee. He relished this while watching the quirky team on
Good Day L.A
. on KTTV, preferring Jillian’s boisterousness, Dorothy’s tabloid banter, and Steve’s ineffectual attempts at giving the news some credence to other morbid newscasts. As a rule, he never read the whole newspaper, keeping the disasters of the world at bay, only indulging in the Calendar section of the
Los Angeles Times
to search the Arts listings and read about celebrities and restaurant reviews.

After that, he spent about an hour on one of the three books he was reading or, if he had been granted the assignment, he’d work on a book review for
WEHO
, a complimentary local gay fortnightly. Because he freelanced from home, the editorial staff rarely saw him and they communicated mostly through emails. Over time, they came to know him as the “cute reviewer who likes to cover books nobody wants to read” but which lent the magazine some intellectualism. His selections, while not limited to academic books, had included such studious ones as
Homoerotics in Hollywood Film, The Essential Gay Mystics,
and whenever possible, any Eastern-themed book, like
Same Sex Love in India
, a new interpretation of the
Kama Sutra,
or tomes on Indian interiors and Islamic architecture.

When he had first begun writing for an upscale, glossy gay monthly, his articles titled “Herbal Anti-depressants” and “The Perfect Martini” had stood out like warts amongst “How to be a Perfect Bottom” and “Steps to Seduce the Straight Jock.” In time, he had amassed enough tear sheets, carefully cropping out the adjacent lube bottles and porn ads, waived the pittance the glossy paid, and found another home at
WEHO
where he could write what he was passionate about. Atif started his days with books and communed with them all day long at work. At night, he again turned to them, looking forward to that moment when his eyes felt leaded, words on the page performed a gavotte, and he surrendered to sleep.

On nights he couldn’t sleep—when the fast, hot Santa Ana winds stoked wildfires and made it hard to breathe, or in spring, when pollen joined the invisible quantum dance and incited his allergies—he adopted a practice of lying on his back and taking exactly nine deep, full breaths through his deviated septum, coaxing his breathing into a manageable pattern, the air moving in and out of his lungs, his heartbeat pacified.

This had made him wonder if a tranquil disposition, that admirable Zen-like quality in some people, came not because they were more spiritually tuned-in, but because they had been blessed with the right bone structure, a clear passage for breath. Breathing fully and effortlessly, something he had always had difficulty with, was after all the kernel of any meditative ritual. Nature then had hardwired him for anxiety.

The night Atif and Rahul first kissed, he jousted with the cast of his life. There was the cavalcade of lovers, some from as far back as his confused, closeted adolescence in Mumbai; Becca, miscast as his enraged employer, sacking him for his carelessness, blaming him for her perilous love life; and his parents, passing his forged social security card back and forth disapprovingly, running their finger over the thick white skin of correction fluid and wondering if they should turn him in.