The Two Krishnas (12 page)

The morning after, Atif broke his ritual for the first time in as long as he could remember. He couldn’t muster an appetite and skipped breakfast, procrastinated on the writing, rushed to work earlier than normal. He needed to be around people, even if he didn’t want to confide in them.

Rahul was haunting Atif’s apartment and had destroyed his solitude.

* * *

For the first time in as long as Rahul could remember, he was terrified.

It wasn’t just that he couldn’t understand his mind, but that even his body felt different now, alive, like a teenager’s—confused, excited, guilty. He went through the motions of the day in a narcoticized state of desire, pretending to be part of the world spinning around him, but as hard as he tried, it was as if a veil had fallen over him so that when he looked at others, things, places, he saw only Atif.

At the bank, he stared at files begging for management approvals, initialing them mindlessly, as if thousands and even millions of dollars weren’t hanging in the balance. He swallowed cupfuls of sugar-loaded black coffee in the break room, which only fueled his restlessness; he paced around the air-conditioned branch making perfunctory conversation with his staff yet hearing little of what they said, and he took a two-hour lunch during which he walked endlessly, as if trying to escape the unrelenting opera of his mind.

All day he shook his legs under his desk, trying to deal with clients negotiating rate bumps on large Certificates of Deposit or demanding overdraft fee reversals despite having carelessly issued checks on insufficient balances, and he could think only about Atif, granting them the gratification he so desperately sought. Everything was eclipsed by Atif.

Another day he endured an appointment with the controller of a major airline on Century Boulevard, amazing himself by sitting through the entire conversation, nodding his head, offering neutral expressions, and grasping absolutely nothing of what was being said about liquidity requirements, no-hold policies and priority service. At a meeting later that afternoon, Rahul sat in a room crowded with other managers as a district manager droned interminably about the institution’s market share, and how to best compete with others with a better distribution, the projected slides flashing at Rahul. All of it the concern of an alien race, nothing to do with him.

He was everywhere but there, even in the past, that foreboding realm that he could only access moments at a time before feeling singed. Atif had pried the doors open, doors that he had spent a whole lifetime barricading. He sat in a dimly lit room full of obsequious suits and pie charts but in his mind he saw the crystalline waters of the Indian Ocean dotted with
dhows;
instead of the stale cologne and perspiration, he smelled the beach’s salty air; talk of new sales campaigns and incentive plans warbled and turned into the rustle of palm trees—the sound of beads in a silver tray—as they craned over the seaweed strewn beaches of Mombasa. Slowly, he stopped chewing the gum in his mouth and tasted early morning breakfasts of
mahambri
and
bharazi,
creamy beans liberally dusted with cayenne and salt and eaten with sweet, fried bread.

He saw the cricket field of Aga Khan High on a torpidly hot day, the foreboding old baobab tree rumored to house spirits rooted in the middle of it. He tasted the fruit of this ancient tree, broken down from its pod, cooked and dyed in sugary red syrup. As he grasped the bat with its familiar smell of linseed oil and leaned into it, the roomful of suits transmuted into an elated crowd anticipating his hit. In the throngs he saw Hanif again, the one who was never found. Hanif with the pained expression, longing for him, and Rahul averted his gaze, embarrassed, ashamed. He found that his parents and sister were also there, safe and hale, cheering him on to glory. But then the sun accreted, surged, its flames inflaming everything. Harrowing cries. Bodies alight, whirling like spindles of fire.

Rahul convulsed, drew a sharp breath, jolted back.

People started to look but quickly turned their attention back to the motivational speech on household acquisitions, punctuating the presentation with an endorsing laugh track. The manager sitting on his left, a balding, hefty Latino from Pasadena, sympathetically offered him a stick of chewing gum. He felt the impulse to flee from the room but he sat very still, dabbed the beads of perspiration from his forehead with his handkerchief and retuned to the presentation, more lost than ever as new charts flew up. The district manager was attempting some humor about the banking industry now, prophesizing that at the rate of mergers, one day they would all be working for the same bank, hopefully theirs, and this drew more gratuitous laughter from the obsequious ass-kissers.

You are all dispensable
, he thought, looking around the room.
Don’t you see it? Replaceable. Ants in the colony of commerce.

He had hurt Pooja last night. Instead of making love to her, he had cast himself upon her like a punishment, in a way he had never done before. She had recoiled from him, unable to recognize the man who had come to her and who, even when she remonstrated out of sheer pain, had continued to drive himself into her until he had fallen upon her like some heavy animal, unsure if he’d ever be able to rise again.

In the morning, they said nothing to each other about what had happened and although she made breakfast for him—golden brown
aloo parathas
and South Indian egg
ekuri
—just as she had for the almost twenty years of their life together, she would not look him in the eye. Shame rose in him and he had wanted to explain, to touch her with the tenderness that had been lacking the night before, to apologize, but he did not understand his own heart and averting his own gaze from her, left for work.

For the first time Rahul understood something quintessential about the nature of addiction. In the end addiction was not so much about externalities, about seeking something transcendental or outside of you. Rather, it was about reaching fractal interiorities that had been blockaded. He had seen Atif, tasted him, and in doing so, he recognized something more than he had bargained for. Something no longer obscured by a marriage, offspring and career.

Himself.

* * *

A week had passed but Atif thought of Rahul constantly. He kept seeing Rahul, tall and masculine in that immaculately cut suit and the five o’clock shadow on his handsome face, standing on the other side of the counter, giving him that lingering look, wordlessly reaching out to him, asking to be understood and then, just as quickly, letting his gaze fall, as if he had said too much, revealed something. It had been so long since Atif had desired someone, so long since someone had looked at him, actually looked at him, that he felt as if Rahul’s eyes had polished years of tarnish and grime off him.

Atif prayed that they would meet again and at one point had even called directory assistance in his desperation, unsure of what he would do if he actually tracked down Rahul’s number. Seventeen Rahul Kapoors existed in the Westside. He was grateful and crushed simultaneously.

He was scheduled to work the late shift on a weekday, which meant he had to help close the bookstore at ten o’clock and drop off the daily deposit in the bank’s night vault on his way home. It was about an hour before closing time when the phone rang. Atif was standing next to Becca, who was fretting that her boyfriend had not called her as he had promised to. The caller hung up and she became visibly perturbed, convinced it was him trying to make amends. When the phone rang again, less than a minute later, Atif picked it up while she loomed over him expectantly.

“May I speak with Atif, please?”

That voice. Atif’s heart leapt in his ribcage. “Hi, it’s me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, assuming Atif already knew who it was. “I tried your cell phone but it—”

“I know. No reception here.”

“You probably can’t talk right now…”

Becca’s hands were practically on the phone, ready to wrestle it away from him. Atif shook his head to indicate it wasn’t for her. She slumped back. “Can I call you right back?”

Rahul gave him his cell phone number.

Without bothering to explain, Atif ran out onto the patio and tried to find a secluded corner from where he could use his cell phone. No bars. He waved the phone around in the air frantically but the little gadget refused to grant permission. He walked to the other end where a gay couple was seated on the bench, flipping through a book. The younger of the two smiled at Atif sympathetically as he continued to shake his cell phone and pace around like an agitated animal, and said “Cell phones, I swear,” and Atif politely smiled back. He wanted to hurl the phone across the street but told himself to calm down, to breathe, breathe, breathe.

Suddenly, as if by a little miracle, he noticed a payphone located across the street, outside an elegant Italian restaurant, past the center divider where they had met. He made a dash for it, thankful for the lunch change jingling in his pocket. At the center divider, he waited for the heavier eastbound traffic under the large fanning tree and felt elated at the memory of their meeting. When he got the chance, he sprinted across as fast as his legs would carry him and panting, seized the phone and fed it with a quarter.

It rang interminably. He tried to calm himself, his heart still racing, every trill drawing Rahul further away from him. Maybe he wouldn’t be there, had changed his mind. His hand closed around the impotent cell phone in his pocket and he fought the urge to smash it against the wall. But then Rahul’s voice poured into his ears, salve on a wound.

“Can we meet?” Rahul said.

“Yes, but not here. My place,” he said. “I can be there in half an hour.”

* * *

Now that the boy who had haunted him unceasingly stood barely inches away, Rahul’s body trembled. “God, I’m shaking,” he said, a hundred hunched fears and desires uncoiling. Everything he had pushed down for so long came loose now, in a rush, intoxicating, dizzying.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“All the way here,” he said, “I kept asking myself what I was doing. Something breaking. Dying.”

Atif touched his arm. “Yet you’ve never felt more alive.”

They went to each other not like strangers but like lovers who, after an interminably long and thirsty separation, were merging again, rediscovering each other.

They sank to the ground, their bodies gnarled together. Words unnecessary. Their bodies expressed what language could not, with a hunger devoid of grace. When an animal rends his prey seeking sustenance, he lacks the finesse, the elegance of his normal gait and powerful pursuit. This is how they were. Rahul responded with the voracity of his kisses and with hands that clawed and tore at Atif. Sometimes their bodies locked in impossible configurations, their limbs intertwined, but always they bore each other’s weight, supplying nourishment to each other.

When Rahul finally entered him, Atif called out his name over and over again with such abandon and yearning that it sounded like the invocation of a man possessed. Rahul pressed his hand over Atif’s mouth, trying to lose himself, shirking recognition. He continued to drive himself further into Atif’s body, a man struggling to shake himself free of his own skeleton.

When they lay on the floor next to each other by the side of the bed, all they could hear was the sound of their breathing and from somewhere out there, a distant aria clashing with the laugh track from someone else’s television. Light streamed in through the window from the lamp outside and could have easily been mistaken for moonlight. The heady scent of tuberoses wafted in from the living room.

In the silence between them, in Rahul’s gentle caresses, Atif sought hope; now that the first hurdle had been overcome, now that Rahul had come this far and hadn’t taken flight in a surge of regret or shame, he would come back for more. Atif raised Rahul’s large hand into the shaft of light and placed his palm against it. The hand of a child against his father’s. Pearly light glowed around the silhouette of long fingers, the band on Rahul’s finger glinting dully. Atif circled his fingers around it, unsure if he was trying to block it out or recognize its significance. Sensing this, Rahul’s hand closed in around Atif’s, pulling them down.

“I’ve always felt great love for her. But never great passion.”

Atif looked at him. It was not just the face of someone who could betray a lifelong wife, a wife who could after decades be so easily deceived, but the face of someone who had outlived something much more unspeakable.

Rahul’s face began trembling and suddenly, as if a wave that he had no control over was washing over him, he heaved into tears. Atif drew him into his arms, kissed him tenderly, the way his mother had when he’d been little—on his forehead, the curls of his lashes, on the strong aquiline nose and fleshy lips—and conveyed in gesture instead of words that he would be there for him if Rahul would only let him.

* * *

In the morning, Rahul hoped to evade Pooja. He woke earlier than usual, careful not to wake her as he lifted himself out of their bed and prepared for work. But by the time he had emerged from the shower and walked into the kitchen, she had already washed up in the kitchen sink, as she sometimes did despite the extra bathroom, and was laying out stacks of thick
parathas
and eggs on the table. Z-TV played mutely on the television set and Bollywood heartthrob Vivek Oberoi was twirling his on-screen love interest against a multitude of extras, also gyrating to the ghosted soundtrack.