The Two Krishnas (3 page)

The doorbell chimed again. Pooja took another look at herself. Gently, she touched her bindi with her index finger, conjuring Rahul. “I’ll be right there,” she called out and rushed to the kitchen to survey her preparations. In her haste, she almost tripped over Ajay’s chrome dumbbells in the hallway, which Rahul had also been using of late. She could not understand why Rahul was concerning himself with such things. No doubt he had always been athletic in school, but decades had fleeted by and he had let himself go; although she had noticed with at least some regret how age had begun to mold and soften their physiques, she had gotten used to the idea of them transforming together.

Pooja took a deep breath and opened the door.

“Namaste, Mrs. Kapoor.”

“Hello, Greg. Come in, come in,” she said, stepping aside.

“Parmesh, please,” he said, a bit wounded, his hands still folded.

“Oh, yes, yes, Parmesh, of course. Sorry,” she said. “Come in, please.”

Parmesh was garbed in faded blue jeans and a psychedelic white cotton
kurta
crammed with every imaginable Hindu iconography from Om to the dancing Natraja. Around the teenager’s neck hung a necklace of
rudhraksha
beads, and his golden hair was pulled back into a ponytail so that through his pale bespectacled face, he looked like he was practically gaping at spirituality. He inhaled deeply, looking as if he had entered a temple.

Pooja led him into the kitchen where a box of baked Indian savories—
papdis, dhokdas,
Indian trail mix and such—waited with an invoice taped to it. Next to it, a sealed container of the shrimp curry for Charlie Ackerman.

“It’s always so nice here, Mrs. Kapoor. So tranquil,” he said.

Oh, that’s an easy enough effect to achieve,
thought Pooja,
when nobody’s ever around and sufficient perfumed cones and incenses have been burned.
“Thank you, Parmesh.”

She found him looking adoringly at the bronze statue of baby Ganesha on the mantelpiece, crawling along as it looked over its plump shoulder, holding a ball of rice in his hand.
I swear,
she thought,
this boy feels more for our Gods than my own son does!
The thought made her bristle, as if personal wealth had been squandered on strangers.

“And how are your parents?” Pooja asked perfunctorily. She had seen the Goldsteins just once, in passing at The Banyan when making a delivery herself. Parmesh had just started working there and his bedecked parents had dropped by to inspect the studio on their way to some fund-raiser. She could still see them, ill at ease, scanning the lobby with displeasure.

“Oh, you know. Okay, I guess,” he shrugged, eyeing the Bollywood cassettes she had lugged from Kenya, stacked neatly next to the stereo.

Pooja glanced at him.

“Business is booming. But in the end, what good’s all that?”

Pooja felt a tinge of envy even as she was surprised by his candor. How old was this boy, nineteen or ninety? Why wasn’t he out there dating girls, staying out late, doing the things that displeased parents but which were normal at his age, more like her own son?

“I’m sure they work very hard to make sure you have a good life.”

Parmesh managed a smile, appreciating her attempt at vindication.

She motioned him towards the food and he obediently sprang to action. “I’ll help you with the curry,” she said.

It was clear just from the hankering on Parmesh’s face as he embraced the box that he wished he hadn’t had to skip a lifetime to be reincarnated into a devout Hindu home like the one he was standing in.
If he only knew,
thought Pooja, shaking her head imperceptibly.

* * *

Greg, also known by his own preference as Parmesh (“creator”), was the gangly nineteen-year-old son of Valerie and Mark Goldstein, two of the most sought-after dermatologists in Beverly Hills. They were responsible for the looks of much of Hollywood royalty, many of whom appeared in affectionate poses with the couple in the gallery of pictures lining the walls of their home and office. Parmesh, of course, was not impressed.

While Parmesh’s passion for Hinduism vexed his parents, it was painfully obvious to him that he had been a Hindu in his previous life, and that skin color—like the assortment of luxury cars and palatial homes his parents flaunted—got in the way of real advancement. He longed to chuck it all away, move to an ashram in India where he could learn from a guru.

His parents had balked. Having failed to persuade him to see a psychiatrist—another crutch indicating spiritual bankruptcy to Parmesh—they tried a different approach. First, they confiscated his credit cards. “You want to be more like
them?
Running around in goddamn Halloween sheets? Well, we’ll see how lucky you feel when you can’t buy those goddamned Lucky jeans anymore!” Mark Goldstein hollered, pocketing the plastic that Parmesh coolly surrendered, the loss of this perk only enabling his renunciation of the material world. “Next he’ll want to shave off his goddamn head.”

“Mark,” Valerie Goldstein cried. “Don’t give him any more ideas!”

They took away his car keys. “From now on you can just stay in your goddamn room, channel Buddha from there,” Mark Goldstein suggested smugly.

So Parmesh, further exasperated that the Buddha, who was not even the focus of his worship, had become both embodiment of and scapegoat for eastern spirituality to his parents, retreated to his room and spent all his time chanting and meditating, learning rudimentary Hindi, driving his parents crazy. When necessary, he enthusiastically hopped onto public transit for hour-long bus commutes, searching for true camaraderie with the masses, some of whom couldn’t even manage a polite nod and looked either resigned to their deprivation or stared out the windows enviously at the bevy of gleaming cars.

Fearing that one of these days Parmesh might simply hike his way up to some peak on the Himalayas and not return home, his parents settled upon a compromise. First, with Valerie Goldstein sobbing theatrically, they reminded him that honoring one’s parents was paramount in every faith, and that the pain he was inflicting on them was a sin even in the eyes of the many-limbed creatures he thought of as gods. He must apply to colleges, delay his plans of trekking to some ashram. In return, he could keep his job at The Banyan and the Goldsteins would also fund any charities of his choice. As if on cue, Valerie Goldstein presented him with a brochure on a Calcutta orphanage.

“Surely you’re not going to be so goddamned selfish and think only of yourself? You do want to help them, don’t you, Pa - Pa- Pruss—” Mark Goldstein looked at his wife. “Oh, whatever the hell is it he likes to be called these days?”

She threw up her hands helplessly.

The pained faces of malnourished children in scraps of clothing with matted, ropy hair and distended bellies cried out at Parmesh. He was unpleasantly reminded—as the Goldsteins themselves must have when they conjured this little ruse—of the time during the Ethiopian famine when he had seen such harrowing images on television and found it impossible to eat; it was only when they promised to mail out a reasonable donation to Unicef that he could muster up an appetite for the veal and foie gras he would also end up renouncing some years later out of his concern for animal welfare.

* * *

Lovers, Rahul learned, create an orbit around themselves.

Within this sphere, they could come together with a kind of desperate hunger and the outside world and everything that didn’t begin or end with their colliding bodies was erased or committed to pure oblivion. It was like that when Rahul sprinted up the stairs and entered the apartment.

The first thing that changed about his world was the smell. Wisps of perfume, like the
anchal
of an elusive Apsara that had just left the room danced around him. It was always the same intoxicating scent, of ripe, effusive tuberoses. Tapering candles stood guard over an immaculate feast, illuminating the dinner table directly across the entry. Atif stood next to it with a look of such yearning on his face that his breathing had become labored and it seemed that any moment his legs would buckle. A week had passed since they last met and his resolve was finally draining out of him like blood from a punctured heart.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Rahul. “I can’t stay too long.”

Atif managed an unconvincing shrug, expecting as much. Such was the nature of their relationship. An apology expressed regret but could never serve as reassurance that it wouldn’t happen again. Atif’s knuckles were white from gripping the chair. “How much time do you have?”

Rahul approached Atif, looking down at him. Atif winced as if from a sharp punch. Rahul touched the scar on his lip and leaned forward to kiss his forehead, feeling the breath escape Atif in a sigh. Atif’s bare feet climbed onto Rahul’s polished shoes and he buried his face in Rahul’s chest, his arms encircling the strong girth of Rahul’s waist. At that moment, if Rahul had been able to hear Atif’s heart, he would have heard, “Thank you God for bringing him to me. Now I can feel the air in my lungs. Now the merciless counting of time can stop. He’s mine, every bit of him. She doesn’t exist here.”

They began to kiss and Atif began his ascent on Rahul, twining onto him like a vine. Rahul lifted him completely off the ground, against gravity and the commitments that had kept them bound to the heavy earth.

Afterward, when they lay on the floor, temporarily satiated and peaceful, Rahul looked down at the much younger boy pinned under his weight. Atif’s eyes were closed and a faint smile played around his lips. Ecstatic. Rahul had never been with anyone who knew how to give himself so completely to a moment, to a feeling, to him. The abandon in Atif was nothing less than mystical.

With their bodies clinging together, a pleach of sticky limbs, Rahul finally felt the symphony of an integrated self, no matter how fleeting or costly the feeling. Sweat and semen sheathed them, but Rahul didn’t move.

Atif opened his eyes and looked adoringly at Rahul. He ran his hand over Rahul’s face and then, after licking the salt off his fingers, coasted both hands over the film of sweat covering Rahul’s strong back. Rahul turned his face away from Atif’s adulating gaze, the naked tenderness, and rested it upon his own shoulder, his mouth pressed against his bicep. His eyes fell on the bedside clock. He would be unable to stay for dinner.

Atif caught this, looking at the clock and then up at Rahul.

Rahul smiled, reached overhead and pulled the comforter off the bed with one hand. He deftly arranged it around their adjoined bodies, covering them in a soft cloud. They continued to lie in silence for a while. Then Atif said, a distant look in his eyes, “I wish I knew what it was like to spend a whole night with you. To fall asleep next to you, know what you dream.” The tremor of an expected refusal played in his voice and it broke Rahul’s heart.

“Rent ‘The Exorcist,’” he offered flippantly, stroking Atif’s hair.

Atif stopped himself from saying more but couldn’t bring himself to respond. Rahul’s body tensed; he looked away. Claustrophobia invaded him. He wanted to say: but you knew going in that it was going to be like this.

He tried to move but Atif grabbed his arm, keeping their bodies joined.

“I’m sorry. Please, stay.”

Rahul looked at that face, remembering the sudden and disturbing attraction he had felt when he first laid eyes on Atif across the aisles of books at the store where Atif worked. He’d had the distinct feeling, however improbable, that they had met before, actually talked, gotten to know each other in a way more than just casual; the smiting, drug-like titillation, the anxiety and euphoria of being re-awakened. Those eyes, the pain in them.

But at moments like this, when he was reminded of how much others were being made to suffer because of his selfishness, of his disregard not only for his wife and lover, but also his son whom he could barely face, Rahul grew disgusted with himself.

“I know, I shouldn’t say such things but…It’s just that sometimes I wonder, you know? I wish we could go away, just the two of us. Couldn’t you just say you were going away on a business trip or some…Shit. Here I go again.”

Rahul broke away from Atif’s grasp, rolled off to the side. He looked up at the stucco ceiling. “There are certain things that I just can’t do, Atif. You know that. You knew that.”

Atif turned his face away from Rahul, tears stinging his eyes. Yes, he had always known it would be this way. From the very beginning, even though the idea of having a married man for a lover had seemed sexy, a fantasy, he had also known that the trajectory of an affair inevitably passed through broken promises, hurried, hushed phone conversations with abrupt hang-ups, private meetings, self-loathing, incomplete nights. If Atif had wanted to build a home with someone, to be seen in public with his lover, take off on vacations together, even just feel the moisture of someone’s breath on his neck through the night, then this was not the man. Why, Rahul could scarcely even use the word “gay” and perhaps he didn’t even think of them as such. He was just one of those men who was comfortable loving you as long as he wasn’t labeled, thrust into a movement or asked to give up the very things and people that kept him from doing the things Atif was asking him to.

Rahul propped himself up on one arm and looked at Atif. He touched Atif’s face and forced him to look back at him, feeling his pain as if he were being lacerated himself. He fingered the scar on Atif’s lip gently, wishing he could have prevented whatever had caused it along with what he was now inflicting. “You deserve more than this. Someone who can give you more, do all those things with you.”