The Little Pink Boys (2)

The distance from my place to Church Street at the dead of night is about 25 minutes, but then where do you find the dead of night in Bangalore? Crawling cabs, cops engaged in friendly banter with drunk motorcyclists they intend to extort from, metro workers settling in for a whole night of hard work, security guards cycling back to their chummeries, frenetic ambulances zigzaging their way through one-way streets, this city is in a constant state of bedlam be it night or day. 

I park my Harley opposite Sobha Mall and walk up to Empire, where Monami has ordered us a couple of shawarmas. I’m not particularly fond of the pita bread, but then, I had already had a difficult conversation today, and was willing to let go, despite the chewy bread and the undercooked chicken. Is it bird flu time, I can’t remember. Shouldn’t we be pressure cooking all kinds of meat this time of year, I wonder aloud. 

“Come on, you wimp, how long are you gonna live anyway? To think you ride a big-ass bike,” she snorted.

“What’s the bike gotta do with wanting to not have salmonella crawling into my gut?”

“Gah, that’s a bacteria, and bird flu is caused by a virus. Huge difference. Anyway, don’t worry, the oven generates enough heat to get all the fear out of the chicken. Can you enjoy your food, please? What happened to you?”

“Well it seems I kissed a guy.”

“What, when!”

“I mean long back, but he called today and the conversation got awkward.”

“Haha, I kiss my roommate every now and then, don’t you worry. I hope you aren’t turned off by me kissing Reshmi? But I guess you boys are a bit more homophobic than us, so it’s natural that you find it awkward,” she offered as way of explanation, womansplaining everything very easily, like she always does.  

I can lay out all my troubles in front of her, and she will find a way out of everything. 

A simple, straightforward way. 

I guess she could have been a great counselor, but I have no clue what she does, really. Either she’s from a rich background, suddenly run into money, or has a very well-paying job, I have no way to tell. Our encounters are kept easy and sanitized, without any probing into our backgrounds. Unlike the popular belief that women need something emotional whereas men just want their women to show up naked, Monami seems to have overcome that stereotype, and somehow managed to flip it a bit. In the sense that I have started needing her more than I would like to admit. For her to show up. Clothed even.

“Do you think our sexual orientation could be traced back to our DNA, or is it conditioning?” she asked.

“You seem to know a lot about everything, maybe you know it better than me? Plus I’ve not specialized in the Watson and Crick model of DNA,” I chuckle, feeling smug about having remembered something from my high-school biology book.

“I do know better than you, come on, like that’s anything to argue about! And I just wanted to know what you thought about it. Btw, I don’t think there’s any gay gene particularly. I must study about it. And also, F Y I, Watson and Crick stole the structure of DNA from Rosalind Franklin. I’m sure you didn’t know that. But then she was a woman, and that’s gonna be a long night.”

She tells me about the Matilda Effect in science, where men have taken credit for what their female colleagues have invented or discovered, and rattles off a lot of names of women wronged. By now we have walked up to the other end of Church Street and it is time to walk back to the motorcycle.

“Come home?” she offers, and I nod my head in silent approval. The last few patrons of Kling are out on the sidewalk, engaged in what appears to be cheerful badinage, the homeless are finally curling up in their blankets, the dogs are waiting for the garbage from the restaurants to be taken out, and the last metro silently leaves MG Road station above our heads. Or so I imagine. It is already past 2.00 in the morning and there are no metros plying this route now. 

At her place tonight it isn’t the usual. Clothes don’t come off, and we just light a couple of cigarettes and doze off on her rather sturdy sofa. Where is it from? Damro, she says, patting me reassuringly. Reshmi comes out of her room, waves a groggy hello in our general direction, and starts urinating with the door open. I can hear the faint trickle of her pee, and wonder if the unexpected arousal is for her or Monami. Something about it reassures me.

Monami wraps her arm around me. Am I falling in love? Losing my sangfroid in the face of an impending relationship?

But then darkness sneaks up on you when you least remember.

The Little Pink Boys (1)

It is late, and my work is about to get over. It has been a very long day staring at the draft proposal for my client, and my eyes are drier than usual. That’s when the phone purrs into life with a message. Ungodly hour, when god has gone off to sleep, or is helping himself to some live pornography, in all probability from Brazil. 

What if he has an Asian fetish, though?

I can’t understand Asian porn.

Am racist to the core.

Only blondes do it for me. 

Late in the night, my mind works in staccato, in short telegraphic bursts that can be disconcertingly digressive in effect. But my work is over, the bottle of wine is out, a cheap rose bottled in 2017 from a local vineyard, and the gallivanting causes no apparent harm. 

Most of the women I interact with late in the night are muted, so who could it be?

It turns out to be Swarnava. From our Calcutta days working for The Statesman. From those dark halls lined with wooden desks and the smell of paper and silverfish.

"It's about -9 degrees today. I just dropped my mum off to the hospice. It's depressing as fuck."

"What is, the cold or the hospice? I, for myself, love the cold. I should have been there, ideally."

I am a partial redneck, dreaming of guns and owning big trucks, although what was I gonna haul in them if I didn’t like big game? A sniper I could have been. And am a pretty good shot. But was it centigrade or Fahrenheit? Somehow the idea of killing humans from a distance seemed way more acceptable than a white-tailed deer in open season. Mark Wahlberg has romanticized it for us. Us who are still here, in India.

"The whole situation, to be honest. The fact that she's not gonna make it. That am here. Oh, and I mean Fahrenheit, which should be -23 degrees back home.”

What’s home anymore, we ponder. How the definitions changed, how we grew roots and got uprooted every single time, moving from city to city, state to state, and in his case, from country to country. How’s your home looking? Not so good. Neither is mine.

The topic changes to gender identities and whether it has gone too far. I object to people identifying as feline beings, or bats. I feel they need to be thrashed with a cricket bat if the need arises. He objects to young adults changing their gender without consulting their parents. I feel that’s one’s personal choice. But testicular injuries in women’s sports have increased manifold, which has us in splits. Where do you draw the line?

“Why did you become so decidedly straight?” he asks rather bluntly.

I don’t reply for a while. The little boys weren’t pink anymore, they suddenly turned abhorrently hirsute, overnight. “I was always straight,” I offer as an explanation.

“I am bisexual, my wife knows it. You haven’t been my only dalliance with the same sex. However, despite us, you have always been very straight, which made me wonder what was it between us, Rajan?”

“You were effeminate, you reminded me of a girl, we connected, and the dark corridors of The Statesman didn’t stop us. Why overthink it?”

“I don’t, really. My mum liked you a lot. I guess she sensed it all. We wouldn’t call it love, would we?

She asked after you today. I said you’re doing well.”

“I haven’t tried to categorize it. But yes, like you said, I have been very straight since you, or even before you. Am almost homophobic now. When men kiss men on screen, I cringe.” 

I don’t have to pretend to be a likable character, saying the right things, being politically correct with every thought that comes out of my mouth. Although I like watching women on women, men turn me off, and always have had. Was it a woman’s soul trapped in Swarnava’s body? I can’t forget my first kiss with him, the suddenness of it, and how it all seemed perfect. Did I ever feel so heady kissing any of my girlfriends? We didn’t agree on many things then, and we don’t now either. Like I cannot seem to fit this episode in my otherwise linear love life. I have always liked women, and continue to like them till date. Kissing him didn’t seem off, somehow. It was as natural as reading The Telegraph every morning. Our competitor with more ad revenue. What were they doing right?

“You called me a little pink boy, remember? You said you liked how my mouth smelled.”

We weren’t little any longer. Or boys. But the overlaying of this memory with diesel trucks and guns, of shooting ranges and cowboy shirts, of deliberate shaping of facial fuzz as beards, or of doc martens, didn’t make us any less pink. 

I don’t reply to his message. 

Monami wants to meet at Empire, Church Street. Her message had arrived unannounced, as muted messages usually do, languishing there for a while before I could read it. Can I make it by 1:00 a.m.? Then perhaps to her place? I take out my trucker jacket. There’s a chill in the air tonight. My Harley is bound to wake up the neighbors at this ungodly hour, but god’s chosen to leave his house now, with the strong redolence of a little pink boy lingering in his mouth.