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.
No comments:
Post a Comment