Seahorse. Janice Pariat

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СКАЧАТЬ awoke at odd hours between early afternoon and evening. He was out of time. Removed from it like a modern-day Tithonus, existing at the quiet limit of the world.

      I’d hurry over to Lenny’s room after school, or on weekend afternoons. It was a basement level space, down a narrow flight of steps accessible only from the outside of the house. Dimly-lit, oddly shaped, with jutting walls and sudden corners, and quite bare apart from a single bed, a writing table, and cupboard. In the corner stood a wooden shelf sinking under the weight of books, some so old they’d turned brittle, riddled by silverfish. They once belonged to a tenant upstairs, an elderly Bengali gentleman who died on a cold winter’s night, leaving Lenny’s family in the awkward position of having to pack up his belongings and giving them away to charity—for he had no family, here or elsewhere, that they knew of. Lenny persuaded his parents to let him keep the library—an eclectic collection, ranging from the obscure (The Collected Letters of Henry J Wintercastle) to the mildly collectable (an 1895 edition of A Tale of Two Cities). I remember how they lay thick and heavy in my hands, slightly musty, the smell that makes me think of Lenny when I walk into a secondhand bookshop.

      In the afternoons, we’d go for walks in the pine forest behind his house, and smoke cheap cigarettes, seated on mossy rocks or, if it was a dry month, lying on the ground.

      In between the roots of trees, the spines of the earth. Everything suddenly inverted, an upturned silence, grass behind my neck, a tilted view of patchy sky through crazy tangle of twigs and needle-leaves. We’d talk, or rather he’d talk and I’d listen. His voice murmuring like a stream. A book he’d read. This movie he’d seen, about a man wrongly sent to prison. A line he liked. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. A poem by Auden. His favorite. All we are not stares back at what we are. Or we’d be quiet. And if we were quiet and unmoving long enough, the forest would flourish over us. They would return, like slivers of sky, a pair of long-tailed blue jays. Elsewhere, a cluster of playful sparrows ventured closer. The clouds seemed to stop and linger. I’d feel heavier and lighter, quieted by the fall of pine needles, feeling their smooth silkiness under my hands. The prickle of tiny black ants clambering over my fingers. For them, I was tree root and stone. Here and there, the sudden fickle flit of yellow butterflies. We were woven, all at once, into the fabric of a spring afternoon.

      On other days, colder and shorter, Lenny would take me to tea shops, scattered around town, near bustling markets, on busy main roads. We’d dip slabs of rice cake into small chipped cups of bitter tea, and watch the crowd swell and thin around us. Folk who dressed rough and spoke rough, butchers and builders who worked with their hands. (Of whom my parents would have disapproved, saying they were not “our type.”) Sometimes, we headed away from the clamor of the centre, past the car parks and newsstands, the bakeries and pharmacies, and slipped into a narrow lane flanked by a sludgy canal and the bricked back of a building. Its smoothness interrupted by a chink, an opening that led into a triangular one-room tea shop manned by a lady with an aged face and young eyes. She served us heaped plates of food, brimful cups of tea and called Lenny “my butterfly.” I couldn’t quite follow their banter—their language wrapped in lively innuendo.

      “How many plums have you eaten recently?” she once asked Lenny.

      I reminded them it wasn’t yet the season.

      But it pleased me to be with them, to feel part of something adult and amorous.

      More often, deterred by relentless rain, we’d stay indoors, in Lenny’s room. Reading, or playing our own version of darts on an enormous map of the world on the wall—a patchwork of colors amid posters of longhaired musicians in white vests and tight leather pants. Lenny would aim for South America—because he said he loved that vision of wildness—and land mostly in the Pacific or Atlantic. I’d aim for England—he’d call me boring—and end up in North Africa, or the deep blue Mediterranean.

      We’d fling the darts from across the room, lazily lying on his bed, and then I’d scurry over to gather them.

      “I have to get out of here, Nem,” he’d tell me, as he aimed for Brazil.

      “You will,” I’d say loyally, because I truly believed he could achieve anything.

      For the longest time, I placed it there—the reason for Lenny’s restlessness. His plummeting moods and sudden disappearances. Those afternoons when he wouldn’t permit me to accompany him out. “But where are you going?” I’d ask and he wouldn’t reply, sending me home instead. “Go finish your homework.” Those evenings when he didn’t return to his room at all. Later, the unexplained mud on his motorcycle wheels, his shoes, the frayed edges of his jeans.

      I placed it there.

      The smallness of our small town, its bland familiarity and quiet, terrifying dullness.

      Yet how are we to truly map others? To fully navigate the rooms they carve in their hearts. The whispers they alone understand. What is love to their ear? The crevice it fits into is different for each of us. We are separate worlds illuminated by strange suns, casting unrecognizable shadows.

      In the end, we follow spirits only our eyes can spy.

       I have to get out of here, Nem.

      Eventually, I suppose, that’s what Lenny did. In a way that left him with no hope of return.

      A few weeks after I found out about Lenny, Nicholas and I went to a bar in Model Town, a neighborhood near the university, comprising circles of apartment blocks built around a lake. We took an autorickshaw, weaving through the traffic, between lumbering DTC buses, honking cars and pedestrians who’d spilled onto the road from sidewalks choked with garbage and abandoned construction material. In certain places, Delhi swayed in a perpetual state of chaos, and that night I was glad for the tumult. The bar was located in the unsavoury side of Model Town, just off the imaginatively named 2^nd Main Road. Clusters of men loitered around, hovering close to a paan and cigarette stall. How they stared at us—this strange duo, a tall white foreigner and his small-built companion who looked as much an outsider.

      Inside, a low smoke-cloud hung over the room. The clientele, middle-aged and solely male, dotted the tables, seated with their drinks and plates of glistening murg tikka masala and seekh kebabs. I don’t remember what we were drinking, but it was different from the usual stuff we swilled in college—foul Haywards 10,000 for a cheap, quick high or a blindingly acidic whisky called Binnie Scot. It wasn’t long before I lost count of the refills. The bar transformed into a warm cocoon. A small planet spiraling into free fall, plummeting through space. The lights were brighter and dimmer all at once, the air pulsing with a musical beat that arose from all corners.

       I know who killed Lenny.

      I thought I heard myself say those words; I wasn’t certain.

      Nicholas placed his hand on my arm. He wasn’t killed, he said.

       He was.

      “Your sister explained… there were complications…”

       No, he was killed.

      In my head, I was adamant.

      “Why do you say so, Nehemiah?”

      I stayed silent.

      He asked me again.

      Much as I wanted to confide in him, at the time I couldn’t bring myself to explain.

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