Seahorse. Janice Pariat

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      In our time together, I thought this was one of few details hidden from me about Nicholas. The strangeness of love is it tempts you to feel you haven’t met a person at a particular moment in their life, a mere sliver of time, but that somehow you’ve embraced it all. Their laden pasts, their abundant present, and (you hope so much) their undiscovered future. I did try and enquire, occasionally, as elliptically as I could—whether he’d been for many walks in the Ridge, if he’d heard some of the stories about the place, the ghosts, the strange creatures, the couples and parties at the monument.

      He’d furrow his brow. “Yes… Myra and I explored it a few times too…”

      Myra was his step-sister, who’d visited him in Delhi over Christmas that year. I wasn’t keen to discuss her, bring her into our conversation; while she was around, I hardly stayed at the bungalow, and Nicholas and I were never alone.

      Had anything odd ever happened? In the Ridge.

      I had to leave it at that; I wouldn’t like to try his patience.

      I never confessed what I’d overheard, him and Adheer, and how.

      Once, though, I asked if he knew about the pond.

      “In the forest? Are you sure?”

      I was certain.

      When he asked me where, I couldn’t explain its exact location.

      I found it the afternoon I ducked into the tower.

      By the time I emerged, it was early evening, and in the twilight, the forest had thickened, hiding its paths under leafy shadow. Suddenly, it wasn’t a place to be alone. I tried to retrace my steps, but must’ve taken a wrong turn. The track disappeared and the ground hollowed into a pond. The water green and solid, clogged with lotus roots and leaves. I stood at the edge, the woods around me glistening with hidden light. I turned back, my breath heavy, a trace of fear on my tongue. Something struck at my shoulder, a dead, heavyweight branch. As panic rose like a dark thing from my chest, I caught a glimpse of the mud track leading out to the main road.

      When people leave unexpectedly… Nicholas, Lenny… you are left only with unanswered questions; they travel long with you, looping their way into your thoughts, becoming your intimate companions.

      “But where are you going?” I’d ask Lenny, and he’d offer no reply. On those afternoons he wouldn’t permit me to accompany him, on those evenings he didn’t return to his room. The mud, unexplained, splattered on his motorbike wheels.

      Maybe on one of those excursions he met Mihir.

      The stranger.

      The solitary backpacker who drifted into our hometown, winding his way from the northern tip of the country, down the wild mountains, across wide rivers and into our sloping streets. He had coal-dust eyes, and mercilessly sun-darkened skin. I remember he carried the scent of bonfires, of nights spent out in the open, of old wood-bone. He spoke softly, hesitant for you to hear what he had to say.

      While I was working on somehow getting through my final exams in my last year in school, Lenny took Mihir for bike rides out of town, to all the secret tea stalls he’d shown me. To the forest. The lady at the one-room tea shop called them her butterflies.

      I met them infrequently—between tuition, extra classes, and paranoid parents, I had little time—yet when I did, I could sense Lenny was secretly, silently reanimated. They would travel together, it was planned.

      “Where?” I asked in wonder.

      And Mihir, in his twilight voice would tell us where СКАЧАТЬ