“No need for such drama. Here’s the key.” I threw it at him. “There are taxis around the corner—I hope this time you have enough money in your wallet to pay the fare yourself.”


HE CALLED ABOUT an hour later on his cell. “I have to tell you something.” I didn’t answer. “About your question.” Again, I kept silent. “Are you there?”

“Go on, I’m listening.”

“Not like that. I’m downstairs.”

He had found the path that circled around to the small strip of beach behind the building. As I approached, he rose from the fallen palm trunk on which he sat. “Jaz?”

“Yes, it’s me.” I stepped carefully toward him across the debris-littered sand. The moon shone down through the palm fronds, covering him in a delicate crisscross of light. He looked insubstantial, lace-like, like a spirit that had lost its way and been captured in this lunar mesh.

For a few minutes we stood in silence, watching the bay. The tide was the furthest I’d ever seen, the waves streaks of silver that appeared almost stationary. “I’d read about the park,” he finally said. “On the internet, while still in Karnal.”

It all came tumbling out—how after junior college in Karnal, he knew he had to spend his three senior years somewhere else, how he’d found postings for similar parks in Delhi, but it still seemed too close to his mother and his family. “I felt dreadful applying for the scholarship, but I knew I had to go far away to survive. It still took me a year and a half in Bombay before I got together the courage to do anything.”

He began telling me more—about grappling with his inner feelings, the doubts he had. Too much information smothers passion every time, I wanted to warn him. Before the moment could drift away in a flow of words, I leaned forward and locked his lips in a kiss.

His mouth felt small, perhaps because his tongue didn’t know how to respond. I held his head and pressed my body into his. He sighed—a sound that emanated from deep within his throat and didn’t fully escape. The moon’s filigree covered my person as well, its rays now engulfed us both in their net.

Upstairs, I led him by the hand to my room. His skin tasted salty but fresh. He cried out when I took him in my mouth, grabbing my head and finishing before I could slow him down. Afterwards, he buried his head in my chest and shyly asked if he could reciprocate.

We slept curled up together. I offered to get us a second pillow, but Karun said no. “I want to be as close as we can—I’ve never spent the night with someone else.” It occurred to me that this was the first time for me as well. For all these years, I’d been used to shikar, in which one doesn’t need a bed.


THE SUN HAS SUNK LOWER, but dusk hasn’t arrived yet. It looks like we’re passing through one of the shabbier tracts of Matunga or Mahim, but I can’t be sure. It’s easier to tell at night, when the poor areas are the only ones without light. The rich have their own generators, prompted by the past year’s power cuts.

What will I do once the sun sets? The bulbs and switches in my compartment surely don’t work. Boxes of incense and candles lie stacked next to a pile of saris in a corner, but the Jazter, a non-smoker, is matchless. I pull the tarpaulin off a row of crates running along a wall and discover a weapons cache. Gingerly, I sort through the rifles, the ammunition, the hand grenades, wary of triggering off my own private October 19. I find nothing to illuminate my surroundings—at least not without a bit of a blast.

Wrapped in a cloth is a handgun. It looks as cute and compact as a toy—surely it fires nothing more potent than caps. I’ve never handled a gun before—I’m startled by how much it weighs. I look for the safety catch, such a frequent hiccup in the novels I’ve read, but cannot locate it. Dare I squeeze the trigger to see if it’s loaded? I place it back atop the pile, then pick it up again. Ever since the war started, I’ve felt unsafe—all the people out to get me, as in this morning’s close shave. So I stash the gun in my side trouser pocket. Immediately, I worry about accidental discharges. I try to corral the Jazter jewels out of harm’s way but they keep swinging back.

This all seems so unreal that I feel like laughing. To think I need a gun to protect against those who’d kill me for being Muslim. The joke is on them—the last time I prayed was with Rahim, in the mosque annex. It’s too bad they don’t know about my true religion of noodling—a reason to really get their nuts in a snit.


THE NEXT DAY, Karun seemed to slip rapidly into morning-after regret. “What time is it? My roommate must be wondering where I went.”

“It’s only ten, and it’s a Saturday, so just relax. I’ll freshen up a bit and then whip us up some omelets.” He looked at me wide-eyed, as if stricken at the thought of eggs. “Of course, if you like, I could make you something else—”

“No, it’s not that. I just have to go.” He fished out his shirt from the jumble on the floor and put it on, then hopped around on one foot as he tried to get the other through a trouser leg. “I’m sorry—I just need to be by myself.”

My shikari reflexes kicked in with full force, juices astir at my prey’s escape attempt. “Wait,” I said, struck by déjà vu as he scuttled to the entryway, shoes in hand. “I won’t let you leave just like that.”

The locked door stopped him as before. “Could you give me the key, please. Please?”

“Or what? You’ll threaten to cry for help again? Go ahead, scream all you want, be my guest. I’m not opening the door until after breakfast.”

“I’ll come back, I promise. Some other time, believe me. Right now, just let me go.” Tears sprang to his eyes, panic to his face.

“No, Karun. It’s always scary in the beginning. You can’t just keep running away like that.”

He let me take his shoes and set them down, then lead him back to my room. I tried to steer him to the bed again, but he slumped in a chair instead. Minutes ticked by without him speaking. Finally, I prompted him. “Why don’t you finish telling me what you started last night on the beach? What made you go looking in the first place on the web.”

He must have been waiting for encouragement, because he opened up at once. It began with an innocent question at a family gathering—his cousin Sheila asked him why he didn’t have a girlfriend. “Everyone stopped talking just then, and in the silence, I turned absolutely red. I mumbled something about waiting to finish my studies, that not all my college mates were paired. ‘Yes, but you don’t ever even talk about women,’ Sheila said. ‘Not to you, he doesn’t,’ my mother shot back in my defense. People laughed, and the conversation went on, but Sheila’s remark stayed with me. One of those thoughts that keeps burrowing deeper, once it gains entry into your head.

“Why didn’t I take any interest in the opposite sex? My mother, I knew, kept waiting for me to say something about a girlfriend. The boys in junior college, just like the ones in high school, talked about nothing else—it was all I could do to tune them out. I wondered if I might be different—could I prefer men? A purely intellectual hypothesis, mind you, like one might make in physics or mathematics—I’d never detected any actual such feelings in myself. But it quickly became an obsession—I started reading everything I could find about it on the internet. The only scientific way to answer the question, I realized, was to put it to an experimental test.”

“But you’d never even tried it with a woman.”

“I thought about it. Going to a brothel or something sordid like that. I couldn’t get up the courage. Just like I circled the park so many times, too scared to go in, before the evening we met.”

“The evening you ran away.”

“I panicked, as I did each time I thought about explaining myself at tea afterwards. It’s hard to bridge the gap between theory and experiment. As you can see, even sitting here talking to you now takes an effort.”

“I’m honored, I guess. To be your science experiment.” The Jazter had been called many other things after sex, but never that. “And what have you discovered from this experiment?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

I was. After last night, I knew which band he played in—down to the exact instrument. But who was I to argue if he felt he needed to research an encore concert? “I’ll be glad to help any way I can.”

We had breakfast, and then I prepared the bathtub, using a bubble solution my mother had got from France. At first, Karun wouldn’t get in with me, despite my promise of only vegetarian fun. But then curiosity got the better of him. “Nobody I’ve known has ever owned a bathtub—I suppose you must see them all the time in the West.” He put a foot in tentatively, as if mindful of popping the bubbles, then lowered himself to face me in the water. “I always imagined from the photos that they would feel like small personal swimming pools. But actually, this is so much tinier.”

He dodged his body out of the way when I tried to soap him up. So I splashed him, and tickled him with my toes, to which he did respond. Before long, other parts of our anatomy inescapably got involved. And yet, the Jazter scrupulously restrained himself—not so much to honor his gentlemanly word as to preserve Karun’s stamina for afternoon research.

Back in my room, Karun noticed the stack of games I had as a kid. “A model train set! Does it still work?”

“Yes, but it takes forever to set up.” I tried to steer him to something snappier, like Boggle or Mikado, but his mind was set. So I took down the toy village accessories from the top of my cupboard, and the box of extra rails from under my bed. Karun dove right in, spreading out the components, coupling the bogeys, installing the village, down to the tiny plastic men and women. As he stretched out over the tracks to peer at how they aligned through a tunnel, I had visions of the train choo-chooing (chew-chewing?) through the valley of his ass.

Between my lecherous fantasies, I helped Karun with the setup. “This was always my favorite,” I said, demonstrating how two sections of track could cross with the help of an elevated bridge. “A great spot for nifty accidents—one train derailing atop another, even a bomb attack once that set the bridge aflame.”

The talk of havoc got Karun all excited—he couldn’t wait to set up a collision once we finished laying the rails. We rammed engines into each other, made cars fly off the tracks, and in one particularly tragic accident, watched as a runaway train mowed down an entire village. “It’s even better with fire,” I said, and a pyromaniacal gleam immediately sprang to Karun’s eyes. We drew the curtains and turned off the lights, then sent two trains to their mutually assured doom by stuffing them with matches and lit birthday candles.

Later, as we lay amid the ruins (in the finale, an enemy air raid had blown apart the tracks), I took one of the engines and ran it down Karun’s back. “Does it tickle?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I skimmed it lazily over his buttocks. “And now?” He didn’t answer, so I rolled it down his leg, teased his ankle with it, then rolled it back. “This little engine thinks it’s time for another experiment.” I worked off his pants and underwear, then pressed the engine playfully into his cleft.

Karun still didn’t speak, but stretched out more fully, crossing his forearms to rest his head. He sighed as I retraced the engine’s path with my lips, kissing him all over, using my tongue to tease out ingress. I moved to position myself in place, the condom already discreetly slipped on, my mouth still planting kisses to keep him relaxed. “Shh,” I whispered, as I began to enter and he tensed, “it’ll feel better in a second.” I wrapped myself over his body as completely as I could, to convey my tenderness, to let him feel our oneness.

That night, I awoke around three a.m. Karun lay beside me, his mouth open, the air flowing in and out in regular breaths. He looked innocent, untroubled—I wondered what dreams unfolded in his head. Could I be in them, could his scientist mind be tabulating the results of his tests? We still had tomorrow morning—I’d have to think up some more games, some other experiments. Right now, though, I just wanted to gaze at him, feel the warmth of his body next to mine, absorb the pleasure of sharing my bed.

8

THE FIRST THING THAT STRIKES ME WHEN THE TRAIN CRASHES through the wall and barrels down the road is the collisions Karun and I used to engineer. The candles, the matches, the smoke billowing out from the windows, the flames burning paint off the cars. Surely when the weapons in my compartment detonate, they will surpass any of our extravaganzas. Too bad I’ll be seated right in the middle. The Jazter would have preferred being a spectator of the conflagration to come, rather than an ingredient.