They began to grab at his clothes, but he broke free and ran up the steps. For a while, they banged on the door, even ramming it a few times, but the bolts held. I found him huddled in bed, his shirt torn, scratches on his arms and face. “We have to go to the police,” I said, unsure, even as I made the suggestion, as to what reception we could expect.

“I can’t. I have to return tonight. The operation is tomorrow.”

I kissed his face and held him close. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something while you’re away.”

“The things he said about my mother. I don’t think I want to stay here any longer.”

We had sex before he left. It was more comforting than passionate, and I held him in my arms afterwards as long as I could. “I love you,” I said, and he whispered the words back to me. I imagined the two of us living in a new flat somewhere, perhaps even back in Bombay. His mother, Harjeet, my indiscretions, left floating behind in a different universe far away. “I love you,” I said again, and not knowing it then, kissed him for the final time in the home we’d built. Then I took him to the station to catch his train.


SATURDAY MORNING, I knocked on Harjeet’s door. No other option remained but to talk to him, since Mrs. Singh wouldn’t help and I didn’t have any evidence to file a police report. (I could have threatened him with physical violence, but the thirty kilos he had on me gave me pause.)

He answered the door in his undershirt, with a handkerchief over his knot of hair. “What do you want?” He looked more surprised to see me than irked.

“I want your harassment to stop. What you did to my friend last evening—stop bothering us. Just stop.”

He stretched lazily. “Or else you’ll do what?”

“I’ll go to the police.”

“And you think they’ll listen to a gandu like you?” He laughed. “To you and your sweetie friend? Where is he anyway? We must have really scared him if he didn’t even have the courage to come down.”

“His mother has cancer, so he’s in Karnal for a few months.”

Something shifted in Harjeet’s eyes, but it wasn’t the remorse I hoped to elicit. “Well, tell Sweetie we’re very, very sorry. We’ll all be waiting on the steps to greet him when he returns.” He slammed the door in my face.

That evening, the motorcycle friends burst into one of their sessions even before getting fully drunk. They sang all sorts of Bollywood numbers about separation and longing. They even performed “My sweetie lies over Karnal, my sweetie lies over the sea”—given their deep Punjabi vernacular, I hadn’t expected them to be conversant with English ditties. They finally stopped when neighbors from the adjoining house threatened to call the police.

At two a.m., someone knocked loudly on the door. For an instant, I had the irrational thought it might be Karun—I’d been trying to reach him all day to ask about the second operation they’d performed on his mother. Instead, I found Harjeet, so drunk that he held on to the doorjamb for support. “I just thought—” he said, and stumbled into the room.

For the next few minutes, he stared at the walls, trying to condense a coherent thought. “I sleep right beneath you now, in my mother’s room,” he finally said. “I can hear you go to the toilet.”

He planted himself on a chair, then slid off over the side. He mumbled vague apologies (or perhaps they were threats?) while sprawled out on the floor. At one point, he caught my leg and tried to pull me down next to him. It took me the better part of an hour to drag him out the door. I left him on the landing softly singing one of his homo songs to himself.

The Jazter had sometimes wondered about the reason behind Harjeet’s belligerence—the ensuing week left no doubt. It was like watching a fairy-tale battle, a personal jihad—the entire gamut of reactions compressed and played out. One day he tried to push me aside on the steps, the next, he stared lasciviously as he let me pass; in the evenings he sang insulting songs with his friends, then staggered up to my door drunk. Most bizarrely, he resumed his exercises on my landing, wearing a thong (and matching head knot) so electric yellow it made even the Jazter blush.

At first, I simply ignored him—when he knocked, I kept my door shut. Then—purely in an abstract sense—I started wondering how he would be to fuck. I peeped through my window as he strained at his barbells—the muscles on his chest bulged and popped. In body type, he would have to get an A-minus in terms of what the Jazter usually looked for. There was the added bonus of doing it for the first time with a Sikh—another species of prey checked off. The bottom-line question: What would be the harm? After all, the Jazter had already cheated so many times in the park.

So I decided I’d forge ahead. Give the Sikh my very own seekh kebab. With home delivery an option, why go foraging in the park? I slipped a note in his mailbox. Lose your friends for an evening and come up as soon as it gets dark.

He was very nervous, so I made him go back downstairs and get some rum. We didn’t talk much as we sat on the sofa and passed the bottle between us. I took the liquor away to the kitchen before he got too drunk. The bed I shared with Karun seemed too much of a betrayal, so I spread a mat on the floor. “Why don’t you take your clothes off?”

His body looked even bigger naked. The way he arranged himself on the mat with a pillow under his stomach made it clear what he’d come for. So dispensing with the niceties I put on a condom. All this economy pleased me, made me feel back in the park.

He cursed in Punjabi as he contorted and bucked under me. It felt like riding a whale, like harpooning a sea monster. He wanted it again after we’d rested, so I summoned up the energy to lift his massive legs and do him faceup. When he asked for a third helping, I passed.

At the door, he hugged me awkwardly, but we didn’t kiss. The next evening, we dispensed with the embrace as well. He began coming up regularly, with an extra afternoon visit on the weekend. He still got boisterous when his motorcycle buddies were around, but the homo songs had long ceased to offend.

For a while, I felt quite happy with the arrangement—Harjeet’s body nicely fit the bill, plus it was so readily available. Then I realized the problem I’d created for myself. How would I extricate myself once I tired of Harjeet, or even more pressingly, once Karun came back? I racked my brain, but couldn’t come up with a solution, other than moving out. Hadn’t Karun said he didn’t want to live in the same building as Harjeet when he returned? Should I be looking for another landlord who would rent to us?

I needn’t have worried. The door opened one evening as I fucked Harjeet on the mat. With Harjeet’s usual noisiness, neither of us heard, and I continued all the way to climax. As I slumped forward, my gaze alit on Karun’s figure, standing with a bag still in his hand. Even in my fuzzy state, his shock came through clearly, I felt his horrified stare. “My mother died last night. I cremated her this morning,” he said.

10

KARUN RETURNED AFTER I LEFT FOR WORK THE NEXT DAY AND moved his belongings out. I tried calling him on his cell phone, but he didn’t answer—the number got disconnected soon. I sat down to write him a letter of apology but quickly found myself bogged down—my behavior with Harjeet looked even more outrageous on paper, especially when juxtaposed against the loss of his mother. Besides, I didn’t have his mailing address in Karnal even though I’d been in person to the flat. One day, I took the train there, but a padlocked door greeted me. The shopkeeper downstairs who gave me the street number told me nobody had stayed in the flat since the death. I even tried Karun’s university, but they had no idea of his whereabouts.

His leaving proved unlucky for me. When I told Harjeet I couldn’t imagine having sex with him again, he flew into a rage and punched me in the face, then kicked me several times as I writhed on the ground. It took six stitches to sew up my lip and several visits to the dentist to have a knocked-out tooth fixed. Just as the pain in my ribs subsided, I found my office locked when I arrived at work—the company had gone belly-up. I couldn’t find another job—the market dried up overnight due to the sudden economic downturn. My pocket got picked and someone (Harjeet, I suspect) broke into my apartment and stole my computer and television.

I moved back in with my parents in Bombay. I missed Karun intensely, feeling so depressed I couldn’t get up some days. Now that I had squandered my relationship, I wanted nothing more than to recapture it. Despite almost seven years together, something profoundly unfulfilled remained between us—as if I was on the cusp of absorbing a deep and personal message Karun had been trying to convey. I sent several letters to the Karnal flat, but received no reply. The prospect of frequenting my old haunts looking for release again felt sordid, pathetic. I didn’t quite understand this—hadn’t I been cruising the Delhi parks quite breezily just some weeks back? Karun’s memory rose like a pillar of light, emitting a radiant integrity I felt compelled to emulate.

I forced myself to go to gay events to find someone else. I met Sonal at a Gay Bombay disco night—he had his own tiny place at Andheri. For the four months we dated, I kept comparing him to Karun and coming up short. His body felt all wrong, his aroma didn’t intoxicate. He had no ambition beyond being a sales clerk, and talked incessantly about Bollywood films. Within a week, I felt I knew everything I needed to know about him—no reserve remaining to intrigue me, like the smile I gradually learned to tease out on Karun’s lips. I went out with other people as well, but none of them lasted as long.

After almost a year of unemployment, a financial advisory firm in Hyderabad offered me a position. I took it, determined to use the new surroundings to pull me out of my malaise. Indeed, the huge central lake soon set my dormant shikari radar abuzz again. I spent several agreeable evenings there, strolling the periphery to ferret out the activity spots, observing the intriguing new species of local prey. The vivid mix of the North and the South in their features, the Muslim and the Hindu, the fair and the dark—all packaged with a small-town innocence, an old-fashioned politeness, which I found particularly restorative. I never knew what language they’d lapse into when fucked—Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English). It occurred to me that such local delicacies, such spécialités du terroir, must exist in every state. Perhaps I needed to go on a therapeutic national pilgrimage (my very own Haj, my personal rath yatra) to sample them all in their natural locales. What better way to feel the pulse of the nation, to connect with the poor and the rich, to track all the shining progress new India had made?

But the only trips I took were to Bombay and Delhi for business, and these invariably plunged me into a melancholic state. I felt strangled by the nostalgia, by the memories of my days with Karun. I tried not to look up while walking the streets of the capital so as not to catch glimpse of a barsati. In Bombay, I took various detours to avoid the Oval, the university library, the Regal, all the landmarks across which our history had played. Each time I returned home, it seemed to take weeks before the hangover of my past life lifted. I threw away the photos I had of Karun and ceased my letter-writing campaign.

Work provided a welcome distraction. Recent political reforms had injected considerable excitement into the China-related investments I tracked (along with a majority of analysts at the office). The newly sanctioned Youth Democratic League, initially dismissed as a propaganda tool to voice aggressive, ultranationalist positions unofficially, had tapped into a country-wide generational vein that made its popularity surge well beyond the Chinese government’s control. Its rabid calls to pull the plug on the U.S. debt, teach Europe a lesson for censuring China over human rights in the UN, invade not only Taiwan but also Korea and Japan, had resulted in wild swings in the yuan, especially once the League demonstrated its clout by calling a successful one-day nationwide shutdown to protest their country’s kowtowing to the West. To my fascination, Indian stocks didn’t tank along with their Chinese counterparts as they historically had (along with much of the developing market). Rather, they went up: investors took shelter in India’s relative stability with each new alarming power gambit by the League. I also started noticing the converse: a bump in the Shanghai exchange each time a terrorist attack caused a drop in the Sensex, as if India and China had been locked into a zero-sum game. (Had I been a professor like my parents, perhaps I could have written a paper to christen this coupling the Jazter Phenomenon.)