Seahorse - Janice Pariat

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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 2nd 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.

      If art is preservation, it is also confession.

      Few lectures stay with me from my university days—a class on DH Lawrence’s language of synesthesia, Woolf’s complex layering of time, Ismat Chughtai’s seething denouncement of the world—and those that do were mostly delivered by Doctor Mahesar. A professor of petite yet rotund build and razor-sharp articulation. His tutorial room was atop the college building, on the open, flat roof, overlooking the lawns and trees, where in the evening, squawking parrots came to roost. In the summer, it was unbearable, a compact, vicious furnace, with only the rare, welcome visitation of a breeze.

      One morning, we discussed “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

      We watched beads of sweat form on Doctor Mahesar’s forehead, and stream gently down the contours of his face. Before him, bent over our Annotated T. S. Eliot, we similarly perspired—the smell of sweat, pungent as a sliced onion, hung in the air. Last year, under identical sweltering conditions, Doctor Mahesar had thrown his text on the table. “I give up.” He said he couldn’t teach “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” without crumbling under the weight of irony.

      Naturally, he was everyone’s favorite professor.

      That day, everyone in the room hoped for a similar tirade, seeing there was mention of fog and cool winter evenings, but no such shenanigans took place.

      “How does the poem begin?” he asked, holding the text up to us like a mirror.

      There was a mumble of voices—Let us go then, you and I… when the evening is spread out against the sky…

      “That is incorrect.”

      Small circles of confusion spun around the room. Finally, a girl in the front row spoke up, “It begins with an epigraph.”

      “Thank you, Ameya. Yes, it begins with an epigraph.”

      “You mean the part we can’t understand,” said someone from the back.

      “Yes, Noel. The part in Italian, which, if you’ve heard of it, is a Neo-Latin Romance language spoken mainly in Europe.”

      The class sniggered.

      “S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse, a persona che mai tornasse al mondo… Now, I’m sure there’s someone here who can recite it for us word for word in translation.”

      There was deep and resolute silence.

      The professor spoke the lines softly.

      “If I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker… But since, up from these depths, no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed. So you see, the poem begins with the promise of a secret between

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