Seahorse. Janice Pariat

in the toilets or a corner of the empty library. The one in Math tuition, who sat beside me, his hand below the table, on my thigh, unconcerned by the mysteries of trigonometry. In my hometown, I’d hang out with Lenny, and he hardly talked about girls, or to girls. So I didn’t tell him about my sister’s friend, how she’d lean over while I was at my study table… “Such a good boy, always reading”… her neckline dropping low and open. How she’d casually brush against my arm, my shoulder, if we happened to cross paths in the kitchen, the corridor.

      In college, I stayed away. Uneasy. Apprehensive. Unsure. There were too many invisible, unspoken rules to navigate. I thought of Adheer. Poo pusher. What would Kalsang do? If I told him. Would he shift out of our room too?

      “So… nothing?” he reiterated.

      “No.”

      The silence lay rich and deep.

      His voice broke through the darkness. “That’s okay, man. They say the longer you wait, the better it feels.”

      This wasn’t, couldn’t be, true, not in this world or the next, but that’s the reason I was fond of Kalsang. He was exceptionally cheerful.

      He began inviting me to parties outside college, probably in a bid to alter my chaste circumstances. But in vain. These were mostly large gatherings—immense crowds of strangers, friends of friends of friends—and I shied away. I could see, though, that it was a liberation. Outstation students who lived in the city harnessing a new, unbridled freedom. It couldn’t have always been this way, but the country was changing. Opening its arms—multiple, like pictures of all those Hindu goddesses hanging in auto rickshaws and shops—to the world, embracing the policies of tomorrow. The ones that had brought Coca Cola and Hallmark into our markets, MTV into our homes, and stamped Levi’s across our asses. Allegedly, this was “freedom of choice”. And it filtered to us, in our student room, with its wobbly wooden tables and bare lamps, rumpled sheets and uncushioned chairs, all coated in a layer of undisputed dust. We could head elsewhere, if we preferred, somewhere brighter, more glittery. Where everyone dressed like the people on TV, and danced to the latest music, and believed that somehow, because of all this, they were unbelievably lucky.

      “Want to come?” Kalsang would ask.

      “Alright, let’s go.”

      The night awaited, brimming with possibility.

      I never did find out whether anything happened between Nicholas and Adheer.

      Despite the rumors.

      In all our time together, I hesitated to ask.

      (In all our time together, I hardly needed to think of Adheer.)

      They made me think of Adheer.

      I suppose it’s an alliance that calls for some explanation.

      One morning, in late September, I headed out the college campus into the Ridge Forest. Trying, fervently, to avoid thinking of a news item from a few weeks ago—a corpse had been found, hastily hidden in the undergrowth. For days, newspapers plied their choicest headlines: “Mystery Body”; “Mutilated beyond recognition”; “Advanced stages of putrefaction.”

      Apparently, this happened here with disconcerting frequency.

      And if it wasn’t the discovery of a corpse, the Ridge, as with most ancient places, seethed with other stories. Of unhappy spirits that lived in its trees. Of a strange creature, similar to a white horse with a very long neck, which could often be sighted at night. Of a ghostly woman and child weeping. It was well known too that amorous couples found shelter here behind the cover of shadow and leaves.

      In all honesty, I might have preferred coming across a ghost.

      My journey through the forest proved quiet, and disappointingly, uneventful.

      Beneath my feet, the ground squelched, softened by months of monsoon rain, and the air carried the smell of damp, decaying things. Here and there, a high-rising gulmohar, now green and unblooming, and the sparse babul with yellow summer blossoms. Hidden amid the others, the petite ber, with drooping, glossy leaves, and, of which I was fondest, the golden amaltash, when it was radiant against a blue April sky. I hadn’t ever spotted any yet, but the forest was inhabited by gentle chinkara and blue-coated nilgai. Once or twice, I thought I’d glimpsed a tiny leaf warbler, and the sudden scarlet of a rose finch. Over the years, this place had remained unaltered while the landscape around its fringes transformed rapidly—on one side the university buildings, on the other, the Civil Lines neighborhood, demarcated from imperial-era military zones, a remnant of the British Raj. In comparison to the south of the city, though, the north was relatively static.

      The South, if you’ll forgive the hyperbole, was our generation’s brave new world.

      Heaving with suddenly wealthy neighborhoods, its roads peeling under the speed of foreign cars. Everywhere the fresh scent of money, the incredible hum of movement.

      It all seemed terrifically heady and exciting, but here, in the north, beyond the Dantian circles of Connaught Place, the tangle of crowded markets in the old walled city, the hulking sandstone loneliness of the Red Fort, life was still somewhat slow and untouched.

      And that afternoon, as I tread on a slushy dirt track, listening to the sounds of a forest, I could have been miles away from a city of many millions.

       “In a forest,” Lenny once told me, “all time is trapped.”

      Admittedly, tramping through the Ridge wasn’t a preferred pastime. I was on a journalistic mission. In my first year in college, I’d been accosted by Santanu, a lanky Bengali with the (still) faint beginnings of a mustache and wispy long hair.

      “Would you like to write an article?” he asked.

      “For?”

      “The college newsletter.” Of which Santanu was the often despairing, yet resilient, student editor.

      “I’m not sure I’m the best person for this.”

      “You’re in English Lit, aren’t you?”

      I nodded.

      “Everyone in the Lit department can write. Or at least has some secret ambition to be the next Rushdie or something.”

      Accustomed to persuading reluctant contributors, Santanu wasn’t one to give up easily—“I’ll give you plenty of time”; “You’ll see your name in print”, and finally, “I’ll buy you beer.”

      Okay, I said, suddenly convinced.

      Since then, I often wrote for the newsletter—a piece on the oldest academic bookstore in Kamla Nagar, a commercial area near the University, interviews with visiting lecturers, a book review as though penned by Chaucer: But thilke text held he nat worth an oistre.

      That day, I was trudging through the forest looking for a story.

      Soon, I came to a clearing. And there stood a four-tiered tower, atop a stepped platform, built of fire-red sandstone, capped by a Celtic cross.

      Santanu wanted me to write on the Mutiny Memorial.

      Apart from solemn, elegiac monument to the dead, it also served, for years now, as a frequent nocturnal hangout for university students. For gatherings of the least expensive and un-glamorous kind. Usually, the birthday boy spent the money his parents sent him to buy “something nice” on a neat half dozen bottles of whisky. Now, though, the place was vacant, strewn with the remnants of revelry, cigarette butts, broken bottles and greasy bits of newspaper.

      The tower glowed warm and fiery against the sky. Over a century ago, it had been built by the British to commemorate the soldiers who died in the Mutiny of 1857. (Or as Santanu explained, more appropriately “India’s First War of Independence.”) It rose above the trees in solid, symmetrical lines, tipped by elaborate Gothic adornments. On the walls, white