Seahorse. Janice Pariat

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 he’d been. To Varanasi, sitting at Assi Ghat at dawn, to Sandakphu from where you could see the Himalayas, and four of the highest peaks in the world. To a hidden, abandoned fort along the Konkan coast.

      For a while, it was alive, the map hanging on the wall, glowing with promise.

      Yet living is all loss.

      And time, or rather the passage of time, doesn’t bring understanding. Only invention, appropriation. A wild attempt to prop up the past before it slides out of sight. Often, I feel I haven’t truly left the forest. That I’m still there, astray on an endless evening. Stumbling around in the darkness, looking for a clearing, where anything is possible.

      If Kalsang’s parents would have “killed him” if they discovered he was sleeping with his cousin, mine would have done the same if they suspected the slightest deviance. So I was careful, making sure I was in my room every second Sunday when they called on the common telephone in the corridor. It rang loudly and often, when it worked, that is, or hadn’t been set on fire for fun, or stolen by someone looking to make some quick, easy money.

      On any given day, it was difficult to carry on a conversation with my father.

      I remember once, when I was still in school, he brought home a sapling from the market, a delicate green thing wrapped in plastic and soil. He planted it in our garden thinking it was a flowering hydrangea, but it grew into something else. A great tangling creeper with dark leaves and rare orange blossoms. And he’d stand in front of it bewildered.

       What is this?

      Sometimes, he looked at me the same way.

      It didn’t help that, more often than not, the corridor erupted in riotous distraction. At the far end, boys played “indoor cricket” with a tennis ball, someone else danced around in a towel and little else. Music blared from many rooms, spanning various eras and genres. Kishore Kumar from one, Black Sabbath from the other.

      Our conversations proceeded the same way each time, as though we were working meticulously through a checklist.

      “Hello.”

      “Hello… can you hear me?” My father always asked.

      “Yes… hello pa.”

      I can still imagine him now, walking out the house, down the sloping road to the market, to a PCO round the corner, a small shop with a telephone booth attached to it like an afterthought. A black and yellow signboard dangling over its door. Nine o’clock was late for my hometown. Its streets would be empty, filled only with a flimsy mist and nippy breeze. My father would be tired, after a day’s work at the hospital, but he’d wait until the crowds were gone to escape the queue at the PCO.

      “Howwwzzzaaaaatttttt!” the cricketers would shout.

      “What’s that?” My father’s voice would ripple, like he was speaking underwater.

      “Nothing, pa.”

      “What was that noise?”

      “Nothing.”

      “Okay. How’s everything?”

      “Fine.”

      Conversations were a staccato recital—short, abrupt, awkward.

      “How’s ma?”

      “She’s here… she wants to speak to you.”

      “And Joyce? How is she?”

      “She’s fine… busy with her work.”

      My elder sister was a nurse in Calcutta. We wrote each other occasional letters, but moved in different worlds, which barely touched apart from when we both happened to be home.

      At times, with my father, I’d feel more expansive.

      “I’m writing an article for the college magazine.”

      “Is it part of your course work?”

      “No… I’m just writing it…”

      “When are your next holidays?”

      And I’d tell him. Pujas. Diwali. Christmas.

      “For how long?”

      “About two weeks… I think.”

      “It’s better you stay in Delhi then… it’s too short…”

      “Yes.” There were other reasons my father preferred that I stay away from my hometown.

      “Here, speak to your mother…”

      This would be a relief. My mother was easier, more affectionate.

      She’d run through all her concerns—food, cleanliness and the heat.

      “I’m fine, ma, don’t worry.”

      “Your sister is thin as a stick; I told her how can she nurse other people if she won’t look after herself.”

      I could imagine Joyce’s face, the way she’d click her tongue in exasperation.

      I smiled. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

      I’d allow my mother to chatter on—a cousin having a baby, a grand-uncle in hospital, an aunt visiting over the weekend. The news was as distant as I felt about my hometown, standing in the corridor, cradling the receiver against my cheek.

      “Alright, dear… we’ll speak to you again soon…”

      Sometimes, I’d slip it in. “Ma, what news of Lenny?”

      A sharp breath, the beep of the machine. Beep. And then a few seconds more.

      “Nothing, as yet. He’s still there…”

      “For how long, ma?”

      “Until he’s cured.”

      And there was nothing left for me to say but good night.

      Sometimes, I tried to imagine Lenny.

      From the hints in his letters, the tiny details he slipped in without noticing, or assuming them to be of importance. In the room next to his, a young boy drew picture after picture of a black sun. Over and over, in infinite, untiring circles. “Why don’t you draw something else?” they’d tell the boy. And he would. A forest, a house, a line of mountains. Then he’d finish with a black circle, coloring it in until the crayon broke. On the other side, the room to his right, a girl would silently play with stones—five pebbles that she’d toss in the air and scatter on the ground. Picking up each one carefully as though they were jewels.

       Nem, I am wedged between the earth and sky.