A memory

Walking from work this afternoon in the rain reminded me of home. And the two of us, from years ago, when we were fifteen and fourteen, respectively. You, A, used to live on the fifth floor of a pink building by the toll bridge in a neighborhood called Park Circus, surrounded by prayers, conservative Muslims and the delightful aroma of chicken kabobs. Cars and buses would come and go, too ordinary to notice on their usual journeys, belching puffs of soot from old, rusted radiators. And you would sit by the balcony, holding a paint brush, and stare at the clouds walking in the sky, waving at you, calling you names, slipping away into the silence of twilight.

I lived in a house, similarly pink, in a sub-urban district by the degenerate lake, surrounded by retirees, songs of the orchards and mile-long thickets of bamboo trees. The eunuchs would come, at the crack of noon, and dance to the sounds of violent drums and hiss at strangers, standing behind black grille gates counting handfuls of coins, and erupt in peals of joyful laughter when the beats came to an end. The pharmacist next door would return to work after a satisfying lunch of rice and fish, sometimes stopping by to say Hello and inquiring about my father's whereabouts. His father was shot, ten years ago, on a Saturday night by a gang of robbers, dressed as girls, haggling over the cost of a cough syrup bottle. He bled to death in front of my eyes. The ambulance never came, the police didn't report. And that was the end of Ravi K.

When thoughts of home came swarming in, I held my breath and pressed my jaws and widened my lips in a curled semi-circle. And looked at my nails, the uneven white edges, and thought, for a second, about Mother, who I haven't seen in four full years. And then I thought about you and me, in the silent corner of a pastry shop, staring at the ceiling and the wide French windows, discussing Shakespeare, Lord of the Rings and life in America. There was a transience about the moment, like the cusp of traffic lights turning red to green, or orange to red, commanding passengers to go or to stop, and then it was gone, within the blink of an eye, back to 4:30 pm, rush hour traffic and the metallic thrumming of subway cars.

The rain poured down through overhead clouds and wet the sidewalks in a dark, earthy gray. The drops, at first, looked like miniature bubbles; like tiny beads of undissolved gas in a clear, refrigerated liquid. Soft, and bouncy and a little spongy, they rolled off the sleeves of my orange checkered shirt. But then they got larger and larger, taking the shape of transparent pellets, and diffused throughout my poplin weave. It reminded me strongly of the monsoons in the city, when you and I, in painted caravans, would sit on the broken seats towards the back and eat mangoes cut in cubes, our faces and teeth yellow with pulp, and compare who had had more leftovers stuck to the skin. We would go to the temple in the nearby village and I would pray for peace and forgiveness, till tears squeezed out of my wooden brown eyes. You waited outside by the off-white shoe racks, and counted the number of hibiscus buds, and stared at the expressions of traveling devotees who went to the temple, hoping earnestly that God would fix their lives. You and I disagreed on the nature and extent of our religious beliefs, but we were respectful of each other and avoided the topic; fearing that our disagreement would split us in half.

I remember very well, a certain day in the April of 2004, when the floods crashed into the perimeter of the city. People died mercilessly, hungry and homeless, because their mud shacks melted back to the earth. Fish bones floated on the murky waters and twirled, in dance, in the currents. We had no power for days. The buses froze. The flowers cried. Steam from China cups of nearby homes filled the neighborhood air with a dizzying aroma of Darjeeling tea. In the middle of this, you asked me softly, Do you want to go for a walk? I said yes, instantly. And so we went, without rain boots or shoes, walking on water, and stopped in a field, soft as putty in the south side of town. We walked around. The ground felt like cake with unsettled icing, brown and green, alternating with the portraits of grass, brown clay and carcasses of three dead crows. You took out a flash light and projected it upward to see how far the amber bulb would light up the air. And then you said, do you mind holding my jacket for a minute? I didn't say yes, but pushed forward my right arm, my palm facing up to the circus of clouds. You walked to the center of the rectangular field, your footsteps echoing in the silence of the evening, and stood there for a second. After that, you knelt down carefully and tilted to your side, before laying down flat on the ground, on your belly, hands stretched out in a loose empty grip and your hair jet-black, like Pashmina wool. You put your ear against the surface of the field, and said to me, I hear heartbeats of our land. What joy filled me up, I cannot even describe. I ran to the edges of the isolated field and laughed with leaves, and flapped my arms like a wandering magpie, my soul energized with the beauty of a wet, monsoon, evening. 

There is happiness, sometimes, in the tragedy of monsoons. When the dams crack open, and the water gates flood, and the sound of sizzles surround the town. It is a memory of home that I never forgot; you and me, in an empty field, gaping at the sky.