Neon Noon Read online

  FOURTH ESTATE • New Delhi

  Von einem gewissen punkt an gibt es keine rückkehr mehr. Dieser punkt ist zu erreichen. (From a certain point on there is no more returning. That point must be reached.)

  —Franz Kafka

  Contents

  Part One: The Shattered Idyll

  I Never Think of Those Two Nights

  Flashback to a Sunday Morning

  Flashback to Nepal Holiday

  Part Two: The Bachelor

  I Think of Interlaken

  Part Three: Neon Noon

  Acknowledgements

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Advance Praise for Neon Noon

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  The Shattered Idyll

  I Never Think of Those Two Nights

  ~~~~

  Hi T,

  Quite a while, right? Maybe this surprises you. I thought a lot before sending this email.

  I’ve been following your short stories in all those magazines, and the news is that we are competitors now, for I too have written a short story. I want you to read it. It doesn’t have a title as of now, but maybe you can help me with that.

  If you read it (and I hope you read it), you’ll see how I took some liberties with the timing, the exact actions, so on.

  Tell me what you think about it? But if you think it’s better not to write back, don’t write back. That’s okay.

  But if you choose to write back, maybe you can also tell me if you’ve moved houses, if you’ve changed some things, travelled somewhere, or plan to.

  Basically, how are things?

  Best,

  S

 

  Two drunken meaningless nights—that’s all they were, nothing more.

  At that time, December 2012, I was working as a copyeditor for an LGBT publishing house in Mahalaxmi. Rectifying erotica—that was my job. I got the job after a very basic lie. Martha, the edgy chief editor who interviewed me at a loud downtown café, clearly preferred people from what she called ‘the community’. I needed the money badly, no full-time opportunities were coming up, and so I told Martha that I was lesbian. She didn’t seem to need any other qualification. A week later, I found myself in the firm, piled with so much work that it made me wonder if they had been waiting for me for months. What I had to read was tiresome initially, even irritating, with all those male characters getting intimate with each other, but I took solace in the fact that things had finally started chugging along for me.

  I was managing some scribbling of my own too, but those were primarily the days when an alternate realization was gaining a hold on me: that my poems had no ability to suggest what was beyond language, that my poems were imprisoned in their words and in their planar feelings—that they just couldn’t and wouldn’t do what poetry was really supposed to, whatever that is. My total output until then was a set of forty-one poems, some of which I would send out for publication. I received a steady flow of impersonal rejection letters from the more reputed literary magazines. There were, however, some freak acceptance letters; the most recent one had happened in November, when a short poem found space in the print issue of a highly-thought-of magazine.

  It was through that magazine that I knew T. He had been a regular fiction contributor to it. I had read all his stories there, and he seemed interesting. His stories suggested that he was young and struggling with youth, which was a problem I believed I shared with him.

  The issue I had been published in also carried one of T’s stories. I remember particularly liking that story of his; I think it was called The Bombay of Life, and it had something to do with love and literature, and how a writer’s life can be a vacillation between the two. It had a sense of vulnerability. I liked that.

  Surprisingly for me, T knew me as a poet, which is something I learnt when he accepted my friend request and chatted with me. On chat windows, he used all the right punctuation, never abbreviated, never distended, and always ended sentences with a period. I wanted to meet him in person, and it was not long before I mentioned this to him. He thought it was a good idea. I proposed Janata Bar in Bandra, a place I found comforting since it was inexpensive—something I knew from having frequented it with my university friends. The location also worked for T as he lived close to it, in fact only a hundred or so metres away.

  I remember that when I was on the long train ride that evening—toward Bandra station, diddling through a book of poetry that I had recently stolen from a friend—I was thinking about the postures and mannerisms that could suit the evening. I was thinking how I’d already perceived and shaped T’s online persona to fit whatever criteria I had at the time, and I had the notion that he had done the same to me. Seduction was a word I had always liked the sound of. But I resolved that I wouldn’t sleep with him that night. I had been doing a lot of that those days.

  Janata Bar is a place for the janata. The tables are non-exclusive, which is to say you share your table; and therefore the chances of meeting new people are high. The young and/or ‘young-at-heart’ come to Janata. Once, I remember, I overheard a conversation between three guys well into their fifties. I don’t want to marry her, I just want to fuck her, one of them said. The others goaded him on. So yes, that’s the kind of ‘young-at-heart’ people who come to Janata. The rest are in their twenties, mostly copyeditors or advertisers or designers who work in Bandra’s tiny creative agencies—guys and girls who think of themselves as cool, but don’t really have the money to go to better, more expensive places. Only the MBA guys get to go to the better places.

  T was an MBA guy. As he stepped into Janata, dressed formally after work, lugging a laptop bag on his left side, I had a moment when I thought this could be a mistake. He might not belong here as much as I did. We shook hands in a gesture so formal that it was almost comic. But he settled down quickly, then ordered a quarter of Royal Stag. His brand of whiskey reassured me.

  You’re quite a writer, I said.

  T didn’t answer. He just reached for the book in my hand, took it, flipped over a few pages and returned it without reading anything.

  How is life, I asked him. I’m reading this book, T said. What book, I asked. Well, I am reading what I call the graveyard writers, he said. He didn’t really name the book, I thought. And who would the graveyard writers be, I asked. Roberto Bolaño, Sadat Hasan Manto, T said. I don’t know either of them, I said, shrugging. T smiled at that, and I feared I’d conclusively revealed how much of an outsider I really am to this whole business of literature. It is one thing to write poems, quite another to know the writers other people expect you to know (and you suspect you should).

  I love their writing, T said with a flourish of his hands. The spontaneity. Sometimes I feel they create the illusion, the illusion that they are not concerned with the demands of the narrative, that they are just rambling—recording events and conversations. But you can’t miss the sense of doom in each sentence. The story always reaches a precipice from where everything is hurled. And down it all comes—all crash and burn.

  This guy is a reader, I told myself. Do you read a lot, I asked him.

  Wish I could read a little less and write a little more, he said.

  I nodded, as if I knew a lot about what he was saying. You must have a big library, I said.

  I can’t say, he said.

  We talked about some other things then. Slowly the whiskey diminished and another quarter was ordered. We got tipsy. We hushed a joke about the two men we were sharing our table with. We joked about the pictures that hung on the walls, especially the one above the cash counter: a naked Jain guru making a gesture akin to catching a basketball for some reason, something that I’d always found funny here at Janata. T never really laughed. The ma
ximum he offered was a smile.

  I, finding T generally reticent, started speaking of things I knew about, or thought I knew about. I began by talking about my work at the publishing house. Then I talked about erotica, about the fundamentals of good erotica. I talked about Venus in India. At some point I enumerated what I liked about D.H. Lawrence’s poetry. I talked about the ripe peaches of Lawrence’s poetry, passions on the brink, passions served, the ethic of serving passions.

  All through this, T looked at me with a blank expression, lips parted, eyebrows slightly raised. If he was interested, it was only a mild interest, and eventually he did cut me off.

  Let’s move, let’s go to my place, he said. I, being myself, immediately switched into thinking about the possibilities of the night. Yes, let’s go, I said, and we were off from Janata Bar in five minutes.

  T was not just the MBA guy—he was the rich MBA guy. A flat as spacious as his in Bandra, thrice the size of my shithole in Malad—it probably cost him six times as much as mine. The door opened facing a kitchen and a bedroom, which was a bit awkward, but the glowing white of its walls, the sparkle of its creamy tiles and its generally minimalistic look made one forget those things. On the immediate right, there was a door to another room, which T promptly shut. I asked him if he shared the flat with someone. No, I like having two rooms, he said.

  Past the entrance to the room which T had closed, there was the large living room, also on the right side. He took me there, and we sat on different sofas, both waiting for the first words to be uttered in this new janata-less zone. There was a table in one corner of the room, its round glass top naked and cracked. I was curious about the history of that crack; I couldn’t imagine T causing it.

  Actually, if T had said the right words then, I would have given myself to him. But he didn’t look like he wanted to say anything, or he looked like he was deliberating, like he had all the time in the world. Wasn’t it he who had suggested we get out of Janata?

  Thinking of a way of moving forward, I said, Can I see your library?

  T looked about for a few seconds. No, he said then. Because it’s in the other room.

  What the fuck, I thought, though I didn’t bother asking him further. I had believed that he had stacks of books in a cupboard or in a rack. He didn’t. Perhaps he only had a couple of books that he borrowed or stole from friends. Perhaps T was not the reader I thought he was. Or maybe he did have a library inside that room, and maybe he had a neurotic reason for barring entry. Maybe there was someone in that room right now, some drugged girl that he had met just before me and raped multiple times. Or maybe there was a corpse that he had forgotten about and remembered just in time, a corpse twisted in a way only death can achieve. Maybe the room was strewn with syringes that he had been using to serve his addictions, or maybe there were ghosts there, soporific ghosts who would awaken if they sensed a foreign presence. My thoughts were morbid but, perversely, I liked thinking them. They made me feel I was still myself, even after so much whiskey.

  I’m paranoid at times. I’ve learnt to live with it.

  T opened a bottle of expensive whiskey. We must have talked about something then, but I don’t remember what. The air conditioner was running at just the right temperature. Good whiskey flowed. I began to relax a bit.

  Perhaps we passed an hour like this, perhaps two, though it was sure that we were getting drunker by the minute. And then T called for my attention, he asked me, without warning, without context, if I would like to have him read a chapter of his novel. No doubt I would, I slurred. It is still a novel in progress, he gave me the disclaimer. I don’t care, I said. I didn’t.

  T went inside the other room and emerged with a sheaf of papers. He placed himself on the same wide sofa I was seated on. The distance between us was less than two feet.

  He started reading. The chapter was about a man, quite like him, taking a train from Bandra to Churchgate to work. Stations passed, and the third-person narrator spoke of the many quotidian details of taking a morning train—the rush, the smell of sweat, the noise, the newspapers, the students, the beggars, the hijras. It was boring to begin with, but I allowed T to read on. As the young man alighted at Churchgate, the narrator came up with a metaphor, a metaphor that had something to do with leaving a manageable system (the train compartment) and entering the larger chaos of the world (the station) every day. It was a metaphor that I wasn’t sure I grasped the total significance of. The man reached his office and logged in to his computer, and felt, for the nth time, how boring and meaningless every workday was—nicotine, caffeine, furtive reading-and-writing as ways to pass his ten hours at work. The initial boredom of T’s text slowly mutated into a kind of unease, even horror. I thought this was symptomatic of my drunken state, but then I understood it as an organic effect created by the text itself, though I couldn’t pinpoint how. T read on as a fear began to settle in my heart and I moved closer to him, almost touching him. The man left the office and walked through the traffic to go to a nearby restaurant to have dinner, the same food in the same restaurant, every day. He went to a bookstore after dinner and walked through the large racks where silly bestsellers stood menacingly. He then walked to Churchgate station to take the train back to Bandra, where he dithered about taking the train—as if there were something else that he could do at the station. T read on as the man watched the train start and move away from him and pick up speed. The man then began to run after the train, finally jumped to get inside or to enable an accident, like a foot slipping on the edge of the compartment door, an accident that would only partly be his making. The man then sat in the near-empty compartment and perceived, in the dangling handles overhead, the absence of souls in this city. The stations passed again in the reverse order, and as a vague memory took hold of the young man, he took out a pen and a piece of paper from his pocket and wrote a poem—and then T read that poem and I clutched my heart, and I held T’s shirt because the poem was the most beautiful poem I had come across in my life. It was a small poem and it was a beautiful poem, so very beautiful that T choked on its last words and all the whiskey drained out of my head. That was the end of the chapter, and I whispered to T to read the poem again, and this time he read it a little less intimately, a little less personally, and although I’d then memorized the words, I cannot recollect them today.

  Of course there was silence after that, like the silence on the other side of a commotion. Perhaps it is my imagination now that tells me that T was shaking. Perhaps he really was. Could I hear his heartbeat? Very possible, for I was almost in his arms, cuddling with him out of trepidation or something else. Anything could have happened. Something should have happened. I wanted it to happen. More whiskey, T asked, pushing me slightly away. I said yes, and T fixed me another drink. I’m sleepy, I said. Finish this last drink and then you can sleep, he said. No, let’s sleep.

  He took me to the room that was not closed, switched on the air conditioner there and gave me a sheet to cover myself with. Sleep, he said. I was surprised. I was surprised he didn’t have a clue regarding what should have been the natural course of such a night, and I realized this was the kind of man you had to hand-hold right till the brink. So I said, won’t you sleep with me? It’s okay, I’ll sleep in the other room, he said.

  I was disappointed, but I don’t think it took me long to fall asleep. I had a dream in which I saw a room with towers of books and papers, and ghosts of writers billowing about in post-mortal confusion. I saw a man sleeping naked on the floor of this room—a man sleeping in a fetal position, with his thumb in his mouth. I sensed this man was T although I wanted to make sure; but my dream wouldn’t allow me a close-up, and perhaps this uncertainty was for my own benefit for I did not really want to know if this man was T, for that surety would have then converted—somehow, I don’t know how—this dream into a nightmare. Nevertheless the dream went on without a plot, like dreams do. It was a dream stuck in a room where nothing interesting happened, where the main character just slept
. To tell the truth, it was a boring dream, a boring dream that recurred all night.

  I woke up early, close to four. It was still dark outside and I was dehydrated. I went to the kitchen and opened the fridge to drink some water. There was nothing in T’s fridge except water and whiskey and wine. I opened the cabinets above the stove—there was nothing there either. I wondered if the house had always been like this, or if T was in the process of leaving it.

  I decided I would go into T’s room then, but as I pushed the door I found that it was locked from the inside. I felt a terrible loneliness—something related to the emptiness of T’s apartment, perhaps. I left the place in the next five minutes.

  I took an auto to Malad. The auto seemed to glide over the road, and I mused that my life was a like a road being swallowed by a vehicle moving ahead with insufficient headlights. The sky was womb-dark.

  Over the next few days, I thought of T many times, and I sometimes thought of the secrets that he hid in the other room. I tried to make sense of what had really happened in our first meeting, or whether anything substantial had happened at all. Other than that, I met a rich friend who had recently turned into a communist: a believer in the possibility of a leftist social transformation, as he called it. Once, this guy drove me from work to his flat in Worli and showed me YouTube videos of a rabid leftist philosopher. He waited for me to be impressed, which I wasn’t. We eventually ended up sleeping together and he turned out to be more than half-decent in bed.

  During this time, I chatted online a couple of times with T, nothing more substantial than the usual hi and hello. I didn’t know if we should meet again, or if it was I who should be the one asking for it. Then one Friday, T wrote to me: I’m alone. Do you mind meeting me?

  The second meeting also took place in Janata Bar, two weeks after the first.

  We ordered rum and cola. He looked good. He was not in formals that day, which meant that he had made the effort to go home after office and change for the occasion. He was in a loose polo and jeans, and looked handsome. I think I was wearing a grey tank top and blue jeans, or maybe I was wearing a salwaar-kameez. I don’t exactly remember.