The night after Hetali’s funeral, the skies open up. Prakash and I take the 8-hour bus ride out of the city in the pouring rain. We are listening to the sound of drums beating — A religious procession passing by, a loud song that I don’t recognize. She and I used to listen to instrumental music and then try to guess the composer. Armin Van Buren. No way. Ennja. Hmm. Maybe Ennja. Through the bus window, I can barely read the highway signs or make out the sugarcane mills as we head west toward Sangamner. The world is smudged, impressionistic. I keep seeing Hetali laying on the pyre, the purified butter which the Hindus pour over the wood seeping through the wooden logs and into her skin.
At the restaurant, Prakash pours me a glass of raw Indian liquor. I have pushed bite-sized pieces of rice around on my plate, hiding them beneath the daal. Slumped against the wooden table, I am trying to summon the energy to lift the glass to my lips. I just don’t have any inclination to drink. The world is at a remove — just far enough away so that I think I can’t touch it and it can’t harm me. When I was a child, I knew that I had a weak eye — and in order to strengthen it, I would sometimes drop a gray filmy patch over my stronger eye so that my vision would correct itself. Now, it is as if I have two of those gray filmy patches over both my eyes, softening the edges of my world outside. But no matter how much I try to avoid the thought, it doesn’t change the facts: My friend is dead. Her sister is lying in a hospital, dying.
The waiter clears my plate. I excuse myself from the table and walk very slowly to the restroom. Blood is rushing to my head, my knees are rubbery, and for a moment, I think I might faint. Each step feels precarious, as if I were on the ice, as if I were an old man, and if I fall, my bones will crack open. I’m wearing the black shirt I wore to the cemetery yesterday, the smudges of white ash still a reminder; Inhaling sharply, I smell the charred flesh. I quickly turn around and throw up dinner.
After an hour, I leave Prakash standing on the curb in the pouring rain. I cannot imagine going back to my room. The auto-rickshaw splatters him with muddy water as we pull away, and I can see his mouth moving. Where’s Prakash going to end up tonight? Maybe he’ll check into a hotel and order up a bottle of scotch from room service. Maybe he will bring up a whore and fuck her into oblivion.
I tell the rickshaw driver to head toward the college. I’ve recently moved out of the dorm room and into a small one-bedroom on the outskirts of the campus. I’m afraid to go back there now. I’ve barely been in the room in weeks. I don’t want to face the questioning eyes of my lady landlord, the dying money plant in the corner, the month-old clothes, the mildew-smelling mattress — my past uncomplicated life.
“Hey, you do know where we’re going right?” the driver asks.
We are heading uptown on Nasik highway.
“Give me a minute,” I say.
“You’ve gotta give me a destination now,” says the driver.
“Hostel 2, A.V College,” I say, deciding to ring Parul’s buzzer, praying she’s at her flat. I have very few options left in my life, almost no one to whom I’m close enough to show up in the middle of the night. Parul and Pratap are about it. My other college friends have disappeared — or rather, it is I who have done the disappearing. Not a minute goes by without a thought of Hetali. She is a constant presence, rising up inside me, watching me, and never letting me forget the terrible choices I made.
We pull up to Parul’s apartment in the middle of the block, and I pay the driver, then ask him to wait while I ring her.
“Yes?” she calls down from the balcony after a minute, her voice suspicious.
“It’s me.”
“Who?”
“Z.”
“Well, God, come on up,” she says.
Parul lives alone in a studio apartment with two roommates. She sleeps on a futon, surrounded by books on electronics engineering she’s studying in her second-year class. Her black-and-white dress is flung over the back of a metal framed chair, as is the suit she wears for her internship job at the local firm.
Parul hands me a mug of tea. She’s wearing a black gown, and I remember finding that detail attractive, even during my grief. I want to have a life where flowing black gowns, cute roommates, and warm mugs of tea are within the realm of possibility.
“Can I sleep here tonight?” I ask.
“Well, it’ll be hard for you to stay here,” says Parul, “but my downstairs neighbor is in Delhi for the month. I have the keys to her place. You can stay there as long as you like.”
And so it happens that the night after Hetali’s funeral, I am in the apartment of a complete stranger. Parul leaves me with my mug of tea and an extra pillow that she knows I like and retires to wrap up her assignment for tomorrow’s class. I want to hold on to the sleeve of her robe and beg her not to leave, but instead, I hold the pillow to my chest and nod when she asks skeptically if I’ll be okay. This is the first moment I have actually been by myself since Hetali’s death. My friend is alone in the ether, her sister is alone in her hospital bed, and I am here alone in the home of someone named Riya who is in Delhi for vacation.
I don’t know what to do to quiet my nerves. I pace the floor, roll my shoulders back and forth, and shake out my arms and legs like a rag doll. I clear my throat, just to hear the sound of my own voice. I feel as if I’ve swallowed a grenade, and I’m ticking to explode — in the morning, Parul will come downstairs and find me splattered all over the ceiling. I think about going out to buy some street food — there’s an all-night food stall still open on campus. I’m again tempted to do what I’ve always done and find a way to make an end run around these thoughts instead of actually living with them. But something tells me that what’s happening inside me is not about to go away anytime soon, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Next to the bay window overlooking the street, there is a cheap plywood desk and an old wooden chair. I bend over the desk and start methodically riffling through the papers, mail, and magazines lying around. I find an eight-by-ten of Riya, who, it turns out, is a beautiful brunette. I picture her now, in the south side of Delhi where their types of hers reside She’s probably just finishing up her nightly aerobics class after a day filled with shopping and nibbling little sushi bites in high-end restaurants.
I pull open the file drawers and begin exploring the life of this girl in whose apartment I am spending the night. I know I’m doing something terribly wrong, something that would horrify Parul if she could peep through a hole into her floor and see me now, but I just can’t help myself. I’m looking for a toehold on a slippery slope, and I think I might find it in this desk as if buried in these drawers might be the secret to living my life as a young man. I look around this stranger’s apartment and think I could die here, and no one would even know. I feel like I am about to throw up at any minute. When I think of anything that’s ever harmed me — they’ve all had one thing in common: the revulsion, the nausea that I’ve had to fight past before I could take them in. My stay there felt intensely similar to the only time I took a deep swig of cheap Indian liquor and felt the blaze all the way to my liver or the way a burning fire felt when I reached out to touch it with my fingertips. As with all the rest, I told myself that I could handle it — that there was no other way except to handle it.
It seemed to me, at the age of twenty, that I had already ruined myself.
And so it was — I spent the night after Hetali’s death thumbing through the file drawers of a young woman who seemed to be living a healthy, normal life. Carefully tucked into yellow manila folders were her xeroxed receipts, on the deep end , a pack of condoms, old expense reports, and correspondence with her parents. There was a white envelope addressed to her from Srinagar and in the drawer three pairs of lacy lingerie sent to her by her boyfriend, along with a few love letters that meant nothing to me. I gazed enviably at her eight-by-ten, and she smiled back at me, bright-eyed and confident.
I shudder at the memory of myself, hunched over her personal papers, letters from ex-boyfriends, family photos, and medical reports. I desperately wanted to trade places with her simple, uncomplicated life . I thought of what she’d see if she looked through my desk drawers: unopened books, unread letters, loose change, and bottle caps that were stolen from the cafeteria. In months to come, I will occasionally catch a glimpse of a familiar-looking brunette on the campus and realize where I know her from. I never closed my eyes that night.
The rain stopped pounding against the side of the apartment at some point, and the town was as still as I had ever heard it. And when the pale, thin light of dawn trickled through the eastern window, I rose from the desk and looked out onto the deserted street. I wasn’t even sure I still existed.
The whole world seemed empty, for a moment washed clean.
