thirty years old and somehow, to the grave distress of his family, unmarried, had picked up a copy of the Calcutta College Courier with amusement as he waited for his friend Charlie Roy, a professor teaching at the school, who was always late.
Pival, young and alive with purpose, watched this tall, slim, yet commanding stranger sneer at her paper and saw red. Who was this man? What did he know of journalism? She could not stand by and watch him scorn her hard work, her long nights of setting type and editing articles. A closer look revealed that this stranger, handsome as he was, was laughing at her own article, a piece she’d been quite proud of, detailing the city’s architecture as a troubling metaphor for the continued influence of British colonialism on Indian mentality and cultural consciousness. Her article was cautiously tinged with Naxalite rigor, coated in intellectual argument, and she was deeply proud of it. Pival was not one to stand by while her work was being impugned in such a cavalier manner. She marched up to this strange man and asked him in polite and careful English:
“What, exactly, is so very funny?”
Ram Sengupta looked up at this serious young woman, with her dark eyes glinting, and asked her to join him for tea. Pival was so flustered that she sat down without another word. When Charlie Roy finally showed up some thirty minutes later, he found his friend, a confirmed bachelor, assessing his future wife.
The two fused into a unit almost immediately. Ram’s authority destroyed Pival’s own sense of herself and replaced it with a version that Ram created, a version she liked better, for a time. For Pival’s part she had never met a man who looked at her with such a mix of calculation and interest, and she mistook his manipulative speculation for a deep true love. So, for that matter, did he. They were engaged within a month.
Looking back on her excitement at the time, Pival cursed herself for being ten times a fool. She had thought Ram would be the antidote to the loneliness and longing she had begun to feel. Instead, he became the cause of both. She had thought for a while that her marriage was normal, no worse than many, better than most. But it had proved weak, and in the end, rotten to the core.
But Ram was gone now. And she could have her son back, just as soon as she could wrench him from the grasp of the man in California. They could be together. And if he was really gone, if it hadn’t been, as she hoped, a kindly meant act that pierced her heart with its cruelty, she could die with Rahi. Even if she couldn’t live with him.
The morning after Jake and Bhim had slept together for the first time, Jake, as he had done every morning for the last twelve years, took a run. His lifetime of waiting in traffic had bred in him a need for movement. He had run through college, through his early twenties, and even now, curled up in the arms of a man he wanted and hadn’t known he could have, his muscles still tensed and prepared themselves. He shifted carefully in Bhim’s embrace, inching out of it in slow degrees, and then, grabbing his shorts and his phone, he escaped the room and was gone, his feet pounding the pavement as he moved with tireless joy through the morning haze of the city.
On his daily runs, Jake would often see remnants of the Los Angeles nightlife haunting the city and wincing in the harsh light of the sunrise. What hurt their eyes made his glow; he loved the mornings. Jake worked for a large architecture firm located in downtown L.A., which catered to the elite and the effete, as his bosses liked to joke. The firm included both landscape architecture and residential and commercial work, and often attracted clients interested in combined design, updating or creating new spaces that integrated natural design as well as buildings. Jake worked in the landscape department. He enjoyed any work that took him outside, that had him under the sun for hours on end. He loved the smell of dirt and the way plants anchored into it.
After college, Jake had floated for a bit, uncertain what he wanted to do next. He had enjoyed working on Brown’s organic farm so he got a job at the New York Botanical Garden as a researcher. But he soon realized that biology wasn’t as interesting to him as space, and the way plants and buildings could fill it. He enrolled in architecture school the following fall. Within two years he had his master’s and, weary of the East Coast winters, chose a job in Los Angeles, to the delight of his parents, and started working at Space Solutions. Once he settled into that it seemed that he settled into everything. Life became pleasant, compartmentalized, and predictable. The job was good, the people were nice, the high school friends who like him had come back were happy to reconnect, the guys he met were fit and a little dim, but open and friendly and never hard to catch or lose. His apartment was spacious, his world was small.
Now someone had joined him, and the apartment no longer was empty. Suddenly he wondered why he was running away from home, not toward it. What would Bhim say, when he woke up? Would he regret this? Jake’s breath caught in his chest. This had been one of the best moments of his life, the first time he had felt truly with someone else, in sync with him. What if Bhim hated what they had done, what if he woke up horrified with Jake and with himself? He tried to shake off these thoughts, to run again, but his feet had turned to lead. He walked home, dragging his body the few blocks back to his apartment, and opened the door with dread.
Bhim was still in the bed, sleeping. His lashes formed spiky uneven crescents on his cheeks and Jake felt a sense of relief that there was something in Bhim’s face that wasn’t perfect. He watched him sleep deeply and got into the shower. Jake washed himself off briskly, trying to ignore the fear that had struck his heart. What if, what if, what if resounded in his brain and he wished he could drown out the noise of his worries. He almost wanted to wake Bhim up, to face his judgment and his disgust sooner rather than later, but each moment gave him more time to feel like they were together.
He struggled to clean his back, working to reach the space where his hand refused to reach, right underneath his shoulder blades and above his tailbone. Suddenly he felt a hand joining his, washing that area for him, spreading the soap gently up and down his spine. He held his body perfectly still, not wanting the moment to end. He felt a handful of water spill down his back, washing away the soap.
“Feeling dirty?” he asked, his voice a strange croaking sound. He closed his eyes, regretting the stupid innuendo of the question, although he wanted a genuine answer. He wanted to know if Bhim felt unclean after what they had done but had sheepishly used a line from a teen drama.
“Maybe.” Bhim’s voice whispered the response in his ear. “Help me wash?” Jake turned to see Bhim’s face, earnest, smiling, cautious, and amused. Hopeful. He kissed him, and fell in love all over again.
Later, he tried to get Bhim to run with him, but Bhim hated it. Bhim could manage only a few blocks at a panting, halting stride before giving up, claiming that his heart would explode. It was a relief to find something Bhim was so bad at, something that ruffled his serenity. Still, it was disappointing. Jake knew that with Bhim he would have a future of running alone. He tried to accept that, he did, but he realized that his routes became circles, wider and wider, but always pulling him back to the same place. Whenever Bhim came to stay with him his runs were short and left him with that same fear, that if he went too far or stayed away too long Bhim would be gone, that he would return home to an empty house and a vacant life. Jake could run well only when Bhim returned to Berkeley and he was alone. He ignored that, though, refusing to examine the fact that the two things that made him feel best were mutually exclusive. He tried to stop feeling afraid whenever Bhim left, but he couldn’t hide it from his dreams. In his dreams Bhim ran, and he outpaced Jake, even, getting farther and farther away forever.
The last
