If you think this ain’t swing, go see a rhythm doctor, blasts the jingle of Radio Ohio, an American station I’ve become addicted to. Good morning, Ohio, such a glorious rainy day, chirps the anchor into my scorching hot Bangalore night. City overlaying city, like a photograph laid over a photograph. Only music and a weather forecast, but even that doesn’t help me fall asleep. Through the syncopated beats of the trumpet, our unfurnished rooms reverberate with the few tones of a marimba. Irritating, an endless jumble in my head which K sometimes interrupts by taking a call. I see his face change, his lips press tight together, his forehead etch. Or I’m just imagining him that way from eavesdropping on his voice from behind the door, blurting from his throat, rough and uneven, as if he’s drunk.
‘I told you to stop calling me.’ I hear how he’s speaking with suppressed rage, how he paces the kitchen and turns the faucet on full force so the gushing water will drown out his words, so I won’t hear him when he says he has nothing to do with this.
‘I’ll report you to the police,’ he threatens, repeating that he has nothing to do with this.
Then he turns off his cell phone and tosses it onto the kitchen counter. Like a character on stage, he steps back. He never speaks about this, doesn’t report the sentences they’re saying at the other end, which would be in italics if this were a script. He opens the refrigerator – I imagine how its light bathes his face like a saint’s. Grabs a moist bottle of beer, bangs the door shut again and goes over to the living-room window. Slowly parting the curtain, he peers out onto the street. Seeking silhouettes under the street lamps, as if they’re a fucking Lili Marleen. A habit I picked up from him, or he from me, I muse as I go over to the fixed bars of the always open window, my hands empty.
Again I rerun my actions of an hour earlier, checking whether I’d locked all the doors: the double-paned one, glass, at the top of the outdoor stairs, the hallway door and this one from my room. Then, imperceptibly, I part the curtain, a crack into the outside world, and inhale the aroma of warm cake from the pastry shop across the street, gliding through my pores like dental floss: tea cakes and iced cookies in bright, toxic colours – neon pink, harlequin green, cyan. The spongy Lego blocks arranged in pyramidal structures behind the grimy glass of the display window. When I crave them, I remember they’re merely signs, you can’t eat language. Their smell mingles with the hormonal rot of ruby-red pomegranate arils in a bowl which I left in the middle of your table a long time ago, covering it with a sheet of paper, though it was besieged, nevertheless, by flies. They have them, pomegranates, all year long here, it’s always like summer, my biological clock permanently out of whack.
Above the pastry shop, on the concrete railing around the roof terrace, a demon sticks its tongue out to ward off evil, as if a tongue could be so powerful. Along the tracks across from Mosque Road, the colourful little church of St Anthony’s emerges from the tin and cardboard of a slum, the kitsch of optimism, but that doesn’t interest me now, it reminds me too much of you. I stab my gaze into the back of a man who is pissing on its side wall and then zips up his fly in the dead end of your memory: a gesture always accompanying relief of one sort or another.
K is up north, shooting photographs of textile workers around Delhi. A state-funded project of his. To date his work articulates a sweet madness, as a famous Indian photographer said in the report submitted to the committee. K is an artist who has already fulfilled all promises.
He is often not at home even when he’s in town. In the afternoon, when he returns, he asks if I’ve already eaten. This is the first question he asks the rickshaw and taxi drivers as soon as he settles onto the back seat. A question used in this city in place of a greeting. It is personal, maternal, sinking instantly through the layers of the psyche to the root of the pelvis, like everything else we are unable to answer, or ask.
So that’s why I don’t ask him about the calls.
I don’t know who’s at the other end. I know only that it’s men, and they are all somehow connected, with you at their centre. K told me it’s about unfinished business – business he doesn’t want to embroil me in.
He’ll explain at some point, he said. Not yet.
I look for them but find only the usual suspects. Men who are forever sitting on motorbikes parked under my window. They smoke and wait in line for Gentlemen, the men’s ‘beauty saloon’, as the sign describes it, open till late.
Gentlemen offers the fresh wedding look, as is scrawled above the entrance in a wavy, three-dimensional Futura font in blue and red: a dramatic tone suggestive of Indian movie posters. Men comb their whiskers down into apostrophes or single quote marks. They frame the speaking lips, what they’re saying, like a permanent sneer.
He’d prefer it not to be so, but I still don’t feel this to be my house: almost all the moveable property is yours. I’m an outsider surrounded by your things. An intruder. Another woman, though I know you’d have nothing against sharing him with me.
The house is our first in this city in the south, your city. Our first attempt at a home.
Yours are the dishes, some of them chipped porcelain, others metal, with compartments that reminded me at first of prison and school cafeterias but slowly became an acquired taste, like the drama. Your pressure cooker, which I use to make the same dishes you made, rice and dal, but the tastes and textures are altogether different, a halfway success, I’ll always be your apprentice. I repurposed the big wooden bowl you used for kneading dough as a bowl for salads; I consider the stone tawa in which you prepared millet flour and masala dumplings, K’s favourite, an artefact of sorts, and I never use it, only running my fingers over it from time to time to check whether a tawa can truly be made of stone. Yours is the filter for South Indian coffee which I stole from your beauty salon, thinking nobody would notice. Yours the gas burner on the kitchen counter, the only new part the propane tank we hooked up to it. We drink from your glasses, press our lips to the same glass, washed clean of the traces of your lips, we dry our hands on your dish towels. We sleep on your mattress, and sometimes this feels like a violation, and at other times I’m overcome by discomfort, even disgust, but I don’t want to insult K or incur unnecessary expense.
Maybe I’ve just grown accustomed to lying on the chalk outline that your body, still warm, left lingering on surfaces.
