She took some colour from her pouch and streaked his face yellow. ‘Nice to meet you. Happy Holi.’
The intervention of two English-speaking guests broke the tension. Mateen and the model greeted and kissed Sanyogita. Ra had appeared among them. The head of security slipped off. Only Aakash stood where he was. He shuddered and came out of one of his trances, as if he’d just been planning my workout.
‘Ash-man!’
‘Yes, man,’ he replied, pinching my sides as he did in the gym. ‘Looking good, man.
His confidence returned, but his face gleamed unnaturally.
We drove home through empty streets. Every now and then we encountered a car full of people like us, coloured, crowded, satiated. Only Aakash was in black clothes, with a single yellow streak. I had asked if we could give him a lift; Sanyogita pointed out that we ourselves were taking a lift with Ra; Ra happily agreed to have him dropped off.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Sectorpur,’ Aakash replied.
Ra’s face went blank. ‘I’m sure my driver knows where it is.’
The car was quiet. The avenues swung past us like the spokes of a wheel. A kind of evening static, hushed and colourless, settled over the city. The trees acquired a violet tint. Weak outdoor lights came on in Doric-columned verandas.
‘So quiet, no? Can’t believe it’s already over. I’ll sing a song.’
Mandira sang a film song about Holi. It was spirited but sounded like a dirge for coming at the wrong time of the day. We were dropped off first.
‘Ash-man.’
‘Yes, man,’ Aakash smiled, half-closing his eyes.
‘See you, tomorrow.’
They drove off.
Sanyogita bathed me that night. I sat on her fifties marble-chipped bathroom floor under a naked yellow bulb. She sat on a red plastic stool, using a bucket and mug. The colour ran in stages from my body, leaving areas of uncoloured flesh ringed blue and pink. The bucket bath, the dim bulb, the colour running from my body to vanish in a vortex over a stainless-steel drain cover – these things, coming now at the end of festival in a new and altered city, each conspired in dredging up the Holis of my childhood. And it felt as though Sanyogita had put together this ritual knowing the effect it would have.
6
A few days later, Aakash was restless throughout our workout. We were exercising my legs, ‘doing squats,’ he said, rhyming it with bats. The exercise made me nervous. I didn’t like the bar resting painfully on the back of my neck. I didn’t like unhooking it and suddenly feeling the weight on my legs and lowering myself from the hips. The muscles in my thighs trembled and swelled. They had to fight to bring me up again. Thinking of them failing was terrifying: the bar with its pink and orange plates pushing me into the ground. Aakash, like a syce with a reluctant horse, belted a broad back support around my waist. Then pressing two corners of a white hand towel against the centre of the bar, he whipped it into a tube-shaped cushion. When it rested on the back of my neck, he gripped me under the arms, his short-fingered hands softening the surprise of the weight.
He remained quiet and intense throughout. There was no screaming, ‘Come on, you’ll give me two more,’ no ‘Done done-a-done done.’ And when I was leaving the cold, incense-filled room, he said, almost threateningly, ‘What are you doing later?’
‘Nothing, I’m around,’ I replied, surprised at the urgency in his voice.
‘Good. I’m coming over. I’ll call you to get the address.’
I went back to my mother’s flat that afternoon. I was embarrassed to be meeting Aakash outside the gym. But the plan, coming so spontaneously and arousing my curiosity, felt part of the ease of Aakash’s manners, his endearing overfamiliarity; to resist, I felt, would be to hold on to an imported idea of propriety. On the drive home the streets were filled with the forerunners of the May flowering: the silk cotton’s coral corresponding to the gulmohar’s burnt orange; kachnar’s purple to the jarul’s wispy mauve; and the oleander’s yellow trumpet-shaped flowers, a deceptive but poor imitation of the laburnum. Just before South End Lane, a giant pilkhan towered over these slender flowering trees. Its dense canopy fanned black against the spring sky, now whitening with every degree of approaching heat.
I lied to Sanyogita about needing books in my mother’s library, ate lunch on a trolley alone and sat down to wait for Aakash. At about three thirty, his name flashed on my phone. A few minutes later he was at my door.
I had only ever seen him in uniforms. Now in his own clothes, his attention to style was apparent. He wore low, loose jeans and a striped grey and black T-shirt. Its long sleeves were pulled up to the elbow. A small black backpack hung from his shoulders and a hands-free wire sprawled over their great expanse. Like at the Holi party, he seemed bigger and darker outside Junglee.
He was in a lighter mood than he’d been in at the gym, but watchful. A look of delight entered his eyes as they scanned the flat.
‘You live here alone?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Man, what peacefulness! I have never, not even for a minute, been alone in the place where we live. Not once, not for a minute. Do you get scared sleeping here at night?’
‘No, I sleep at Sanyogita’s. Do you live with your family?’
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘My father’s an auditor in the defence ministry and so we have a flat in the Air Force Colony in Sectorpur.’
‘Do you have any siblings?’
‘Two brothers,’ he replied, then seeming to read a question in my eyes, added, ‘We’re very close, but,’ and now in English, ‘they are very differ from me. My whole family are very differ from me.’
The kitchen door swung open and Shakti appeared with a glass of water on a tray. Once fresh from the village, the city and the job had turned him cynical. But though he’d never met Aakash before, his dull eyes brightened at seeing him. Aakash took the water and registered the interest in his face. Shakti watched him as he drank, the dull look returning to his eyes. Just as his gaze had drifted away, Aakash clamped Shakti’s vast stomach between two fingers. Like a huge toy, Shakti exploded in laughter and surprise. Aakash smiled, holding on to his stomach while wiping his lips, then said, ‘That wife of yours must treat you really well. What’s this stomach hanging out? Too much rice?’ Looking to me for approval, he added, ‘Give me two months with this guy and I’ll whip him into shape.’
‘Shakti, Aakash,’ I said, and for coming so late, the introduction made Aakash laugh out loud.
He was handing back the glass when his gaze landed on Shakti’s feet. His face filled with concern. ‘Why are you wearing those blue chappals?’ he asked. ‘They make you look bad, man, these cheap chappals.’
Shakti stared in amazement at his feet, as if the rubber chappals were the work of some conjuror. Bata’s blue and white chappals were like a symbol of domestic servitude in India. I must have seen them smooth and worn on Shakti’s feet all my life. But they never struck me as strange on him. I had not seen Shakti grow from being a slim man into a fat man. It had happened while I was away; and in a sense, no one was better placed than me to notice the change. But I had seen nothing. Aakash, without a trace of piety, looked as I couldn’t. He didn’t restore Shakti’s dignity; he flung it at him as if forced to defend something that wasn’t his. And Shakti was star-struck. He stood there, disturbed and intrigued, like an old woman who’s just been whistled at in the street.
In his morose way, he said, ‘Aakash bhai…’ (He never referred to me that way; he called me sir.) ‘How did you make such a good body?’
‘With a lot of effort,’ Aakash snapped, and sent him off to get him beer and sandwiches.
‘Beer?’ I asked.
‘Yes, man, feeling thirsty. You’ll have too, no?’
I looked at my watch, then outside. Afternoon sun poured into the flat.
