Ah, the stories I could relate. How unfortunate the bomb’s made it too late to start a blog.


ONCE KARUN’S CAST came off, I sensed I had to act fast, or risk losing my prey. Before my seduction plans could unravel completely, my mother’s ninety-year-old Habib uncle gave them an unexpected fillip by peacefully passing away. As soon as my parents left for the funeral in Lucknow, I assured our servant Nazir that my lips would be sealed in case he wanted to slip off himself to secretly visit his village. This resulted in an empty flat, a phenomenon rarer than a lunar eclipse.

My dinner invitation seemed to catch Karun off guard: “Your liberation from the cast—we have to celebrate.” We lived at one of the fancier addresses in Worli, in a fourteen-floor building rising by the sea. Karun looked flustered when he glanced around the flat upon entering, so I hastened to ascribe the poshness to my parents, not myself. “They’re those rare people who’ve figured out how to spin philosophy into money, scholarship into wealth.”

But his discomfort stemmed from something else. “I thought we’d be eating with your parents—I didn’t realize even your cook was away.”

Sitting on the couch, his entire body, from fidgeting hands to restless feet, thrummed with nervousness. He declined the Scotch I’d figured on plying him with, so I suggested we eat. “I managed to cajole Nazir into making his famous chicken biryani before he left.”

It helped—ballasted by the food, Karun became a bit more placid. I knew I had to lure him into my room before the sluggishness wore off and he bolted. “Would you like to hear some of my qawwali disco?” I asked, and proceeded to explain the synthesis of Sufi religious music and old dance hits I’d been experimenting with. “The new fusion wave—it’ll storm the music world once I set it loose on the internet.”

He followed me unsurely into the Jazter sanctum, where, truth be told, no shikar had ever entered before. I immediately closed the door and tethered him to the computer with a pair of headphones. I proceeded to play excerpts from several of my concoctions—Fareed Ayaz and the Bee Gees, Donna Summer and Mubarak Ali Khan, finally arriving at my pièce de résistance. “Ready for some ‘Dancing Queen’ like you’ve never heard it before?”

“I’m sure it’s very nice. It’s just that I’m not so familiar with these songs.”

We lapsed into silence. I wanted to rub Karun’s back or slide my hand around his shoulder, but couldn’t think of a way to feign the right spontaneity. But then he gave me an opening. “I thought you didn’t swim.” He pointed to the picture of a group of men in bathing suits on my wall (the one right next to my vintage posters of Ricky Martin and RuPaul, neither of which apparently had lit any lightbulbs).

“I don’t. That’s the U.S. Olympic diving team.” Seeing his confusion, I clarified. “Not that I can dive, either. I just enjoy looking at them.”

He showed no reaction, as if my last sentence had magically dissipated on its journey through the air. So I pressed in a bit. “Who would you say is the most handsome? If you had one to pick?”

This made him redden. “I wouldn’t know.” He looked pointedly away from the picture.

“Come, come, surely that’s not such a hard question to answer. I like the dark one on the left myself. His chest, especially—the way the water beads on his skin.” I decided to go ahead and rub Karun between the shoulder blades—playfully, I thought, though perhaps it appeared manifestly suggestive. “It’s OK, there’s no need to be so uptight about it. Believe me, Karun, I know you better than you think.” I placed my other palm on his thigh—for some reason, I felt the need to punctuate.

In the postmortem, my behavior amazed me. How could the Jazter have plugged through months of painstaking pursuit, then risked it all in a moment of such indelicacy? For an instant, Karun simply stared at my hand, as if calculating whether he could possibly ignore it. Then he sprang up from the bed. “I have to leave,” he said.

I caught up with him as he fumbled with the door at the entryway to the flat. “It’s locked. I have the key.”

“I really have to go.”

“I’ll open it, and you can go, but first you have to answer one question. Tell me, truthfully, why you came.”

“What? You’re the one who invited me. For dinner. Have you forgotten?”

“Not today. Why you came to the park. What you were searching for. All these weeks, the question you’ve evaded.”

He glared at me. “The children. I came to watch them play. Someday I hope to have my own. Satisfied?” His voice had a defiant tone. “Not for this, not for what you were thinking, what you were trying. It’s outrageous.”

“OK, fair enough. You’ve obviously had enough time to cook up a response. But you must be crazy if you expect me to believe it. Even crazier if you believe it yourself.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy—”

“I know the way you were staring at the park. The way you’ve been carrying on with me. Tea and ice cream, what crap. Why don’t you just be honest and admit it?”

“Open this door.” He began pounding on it. “Open this door at once. Somebody help.”

“No need for such drama. Here’s the key.” I threw it at him. “There are taxis around the corner—I hope this time you have enough money in your wallet to pay the fare yourself.”


HE CALLED ABOUT an hour later on his cell. “I have to tell you something.” I didn’t answer. “About your question.” Again, I kept silent. “Are you there?”

“Go on, I’m listening.”

“Not like that. I’m downstairs.”

He had found the path that circled around to the small strip of beach behind the building. As I approached, he rose from the fallen palm trunk on which he sat. “Jaz?”

“Yes, it’s me.” I stepped carefully toward him across the debris-littered sand. The moon shone down through the palm fronds, covering him in a delicate crisscross of light. He looked insubstantial, lace-like, like a spirit that had lost its way and been captured in this lunar mesh.

For a few minutes we stood in silence, watching the bay. The tide was the furthest I’d ever seen, the waves streaks of silver that appeared almost stationary. “I’d read about the park,” he finally said. “On the internet, while still in Karnal.”

It all came tumbling out—how after junior college in Karnal, he knew he had to spend his three senior years somewhere else, how he’d found postings for similar parks in Delhi, but it still seemed too close to his mother and his family. “I felt dreadful applying for the scholarship, but I knew I had to go far away to survive. It still took me a year and a half in Bombay before I got together the courage to do anything.”

He began telling me more—about grappling with his inner feelings, the doubts he had. Too much information smothers passion every time, I wanted to warn him. Before the moment could drift away in a flow of words, I leaned forward and locked his lips in a kiss.

His mouth felt small, perhaps because his tongue didn’t know how to respond. I held his head and pressed my body into his. He sighed—a sound that emanated from deep within his throat and didn’t fully escape. The moon’s filigree covered my person as well, its rays now engulfed us both in their net.

Upstairs, I led him by the hand to my room. His skin tasted salty but fresh. He cried out when I took him in my mouth, grabbing my head and finishing before I could slow him down. Afterwards, he buried his head in my chest and shyly asked if he could reciprocate.

We slept curled up together. I offered to get us a second pillow, but Karun said no. “I want to be as close as we can—I’ve never spent the night with someone else.” It occurred to me that this was the first time for me as well. For all these years, I’d been used to shikar, in which one doesn’t need a bed.


THE SUN HAS SUNK LOWER, but dusk hasn’t arrived yet. It looks like we’re passing through one of the shabbier tracts of Matunga or Mahim, but I can’t be sure. It’s easier to tell at night, when the poor areas are the only ones without light. The rich have their own generators, prompted by the past year’s power cuts.

What will I do once the sun sets? The bulbs and switches in my compartment surely don’t work. Boxes of incense and candles lie stacked next to a pile of saris in a corner, but the Jazter, a non-smoker, is matchless. I pull the tarpaulin off a row of crates running along a wall and discover a weapons cache. Gingerly, I sort through the rifles, the ammunition, the hand grenades, wary of triggering off my own private October 19. I find nothing to illuminate my surroundings—at least not without a bit of a blast.

Wrapped in a cloth is a handgun. It looks as cute and compact as a toy—surely it fires nothing more potent than caps. I’ve never handled a gun before—I’m startled by how much it weighs. I look for the safety catch, such a frequent hiccup in the novels I’ve read, but cannot locate it. Dare I squeeze the trigger to see if it’s loaded? I place it back atop the pile, then pick it up again. Ever since the war started, I’ve felt unsafe—all the people out to get me, as in this morning’s close shave. So I stash the gun in my side trouser pocket. Immediately, I worry about accidental discharges. I try to corral the Jazter jewels out of harm’s way but they keep swinging back.

This all seems so unreal that I feel like laughing. To think I need a gun to protect against those who’d kill me for being Muslim. The joke is on them—the last time I prayed was with Rahim, in the mosque annex. It’s too bad they don’t know about my true religion of noodling—a reason to really get their nuts in a snit.