No Other World

by Rahul Mehta

  Bharat’s aunt and uncle, without going into details, had described Kiran as “broken,” his state as “fragile.” Bharat could see for himself that this wasn’t quite the same Kiran he’d encountered seven years earlier (just as Kiran could see the same thing about Bharat). Kiran’s eyes had taken on a dullness Bharat recognized from his own father’s eyes: chunks of coal wedged in half-open lids. Still, Bharat was cautious. He felt compassion but kept it within a container. He didn’t trust Kiran. He’d never thought of his own father’s sorrow as stemming from selfishness, but he couldn’t help wondering if Kiran’s problems weren’t simply solipsism, a lingering, navel-gazing teenage angst in which his first-world privilege gave him the luxury of continuing to indulge long after his teenage years were over. Still, even if Bharat felt he couldn’t quite trust Kiran, he wanted to do right by his uncle, and especially his aunt, who had been so kind to him. For her, he would try his best to help his cousin-brother.

  As he drove, Bharat considered where they could stop. A Mughal ruin? Was it too dark for that? A temple? Evening Lakshmi Puja? Should he drive him by the grammar school Nishit Kaka had attended?

  Before he knew it, forty minutes had passed. They had arrived in the nearby city. And somehow they had ended up in the place Bharat least expected: one of the trendy new western-style coffee bars cropping up around the region. In quiet corners in back, lovers sat, some of them teenagers, some older, holding hands across tables, hoping disapproving parents (or spouses!) wouldn’t see. A fair-skinned family with a plump little girl eating a whipped-cream-topped tart commandeered the leatherette couch. The sound track was heavy silverware clinking against plates and, overhead, Celine Dion belting “My Heart Will Go On.”

  Kiran wanted a shot of espresso, but it wasn’t on the menu. “I see the machine,” Kiran said to the server, “and you clearly put shots in your mocha-frappé-latte-ccinos or whatever, right? So you can pull one shot for me, just serve it straight?”

  “No sir. Sorry sir. We wouldn’t know how to charge that, sir.”

  “Charge me for a cappuccino. But hold the milk.”

  In the end Kiran was served, in a huge glass mug, a frothy concoction the color of wheat. He sipped, making faces. Bharat slurped, making his own faces, thinking about how his passion fruit smoothie was quadruple the price and an eighth of the quality of the mango lassi available two blocks from his house. But of course, at places like these, you weren’t paying for the drinks: you were paying for the experience.

  It occurred to Kiran, looking at Bharat across the table, that if Bharat still harbored resentment toward him for his bad behavior seven years earlier, Kiran couldn’t tell. Still, he wouldn’t blame him. Kiran had been a shit. Not just for the four days he was home during fall break, but the evening he was supposed to meet Bharat and his family at Rockefeller Center. He had ridden the train into the city as promised, had spotted them across the plaza, waiting outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art Store. He watched them from a distance for several minutes. His mother had found a bench and was sharing a colossal cookie in a paper wrapper with Rohit’s girls and their mother. Bharat and Kiran’s father were standing together, fiddling with a camera. Bharat was trying to help him with something: loading or unloading film or adding a flash, it was unclear from Kiran’s vantage. Rohit was nearby, worrying his watch. Kiran checked his own timepiece, his mother’s slim wristwatch she’d given him at the Elmira mall. In another two years, in the flurry of moving from one apartment to another, he would lose it, but for now he still regularly carried it in pocket, imagining (impossible as it was) he could feel its tick tick tick against his thigh.

  Kiran couldn’t join them. He had known it as soon as he’d seen them in the shadow of the towering Christmas tree, laughing families all around them. He thought of Jeffrey shoving him from his lifeboat into the pool of hot lava, and the next time he saw him, the word that fell from his mouth and exploded like an atom bomb, the fallout still settling. Dude. Irradiated, toxic, Kiran had to keep his distance. He couldn’t risk contaminating his family.

  “So,” Bharat asked between sips of his smoothie, “what are your plans?”

  “For?”

  “For the future.”

  “Ah, the future.” Kiran balanced a sugar cube on the tip of his spoon and made like he was going to catapult it. “No future!” he snarled in his best Johnny Rotten, knowing full well Bharat wouldn’t get the reference.

  “Didn’t your parents say you studied photography in college? What do you plan to do with that?”

  Kiran didn’t answer. He had no idea. In the three years since graduating, he’d managed only low-level positions in fields not even remotely related to photography.

  “Kiran, it’s time to grow up. How old are you? Shouldn’t you be thinking of your future?”

  “How old were you when you came to America? Flunking Accounting 101? Smoking cigarettes on the back patio? Playing dark and mysterious stranger to some unsuspecting local girl while back here you were practically engaged? Were you thinking about your future?”

  Bharat’s face tightened. “In the end I’ve done my duty. I’ve made my parents proud. Will you be able to say the same thing?” Bharat took Kiran’s hand across the table, unconsciously mimicking the lovers. “I’m trying to help you.”

  Pooja was perhaps ten when she first came to live with Guru Ma. Officially she was still Prakash then, but she had never really been Prakash; she had always been Pooja. Even the name Pooja—meaning “prayer”—had come to her when she was very young. She could remember being three years old, falling on some rocks or being hit by her mother or being left alone all day, and telling herself: It is Prakash who is suffering. Pooja is OK.

  She lived with her mother and younger sister in a one-room shack made from scavenged lumber and corrugated metal in a chaotic shantytown along the sloping bank of the river. Looming above them was the skeleton of a hotel being slowly built; it had been almost two years already, and while many of the shantytown residents had managed to find temporary employment on the construction site, they also knew that once the hotel was completed, they would have to leave. Never mind that the shantytown had been there long before the hotel; the hoteliers would not want such views for their guests. Shanti’s mother found occasional work—when they needed her—carrying rocks from one part of the site to another, and Prakash found work fetching tea during the breaks.

  The day Pooja left home, she hid nearby, camping out in a quiet part of the hotel where there was no active work. She had hoped her mother would call for her—“Where is that rotten boy of mine?”—and if she had, she would have gone back. But her mother said nothing. Pooja slept there that night, and the next day, from the shadows, she watched her mother carrying rocks on her head like it was any other day, like it was not the day her son had disappeared. Pooja watched her for an hour, maybe longer, watched her in a way she never had before, her mother trudging back and forth from one rock pile to another, sweat slicking every single part of her so that her whole body seemed to be liquid, like a dirty puddle. She had to stay straight-backed so the rocks wouldn’t tumble from her head, and she wore worn-out chappals, but at least she had chappals; so many of the other women did not. At home, Pooja’s mother had been a terrifying presence; here, she looked cowed.

  That night, Pooja walked. She walked through the town to its dark edge and then along the road to the next town, where she knew there was a community of hijras. That morning Guru Ma was standing in her doorway, hair unkempt, slight stubble on her cheek, but standing in the doorway nonetheless, as if she’d been waiting for her.

  For his first several years living in America, first on his own and then with his bride, when something went wrong or when there was an unexpected boulder in the road and he wasn’t sure he could find his way over or around, Nishit would think, We can always go back. In fact, Shanti had held on to her Indian citizenship until 2001 for that very reason. (It was only in the wake of 9/11 and her own private grief over the death
of Chris’s daughter, Kelly Bell, and the some three thousand other souls like her, and the way that Chris—despite his previously unwavering, God-works-in-mysterious-ways faith, his resolve and assuredness in every situation—became a zombie, it was only after all of that that Shanti realized she was never going back to India, that this was her only home.)

  When the phone call came late one night, Kiran’s flatmate Penny’s voice on the other end—“I’m sorry, Dr. Shah, I wasn’t sure what else to do, I’ve never seen him like this”—Nishit’s first instinct was, Let’s send him back; “back,” even though Kiran had never even been to India. Actually, it wasn’t his first instinct. His first instinct, his and Shanti’s both, was to insist Kiran return to Western New York. They wanted to hold him as close and as tight and as long as they could, as though he were a toddler who’d tripped on the stairs and needed reassurance that he was OK, that whatever sharp pain he had felt when he fell was fleeting and would leave at most a scratch. But he and Shanti understood intuitively that home was part of his hurt and that coming there would not help him. That’s when Nishit thought of India. It came to him in the image that so often replayed in his head: him and his brother sitting in the second-floor window, Prabhu clipping his nails, his grip on his wrist both tender and firm. Don’t let go of me. Nishit knew that’s where Kiran needed to go. The more he thought about it and the more he discussed it with Shanti, the more they agreed. Seeing India, seeing where he was from—yes, from, Nishit and Shanti stuck by that word, never mind where Kiran was born and raised, he was from India—and being in the very house where Nishit had grown up would give Kiran perspective on his own life.

  The next day Nishit made his own late-night phone call, to his brother (late night for Nishit, late morning for Prabhu), his words an echo of another very different transcontinental conversation seventeen years earlier: “Brother, I need you.”

  Morning, battling a summer fever exacerbated by a heat wave and which he self-treated with a high-dose injection of paracetamol, Nishit drove straight through the six hours to New York City. He loaded what he could of Kiran’s belongings into the minivan, struggling down the five flights of Kiran’s sixth-floor walk-up with garbage bags full of clothes and toiletries and paperback books and piles and piles of unopened mail, Kiran barely able to help, stumbling up and down the stairs like a sleepwalker. For years to come, when Nishit and Shanti visited their son in whatever apartment or house he happened to be living in at the time, Shanti would always clean. No matter how meticulously Kiran thought he had scrubbed before his parents’ visit, Shanti would find a shelf of books with a fine layer of dust on their upright edges or kitchen cabinets smudged with fingerprints and she would go to work. Now it was Nishit who was tidying up after his son, more than tidying. He’d swept and mopped the floor, scattered cobwebs from corners, wiped soot from the windowsill, and now he was on his hands and knees scrubbing at a stain on the grubby baseboard. Would Penny and her new roommate—Kiran’s replacement—even notice how Nishit had cleaned? He sprayed more and more cleaning solution, applying more and more pressure to the stain, while Kiran, slumped against the wall, weakly protested, “Dad, that was there before I moved in. It was already like that.” Even before Kiran said this, Nishit knew the futility of his actions. Apartments like these—old apartments with decades of tenants—could never be cleaned; they bled filth from every crack, every seam. Outside the window that faced a brick wall, the gray light blackened, and Nishit set down the scrub brush. He knew they needed to get on the road. They still had a long drive home.

  Over the phone, Penny had told Nishit about the job Kiran had stopped going to, the days on end of not leaving the apartment, barely leaving his room, the nonpayment of rent (“I was happy to cover Kiran one month, Dr. Shah, but I can’t afford any more”). Nishit heard in her voice a hesitation and knew there was more she didn’t want to say, and, truth be told, Nishit wasn’t sure he wanted to hear.

  Three weeks later Kiran was on a flight to India.

  Chapter 19

  Guru Ma had warned Pooja about dogs. Funny that this is what she warned her about, rather than the men like wolves. Not that all men were like this. Some were deer and some were doves and some were kittens. But most were wolves, Pooja thought.

  Hanuman had come to her beneath the peepal tree in Bharat’s yard. She hadn’t invited him, but she hadn’t either pushed him away or slapped at him with the flat bottoms of her chappals as so many did. Though she tried to feign indifference, by the third day she couldn’t help scratching behind his ears, running a hand, a slender, bangled wrist, once or twice down the full length of his body, not absentmindedly the way she sometimes saw the ducan-walla sitting outside on a kerosene can stroking a stray. She did it deliberately, with a smooth, firm motion. She liked that—even before she had petted him, even before she had started fixing meals of scraps for him (scraps from scraps Kiran brought her)—he kept coming to her, kept coming back to her. When at night she returned from being with the men, there he was under the tree, waiting for her. And when she slept, he lay not against her, but near her, near enough that she could hear and feel his heavy breath and he—she felt sure—could feel hers.

  Guru Ma had said dogs were dirty. She’d said this years ago, when Pooja first came to live with her. She said a hijra above all else must be clean, and dogs were the opposite of clean, particularly these dogs, stray dogs, street dogs, filthy beasts who came sniffing at her door, who lay on her steps all day as if the steps belonged to them, as if the dogs were the ones who swept them. But even then Pooja had felt a connection to the dogs. She had known what it meant to have nowhere to go, to sleep on a step that was not yours. She had known what it meant to stray. Surely Guru Ma had known these things, too.

  Pooja initially named the dog Hanuman, Hanu for short, in honor of what she interpreted as his devotion. But later she wondered if this was correct. Was he truly devoted to her the way the monkey-god Hanuman was devoted to Sita; was that why the dog kept coming to her? Or was she mistaking devotion for something more simple, more basic: desire? Wasn’t it something all animals felt: this desire to lie as close as possible to another beating heart?

  “Are you sure you are a boy?” Chota Kaka teased, almost an hour after Kiran and Bharat had arrived. As he chortled and trumpeted, making huge, elephant-like sounds, the other men in the room began shifting uncomfortably. “I know Bharat says you are one boy, but you seem like one girl. Are you sure you are not really one girl?”

  After their tense conversation at the coffee shop, Bharat had decided that, before heading home, he and Kiran might stop in at the house of some relatives, given that they were already in the city. He was following Nishit Kaka’s instructions to show Kiran where he was from. Chota Kaka—Nishit’s father’s brother—was someone Nishit Kaka would want Kiran to meet.

  Kiran had been able to see immediately upon their arrival that Chota Kaka was drunk. It amazed Kiran how many drunk men he had encountered since being in town. He’d see them at all hours of the day, in the shops or on the street. It was especially surprising considering alcohol was prohibited in this particular region and couldn’t be purchased legally anywhere.

  Chota Kaka’s name seemed to Kiran a paradox: chota means small, but he was huge. With his swollen round body and his brightly colored kurta, Chota Kaka resembled a hot-air balloon, but without the lightness. He lay only half upright, beached on a rattan chaise in the center of the room.

  Kiran turned to Bharat in hopes he might defend him, but for now Bharat remained silent. Kiran couldn’t blame him.

  “I know how we can find out,” Chota Kaka snorted. “Drop your trousers.”

  He was looking straight at Kiran, wild-eyed, pointing. “No? Why so shy? The women are in the other room. Maybe that is where you should be.”

  “Aré, Chota Kaka, leave him alone,” Bharat finally said. “Just because he has long hair?” He tried to play it off as a joke. No one wanted to cross Chota Kaka or hurt his feelings. They were fa
mily, after all.

  “It’s not just his long hair. There is something about him. Something not quite right. I don’t believe he is a boy. Why doesn’t he drop his trousers? Put the matter to rest?”

  “Chota, leave it,” another relative said. “You honestly want this boy to drop his trousers right here in the sitting room, in front of all of us?”

  “What if a lady comes in?” someone else chimed in. “You would like one of your daughters to see Kiran’s pee pee?”

  “You know Kaka in America has two children. This is the younger. You have seen so many pictures ever since he was born. What is this nonsense, Chota? Stop teasing the poor fellow.”

  Chota Kaka clicked his tongue and shook his head side to side. “Oh, sorry, sorry. Nothing meant. I see now, he is not a girl.” With some difficulty, he rolled out of the rattan chaise, woven cane snapping beneath him. On his feet, he almost tumbled forward, stumbling his way over to the wooden ladder-back chair where Kiran sat. He stood behind Kiran, lightly tracing a single index finger down the length of Kiran’s hair, along his neck, and across his shoulder, before allowing it to float back down and rest on the back of the chair. He leaned over and whispered, his breath hot against Kiran’s ear, “You are a gandu.”

  Kiran didn’t know the word, but he didn’t need a translation. Over his lifetime, he had heard the word faggot enough to recognize it in any language.

  Kiran had bought the Superman journal in a moment of whimsy just before leaving for India. He had seen it on display in the bookstore at the airport, propped next to a Wonder Woman journal, which was the one he picked up first. But in the end he was seduced by Superman, in particular the lock of hair that curled in the center of his forehead. Only Superman had that lock of hair; Clark Kent didn’t. Clark’s hair was perfect, parted, combed.