The City Son

by Samrat Upadhyay

  He nods.

  “Come, let’s take off your clothes.”

  He allows her to take off his shirt, then his pants. He has on white underwear. She cups his crotch with her palm and says, “Oh, look, how big the spot is on your kattu.” She pulls down his underwear and inspects his penis. There is a globule of semen on its tip, like creamy dew. She picks up the globule with her fingertip and tastes it with her tongue.

  In the bathroom she washes him. The water is cold. He shivers. She’s business-like now, and her able hands soap him all over. He whimpers when the soap stings his eyes; she flicks away the soapsuds from around them. She briskly rubs him under his armpits, then the crack in his buttocks and his balls and his penis. “How can she call herself a mother?” Didi grumbles. “She ought to have died soon after giving birth to you so I’d have you all to myself.” She pours water over him to wash away the soap. “Soon, I’ll make my son some chouchou soup so he’ll be warm and cozy.” She fetches a towel and rubs him until warmth spreads through his muscles and skin. She leads him to the living room and grabs a pair of Amit’s pants and puts them on him. They’re slightly big for him, so she has to fold the bottom as well as the waist. She has him sit on the bed with a thick blanket around him, like his father, then she goes to the kitchen.

  Tarun thinks that somehow Mahesh Uncle and his mother are going to discover that he’s ejaculated. He thinks it’ll be obvious on his face, a telltale sign that all adults know. And once they learn this truth, then the truth about him and Didi will also be forced out into the open. So for a couple of days he avoids everyone in Lazimpat. Even when he’s talking to Mahesh Uncle or Sanmaya, he turns his face away. But Mahesh Uncle is especially busy with his work and doesn’t dwell upon Tarun’s behavior. And Sanmaya is too busy with her own talk; besides, she doesn’t see too well. And his mother? Whenever she gets a chance she escapes Lazimpat and fitfully walks through the city. Mostly, her eyes are fixed on the pavement, but even when she lifts her head, she doesn’t appear conscious of much, except not running into traffic. At times her lips move silently; at times words fly out, but no one understands what she’s saying. She trudges in her worn house dhoti, her hair uncombed, dragging her slippers. Street urchins follow her, make faces, calling her names to taunt her. Drunk and perverted men block her way, making suggestions, for she still has the air of a former beauty. She doesn’t venture into the city center, toward Bangemudha; it’s as though she has forgotten that part of her life.

  By the time he is fourteen, Tarun is somewhat of a loner. He has friends, but he prefers his own company. He comes up with excuses not to spend time with friends. “I have things to do at home,” he tells them. He uses his mother as an excuse. “Today, my mother is in an especially bad state,” he says when he’s asked to join them for an outing or for a movie or just to relax on someone’s roof listening to music and smoking a cigarette or two. He is well liked, for he is mild mannered and considerate, but over time his friends have grown weary of how much persuasion he needs before he agrees to their company. He’s acquired a reputation as a lone wolf. When he does get together with them, he ends up faking a headache to leave early so he can then be alone with his own thoughts or go home and listen to music in the quietude of his own room. Or masturbate. When he masturbates he tries hard to think of girls, but in the end it’s Didi he thinks of and comes, quickly and without fuss.

  “Think of pretty chicks,” Amit had said when he’d demonstrated for Tarun and Sumit and a handful of neighborhood boys how to masturbate. They were in a patch of bamboo grove near their house, and Amit had dropped his shorts and taken out his penis, which was long and twisted at the top. “See this beautiful creature?” he’d said, stroking it and watching it grow. “This bhai will happily serve many maidens for years.” He petted it, and it slowly raised its head like an animal aroused from sleep. “Dai,” cautioned Sumit, but he was smiling as usual. “And so this is how you masturbate,” he said, and his hand moved at first leisurely, then rapidly. “It helps if you think of pretty chicks.” He mentioned the names of a girl or two they all knew. He told his rapt audience that he was concentrating on one of those girls, then he shuddered and came.

  But Tarun gets anxious with pretty girls. He thinks they won’t find him manly enough. He pictures pretty girls laughing at him, making fun of his penis, which is smaller than Amit’s. It’s slightly larger than Sumit’s—he’d taken a glance when they’d peed together into the bushes—but that hardly seems like a consolation. More important, no matter what its size, he feels like he has a child’s penis and that pretty girls will simply laugh him away. He is convinced that they call him a sissy behind his back. He pictures them saying to one another, Who would want to be with him? He’s a dirty little boy. Deep inside, he knows that girls don’t talk about him that way. If anything, he’s aware of how the eyes of the girls linger on him. He’s heard whispers of “handsome” and “good-looking,” but he’s convinced that after a short conversation with him they will realize what a pansy and how unmanly he is, and his good looks won’t matter. Once they discover that he’s not worth their time, they’ll gravitate toward someone like Amit. Yes, Tarun can see how these girls would throw Amit admiring glances. Amit has a perpetually sneering expression, and he leers at girls. One time he made a fornicating gesture with his hands at a girl who was sitting at her window near Bangemudha, a girl rumored to be loose. This happened toward early evening when people were about. Tarun was mortified, but the girl only preened and smiled and left the window. Tarun thought about that girl for many days. It was manly, that gesture. The girl had liked it. Girls liked such displays of manliness. He practiced the gesture in front of the mirror: the left index finger and thumb forming a tight hole, and the right index finger pumping it like a piston. But when Tarun did it, it looked like a timid boy playing with his fingers, like girls play with dolls.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SILENTLY THEY MOVE toward each other and embrace. He is as tall as she is, yet in that moment he is the child who used to follow her around the house, cling to her dhoti, and eat her food.

  She smothers his lips with hers. She has lipstick on. “My beautiful son,” she says. She cries, “I haven’t feasted my eyes on you for days.” She plants kisses all over his face, his neck. Her hand gently rubs his crotch. From the corner of his eyes, he notices that the curtains on the window facing the street aren’t closed, and with one hand he reaches over to close them, but she clasps him tightly and says, “Let them be. It doesn’t matter.” Still, his fingers strain and pull them shut. In the back of his mind, he thinks Amit can walk in on them—these days Amit makes sudden, brief appearances to eat, then leaves—and Tarun stretches his neck to look at the door, which is latched shut.

  She runs her hand over his body hungrily, overzealously, as though she’ll not get another opportunity like this. They shuffle toward the bed, where, as soon as they lie down, she reaches inside his pants and touches him. He ejaculates instantly in her hand. Her wet hand still inside his pants, she smiles, like she smiles when he gulps down her food and lets out a burp. They lie together like this for a few minutes. She says she’ll clean him up before others come, and he says he’ll do it himself. Let me do it, Son, she says. He blushes, shakes his head. You love your Didi, don’t you? she asks. He nods. You love me more than you love your mother? she asks slyly. He’s silent, then he says, I love you more than my mother. She closes her eyes and takes a long breath, gratified. I’m your real mother, am I not, even though I’m ugly? Please say yes, chora. He’s quiet again, then he says, Yes, you are my real mother. Her eyes are still closed; her lips are quivering.

  Later, as he’s cleaning himself in the bathroom, he hears Sumit and his father enter. “The doctor said that it’s mild bronchitis, but that it could become severe,” Sumit explains. The Masterji coughs violently. When Tarun emerges from the bathroom, he has his shirt out, covering the wet patch on his crotch. Didi hasn’t yet wiped off her lipstick. As Sumit leads his fathe
r to the bed, the Masterji repeatedly glances at Didi’s face, then he studies Tarun, and something shifts in his eyes. His nose gives an involuntary twitch: the smell in the room has hit his nostrils. The Masterji crawls into bed. Didi stands over him next to the bed and says, “Poor soul. I’ll make some soup for you. You’ll feel better.”

  One day Apsara happens to be in Naxal, on the street where she grew up. It’s hard to tell whether she’s cognizant of her old neighborhood, for her face is devoid of any expression. Her mother, Tarun’s grandmother, spots her from the window. With uncharacteristic compassion, her mother rushes down and goes to her. Caressing her daughter’s cheek in the middle of the street—neighbors are watching; they know who Apsara is, her history—Tarun’s grandmother says, “Look what has become of you.” But one gets the feeling that it’s mostly for show, for she’s aware that some could criticize her for being a heartless mother. “Won’t you come inside?” she says. “Won’t you stay for a while with your old mother? Look how my heart has been torn to pieces seeing you like this.” Tarun’s uncle has already married and moved to a new place. Apsara hasn’t set foot inside this house since that fateful day when she took Tarun with her to Kupondole. The kitchen has been remodeled, so there is a shiny new counter and an island in the middle, a place “where I can chop carrots and cauliflower with ease,” Apsara’s mother informs her daughter. Apsara takes everything in. Nothing about her childhood home evokes anything anymore. There are old photographs on the wall of the living room. She with her brother taken at a portrait studio, she in cowboy attire, and her brother dressed as an American Indian. A photo of her during her college days. She is alone in that photograph, her eager face thrust at the camera. Her mother catches her observing her photo and weeps. “Chhori, chhori, what happened? Look at you in that photo! And look at you now.” She runs her hand through her daughter’s stringy hair; she fingers her daughter’s worn-out dhoti. But in the end, nothing comes out of this visit. Apsara doesn’t return to her maternal home, and her mother doesn’t make overtures to bring her daughter and her grandson back into her life.

  Didi allows him to pet her breasts now. She opens her blouse and her bra, and he rubs and fondles her nipples. Her nipples are dark, resembling the black spots on her face. He also clumsily sucks on them, but they give off an odor, like the smell of damp clothes. Yet he thinks they are beautiful. She strokes the back of his head and encourages him as he sucks on them. She doesn’t appear aroused, merely pleased, and sometimes overwhelmed with emotion. When he looks up from her breasts, she says, “You have to promise you won’t ever leave me.”

  He, too, is affected by her emotions, and he can barely get his words out. “I’ll never leave you, Didi.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “I promise.” And he moves up to her face and kisses her deeply and passionately on the mouth. He feels like a man kissing a woman. “I’ll take care of you, don’t worry,” he says. Even his voice becomes rougher, like Amit’s, and he kisses her a bit forcefully. She’s pleasantly surprised, for she says, “How strong you’re becoming.” He feels powerful and kisses her more. It occurs to him that no boy his age, not even Amit, has access to a full-grown woman like this. The other boys are only talk and no action, and here he is, sucking on a real woman’s breasts.

  He is hard, and Didi’s fingers are inside his underwear, stroking. “My son has become really big now.” At her words he spurts all over her hand.

  “It’s so nice, just you and me,” Didi says. “No one in this world has a clue about the deep love you and I have for each other. Your father, well, I’m sure he’s dying of jealousy.” She laughs softly. “This jealous world will try to tear us apart, Tarun, do you understand? You won’t let it happen, will you, Son? Will you let anyone come between us?”

  “I won’t let anyone come between us.”

  “I knew it,” she says, and kisses him with much feeling.

  It’s true: he can’t imagine not being with Didi. What would he do? Where would he go? He’d be so alone in this world.

  He hasn’t told Didi about his struggle with pretty girls. Not too long after Amit used the fornicating gesture at the girl, Tarun passed by her house and saw her at her window. His heart hammering, he lifted his arms and performed the obscene gesture. She stared, then—her face contorted—spat at him. Her spit missed him, but he got some sprinkles. Her response devastated him, depleted him. It was a confirmation that pretty girls—this one isn’t even that pretty, more “sexy,” as Amit informed the boys—sense that something is wrong with him, that he is weak and vulgar. Maybe this girl knows about him and Didi? But how is that possible? How can this girl who lives fifteen houses away have the knowledge of what goes on behind the white curtains in the Bangemudha house?

  But whenever he tells Didi about his thoughts on girls, she says, “All these girls are not worth your time. These sahariya types. They’ll stab you in the back the first chance they get. They don’t have any morals, just like your mother. Look at how she so unabashedly fornicated with your father. The only good thing she did was bring you into this world.” She says this when they’re lying together in the Masterji’s bed. Tarun is pressed against her, his head resting on the crook of her arm. She is always fully clothed during these hours of intimacy. Even when she gives him her breasts she doesn’t remove her bra or her blouse, only opens her clothing halfway so he can reach them. She takes off his clothes for him, usually commenting on how she never gets enough of looking at him, kissing him on the shoulder, on the neck, on his ears, and on his mouth. She leaves his underwear on because she likes looking at his bulge.

  Sometimes her hand stays down there, gently massaging. He knows that at any moment he’ll come in her hand. But she also stops massaging for a minute or so to elongate his pleasure, and hers. There are days when she makes him come twice.

  “It’s as though God forced your mother to give birth to you as a gift for me,” she says. “For some reason you were not supposed to come out of my womb, although by all means you should have. Maybe God screwed up.” She laughs. “It doesn’t matter. By all accounts you’re my baby. You came from here.” She takes his hand and places it on her stomach. She covers his hand with her big hands and says, “This is where you came out of. I don’t care what that Apsara Thapa says, or your weakling of a father says, I don’t care what anyone says.” She says “anyone” with much venom. “You were in here for nine months, in the year between Amit and Sumit. I remember your kicks. I remember thinking then that once you were born people would be amazed that such a thing of beauty came out of such an ugly mother.”

  He touches her face, his own face still in the crook of her arm, and says, “I don’t care that you’re ugly.” Yes, she is big and round, but he likes her largeness.

  “You’re just being a good son,” she says, “saying nice things to your mother.” She pulls him tighter into her. “You’ll never abandon your mother, will you?” He shakes his head.

  Since the curtains are drawn, the light in the room is muted. Evening is approaching. Noise from the outside filters in—traffic sounds, shouts of children playing on the street, snippets of conversation, a laugh or an exclamation. Yet it feels as if he and Didi are in a cocoon that no one can penetrate. But soon it’ll be time for others to return home. He doesn’t know where she sends them to on these special Saturdays. It’s as though she banishes them with the injunction to not even come near the house until the specified time. These days she locks the front door from the outside and comes in through a back door next to the kitchen, so that any visitor would think the whole family had gone out.

  He wonders what goes through the minds of his father and Sumit. The Masterji knows what Didi does with Tarun, but there’s nothing he can do about it. Tarun has no idea whether that smiling half brother of his suspects anything, for when he returns Sumit says, “Dai,” with a pleasant face and talks to Tarun normally. The Masterji goes to his bed, pulls the blanket around him, shivering a bit even when it’s not
that cold. He doesn’t meet Didi’s or Tarun’s eyes. He must smell their intimacy on the bed.

  Amit asks Tarun for money when he visits. “Just a couple of rupees, bhai,” he says. “You are the rich brother, I am the poor brother. What’s the harm in funneling a rupee here and there? In your Lazimpat mansion it grows on trees, and we hear your Mahesh Uncle is planting even more trees.” Tarun gets a weekly allowance of fifty rupees, so he doesn’t mind sharing some with Amit. Sumit tells Tarun that Amit not only smokes ganja but also takes tablets called speed and Calmpose. In the last few months, Amit’s aggression toward Tarun has stopped altogether. He’s more ingratiating now, sometimes timing his appearance at Bangemudha on Saturdays to coincide with Tarun’s visits. Then as soon as he gets some money from Tarun, he vanishes. Sometimes he winks at Tarun and tilts his head toward Didi.

  After she visited her maternal home, Apsara stopped her walks into the city, as though that was the final straw. Tarun finds it hard to look at her. He’s repulsed by her appearance. She looks like an emaciated street beggar. She’s lost so much weight her cheeks have no flesh, only two bones jutting out like rocks. Her eye sockets have retreated into her skull, so her eyes look like they’re floating in black space. She has lost control over her lower lip because it hangs down in a perpetual pout. She sits on a rocking chair, softly rocking back and forth, staring at a place in her mind. Sanmaya takes care of her, delivers her food, helps her with a change of clothes, makes sure she goes to the bathroom.