Yaraana

by Hoshang Merchant

  written by their hands,

  if I now reach for the pen

  will they understand?

  Should I listen to my heart

  and wrestle with this guilt?

  Should I lock myself inside

  the walls they would build?

  I want to fill their eyes with joy,

  yet let my spirit run wild.

  How can I find the love I seek

  And still remain their child?

  Sunshine Trilogy

  Owais Khan

  I. TALKING TO THE SUNSHINE

  I get tired of journeys

  I get tired of my job.

  Of driving

  of being driven

  crazy by my mother’s demands.

  I get tired of seasons;

  of summer, of winter

  even, of monsoons.

  I get tired

  of conforming to the society’s diktats.

  I get tired

  of screaming queens

  of scheming activists.

  I get tired of my desire

  for sexy boys with massive dicks.

  I, often, even get tired

  of myself.

  What I never

  seem to get tired of

  is talking to you.

  Anytime, any place;

  with you, without you;

  I can talk, and talk forever

  to you.

  Sometimes,

  I talk in prose

  sometimes in third-class

  poetry like this.

  Sometimes in the surreal

  language of the dreams.

  And sometimes without talking at all.

  You are my life

  my sunshine,

  how could I get tired

  of being with you . . .

  II. A POSER . . .

  I am not the wittiest

  of queens you can find.

  I do not have

  the sexiest of bodies

  which keep flitting around you.

  I certainly do not possess

  the biggest of penile appendages

  that you have experienced.

  I am not even

  passable as a pleasure provider.

  I am so much older,

  with so much excess fat,

  with so little time

  before I lose the last hair on my head.

  I have the loveliest of tempers—

  and the worst of possessive natures.

  Given half a chance

  my mom would exchange

  me for an Idi Amin.

  So why do I try wooing you,

  my Sunshine?

  What could you possibly

  find in me?

  III . . . AND A REPLY

  He told me

  all about himself.

  What he perhaps thought,

  warts, and all.

  And asked me not

  an iota in return.

  And he watched my face

  bit by bit revealing

  his innermost,

  perhaps, waiting,

  for the first signs

  of flinching in my face.

  Little did he know

  that in exchange of being his,

  I could give up

  all that is mine,

  and all that,

  could ever be mine.

  Least of all,

  ever think of insisting

  that he fall in line

  with the established mores of

  the present day society.

  Little did he know

  that riddled with my numerous

  insecurities and infirmities,

  I could scarcely believe

  that he had

  actually brought with him

  for me

  his golden sunshine

  flooding all the darkest

  deepest corners of my being

  with his undying rays of love.

  My Sunshine,

  would you actually believe

  that the most cherished,

  the most beloved,

  the most important moment

  in my entire life,

  is when

  in a reply to my most

  convoluted question about us,

  you had buried your face

  in my naked shoulder, and

  had said, simply,

  ‘I want to

  be yours.’

  from Trying to Grow

  Firdaus Kanga

  Cyrus came around lunchtime, kissed Dolly, said, ‘I knew I didn’t stand a chance,’ mumbled at me, ‘I’ve got to rush, have a lunch date,’ and was gone.

  I was sure he was meeting Ruby. When he didn’t come that night, I was certain. Then I wondered if I’d hurt him last night by not saying thank you. I was terrified I’d never see him again.

  Cyrus didn’t turn up the next evening or the next or . . . I woke up about sixty-five times every night, opened my book on the Indian Contract Act and sobbed into the passages Cyrus had marked. Or I sat at the window and watched the stars because they reminded me of the telescope. The day I spent in a night-black fog, looking at plastic bags and Sam’s razor with a speculative eye. I cursed Ruby, because I bet if she hadn’t been around to entice him, Cyrus would have got over his hurt if only because he’d have wanted someone to talk to. I could see his firm hands in her hair and his arcing mouth mocking kisses into her neck and I had to pull down the shutters on my mind. And think of other things.

  Like Dolly was going away really soon, as soon as Sam got his visa and stuff. Because there was no way Salim could come to Bombay for the next two years and even Sera thought thirty wasn’t exactly young to get married. So the plan was for Dolly to fly out to New York with Sam, on her last free tickets, and get married there.

  We thought it was absolutely right for Dolly to take Sam along instead of her mother because she was always his daughter like I was Sera’s son. That’s how it is with almost every family I know. Both parents are crazy about both kids but in some tiny way each adopts one—a kind of division of labour. I don’t know how it works for people who have more than two kids because Parsis almost never do. They feel it’s some sort of extravagance, like having a television in the bedroom.

  At last, Cyrus came over. ‘Hello!’ he said with his killing smile. ‘Sorry I’ve been neglecting you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be,’ I said, taking deep, slow breaths. ‘You come because you like being with me, not to give me company. At least, I hope it’s that way.’

  ‘Brit,’ he said, falling into his familiar cross-legged seat in front of me, ‘have I . . . hurt you?’

  ‘No.’ I thought how easy it would be to fall off my chair, right into his arms.

  ‘I know it’s been—how many, ten, eleven days?’ Twelve, I thought, and you didn’t even keep count. ‘But I’ve been busy; really, I have.’

  ‘Of course; you don’t have to give me an account.’

  ‘Fucking shit! Stop that!’

  ‘Don’t shout at me, Cyrus.’

  ‘Okay, so I didn’t meet you, so you feel awful. I’d have felt miserable if you’d stopped meeting me suddenly. Why can’t you say so? What’s happened to your famous frankness?’ His face turned a darker brown and as if his skin was finding trouble holding in that blood, his eyes were thrown open to make more room.

  ‘Cyrus?’ I whispered. Then I was lifted off my chair and he was saying into my hair, ‘Brit, I’m sorry, but will you promise never, never to stop—’

  ‘Stop what, Cyrus?’ My hand was on his neck and I was rubbing his earlobe with my thumb.

  ‘Being my friend. Because I never will, not even if you never will, I mean, never do, I mean never—’ We started laughing louder and louder as if someone was turning a knob in our chests.

  Then I realized I had a huge hard-on pushing into his tummy, and the way he was holding me around my back, there was no way I could move away without fall
ing out of his arms. And there was no way I could turn soft as long as I could smell his clean hard smell and see his small nostrils flare with the effect of carrying me. I kissed his eyelids and he smiled, so I kissed the drooping corners of his mouth. Then I shut my eyes and held him for every moment that had passed since he asked for that safety-pin.

  I could’ve stayed that way till Sera crew the morning open but Cyrus had shifted his mouth to mine and begun sucking with small, milky sounds. I opened my mouth to the bristle of his stubble and the gush of hot breath from his nose while I felt his big man’s hands grasping my bottom.

  My hard-on was melting away and I didn’t know what to do. I mean here I was on the brink of passion and all I could think of was that I didn’t want Cyrus’s toothpaste-tasting tongue in my mouth where it was slowly pushing its way past my transparent teeth. Somehow, it felt all wrong as if I had clasped the wrong partner in the dark.

  I gagged and Cyrus drew his head back and said, ‘Sorry, this isn’t working.’

  ‘Not for me either,’ I said, feeling my sovereign mouth with my tongue. I shook my head and felt his warm face with my fingertips. A huge tenderness was lapping against my insides, a sea of semen and tears.

  ‘Are you gay?’ he said, at last.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I look at you now and I want you, and I’m angry with myself for feeling what I did when you were holding me. As if I was one of a pair of Siamese twins—’

  ‘Um, I know; we’re much too alike, aren’t we, stubble and muscles.’ He put me down on the large, carved sofa and sat on the floor in front of me.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said wearily. ‘Oh, what I thought it would be—’

  ‘Well, at least I didn’t have any expectations,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Then why did you?’ I said. I knew why I did. But my reasons couldn’t have been his; as clear as I could see he had no reason to want me.

  ‘I knew you wanted me.’

  ‘You tried to make love to me out of charity?’ I shouted.

  ‘Sshh! You want to wake them up? It wasn’t charity, you ass. I wanted to because I knew you wanted me like crazy.’

  ‘You knew? All along?’

  ‘Sure. The way you’d stare and stare at my crotch.’ He began to laugh, watching me all the time.

  ‘D’you really mean that?’ I was feeling what I later found out was drunk.

  ‘Of course. How do you think I knew? And that neck massage you gave me? Oh, boy! I’ll never—’

  ‘Okay, so what if I wanted you?’

  ‘You know what it’s like to be wanted that much?’

  ‘Of course not, you idiot.’

  ‘There’s no need to get angry when you’re sad.’

  ‘You know, I really love you.’

  ‘Why did you want me, Brit?’

  I’d rehearsed this about sixty-seven times. ‘You’re tall, I’m four feet nothing, you’ve got muscles in your thighs when I’ve got matchsticks, you have a voice like hot chocolate—’

  ‘Stop being funny.’

  ‘I’m not. You have got a voice like hot chocolate and osteo makes me squawk. You’ve got a swimmer’s chest; I’ve got a pigeon-chest. Girls love your body; they don’t look at mine except to shudder—’

  ‘That’s not true. No one thinks about that, once they know you.’

  ‘You look good and not all the cosmetic surgeons in America can make me like looking at myself.’

  ‘Is any of that important?’

  ‘Don’t tell me beauty is skin deep and all that crap because it isn’t true. I want to be straight and tall because I’ve got just one life and I’ll go through it without anyone ever wanting me like I wanted you. It’s like—’

  ‘A sweeper watching a Brahmin?’

  ‘Yes, you either hate that something you can never have, or you adore it.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘The desire of the moth for the star.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain lust.’

  ‘It does. If I could have you, which meant you wanted me, that meant my body was as good as yours.’

  ‘Whoo!’ he gasped, spreading his palm on his chest, letting his tongue hang out. That tongue.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘you haven’t heard everything.’ My passion had escaped solitary confinement and it couldn’t stop talking. ‘I was opting out of the race—’

  ‘For girls?’

  ‘Yes.’ I made a face like that chap in MAD magazine.

  ‘But you were entering another race, weren’t you?’

  ‘You were out of reach. So where was the race?’

  ‘ . . . But I wasn’t out of reach, was I?’

  ‘As soon as you weren’t, I got out of your arms. Don’t look like that, I’m not crazy. It’s just that wanting you was a faking, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That hard-on was no fake; everything you wanted to do with me wasn’t. What the hell, Brit—this fucking frigidity, where’s it going to get you?’

  ‘But don’t you see! I couldn’t do things with you because it would have been like a poor girl marrying a millionaire for his money. You’d say that was sick, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘That girl never felt for him what you felt for me.’

  ‘Feeling, feeling, tell me, what’s the use of feeling?’ Do all men sound like their mothers when things get tough? ‘I’ve felt sorry for myself, and frightened for myself, and what good has that done me? You’ve got to know what makes you feel something.’

  ‘By which time love is desiccated—’

  ‘It was never love.’

  ‘Are you sure, Brit?’

  I looked at his solemn face, his mouth turned down at the corners, eyes large with what I was feeling, and I knew I wasn’t sure. I didn’t answer him.

  He smiled and put his warm hand on my knee. ‘You are looking for something, Brit. Will you be brave enough to grab it when you find it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,’ I said, answering that other question.

  ‘Stop it,’ he barked in George Patton style. ‘Stop looking like Osteo Brit. Think of the problems you’ll never have—’

  ‘Waiting in a bus queue with smelly fishmongers—’

  ‘Squelching your way through monsoon slush on your way to work—’

  ‘Getting pickpocketed in a crowd—’

  ‘Being knocked over by a speeding taxi—’

  ‘Wearing out my shoes—’

  ‘Helping with the housework when the servants are on strike—’

  ‘You never did that, I bet. Your mother wouldn’t let you, and Defarge wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘I have problems you never will,’ he said, trying to look like Saint Joan and ending up like the Dauphin.

  ‘Like?’ I said sceptically.

  ‘Wanting someone because they want you. That’s one of the reasons why I sleep around. If a girl wants me really badly. God! It’s so exciting I can’t resist.’

  ‘What about what you want?’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder.’

  ‘But you were ready to go gay.’

  ‘I wanted to know what it would be like—you’ve got to try everything once.’

  ‘That’s cheap.’

  ‘That’s brave.’

  ‘Wanting a girl just because she wants you—that’s not brave. Just shows you’re terrified of never being wanted again. Like I felt with Ruby after I missed that kiss.’

  ‘Ruby! God! She’s something!’

  ‘Take care you don’t get her preggers,’ I said.

  ‘Preggers? Ha, he! Where did you get that forties’ phrase from!’

  ‘Sera—she thought Dolly was preggers.’

  ‘Dolly’s going away soon, isn’t she?’

  ‘Will you take me around and things?’

  Cyrus bit his lip. ‘I’ll try my best but I’m going to be a bit busy—’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, swinging away on a trapeze and my brave act. ‘I’ll only ask when it’s absolutely ne
cessary.’

  ‘Very funny. Brit, look! Just because I can’t spend so much time with you doesn’t mean I don’t want to. I just want to do something else too.’

  ‘Sure, you don’t have to worry about me.’ A cock crew from the servant’s quarters of the building behind us, where we’d seen the bathing bai.

  ‘Four o’clock! Sera’s going to slaughter me if she wakes. I’m going. Put me in my chair.’ I was thinking of the time when Sam had found me Cyrus-drunk in the rocking chair.

  ‘Okay, here goes!’ He swung me into his arms. ‘Take care you don’t get another hard-on. You know what that does to me.’

  ‘What!’ screamed Sera. ‘Am I going mad? Or did I hear right?’

  ‘Fucking shit!’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Put me down,’ I said through my teeth, realizing my hands were clasping Cyrus’s bottom because his arms had sagged with shock.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, letting me down gently.

  ‘Are the two of you perverted?’ said Sera.

  ‘It was all a joke,’ said Cyrus, flashing his Sera-stumping smile.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Sera, trying to keep her voice from flying out of the window. ‘Defarge told me how she found you in the bathroom one night, some time back. I didn’t pay any attention because I know her imagination is as dirty as those books they sell at Flora Fountain. But I was wrong.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘do you really think we’re lovers? Do you think a guy like Cyrus would want a guy like me? We’re not even the same size.’

  ‘Aaahah!’ said Sera, clapping a hand to her mouth. ‘How d’you know what size he is? You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’

  ‘Not that size, Sera,’ said Cyrus. ‘This size—look.’ He stretched an imaginary tape-measure from my hair to my slippers.

  ‘Then what were you doing in each other’s arms?’

  ‘I was lifting him into his chair.’

  ‘Brit doesn’t need to be lifted into his chair. All you have to do is move the chair over to him and he shifts into it by himself. You’ve known him long enough to know that. You are perverted—both of you.’

  ‘Well,’ said Cyrus, the smartass, ‘you need two hands to clap.’

  ‘Saaaam,’ howled Sera.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ Sam stepped out from behind the door, where he was awaiting his cue.

  ‘Our son is a pervert.’ She dropped her words with the dull thud of paperweights.

  ‘Homosexual, you mean,’ said Sam. ‘No one is a pervert any more. You can slice up half a dozen women and you’re only socially maladjusted.’