Seahorse. Janice Pariat

only thing I denied him.

      “It’s from Lenny.”

      I remember Nicholas watching me, his eyes, dark and attentive, taking in my gestures.

      We were in the study, lounging on the sofa.

      “You told me somebody had killed him…” he said softly. “Why did you say that? What did you mean?”

      The stranger with the coal-dust eyes, and sun-darkened skin. Who carried the scent of cold nights and bonfires. Lenny took him for bike rides out of town, to all the secret tea shops he’d shown me. To the pine forest. One afternoon, Lenny took him to his room, when everyone was out. But his father happened to return early and, for some reason, did something out of the usual. He walked downstairs to the basement.

      “He found them there…” I told Nicholas.

      In bed, entwined, skin on skin.

      And while I have spent many years thinking about that, conjuring endless scenarios, this is one moment I cannot bring myself to imagine.

      It is merely darkness. A blank spot. An open grave.

      Did his father shout? Did he retch? Did he storm up to Lenny and slap him across the face? Pull him away in his nakedness and shame? Did he stare at his son in the stranger’s arms and walk out silently?

       “They would’ve killed me…”

      Everything else remains pristinely clear in my mind—the oddly-angled room, the air tinged with the smell of cheap tobacco and old books. The map on the wall. The bed. The bed. Lenny’s family tried to keep it quiet.

      “Can you imagine,” I asked Nicholas, “how fast news spreads in a small town?”

      Where everyone knew everyone else. And whispers grew as tangled gardens, abandoned in their wildness, words flitting like butterflies from tongue to tongue.

      “Did you see him again?” asked Nicholas.

      I shook my head. “I only wrote him letters.”

      At the time this happened, I had just finished high school. My final exams a week behind me. I had no clear plans for after, the thing everyone called the future. And so I thought that’s what my father wanted to discuss, one evening, when he called me to his study. Except, when I walked in, there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before—embarrassment.

      “I wanted to talk to you about…” He stopped. Hesitant. He needn’t have said any more. I knew that the words about Lenny, whirling around town, had reached his ears too. I expected clamor and curses, rebukes and reprimands. I told you… I told you… I told you… I told you… he was a disgusting boy. To stay away. Instead he spoke with surprisingly timidity.

      “Did he do anything to you?”

      I was much too taken aback to reply.

      “Tell me, did he?”

      “What do you mean?”

      It grew, the look in his eyes. Twisting on his tongue.

      “Did he… touch you?”

      His words hung in the air, cleaving the space between us.

      I shook my head.

      Perhaps then it changed to relief. He sat back in his chair.

      “It’s better you don’t see him again.”

      “But why?”

      “It is better.”

      I had my hands on the table, clenched, my knuckles white.

      “Right now he needs to be left alone with his family. You see, Lenny is suffering from—a disease. Your mother and I don’t want you around him…” It’s contagious.

      I held my silence.

      My father was done. “I think I’ve made myself clear.”

      It wasn’t enough to keep me from seeing him.

      My parents sent me away to Delhi. They thought it for the best. They’d heard of a college there, founded on good, wholesome Christian principles, where students lived on campus, which had special seat allocations for people like me who came from places and communities far from the capital, marked as underprivileged and marginalized. I was sent away. I was offered to Nicholas on a plate. Something like fate.

      If time is measured in a god’s blink, I didn’t emerge from my room for a million years. I don’t know if it was the next day, or the next week—or had a month passed?—after I heard about Lenny. At some point, on some day, before dawn, when the murmuring voices were silenced, and darkness glowed with a light that seemed to come from nowhere, I walked out of the residence hall, down the brick-lined path, away from the campus and into the forest. I picked my way through stone and undergrowth, the leaves glistening with dampness. Somewhere, perhaps, a moon. Ancient, watching through the branches of charcoal trees. The air still and silent, pulsing with unknown things.

      I came to a tower. A tall sandstone tower, which I entered, and climbed, because from the top I’d be able to see all the reasons why. The air would be fresher, and filled with promise. From there, I’d be distant, removed from the clutches of this great and quartering heaviness. I’d almost reached the end when suddenly there was no ground to stand on. Like stepping on water. Falling through the air.

      I lay curled at the bottom of the spiral staircase, the floor stone-cold and grainy against my skin. Hours later, a figure appeared at the doorway, and stood in a pale rectangle of light. His brows furrowed, his hands hesitantly reaching out to stop a fall that had already happened.

      I didn’t look up, didn’t ask why or where, as I was half-carried and led out into the forest, the trees green and reverent around us. Something ached but I couldn’t tell where the pain arose from, it seemed to surround me, dense as the humid late summer air.

      After a while, we reached a wide road lined by Gulmohar trees, bathed in a rich and luxurious silence. The slow, persistent purr of a passing car. The faint jingle of bells. We stopped at a gate where a man rushed out to help us. The exchange of words between them was brief and muted. Soon, I sensed we were indoors, in a cool and high-ceilinged corridor, the creak of doors, the slap of footfall, the voice of a woman. Hands, gentle as cotton, lifted me over, suspended me for a second in mid-air like I’d been only just before, while falling, and then a sudden release onto a soft, smooth plane that stretched endlessly like a field of snow. The unmistakable smell of fresh linen. Of something sharp and lemony. The warmth of wind and sunshine. A heated touch swept over me, a cloth struck at my skin, rough, spongy and damp. Something peeled, layer after infinitesimal layer. And then the deep, dark mercy of sleep.