The other man

By Udayan

It was unlikely the downpour would stop tonight. Sheets upon sheets of dark and silver liquid strewing across the rickety windows of the junior editor’s office. There were reports of violence coming in till late into the night. I was just an intern but work was a deluge, so Sameer asked me to stay back. The killings in Bombay were expected, but the wintry rains in Calcutta tonight were not. I had to board a local from Dumdum to Shyambazar, and from there take a rickshaw to my Scottish Church’s Duff Hostel on Beadon Street which was a further two kilometres away. In this rain, there was no chance of either reaching the station without getting drenched or getting a rickshaw from there, if I didn’t make it in another half  hour.

The room was dark now. I looked at my watch. A platinum Breitling, that my cousin brought from Zurich last year. My more successful cousin. Journalism interns apparently don’t belong to that category, if my mother is to be believed. “Why do you want to be a journalist when you can be an engineer?”

It was quarter to eleven. Buses would’ve stopped plying through the city. Like blood that suddenly stood still inside veins. And Calcutta drifting into a coma. From the first floor window I could see a couple of blue and yellow painted wooden buses parked under a streetlight. Abandoned toys on the bare floor of an asylum city whose children were fast asleep.

The door opened finally and Sameer, my editor walked in once again. His face looked beautiful in the dark room, illuminated slightly by the streetlights outside and the lighted cigarette he held within his fingers. His long, dark face. His stubbled skin upon his sylphlike cheekbones. It had just been a week since I joined and I was falling in love with that face.

“Gave them the reports. Bombay’s not the only place where riots have broken out” He said as he entered the room. His voice non-chalant, professional. “Had to get the generators on at the printers”

He heaved himself onto the wooden chair. Removed his glasses, and inhaled the smoke deeply. Then looked up at the ceiling. The dust smeared ceiling fan gave him a sinister stare back. His stubble touched the tip of his Adam’s apple. I observed its rhythmic movements in sync with the effusing smoke.

“Let’s hit the sack, mister.” He said as he threw the butt of his cigarette away. In the dark room, I saw the little missile projectile its way above the desk, and fall on the concrete floor, disbanding its little sparks around.

I followed him into the guest room on the third floor. I watched his tall, lean silhouette frame against the milieu of the torch’s light. The guest room had an emergency solar lamp. I pressed the protruding black switch and it sated the room with white neon light. By the time my eyes adjusted he had taken his shirt off, and was wearing a white vest tucked into his trousers. I could see he’d been sweating. His vest hugged him with the wetness it had absorbed. The black hair on his chest that showed was cleaving to his skin. I sat down on the bed just to get closer to him. As I inhaled the muskiness in the air, I felt the hair on my skin stand up, as if in awe of the sweet-sour smell of his sweat.

“Like what you’re seeing, eh?” I was caught by the unexpectedness and the jest of it. “Yeah baby, give me more..”, I laughed out sarcastically, my faltering voice trying hard not to fragment, amazed at my own audacity. “Then, you’ll get more..” he gave me a longer stare, and put his hands on my shoulders. The warmth of those hands rushed through my veins. My male hardness showed beneath my blue jeans. A snag. A chill. I dared not to look at his. I slowly and awkwardly fell on my back upon the mattress. I craved to yield myself to him, as he took off his vest and revealed his fetching self. My hands reached out and pulled back the lamp’s tiny black switch. For a few moments, I lost him in the darkness, and then I lost myself in him.

The next three months were a blur. I loved the way he trotted his tongue down my neck, to my belly button, his moist warm breath, tickling the fine line of hair that ran down further. I loved the way his strong hands held me firmly by my waist as he entered me. I loved his fuzzy touch on my face as I woke up in the mornings, since the nights were rarely spent at my hostel those days.

The world was perfect. There was only one deception, one blemish in the wholeness- Sameer had a wife.

***

It’s not that I was kept in the dark. “I’m married, you know”, it was divulged, matter-of-factly on day three. The black coffee I was sipping on the verandah of his Saltlake flat suddenly smacked too bitter to be drunk. The cool December breeze precipitously froze the pumping in my arteries. I spent the day on College Street, dusting gray, scraggy books with my fingers till they were smeared black. I bought an Albert Camus and a Samuel Becket. On the first page of Becket’s Endgame were these smudged, charcoaled words,

“Laura, sometimes I think, we’re also like Hamm and Clove. So imperfect in ourselves. So we came together to complete each other. Yet, here we often are… waiting for the Endgame..

Love, Jonathan, 19th January, 1961”

But I did entrain the metro from Central to Shyambazar, took a bus to Salt Lake, and then a rickshaw to his apartment , drifting past the chic homes of Calcutta’s rich, walked up the two flights of stairs, and rang the bell. He opened the door, nailed me by the shoulder, lugged me in. We kissed. The nicotine and the scotch cuffed my senses, and warted my cognitions. Perhaps I had yearned for that to happen.

Our venereal encounters became difficult after his wife returned home from her journalistic assignments in northern Sri Lanka. Shiuli and I must’ve become friends at some point of time. I listened to her mellow recitals of Nazrul Islam and Jibanananda on spring afternoons while Sameer was busy at work. I helped her choose the best Burgundy wine for the Coq au Vin she was making at home, after she was gifted a book on French cooking by a colleague. I was the one who accompanied her to the salon at Park Street where she finally got the curls she wanted. I felt uncontrollably delighted and sad for her as she looked into the mirror, her hair a riotous bun, the Kohl in her eyes subtly submerging into her aphotic skin.

Yes, Shiuli and I must’ve become friends at some point of time. For that’s the reason she thought it was okay to do what she did.

It was a sultry May afternoon. The febrile sun vaporised the Hoogly as much as it sogged the humanity on the restless streets. I came to their house to pick up my college bag that I’d left at their place the previous evening when I attended their first wedding anniversary party. Sameer wasn’t at home. When Shiuli opened the door, her eyes were red from crying. Her face shrunken from the wrench of what was devouring her from within.

“Please promise you’ll never see Sameer again.” Her eyes beseeched, begged.

She had read through the pages of my journal that was lying in my bag. I picked it up and left. And never saw him again for the next two months during which I ceded myself to the therapeutic causatums of Marjorie Bowen and marijuana. Till the day he knocked on my hostel door, in an inebriated state. It was early dawn. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his face had sunk.

He sat on the bed for several moments before breaking down. “She killed herself. She killed herself..” the words rolled within the stunted hostel room into my ears, oozed through my veins , choking every cell of my body.

***

“She said she always knew something was wrong. Very wrong” Sameer was almost talking to himself as he stared into the vastness of the Hooghly. It was late evening and dark clouds were hovering over the spears of the temple tops of the Belur Monastery upon whose stretched-out and open lawns we were sitting. Worshippers were gathering in bunches- children tugging on to the sarees of their mothers. Old couples getting off the motorized ferries that were transporting people from the other bank. Saffron robed monks with shaved heads breezing inside the temple, bare foot.

Almost two months had passed by since Shiuli had decided it was better to die than have a husband who was in love with another man. “It is not me who he loves..” that’s all she’d written in her suicide note, found in her embroidered jute wallet Sameer had bought for her from Puri. But that was enough for her father- a senior Writer’s Building councillor to lodge a slew of criminal cases against his son-in-law.

Those were the months when we came closer on a more emotional plane. Sitting on the wooden benches of the district court in Calcutta, taking long walks on the Maidan, in the shadows of Fort William, staring at the night fishermen for hours on the banks of the Hooghly at Belur. That’s when I saw the fracturable, more vulnerable side of the invincible god I deified. That was the time when he told me about his childhood days at Kalimpong, how he cycled his winding hilly way to school on frosty December mornings, how tranquilizing the aroma of hot green tea felt on those wintry nights, how the Gorkha boy from Darjeeling stole his heart and how they kissed on top of Tiger Hill after dusk. He told me of his college days at Delhi, where he was equally enamoured and disillusioned with the radical Left, and he told me of how he could not refuse when Shiuli, his childhood pal, asked him for a life together.

And that was also the time when he became increasingly religious. I realized it was the guilt that was eating him from within. So I never dissuaded him. He’d spend hours at the monastery, reading the scriptures, books on lectures by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and chanting and meditating at home.

After nearly a year, all charges were eventually dropped. They could never find the existence of the elusive “other woman”. I presume it never occurred to them that there was no “other woman”. My studies were over and I had a job offer from the Madras office of The Hindu. Yes, my mother was finally proud of her journalist son. But I was hollow inside. I felt the last one year had sapped my innards of the blood life that flowed through my arteries. My heart pumped void space. Undesired memories clogged my veins.

But perhaps I could never totally realize how or what he felt. He was no longer living in this world. And so maybe it wasn’t that bad that he enunciated it despite my passionate palliations. Sameer was formally ordained into the Ramakrishna mission as a monk on 29th May 1994. That morning, before the initiation ceremony I came to meet him at the temple, for the one last time. It was raining exactly like it rained on that fateful winter night two years back. Endless sheets of water, silt and twigs lashed the granite temple walls. I waited for him to speak. He said he loved me. I asked him to say that once again. And so he said it again. And again. And again.