I looked around desperately for somewhere to hide
The only place I could see was between the two tombstones in the middle of the room. I had barely squeezed myself in there when the lovers arrived. She had a terrible shrill sort of giggle which was nasal and unmusical. His voice was okay.
“Ao na,” he was saying.
Giggle, giggle. “Na, na.”
“Ao na.”
“Na, na.”
“What are you scared of? Do you think your mother will jump out from behind a pillar?”
Giggle, giggle again. “Na, na darling. I was just—” She stopped.
“Just what?”
“Thinking.”
“Let me do the thinking for both of us, okay?”
“Okay, darling.”
Naturally, thinking is the last thing a man does when he is with a woman he desires. Women are different. They can think anytime because nothing rears up between their legs to block the forward march of their brains.
Footsteps. Giggle, giggle, silence. I raised my head carefully. Long hair, plastic heels, socks with sandals. A silly pink woolen hat with bunny rabbits and a pom-pom dangling from the top. Take it off, I begged the man silently, she’ll be much prettier without it. And sure enough, as I watched, the man lifted his hand and swept the hat off. But that was only the beginning. Before my astonished eyes, the coat came off too, and the shoes. And then the rest. When they were down to their underwear, the clothes in a heap beneath them, the woman made a feeble protest which was just as soon disregarded. Then I was watching the man’s naked butt go up and down, up and down, between her naked knees, and I swear to you they both seemed far more naked with their underwear around their ankles than I had seemed with nothing on.
Afterwards, she cried a little and he held her in his arms looking bored. Then, while she finished dressing, he went outside to smoke a cigarette.
Night fell and the tomb went silent. Just as I was about to get up and go look for food, another couple arrived. They were quicker than the first, more experienced. They didn’t even bother to take off their clothes. After they left another pair entered. This time they were both men. I didn’t look. When they were finished, I dashed to one of the open arches and leapt out. All that copulation was beginning to stress me out.
Now, a different Lodhi Gardens met my eyes. Gone were the self-important bureaucrats, the children, the ayahs, the sedate lovers, the exercise freaks, and the tourists. In their place, under each halogen lamp, there stood a couple in a perfect Khajuraho pose.
Soon I began to feel really cold and a little uneasy. There were only men left, many of them alone, and they seemed to know I was wearing nothing underneath. One approached, expensively dressed.
I had an idea and let him follow me into the Mughal sentry tower beside the rose garden. When he arrived, I told him abruptly to take off his clothes. “How much?” he asked first.
“Free if you take off all your clothes first,” I replied.
“You want to see my jewels then?” he asked.
I didn’t know what he meant, so I nodded.
He began to take off his clothes.
I didn’t move a muscle until they were in a pile on the floor and he was naked before me. Then I took off my dead man’s sheet, threw it over his head, kicked him in the groin a few times, and stole his clothes.
Decently clothed once more, I said goodbye to my days of consulting and ventured into the hospitality industry. Lodhi Gardens’ lovers paid me to ensure an uninterrupted session in a tomb. I provided a bed, water, and talcum powder for after, and I even charged those who were waiting to watch.
After all, they were one big family of lovers, weren’t they? And watching others gave them ideas. So everyone was happy.
As for me, I invested in the stock market, stopped taking drugs, and grew rich. My son and wife eventually moved back in with me and we all lived happily ever after in a brand-new flat on the right side of the Yamuna.
And every once in a while, when I find myself on the Japanese Bridge to NOIDA, I think about the man whose clothes I stole. And I wonder whether he ever realized the gift I’d given him or whether he simply wrapped the dead man’s sheet around him, crawled back into his car, and drove home to his empty life.
Last in, first out
by Irwin Allan Sealy
Delhi Ridge
A wise man would have gone home when he heard the tube light smash, but my wife calls me an unwise man and I must be, since I smoke as well as drive an autorickshaw on Delhi roads, and I butted in.
For that matter, a wise man would have finished his BCom and gone into marketing, but I thought: No office for me, no boss for Baba Ganoush. And this looked like the life back then, not that I’m saying it isn’t still, some days, maybe even many days. But autorickshawry has its own traps and it’s always tempting to get that last fare, just one more, and that’s the one that takes you out of your way — when it doesn’t land you in trouble.
God knows there’s trouble enough by day on Delhi roads. And three wheels aren’t the steadiest undercarriage when the going gets rough. Better than two is all you can say, and probably not all the time either. You see some sights on the road that you’d like to forget, and when it comes to the crunch, the guy with the least steel is the loser. I’ve seen some two-wheeler accidents where the helmet didn’t help much more than the severed head. Bastard Blue Line buses! people screech, me too, but might is right in the jungle.
Keep well in, I tell my passengers, and they do. (As if it would make a whole lot of difference when the bus rams you.) But a wraparound shield is better than nothing — even if the dents are starting to join up on my Bhavra. The Bee is what I named her in the good old black-and-yellow days before this greenie shift.
You could say I own the buzzer. I’ve paid back most of the deposit on her to the Punjab National Bank, and I can usually go home by 9, maybe 10. Mornings I start early with schoolkids, twelve monsters packed in with a little removable wooden bench, schoolbags outside. And I don’t always work late. I’ve saved a bit of money in term deposits at the PNB. If I overdraw on the current account, they automatically take it out of the next deposit: last in, first out.
Most days I wear a clean white polyester safari to work. Impractical, I know, and the wife never fails to remind me, though secretly she likes me in it. No pen in my pocket, no comb either. Good Agra sandals, size eleven, and I don’t tuck one foot under me as I drive. It’s hard enough having to double over just to get into the driver’s seat. No holy pictures along the top of the windscreen, just the Shah Rukh poster at the back on the one side and Deepika on the other. I have noticed men sit right up against my life-size Deepika, the shot in the black negligee that got everyone going. Women cozy up to the King.
Anyway, this night I was cruising along the busy Mall Road in Civil Lines looking for a last fare when something about the peace of University Road pulled me in toward the Ridge. I left the rat race behind and sailed along past those sedate college gates in top gear, engine purring. All the walls have gotten higher since I was a student — maybe that’s saying something, if only that I haven’t gotten any shorter. I switched off the stereo.