Like the other two women, she carries a burkha folded loosely over her arm instead of being robed in it. She accepts a cigarette from one of her male companions—its end burns bright orange as she takes a drag. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll spot you smoking?” Sarita asks, staring.
“Who, the Limbus?” The woman laughs. “Don’t worry, they never bother us here.” She takes another drag of the cigarette. “Are you hiding from them?—is that why you ask?”
Sarita begins to stammer a denial, but the woman interrupts her with another laugh. “I’m just teasing. And it’s OK even if you are. We won’t tell—no Limbus among us.” She offers Sarita the cigarette. “Here, would you like a puff?”
Sequeira’s turns out to be a nightclub on the Bandra side. “How strange you haven’t heard of it. I thought for sure that’s where you were headed when I saw the jeans and the sneakers. That’s what all the men wear—it’s practically a uniform. Not that I mean to pry into your destination, but you might as well have a look if you’re trying to get across.”
Just then, a bell chimes softly behind us. A dark shape has materialized from the sea—as we watch, a small boat detaches itself from the ferry and approaches through the ripples. An ark borne by fairies through the heavens couldn’t warm the Jazter cockles more, I think to myself, as our means of escape from Mahim draws up.
“This is the part I hate,” the woman, whose name is Zara, says, taking off her shoes. “You have to wade into the water to get to the boat. Which means that afterwards, on the dance floor, your feet remain sticky all night with salt.”
THE INCIDENT WITH Harjeet occurred when Karun came back for a short visit before they took his mother’s new tumors out. The convalescence period would last well into the winter, so he wanted to get his sweaters and coat. He had purchased a medical garter his mother would need after the operation and was just opening the metal gate downstairs when the motorcycles pulled up. “Home, Sweetie?” Harjeet called out, and his three friends laughed and whistled.
We’d agreed Karun should simply not react when taunted, so leaving the gate open, he hurried up the path towards the house. The motorcycles vroomed in behind, right through the gate. “A present for your hubby?” Harjeet said, and still astride his bike, yanked the box out from Karun’s hands.
He couldn’t help but reply, he told me, even though he probably shouldn’t have. “Give that back.”
Harjeet pulled the garter out of the box and held it up, dangling by a strap. “Look! It’s some sort of women’s underwear. Does Sweetie get to wear it, or does Hubby?” He took a deep sniff of the material. “Mmmmm—smells good—must be Sweetie.”
“It’s for my mother.”
“Look, everyone—not just a sweetie, but a motherfucker too! And Hubby must join in—who does he fuck first—the sweetie or the mother?” Harjeet wrapped the garter over his head and, getting off his bike, started prancing and singing, “I’m a gandu and a ma-ka-chod too.”
Karun managed to get into the house, but Harjeet and his friends followed and cornered him in the stairwell. Harjeet started snapping the garter at his crotch—one of the shots hit home, making him double up in pain. “Perhaps the sweetie would like a taste of uncut Sikh instead of the same old hubby-mian every day?”
They began to grab at his clothes, but he broke free and ran up the steps. For a while, they banged on the door, even ramming it a few times, but the bolts held. I found him huddled in bed, his shirt torn, scratches on his arms and face. “We have to go to the police,” I said, unsure, even as I made the suggestion, as to what reception we could expect.
“I can’t. I have to return tonight. The operation is tomorrow.”
I kissed his face and held him close. “Don’t worry. I’ll think of something while you’re away.”
“The things he said about my mother. I don’t think I want to stay here any longer.”
We had sex before he left. It was more comforting than passionate, and I held him in my arms afterwards as long as I could. “I love you,” I said, and he whispered the words back to me. I imagined the two of us living in a new flat somewhere, perhaps even back in Bombay. His mother, Harjeet, my indiscretions, left floating behind in a different universe far away. “I love you,” I said again, and not knowing it then, kissed him for the final time in the home we’d built. Then I took him to the station to catch his train.
SATURDAY MORNING, I knocked on Harjeet’s door. No other option remained but to talk to him, since Mrs. Singh wouldn’t help and I didn’t have any evidence to file a police report. (I could have threatened him with physical violence, but the thirty kilos he had on me gave me pause.)
He answered the door in his undershirt, with a handkerchief over his knot of hair. “What do you want?” He looked more surprised to see me than irked.
“I want your harassment to stop. What you did to my friend last evening—stop bothering us. Just stop.”
He stretched lazily. “Or else you’ll do what?”
“I’ll go to the police.”
“And you think they’ll listen to a gandu like you?” He laughed. “To you and your sweetie friend? Where is he anyway? We must have really scared him if he didn’t even have the courage to come down.”
“His mother has cancer, so he’s in Karnal for a few months.”
Something shifted in Harjeet’s eyes, but it wasn’t the remorse I hoped to elicit. “Well, tell Sweetie we’re very, very sorry. We’ll all be waiting on the steps to greet him when he returns.” He slammed the door in my face.
That evening, the motorcycle friends burst into one of their sessions even before getting fully drunk. They sang all sorts of Bollywood numbers about separation and longing. They even performed “My sweetie lies over Karnal, my sweetie lies over the sea”—given their deep Punjabi vernacular, I hadn’t expected them to be conversant with English ditties. They finally stopped when neighbors from the adjoining house threatened to call the police.
At two a.m., someone knocked loudly on the door. For an instant, I had the irrational thought it might be Karun—I’d been trying to reach him all day to ask about the second operation they’d performed on his mother. Instead, I found Harjeet, so drunk that he held on to the doorjamb for support. “I just thought—” he said, and stumbled into the room.
For the next few minutes, he stared at the walls, trying to condense a coherent thought. “I sleep right beneath you now, in my mother’s room,” he finally said. “I can hear you go to the toilet.”
He planted himself on a chair, then slid off over the side. He mumbled vague apologies (or perhaps they were threats?) while sprawled out on the floor. At one point, he caught my leg and tried to pull me down next to him. It took me the better part of an hour to drag him out the door. I left him on the landing softly singing one of his homo songs to himself.
The Jazter had sometimes wondered about the reason behind Harjeet’s belligerence—the ensuing week left no doubt. It was like watching a fairy-tale battle, a personal jihad—the entire gamut of reactions compressed and played out. One day he tried to push me aside on the steps, the next, he stared lasciviously as he let me pass; in the evenings he sang insulting songs with his friends, then staggered up to my door drunk. Most bizarrely, he resumed his exercises on my landing, wearing a thong (and matching head knot) so electric yellow it made even the Jazter blush.
At first, I simply ignored him—when he knocked, I kept my door shut. Then—purely in an abstract sense—I started wondering how he would be to fuck. I peeped through my window as he strained at his barbells—the muscles on his chest bulged and popped. In body type, he would have to get an A-minus in terms of what the Jazter usually looked for. There was the added bonus of doing it for the first time with a Sikh—another species of prey checked off. The bottom-line question: What would be the harm? After all, the Jazter had already cheated so many times in the park.