The Last Guest (Part 2 of 3)
"And here I was worried the world would think less of me because I had changed my anatomy. Her question was a slap across my face. At that moment, I felt I had no chance in this world."
This is the second in a three-part serialized short story. You can read Part 1 here.
“Something I hate about myself?” Binati wondered aloud as she fiddled with the prompt card.
Every round had a storyteller who collected a card each from the others before picking one as a prompt to recall a true story. When that round ended, everyone picked a fresh card from the draw pile to restore their stock of cards and the storyteller moved clockwise.
“My many neuroses,” she said after some thought. “Even though you’ve to understand, I’m helpless. I wish I had chosen them though.”
“Just on the evidence of Dhruv’s drinking,” said Apurva, “I have to agree.” Everyone turned in the direction of Dhruv, who overtly pretended to hide his drink behind his back.
“Something I would like to change about the way I deal with conflict,” said Sam next, “is to actually deal with it and not bottle it up. I’m Miss Conflict-Avoidant.”
“My wife’s goal in life is to be liked,” commented Karthik. “What would you say if the person next to you at work comes in smelling like a sewer?”
Sam grimaced at the prospect. “Absolutely nothing?”
One by one they spoke. No one clamped up but no one broke the dam either. Each adjusted how much and what they shared, calibrating to the level of openness in the room. They were all feeling around, sussing the mood. The game continued, the conversation flowed, intimacy mixed with social polish.
“Something that was painful when it happened but makes me laugh now…well, I’ve a full playlist for this. How much time do we have?” asked Arunima, twirling a card between her fingers. She put the card down, swept up the crusts from the coffee table, popped them into her mouth, and began.
“Some years ago, when I had transitioned but was still figuring things out, I met this wonderful Gujarati lady as part of this Art of Living thing I did. We were both in the program and our group had gone on a weekend retreat. Over those three-four days, this lady and I kind of hit it off because we were both shy and then on the last day, she told me that she couldn’t help but think of me as her daughter-in-law, and would I meet her son? She would be delighted if I said—”
“How arrogant!” someone said.
Arunima smiled. “When she said that—and I remember this so clearly—it felt like I was out there in the cold and this woman, this total stranger, had gathered a heap of logs and made a fire for me. I hugged her…I knew that I was not going to consider her proposal, but I also felt like I owed her the truth. So I told her.
“She went quiet for a minute and then said, ‘That doesn’t change what I asked for.’ I was like ‘wow, what a lady! I hope her son takes after her’ because, come on, normally, who would say that? I was in love with her. I was so desperate at that point that it was a pity the lady herself wasn’t available. So the retreat ended the next day but I decided to stay back for a couple more days—it was a lovely property in Bhandardara. The morning after, once we had gone our separate ways, I wake up to a dozen missed calls from her. I call her back and she’s all flustered. She says, I shared your birth details with our panditji and he’s worried. At this point she starts crying on the phone. Even as I’m putting together the words in my head, she asks me point blank, ‘Can you confirm your caste with your family?’
“It was a beautiful morning. I was standing outside my cottage, staring out across Arthur Lake and the mountains behind it. I remember thinking: Of all the things that stood in her way of accepting me, caste was a dealbreaker for her! Caste? And here I was worried the world would think less of me because I had changed my anatomy. Her question was a slap across my face. At that moment, I felt I had no chance in this world.”
“That’s so sick! How on earth is it funny?” said Yamini.
“Of course it is,” claimed Kabir. “That time at an Art of Living program when Arunima tried a Gujarati senior citizen for size. How can you beat that?”
“It feels absurd now, doesn’t it?” said Arunima. “But…you got to be able to laugh about some things to save something inside you to cope with the truly dark stuff.”
Yamini shook her head.
“Okay! My turn?” asked Kabir, slipping a wedge of lime into his newly filled glass.
“This is getting heavy, man. I need more punch in my spirit,” said Dhruv, reaching for the bottle of cointreau in the bar cabinet. “Can you go easy with your story, please?” Dhruv asked Kabir.
“What are you saying? She has raised the bar,” Kabir said, pointing at Arunima. “I gotta keep up.” He scratched the fuzz on his chin as he looked through the cards in his hand. “I’ll go with…one funny incident from your past that may be socially questionable now…this was back when I was twelve—no, thirteen,” he began. “Twenty-five years ago, the summer of my thirteenth year, the year of my blossoming manhood—”
“Come on! Cut the crap, Kabir,” grumbled Binati.
“Over the top?” asked Kabir. “Alright, let me start again.” He took a big swig of his drink.
“As a kid I always wanted to be in boarding school. I had been pestering my parents for a while. Finally that summer, they said, we’ve had enough…pack your bags…we’re going to Mount Carmel’s in Mussoorie. The school was doing a two-week trial…I mean you guys must’ve heard of Mount Carmel’s…they always have more kids wanting to be there than there are seats for them. But I was an only child so my dad wanted to make sure that the school environment would build my character…or some nonsense like that. I couldn’t care less where they sent me and for what reason, as long as I was out of the house.
“Anyway, this is Mussoorie we’re talking about, so everything was picturesque. Kids had trooped from all over the country. Within a couple of days, I had found myself a crew of boys. A loud, spoiled bunch at a fancy boarding school—straight out of the Karan Johar playbook.”
“Bro has standards,” said Dhruv, sipping on his cointreau.
“Karan Johar? Please tell me this is not some unrequited love story,” begged Binati. “I can’t take it from Kabir of all people.” A guffaw, followed by shushes.
“So,” continued Kabir, “we had something called free play where we kids were left on our own. This one afternoon, about a week into the trial, we wandered into the forest. It was a huge campus and you could spend hours wandering. Tailing us was this kid, this boy…he wasn’t in our group. By now we had become wise to each other and everyone saw—it wasn’t just me, I swear—this kid was weird. He had this walk, you know, he would sway his hips, his voice hadn’t broken, and he was not good with words. All of this would’ve been fine on its own but…but the kid wanted to be a part of everything…a full enthu cutlet. Because of how clearly out of place this kid was, everybody let him hang around because they thought it would be easy enough to put him in his place and I took the lead with that. If he said a word wrong or his trousers were too short, I would let him have it. And for me, really, it was a fresh start. Getting out of home was like I could be anyone. I mean there are things I did in Mussoorie that I wouldn’t think of doing back at home. I would harass this kid day and night. But it didn’t seem to have any effect on him. He would just be the same, cling to us like…like he was one of us. That got to me.
“Anyway, that afternoon, we are out in the woods, shooting the breeze, when someone finds this forked piece of wood. Before you know it, we’ve stripped the wood of its bark and filed it and someone has pulled out a pair of rubber insoles—and we’ve made a slingshot. Now we’ve put so much work into it, we better put them to use. Right? So we climb up this big boulder to see what we could shoot at from that height. The taller kids go up first and lend a hand to the ones below and hoist them up, one by one. Now all of us have been pulled up and just this kid is waiting down for someone to pull him up. And I offer him a hand, of course. I wait for him to hang off me. Once he’s off the ground, I let him go. He slips off the face of the rock and falls. He has this gash on his elbow. Nothing that would put him in a hospital but it’s funny. Everyone watching from up is in splits. This boy turns to look up and, by God, he had some spine about him…he looks up at me and shows me the middle finger. That’s it, that does it for me. I jump down the rock and I’m on to him in a flash. I throw him on the ground but he…he fights tooth and nail…the more he resists the harder I go at him. By now my friends are egging me on and our shirts have torn and our mouths have dirt. This kid is putting up a real fight and it is beginning to turn embarrassing for me so I—”
Kabir interrupted himself with a sigh. He got up, sat back down. He looked at the glass in his hand, ran a fingertip on its rim, then looking back up at everyone, asked, “Are you guys ready for this?”
“What? Are you kidding us?” said Karthik. “Come on, man.”
“Are the ladies okay with this?”
“Yeah yeah…the women will survive,” said Binati, rolling her eyes.
Kabir lifted his shoulders in a grand shrug, his palms splayed wide, his eyebrows climbing high in a gesture that said, “Well, you asked for it.”
“I pull his pants down, down with his chaddi…all the way to his knees. I press down on him, and while his legs are locked because I’ve wrapped myself around his knees, I jam a foot under his chin. So his underwear is gone, he can’t use his legs, and he can’t look down because my foot’s pressing on his throat. By now, all the boys up top cheering and egging on our scuffle in the dirt have stopped. Everyone has gone real quiet. You can only hear the treetops. We both lay there like that until a couple of guys pull me apart. The boy continues to just lay there, his shirt sleeve bloody, his mouth thick with dirt and spit, his nose running. I don’t know if it’s the shock or what but he doesn’t stir for a long time. A few of the boys check on him and he’s fine, he’s breathing, so we leave him and walk off.”
Kabir knocked back the last of his drink and put down his empty glass on the marble. He looked around the room and all the faces bar one were gawking at him.
“Typical engineering student behavior. Our boy Kabir showed all the signs in advance,” said Apurva, after a long pause.
“How did you ever end up with Anya, man?” quipped Karthik.
To which Kabir pointed a thumb at Anya, like a hitchhiker, and mouthed the words “Ask her.”
“God, Kabir! You were such a devil.” said Yamini.
“Hai na? I don’t get half the things boys do,” said Anya, as she checked the status of the dessert on her phone.
“So then? What happened next?” Sam asked, unsure if the narration had seen its finish.
“Then what…the whole thing blew up. My parents were called, I was asked to leave. My dad was furious. He grounded me for a week. Goodbye, boarding school.”
“What happened to the boy?” asked Sam.
“He left. He was having a rough time even before all this, he wouldn’t have made it past the trial. I mean, imagine this kid among a hundred rowdy boys. Honestly, I think it did him some good.”
Arunima had not stirred awhile. Now, without so much as a murmur, she got up and went to the bathroom. When she emerged a full two minutes later, her eyes were puffy and she was shivering even though the temperature on the air-conditioner read the same as before. For the first time that evening no one noticed her.
“Do you remember the boy’s name?” she asked. The words sounded heavy, like they had escaped a gasping throat.
Kabir shook his head. “There was this moment,” he said, his gaze floating somewhere beyond the room, “when I was on top of him and we were going at each other and I caught his eyes. They had this color I had not seen before…like a green…Aishwarya Rai types…very exoti—”
Kabir stopped short and straightened himself up. Unbeknown to him, Arunima had walked across the coffee table to the window sill where he had been all this while.
“What else did you do to that boy when you had him under you? Remember?” As she spoke, she leaned in. The overhanging pendant lamp caught her eyes. They blazed green. Kabir recoiled.
“Did you do this?” As she said this, she grabbed Kabir’s crotch.
“What the fuck!” he said.
With hard, unblinking eyes, she scanned Kabir’s face. Kabir stepped off his window perch. She followed him. There was a terseness to her movement, the way she pursued him across the room.
“The funny thing,” she said, suddenly stopping in her tracks, “in all this was that you were looking for his balls but she never wanted any in the first place.” Her voice no longer had any edge. She sounded tired.
With these words, she dropped to the floor. As she fell, her elbow caught the edge of the dining table. It made a dull thud, followed by the glasstop rattling on its wooden frame. She didn’t flinch. Big, fat drops rained from her eyes. Away from the light, the green of her eyes was darker, a deep hazel. The teardrops tumbled down the gray sweatshirt she had on and reappeared as dark splotches around the hollow of her belly. She just sat there, making no attempt to stop the cascade.
Kabir, whose lips had shifted from slightly parted to curling downward, turned on a dime and headed into one of the bedrooms. Anya hotfooted after.
The grandfather clock on the wall chimed once. Twice. Thrice.
It rang into the silence a full eleven times before murmurs could be heard from the bedroom, which rose to loud accusations before turning into sharp hisses, which slipped through gritted teeth, slid under the closed door, and lingered in the space like a poisonous gas.
Arunima had hauled herself to the French window. She sat motionless, pulling on her vape and staring at the rickshaws that screeched to a halt, swerving at the last second to avoid scampering strays; the merrymakers who left their garland crackers unlit and scuttled away from the pouring rain; and the bikers who screamed abuses at speeding cars that splashed water from potholes on them.
Binati arranged and re-arranged the coasters on the coffee table in different geometries; Sam and Karthik cleared out the cheese platter, then wondered if they should’ve let it be in case someone built up, against all odds, an appetite; Dhruv scooped up his glass and finished off his cointreau in two big gulps. Apurva, for the first time in a million visits, browsed through the hosts’ bookshelf. And when Yamini blew out the scented candles, the room turned icy.
To be continued… (the third and final part coming soon)