The Last Guest (Part 3 of 3)
She was no totem. She wanted to be granted the status of a full human being, capable of the most sublime feats and egregious missteps within the same day.
This is the third and final part in a three-part serialized short story. You can read parts 1 and 2 here.
“Is this..?” asked Yamini.
“Mm-hmm.” Sam, whose phone they were huddled over, affirmed.
Dhruv and Apurva put an arm around Karthik on either side of him and leaned over. Binati too joined in. The gang was staring at a picture of a young boy sitting on a swing on the patio of a squat house. Two plaits, woven from his lustrous hair, fell over his shoulders.
Arunima Ahluwalia came out to her parents when she was thirteen. What her parents thought to be a phase, read the caption on the Instagram post, turned out to be much more than that.
“I refused to cut my hair after Mussoorie. My parents gave up. This was from that year…just before I came out,” said Arunima. The splotches on her sweatshirt had faded.
Sam threw an arm around Arunima and squeezed her shoulder lightly.
“You guys could hardly wait, I guess.” No one had noticed Anya emerge from the bedroom until they heard her say the words.
The huddle broke. Something in Anya’s tone wasn’t quite right. Not a lament; not a joke either.
“Don’t take this otherwise, Anya,” said Sam.
Anya met her eyes. “I’m trying not to. But I’m not used to seeing you pick a side.”
Karthik was about to say something when Sam raised a palm and stopped him.
“So what, Anya?” Binati intervened. “Your husband is a dick. We always suspected, right? Tonight only proves it.”
“I’m with her,” Yamini said, nodding at Binati. Then making a sweep of her hands, she continued. “This works as long as you don’t see the real Kabir. We come here, we tolerate him because of you…because you don’t see the bully he can be. But the minute that changes, the minute it gets awkward for you—I mean, right now I would understand if you asked us to leave.”
Saying this, Yamini slung her bag around her shoulder. Apurva stood up. The others, similarly provoked, began to gather their paraphernalia.
“No no no, please…please. Don’t leave.” Anya looked them in the eye as she said this. She didn’t see it as grovelling, far from it. If I were to let you all leave now, she thought, we might never meet again.
She picked up a matchbox. She lit the candle closest to her before making her way clockwise to the others. As eucalyptus and cedarwood wafted in, Kabir’s uneven snores could be heard from the bedroom.
She had come out of the bedroom with the intention of calling it a night. But seeing her friends huddled together, hearing them not mince their words, had birthed a thought so preposterous it felt profound to her. They were, finally, shedding their invulnerability. They were peeling off those masks. Now only if they could see that what lay ahead was not a dead end but a bend in the road—not quite that, no…only if she could show them, the fractured paths their friendship had taken thus far would cohere into one none of them would’ve ever imagined.
She decided in that instant that the only way to show them was to lead them into it. In nature it’s not those who are the strongest who survive, she remembered this line from an ad she had written in another life as a copywriter, it is those who adapt. And now was the time to adapt, she knew.
“This one time I was terribly sick a day before one of our parties,” she began, “so I put Kabir to the task. He had to cut into these tender coconuts and scrape out the malai. He was struggling with it, and grumbling nonstop: Why do I have to do this? Why can’t you call it off? So, I said, What do you mean call it off? He said, Look at you. You’re so sick and yet you’re worrying about what? A freaking party?
“But the gang will be coming tomorrow, I said.
“So what? he said. You don’t even like hosting them. They don’t open up; it’s all so frivolous, you complain. So what’s with this loyalty toward them? Tell them: no.
“He was right. I was sick but I was acting out of some sense of duty, loyalty, whatever. It was twisted. But Kabir thought I could separate my loyalty toward him, my husband, from the loyalty toward you all, my friends. Like my loyalty for him existed on a separate plane, a higher plane. It did not. The loyalty I had for him, what I felt for you guys—I couldn’t pour one out without emptying the other. All of it came from the same place. But if you weren’t someone for whom this was true, you just wouldn’t get it. And Kabir didn’t get it. He didn’t get it. He only knew that I wanted more from you all, it took a lot out of me, and yet I still entertained you. But then the more evenings I spent with you guys the more I felt…like, was it all in my head? Were you guys all too cool for me? It has always been like this for me, you know. You say I’m blind to Kabir. Maybe I am. I’m not ready to talk about my husband, not yet, but I want to say this: I know that I pour myself into people in ways that test my commitment to them. It is what makes me me…it is also my curse,” said Anya, as she brought a finger to the flame. Again and again, like a child discovering fire, she slid her fingers across.
“Why haven’t you ever mentioned this before?” asked Sam. Her question was met with a curious agreement around the room.
“You’ve never asked me how I served you four-course meals when my head was a shaken bottle of soda and my sinuses were a leaky tap,” said Anya, laughing at her mixed metaphors.
Sam gave Anya a side hug. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin up, as if in deep thought, before exhaling deeply. “There’s something I want you all to know,” she said.
“Oh hell! This is turning out into one of those fireside chats gone wrong,” Apurva said.
No one took the bait. He got probing looks instead.
“I’m addicted to reading erotica. What you would call soft porn novels. Most nights I’m up at two in the morning, reading my Fifty Shades and making mental lists of things from the next day that I can put off for later. The other day I missed paying the school fees for the quarter. At first I thought it was unimportant…just a phase. But it just kept growing, like it was filling a hole in my life I didn’t know existed. Things got worse when he,” she said, glancing at Karthik, “gifted me a Kindle. He didn’t know—poor fellow. Now if I have a bad day, if I have a good one, in between chores, after meals—I’ve round-the-clock access to a personal library of soft porn. That’s it.”
She shrugged, out of turn, then realizing she might have been too abrupt for her audience, she added, “Ya, I just needed to say this. And no—I don’t feel like I’m a horrible person or I’m contaminated or something.”
Sam said all this while staring at her open palms. When she looked up, like she was looking up from her notes, it was only Arunima’s eyes she met. It was like she was breaking it to her first, although everyone was just as present. The gang saw her effort, understood what it meant, and, at the same time, felt drawn to the idea. And so, as Sam sank back into the cushions on the couch and checked random apps on her smartwatch, faces cleared, backs straightened, and one by one, they picked up the gauntlet.
Apurva revealed that ever since losing his job earlier in the year, he had been increasingly uneasy in social situations. He had begun dropping names and casually throwing little embellishments into conversations. His shame grew from the very things he said to expunge the shame of being jobless. There was little to be gained from his half-truths, but over time it had become easier to go on than it had been to stop. He looked around the room as he spoke but he let his gaze rest a tad longer on Arunima.
Dhruv went further. He started by addressing Arunima, then remembered the others and looked at them as well. He said he had been questioning the point of keeping his job ever since his wife had had a promotion. She earned enough for both of them and their child. His salary was surplus to their needs. He had never so dearly cherished the manly pleasure of providing for his family until he didn’t have it. Maybe he was behind the times, he said, but that didn’t gall him as much as the fact he was dispensable.
Each started slowly, measuredly, with the most recent and the most visible malaise in their lives and, growing bolder with each attempt, worked their way deeper into the soil of the past until they were unearthing old artifacts and dusting them off. With each excavation, what each pulled out became more and more intimate and grisly. They came and went as they pleased. They had long foregone cards and prompts.
Through the degustation of sharing, one thing remained constant: they all sought Arunima out. They felt most acutely the presence of this last guest, a virtual stranger whose presence granted them permission and anonymity. They felt called to the moment, this moment that had earned its keep. If they spent it baring their souls, they could not be implicated. As long as she was there. They had never felt as human as they did in her presence.
Arunima, on her part, had not recognized Kabir until his story. After, she had not chosen her response to him. Her body had just erupted, like from a stab in the gut, and for several minutes after, her mouth was dry; her shoulders, stiff; and her gaze, fierce. At first, she sat passively as the others kept stealing looks at her. Then she noticed them change. She saw how, uncompressed, their lives gained dimensions. They were no longer placeholders to each other. Where before they believed they wholly knew each other, now they seemed to re-emerge in each other’s eyes as more of a mystery, singular in the questions they posed.
When dessert finally arrived, well past midnight, a ravenous collective appetite surfaced. Instantly, the party seemed to have reached a kind of doneness. They traded pouring their hearts out for demolishing the newly arrived jars of the motichoor ladoo cheesecake.
Now is a good time to leave, someone said. The rainstorm had passed. They said their goodbyes, gave each other hugs, the tightest for her, Arunima. Someone offered to drop her but she declined.
“Aru!” called Anya at the door, throwing an arm around the guest’s neck. “I’m so sorry.”
“Forget about it,” she said to her host, even though she knew she herself would not take her own advice.
“Aru, we’re meeting again in a couple of weeks for my birthday. Will you come?” said Sam, in the elevator down. “Full disclosure: my parties are basic, not like Anya’s.”
She smiled.
“I know what that smile means,” Sam said. “Is it because of Kabir?”
She shook her head.
“Then?” Sam asked. The doors parted. Karthik was already there outside the lobby, finishing a smoke. An SUV pulled up. “Gotta go but let’s talk later,” Sam said, as she climbed into the vehicle.
Arunima waved the couple goodbye, and for a long time after, she just stood there. The palm fronds overhead rustled. An empty packet of potato wafers danced in the breeze. Two teenagers arranged a row of anars and lit them up in a sequence. As showers of sparks shot upward, strays warily rushed out from under rickshaws parked by the side of the road.
She took it all in.
She was no longer Arun, the twelve-year-old boy about to spiral into darkness. She went by Arunima now. Had she turned into Aru for her new friends? They had stood by her. They had come out to her. Yet, she suspected, they saw in her that helpless twelve-year-old from another life. She didn’t begrudge them but she was guarded about anyone who claimed her side because she represented something to them, just as she was about anyone who went against her for the same reason. They were both sides of the same coin: those quick to adore and those quick to abhor. She couldn’t value one without coming to value the other. She was no totem. She wanted to be granted the status of a full human being, capable of the most sublime feats and egregious missteps within the same day.
As she trod barefoot, dress shoes in hand, moonily eyeing the wet leaves and the runnels and the shimmering street lights, it felt good to feel the ground beneath her feet.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Vikram Shah, Himanshu Bora, Amrita Singh, Anselmo Martyres, Kutapa Muthanna, and Clarinda Cerejo for reading drafts and helping shape the story.