The Two Krishnas (49 page)

The lights changed and the car resumed its trek through Westwood, past the National Cemetery on the left and the Federal Building on the right where crowds of protestors were picketing against Bush’s foreign policy in Iraq. Some of the cars honked their endorsement and the bolstered crowd raised their picket signs higher and cheered in appreciation.

Ajay remained gripped by the thoughts of his suffering mother and selfish father. As hard as he tried, he was unable to squash the thought that in the end, his father was no different from Nicky’s, that ultimately they had also been abandoned; only in this case, he actually knew where his father was, only minutes away, had access to him, could confront him, ask him why he didn’t love them anymore, ask him how it could be this easy to turn your back on your family, and suddenly he was not willing to let the bastard get away with it.

“This is why there’s all this fucking traffic!” Nicky growled. “Man, these assholes elected the retard, now they’re all surprised he can’t do shit right.”

“Take us back.”

Nicky looked at his friend, confused. “Back? Where?”

Ajay, looking straight ahead but already immersed in the tumultuous, agonizing realm of his mind said, “Back to Santa Monica. I want to see that son-of-a-bitch.”

* * *

It’s rare to find unadulterated happiness because it is impossible to get what you want without hurting another, to gain for yourself without depriving another.
Such contentment,
thought Rahul, sitting on the couch and staring at the phone in his hands,
can only be achieved either through a complete excision of conscience, a disregard for everything but the object of your desire, or the expunging of all desire itself.

What’s the use of all this,
he asked himself, looking around the living room which only after weeks had already started to feel like his own,
if I have to lose my son and quash Pooja, who has stood by me all these years? And yet, is there truly any way for me to go back to a life of make-believe?

Having given him a few minutes to make his call, Atif came back into the room. He sat next to Rahul and put his arm around him. “Give him time, Rahul.”

Rahul nodded catatonically and it was obvious he wasn’t convinced that time would solve anything. Atif wanted to say more to make him feel better even though he also suspected the futility of this. As long as Rahul had to sacrifice his son and wife to be with him, he would always feel condemned and, to some extent, Rahul would remain inaccessible to Atif. As he rubbed Rahul’s shoulder gently, he reminded himself that sometimes matters were in fact better left in abeyance, that the compulsion to solve everything in the present was an imperious, Western way of thinking.

He tried to take Rahul into his arms, but Rahul resisted, lost.

“I remember when Ajay was born,” Rahul said. “It was only his mother and me. No grandparents or uncles and aunts, no one. Just Pooja and me. It was a difficult birth. He had to be pulled out with forceps. But he came out bellowing,” here he gave a short, proud laugh, acknowledging his son’s fortitude and drive. “After everything that had happened, he gave me a reason, you know? Life would continue through him, beyond us, and the past would…” he flinched. “But he’s had a lonely childhood. Pooja grew so protective of him. And I kept thinking I’d hurt him somehow, I don’t know. I haven’t been a proper father to him,” he said sorrowfully.

“No, no, no,” Atif said vehemently, touching his face and making him look up. “You’ve been a great father, Rahul. And I’m sure he knows. I’m sure of it.” Atif thought of his own father, the phone call that never came, and he thought,
I wish you had been my father.
“But if you
really
want to do this, Rahul, why not go and see him? Trying to do this over the phone…” he trailed off.

“Because I’m afraid. There will be more questions. Questions I don’t know how to answer.” Rahul looked at Atif, the fear apparent in his eyes. “How do I tell him about myself, Atif? About this? I don’t have a roadmap for something like this…” Rahul remembered his conversation with Ajay in the kitchen, the disgust in his son’s voice when he had described how he beat up some guy for making a pass at him. How could Rahul tell his son he was no different?

“Sooner or later, maybe, maybe he’ll…” but then Atif remembered his own situation, how his parents had been unable to understand or accept, and suddenly his faith in other peoples’ tolerance evaporated.

Rahul attempted to clear his throat but then he buried his face in his hands and hunched over in his grief, beginning to cry. As the tears washed through him, his body convulsed. Atif took him in his arms. There’s so much you can tell about a man from what breaks him down, he thought. For his own parents, it had been the abject humiliation of being cursed with a son who would not live up to their expectations or be admitted into their very discriminating version of heaven. For Rahul it was the loss of one love to gain another.

Though Rahul was right there, Atif grew afraid that he would lose him again and that this time, no prayer or promise would bring him back. A reservoir of fear pushed against the walls of Atif’s ribcage, agitating him, making him so nervous that he wanted hold on to Rahul and never let him go. He could smell Rahul’s odor, and felt so affected by it that he leaned into Rahul, began kissing him, but Rahul resisted, steeped in pain. Atif persisted more gently, rubbing Rahul’s broad back, kissing his ears, neck, eyes, offering intermittent assurances that everything would be all right.

Finally, Rahul grew aroused by Atif’s affection and yielded, pushing him down on the couch with force, covering Atif’s body with his own. They did not kiss, their lovemaking impassioned but choleric. And as Rahul drove himself deeper, like a man evading the tyranny of his conscience, Atif tried to convince himself that their love story had triumphed.

* * *

By the time Ajay had climbed up the flight of dimly lit stairs to where he expected to find his father and the woman who had taken him away from them, he had missed Rahul by just minutes. Having picked up on his smoking habit again, Rahul had walked over to a liquor store a few blocks down the street for a fresh pack of Marlboros.

Ajay used the cat-knocker to rap on the door a few times even though he noticed that the door was in fact ajar. Looking back at Nicky, he said, “Maybe you should wait in the car,” but then they were both startled when the unmistakable voice of another man from the inside groaned and then called out, “Oh! Did you close it? I told you to leave it open. Hang on, Rahul.”

For a fleeting moment, hearing a man’s voice relieved Ajay of all his suspicions. Perhaps his father was staying with a friend, someone he knew from banking, and all his fears about another woman would be unfounded. He pushed the door open and stepped into a chimerical apartment dancing in the light of candles and the perfume of flowers. The floor under his feet was strewn with clothes—men’s underwear, boxers, socks, undershirt and white button-down dress shirt and, further away, glowing iridescently at him like a snake in the carpet, his father’s opulent paisley tie, the same one his mother had given to his father and which they had joked would be Ajay’s inheritance some day.

Stepping further in, his eyes took in the spray of tuberoses on the coffee table, the yards of books on shelves and against the walls and his father’s weathered leather briefcase, which could no longer be found by their door where Rahul would discard it after a hard day’s work, but here, in its new place by a desk in a strange apartment. And there were pictures, framed and placed strategically around the well-designed apartment, of his father with another man against scenic backdrops in moments of amusement and leisure.

Nicky stepped in behind him. “What the fuck?” he said with a shocked, mocking laugh.

“Rahul?” Atif came out into the living room just then, stark naked. Finding the two strangers in his home, he first looked confused and then shrank back, horrified. “Who are you?” he cried, bolting back into the bedroom.

Ajay remained frozen, as if an invisible hand had assembled the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and revealed to him his worst nightmare. And even as he stood stationary, the room, indeed the whole world, seemed to spiral off its axis and overturn. “Impossible…” he gasped. He didn’t feel his friend tug at his shoulder, didn’t hear him say, “Ajay, let’s get the fuck out of here, man.”

His body moved almost robotically towards the bedroom from where he could hear the boy talking to someone frantically behind the closed door. He pushed against the door and even as Atif tried his mightiest to hold himself up against it, he was no match for Ajay’s barbarous strength and was eventually knocked to the ground, the phone tumbling from his hands like an ineffectual toy and vanishing somewhere under the disarrayed bed.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” Atif said, scrambling to his feet and cowering back against a wall at the end of the room. “Just take whatever you want, okay? Please…” He grabbed a red and orange towel from the floor, the same one he had blanketed over his belongings in the suitcase when coming to America and which, for some inexplicable reason, Rahul and he used to wipe themselves up after sex.

“Where is he?”

“Who?” Atif cried, noticing that the boy’s face looked strangely familiar. Was he—could he be—Indian? And then, like seeing a Rorschach image revealing itself through the thick brows, intense eyes, flaring nose and full lips, realized that he was looking at a version of Rahul. He turned to the other boy, pleading, “Please, please just take him and go.” But here again, as if by a bizarre coincidence, he recognized another face, felt a chill of dread go up his spine. “You,’ he said, pointing at the towering companion, “I…I know you…Nuru! You know—”

The blow struck him with such force and speed that Atif didn’t even see it coming and, his mind suddenly a blank sheet of pain, he fell backwards and onto the ground. “Shut the fuck up, you fucking faggot! You don’t know nothing!” Nicky roared. He turned to Ajay almost frantically now, rubbing his knuckles in the palm of his hand. “Come on, man, we gotta bail! Now!”

But by then Ajay, who had been standing still, his mind taking in more of the universe in which his father had been only minutes ago—the soiled sheets like frozen currents of what had undulated between his father and this guy, more pictures of them intimate and blissful, his father’s leather sandals –one turned upside down –at the foot of the bed—found himself possessed of forces beyond his control. “You,” he said, his voice subterranean in his own ears, “you did this to us.”

Atif struggled to his feet, tasting the salt of blood in his mouth, holding his arms up in anticipation of further assault. “Please, we didn’t mean to…he didn’t…” but there were no words that could convey the regret about how much pain had been caused, the inevitability of what had already happened. In that moment, Atif wished he could have found a way to comfort the person who not just resembled, but came from the man he loved. He wished that rather than defending himself, he could have allayed his assailant’s pain. But something, a long-suppressed suspicion of how his luck would eventually run out, his own distrust of life or just the pure, unalloyed hate in Ajay’s face told him that things would not work out well. “Please, don’t…”

Ajay, white-faced, his eyes like coals from a brazier of rage, barely mindful of the terror in the boy’s eyes or the crying, grabbed Atif’s slender neck and started shaking him violently.

Atif choked, his hands flying up to his neck as he struggled to free himself from Ajay’s hands. For an instant, he thought that this wasn’t really happening, that Rahul would be back any moment and rouse him from this nightmare, that perhaps his total disbelief could make them vanish. Miraculously, he broke free. Gasping and coughing, he tottered further back into the room only to find himself cornered against the wall. Another blow from Ajay crushed the air from his trunk, sending him reeling. He almost slumped to the ground but was held up by Nicky as Ajay emptied himself out like a cauldron of fury. He cried out in pain, blood spilling from his mouth, but was only hit harder, in his face, his belly, his kidneys, his legs, until he no longer knew where to put his hands because his whole body howled out in pain.

Released, he finally tumbled onto the floor. He scraped against the unyielding wall, emitting a great gush of spittle and blood, and begged, but remained a trapped animal. “Come on, man! Let’s get the fuck out of here!” he heard someone say but when he looked around, he found he could see almost nothing, all sight blocked from his swollen eyes. He began groping in the dark, put out a hand pleadingly.

Against a blood-soaked sky the sun dipped into the Arabian Sea; the sound of rickshaws and cars and humans and animals on the streets grew to a deafening cacophony as deformed beggars and street urchins with plaintive glances and carefree smiles deftly maneuvered their way through it all; his mother and Mrs. Vaid hung washed, colorful bed sheets over a line flapping with laundry on a latticed balcony, clothespins in their mouths; he saw the ecstasy on the face of his lover, the pearls of perspiration rolling to the tip of Rahul’s nose and dropping upon his own face like raindrops on parched earth.

This is when Ajay grabbed a heavy metal candle holder from the bedside table, the candle toppling off and drizzling melted wax that had not congealed, and delivered his next and final strike, swinging with both hands from the right down to the left and smashing it against Atif’s head which collided with the wall like a clay pot.

They scrambled down the stairs, steps at a time, and by the time they landed on the street it seemed to Ajay in some erroneously preternatural way that they might still be able to get away. But by then, the 911 operator had recorded the entire episode—the gruesome cries, the violent clamor. Next door, Nona, laboring away in chat rooms, had grown alarmed by the sounds coming through the walls and made her own frantic call to the police. An alert tone had been sent over the radio frequency and multiple police cars had already descended upon the block and surrounded it.