“… I can drink the moon, but—for that I will need to be alone. And my jaan always watching me so bitter, staying put. She is never leaving me alone.”
The speaker was Amir Khan—not to be confused with Bollywood hero Amir Khan—and I was his “jaan” being bitter, watching him, etc. Many mistakes had been made as regards Amir, as a result of which he had, from an early age, fallen entirely out of rhythm with the world. For one, his ammi, that bitch, had come up with that unimaginative name for a boy who was to grow up inexplicably eccentric and blatantly unheroic, supplying years of comic material to everyone we knew. To be fair, it wasn’t that no other Muslim boys were named Amir Khan and it necessarily had to be surmised that ammijaan had named him after the actor—had it been Shah Rukh Khan, it would’ve been another matter; the King of Bollywood is so popular that it has had the counterintuitive effect of not a lot of people naming their children after him. Amir was named after the more reticent of the superstars, if at all—but people in our hometown have been known to punish each other for lesser crimes.
As fugitives, Amir and I lived in a room on the roof of a house in Old Delhi, in one of the gullies adjacent to the Jama Masjid, where, just when you think the lane, squished between two rows of shops, could cramp no further, it collapses in on itself. If you were to stand on one of the higher steps leading to the masjid and look to the chaos of the area, past the gates and the beggars and the traffic barricades, you would be forgiven for thinking the Revolution had arrived.
Amir and I were not complaining; we did not mind running the risk of rickshaws lazily mounting over our feet, nor the dust and the noise. In our eyes, it was a village fair—sweet and kabab shops were lined next to shops selling sequined salwars and colourful glass bangles, stashed so close together that, to the unaccustomed eye, they might all start leaking into each other. “No problem,” Amir had said. “Ratq…Fatq…Quran says heaven and earth too were joined together like this”—latching the fingers of both hands together—”before”—he cast about for the English word, gave up and unlatched his fingers dramatically to demonstrate the point—”it did like this.”
Whenever one of us came home from some errand, we would say,
“What colour were the salwars?”
“Orange, with malai, sirke wale pyaz and green chutney.”
“And how were the seekh kababs?”
“Why, dark blue embroidered with golden zari.”
By the time of his disappearance, all of that had gone. Amir had come into a convenient kind of madness. I say convenient because it allowed him to forget many things and retain what was required to more or less enjoy himself. For example, he had forgotten how to read and write and speak English (not to suggest that he had naturally possessed any mastery of those things, unlike myself. I had been on the verge of receiving a First Class in English Honours), but wasn’t missing showers or neglecting to put on copious amounts of Axe body spray. Though he was making ominous-sounding statements about “drinking the moon,” he wasn’t exactly avoiding the edible meals. He appeared to have forgotten that we had stopped going to college, but wasn’t making an attempt to go either.
As far as madness goes, Amir’s was thus not particularly perilous. In that regard the madman who roamed our gully, wearing a jute cassock in the Delhi summer, was far ahead. He did not accept water from anyone, or any sum of money greater than two rupees. In the inconsolable noon he shouted repeatedly, “Dilli ab door nahi!” Meaning Delhi is not far now. Though he was already here.
Amir’s own claim was that he was turning into a beast or a bird, because, he said, that’s what human beings became when no one was looking (though I was looking). And though “mad” was the word closest to capturing what was happening, in my opinion, what he was really becoming was a wayward child, a provocateur. He flitted around the roof, making karate noises and punching at the clothes hanging on the lines. He spoke in circular riddles, answering aloud questions that he had asked himself internally. He was fascinated by the water cistern that stood on a platform in a corner of the roof and spent hours poring over it, watching the water level go down. I would have worried that he planned to jump in, but the cistern wasn’t deep enough to cause harm. One day he brought home a giant, nasty-looking jackfruit, nature’s grotesque handiwork standing out in spikes all over its leaking body. Neither of us knew how to peel or cut it, so it sat around rotting and weighing the air down with deathly sweetness, until it so happened that we no longer smelled or took notice of it.
It did occur to me once that we could go on living like this—like beasts, Amir and I. It was raining, and I suspect that the relief had widened the ambit of my imagination. That night we played senselessly on the roof, zooming around the hanging clothes, the shirts, salwars and skirts all sheets of rain, taut and filled with wind. Amir’s hair was long by then, dripping into the chalices carved by his collarbones, the cheap cotton T-shirt translucent, the spectacles tiny panes of rain. “See, jaan?” he had said, and then continued in Hindi, the words all jumbled: in god’s world beauty is not denied to us, even in the worst of times. That would have been his purport, had he still known to speak coherently.
At night, he would perform the isha by the parapet, where the streetlamp cast a small alcove of light. He performed the pre-prayer wudu under the tap fitted to the cistern, the water creeping down his nose like a series of clear bugs. At the end of the prayer, when he opened his eyes and said Ameen, I could tell that our surroundings had turned astounding around him, totally incomprehensible. But to me, it seemed as though he were pronouncing the world itself into being, its wheels of misfortune, along with his own birth and persecution, stoking in me a terrible love for himself, designing the night of his betrayal like a cold, perfect blade—Ameen.
He neglected the other four daily prayers—fajr, dhuhr, asr, and maghrib—but remained fiercely committed to the nightly isha. I could not tell if he was still doing everything by the book or just accruing more sins for the both of us, but I let him go about his way, for I am not a believer. That was why neither of us ever really thought of converting: he, because he believed in Allah, and I, because I believed in nothing.
Out of curiosity, I had once asked him what he prayed for.
“Nothing…” he had replied solemnly. “Rehem, sometimes.” Mercy. “Things you ask for you never get.”
Some nights it rained inside our room. Large holes kept materialising across the ceiling Amir had assembled out of terracotta tiles. We placed steel patilas on the floor, directly underneath the holes, and maneuvered the plastic folding bed out of their way every few days. These rogue showers could not be begrudged their nuisance, as the city was under heatwave alert every other day. In the summer the room turned a pressure cooker and we emulsified within it, laying about in the broth of our bodies, unable to touch for long, let alone fuck. The last time we tried to have sex we had broken out in hives that could not be consoled even by Dermicool. The prickly-heat powder, however, served us differently. Mixed with sweat, it formed an ungainly slush that settled in the creases of skin and gave us a peculiar, geriatric look that put us off each other altogether.
Amir had felled the original ceiling made of asbestos, which used to trap the heat, and built us this one instead. We had drilled ventilators into the walls, fashioned an air cooler out of a table fan and a bowl of ice placed in front of it, poured cold water over the bedsheet at night. Having successfully engineered our own weather, we felt godly and thereafter everything said between us tended to acquire an odd incantatory significance:
Turn on the bulb on the bulb the bulb
Roti and sugar for lunch today? Roti and sugar? Roti? Sugar? Roti?
Get out of my way out of Want some water jaan? Some water jaan? Water?
Although that was probably just me.
When I’d first met Amir, in our hometown, I didn’t think much of him. He was a bespectacled engineering student from the dusty government college round the corner, who had been convinced by his friends that it would be a romantic gesture to jump the wall guarding my English-medium arts college and solicit my affections in front of all my girlfriends.
He wore, tucked-in, one of those checkered shirts that you would expect such a character to wear in a movie, and after the wall-climbing, crash-landing etc, two buds of blood were blooming over his knees, where the baggy trousers had been torn.
“I want to say you something?” he had inquired.
A roll of giggles.
“What is it you want to say me?” I had to make it known to my friends that I had caught the mistake.
He panicked and looked to the two friends who had accompanied him over the wall. They offered no guidance.
“I want to propose you,” he said finally, and all of us laughed loudly, and I said nothing, though I hoped it wouldn’t make him go away, and then it did.
That was how it was, until one noon I happened to watch him perform the dhuhr at the park. He had been lying on our bench with his head in my lap, my dupatta over his face. On the wood backrest I had carved ‘Amir+Ria’ with a pocket-knife. We skipped classes and came to this park primarily to make out (it was possible to give blowjobs there), after which we talked about nothing much and ate chips. I had told the girlfriends about our relationship only the week before, and there had been mayhem. “O bhai!” one of them said, “You’ve gone and done Hindu-Muslim! Bollywood film chal rahi hai teri!” “Don’t bring Hindu-Muslim into everything!” I had snapped. “Besides, I don’t even like him that much.”
But that noon, when the azaan sounded from the local masjid, and Amir removed the dupatta from his face, knelt and put his forehead to the soil, something awful came into my heart, something bitterly luminous like the bite of fire ants, or the beginning of a massive stomach upset. I hoped that his faith would rub off on me, give me something to believe in. Innocence, perhaps; the imagination and patience of the faithful, the forbearance. Or it really could have been the stomach upset. I remember shitting nine times after I went home.
When the first signs of Amir’s strangeness appeared, his ammi said it was because of me. As per the local adage, I had ‘eaten’ his head. I deny. She had confused cause and effect. I had a talent for sniffing out whose blood trembled hot behind their ears, who had a waifish sadness about the face, who produced a small grumble at the back of the throat whenever they started speaking. I wanted Amir because I had seen it coming, and when it came, I demanded admittance to his madness just as I had staked claim in the fruits of his faith.
It started with the complaints of a fishbone perpetually lodged in his throat. At first, it was understandable. We don’t often eat fish in our state; it was a gift from a Bengali friend who was leaving. It was their most expensive fare, too: the hilsa, of strong odour and riddled with bones so intricate you have no choice but to swallow them. In the process, if you are to ingest a bigger, more troublesome bone, the fish isn’t to blame. Amir was usually extremely grateful in these situations and it was only after the friend had left and everyone had dispersed that he told me he had had a bone stuck in his throat all the while. It was beginning to choke him, he said. “Clearly not,” I said, and gave him an overripe banana to mash and swallow, hoping the bone would go down with it.
“Good?” I asked once he’d done it.
“No.”
At night, he came over to my house and called me outside to say he was choking, might die.
“Well, clearly not,” I said again. “Go home. You are fine.”
“But it is happening.”
“Nothing is happening, Amir. You’re here in front of me. Standing. Talking.”
For the moment convinced of his own well-being, he had gone home. But the fishbone stood its ground—to make insistent callous appearances.
Eventually, the fishbone talk and the accompanying retching and wheezing would reach an extent that I would be forced to lose sympathy. The coughing fits, too, went from being jarring to annoying, occurring at the most inopportune moments: when we were fucking, for example. Just when he began to come, a horrible clanging sound would issue from his chest, like someone was throwing steel utensils around in there. I would stop, ask, “What happened, jaan?” In such moments it would be heartless to say “Stop that for fuck’s sake” as I did during other activities similarly interrupted. So: what happened, jaan? I forget how he would answer. In my memory it sounds like a whole lot of wind and static.
After the disappearance, I often reread the frantic WhatsApp messages I used to send him nightly back then, and imagined how dejected—so late was I—his young face must have looked as he read them. I must admit that I had frequently been thoughtless with him.
“Don’t claim 2 love me if u can’t bear 2 stand up 2 ammijaan,” said one of my texts. “U act lyk there hasn’t been a Hindu-Muslim couple in India b4. Cowrd…They jump into the fucking ganga. They drink phenyl. rat-kill…Anyway I told mummy papa 2day I will do sumthing to myself if they keep up lyk dis. Speak to ur bitch ammi or it’s over btwn us. I promise you dis tym …”
India and its rituals were, like this, needlessly invoked in most of my messages, insisting that we were doing a great service to the country by uniting or turning martyrs at its altar. In truth I had scarcely had a thought about India; I would have as easily brought up Greek mythology if it could convince Amir of the greatness of the institution of marriage, especially between us.
Amir had not replied to that message for four hours (in the interim, four “U dere?”s and “U busy?”s had been sent from my side, one each hour), then sent a single line: “wont dat b love jihad? LOL!!”
There he was again, callously participating in jokes made at his own expense. It wasn’t even some sort of wry commentary that was made to me in private; he was the first to cackle whenever the subject was broached among our friends.
The government was doing everything it could to eradicate love jihad, a practice in which, the ruling party workers said, Muslim men were seducing Hindu women for the purpose of marrying them and converting them to Islam. Several interfaith couples had recently been picked up from our hometown, on charges of being unruly and a threat to the general ethos of the area. When they came back, the Muslim boyfriends all sported nearly identical injuries, and who knows why, whenever we asked them what had happened, they smiled and all offered the same answer, identically phrased: Fell off that mango tree way over there, there by the pond. Those couples fled each other’s presence and each forbade us mentioning the other’s name.
This was so for the couples that did return. Some of them didn’t. I had never had a close friend who was a love jihadi; those who did, sometimes received news from the absconders, who said they had started their lives elsewhere. These people were ever only “sending news,” not texting or calling, not even emailing.
All of this is to say: I was set with Amir, things were serious, and the intrigue about us was growing in a way that made me afraid—I felt something was about to happen to me that only happened to other people. Even among interfaith couples we were singular, as we had committed double transgressions. The students of my English-medium arts college did not, as a rule, fraternize with government college students like him.
The exception to this, which had become something of a ritual itself, occurred during the college afterhours, when everyone went to the golgappa vendor who had set up his stand in the middle ground to capture both markets. Starbucks had recently come to town, and we went there and posted many a photo of the cups with our names, but by the last period at college, we could only think of golgappa and unseemly things about boys, most of them the dirty-looking government college waifs. That was where Amir had first seen me, too, and where what was to be my fate—that term is dull, but how else could I describe this series of elopement, marriage and disappearance—had been awaiting me. That was where Amir had first called me beautiful, and I knew he had been transformed, because a man would not otherwise say that word. At least I had never heard it said by a man, save for Bollywood heroes. Amir Khan. Shah Rukh Khan. Hrithik Roshan. How desperately I wanted to say he was beautiful, too—that Amir. When I went back and told the girlfriends, they said no, absolutely not, none of this was permissible, and all of it very, very cheap.
It was strange, how we had been back there in that small town, all of us young and horrible. We could not be said to care very much about each other, but we would lay our lives down for what we called the Group. We would let the Group put us on trial and sentence us to death, then summon us back to the village as blubbering, sorrowing spirits. Before the Group we were to divulge the very material of our souls—and sometimes, bodies; when poor Vaishali learnt to masturbate (hump a pillow), much too late, she had to describe to us, in detail, how she was doing it. In big cities like Delhi you get to be your own person, have a soul of your own. In our hometown the Group kept us, wherever we went. No man in the neighbourhood could touch one of us without jostling a group of twelve girls, even if one of us were to be found, say, hidden in a dark gully late at night, smoking; so we accepted, gladly, the disciplinary nature of our friendship.
During the college afterhours, like I said, the borders turned porous between the students of Amir’s college and mine. Fights and flirtation happened in equal fervour. The golgappa vendor was the only sober person in the vicinity, and he was somehow both maniacal and dispassionate, keeping up with the clamouring crowd without so much as glancing at them. He would not have looked up even if matters were to come to bloodshed among us. Once, a boy who had been beaten up, was brought to the stand to be pacified with golgappas from the now-remorseful beaters. As he stood dripping blood into his golgappa, I imagine he must’ve felt sorry for himself and entitled to general recompense, and had thus asked for a complimentary piece. The vendor had refused per usual.
Of late, the jokes directed at Amir during these afterhours had been growing progressively risqué.
From “Amir bhai, don’t you want to say us anything today?” and “Ria, forgot your burqa at home today?” to “Amir bhai, lower your voice. Haven’t you heard of the UPA?”
“It’s UAPA, duffer,” I had said.
“What is it actually?” Amir was the one asking, out of everyone—casually curious, as though he hadn’t just been threatened.
Dazed, I replied, “Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.”
“You have to be better informed, Amir bhai.” One of the girls this time—they didn’t used to dislike him. “Look how Umar Khalid ended up.”
He turned to me again, confused, meaning who is Umar Khalid?
His innocence was poison inside me—a searing rage would often shoot out of me and lodge into his back instead of the actual offenders.
“Gawar hai kya? Illiterate,” I said.
There was a roll of victorious guffaws, as though held back for a long time. Amir had reddened.
Someone had made a Facebook group for the two colleges, where people could anonymously confess whom they fancied, gripe about dress codes and rows with college authorities, crack “non-veg” jokes and gossip. Before long, the page had become the epicentre of love jihad jokes about Amir and me, and no one could pinpoint when the jokes had turned into actual grievances.
“What has happened to our Hindu girls?? Why are they going for Muslim boys when so many handsome Hindu boys are single and available?” read one anonymous post. (“They like it circumcised,” one of my classmates commented, not anonymously. “Fuck u,” I replied.)
“Ria u do well in English Lit but this is India dear. Dis is not how Sanatani women shud behave.
From,
A proud Sanatani
PS: Stop wearing sleeveless tops 2 class. If sleeveless isnt allowed 4 oders it isnt allowed 4 u dear.”
“luv jihad trend has 2 b stoped. Amir n Ria pls break up. V r requestng u, so pls don’t say u r harased. V ol want u 2, pls brek up.”
“I agree with the previous post that love jihad has to be stopped but its not a trend. Its a war on us. Hindu khatre mein hain. Hindu boys are in pain. We must b strong. Jai Shri Ram.”
“We know, btw, what you get up to at the park. I don’t think we need to remind you what happened to the couple kissing on the road last year. We don’t want something like that to happen to you but you cannot taint the names of two colleges just coz you are horny.”
The Group, too, forsook me. And though they were not actively participating in the anti-love jihad programme, I found, chagrined, some of them liking the posts.
Whether it was while we were scrolling through the posts numbly or being gheraoed near the golgappa stall, Amir would laugh and laugh. Then it would occur to him that he had let the fishbone in his throat sit benignly too long, and he would start to cough.
“It’s idiotic when you laugh in front of them like that,” I had told him. “You’re just telling them it’s okay to say such things to us.”
“Arre it’s fine. You know they joke.”
“Maybe if you laughed harder you’d convince yourself.”
“I don’t do it to convince myself,” he had said randomly, much later. “I laugh to convince them.”
So I took to laughing with him in public and by way of private protest I had us elope and marry, with one of his friends as witness. We had poached Rafsan outside college and taken him along to the mosque without divulging the reason. When we did tell him, he was too confounded to be able to disagree. The imam himself had been the other witness. During the nikah, though, somehow it was I who had almost failed to say “qubool hai,” meaning “I accept,” as though you had been pronounced guilty. I accomplished it, nevertheless, and afterwards, the imam had looked at us sadly—all of us were drenched in sweat; I remember Amir’s face shining—and said, “May Allah forgive us all.”
We went to Amir’s house after it was done; his ammi fainted, came around and called my parents. Thereafter papa threatened to call the police several times, did not do so, then came over himself. As our respective parents were baying for blood, in the next room, Amir and I sat slumped against each other in his bed, feeling deathly depressed, me still in my sequined green sharara, the rose pinned to the pocket of his sherwani oversweet. The attar on our clothes was mixing with the attar of the plate of cold biryani that we had brought as peace offering, now sitting on the bedside table untouched.
Somewhere around the fourth instance of papa insisting that the nikah was illegal and he could drag me out by the hair if he wanted, I dully suggested to Amir that we get registered under the Special Marriage Act for inter-caste and interfaith couples. By then I was sitting upright and he was leaning into me like his spine had been snapped in several places.
“If you read anything other than story books,” he said lachrymosely, “you should know special marriage application has to be submit thirty days before wedding date.”
“You’re going to tell me about reading—and why have you been looking into all that?”
“I knew uncle-aunty will not accept nikah,” he muttered. “We should have done special marriage in the first place. Not the nikah stuffs.”
The nikah stuff had happened at my behest, for no other reason than that I appreciated the aesthetics, the costumes and the rituals. “This is not your Pakistani TV drama, Ria ji,” Amir had said, annoyed. “It’s a real marriage. You understand no?” A Hindu wedding had been his preference. He had argued, once or twice, that a wedding buttressed by Hindu customs could not be easily rubbished by my parents, who outnumbered his ammi by one. It would also considerably weaken the love jihad theory if he were to adopt Hindu customs. I suppose I hadn’t heard him out.
“Okay,” I had said to him, defeated. Papa was still shouting in the next room. “Okay. Should we run away then?”
“How many times you want to run away?”
But that was what we did, just as papa left for the party office, before the whole neighbourhood had been alerted. At the door we were faced by ammijaan; “Sorry ammi,” Amir said, like a mortified child who really was sorry, and she watched us escape in silence. We decided to head to Delhi—not that we wanted to commit a crime in the capital city, under the prime minister’s nose. Amir had a friend with a house there. We could not afford the rent he asked for, so he, out of the goodness of his heart, let us have the room on the roof for free.
“They would not even put their dog in there,” I had said to Amir after visiting the place.
“Of course they wouldn’t,” he had said happily. “It is very hot for dogs in that room.”
It grew on me. It was sanctuary, after all. The room and the terrace were hallowed grounds, the sky a blue pasture around us, unsoiled by the massive, humming crowd that drifted down the street below, but to us so close that we believed ourselves the ones holding it up. In the evenings, we could see wind-drunk kites zooming around the Jama Masjid’s minarets. Here Amir and I were similar in a way that men and women cannot be. We had the kind of deep creamy leisure that we could only have dreamt of earlier, and before long, we, too, had become the kind of people who would send news instead of texting or calling.
What we hadn’t anticipated was that if one gets around to having too much of time, it malfunctions—twists and turns till it becomes a disfigured jumble of splinters poking backwards, forwards, sideways, ways hitherto unimaginable. We fought like dogs. For example, the day he bought me a mirrorwork chunari from the Chandni Chowk market. It was bright pink and velveteen. I remember looking at its innocent excess and wanting to hurt Amir—how dare he—still—still?! “Chhi,” I had said icily, “only a Musalman could have such taste. I couldn’t wear it anywhere—except perhaps to my funeral pyre.” After he disappeared, I wore it every day for a while, sentimentally, wrapping it around myself even in the June blaze.
Even the time of discord had passed, though; in the stasis of daily chores—we started looking for jobs—a dull calm came. I was itching to apply myself to something once again, now that my only project—Amir, love, escape—had seeped into conclusion without much travesty. But that Amir would not have. The fishbone could not be allowed to dissolve.
Since our departure from the town, once the ensuing storm quieted, the old Facebook group had also fallen largely silent. At 2:47 a.m., while I was sleeping next to him, Amir roused it.
“i dont feel good at all” was what he posted.
No one knew how to respond to such a line of attack. For hours, no one said anything, till a girl—I knew her, Pihu was her name—commented, “Wat happened?” Sad emoji. And then another, also a girl: “It wil b ok amir.”
A fake account with a Shiva profile picture replied to both of them: “You Hindu girls love that nalla, don’t you?”
Within minutes, the group was awake again. All the profile pictures changed to Hindu gods, tridents, om symbols, saffron flags. There were threats to track down our IP address. Amir shook with laughter, waking me up.
“Oh you’ve gone insane,” I said, and clasped his head to my chest. “What have you done, mad child? They will find us now.” I hadn’t finished speaking when I heard a deluge of stones dropping on the terracotta ceiling. I clutched his head tighter, his nose digging into my chest. He would not stop laughing. “Amir, stop it! Don’t you hear the stones?”
“Stones!” he exclaimed, his laughter turning into breathless snickering. “It’s raining, jaana.”
It was indeed. The patilas under the holes were filling.
We had been in the room for a month by then. I slept with his face between my breasts that night, myself coiled like a snake around his body. If I had to, I would ingest him for safekeeping. But when I woke up once again—it was still dark, not much time could have passed—he was sitting on the floor facing the wall, rocking on his haunches. When I touched his back, I found the body filling with fever. I patted the hair down and rubbed the back, gripped the searing neck to hold the motion. “Stop it, jaan, stop it, stop it,” I chanted in the ear, straddling the back, but the buzzing wouldn’t stop. After a while, I withdrew and sat on the bed, watching.
Several hours later, after the rain had died down, he quit swaying, turned around and said brightly, “Wow, was it raining just now? Imagine it was so hot morning mein—” He got up and came to bed, and eventually, we slept.
The next time I awoke I found him gone. I can’t say I was surprised. The heat of the day had eaten every last drop of rain, but the patilas under the holes were full. Amir had inexplicably taken the jackfruit.
*
To everyone in our hometown, as things stood, it was not that Amir had betrayed Ria or a man had betrayed a woman. These details were not important. To them, a Muslim had betrayed a Hindu. Another case of love jihad—averted, fortunately. The nikah did not happen. Amir did not exist as far as I was concerned: this was, in fact, a commutation of his sentence—one that I’d fought tooth and nail for. Initially, papa had wanted to file a case of kidnapping against him. I will go stand in the bazaar with a loudspeaker and tell everyone it’s not true, I had said.
It had been a year since the disappearance. Finally I had started waking early—at a time when I had no work in the world; no one had said anything about me going back to college. At that hour, the sky would be congealed bruise-like over the trees; the first crows came to perch on the roof parapet, their heads laden with sleep. In the distance, a red obstruction light blinked atop the telephone tower, as though someone were sending me a signal across a great expanse of time. Amir, of course. Anything can become a portal to someone who has been lost. In fact, the one who is lost becomes the answer to the whole world. I had scarcely thought of anything else all year—all the world one name, one metaphor, one refrain. Amir.
A few days earlier, his ammi had called me once again. She had taken to doing that from time to time; I didn’t know how she had discovered my number, or why she trusted me even though I lived in the middle of the enemy camp and though the unhinged scale of punishment had weighed down cruelly upon her son’s lone back.
The party workers had ransacked their house in course of the investigation into Amir Khan, although no one could explain why that had necessitated cutting off his mother’s gas and water supply, pillaging her kitchen and breaking her furniture. She continued to live there, though, in the dark, giving passersby a fright as she suddenly appeared at the window by the street.
Our phone conversations never lasted long.
Any news?
No. There?
No.
He’s dead, she had declared the last time she called me. Hah. How did she know?
If someone went missing for long enough, he had to be presumed dead.
It’s only been a year, I said.
It’s long enough, she snapped, before admitting, much more quietly: It’d be easier on us—forgive me, Allah—if he were. Dead.
What does Islam say about missing people? I asked.
I don’t know, she said. He is my son and I am pronouncing him dead. He has caused me enough trouble.
For some time, neither of us spoke.
Why did you call me, I asked.
The iddah period has been long over. You can marry someone else.
The iddah period. To be counted since his presumed death—and though there has been no janazah and no nikah?
Yes.
I thanked her.
Do not be bitter, I meant no malice, she said, almost plaintive. I hear they are already looking for a new boy for you. What will you do—will you say yes?
Must you be so invested in my second marriage as well?
I know you loved him, she said after a pause. Only you knew how to. That boy has dragged everyone through hell…The way he would call out to the birds, when he was small, one tiny sliver of a boy. She paused again, remembering. I should go light the candles before it gets too dark—
Wait. Did you used to be a fan of Amir Khan?
No, but I am of Amir Khusrow.
I wondered if Amir had ever learnt of this. Actually, I was named after the great, the mystic Amir Khusrow—but I wouldn’t expect you villagers to know about him.
He could’ve told them that, had he known.
But no, if I was being realistic, that’s not what he would say.
Amir, do you know you were named after Amir Khusrow, not Amir Khan?
Amir who?
Khusrow. Amir Khusrow.
Who is Amir Khusrow?
Me. I’m Amir Khusrow, risen from the dead. Sorry I asked.
The day of the disappearance, a team from the town had gone to Delhi, as correctly anticipated by the absconder. Amir’s friend trailed behind the gang as they climbed upstairs, his head hung low. The constable was at the front, followed by a number of party workers, my parents ashen-faced in the back, guilty by association. The purohit was also there for some reason, holy chalice in hand. Perhaps he was expecting to have to perform an exorcism. A woman constable was also in the back, in case I was the one who needed tackling. With Amir gone, though, I no longer had any special interest in the idea of freedom, or any pressing need for it. I submitted without struggle.
After we came back here, I was investigated twice a day for a while regarding the whereabouts of Amir, but the sincerity of my ignorance had eventually convinced them. For some time, they continued to keep tabs on the Old Delhi house, in case he turned up—maybe he left something—but gave up later on, for the betrayal of the mullah would have been absolute and there could be no change of heart and such other fallacies of the romantic sort.
You’ve slept with him, haven’t you? mummy asked me one night. No, I said, we had been playing Ludo all the while.
He’s not coming back for you.
I hope he doesn’t. That way no one ever finds him.
And though the fact of his betrayal was undisputed, in the middle of the night, when I thought of his face, all too green, too young, troubled by my censorious love and bristly jokes, I had a nagging feeling that it was I—I who had deceived him. All day I wandered about the house, waiting for the page to turn.
My phone had been dead since the return. I didn’t get any notifications or calls save for the ones from Amir’s ammi. So when it started vibrating frantically—1: 22 a.m.—I knew.
“Hello everyone,” said the post. “I am in Delhi house. Tomorrow night I will drink the moon.”
*
The townsfolk congregated. The signs were clear, pandit ji said: Amir was a manifestation of Ketu, the asura who had, as per the Puranas, tried to swallow the moon and caused the Chandra grahan—the lunar eclipse—during the Churning of the Oceans. It was the one time it did not matter that Amir was a Muslim—and this was Hindu mythology.
Indeed, the lunar eclipse was to occur the next night. Evil, they said. He has planned a mystical desecration, an attack on the spirit of the town—no, the spirit of India itself. He had even allowed time for the townspeople to get to Delhi by train.
Let me come along, I said to mummy-papa. Need to see him one last time. They agreed, because, if all went to plan, witnessing the end of Amir Khan would do me good. Say the Surah Yasin when the death throes begin, his ammi said on the phone.
Throes?
She chanted the surah into my ear, as though I were the one dying.
*
In Delhi, the moon was high up in the sky and intact. On the roof, the stunned and silent audience stood around, given pause by the entirely unarmed culprit, who was now praying in a corner. Although the party workers did not usually care for such minutiae, this was, after all, not some kind of whimsical murder. It was an execution, and the convict should be afforded a last prayer.
After the isha, he opened his eyes and calmly surveyed the team. He had on what looked like a bright white jubbah. The childlike greenness was gone from his face—instead, the stillness and composure of a holy grave. A dargah of a boy.
I closed my eyes and recited the Surah Yasin under my breath. I did not know how—I knew no Arabic and could not have memorised it, but it seemed to have been sitting under my tongue. They were right, weren’t they, Amir? I thought. You have converted me—
No one said a word or moved, all of us deathly, moonstruck figures, caught in the mouth of a spell. When I opened my eyes, through the tears, I watched Amir materialise as though he were made of tears himself. When he climbed onto the platform, next to the water cistern, and beckoned us with his fingers, we went quietly, all of us shuffling together, climbing and gathering around obediently. Thus far, Amir had shown no partiality towards me, no sign of recognition. But now, he turned to me suddenly, smiled and said, “Don’t cry.”
So many times, on so many occasions, I had easily dumped into his open palms the bruised sack of my sensitivities and demanded that he repair it, so many times his desperate apologies had, frankly, entertained me—but tonight, this simple, somewhat callous acknowledgement from him had me sobbing freely. He watched me curiously, attempting to decide on a course of action. After a minute, he reached inside his jubbah and produced, miraculously, our jackfruit—whole, peeled, glistening like the washed face of a child—and placed it in my hands. Before I knew how to respond, he had turned his attention back on the cistern and forgotten me for ever.
He looked around to make sure he still had everyone’s attention. Once satisfied, he removed the lid of the cistern and gestured at his still-spellbound audience to come closer and look inside. We did—standing like this, so close to him, I smelled something familiar—Axe body spray—
In the water, the moon had appeared. Amir thrust his head inside and like a beast, lapped it up with his tongue.
In the sky, the eclipse began. And though the desolation of the devout around us only grew with the queer, gurgling noise emanating from the cistern, I knew it, beyond a doubt, to be the sound of garbled giggling. Fatq. Ratq.
Shaoni is a senior editor at Aleph Book Company. Previously, she has worked with The Hindu and People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). Her work has appeared in Frontline, Sunday Magazine, The Hindu, and The Quint.