Here by Arka Bani Maini
She tapped her finger once at the hollow where the collarbones met.
Here
Here, she says.
The wind and darkness entered through the window of the car’s backseat. Tuberose everywhere. My hand was sweaty and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I kept rubbing it on my Dragonball-Z T-shirt.
Here, a whisper again. Slight impatience. This time she stretched her neck like showing a doctor the source of her misery. Kiss me, here. I readjusted my posture. Her lips were lined with the tamarind chutney my mother had served us with hot luchis. My favorite. I struggled to find a place for my hand. The hem of her white frock spread across her thighs and yellow flip-flops were dangling from her feet. Her legs were bony and had grown longer than mine. But they had had three more years to grow. Everything above the hem was an unknown frontier so I placed my hand on her knees and leaned in.
She breathes out and relocates the finger to her chin. Now, here.
I didn’t know why, but the crumbs on her frock looked as tempting as the luchi they were once a part of, but I kept obeying her orders. Her fingers led me to tricky terrains – the nape of her neck, a mole tucked beneath her earlobes, the edge of her shoulders… she smelled like that soap bar found in every middle-class household of 90’s India. Okay, now here.
I didn’t know a lot of things then. We didn’t have phones, computers, or the right kind of magazines. Our movies didn’t have breasts and when the hero and the heroine got too close, a marigold would pop out of nowhere and start quivering. I did overhear school seniors discussing a phuta, a hole, something that only girls seem to have but I didn’t know what it looked like or where I could find one. And I didn’t know why my susu felt nice under running tap water. But Wahida was older and she had a lot of friends, so maybe she knew. Hence I kept quiet and followed her finger.
She pushes aside her shoulder strap to make more space. Here…
“Gaurav, coming for the night show?”, Suneel cranes his neck above my cubicle and breaks my reverie. “Adnan is treating us for his promotion and all. But not fair, man. It should have been you.”
“I’ll come”, I reply and get back to my spreadsheet.
It’s been more than a decade now since I spoke to Wahida. But sometimes at night, when I am alone and the wind and the darkness gush in through the netted windows of my bedroom, I think of Wahida and the hollow of her collarbones.
We are sitting in the second last row of the theatre and Wahida appears on the screen wearing a purple bikini. Suneel is beside me, his hands and mouth stuffed with caramel popcorn, a few rolling down his shirt intermittently.
Everyone knew Wahida would become a movie star or a model or both. She was also the class topper in math, but that didn’t matter because when a girl is pretty, these things don’t matter to people. In the evenings Wahida came home to help me with my math homework. Sometimes we played cricket, but she would soon get bored and ask me to get my dad’s car keys. It wasn’t a fancy car but her parents didn’t have one and she was always eager to get into ours and make stories.
“You are my husband and we are going on a vacation, okay? Tell the driver to take us to America.”
When I kept gaping, she would poke my tummy.
“Driver, drive the car to America”, I would speak out at the empty front seat and get into character. She was the writer, director, and star of her plays. And I was happy to perform whatever role she assigned me.
When Wahida stopped playing cricket with me, I joined an academy. By seventh grade, I was playing inter-school tournaments. I remember a match with the boys from St.Edmund’s where I had a five-wicket haul. The news made it to the sports page of the local newspaper. I could become a cricketer, I thought. A lot of movie stars were marrying cricketers in those days.
But in high school I gave up playing to focus on my academics because my parents realized cricket wasn’t an option anymore. I was good, but not good enough. A lot of movie stars also marry movie stars but I couldn’t have become that either. All sorts of weird things were growing on my face and my body was shaping up rather disproportionately. My place in the backseat was taken over by older and better-looking boys.
She smiled at me though, Wahida, whenever we crossed each other in the school corridor. And sometimes she would hug me, but only when no one was around because she didn’t want more rumors.
Wahida is lying in bed wearing a satin camisole and reading a love letter.
“See this?” Suneel tugs at my shirt and mutters to ensure Adnan doesn’t overhear him. “I don’t understand why their women are so desperate to wear hijab and all. I mean look at her.”
I ignore him and focus on the movie. Wahida’s smile really makes you feel nice, good. The predictions came true. She had grown to be an achingly beautiful woman.
Later we go to our usual watering hole. Rajashekhar, a fresher, is being inducted into our group by Suneel. “Oh, did you know Gaurav used to go to the same school as Wahida Khan?” Raj looks at me expectantly. “Go on, tell him the story”, Suneel keeps nudging me.
“There is no story. We were friends in school and played cricket together. That’s all.” I gulp some beer hoping to end the conversation but Suneel has this smirk that keeps bothering me so I continue. “And sometimes we would get into the backseat of my dad’s car and pretend we were going on a drive.”
Everyone is or pretends to be delighted by this anecdote but Raj is stuck on some afterthought. “Why the backseat, Gaurav da? Why didn’t you get on the front?”
Raj was fresh out of college and there was an innocence on his face that I remember from our days of being freshers. It made me smile. “We were kids, yaar. We didn’t know shit”.
When Wahida was nineteen she fell in love with a guy in his thirties. Nobody in her family knew about this. But I did. We used to talk sometimes, mostly when Wahida was falling in or out of love and she wanted to confide. When she told me the man had proposed her I thought she was lying to make me jealous. It’s just a phase, I told her. You will get over him just like that. I snapped my fingers but I don’t think she heard it through the phone.
She did get over him eventually but not before signing a marriage contract and attempting to run away. Her parents locked her up. I wanted to meet her, but my dad decided it was best we cut ties. Only at night when all our guardians had gone to sleep could I call her from the house phone and she just kept crying. When I think of it now, maybe I should have crawled out my window and climbed in through hers. Held her too and not just listen. Maybe that would have changed things.
Her parents told her that all Hindu guys are like that. She was laughing when she told me this, but maybe she half-believed it. Finally, she decided to become an actor. By then she had matured enough to disregard any parental resistance. “Focus on your twelfth board exams, okay?” she told me before leaving the city. “And don’t make girlfriends; not till you are successful. Else, you will become a fuck up like me.” I think she meant that straight up but I heard something entirely different. That was the last time I heard her voice. She sounded more like a caring sister and less like someone with whom I had once made marigolds dance to the wind.
I come home with my leftover Biryani and put it in the refrigerator. There is a dusty field facing my house and a few slum kids are playing cricket with a makeshift bat. The batsman hits the ball over midwicket. Not a bad shot but he needs to widen his stance and lift the bat higher. Maybe I should tell him someday. I switch off the balcony lights.
Inside, a smell, or its lack thereof makes me pull out a room freshener and spray the corners of my bedroom. Misty Tuberose. There is a weak hiss and vapors but nothing else.
I lie on my bed. Knock…knock… the ball keeps hitting the willow. I try to fall asleep before it gets too quiet. There are rumors that Wahida is dating Arbaaz Siddiqui now. They met while shooting her last movie.
Hey, look, here. I open my eyes. There is a calendar on the wall that has all 365 days listed out flat on a page. An office gift. Lots of space to write your to-dos. The daily targets. Should I call her and cry?
I scroll through Wahida’s Instagram. Somewhere midway is a picture of her posing for a jewelry company. A string of pearls resting on her collarbones. Here.
The calendar is empty but I know tomorrow is Thursday and I have to present my weekly numbers in the open-house just like I have been doing for the past seven years. I must sleep.
I slide my hands inside my pajamas and keep scrolling. There is one in a black lingerie appended by strangers with comments and symbols. Heart. Heart. Heart. Take them fully off na. Peach and Banana. Love you baby. Love you too much. Boycott this slut. Ma’am you are best. Biting lips. Is that Sweat? Cum? Ooooh. This is just disgusting. Gorgeous darling. Absolutely disgusting. Banana and Peach. Go to Pakistan. Blushing smile. Aaaaaah. Ufffff. Too much. Can I bite you? Aubergine. Lots of aubergines… caramel popcorn drooling out of Suneel’s mouth. I feel like punching someone. But I am just too exhausted.
Putting my phone aside, I gaze at the calendar. Black numbers and black letters except for Sundays which are red. The past laid out with blanks waiting to be filled.
Hey, here.
January 1. Her legs are soft and slender and fully grown. Now, here. We are riding a motorbike. February 16. She tells me we are made for each other. Now I smell that tuberose. Knock! The square cut was just phenomenal. What a shot, man! what a fucking shot. March 31. Here. I tell my parents to go fuck themselves. I am marrying Wahida. She does the same. June 4. She takes that finger and places it between her eyes. And Here. I am in Australia playing for the national team. She is shooting a film in Paris. It’s hard but we make it work. Kiss me, here. August 11. She buys me a leather jacket for my birthday. Okay now here. September 1. We have sex in the kitchen. October 27. Our anniversary. We got married in a secret ceremony many moons ago and no one knows about it. See? Here. December 9. What would I do without you, Wahida? Tell me. Please. December 31. I get a new calendar and rewrite everything the same way. Here…here…and now here.
You are not a fuck up, I had told her in our last phone call. I hope she remembers that.
But look, when the lights are out and the kids have gone home, the field looks just like a desert. In it, nothing grows.
Arka Bani Maini is a writer/translator from Assam, a state in India’s Northeast. He also works as a UX Designer for a non-profit and holds an MS in Education Technology from Carnegie Mellon University. He is currently working towards getting his first novel published. Reach him at – abmzone@gmail.com
10 November 2023
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