Family Remains II

[toujours_nigel]

So it's about Diwali, according to the crackers that have been assaulting my ears all bloody day (applegnat, I take back everything I said about this being relatively quiet, oh my god, they'd just not got to the 'best' stuff) which has nothing to do with the story save that this is a Diwali gift to applegnatand 22by7who listen to me rant about this and other stories and never tell me to stop babbling.

This story is:

a) not mine.
b) slashy.
c) rated R for het sex.
d) post-film.
e) AU.
f) following directly from this.
g) proving to be longer than I'd thought.

He drives home with the sun beating down and Mumbai loud in his ears, and sneaks upstairs like a kid coming home after curfew. Ashmit waits till after he has showered and banged his head against the wall and raps against the doorframe when he’s throwing things into a bag to the rhythm of Dada practising on the shooting-range overhead. At least it isn’t Malati-di.

 

“Dada asked for you.”

 

He throws the mulberry tangle of his newest shirt—fruits of the shopping spree with Sweety—on the floor and contemplates leaving boot-prints all over it. “When?”

 

“Malati-di came in with your tea in the morning.” They both pause expectantly while Ashmit favours him with an insinuating smile. “I’ve been waiting ever since.” Our Mikhail-da, such a philanderer, who knows who he was with, tchtchtch. “Will you go now?”

 

“Yeah.” He pulls down half a dozen shirts at random. “Pack this for me.”

 

Which, while it gets rid of Ashmit—and exactly who’s letting Malati-di hire whosoever she wants?—leaves him to trudge up the stairs rehearsing the inevitable ‘arre, amader hero bari phirechhe tahle etokkhone’ conversation and trying to shut away Charlie’s eyes.

 

The stone of the roof is baking under his feet and Dada a gun-toting silhouette that he can’t make out the colours of even with a hand over his eyes and his body is beginning to make known the aches of sleeping on a hard bed against a hard body and his head is pounding with the lack of food. “Dekechhile?”

 

“Mashimoni kaalke phone korechhilen,” Dada says, hands his rifle off. Someone moves against the sun to replace the target. “Malati-di dhorechhilo.”

 

Unholy nexus. Iya Allah. “Shob bole diyechhe?’

 

“Besh kichhuta bariye, in fact.” Dada sighs, graven lines deepening. “Mohila threaten korchhen police-e khobor deben.”

 

“Tai naki?” It has been rather quiet on the eastern front this year.

 

“Nahle baniye bolchhi naki?”

 

“Bolle mondo hoy na, actually.” Dada’s bought new armaments, that’s why the explosions today, testing it all out. “Sweety’r ekta pishi na mashi ache khub dangerous. Besh interesting hobe, dekhte.”

 

“Ki baje bokchhish?” He raises one shoulder in a shrug—why the hell not? “Amader nam-e complain korbe, gadha.”

 

“Ki niye?” Well, she won’t, of course, she never does, but Mashimoni’s Mashimoni, and best steered clear of.

 

“Ami jani naki?” He picks up something smaller, dainty, ivory-handled—a girl’s gun, exquisite. “Mashimoni-r mathar kono tthik ache?”

 

“Psychiatrist dekhate bolo.” Sounder in the head than they are, old cow.

 

Dada fixes him with a cold stare till he stops fidgeting, puts the gun down, straightens out of his slouch, shoulders back and spine straight like the most obedient of foot-soldiers in a private war. “Go see her.” Let it be written and let it be done, like it’s a fucking edict, like he’s as easily ordered around at twenty-six as he never was at sixteen. “She misses you. Take Charlie,” like that’s a sop, like that’ll help, like he wants to be imprisoned into a farcical mirroring of domesticity with Charlie.

 

“I’m going to Goa,” he says, turns on his heel and down the stairs, one hand tight around the bag wrenched from Ashmit’s hand after a quick detour to his room, and into his car before he’s let out breath and driving like Mumbai’s dissolved beneath his wheels like someone else’s heart’s desire.

 

He stops at city-limits to message Dada that yes, he’ll go to bloody Kolkata, because he’s a good kid, and would Sweety and Guddu care to come along as well, and not to get tickets sooner than a week, because he’s so fucking exhausted with lying around in Mumbai that he wants a week of lying around in Goa before he has to go lie around in Kolkata with the lover he can’t have, the brother he hates and the pseudo-sister-in-law that’s been foisted on them both. His life, what a fucking brilliant soap-opera. Ekta Kapoor’d kill to get her hands on it.

 

***

 

Goa is endless shots of alcohol on beaches and in rooms and the arms of willing, laughing people he lets sponge off him, and the woman, mocha skin and coffee-bean eyes who settles beside him on the fifth day—on the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me…—and companionably steals his joint and sits with it dangling from her manicured fingers, blue smoke curling up to mingle with her black curls, and laughs at him when he compliments her and turns her face against his ruined shirt and cries in inaudible sobs, eyeliner running against the fabric while he puts a trembling arm around her and thinks about drying her tears. But he’s only ever made people laugh by showing himself for the fool he is—can’t cut his leading strings, cause puppets must be made to dance—and fuck if he’s going to do that for some addled bitch he doesn’t know the name of.

 

But she’s got mocha skin and coffee-bean eyes and a soft pliant mouth that parts when he kisses it and lets him pull her to her feet and stumble off, arms around each other, to fuck sloppily in his room, skin to latex to skin because fuck if he’s gonna get stuck with some bitch having his kid, and fuck if he’s fucking when he can’t put a condom on. She laughs and laughs when he fumbles and moans when he uses his mouth on her and helps him roll the Kohinoor on, afterwards, like masturbating him, her eyes on his the wall behind his shoulder like she’s seeing someone else, like her black clothes aren’t party wear but mourning.

 

She doesn’t get up and leave, slip into the black lace lingerie he’s tossed anywhere he can throw and offer muttered explanations—husband, child, brother, lesbian—for why she’s slipping out the door, like he doesn’t want her to leave, like an orgasm or three isn’t what they came together for. But she sits up, in a hard chair on the other side of the room, and flexes her right calf like it hurts her, and looks out at the sea and the moon and the beautiful people partying and tells him her name like she owes him that—like it’s a fee, now you know who scratched tiger-claws down your back, now you can add a name to your roster—and her life like it’s blood flowing back into her wound. Her name’s Vivienne, she was married, her husband died, her daughter’s been taken to her mother’s house, she can’t bear the idea of leaving India, falalalalala. One last night, one last fuck, one last beautiful man to soothe the appetite she’s kept for the dead husband. Wife of so-and-so, some major ganglord, some minor god to his men, and what would they think, beautiful Vivienne, did they see you shameless and sinful, when your husband’s barely cold in his grave—how long ago, did you say? Two months? Three? I nearly died three months ago, I wish I had—when your brother died for greed and his twisted love for you?

 

He laughs her from the room, in the end, gets up from the bed and rots around naked under it and behind the closet and behind the chairs to find her bra, panties, dress, heels, watch, earrings, purse. Dresses her himself, hands harsh and hurried and stops her mouth with teeth and tongue every time she tries to speak. He puts his weight against the door when he’s shut her out—tossed her out like so much rubbish, all his lust dead—and laughs till he think he might cry, like she had. Of course he hooks up with a black widow instead of the easy, pretty, drunken girls he’s had the night before, the laughing, heavy-set man ten years older sometime earlier in the week. Of course she would talk, talk, talk till he came floating down, a kite with its string cut and no kite-runner in sight—fuck it, he’ll keep flying, just never fall, the other sort of kite with talons and cruel, crooked beak.

 

But it’s too late—always too late, except to dodge the bullet, there he’d been fast. Fuck it. Sobriety’s lurking somewhere just down the paint-peeled corridor, and his phone chooses this moment to make its presence known, drilling a hole into his skull to match the ones being drilled outwards. Somewhere between Mumbai and Goa, he’d switched it off, but kept it a heavy reassuring weight in his pocket, and pulled it out last night—the night before? How many days has he been here?—to photograph the coy, squealing girls, the shy smile from the boy who’d let himself be drunk under the table and rested his aching heavy head on his arm. He’s got 57 messages, 30 missed calls, Dada, Shumon-da, Mansoor, Charlie, Sweety. He deletes them all unread and goes off in search—in that order—of pants and good coffee. It’s been five days.

 

***

 

He peels back into Mumbai in the pelting rain, skin, clothes, upholstery all soaked—the last few days, the RJ tells him, like she’s not making it up, the last few days and drops of rain before crisp autumn skies. He loves the way the rain makes people sloppy and miserable and far-too-self-occupied to notice two boys kissing in the rain on the rocks off Marine Drive, and the fact that the horse they’ve bet on has been replaced by a lame ringer—Salma and Faizal, his chestnut beauties—and that they’re going to lose their life’s savings. And the way Ashmit looks like a drowned puppy, waiting for him on the side of the road, like he’ll go peeling off down the rail tracks to confess his sins and beg forgiveness, like Charlie’s not someone he doesn’t particularly want to see, like his head doesn’t still throb with the arrhythmic beat of a hundred hammers.

 

“What? What do you want?” Everybody wants somebody…

 

Boy skitters like a puppy kicked in the face and stands his ground in the shelter of Dada’s Jeep. “Your train is in three hours. Malati-di said to wait for you.”

 

“Three hours?”

 

“Yes, Mikhail-da.” He minces two steps back, five steps forward, tries to take his bag. “I’ll unpack for you.”

 

He thinks of teasing the kid about whatever this is, hero-worship, crush, idiocy—who thought it smart to give him constant access to very-willing jailbait, anyway?—pressing him up against the nearest car and mauling him, or, for a change of pace—he’s all fuck-out, all fucked-up—pressing the blade of the knife sheathed down the small of his back to his throat and watch his Adam’s apple jump, but he’s too tired, too old, too in the throes of coming down from the longest-drawn-out high he’s had in months, this year, and he lets the kid take his bag and walks a step ahead of him up the stairs and straight into his bathroom, and soaks till his fingers prune and Ashmit bangs urgently on the door, telling him there’s just two hours left, now, and does he want lunch, does he want coffee, does he want his Punjabis packed or just his shirts?

 

Yes and yes and yes and they make it into Mumbai Central with fifteen minutes to go and Ashmit sprints the length of the platform with him, bag flailing wildly at more sedate passers-by, and comes up into the compartment with him and puts his luggage away while Sweety stands up and fusses at him under guise of supervision, and by the time he drops back out, the train has started moving and they’re both laughing hysterically. This is how he used to laugh with Charlie, he thinks irrelevantly, and looks up at the top bunk which Charlie and his duffel have claimed for their own, and has to drop his eyes from the too-knowing glance.

 

He throws himself into the lower bunk opposite Sweety and Guddu—beneath Charlie, away from his eyes. “We thought you were going to miss the train,” Sweety ventures, when nobody else speaks.

 

“So did I,” he shoots back, smile wide and sincere and entirely-fake.

 

*** *** ***

 

Translations:

 

arre, amader hero bari phirechhe tahle etokkhone: arre, look, our hero’s finally deigned to return home.

Dekechhile: you called

Mashimoni kaalke phone korechhilen, Malati-di dhorechhilo: Mashimoni (Auntie) called yesterday, Malati-di picked up.

Shob bole diyechhe: Told (her) everything

Besh kichhuta bariye, in fact. Mohila threaten korchhen police-e khobor deben.: With exaggerations, in fact. Woman’s threatened to inform the police.

Tai naki: Really

Nahle baniye bolchhi naki: So am I making it up

Bolle mondo hoy na, actually. Sweety’r ekta pishi na mashi ache khub dangerous. Besh interesting hobe, dekhte.: Wouldn’t be half-bad if she did, actually. Sweety has an aunt wjo’s very dangerous. Be interesting to watch.

Ki baje bokchhish: What rot are you talking?

Amader nam-e complain korbe, gadha: She’ll complain about us, idiot.

Ki niye: What about

Ami jani naki: Like I know

Mashimoni-r mathar kono tthik ache: Who knows what goes on in Mashimoni’s head.

Psychiatrist dekhate bolo: Ask her to consult a psychiatrist.