The Two Krishnas (26 page)

He closed his eyes, sending his prayer forth.

In asking for Rahul, Atif had asked for everything. In the womb of silence, his desire began its gestation. As he felt the breath enter and leave his body effortlessly, he knew one other thing. That granted wishes were not always the reward for goodness or worthiness. Sometimes the gods gave you precisely what you asked for but only as a means to punish you with eventual deprivation.

* * *

It was dusk by the time Atif stepped out onto the balcony and noticed the girls huddled around the metal fencing below with candles, wild flowers, incense and books. Phyllis, seated in the middle, rocked back and forth as she read from a book in her hands. Still in the faded blue
kurta
that he had slept in, Atif went down to them, the sleep deprivation and hunger now making him feel feverish. Phyllis looked up at him as he approached and said, “Are you one of Anaïs’ friends?”

“Yeah.” He noticed a photograph of the rambunctious cat by the candle and flowers and began to fully realize the ceremonious nature of their gathering.

She extended her hand, “I’m Phyllis.”

“Yes, I know,” he said, barely touching her hand.

Phyllis was in her twenties, had startling green eyes and a beautiful, trusting face framed by shoulder-length wheat blonde hair. She moved aside to make space for him on the blue and black striped blanket they had spread out over the pavement and the girls shuffled to accommodate him too. “Here, why don’t you join us?” she patted the spot next to her.

He sank down next to her, Anaïs staring back at him from the photo taped to the fence with her wide, alert, gleaming, golden eyes. Bunches of rose and spears of lavender had been wreathed through the metal mesh, and an anthology of Anaïs Nin—who he now realized had inspired her christening—sat next to the gently flickering pink candle with an image of the Virgin Mother on the glass tube. The scent of the bromidic Nag Champa incense hung in the air.

Phyllis introduced the three other girls and he managed to smile weakly, not caring to remember any of the names. “She crossed over yesterday. She got herself stuck,” she said. “Right there.” She pointed to one of the openings in the fence. He imagined the cat’s fragile neck caught in the wire, struggling, asphyxiating.

He couldn’t help thinking that this was the very phrase that was used in the circuit clubs when describing someone who had binged on a cocktail of drugs and fallen into a K-hole or collapsed with an overdose of GHB. Crossing over. Last night, had they crossed over at the same time? Where had he been at the exact moment this had happened?

“One of our neighbors, Jim, he heard her but it was too late by the time he came down. Did you know her well?” she asked, smiling, clearly wanting to celebrate life more than to mourn its passing.

“Yeah,” he said and cleared his throat. “She was like a little dog.”

The girls laughed approvingly. “Yeah! Yeah, totally!” she said. “She was like a little puppy.”

“I even saw her scare a dog once,” he shared, smiling. “I couldn’t believe it. The owner asked me, ‘Whose cat is this? I’ve never seen my dog so terrified!’ and I told him it was mine.”

But in fact he had never claimed ownership of Anaïs and he wasn’t quite sure why he had just lied. He could still see the uncharacteristically responsive kitten intersecting his path, throwing herself on her back and clawing in the air imploringly at him, rolling back up and doing it over and over again until he gave in to her at least for a few minutes and played with her, nuzzling her and rubbing her coat to the appreciative sound of husky purrs.

Phyllis gently placed her hand on his, understanding somehow. “Thank you for loving her,” she said.

It became impossible for him not to believe that something much bigger, more irrevocable was happening now, as if the universe was systematically revoking everything he cared about or which had kept his life in some kind of equilibrium. As he looked at Anaïs’ photo, the pools of her eyes glowing back at him, he knew that he should have cried but nothing came, his eyes remaining strangely dry.

* * *

By the end of his workday, his pain was so unbearable that all Atif wanted to do was curl up in bed and never rise again. Whether it was the aftermath of the drug or his delayed response to the losses he had suffered in the last two days—perhaps a lethal combination of both—his body verged on keeling over.

When in love, he thought, life was charged with an energy permeating everything so that one felt truly alive. Existence found its significance. Fulfillment reached a zenith. And despite all of life’s accumulated cruelties, innocence returned miraculously—why else did lovers insist on making baby-talk even at the risk of appearing ridiculous? But now that the love was gone, he felt sapped, as if the current that had kept him alive had been depleted. He couldn’t bear to look at the center divider across the bookstore, at that consecrated ground where Rahul had come for him.

Becca, always soaking in her own pain, focused on Atif for a change, forcing upon him cups of herbal teas that promised therapeutic benefit and expertly tending to customers while Atif slumped in a corner of the bookstore every chance he got. Even the bright-eyed white boy who took his post by the Eastern Studies shelf like clockwork, and whom Atif had humorously dubbed “
Gora
Guru” failed to inspire or entertain him with his spiritual meanderings on life. This time, the boy had looked up at him with the same clear green eyes and saintly smile, and perhaps intuitively responding to Atif’s pain, volunteered how he had escaped a potentially fatal car accident and the totaling of his car; then spoke on the merits of non-attachment so that he sounded like he would soon be embarking a space ship to some distant empyrean nebula with Deepak Chopra. And only now could Atif actually see how well-intentioned advice could come off sounding insensitive and condescending in the face of devastating pain.

What the hell could he possibly know about the kind of life Atif had led? How could anyone dare suggest there was still something he had to glean from the rejections in his life?

It was just as well that the opulently dressed Indian woman whom Atif had spotted scrutinizing the store with her pencil-browed eyes over the last week or so, the one who never bought anything, hotfooted over to introduce herself to the “
Gora
Guru” in the most forthright manner, completely ignoring Atif.

“Oh, my! What an impressive grasp you have on the subject! Forgive me, please, but I just could not help listening to all the remarkable things you were saying. Now how did a young boy like you get so much wisdom,
henh?
My name, it’s Sonali Patel. You can call me Soni. And you? You are?” She extended a hand bedecked with dark gold bangles to the surprised boy. She completely overlooked Atif and he excused himself with a polite smile, feeling instantly distrustful of her.

He drove home reluctantly past spirited joggers on San Vincente Boulevard. All day he had struggled to escape the confines of the bookstore, yet now the thought of returning to the empty apartment petrified him. The only place that Atif wanted to be, he couldn’t. In his desperation, Atif imagined showing up at Rahul’s, calling him again, hoping he had changed his mind. But if his own parents hadn’t reverted to acceptance, forgiveness, what expectation could he hope for from others?

We are told that we must learn pain so we shall know compassion
, he thought.
So we may know His mercy, His forgiveness. But why must we learn it in the first place? Why should we have to feel anything other than happiness? Why must we have to find our way back to enlightenment? If we never asked to be born, to learn such lessons, and were simply thrust into the morass of life, then why couldn’t we have been born with those values inherent so that we wouldn’t have to clamber through its harsh peaks only to learn lessons we never asked to learn in the first place?

He would have begged for strength, for Rahul, for some kind of understanding, but by now the certitude he had experienced on the dance floor had vanished and was replaced by a hot wave of hate for the god that had orchestrated his perdition. There are others who are happier, he thought, those who have found love and have never had to observe any kind of penance for it. Providence came to them naturally, as if love in all its nuances—from parents, lovers, friends—was their natural birthright. Not all of them believed in the existence of a higher power. They had the right words; a necessary quota of restraint, an intelligence that could not be taught and which empowered them to draw love closer without soul-crushing sacrifices.

In contrast, I’ve prayed,
he thought bitterly,
not with a
salat
or
namaz
, but with the sincerity of words that need no translation, a dialogue between friends, yet I am without love. Alone. Perhaps I don’t have the right words, maybe too many of them and you’ve turned stone deaf, weary. So tell me, God, how would my life be any worse if I denied you now?

* * *

When Atif reached his apartment, past the dried flowers and depleted candle by the fence, the door was a crack open. He stopped breathing. Upon stepping in, he found Rahul reclining on the leather easy chair, his arm crooked over his face as if asleep or trying to shut the light out from his eyes. He must have gasped because right then Rahul came to, looked up at him.

Atif dropped his satchel by the door, unsure if he could believe his eyes, unsure how to react. Rahul sat up. Taking an audible, labored breath, Atif remained rooted to the spot, every pore in his body hungering for Rahul’s skin. He leaned back against the wall, afraid his knees would buckle.

“I know I’ve hurt you,” Rahul said slowly. “I hope you know that I’ve also hurt myself.”

Atif grunted, looked away from him, certain that Rahul could never fathom the depths of such pain. How else could one be capable of inflicting it? While Rahul had managed to function—eating, dressing, defecating, sleeping—without feeling the maniacal, blinding need to be with him, Atif had tasted a kind of annihilation. The last thing Rahul had said to him—about needing time, about not being able to see him—raced through Atif’s mind and he turned his face away.

“Please, just hear me out,” Rahul said. “Please…”

Atif slowly came into the room, still dimly illuminated by the day’s receding light, and stood across from Rahul against the glass panes of the French window. He noticed that Rahul’s face looked worn, deep lines scored his face. The room, once dancing with the sounds of their lovemaking and mirth and music, swelled again with deafening silence.

The conflict of desire and anger within him was so overwhelming that he could barely meet Rahul’s eyes. Part of him yearned to throw himself into Rahul’s arms, to never let him go, but even as his body seemed to lean forward, something restrained him. He felt the foolish urge to save Rahul from the encumbrance of his own words, from what he knew was difficult for him to express, and simply let Rahul’s presence, his return, serve as a balm. But another part, still writhing from rejection, afraid that he may be forsaken again without warning, remained apprehensive, scorched.

He struggled to let Rahul finish what he had to say—even if it was what he feared the most—but there was nothing he could do about the welling in his eyes. What made it worse was that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to cry now from his own hurt or that which he sensed in Rahul.

“In so many ways,” said Rahul, “I am in such awe of you. You know yourself so completely, unlike anyone I know. You know, it takes people a whole lifetime, maybe even a few, to figure out who they are—husband, father, son, brother. There was a time when I thought I knew. But for a long time, I…” he swallowed, his eyes dropped. “I’ve made such a mess of everything.”

“But you’ve always been loved,” Atif said emphatically, feeling his own rejection as a son and now, as a lover. Whatever Rahul had done or not done, he was still needed not just by Atif, but also by his own family. He would never know what it was like to have a family that was alive and well but didn’t want you. “It isn’t fair, that you should be loved so much. Why should you? Why should you be able to live while a little part of me dies every day?”

“I’ve been dead for a long time, Atif. Too afraid to look too hard or too deep. To feel too much.” As Rahul recounted the paralysis of his life, he continued without tears, detached, as if delving into the story of someone other than himself. “Then you come along. So passionate. Unafraid. Open. With your books and your music and the sadness in your eyes—,” his voice grew lighter, gentler, “And suddenly, I felt like someone understood, you know? Recognized me.”

Atif’s tears ran, his hand flew to his mouth. “Yes, but you’ll never understand what it’s like to be me. To want someone so much, to want to see them so badly, you can hardly see yourself. Just constant, unending, like phantom pain. A missing leg that still hurts. You’ve led me to this. And my surrender to you, it’s made this possible. All this time, I was safe. I’d made sure of it. Now,” he found it difficult to continue, “now I’m back to where I was. You are everywhere…I’m nowhere.”

Rahul’s remorseful gaze fell away from Atif and he sat hunched from the weight of his actions. Although he had never doubted how much Atif loved him, it was as if he had just recognized Atif’s fragility, how much power he held over the boy’s very existence. Slowly, he rose to his feet like one who had completed an infinitely exhausting journey and went to Atif. A slat of dying sunlight poured in from behind Atif and cut across them, siphoning them between darkness and light. He lifted Atif’s chin, looked into his plaintive, bloodshot eyes. “You are here,” Rahul said, touching his heart.