The Girl with the Golden Parasol

TWENTY-EIGHT

“You’ve stopped going to the gym?” O.P. asked. “You’ve been looking really weak lately.”

Rahul thought for a moment and said, “I’m still kind of afraid of something, but I don’t know why. I don’t think I did the right thing when I transferred to the Hindi department, yaar.”

“I don’t get it,” Hemant Barua said with a laugh. “Nothing’s ruined yet. To hell with Hindi. Take a short-term course at NIIT or Zap and get out of that hellhole.”

“It’s the same situation in the Urdu department,” Parvez said. “If Hindi’s a hellhole, then Urdu’s the underworld. Shahid didn’t even finish his first year. In the end, he gave up and opened a repair shop for fridges and TVs. Now he’s saying he’ll go to Dubai.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll stay right in the thick of it, I’ll fight right in the thick of it, and I’ll be killed right in the thick of it,” Rahul laughed. It wasn’t a lighthearted laugh.

“Right, you dumb bastard, why pull yourself out of that gutter? That’s where your paracetamol is, where your parasol is, where your butterfly is, where your bird is. Everything’s in Hindi,” the ostrich cried out, and started humming frighteningly out of tune, “My living is here, and dying is here, so where else can I go?”

“Cut it out!” Rahul screamed. Everyone laughed.

Rahul’s thirst for Anjali increased each time they met. He felt as if the sea inside him began anxiously churning whenever he came close to Anjali, ready to swallow up the entire world with its cities, mountains, and people.

Each time he got back after seeing Anjali he felt as if a towering, mad wave born from his sea inside had crashed against the rocky base of a mountain, rebuffed, and now returning. Despairing, and in shock.

What remains, then, is the sea, each time left alone with its murky melancholy.

Today Anjali wore jeans and a loose white T-shirt. This time she and Rahul were on the third floor of the library in the corner of the south wall. There was a filthy, dusty window that had been shut tight for years and hardly let any sunlight through. Then, nothing but stacks and stacks of books.

In a narrow space between two book stacks, Anjali and Rahul conspired to disappear. The smell of old books, the faint light barely coming in through the window, the moisture from the damp walls, the fine dust. . Rahul and Anjali locked themselves in an embrace with such force, filled with such longing, it was as if they needed the entire expanse of the earth to make their wish come true. The space between stacks of books was too narrow.

Never before had Rahul lifted Anjali up and she wrapped her legs around his waist. Those seconds were like suddenly finding oneself in the middle of a misty twilight. Both could scarcely catch their breath. Rahul’s half-closed eyes opened from their trance and regarded Anjali’s face, which had changed completely. Now it was some flower being burned by fire, quivering, wilting into an enchanting potion.

In that hazy moment, Anjali’s eyes appeared to Rahul. What eyes they were, watching a dream unfold of another world. Her eyes were strictly focused, but what she was staring at was some scene far off in the distance, of another realm, another time. She looked as if she would swoon.

They were like two fish swimming in the strong current of a stream, having touched one another, yet their tiny bodies still full of such longing for one another that they continue to swim, and they still want to pierce one another through and through. Time and again their bodies make innocent, improbable gestures to extract themselves from each other’s insides.

Rahul’s hand moved toward the zipper of Anjali’s jeans.

“No, no, what are you doing?” Anjali’s words scattered into the darkness, a semiconscious objection.

“Please let me,” Rahul’s whisper trembled in the air.

“No, not here,” Anjali pulled him tightly toward her.

“Where, then?” Rahul asked, his question floating heaven-ward.

Then a muted thud, as if a book had fallen off the shelf. Anjali and Rahul froze like statues and held their breath.

Padmashree Tiwari and Balram Pandey were looking for something, a book, on the shelf next to the main door.

Rahul gently eased Anjali back down. The two of them crouched down and hid beneath the shelf, trying to control their nervous breathing.

Rahul finally took a deep breath only after Padmashree Tiwari and Balram Pandey had left. Rahul noticed a book peering at them from the shelf behind: Ján Otcenásek’s novel Romeo, Juliet, and Darkness.

Caught in the middle of Nazi soldiers’ boot steps and gunfire, two innocent, helpless teenagers, a boy and a girl, hide inside a room for one full year. The two children grow up between the fear that death might come at any moment, and with their love for one another. Rahul had read this novel just the month before, in Nirmal Verma’s beautiful Hindi translation that read like poetry.

In the corner, next to an ailing wall that could collapse at any moment on top of it, a very delicate plant grew slowly, but surely and lushly, like a riddle amid spreading violence and fear. Like a lifeline in the darkness of sin, in a daring attempt fraught by risk, this, the purest blossom and primary bloom waged struggle in a demonic time.

Rahul kissed Anjali’s hand. “So tell me: when?” he asked. His voice sprang from the solitude and longing of that sea.

“Thursday,” Anjali said as if she’d already had this day in mind from the beginning.

“Why does it have to be Thursday? That’s seven days away. Why not tomorrow?” Rahul was perplexed.

“Crazy boy. That’s the day there are only two classes,” Anjali said.

“Right, Dr. Loknath Tripathi’s Bhakti class and Rajendra Tiwari’s class on Vidyapati,” Rahul said. “You are brilliant.”

Anjali straightened her clothing, took a brush from her purse, and fixed her hair.

“Wait. But where?” Rahul got worried.

“I have no idea,” Anjali answered, and left.

Rahul stood for a long time in that narrow space between the bookshelves, absentmindedly taking books from the shelf and leafing through them.

Oddly enough Rahul didn’t notice the damp, musty smell of the old books, but rather took in the fresh, sensuous fragrance of Anjali’s body that still surrounded him.

Rahul remained for awhile, but just before leaving, he filled his lungs, inhaling the air slowly and deeply.

Lay me on the hills and mountains

of thirst

Burn me in the sun, and dance dance

in its flames

Dance as a fountain of water

Dissolve into ink and write me in the sky

O mirrors

There read of me, then grin at me

O mirrors

Before killing me

O mirrors

For I am your life

The meaning of these lines from Shamsher’s poem slowly opened up to Rahul. Reading poetry and uncovering its meaning: this is the true living of life.