The City of Devi by Suri Manil

Author:Suri, Manil [Suri, Manil]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2013-02-04T08:00:00+00:00

10

KARUN RETURNED AFTER I LEFT FOR WORK THE NEXT DAY AND moved his belongings out. I tried calling him on his cell phone, but he didn’t answer—the number got disconnected soon. I sat down to write him a letter of apology but quickly found myself bogged down—my behavior with Harjeet looked even more outrageous on paper, especially when juxtaposed against the loss of his mother. Besides, I didn’t have his mailing address in Karnal even though I’d been in person to the flat. One day, I took the train there, but a padlocked door greeted me. The shopkeeper downstairs who gave me the street number told me nobody had stayed in the flat since the death. I even tried Karun’s university, but they had no idea of his whereabouts.

His leaving proved unlucky for me. When I told Harjeet I couldn’t imagine having sex with him again, he flew into a rage and punched me in the face, then kicked me several times as I writhed on the ground. It took six stitches to sew up my lip and several visits to the dentist to have a knocked-out tooth fixed. Just as the pain in my ribs subsided, I found my office locked when I arrived at work—the company had gone belly-up. I couldn’t find another job—the market dried up overnight due to the sudden economic downturn. My pocket got picked and someone (Harjeet, I suspect) broke into my apartment and stole my computer and television.

I moved back in with my parents in Bombay. I missed Karun intensely, feeling so depressed I couldn’t get up some days. Now that I had squandered my relationship, I wanted nothing more than to recapture it. Despite almost seven years together, something profoundly unfulfilled remained between us—as if I was on the cusp of absorbing a deep and personal message Karun had been trying to convey. I sent several letters to the Karnal flat, but received no reply. The prospect of frequenting my old haunts looking for release again felt sordid, pathetic. I didn’t quite understand this—hadn’t I been cruising the Delhi parks quite breezily just some weeks back? Karun’s memory rose like a pillar of light, emitting a radiant integrity I felt compelled to emulate.

I forced myself to go to gay events to find someone else. I met Sonal at a Gay Bombay disco night—he had his own tiny place at Andheri. For the four months we dated, I kept comparing him to Karun and coming up short. His body felt all wrong, his aroma didn’t intoxicate. He had no ambition beyond being a sales clerk, and talked incessantly about Bollywood films. Within a week, I felt I knew everything I needed to know about him—no reserve remaining to intrigue me, like the smile I gradually learned to tease out on Karun’s lips. I went out with other people as well, but none of them lasted as long.

After almost a year of unemployment, a financial advisory firm in Hyderabad offered me a position. I took it, determined to use the new surroundings to pull me out of my malaise.

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