Low by Jeet Thayil

Author:Jeet Thayil [Jeet Thayil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571356430
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Now, as promised, there follows a more detailed picture of that first meeting, which began with diversions into Mexico and Bob and continued weeks and months later into a kiss almost of death, a kiss that gave death the middle finger and combined pleasure and fear into a single indelible gesture.

Aki had walked into the empty university library early on a Saturday afternoon, when everybody else, he assumed, was still sleeping off a hangover. He’d been working on his second book of poems. He intended to send it to the publisher on Monday morning, about six months past the deadline. She’d buzzed from the street and he let her in. They shook hands and introduced themselves. He noticed that she wore a formal black dress and ankle boots, unusual attire for a young woman, considering the default uniform on campus was ripped jeans and sneakers. He showed her to a free table, helped her start the desktop and printer, pointed out the coffee machine and bathroom facilities. They worked comfortably together on nearby stations, walled off by corridors of books and desks, the library quiet but for their keyboards and the happy sound of hot water gurgling through the pipes.

Late in the evening, as they shut the library, he asked if she’d like to join him for dinner. She said yes without giving the question much thought. They walked two blocks to a bistro called Mexico and sat at a table in the centre of the room. They ordered steak tacos and rice.

“I’m not a huge fan of Mexican fare,” she said, using a taco like a roti to scoop up beans and beef. “It’s Indian food gone wrong, I always thought.” Seeing the disappointment on his face, she lifted her glass and said: “But the Margaritas are terrific!”

Later that week they went to the Bob Dylan concert at Madison Square Garden (with which event and its particularities the reader has already been acquainted). As with Mexican cuisine, she was no fan but she went along out of kindness or passivity. He found he liked her understated manner and unflappability. It gave her an air of seriousness far beyond her years. As the weeks and months went by he noticed she rarely laughed and she was impossible to shock, not even with a proposal of marriage. She took some days to reply. When she did it was with a gift-wrapped postcard bearing a slogan in all capitals (which she presented to him at Grand Central Station). In four months they were ‘woman and husband’, as she liked to say. Two weeks shy of their fourth anniversary she was dead, killed by her own reckless hand.

There had been plenty of clues if only he had seen them. As he knew now, every signed proclamation she had asked him to make, every poem she had written, every email, every bit of written communication was her way of keeping a record for him in the future. She knew his notoriously porous memory would likely retain none of it.

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