Spit that out. The hair—spit it out. Listening to you gag on your own bile is turning my stomach.
There’s half a kilo of pomfret rotting in the plastic bag behind the door. Ice melted an hour ago; the grey water has found its way to the floor drain, trickling slow through the lime dust. Smells like fried grease and salt. My mother used to say you could tell how poor a house was by how long the fish oil hung in the cotton curtains. Three days, this room has had it. Three days of charred skin and damp bedsheets.
My calf has knotted up so hard the tendon feels like a dry hemp rope. Crouching here on my haunches over this damp oxide is ruining my shins. Hurts like a bastard—but look at you. You’d trade your shins for mine this second, wouldn’t you. Look at your thumb trying to dig into the cement, looking for a crack, an edge to claw. Like a cockroach when the tube light flickers on.
That little tendon under your ear—jumping like a loose scooter throttle. Twitch. Twitch. The body doesn’t give a damn who you are. It’s an illiterate thing. It just wants to shove air in and fart it back out. It wants to wake up tomorrow, take a piss, scrape the white coat off its tongue, borrow twenty rupees for bidi. It doesn’t know there’s an iron sliding bolt on the street door and nobody in this chawl knows my real name. It just wants to stay hot.
My blood is greasy. The same heavy, rank grease you get after three glasses of bad cane spirit—the kind that makes your teeth ache to smash something. Makes a man feel swollen. Broad. Like if I kicked this wooden door frame, the whole brick passage would drop into the open gutter.
Then your chest hitches.
Stop that. Don’t do that wheezing click.
You’ve got that flat wart on the knuckle of your ring finger. My uncle had one just like it. Used to burn them down with battery acid every summer, and every winter the grey skin crawled back out of the meat. You smell of stale gutkha and wet rayon. That blue shirt with the missing collar button—the eighty-rupee lot they dump off handcarts near the bus depot.
Why couldn’t you be large? Why couldn’t you have a thick neck and a gold chain? Looking at that frayed collar makes my teeth feel loose. It would cost me nothing to reach down, hook my fingers into your armpit, drag you up, throw the bolt back, and kick you out into the alley. Go on. Run through the mud until your Bata slippers snap. Go home and tell your sister I’m a butcher. It would be so light. The whole room would go cool and quiet, like pouring well-water over a fresh skin-burn. I could pull over that wooden stool, sit down, roll a smoke, and tell myself I was better than the dogs in the lane.
Down on the main road, the municipal garbage truck hits a pothole. Iron banging on iron. The driver leans on that twin-tone horn—paan-paan—and the sound shears through the ventilator louvers, rattling the tin blades.
Then the road swallows it.
The quiet drops right back down over us. Heavy. You’re still here on the red floor, chin pressed in the lime. I’m still down here on my heels, the iron resting across my knees, the room shut tight.
If I let you walk, you’re at the corner stall by seven tomorrow morning, blowing on a scalding glass of tea and talking about your brother’s ration card. And what do I get for having clean hands? A brass token? A nod from a holy man? When the electric furnace takes you, there aren’t any priests chanting. It’s forty minutes of yellow coils humming behind a steel hatch, and a tray of scorched bone hosed into the creek with the cow dung. No tongue to taste tobacco. No skin to feel the rain when it’s cold enough to make your chest ache.
I’m here now. The blood is in the meat, it’s thick, it’s mine. I don’t want to give it away just to feel holy in a room that smells like dead fish.
Don’t turn around. Keep your chin pressed hard into the lime. Watch that damp patch under the baseboard—see the black mold spreading? Don’t blink. Keep your eyes right on the black.
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