ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A former journalist, EUGENE DATTA has published fiction, poetry, book reviews, and essays in publications around the world. He has held residencies in the U.S., Spain and Switzerland, and now divides his time between India and Germany. “Tonight” is an excerpt from an unpublished novel.

Tonight

By Eugene Datta


Noel cannot get enough of her. Whenever he is with Uma, time seems like a lighted cigarette, more hopelessly fleeting—fast-burning—than it otherwise is. At hand this moment, the next it’s gone. Over! Whether he’s had a chance to make enough use of it or not. An hour or so over coffee once or twice a week, one or two hasty lunches. The occasional evening out, the odd dinner. And a few intimate hours at her place once (and if he’s lucky, twice) a week. But before he’s heard her voice enough, and looked at her enough and breathed her in, or touched her and felt her enough, either he or she has to leave, or both of them, to spend longer stretches of time apart, at different addresses, sleep in beds separated by miles of the city.

So he calls her as often as he can. Sometimes even moments after parting, after having been with her for however long. He takes out his cell phone, presses Dialed Calls and always finds her number among the last few. “Hi, baby!...” Converted to binary information, traveling across the city’s vast, invisible honeycomb grid of hexagons as incoming audio signal, her words convey to his senses an illusion of continuity. The continuity of whatever it was that he was feeling in his blood just a while ago.

Tonight it was less than two hours. From around eight-thirty till a few minutes past ten. They were in her flat—her and her husband’s flat—and because it was a Monday Noel wasn’t quite comfortable. Although she assured him that Tamal was going to be late. “He’s catching up with an old buddy after work,” she said, “so there’s no way he can be home before eleven-thirty, believe me!” He believed her, but that didn’t mitigate his sense of unease. It always nags him when he’s there on a weeknight, knowing that no matter what Uma says, her husband is liable to show up at any moment. It’s only to a point that you can predict someone else’s comings and goings. But today it was more than just the fear of that possibility. The whole time he was there, he felt around him the ether weight of an invisible presence. At one point he even thought he heard a footfall. The sound of dry leaves, or grass, crumbling under a light, cautious foot just outside one of her bedroom windows. Dragging him to the edge of the bed Uma was clawing at his belt. He froze, gripping her hands. “Relax!” she whispered and wrenched herself free. “It’s the cat. She’s hunting.”

“Hope it was the cat, baby,” he said when he called from the car. He was rushing through the crossing in Ballygunge Phanri at the end of a red light, having left her house in a bit of haste.

“If not, it was a dog,” Uma giggled. “Or some peeping Tom!”

In spite of her lack of concern, which is typical of her when it comes to these matters, Noel’s discomfort persisted, like a sharp little lash hidden intractably behind an eyelid. The uncertain but lingering anguish of having been watched and exposed—caught, in a certain sense. But he didn’t bring it up when he called her again after reaching home.

He was on the phone for almost an hour this time, with only one interruption when Uma put him on hold for a few seconds to answer her husband’s call. A few seconds, but stretching across them her silence—the depth, the ring, the absoluteness of it—seemed to have the unbearable potential of time without end. That’s it, Noel was thinking, sitting with the cordless cradled between his head and shoulder. He’s calling to tell her what he saw. Shit! Fussing absently with a strand of nose hair that had either escaped his scissors in the morning, or had grown to an obscene length within hours, he smelled her on the tips of his fingers.

“Yeah, what did he say?” he asked the moment she was back on the line. Keen, edgy, ready for the worst.

“Not coming home.”

“Why?”

“No idea.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“He hung up before I could.”

“Shit.”

“What do you mean ‘shit’?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Sorry. So…” He changed the subject, and Uma was too tired to pursue, so their conversation quickly regained the blissful, blithe, unfocused air of post-coital chat. And after they’d talked long enough they said goodnight.

Now it’s eleven-fifty. Standing in front of his wardrobe mirror Noel pulls out the errant nose hair; it’s so long he doesn’t even need the tweezers. He caresses it out of the nostril, hating the shape his face takes while he does that, its gaping, unsightly vulnerability. To aid his fingers in the loathsome act, he pins it down on his left thumb with the nail tip of his forefinger and then gives it a sharp tug. With a small wincing pain it comes loose, making him sneeze. Once, twice…three times. With the back of the hand holding the extracted strand, he rubs his nose to stop the tingling. The face that stares out of the mirror now is a minor mess and a little colored. The pink of his pedigree—not his mother’s, so much as his grandfather Stuart Erwin Gilchrist’s—has risen through the burnt, doughy yellow to his cheeks and the tip of his nose. A sliver of dust-blackened snot is gleaming on the edge of his upper lip, his face streaked with streams from his slightly-brown watery eyes.

“Jesus,” he says, looking at his face, softer and more rounded and droopier than it was even a few years ago, like the rest of him. Age and a deskbound job, and too much good food and too many bad habits. But mostly age. God, is thirty-nine…well, forty, really—but is that old? Forty? “Forty years three months and…eleven days,” he mumbles, correcting himself. Look at those cheeks! As if a duck has left her eggs under them for safekeeping. “Good Lord!” With his right hand he slaps his damp cheeks—the right one first, twice, then the left, and then the right again. The sudden annoyance, an acid surge of self-loathing, has lent unexpected force to the strikes, keeping the color stingingly afloat on his face. In the other hand, held between his thumb and forefinger, the nose hair feels like a piece of wire. He brings it up and holds it in front of him. Stiff, black and gray-tipped, with a bulging, transparent, fluid-filled follicle. It reminds him of a horrendous habit he’d picked up when he was in his twenties. Eating hair follicles. He had a beard at the time, and whenever his left hand was unoccupied he used it to pluck hair from his beard and put the root between his teeth. Thank God his mother discovered it (to her absolute horror, of course!) before anyone else did and forced him to shave.

Disgusted by the thought, and the sight of his face, and the hair between his fingers, Noel goes to the bathroom. But even after tidying up, he doesn’t like what he sees in the mirror—an older and looser version of what he was before. For all the Huddersfield worsted suits from Henry Poole & Co., not to mention the sundry Marks & Spencer, Van Heusen and Park Avenue jackets, shirts, trousers and ties, and the Paco Rabanne pour homme toiletries and so on, he is, underneath all of that, a pitiable sum of habits and flaws of shape and nature. While the hair on his head is getting thinner by the day, he has to struggle ever harder to keep the hair in his nostrils and ears from rushing into public view. And the midriff—he takes off the already-unbuttoned shirt and tosses it into the laundry basket under the counter, and then runs his palms up and down his stomach, looking at it in the wide counter-to-ceiling mirror—oh, that—this—is a story unto itself. An epic saga of unstoppable day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year accumulation, accrual, buildup, enlargement and expansion, with a subplot of chronic flatulence. How can Uma like this? he thinks, clutching fistfuls of fat, hurting himself. Maybe she doesn’t notice because she doesn’t get to see him long enough without his “tasteful” garb. How would she like to wake up every morning of her life next to this ever-slackening bundle of snoring and farting flab?

Every morning of her life…he ponders the words. He means, of course, every morning of the rest of her life. But no matter how big that number might be—so many mornings times so many years plus some—it is still a finite one, inexorably fixed. Only so many times, and not more. And the count hasn’t even started yet. But once it does, it’ll be only a matter of time—so many days times so many years, or maybe months, who knows—before it’ll be the last morning. As it must be the case with God knows how many other things in his life, counts of mornings, days and nights. Who knows how many people he has already seen, been with, heard from, called or e-mailed for the last time. His grandfather, for instance, who is in his mid-eighties—Noel has arranged to spend a couple of days with him on his next trip to England, but who knows if the old man will be alive to see his “Indian” grandson again. Maybe they’ve already had their parting chat, their final cups of tea together and shared their last silly jokes. Or Alden Tanner, that elderly American man he met in church some time ago; he’d vowed to stay in touch with him but hasn’t, and probably will never see him again in his whole life. Will he get to see his favorite cousin Ashley, and eat another of her freshly-baked lemon waffles? Take another Enfield ride from Chennai to Pondy and back with his childhood friend Kannan “Fatboy” Nanduri? And get drunk together one more time in a nameless bar? Will he ever go back to Pondy again, see Kan, hear him laugh? Or have the last of all those things already happened?

Perhaps they have, who knows? There’s never any way to tell unless destiny makes it obvious, which of course it rarely does. So that means Noel might also have seen his parents for the last time. He spoke to his mother in the morning, the old man was not at home; Noel had last talked to him three days ago, on Sunday. It’s been more than two months since they saw each other last. What if…? What if? And Uma?

Suddenly, he wants to hear her voice again, that life-sustaining lilt. Nothing can derail this reckless train of thought. He walks back into the bedroom, shirtless, barefoot, but still in his formal trousers, and looks at the watch on the night table. It’s exactly one in the morning; late, very late for Uma, but he has to call. He picks up the cordless, opens the call log, selects the last number and presses “dial”. Hearing her phone ring—once, twice, thrice, four times—he begins to wonder if her husband is back. What should Noel do if he picks up the phone? Hi! This is Noel. Are you guys…um…already in bed? Did I…wake you? I probably did, didn’t I? Oh, I’m so sorry. Didn’t realize it was so late. Oh my God, it’s one. Of course! Sorry, Tamal. Very sorry. Talk to you later, OK? Bye, good night. The other option is to promptly disconnect the line, but Tamal would probably guess anyway that it was him.

“Hello?” she answers after the ninth or the tenth ring.

Thank God, he thinks. “Uma....”

“Hi, baby! What…happened?” Her voice is groggy with sleep.

“Nothing, nothing happened. I just…wanted to tell you that…I love you. Very much. I really do!”

“Crazy man. I love you too.”

“Go back to sleep.”

“OK. And you go to sleep as well. Talk to you in the morning. Bye.”

“Bye,” Noel whispers into the receiver. He can see himself in the wardrobe mirror—a hopeless, out-of-shape romantic. Maybe that’s what she thinks, too, when she looks at him from a non-starry-eyed point of view, which he’s sure she does sometimes. All intelligent women do that. Or, worse still, she probably considers him to be nothing more than a selfish, debauched roué, and tolerates him out of pity.

Outside, a dog barks. An offhand, questioning woof rising clear above the drone of the AC; a street dog’s way of announcing the late hour and making sure nothing is seriously amiss in the neighborhood. Closer to the house, maybe just outside the wide iron gates, another replies. The two exchange a couple of lazy yaps before a third one joins in, yowling. Now they find it difficult to stop—woof, woof…arf, ruff…woof…ruff, ruff…bow, wow, wow…arf, woof, woof, ruff, bow—a conference of barks coming closer together and getting frantic. Staying up late these days Noel has got used to this late-night drama. He even knows the dogs, at least the three—two male and one female—that always flop around the gate; they wag their gaunt friendly tails every time they see him. And from the balcony while smoking cigarette after cigarette on long, balmy, sleepless nights, he’s seen them several times in their eager nightly theater.

He wonders if Uma has gone back to sleep yet, feeling a twitch of guilt for having waked her. She needs a lot of rest for the daily recharging of her overworked accounts exec’s batteries. “This ad thing is killing you,” he said to her the other day, trying to talk her into choosing a saner profession, a job less taxing than being at beck and call of who knows how many clients six days a week.

“Do I look like I’m dying?” she whispered with half-closed eyes, leaning in, flaunting her cleavage. They were sitting in a crowded café.

“I’m serious, Uma,” he said, hauling his eyes up from her neckline with effort, as if they were his legs, stuck tight in a deep, boggy mud pit. “Been meaning to tell you this for some time. It’s crazy what you’re doing. Running around town in this heat and pollution, and spending most of your time with people selling, I don’t know, shoes, paint, cigarette, paan masala—”

“Banks. Home loans, car loans.”

“Yes, those too. It’s crazy! A couple more years and it’ll start telling on your health, trust me. It has to stop. It has to stop before it’s too late. Why don’t you look for an airline job?”

“Boring!” She shook her head, making a face, almost like a child horrified at the prospect of Sunday school.

“Then teach!” he said. “I bet you can easily do that with your qualification. Or get into an NGO.”

“Been there, done that.”

“Something else, then. I don’t know. A desk job. In a bank. Citibank, for example. Do you want me to see if there’s any opening?”

“Not yet.” She gave a quick smile, squeezing his arm. “I’ll let you know…when I’m ready.”

“You’ll let me know.” Noel shook his skeptical head.

“I will. Promise! As soon as I’m ready for a change I’ll tell you. But right now it’s OK. It’s not that bad, really. I can handle the strain, and I like what I’m doing, dealing with people. It’s not always easy, of course, but it’s exciting. And…as you can see—” she tilted her chin up, stroking her curls mock-provocatively, showing off the gleaming skin of her neck and chest—“I take good care of myself. You have nothing to worry about, sir,” she murmured, batting her eyelids. “I’m not going to burn out in a hurry.”

He sucks in his stomach to unbuckle the belt. Then whipping it out of the belt-loops he tosses it onto the bed and starts to take off his pants. He keeps standing in front of the wardrobe, now in his underwear, looking at himself, combing his hair with both hands, raking the wispy tufts obsessively from left to right and right to left, pressing them away from the forehead and then clawing them back. The sweat that bathed him hours ago at Uma’s now feels like a dry second skin, cool, fused with desiccated molecules of her body fluids—sweat, saliva, love. He sniffs his fingers; a suffocating smell of oily scalp and dust-laden hair has replaced her scent. He looks at the bulge in his khaki underwear; it’s still a bit bigger than normal, and the stain is still so damp, or large, that he can see it in the mirror.

Walking to the bathroom with his pants and underwear in hand, Noel reflects on what Uma told him about her job: “It’s not always easy, but it’s exciting.” Exciting! he thinks. That’s why she wouldn’t quit this god-awful profession. Anything is acceptable to Uma Roy, whether in life or work, if it excites. Thrill, it’s a must, and often the only requirement; she can risk anything for it, give anything to get it. Anything. And her lust for thrill has proved so infectious that even he, the hard-boiled, no-nonsense corporate professional that he is, has started to behave in the most absurd and uncharacteristic ways imaginable. Walking with her around the Victoria Memorial Hall after work he would suddenly, spontaneously, hop on an ekka for a ride around the Maidan, a stone’s throw from his office, with the tie still on—something he couldn’t picture anyone, let alone himself, doing at this age. Just as he couldn’t see himself floating in the Ganga for hours on a shabby dinghy, which he’s done at least twice since he got to know Uma. There are other things he does these days, voluntarily, on a whim, that he seldom did even when he was in college. Some Saturday nights, he—not Uma—would insist on a long drive, an outing in her husband’s neck of the woods, winding up invariably at the airport dhaba for a very late, very hot, very nothing-to-write-home-about quasi-Punjabi dinner. “Puerile pursuits,” his old man would have scoffed if he found out, “completely unbefitting a PhD from the London School of Economics!” But suddenly, thanks to those and other, even lesser, benefactions of romance, there is a flood of fresh hues in what used to be a lackluster banker’s life. And he owes it, all of it, to Uma; she’s put him back in touch with the simple, blind exhilaration of youth. She’s put him in touch with life.

He deposits the pants and the stained underwear in the laundry basket, imagining her sprawled in bed, her curls ruffled by the ceiling fan’s jagged gusts. He’s never seen her sleep, they’ve not yet had a chance to spend a night together, and it’s a deprivation he tries to combat by asking her all sorts of questions, each more private and awkward than the other, about her bedtime habits: Do you always sleep on that side of the bed? Is that how you sleep? On your back? No? What, do you have a preferred side? What is it, left or right? OK, then you sleep with your back to your husband, right? Or do you sleep facing him? Does he ever…um…touch you? In sleep? Doesn’t he just…throw an arm around you some time? Hunh? Doesn’t he, ever? What about you? Do you? Maybe not knowingly? Hmm? C’mon, I’m sure it happens now and then! No? And what do you do when it gets too hot inside that mosquito net? Don’t tell me you don’t take off your nightie! “My God! Why don’t you take me somewhere if you’re so desperate to see me sleep?” Uma would tell him.

“Why don’t you take me somewhere…?” “Hmh,” Noel snorts. As if meeting each other the way they do wasn’t dicey enough! For the past few weeks—in fact, it’s already been a couple of months, if not longer—they’ve been spending more time at her house than they did before, and there have been several close calls. A few times Tamal showed up just minutes after they’d put on their clothes, as though he knew what was going on, and was waiting outside, like a benevolent spy, to give them the time for courtesy’s sake, or for the sake of whatever, to cover up. Even if that wasn’t the case, the slightly bunched up bedspread, the little craters in the mattress which Uma’s hasty hands couldn’t reach while trying to slap the bed back into order, his lack of composure, the flushed look on her face, her unduly eager patter about the most banal things, or the rich, sex-perfumed air in the room—at least that, if not anything else—must have made him doubt and wonder. If he is already at home when they arrive, they sit and talk, listening to music, drinking tea, until Uma finds an excuse to send her husband on an errand, just so they can be alone for a few minutes. Sometimes, the little devil that she is, she cuddles up to him even when Tamal is at home, watching TV in the other room, and licks his earlobes, thrusts her tongue into his mouth and her hand into his pants, stroking him into submission. Whenever that happens, and it has quite a few times over the past two or three months, Noel is so incapacitated by her charm and daring that he loses the will and the strength, and the sanity that enables him to function in life with dignity and aplomb, to make her stop, knowing full well that at any moment Tamal can rise from the sofa in the next room, and, noiselessly, without so much as a swish-swish of his pants, walk in, and their lives, the lives of all three of them, can be instantly ruined. Forever.

Tamal, though, is seamlessly civil. Noel wonders how he can go on being that way, knowing—guessing, at least—what he certainly does. Thinking what he would have done if it happened to him, if Uma were his wife and she was seeing someone else—he would’ve lost it; he would’ve gone completely berserk; fuck good behavior, he would’ve broken a few bones by now—Noel feels a curious mixture of bewilderment, admiration and pity. And guilt! There’s no way he can deny his responsibility. He can’t wash his hands of the affair, pretend all is hunky-dory, and ride off into the sunset with the love of his life, his loot.

“We have to be a bit more careful, Uma,” he said to her this morning when she called to tell him that he could come over after work. Much as he craves being alone and intimate with her, he doesn’t like the idea of going to their house every week. “We’re behaving like teenagers here, aren’t we? I mean, let’s face it, you’re still married, right? We can’t be so irresponsible until you’re ready for separation. There are a few things we can’t do until you move out of that house. We shouldn’t take so much advantage of his…trust, for one thing. It’s horribly disrespectful. I mean, think about it, the man comes home and finds me, his wife’s lover, sitting in his bedroom. He says hello to someone who is…you know, sleeping with his wife, right? That’s what we’re forcing him to do, whether he knows it or not. We don’t have the right to do that, you know.” Her response, predictably, was: “Fine, then don’t come.” “Why don’t you come to my place?” Noel urged her. “No,” she said grumpily. “He’ll be more suspicious if he doesn’t find me at home after ten, or whenever he’s back.”

So he went to her place this evening, as he did countless times before, suppressing the squirming worms of discomfort and misgiving, and swallowing his pride, the hard, thorny ball of it. What choice did he have?

Noel could never imagine letting another person be in so much control of his life. But Uma, she has him wrapped around her little finger, body and soul. None of the women he knew before her—Agnes, his first real love; Kavitha, the Zeenat Aman of Loyola College for whom he even flunked a test or two; Richa and Poonam, two sisters with whom he’d had torrid affairs during his reckless days at St. Stephen’s; Nur, the Egyptian goddess he lived with for a year and a half while at LSE; Asha; Pallavi; Jennifer; and a couple of others he’s dated over the years—not one of them, despite ably stoking the fire of his masculine pride, putting vain smiles on his face and disobedient quivers in his crotch, and at other times causing angst spells of varied intensity and length, made him fall as violently, as wholly and helplessly in love with them as Uma has. He didn’t even know he was capable of such blinding, insane passion until he met her.

And yet, she is someone else’s wife! He lets out a long sigh, tightens his jaw and shakes his head. Staring into the mirror he doesn’t look at himself, or at the fluorescent-washed blue-tiled wall behind him; his gaze meets that of his reflection at some indeterminate middle distance just behind the surface of the mirror, in a few square inches of space in his thought-blurred, unfocused vision. How long can we go on like this? he thinks, chewing the inside of his cheek. How much longer? How long can people sustain a part-time partnership like theirs, such an illicit, chancy romance? His biggest fear is that unless things change, and change soon, and drastically, the shameful covertness of their liaison and its attendant ills, its peril and its inadequacy, might crack their resolve, and he, or Uma, or both of them, might suddenly want to throw in the towel, thwarted, scarred by ignominy, and walk away from the relationship. What then?

Noel cannot think anymore, enervated as his mind is by sheer dread, the fear of that disastrous possibility. His thought stalls dead in its track, like a car out of fuel, unable to move further.

A sudden loud noise startles him. It’s the night watchman hitting the lamppost with his baton, and waking the dogs. It happens every night; the ear-splitting gong followed by the dogs’ nervous howl—they yelp their heads off, those stupid animals. The bahadur does it to alert the neighborhood, he’s been told by his landlord. “So that thieves and burglars and other anti-social elements stay away.” “But we pay him so we can sleep in peace, don’t we?” Noel had asked, bewildered. “No, no, it’s a good thing,” the old man insisted. “How else will we know if he is doing his job?”

His thoughts go back to Uma as soon as the dogs shut up. Uma, and the stark choice that faces him. He knows that he’ll have to either walk out of her life or wrest her out of her marriage, forcefully if need be. Forcefully, he thinks. Like a shameless, heartless, conscienceless man. Like a brute, if need be. But what if she resents him for that? What if their love doesn’t survive her divorce? It’ll destroy all three of them then. All three will end up losing, a consequence far worse than there being just one loser—him, for instance. If he lets go of Uma, and does it soon enough, maybe there’s still a chance she can try and rebuild her life with her husband. Maybe they can put the pieces of broken trust back together and reclaim their marriage, and be happy. After all, it’s her happiness—isn’t it?—that Noel most desires. He just wishes it didn’t cost him his own.

He steps into the shower stall and draws the curtain. Picturing her asleep in the bed in which they made love a few hours ago, he looks down at his naked self, the smooth bulge of his stomach, and sticking limply out of its plunging circumference a blob of flesh—harmless, even ineffectual by the looks of it—nestled in puffs of gray-streaked fuzz. A smell of wild mountain trails, deep, shadowy tangles of lush vines, damp, moss-covered rocks and nameless flowers faintly rises to his nostrils. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply, holding the aroma in his lungs as long as he can, and then, breathing out, he turns on the shower.



Published October 2008