It’s raining like cats and dogs. Big bits and pieces of water-drops hit the ground like they were in a rush to empty the sky. Cars run through the wind like bullets flying for a millisecond and disappearing, a crowd of people with surfing boards and towels hanging out of their shoulders are lazily waiting for the lights to turn red, phones keep ringing, there is an ambulance trying to pick a child in seizure. Ameena is standing there looking outside, pale and skinny, her long skirt clinging to her legs…
He ran his hands down her neck towards the shoulder, slowly massaging back and forth. It was feeling warm and soft, his hands pressing against the flatness of her shoulders. She was therefore irked to rule out any further possibility. Nevertheless, the nature of hands, their flexibility to reach anywhere and everywhere…what if? She kept thinking, she kept waiting for that moment to come, where his hands would suddenly declare themselves the omnipotent and rule over her.
"Alright Rupendra, thank you. I’m good” said she, destroying the weaves of dreams his hands must have woven in this short period of time.
"What? Comon, here I can do better, hold on a little more" wielding his hands softer and pressing tight against her shoulders and down towards her back, his hands suddenly run at the back of the body like a virus rummaging through computer files setting them ablaze! Down below her shoulder towards the back, slowly on to the head, fingers fiddling with the long black hair; she could feel the heat emanating from within her. She just laid on the couch with her head on the edge, letting the cascade of thick wavy hair touch the ground. He used both his hands, now softly, now vigorously, touching the roots of her hair, bringing it down slowly in a dramatic way, which both sensitized and scared Ameena.
"Rupendra, I have to go". She stood up, stiff and blushing. At the back of her mind, confusions paraded all along, that had it been for someone else, she would have loved some more of the massage…
"A…how can you just leave like that? Now it’s my turn" Rupendra slouches his short, plump body on the couch, his legs intertwined on the edge. He folds his arms and waits, looking at the other direction, tilting his head to be taken care of, his fat black lips twitching like a curled leech.
Ameena just wanted to walk out; she didn’t want to witness any further the melodrama that could lead to something much unintended- the plethora of events that convoluted the already complicated feeling of senselessness. A tinge of sadness that was looming large above the ceilings, a sequence of his gigglings and insistence that she remotely refuted; she suddenly dragged the edges of her fingers across the edge of the couch that ran a meter long, generating a sensation so erotic she wanted to drift away from it, immediately. Rupendra was unaware of it all, his head still tilted and his eyes half closed readying themselves to be soothed. But she didn’t love him, he wasn’t anybody to her. She had just met him while she’d been to eat at Mcdonalds and he’d served her some crispy French fries and a large Diet Coke. “Are you from Nepal?” he had asked with a generous curiosity, his mouth half open. “Oh Hi! Tapai pani Nepali ho?” Ameena wasn’t taken aback at all; instead she was amused that someone would have been so observant and enthusiastic to know her. And so the conversation had begun.
Her fingers slithered over his scalp and she was messing with his hair for a while. She could see he was trying hard to get the feel of hands. He must have imagined the duet slip through the shoulders and glide forward.
Rupendra was the only other person she thought she ‘trusted’ when she transferred to this university in Kansas. Ameena shared a little apartment with an orthodox, sickly religious Indian girl. Her ‘home’ looked like a dark hallway of the hotel she had worked in earlier, or more like a gully in New York, with its smell of rusty sinks in the bathroom and kitchen. The room was clamored with sleeping bags and towels and clothes and books; the greenish-yellow couch picked up from the trash lied in a corner, stiff and observant of the dull activities that went on in the room throughout the day. The vermillion red carpet just sat there like the king of all, looking bright and new, so much at odds with the rest of the sensations that ran around the room.
"Do you have a mouth freshener?" asked Rupendra once puffing air out and smelling what little the hand that stood in front refracted back. The bus kept pacing on its own, but somehow Ameena felt it was taking longer than usual to reach there.
"Oh I don’t”.
"I think I have a bad constipation" Rupendra uttered out the ultimate truth, with the same nervous laugh, cough-like laugh that he pulled back before he let it end; and she was always uncomfortable with the feeling that the remaining laughter must have stuck inside his throat, for no apparent reason. She also noticed Rupendra took his hand all the way back and kept swiping his hair, and they suddenly swung in front of him, half folded and close to the chest, like a chandelier, and they moved up and down to squeeze his chest. Greasily oiled and combed, his hair parted in the middle leaving a few strands hanging on the sides. The aroma he carried reminded Ameena of the air in Sundhara that spread across Khichapokhari and Ratnapark, not quite that of a Sekuwa being baked…His skin was mildly tanned, high cheekbones stood on each side and the rest of the hollow part of the cheeks filled with meat; it wasn’t plump, only when he laughed the two little cheeks would cuddle up to form a ball of meat and shine in redness, leaving his eyes look like neatly penciled lines below his messy eyebrows. Nevertheless, he is a nice man, she assured herself.
In the course of events that followed, Ameena had known quite a few people around campus; Rupendra was no more her primary ‘hangout buddy’. But the relationship or the so called relationshiplessness among the two was still intact. Neither tried harder to refrain from relationship nor from gaining one. It didn’t matter. Yet, when Ameena occasionally saw him, Rupendra would point at the skirt she wore and throw his head up on the air and laugh his cough-like laugh.
Ameena wouldn’t be shocked, but a mild disgust would overtake her and she’d walk down the hall like a model, twisting her hips, and come back to pay for his laughters.
The massage. Ameena’s hands lost that chilliness that first jolted her when she had touched him. Rupendra wouldn’t say a word; he swirled back a cushion and slided down onto the couch, now almost lying flat, flipped his body back, his face grinning at the stained carpet. "On the back" he said.
"I'm done. I have to go" Ameena walked out the door. "Oh Ameena!..." A voice hardened. She ran out the door onto the open parking space and stood still for a handful of fresh air. And then she kept walking, looking around the baseball field, the green trees, the open space spread around afar…she had never disliked anyone so much in her life.
She met Anil on her way, a stout, tall, dark guy with tight jeans- it almost stuck down at his ankles with the black socks he wore. At the back of her mind she already knew he was from India. She saw Dr Black and felt nearer to her dreams and farther and farther away from the ditch she was sinking into.
"What would you do if you were the president of the United States instead?" Dr. Black had asked the class, almost uncertain and helpless about the war to come, war on Iraq; suggestions were umpteen but solution was always a problem.
Ameena went to play pool with some friends and went back to MacDonald’s for dinner. Kansas wasn’t a city, at least where she lived wasn’t. And things weren’t like where she came from. Not knowing anyone in the college was worse than being poor, she had realized. Rupendra was there, always, but it didn’t make any sense. Rather, something of him was starting to repel her. And he came there every day, sometimes almost after every class. He didn’t make any effort to hide anything, the lamest or the most personal of things; that his underpants were coffee stained when it lay on the couch last night, or that he cheated on all of his ex-girlfriends. Ameena knew the ins and outs of his history, for no reason. His girlfriend back in Nepal was getting married to another guy, who had lived in Australia for 7 years. Ameena had asked him if he loved her, he had said yes he did, more than himself, yet he didn’t go get her. "I don’t want to stay in Nepal" he had confided to her that they had broken up after 10yrs of being together. A chill had run down her spines. She hated it, hated his guts; to let go of someone you have treasured all your life and still be normal, like nothing has happened. And she pitied the girl.
"I heard she is really depressed" Rupendra again said with an air of authority. "She cries on the phone every night with me, what can I do? You tell me, what can I do?" I didn’t want to tell him what to do, there was nothing to tell, and besides, what he was doing was self-explanatory.
It was pouring. She didn’t want to go to Rupendra’s. His house stood there by itself, it was near, but he seemed too distant and fading, she refused to ache her mind to get the memories attached with him. There wasn’t much to look forward to, but the peanut butter he spread around the bread, lots of it, and put into his mouth, plucking the remains in his mouth with his fingers, or the way he panted, like a dog, all sweaty after jumping a while in the basketball court, his short stature, tanned tight skin turning bluish red, his cough-like laugh, his forehead shrunk at a place at the smallest misfit of a matter, as if there is no more pleasure in living life and that this misfit is the sole cause of it…she didn’t like the feel of it, she suffocated.
But then it was raining hard, and days weren’t always pleasant. And she needed enough attention to keep living. "I’m a social being, with cravings, desires, I cannot be another Lord Budhha” her dismays utter out on their own and disappear in thin air. It strikes Ameena that even Buddha had a social life once! She hurriedly strolls down the road towards the narrow gully. Drenched in water with translucent white cloth sticking to her body, Ameena knocks on the door.
“Oh!” Rupendra is a little appalled. “Comon in”
“Is anyone home?” Ameena moves towards the center of the room, and pulls the blinders down.
“No, just me”
“Well, I’m wet, do you have a towel?” She starts taking her clothes off, one by one.
