Chapter 3: The Midnight Masala(1997)

The funeral was in the village, and the house was theirs for two nights and three days. Ravi stood at the gate in the early light and watched the scooter take his parents down the lane, and the dust of their going hung in the air a long time after the sound had turned the corner. His mother looked back once and called something the wind took apart before it reached him, and Sneha, standing at the door behind him in her school uniform, said, “She said to lock the gate at night and don’t fight.”

“Lock the gate,” Ravi said. “Don’t fight.”

“Same thing.”

The house settled around them like a held breath. The pink clock with the goddess measured the morning, the fridge hummed, the fan turned, and the rooms smelled of his mother’s leaving — oil in the kitchen, talc on the dressing table, the steel dabba on the counter covered with a cloth, lunch and dinner both, enough for two days, enough for anything. Sneha went through the rooms like a surveyor, opening cupboards, checking the water in the filter, testing the latch on the back window, and came back to stand in front of him with her hands on her hips. “We can eat whatever we want. We can watch whatever we want.”

“Same thing,” Ravi said, and she laughed, and that was the door.

The cable man had come two months ago and bolted the dish to the roof with iron clamps, and the television that had been black-and-white in the village, that had needed the folded cardboard and the exact angle and the hand held just so, now held forty channels in colors that seemed to bleed. Ravi had learned them the way other boys learned batting averages — which one carried the news at nine, which one carried the films, which one, after midnight, when the transmissions went soft and the picture bloomed with grain, carried the films the others would not touch.

The afternoon passed in yellow light. Sneha lay on her stomach on the good sofa with a film magazine, her feet up, her toes moving in the air, and Ravi sat at the dining table with his books open and did not read them. The light went long across the floor. The shadows climbed the wall. The clock ticked, and his sister turned a page and said, without looking up, “You’re staring at the same line,” and the words went through him like a current — the same words, the same shape of room, three years back, a different woman — and he said, “I’m not,” and she said, “You are,” and he looked at the page and saw only the night to come.

She went to bed at ten, and her door closed, and Ravi sat in the living room with the lights off and the television on low and waited for midnight.

The satellite channel came in clean. No static, no antenna, no cardboard wedge — the picture was perfect, the color perfect, the woman on the screen so close and so clear she seemed to be breathing the same air. The film was a foreign thing, a different way of being — the light falling through the windows of an apartment, the man and the woman looking at each other, their clothes coming off slow and unhurried like a conversation. Ravi had watched this channel before, in the dark of his room with the sound low, but never with the whole house empty, never with the volume up and the curtains open and the night outside as black as the screen.

The window was open. He had opened it himself. The curtain moved in the night air, and the sound of the lane came in — a dog, a scooter far off, a television leaking through its own lit window across the way — and the woman on the screen made a sound, low and long, and Ravi’s hand went to himself.

Her voice came from the dark of the passage. “What are you watching?”

His hand came away, the remote went wrong, the volume jumped, and the woman on the screen moaned into the sudden loud of the room, full and unmistakable, and then the sound cut out and the room was quiet except for the fan and the clock, and Ravi sat on the durrie with his hands over his lap and his heart going like a drum and his sister standing in the doorway in her white cotton nightie, the light from the screen moving across her face.

“Nothing,” he said.

She looked at the screen. The woman was on her knees, the man behind her, the camera close, and Sneha looked at it the way you look at a door you are deciding whether to walk through. “Turn it back up.”

“Go to sleep.”

“Turn it back up, Ravi.” She came in barefoot, her plait over her shoulder, and sat down on the durrie two feet from him, her knees drawn up, her arms around them. “I want to watch.”

The volume came back up, low, and the sound filled the room again — the wet sounds, the breathing, the foreign words — and they sat in the dark together, and Ravi’s eyes went to the screen and away, to the screen and away, and his sister’s shoulder was a foot away in the dark, and the whole of him was a single lit wire.

She watched without moving. He watched her watch. The light from the screen moved across her face, blue-white, her eyes wide, her mouth slightly open, and she was fifteen years old and she was watching a woman take a man into her mouth, and Ravi looked at her face and the world tilted under him.

Then she said, “Does it feel like that?”

“What?”

“That.” She nodded at the screen. “When you do it. Does it feel like that?”

The fan turned. The clock ticked. Ravi’s voice came out small. “I don’t know. I’ve never — with anyone.”

She looked at him. The look went on, and something in it opened, the same door, and she said, “Neither have I.”

The film went on. The man and the woman moved through the rooms of the apartment, and somewhere in the middle of it Ravi’s hand found hers in the dark — or hers found his, he would never be able to say — and they held on, and Sneha’s grip tightened, and neither of them looked away.

“Show me,” she said.

“Show you what?”

“Yours.” She let go of his hand and sat back, and her face in the blue light was the face of someone who had decided. “I want to see yours.”

The words ran through him like a struck wire. He had been seen before — had left windows open for it, had knelt in kitchens and offered himself to the eyes of women — but no one had ever asked. Divya had taken his hand and guided it. Hema had pulled him down and held him there. No one had ever said the words — Show me — and meant his body, his alone.

His hands went to his waist. The button came open, the zip, and he pushed his shorts down to his thighs, and he was already hard, had been hard since the first question, since the door, and he took himself in his hand and showed her.

She looked. The light from the screen moved across him, and she looked at him the way she had looked at the screen — wide-eyed, studying, her mouth slightly open — and she reached out, and her fingers touched him.

Her fingers were cool, and the touch was light, a question, and Ravi’s whole body went tight. “Does it hurt?” she said.

“No.”

“It’s warm.” Her fingers closed around him, and the world went quiet.

She learned him the way she learned everything — carefully, her head tilted, watching her own hand work. Her thumb moved over him the way she had seen the woman on the screen move hers, and her grip adjusted, and she watched his face the whole time, and the watching undid him — his sister’s eyes on him, on his face, on the place where her hand held him, the blue light moving, the house empty, the window open — and he was being seen by someone who wanted to look.

“I want to see what happens,” she said, and her hand moved faster, and Ravi’s head went back, and the wanting rose in him like a tide and broke, and he came in his sister’s hand with a sound he bit off against his own wrist, and she watched the whole of it, and when it was over she looked at her hand, at the wetness of it, and she said, “That’s what it looks like.”

“Your turn,” he said.

The words hung in the room. She looked at him, and then she lay back on the durrie, and the light from the screen moved across her, and she said, “Show me how.”

He had done this before — had knelt in a kitchen with the curtain half drawn, had learned a woman’s body with his mouth and his hands — and the knowledge came back to him now, the remembered map, and he moved down her body and his hands found the hem of her nightie and pushed it up, and the light from the screen moved across her skin, and his sister lay open before him, and the sight of her undid him more than any of it.

Her body was a new country. He mapped it with his eyes first, in the blue flicker — the hollow of her throat where her pulse beat, the small rise of her breasts under the thin cotton, the nipples dark through the fabric, the flat brown plane of her stomach that rose and fell with her quick breath, the jut of her hip bones, the soft inward curve of her waist, the dark triangle between her legs, and below it the long line of her thighs, and her knees, and her ankles, and her toes that curled and uncurled against the durrie. Fifteen years old, all of her, and she lay there watching him look, her eyes wide, her breath gone shallow, her hands at her sides, fists, waiting.