Monday, June 23, 2008

stand-in

this brings me back to a time somewhere in 2004, only it's as if we're so much older now. it feels like... it must've been in the afternoon. i'd say four. i cannot remember because there were so many warm and sticky afternoons, companion to that familiar greasy feeling. rudy and i are a little tired, maybe a food coma, maybe just from all the sums done and left to be done. we walk out from the back gate of mt. sinai, that joke of a gate, to the green-carpeted oasis called the surau. many times i sat there alone waiting for him to come find me, but the law of attraction hadnt started working yet for me. but this day we went there together. there's a slight smell of urine, which rudy insists is algae. there are some scraps on the carpet but we ignore them as together, we press our foreheads to the ground. we worship apart, sometimes together, sometimes one behind the other. i know his back well, his cracking voice and the smooth curve of his bum sheathed in white. there was the desire and there was the distance.

and now we're in our twenties, slightly weathered. we're lying on our backs on the floor of my parents' room, and here is that same back (maybe more muscular now). here is nostalgia, memory, and hope. here is distance bridged, reconciled, and then spread once again. here i am once more, not knowing what i'm thinking about, a quivering seventeen year-old again.

addendum: after he's walked out of the gate, i run after him and offer to walk him to the train station. i want to tell him that i'm sorry we've drifted apart again and that i really do want to stick around to change that, again. instead i ask him if he remembers our afternoons at the surau, and he did.

twenty minutes pass, with aaahs from amina sinai, coming harder and faster by the minute, and weak tiring aaahs from vanita in the next room. the monster in the street has already begun to celebrate; the new myth courses through its veins, replacing its blood with corpuscles of saffron and green. and in delhi, a wiry serious man sits in the assembly hall and prepares to make a speech. at methwold's estate goldfish hang stilly in ponds while the residents go from house to house bearing pistachio sweetmeats, embracing and kissing one another - green pistachio is eaten, and saffron laddoo-balls. two children move down secret passages while in agra and aging doctor sits with his wife, who has two moles o her face like witchnipples, and in the midst of sleeping geese and moth-eaten memories they are somehow struck silent, and can find nothing to say. and in all the cities all the towns all the villages the little dia-lamps burn on window-sills porches verandahs, while trains burn in the punjab, with the green flames of blistering paint and the glaring saffron of fired fuel, like the biggest dias in the world.

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