Not All Those Who Wander
ARJUN NATH
Not All Those Who Wander
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
CONTENTS
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Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
NOT ALL THOSE WHO WANDER
Arjun Nath is the author of the acclaimed memoir White Magic: A Story of Heartbreak, Hard Drugs and Hope. In his past lives he has been a teenager, a heroin addict, a corporate lawyer, as well as a screenwriter, webpage designer and once, briefly, a nine-year-old professional bootblack. He chose to become a writer mostly because wearing pants is optional.
Arjun lives in New Delhi and Not All Those Who Wander is his first novel. If you have any recommendations for sports movies, please send them in to [email protected].
PRAISE FOR WHITE MAGIC
‘An endearingly honest book that treads the fine line between tragedy and comedy, hope and hopelessness, self-loathing and self-love. Nath writes like a champion’—Indian Express
‘The story remains with me. It is almost filmy—the locations and characters, the scenes the author recreates, the heroic narrator. His combination of being vulnerable and insightful, friendly and awkward, loving and lost is impossible not to identify with . . . not to want to be friends with’—Livemint
‘Nath’s prose, peppered with yuppy jargon (the F-word occurs so frequently, one loses count), is refreshingly original and he has a wicked way with words’—Deccan Chronicle
If you say anything out loud often enough, it eventually disappears. With each repetition, names shed meaning like a tortoise moulting, the skin coming off slowly in white, flaky bits until the original creature, in a sense, no longer exists.
Try it. Say ‘egg’ out loud.
Egg.
Now say it a few more times.
Egg. Egg. Egg egg egg.
You see? After the fifth or sixth time, it isn’t something you make an omelette with but just an undefinably silly sound. It might even make you laugh. You won’t know why you find it funny, but it probably has something to do with the nonsense rhymes you chanted when you were yet young and shiny. Eenie meenie. Akkar bakkar.
This is how we learn to remember. By repeating names. This is how we forget.
Start small. Say spider. Say mos-qui-to. Move on to the higher animals. Say fox. Did you know that there are thirty-seven species of fox in the world? If all of them simultaneously became extinct tomorrow, it would not impact your life one whit. You might not even notice. Say fox.
Abstractions are trickier. At least an egg is always an egg is always an egg. But love? Oh no. Love is a slippery sonofabitch. Love is a many-splendoured thing. It is blind. It makes the world go ’round. Love is friendship that has caught fire. Love is madness, a swelling in the chest too big to contain, and photographs of puppies that somebody posted online. You don’t know what love is, not really, but you know what it isn’t.
Love isn’t easy like Sunday morning.
Say love. If you don’t know what something means to begin with, is it possible to make it mean even less?
Try it. Love love love love love love love.
Say lust. Say sorrow. Say mother, and father.
Say God and be damned. It’s a stupid name for a supreme being anyway. And if you can kill god before breakfast someday then, perhaps then, there is hope for you. Because sending all of these names—of things and places and people and god—into the void is just practice for the only name that matters. The only name that has ever mattered. The one that wounds your heart and makes you soar. Like dancing on broken glass. Sure you bleed, but you’re still dancing, aren’t you? You can’t stop, and you can’t not.
Gehna.
Try it.
Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna
You can rub the shine off of most names by saying them a lot.
1
Eram first saw Gehna Rai through her brother’s aquarium.
Varun was twenty-three, which meant that he was proper grown, but it was hard to tell with him sometimes. He liked nothing so much as a good argument and he always took the contrary view: he was a Darwinist with animal lovers, a rabid bigot among liberals, pro-life with feminists, pro-choice with Catholics, he advocated gay marriage to conservatives and was a loyal supporter of whichever government happened to be in power.
He also liked to piss Gehna off, which was fun for him because she cared about things. People who cared were always easy to provoke.
The six-foot home aquarium was a sophisticated affair—automatic filtration system, temperature controls and lots of vegetation the baby mollies could dart into whenever their parents tried to eat them. Varun rooted for the parents.
‘Go get ’em,’ he would yell. ‘Get that little bastard. He’s behind the seaweed.’
And Gehna, as if on cue, would be outraged. ‘How could you! The poor thing can’t even defend itself. Is this why you keep them? So you can watch them, what, cannibalize each other?’
‘Natural selection, baby,’ Varun would say, tapping the plate glass of the tank to show the adult Black Molly where its dinner was hiding. ‘The weak are doomed. Try not to let your heart bleed all over my carpet.’
That evening was the first time Eram visited Varun’s 2-BHK apartment in the Bandra suburb. The main thing that made this apartment different from the trillions of other apartments in Mumbai was that its door was open. Not just unlocked, but left ajar.
Who does that in a big city? Eram wondered. Nobody who’s still breathing, that’s who. In the movies, gumshoes always have these tough-as-shit names like Spade or Hammer or Shaft. I could be PI Steele, hot on the scene of a mystery so raw that it bled. The door opened with a loud creak. Steele waited for something to happen, a matchstick stuck in his mouth like it was a pin holding the rest of him together. He needn’t have bothered—in this crummy neighbourhood, even a shotgun blast wouldn’t have stirred the residents. Inside, the apartment was bright and cold as a morgue. Steele hoped that the resemblance ended there. He hoped that the worst thing he would find in here was milk gone bad. But deep in his bones he knew it wasn’t to be. Death had been a guest here tonight. Pity, thought Steele, slipping the matchstick into the pocket of his trench coat. He’d have to scratch that dinner date he had with a dame so hot you could fry bacon on her.
The goddamn movies, Eram thought. You watch too many of them, they set up shop in your brain.
The big aquarium sat on a counter dividing the kitchen alcove from the hall. When he bent down to get a closer look, Eram saw a girl in a pink camisole curled into an armchair on the other side of the tank.
‘Look at that. A pretty pink fish.’
The girl lowered the book she was reading. Through the clear water of the aquarium—past the mollies, goldfish, tetras, platies and pairs of kissing gourami that fought with their mouths pressed tight together—Eram looked into her eyes. He may have looked a moment too long. She smiled at him with half of her mouth. How could he have known, at seventeen, the peril in girls with sad eyes and crooked smiles? Eram’s pulse jerked like a koi fish fresh to the net. It suddenly became imperative that the aquarium not be between the pink girl and himself, so he stepped around it.
‘How’s that for the meet-cute of the millennium?’ he asked.
‘That depends, I guess.’
‘On what?’
‘On me knowing what a “meet-cute” is.’
‘Oh, right. A meet-cute is that scene in all the romcoms when the boy and girl meet each other for the first time. Think Hugh Grant spilling OJ on Julia Roberts in Notting Hill. Or like Hazel and Gus at a cancer support meeting in The Fault in Our Stars.’
‘Or that one where a boy sneaks into an apartment without ringing the bell and gawks at the girl for god alone knows how long until she nearly has a major coronary incident.’
‘Listen, I would have gawked a whole lot longer but these damned fish kept getting in my way. Why was the door open?’
‘So that Munshi can go in and out as he pleases. My brother’s cat.’
‘Axe murderers can go in and out as they please too, y’know.’
‘I guess. Are you one though? An axe murderer?’
‘Well, no. Not yet anyway. But I’m still young. Who knows, couple more years surrounded by all the idiots and fakes on this shitty rock and I might just—’
‘Eram! Wassup, dude.’ Varun charged into the hall. You could get tired just looking at him. He was one of these guys who never sauntered or strolled anywhere. Even his words jostled each other out of the way. ‘You meet my sister Gehna? No? That’s her in the corner pretending to be good. She’s usually not this quiet, more’s the pity. Gehna!’ Varun snapped his fingers before the girl’s nose. ‘This is Eram. He’s a teenager as well. I dunno what I’m doing, hanging out with a bunch of babies. Say something interesting.’
Gehna shot death rays at her brother before giving Eram that crooked smile again.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ She stuck out a hand and Eram took it, briefly. It wasn’t quite the meet-cute of the millennium. No sweet dreams would be made of this.
And yet, Eram thought.
Varun rubbernecked at them like he was at a tennis match. ‘What is this, a tea party? Are you guys going to discuss your favourite books now? I made the most darling little cucumber sandwiches for just such an occasion, shall I have Jeeves bring them in? Fuck me.’
He punched Eram on the shoulder. ‘C’mon boy, you’re getting crushed tonight.’
‘What’s happening tonight?’ Gehna asked.
‘I’m getting crushed apparently,’ Eram informed her.
He pulled out a chess set from his pocket, one of those portable, metallic jobs where the pieces all carry a sliver of magnet to keep them from sliding off during train journeys and such. Varun laughed, a high-pitched guffaw that set Eram’s teeth on edge. ‘Not on that peewee set, you’re not. Size is everything, dude. We’ll use mine.’ He pointed to the coffee table in the hall, on which his cut-crystal chessboard was displayed.
Eram put his set away. ‘Sure. My grandfather gave me this set. I carry it around just to remind me of him, y’know?’ He shrugged. ‘But you’re right. Size is everything. Is that real crystal?’ he walked directly over to examine Varun’s chessboard. Gehna felt heat rise to her cheeks. She scowled at Varun, miming for him to go over and make things right. Giving his nose a vigorous rub, Varun, incredibly, did as he was asked.
Eram and he had an awkward few moments (‘I’m sorry, bro.’ ‘No, dude, I’m sorry.’) but in the end Varun insisted that they use Eram’s chess set. Eram snatched up two of the pawns, one black and one white, and put both hands behind his back.
‘Choose,’ he said.
Varun considered the option carefully, scanning his opponent’s face for clues. Eram smiled at him. ‘You think I know which one it is? I don’t. Just pick.’
‘Left,’ said Varun immediately, as if he’d figured it all out in that very instant.
From where Gehna was sitting, she could see Eram switch the pieces from one hand to the other behind his back. She sat up very straight, intending to call him out on it. She was a big believer in fairness of all kinds, especially when it came to board games. But before she could say a word—‘Cheating!’ she might have said—Eram opened his left hand and let the white pawn roll on to the board. Varun whooped.
Reverse cheating?
Gehna was highly confused by then, no less when Eram turned to wink at her. She sank deep into the chair, propping the book up between herself and the source of her confusion.
If she had a type, Eram fell far outside of it. All of her boyfriends (and there had been more than a couple—Gehna had dated more or less without pause since puberty) had been tall, with dark skin and big arms. They’d been well-informed of current affairs and articulate in their lust for her. Not a single one had ever been handsome or too good-looking or, god forbid, cute. In short, she preferred the men to the boys. Eram was of middling height and fair-skinned. Pale, really, like those vampires who were forever seducing young virgins in the movies. Dark hair that tumbled artlessly down on his forehead as if he couldn’t be arsed to comb it. His face escaped being too pretty only because of a scar on his right temple and a smile that rarely reached his eyes.
Sneaking a look around her book, Gehna could see through the rumpled white linen shirt he had on that he was slightly built—are those ribs I can count?—and that he had pink nipples. Gehna wasn’t sure she liked the idea of that. Guys don’t have pink anything, do they? The next moment she was taken by a vision of running a hand across his chest, so strong and sudden that it made her dizzy. When the world stopped being bendy again, she saw Eram reach with two slender fingers and float his bishop four diagonals into the centre of the board. What appeared to be a harmless enough move to Gehna agitated the hell out of Varun.
‘No. No no no!’
He jumped up and paced a few steps on the carpet, all the while glaring at the board.
He looks like an angry young goshawk. That beak is unmistakably Rai.
Gehna ran a finger along the curvature of her own nose and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Back when she was twelve and just beginning to hate bits of herself, she had tried to fix the thing alternately with sticky plaster, the hard heel of her hand and a pair of pliers. That was also the summer she had her first blood. A summer of shame.