Outside, he set our suitcase under a cement overhang and lit a cigarette
as he waited for me to catch up. The air was thickly humid in the way Hyderabad didn’t get, the dry heat of the high plateau. We had journeyed down the sloping earth to the Bay of Bengal, its salt carried in the rain, tasted on my lips. Sameer’s skin, if he would only let me kiss it, must have held the same flavor. His T-shirt was sticking to him.
When I caught up, he said, “Stay with the bags. I’ll just run and hire a taxi.” For a moment, he stared out into the rain, the kind of torrential storm Hyderabad hadn’t yet experienced, the monsoons rising up from the south. Taxis were lined along the curb of the sidewalk, some distance away, and we had brought no umbrella, not preparing for anything but the Consulate.
I reached out and touched his back, running my hand down the center, along the ridges of his spine, and he turned and shot me that look he’d first given me when I’d suggested we stay on in India. He didn’t know who his wife was.
“Sameer, please,” I began, but he lurched away, his boots sloshing through the pools of water, and I watched him duck his head into a taxi window, his clothes and hair pinched down with water. As he was trying to get into the backseat, that woman in the burkha came up to him and said something, and he pointed down the road, before jumping into the taxi. She got into another one by herself. The taxi pulled up as close to me as possible, and Sameer and the driver, a short man wearing what looked to be a black plastic bag, cut out around his face, came running over. They grabbed the bags, and I scampered behind them to the car.
The hotel was just off Mount Road, a wide street filled mostly with cars and taxis. I didn’t see any cycle-rickshaws here, everything looking cleaner, sharper, more in order. Stoplights that were heeded, a center divide between us and oncoming traffic, underground subways. I saw foreigners hiking about with overloaded backpacks, parka hoods tied tightly under their chins, their white skin startling to me, making Nate seem even more alien. The taxi pulled into the U-shaped driveway of Hotel Sri Lenka, dropping us right in front of the doors, and
the bellman, dressed in red, his head shaved in some penitence, raced to the car and got our bags. As we were heading in, I saw a line of monks walking by, dressed in orange robes, heads shaved like the bellman’s. They were holding brass bowls, fragrant fumes rising up and out, the gentle tinkling of temple bells. They did not seem to notice the rain.
The room was not like what I had expected, nothing like a honeymoon suite. It was on the second floor, just two twin beds pushed together to make a queen, a crouching toilet, a water heater for baths, a heavy floral curtain over the glass door blocking out the dim light. The bellman pushed it back and slid open the door to a narrow balcony, the rain wetting the carpet. Coconut trees outside, terra-cotta roof tiles of the building next door. When I peeked into the alley below, I saw a man reading a newspaper in the doorway of what looked to be his apartment. He was sitting cross-legged on the top step, shielded from the slanted rain, his arms cut off at the elbows. He would lick a stump and use it to flip a page.
The bellman left and Sameer peeled off his wet T-shirt. He stood before me a moment, wiping his chest with it, before saying he was going to take a bath. When he went inside, I heard him lock the door.
WHAT COULD WE do in this rain? Where could we go?
There was a cafe across the street that made foot-long masala
dosas
, and we ordered breakfast from there. Sameer paid the bellman to pick up the food for us. Then he sat at the round table by the door with the immigration forms I had brought back with me from the U.S. I watched him run the pen over the same question again and again, trying to read it. Finally his face fell into his hands.
When the
dosas
arrived, I fed him myself, like Nafiza used to feed me. As he chewed, he stared at me with glistening, pained eyes. “
I am more intimate to you than your own jugular vein.”
How could he not see this?
I set the dish down and crouched before him, taking his hands in
mine, that silver toe ring denting the flesh around his thumb. I kissed it. “I want you to make love to me.”
He blinked at me, but said nothing.
“I want you to make love to me, Sameer,” I repeated. “I don’t want to wait anymore. I am clean now, I am entirely yours.”
He pushed his chair away from me and rose, fingers on his forehead. “We seem to be living in two different worlds, Layla. I seem to recall you telling me that you’d gone to some bloody clinic, days before our honeymoon, to get rid of some other man’s filth.” His voice was rising in a way I’d never heard, spit spewing from his mouth.
I stepped toward him, and he angled away, then pushed to the other side of the room. He stumbled over the suitcase. Suddenly he was racing back to the door, and I stepped before it. He stopped, grimacing.
“I love you,” I said. “I told you because I love you. Do you think I told anyone else—not even him!” Even as I was saying it, I heard how it must have sounded to him, twisted. Yet it was the truth. I had confessed to Sameer, exposing not simply what I had done, but who I was, my faults, my mistakes. In exchange, I wanted his forgiveness, his acceptance. “I want the fulfillment of my love, Sameer. I want you to make love to me.”
“Are you mad? Have you gone out of your bloody mind?” He jabbed at his own head. “Make love to you? Do you think I’m just some … some bloody, I don’t know, machine, that can just get it up and do it, fuck you, lie in bed with you, like you’ve been lying in my bed, lying to me, fucking me over. No, I can’t, and I won’t! I won’t touch you … not now.”
“Not now, not now,” I said, mimicking him, the anger in me rising, taking full control, an intensity of feeling I’d never known before, a demon stronger than lust or love, and I picked up the ashtray from the table, intending to hit him, and he watched me, arms crossed over his chest, tongue pushing through his front teeth, daring me in that way I sometimes dared Dad, removed from all emotion, all physical pain. It was the opposite of prayer, where the spirit rises, soaring above
the prison of our bodies; here, whenever Dad struck me, I hid inside the tendrils and gut of my own flesh, between the heating of the quickened heart, no sensation reaching me.
I set down the ashtray whispering, “It is our honeymoon.”
“Yes, it is,” he said, then stepped onto the balcony and lit a cigarette. In the dark day, his figure was a darker shadow.
SO WE STAYED in the room all day, in this tropical paradise, the air suf fused with the scent of the bay I imagined that other couples on their honeymoon, even when it was sultry and inviting, chose to stay inside, providing each other the pleasure that no day, no matter how lush, ever could. Here, now, I had planted myself in the chair by the round table, close to the door, forbidding my husband to leave.
He was lying on the bed, on top of the covers, arms behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. No rotating fan here, just the ocean’s wind coming through the glass sliding door, the kind Nate had pushed open to slip inside. The rain had dampened the floral curtain, half-drawn to keep the wetness out, and water dripped onto the carpet, a growing darkness that looked as though someone had urinated. I was now smoking his cigarettes, the ashtray nearly full. Night, day, there was no difference here, one rolling into the next without respite. I had seen nothing of Madras, but I already hated it.
“Would you have preferred I not tell you?”
He rolled onto his side, his back to me. “Please, give me some peace.”
“I have been thinking these past few days—I guess ever since I found those articles—how strange it is … you know, it almost seems as though you prepared me for some incredible sexual adventure, yet you’ve given me nothing. I mean, yes, I’ve been taking you in my mouth, but you weren’t prepared to do more even back then, when you didn’t know about … what was happening inside me. You’ve not made a move in a month. I mean, it’s not like I’ve been holding you back, like you’ve wanted to make love to me and I’ve been holding
you back. You have been perfectly satisfied with the way it is. I’m the one who wants more. You could go on like this, couldn’t you? Honestly—and we are being honest with each other, ever since we got onto that damn train, we’ve been perfectly honest with each other—so, honestly, Sameer, what you do and what those articles describe are so very different, because really,
honestly
, you’ve not made a move, I mean, you’ve not once touched me, not really, you’ve not once, for instance, touched my breasts. I thought … well, I thought men liked that kind of thing.” I sucked at the cigarette and noticed my hand was trembling. The room stank of sea salt and mildew and stale smoke.
He folded the pillow over his head. I was now the noise he did not want penetrating his skull, breaking into whatever it was he believed. “You want to talk about letters, baby, what about the ones you wrote to me, huh? Remember how you would describe your
amme
, always talking talking, driving you mad. That’s what you’re doing now, talking in circles, driving me bloody mad. You can’t tell me what you did, then expect me to … to . . bloody hell, I don’t even know what you want from me anymore.”
I snuffed out the cigarette and went to him, my knee falling into the crack between the two single mattresses and getting caught. I yanked it free and straddled his hips so that he fell onto his back. I began undoing his belt. How could he not know what I wanted when I had exposed myself in the severest way?
“Make love to me, please, just once,” I pleaded.
He pried my hands away. “I’m warning you, Layla, I’m barely keeping control of myself. Don’t do this, don’t throw me over the edge.”
I unzipped his trousers. “Is it me, Sameer? Do you not find me attractive? Is it my round features, my darker skin? Everyone at the wedding whispering how much more beautiful the groom is than the bride. Is that it, am I too ugly to fuck?”
He rose, gripping my hands behind my back, and stared at me in surprise, then, finally, in some recognition. “This isn’t about me, is it, Layla? This is about you, this is about your bloody father! I told you,
I’m not him. I don’t care what he told you about the way you look, nor what those fools said at the wedding. In India, it’s about skin color, that’s all. If you had skin like mine, they’d all say you were beautiful, but no one’s looking at
you
, Layla. No one sees you, not here …”
“That’s right, Sameer, no one sees me, not even you. Somehow, I’m not enough for you, am I? What is it about me that you
really
find .. repelling?”
The word he had chosen when he had tasted me on the wedding night was still reverberating inside, a noise like Amme’s wail from the other side of the locked door. She had been rejected, she had been cast out, not just herself but her entire femaleness humiliated, spurned. Of no use to the one man who, in this world, could be her lover.
Sameer closed his eyes, head sinking in apology for what he’d said, and his grip loosened around my wrists. I passed my fingers through his thick hair, kissing him. We fell sideways on the bed, the slit between the two mattresses passing under my back, widening. He fumbled with my kurta, raising it, digging his hand inside, finding my breast, but I knew he was merely being the dutiful husband, the one who had responsibilities to everyone but himself.
I released him, though I didn’t want to, and after a moment, sensing my body had gone still, his face fell into the curve of my neck. Which of us was defeated?
“Listen, Layla, to me, making love is communication, it’s connection. If my heart is feeling love for you, if my lips are telling you so, then my body will follow. It’s just another language you and I can speak to each other, just one more way of coming together. But I’ve got to first hear that love in my heart … otherwise—well, since you’ve asked me to be honest—I can’t get hard. I don’t know what sex is to you, but that’s what it is to me. If there is no love, there is no expression of love.”
“Are you saying you don’t love me?”
He sighed as he rose off my body and zipped up his trousers. “I’m saying I’m really confused. The things you’ve done have really hurt me.
You don’t seem to understand how much it took out of me to forgive your … infidelity. You were always impatient about it, never once apologizing, just requiring that I move on as though nothing had happened. And now you’re doing the same thing, except worse. Look at the demands you are making. It’s like you’re suddenly a little girl, an unreasonable little girl. You have lost all sense of yourself.”
From the suitcase, he dug out that blue button-down I so admired on him.
“Let me go with you,” I said. “Don’t leave me, please.”
He changed by keeping his body turned from me, as though hiding himself away. “I don’t like leaving you, Layla, believe me, I’ve been wanting to go on this trip all month, you know that. I hate it there, in my parents’ house, I hate that they’re just outside the door, able to hear everything we do. I’ve wanted nothing more than to get out of there, to come here with you. Bloody hell, didn’t I work till two days ago, saving up for this trip? But, now, there’s no peace with you, either.”
“I won’t talk about it anymore. I promise.”