Tushar’s face lit up when I walked into Happy Snaps. “How was your night out?” he called out.
“Okay,” I said, managing a small smile so he wouldn’t know something was wrong.
“No work for you today?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“No camera.”
He was right. I hadn’t bothered to bring my camera with me. There was no way I could have worked today. After what had happened last night, I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired or creative.
“No, just came by to say hi.”
My voice was not that convincing, but his face lit up just the same. I had to keep up the pretense because there was nothing about last night that I’d be able to share with him.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He was working at the computer and had dozens of photographs up on the screen. “Trying to finalize the photos from Hari’s reception.”
I sat next to him and watched him quickly scroll over the small images, occasionally finding one he wanted to see in full size.
In my best nonchalant voice, I asked him, “Have you ever been behind the Law Garden at night?”
He shook his head. “Why do you ask?”
“I was at Law Garden with Biren last night. You know, to get some ice cream and meet his friends, but then we saw a commotion behind it with a lot of cops.”
He nodded knowingly. “Oh, yes. Maybe you saw the area where the gay men spend time. Police are always trying to catch people there.”
“Catch them for what?”
He continued, “They don’t talk about it, but I’ve heard sometimes people go just to teach them a lesson.”
I felt nauseous. I feared the answer but asked the question. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve heard the police sometimes go to show them why what they are doing is wrong.” His tone was neutral as he reported his knowledge on the issue, and it was hard for me to know where he stood, but I knew how sensitive this issue was in India, and now wasn’t the time to get into an in-depth discussion of his personal feelings on the subject.
As I processed Tushar’s explanation of the raids, I thought back to when Biren had first told me he was gay. He’d said that if the police found out, he could be beaten or something much worse. Panic swelled within me as I contemplated what that meant and thought about how he had looked that morning. His body aching, his steps so careful, his spirit broken.
I remained calm on the outside while a little voice inside me screamed. I went to the small bathroom in the back of the shop. I pulled the chain to turn on the light, took one look at myself in the small mirror with the crack in the corner, and leaned over the sink to vomit.
32
When I got back to the bungalow, I saw the door to Neel’s room was slightly ajar. Things had been stilted since our fight, but I had to see him. I knocked softly before pushing the door open and then closing it behind us.
I saw the half-full suitcase on the bed. “Are you going back home?”
He shook his head. “Dipti and I talked yesterday, and we agreed I should spend a few days with her at her family’s place,” he said. “Maybe you were right after all, and staying was best, and this is another step in the right direction.”
“What changed her mind?” I asked.
“She didn’t say. But she did say you had gone to see her.”
He looked at me pointedly, and I worried yet another thing had gone wrong in the last twenty-four hours and I’d messed something up between them too.
“Seems I owe you a thank-you for something because she said as she thought about that conversation, she realized we needed to find a way to the other side of this.”
He smiled softly. I could see he was acting as if everything were okay, but it was understandable under the circumstances. Fake it till you make it had been our mantra when we first moved to Chicago and were trying to make friends in school. Old habits died hard.
“I also owe you an apology.” He raked his hand through his hair.
I sat in the chair across from the bed, knowing we needed this conversation before we moved to the next one.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’ve been going—”
“No.” He shook his head. “It’s not. I’ve never been that cruel with you.”
“No, you haven’t,” I agreed. After a long pause, I said, “What hurt most was that I could tell you meant what you said.”
He came to me, shaking his head. “It’s not your fault that we wanted to protect you. You were the youngest. It was our job to protect you, and it wasn’t right for me to throw that back at you. I shouldn’t have blamed you for decisions that I made. Sometimes I resented having to carry the knowledge on my own. I couldn’t let Mom and Dad know that what I saw was affecting me, and we normally shared things with each other, but I didn’t want you to have the burden either, so I buried so much of it.”