Lena waves me off with one hand, her eyes already dropping shut. “Don’t mention it.” I can’t help smiling at that. So cool, so casual—but all her real emotions are there, just under the surface, just behind her words. Maybe we’re not so different after all.
My fingers are itching for a pencil—I’d love to work this room into a comic—but instead I slip into the bathroom and close the door gently behind me. I’d stick around and press her for more information about the city, or maybe strike out on my own, but Bombay is intimidating—I’ve never seen anything like it. The cars practically careen into each other, always swerving at the last second. A slum stretches for at least a mile beyond the hotel; our view from the sixth floor overlooks it and the Arabian Sea beyond. From the bathroom, I can see some children jumping among heaps of trash and others squatting to poop near the side of the road. When we were outside, peddlers hawked stacks of lychees and bananas from wooden carts. Women thrust their babies at us, motioning for pictures. This was all in the trip from the airport to the hotel; I’m exhausted just from having absorbed it. I’m not ready to brave the city alone. Plus, I’m pretty sleepy too.
That’s what I’m thinking as I step in the shower. But all of it is a cover for what’s really occupying my mind. I’ve always been good at that—thinking loose, easy thoughts to cover up the hulking ones that lie in wait. This time, it’s about Adam. Adam, Charlie’s old roommate from Bombay. The one who met up with us once when Charlie and I connected in D.C., just eight or nine months ago. Adam took a year off after high school and stayed in Bombay to work for an NGO. He’s still here. I sent him a Facebook message before we left, and Lena and I talked about meeting up with him tomorrow. It’s the plan. If something weird was going on with Charlie in Bombay, Adam would be the one to know.
I ignore the pounding in my heart as his face flashes through my memory. Blond hair, a rugged build—he was captain of the cricket team at the American School in Bombay—tanned skin from hours in the Indian sun. I scrub my hair harder, digging my nails into my scalp until it hurts.
We were in D.C. because Charlie’s dad was there for work, and Charlie was on break from college for the holidays, and I was on Thanksgiving break from high school, and could drive there easily from Chicago. I told my parents I was staying with his family; but in reality, we had his uncle’s empty bachelor pad in Georgetown all to ourselves for five days . . . except for the two nights Adam stayed there too.
Adam. Three shots of tequila. Charlie passing out early, my head on his shoulder. I was about to turn eighteen. There are wrappers all around us from the cupcakes we’ve been devouring; we each had at least three. Adam’s on the foldout couch and I’m with Charlie in the master bed, but Charlie’s snoring loudly, so I go out to the kitchen for some water.
I scrub, I rinse. I transfer the pain of remembering into my body, my head. I turn the heat up until it’s scalding, burning all of the germs and mistakes away. Finally, when I start to feel lightheaded, I switch the nozzle off and step onto the thick, lush white area rug that partially covers the gray marble floor of the bathroom.
I reach for a towel and notice flecks of red under my fingernails. Blood. My scalp is tender from where I scratched too hard. I know what I’m going to do even before I reach for my pants, which lie rumpled on the floor, and pull out the piece of paper that’s folded up in the back pocket. There’s an address scrawled on the back, hastily jotted down from my Facebook account just yesterday.
Lena is sound asleep by the time I get out of the shower, so it’s no trouble to sneak off. The taxi driver tells me, in halting English, that normally it takes two hours to get from Colaba to Andheri, even with the Sea Link. That before the Sea Link, it would have taken four hours in rush hour traffic. But today we’re lucky, he says. It’s a Hindu holiday and there are no cars on the roads—only people, crowds of them, many walking hand in hand or with arms slung over one another’s shoulders. It’s an expression of affection between boys and other boys, men and other men, women and women—but never men and women mixed. Friends are showing each other the closeness they can’t show the opposite sex in this strange country where arranged marriages still happen all the time.