Shrimps and Gunpowder
by Amita Basu
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Our alley is all three- or four-storey houses, painted hot pink or sky blue, overcrowded drawing rooms elbowing neighbours’ bedrooms. Crimson and navy blue SUVs share the sloping driveways with lounging street dogs and cows.
Hybrid cows, these, black-and-white: mountains of flesh sitting statue-still, except for the shit-encrusted tails fly-flicking, and the square jaws masticating, drooling whitey-green. Under the unquiet gray that stands, in the metropolis, for the black of night, the street lamps cast deceptive shadows.
A single blade of grass, cowering between paving stones, casts a mile-long shadow slithering snakelike over my foot. And a shallow circular shadow, which I felt sure was cast by a stray pebble, turns out to be a fresh pothole suddenly underfoot.
“Ow,” says Komal, as her stiff right knee buckles, and it’s I who wince. I clutch her elbow and nudge my glasses up my nose, the better to see where I’m guiding her.
“Aryan Chariot okay for dinner?” My question is perfunctory. Before she graduated, Komal stayed in the hostel, but she made no other friends. Her hostel mates ignored her all year, then sucked up to her the week before exams, so that she’d coach them. Komal’s default response is yes: to me, to anyone who shows the slightest interest.
“Sure, or we could also try Anand Vihar?” says Komal. “They’ve finished their renovations.”
“Which do you prefer?” I ask, suddenly annoyed, determined to make her choose.
“My butter-chicken-and-naan is equally good at both places,” says Komal. “But only Anand Vihar has that skin-on grilled chicken that you like, and the big salad.”
I squeeze her elbow. “Anand Vihar it is.” My annoyance vanishes, leaving me feeling foolish.
Of course Komal cares about me. When I come back from the golf course, which is open to non-member walkers and joggers before working hours, Komal asks how many laps I ran this morning and whether the uncles gathering flowers for their wives’ pujas had left one or two shiuli on the tree to scent the air for seculars.
And now Komal, as I lead her through the back alleys, stumbles against shadows and stubs her toe against nothings. Maybe she’s been working from home again, like after her breakup, forgetting how to use her feet, her voice.
At Anand Vihar, Komal shuffles up the steps: black granite, shiny and sharp-edged, powdered with cement dust from the upper storey that’s still under construction. She stands hugging her tummy, penduluming, staring at the table as the waiter clears up.
She collapses into her seat. She looks up across the little square table at me, as if we were alone in the restaurant this Sunday evening, alone in the world. But maybe it’s only because she’s too shy to people-watch, to make eye contact even with the stick-thin pimple-faced waiters that she gives me this attention.
But her bald spot is growing, her knees are going, her jacket’s no longer buttoning and it doesn’t matter why she likes me; I’m all she’s got.
“No,” I cry, “lemme see what else there is!” And I didn’t ask for this revelation, I refuse it, I sit fidgeting in my chair, frowning at the menu.
“What did you eat at Goa?”
“Prawns. Lots of prawns.”
“Yum! Any good?”
“Huge and fresh and sweet.” I survey the diners. There’re some women skinnier than me, and some women curvier than me, but there’s no woman who’s both skinnier and curvier than me.
“Well, some restaurants skip degutting their prawns, so sometimes they’re bitter. They sell them right at the beach, too; you can eat prawns lounging thirty feet from the water. You sit on a chair to keep the sand out of your bumcrack, under an umbrella. This umbrella you’ve got to hire by the hour.
“And you do, for even at 9:00 a.m. the sun broils you. Before dawn, you watch the fishermen prepare to set off. They unravel their nets... which takes ages, somehow. You’d think they’d fold their nets up neatly in the first place... When they come back, they throw their catch into piles on the sand. You watch as you eat your prawns which they brought. For this scenery, you pay twice what you’d pay in a restaurant 200 meters away on the street. And it’s worth it. Yes: good prawns, good scenery, good trip.”
“Show photos!” Komal has so little practice asking for anything that she can only do it by regressing into childhood, lips pouting, eyes sparkling behind big mud-brown framed eyeglasses.
Is this how she looked, I wonder, that afternoon when she asked her parents for the most important thing. How badly did they fail her, I wonder. Did they try to throw her out, too, did they ask her why can’t you just be normal? “Screw it,” I say, “I’ll just have my usual.” We place our order.
I pass Komal my phone. I bring my own chair around, keeping her to my left, which takes a bit of calculation, for I’m bad at left and right, even worse at simulating them in my head. I’ve got photos from the spice plantation, the cruise boat, and the scenic old churches in Panjim.
But Komal is rushing through. I thumb back and offer commentary. “That tree with the cottony sprays of white flowers? It’s allspice. I bought allspice powder at the plantation’s shop. Have you ever tasted allspice? We grow it in India. We’ve been exporting it to Europe for centuries. I’ve never seen it before! I’d heard of allspice; I’d thought it was a spice mix. Like ‘all the spices.’”
“Allspice.” Komal mouths the word. “What’s it taste like?”
“Like a combo of three other spices. Cinnamon, nutmeg, and the third note is uh, clove,” I venture. My memory’s not what it used to be.
“Ooh, that might work as gunpowder.” ‘Gunpowders’ are coarsely powdered blends of roasted spices and lentils, which resemble gunpowder not at all, unless you’re as myopic as I am and as colourblind as a collie. Back in Kerala, ‘gunpowders’ are served alongside red rice, several vegetable dishes and with meat, if you’re Hindu but non-vegetarian, as most Malayalis are, as Komal is and as I am, and as, I discovered only lately, most Indians are.
I’d been fooled into thinking otherwise by the glut of restaurants marked “pure vegetarian.” But that, it turns out, is only a courtesy to the hoi polloi chasing the Brahmins’ ostentatiously abstemious habits.
“It’d be nice having another flavour of gunpowder.” Here in Bangalore, when she’s not bingeing junk, Komal makes a meal out of a mound of white rice and a teaspoon of gunpowder, sometimes made into a paste with a five-rupee sachet of Mother Dairy ghee.
“Yeah, that might work... And this was on the cruise boat, which goes down Mandovi River and back. I photographed the sunset from the deck. Then the boat began blasting music, and there wasn’t much to see above, so we went down to the ballroom. We spent the hour dancing to Bollywood hits, rubbishy music, fit only for dancing to...
“And these are the casino boats. Big as ocean liners!” Komal listens politely. I open my mouth to explain about the casino boats. But Komal is thumbing her way forward, rushing forward. She’s from Kerala, but she’s never been to Goa and now shows no interest in my photos, so why did she ask to see them?
“Ooh.” Komal has found the beach photos. She pauses on a photo of me and two of my tripmates. The waves lap at our heels. The sun crimsons behind us as it sinks through a cloudless colourless sky. “Bikini?” says Komal.
“My friends are wearing bikinis, yes. They bought them there. They’re expensive! I didn’t know when I’d use one again, so,” I chuckle, “I’m wearing my regular underwear.”
“This is your regular underwear?” Komal peers at my phone.
“It’s just a cotton underwired bra, unpadded,” I add — trying not to emphasise “unpadded” — “and cotton hipster briefs.” I omit telling Komal that, in this photo and in all the others, my bra straps are clipped behind, racerback-style, with a bra clip, to shorten the bra straps and lift my breasts, which sag even minus a drenched cotton bra. “There’s a reason they don’t make bikinis from cotton,” I add irrelevantly.
“Wow. I could never wear my underwear as a bikini!”
Pokerfaced, I bite into a drumstick. Komal often leaves her underwear around our bathroom. She still wears white woven-cotton wireless bras of the kind our mothers bought us when we were twelve, which show their lacy seams through teeshirts, and which, working by compression rather than lift, squeeze your lungs uncomfortably. As for Komal’s underpants, I mistook them at first for high-waisted knee-length city-shorts.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen your underwear,” says Komal.
“I don’t like leaving mine around... Ha, it’s my first year away from home. Two years in hostel during M.A., and then I’ll be leaving everything out, too.” No, I won’t. I’ll never let myself go like that.
Komal’s still staring at the first beach photo. Finally, she thumbs forward. This one’s just me: same setting, the photographer, a stranger we’d just met, kneeling for a better angle, five feet away.
Looking at the photo now, through Komal’s eyes, I see he knelt slightly to my left. He must’ve figured out my squint, despite all my efforts to hide it, and found himself a good angle to counteract it, and all without letting on. He saw me, I realise, and I feel furious and grateful and terrified. I press my palms to my cheeks, but the tandoori masala from the chicken on my fingers only makes my cheeks redder.
“You’re hot,” says Komal. I giggle, then bite into the drumstick so hard, I strike bone. “You’ve got an hourglass figure and perfect skin.”
I masticate with exaggerated relish. “I do like my skin.” Vanity is a sin. Vanity almost killed me. I change the subject. I tell Komal how my friend pulled her calf muscle on our jungle hike, and I carried her 7-kilo backpack on my chest, walked sandwiched between two backpacks three hours forth, three hours back. And I tell her about the Nigerian giant my friend picked up on Tinder, who grabbed my backside instead, and I slapped him. Should I have made the Nigerian a Dane, I wonder, so as not to sound racist?
“You’re so cool,” says Komal.
“Aww, shut up.” I don’t tell Komal that midway through the hike my shoulders, strained by two backpacks plus my clipped bra straps, felt like they’d break into two; I don’t tell Komal that the bottom-pinching pleased me, just a little, and that I considered not telling my friend. My actual behaviour remained admirable, so my mind workings become irrelevant. I cannot sacrifice Komal’s admiration.
“I’ve gained weight,” Komal blurts, still staring at my phone. “Four kilos.”
She looks up quickly but I’m even quicker; I’ve masked my horror. Four kilos in a week! “It happens,” I say. I implore her to come to the golf course with me. She says people stare at her no matter what she wears.
To hell with people, I say. I implore her to let me make her salads. Hmmm, she says. Halfway through her meal, she’s smashed up her neon-orange gravied chicken and crumbled her naan into it. She pushes her plate away and keeps thumbing through my photos. “See,” I say, “if you eat real food, you’re easily sated.”
“Maybe,” she says.
Maybe she’s lost her appetite for real food. Maybe she’s trying to uglify herself.
That Saturday last October, it was Komal who suggested that we drink. I gaped, then ran down to the liquor shop before she could change her mind. Midway through my Kingfisher, I realised Komal didn’t want to drink: she wanted to get drunk.
Soon she was kneeling over the toilet. But she didn’t throw up. She talked. Maybe she felt better able to talk in that novel situation, sprawled on the shabby tiles with me.
It was her brother, she said. He’d been ten, and she’d been four, and he’d tried his fingers first. That felt strange, but kind of good. Then he’d tried his... his thing, she said. After everything that had happened, she still couldn’t say the word. When he put in his thing, that no longer felt good. She cried out. He skulked away.
She spent a week creeping around on tiptoes, wondering if people could tell, thinking up excuses why she’d let it happen. Finally, she told her parents. They shouted at her, shook her, almost slapped her. He’s just a curious little boy, they said. No damage done, they said. And anyway she’d probably imagined the whole thing, with all those books you read, they said.
“What’s your brother’s name?” I’d cried, springing to my feet, looking around for my steel water flask. Gimme his address. Somewhere in Nepal, wasn’t it, in medical school? I’ll catch a train and go bash his head in, I’d said.
She wouldn’t tell me. She’d drained a quart of McDowell’s, but she wouldn’t tell me her brother’s name. And Kumar is far too common a last name. I’d never find him, myself. And Komal wasn’t on social media. There was nothing I could look through. She wouldn’t say another word, and she refused to touch the second quart.
Not that evening and not afterwards. So that was the end of our dawdling in Sagar restaurants, over idli-sambhar at one-legged stand-up steel tables, watching clerks rushing through lunch, making up stories about them; of our expeditions to discover which hole-in-the-wall or overpriced Café Coffee Day outlet serves Bangalore’s most rancid coffee; of our lounging in bed in the streaming Saturday sun, dreaming up outlines for our award-winning, best-selling novels.
Komal has forsaken me. I thought that evening we were stepping into my mirage of soul-sisterhood. But, ever since, if I mention her brother, or her hair, or a therapist, she freezes up; and then, if I don’t take the hint, she replies with as close an approach to rudeness, to shortness, as she’s capable of.
Komal has forsaken me; but it’s okay, I’II tell myself, scolding myself for the quick, hot, sneaky tears gushing up my throat. It’s okay because, when I graduate, it’s I who will go away from her and make new friends.
I always make new friends. Pa works for the bank; he keeps getting transferred. We’ve always moved around, a new city every couple of years. I’ll make friends in Delhi. How hard can it be to find someone who will discover, without my telling them, that I love oleanders and hate roses; that I secretly wonder what the big deal is about Shakespeare, with his odd pacing and inconsistent characterisation; that I need to have whoever I’m with always to my left, so I can see them properly, so they can’t see my squint?
I’m staring at Komal, silently bidding her goodbye, and all this time she’s been thumbing through photos, and I’ve been lecturing about salads and morning walks. With savage relish, I picture Komal stuck in this dead-end job, hunched, redhanded with dusty Dorito guilt. I picture the Komal-shaped hole in my life and, yes, this is what I deserve; I don’t deserve any friends or any success; I’m still just a fat fuck.
Copyright © 2025 by Amita Basu
