Read Online Seahorse by Janice Pariat - Free Book Online

his son in the stranger’s arms and walk out silently?
    â€œThey would’ve killed me…”
    Everything else remains pristinely clear in my mind—the oddly-angled room, the air tinged with the smell of cheap tobacco and old books. The map on the wall. The bed. The bed. Lenny’s family tried to keep it quiet.
    â€œCan you imagine,” I asked Nicholas, “how fast news spreads in a small town?”
    Where everyone knew everyone else. And whispers grew as tangled gardens, abandoned in their wildness, words flitting like butterflies from tongue to tongue.
    â€œDid you see him again?” asked Nicholas.
    I shook my head. “I only wrote him letters.”
    At the time this happened, I had just finished high school. My final exams a week behind me. I had no clear plans for after, the thing everyone called the future. And so I thought that’s what my father wanted to discuss, one evening, when he called me to his study. Except, when I walked in, there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before—embarrassment.
    â€œI wanted to talk to you about…” He stopped. Hesitant. He needn’t have said any more. I knew that the words about Lenny, whirlingaround town, had reached his ears too. I expected clamor and curses, rebukes and reprimands. I told you… I told you… I told you… I told you… he was a disgusting boy. To stay away. Instead he spoke with surprisingly timidity.
    â€œDid he do anything to you?”
    I was much too taken aback to reply.
    â€œTell me, did he?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    It grew, the look in his eyes. Twisting on his tongue.
    â€œDid he… touch you?”
    His words hung in the air, cleaving the space between us.
    I shook my head.
    Perhaps then it changed to relief. He sat back in his chair.
    â€œIt’s better you don’t see him again.”
    â€œBut why?”
    â€œIt is better.”
    I had my hands on the table, clenched, my knuckles white.
    â€œRight now he needs to be left alone with his family. You see, Lenny is suffering from—a disease. Your mother and I don’t want you around him…” It’s contagious.
    I held my silence.
    My father was done. “I think I’ve made myself clear.”
    It wasn’t enough to keep me from seeing him.
    My parents sent me away to Delhi. They thought it for the best. They’d heard of a college there, founded on good, wholesome Christian principles, where students lived on campus, which had special seat allocations for people like me who came from places and communities far from the capital, marked as underprivileged and marginalized. I was sent away. I was offered to Nicholas on a plate. Something like fate.

    If time is measured in a god’s blink, I didn’t emerge from my room for a million years. I don’t know if it was the next day, or the next week—or had a month passed?—after I heard about Lenny. At some point, on some day, before dawn, when the murmuring voices were silenced, and darkness glowed with a light that seemed to come from nowhere, I walked out of the residence hall, down the brick-lined path, away from the campus and into the forest. I picked my way through stone and undergrowth, the leaves glistening with dampness. Somewhere, perhaps, a moon. Ancient, watching through the branches of charcoal trees. The air still and silent, pulsing with unknown things.
    I came to a tower. A tall sandstone tower, which I entered, and climbed, because from the top I’d be able to see all the reasons why. The air would be fresher, and filled with promise. From there, I’d be distant, removed from the clutches of this great and quartering heaviness. I’d almost reached the end when suddenly there was no ground to stand on. Like stepping on water. Falling through the air.
    I lay curled at the bottom of the spiral staircase, the floor stone-cold and grainy against my skin. Hours later, a figure