She Lived Next Door – Part 5 of 5

Things came to such an abrupt end that they didn’t seem to have gone away from my life. In fact, even today when I am alone, I feel her presence around me. I feel that I am breathing in that jasmine scent and touching those petal-soft lips with mine.

I cried a lot the night my grandmother died, and that surprised everyone because no one expected me to have grown close to that senile old woman with whom all I had shared was a few minutes of conversation. Everyone billed me to be a softie and my father and his friends laughed at me for that. But no one knew what the real cause of my sorrow was—the death of my Grandma also spelled the death of my meetings with Marlena. It wasn’t one chapter but two chapters that had been brought to an end.

I didn’t go to Marlena’s house after that; there was no reason to. We crossed each other several times, and though I spoke casually with her now, there wasn’t anything more to it. I moved on to my next grade and I met girls and Marlena somehow receded into the background. I never thought she would, but it happened over a period of time.

Then one day, Johnny called me to his house. I had to convince my mother a lot to be able to go to his place. When I reached there, the usual gang was all there, and then Johnny took something out from under his shirt.

“Looksie,” he said. “Your girlfriend!”

I kept looking at the jacket of the cassette he clutched. Rachel’s Games, the cover announced. And it featured a picture of a much younger Marlena, bare-breasted, with leather straps all around her body, surrounded by four hunky men.

“Oh, but would this matter to him?” Sam teased. “He must have seen the live performance, right?”

“She made this boy a man!” Rusky said, grabbing my crotch.

It was typical boy banter, not meant to degrade me, but for some reason I felt terribly offended. And I snatched the cassette from Johnny’s hands and flung it on the floor and stamped on it again and again till the blow landed right across my cheek.

Mother asked me several times how I had got the torn lip, and I repeatedly told her that I had tripped over and fallen, but she refused to believe me. She knew that I had been to Johnny’s, of course, and with that annoying motherly instinct, she put two and two together and understood what might have happened. I thought she would go to Johnny’s place and give him a piece of her mind, but she was fresh out of the death of her mother and didn’t want to do anything of that sort.

That kind of saved me.

But the larger punishment of that brawl was yet to come—for that year, when I finished my grade, I was packed off to a hostel where I spent the next three years of my life. “I will have to take a job to make ends meet,” my mother said, “and with your Dad out of the house most of the time, it is best that you are under the supervision of the matrons there.”

***

I never returned home in those three years. My mother came every three months to meet me and once she even brought Dad. She was right—the hostel life did harden me up. Marlena and the hostel, those were the two things that made me a man. Living with my parents, I would dream of an independent life. But here at the hostel when I had to clean my own underwear and shower in the common area, I understood what I had missed. Anyway, it put the edge on me eventually and I was a very different person when I returned home as a sixteen-year old in 1991.

As I walked the corridor to reach my house, most of the aunts came out to welcome me—Aunt Janet was there and so also were Aunts Mercy and Candice, though Candice had become so old that she could not see me properly. “What a strapping young man your son has become, Edith!” Aunt Mercy said, shamelessly feeling my abs. And as I neared my house, my heart started beating faster. Marlena’s door was approaching, and I wondered if she would be standing out there to welcome me too.

But I had no such luck.

All the doors on the corridor were open to usher me in. Even Johnny was there, and he showed me his middle finger as I passed by, but this one door—Marlena’s door—was ominously shut and locked.

Later, when we were inside, the first question I asked my mother was, “Where is she?”

“Who?” my mother asked. “Marlena?”

I nodded, not really wanting to hear the answer.

“Oh, that was a really bad turn of events. She died last month.”

I knew it would be something like this. I had seen this a long way coming. Even when I was at the hostel, fantasizing my way through those lonely nights, I knew that there wouldn’t be a happy ending to my story with Marlena. It was too good a thing to have a happy ending.

“What happened?” I said, my mouth choked, though I checked the tears this time.

“She had cancer,” my mother said. “She had it all along. Even before she came here. Who could guess? With all the makeup she put all over her face? Maybe she did that to hide all those scars. And did you ever know she used to wear a wig?”

I didn’t want to act as though as I was in mourning. Marlena had entrusted me with a secret—the secret of the kiss—and I had to keep it. I could not dishonor her by letting loose a volley of tears and making people suspect my affection for her.

But my diffidence in shedding tears was challenged when my mother brought out a large paper envelope. “Marlena asked me to give this to you, in her last days,” she said. I opened it carefully, and saw that it contained the first portrait I made of her. Behind the picture was a line scrawled in her handwriting: Returning it to you because only you can keep it best.

Then mother came back again, holding the statue of the Buddha in her hands. “She never came back for this,” she said.

“Give it to me,” I said, fighting back my sobs. “I think I know where this belongs.”

***

It was difficult to find the house of Alex Morrison. He was listed in the telephone directory, but there were several Alex Morrisons and when the operator asked me what he did, I could not bring myself to say that he was a porn movie director. Finally, through the process of elimination, I hit at the right one.

“Who is it?” he asked the girl who opened the door.

“Some young man named Geoffrey,” she said.

Alex came out to see me. It was evident he had been crying.

“What do you want?” he said in an annoyed tone.

“Sir, you don’t know me,” I said. “But I have something of yours.”

He looked at me curiously as I put my hand in the bag I carried and got the Buddha out.

“How did you get this?” he asked.

“Long story, sir,” I said. “But you should know I was Marlena’s neighbor. She had given it to us.”

“So that’s where she was hiding it all the time!”

“Why would she hide it?” I asked.

At that, he took the Buddha from my hand and held it by the sides with the fingers of both his hands. Then applying some pressure, he managed to pull the two halves apart. And, in those halves was a picture of a little girl.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“You see her here,” he said. “This is Isobel, her daughter.”

Isobel, the girl who had opened the door, was almost my age. She had her mother’s eyes.

“Why would she hide her daughter’s photograph?” I still could not understand.

“Because I have been a bastard, that’s why. She never told me that she had that… disease. When she knew, she just walked away with two things—the Buddha I had given her as a present and our daughter’s photo in it. And when I landed in her house and was a dick and forced her to give it back, she wouldn’t give it to me. She said it was lost. I didn’t realize these were the two things that really mattered to her, and she wanted to keep them safe. With you.”

And, once again, the last two words of a sentence spoken to me had a profound effect on my soul. An effect that still sends a shudder down my spine.

END

She Lived Next Door – Part 4 of 5

The next day at Marlena’s place was an eye-opener in more ways than one.

“I know you understood what happened yesterday,” she said in the afternoon when I had finished lunch.

“It’s okay, Marlena,” I said.

“It’s not okay with me,” she said. “I cannot keep this within me anymore. I want someone to hear me without judging me. Will you be that set of ears?”

In that moment, Marlena looked haggard. She looked like she had aged a hundred years. I realized that she hadn’t bothered to put on much makeup even.

“When you are my age,” she began, “you will find that you have a past. Everyone has a past. Most people continue living that past till it becomes their present and then it doesn’t matter to them anyway. But I chose to leave that past behind. I didn’t want to hang on to it. And that’s precisely the reason why it has the power to haunt me.”

I kept looking at her without speaking, realizing what she had meant by wanting a set of ears.

“This is the past I don’t want to speak about,” she continued. “I want to keep it buried till it can haunt me no more. But there are some common bridges between then and now which don’t let me forget. Alex is part of them.”

“I know I must push him away,” she said, “maybe for his own good. But I can’t seem to stop him. He has been with me in ways that I cannot mention, but then he does these hurtful things, and I get confused. Being with him is difficult, but being without him is more difficult.”

That night, as I lay on my own bed back at home, waiting for the sleep that had become very elusive in those days, I mulled over what Marlena had said. I thought of Alex, the arch-villain in her life, and who had a right to her body, which I didn’t have. I felt I had grown taller in that month; then why would she not be with me? In a twisted way, I imagined that I was Alex, and I could force her to do things to me, and slowly that lulled me into a fitful sleep punctuated with broken dreams.

***

A day after that, I came closest to achieving my desires with Marlena.

It was the third Sunday that I was at her house. After she had opened out to me, we were no longer a babysitter and a ward—I guess we never had that kind of relation right from the outset. I, at least, now began to feel that she had begun looking at me with more respect. Probably it was because of the fact that I had heard out her ordeal with Alex patiently and because I hadn’t told it to anyone. She recognized the fact that I could keep an important secret. No mere boy can do that; only true men can keep secrets buried within their bellies till they don’t matter anymore.

We had watched a movie together. It was Casablanca, and I would never have watched it by myself, but she sort of forced me into it. It turned out to be one of those classics that had an intriguing story as well, and I was hooked to it till the very end. By the time Rick spoke the line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” my heart was beating with emotion. The movie had definitely affected Marlena too, who though she was not watching it for the first time, had moist eyes. Then I understood that the moistness could not have been because of the movie but because of some raw nerve that the movie had touched.

But then she did something that I would never forget. In fact, the reason I am writing this tale is because of this particular incident.

For the entire length of the movie, she had sat on a chair and I was on the couch, but when the movie got over, she came and sat right next to me. She sat so close that our thighs brushed against each other. I debated the appropriateness of this, when I felt the now-familiar hardness between my legs. In my fantasies, I had always wanted this to happen with Marlena, but now when it was really happening, all I could feel was utter shame.

However, Marlena’s eyes were fixed upon my face. She looked at me with those moist reddened eyes, her makeup back to an extent, and held my jaw.

The kiss was smooth. Her lips were exactly as I had imagined them to be. They felt like the marshmallows I enjoyed so much, and tasted like some exotic fruit.

I was naïve, untutored in these things, but I knew that I had to do something.

As I felt the tenderness of her lips, I pursed my own. Tepidly, I bit her lower lip, and then the upper one. We caressed each other for a long time, probably for a few minutes, our hands firmly placed on each other’s backs.

Then my eagerness got the better of me. I parted my lips slightly, and brought my tongue out, using it to feel her lips. I knew she liked it, for she let out a slight moan, and that accelerated me all the more. I shoved my tongue into her mouth. She didn’t part her lips willingly for that, but by now I was so heated up that nothing could have stopped me. I used my tongue to part her lips further, and further, till I could feel her tongue.

And it was at this exact electric moment that she pushed me away from her.

It was not just a push; it was a violent shove. It felt as though I was some kind of animal creeping on her body and she wanted to get me off her. I fell backward on the couch and my head hit the sidearm of the couch. It later turned to a small bump, but as it was well-hidden by my hair, I never did have to face any questions about it.

When Marlena saw that I had been hurt, she was filled with remorse. She held me close, and cried.

“I am so sorry, so sorry… I didn’t mean this to happen, just got carried away. Will you ever forgive me?”

I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing. She had come to me, she had initiated the kiss and then she had decided to fling me away; and yet, I wasn’t angry with her. And I continued sitting in silence on my end of the couch, and she retracted to hers.

We sat for a long time in that silence, till night began to fall outside. Finally, the silence was disrupted by yet another doorbell.

Doorbells at Marlena’s house were quite rare, and I was secretly thankful for that, because they never brought any good news.

This time, my mother was at the door, and her eyes were red too.

“Jeff… I have come to take you… You have to come with me. Your Grandma… she is no more.”

 

Continue to the concluding Part 5.

She Lived Next Door – Part 3 of 5

My mother had to go to Grandma’s house for several days after that. “Maybe this week is the last,” she said for four weeks. “It’s good that you saw Grandma that day,” she said. “Now she does not recognize even me,” she said. But I did not have any sympathetic answers for that. Marlena was too willing to have me over, and I was just as willing to go over to her place. In fact, the three of us—my mother, Marlena and I—developed an unspoken routine.

I would return from school and find my lunch and, at times, even dinner prepared by my mother waiting at Marlena’s house. I knew that my door would be locked, and so I would directly knock at her house. She would open the door each time with that warm smile of hers and receive me. When Grandma eventually passed away in December that year, I had spent close to a month at Marlena’s house, and each day she had received me like I was a first-time visitor to her place.

The first few days had been hard on mother. She would spend the whole day tending to her mother, but in the nights when she returned, she would ask me all sorts of questions about my stay at Marlena’s place.

“Did anyone visit her?” she would ask most of the time. But no one ever visited Marlena. Rarely did her doorbell ring, and even if it did, it was someone with the groceries or some or the other bill. I was her only privileged visitor.

“Does she behave normally with you?” she used to ask too. But why would she not behave normally?—I wondered. And what is normal really? My mother didn’t realize I was a grownup now.

I never answered such questions from mother. And most times those days, when mother came home, Dad used to come back from his work too, and then mother wouldn’t say anything. I never saw the two of them share a good word in all those years, and that was very surprising to me. People who marry out of love should not spend even a moment away from each other. But if anyone would have met my parents, they would have had a very different opinion of that generalization.

The first painting took an hour to make. I showed it to Marlena when it was done. I have that painting somewhere still, and now I am actually embarrassed to even think f it. But back then, I was proud of that creation. I showed it Marlena with the same pride. And full credit goes to her for not mowing it down.

“How wonderful!” she said. I had observed that Marlena usually spoke in exclamations. Her whole life was a large exclamation mark. Maybe it was the energy coupled with her beauty that made her such a lethal combination.

“Do you like it?” I asked, trying in vain to wipe the stupid grin off my face.

“I love it!” she said. “Can I keep it?”

“Of course!” I said.

“I’ll keep it very carefully. You can be sure of that.”

I’d later realize that that sentence was the only lie Marlena had ever told me. And even that wasn’t intentional. The painting—my first good portrait—was destined to come back to me in a manner most unexpected.

I could never guess Marlena’s age in all the time that I spent in close proximity with her. She looked like a 25 to me at times and sometimes she looked like a 45. She never spoke about any family and I never asked. Talking about family is boring, I felt, mostly taking a cue from my own family. But when I had to go to the bathroom, I had to go through her inner room, and on one of these occasions, I saw a photograph on her bedside table.

The bed itself had intrigued me. It was a large bed made of the softest material I had seen. It didn’t have the hard coir mattresses that I had back home. This was soft, maybe of that eiderdown thing that was in vogue back then, and it had soft silken sheets on it. There were two pillows on it too. I wondered why she needed two. And my hormonal mind imagined me on that other pillow with her. I was learning new things through my Dad’s medical books back home, and I had begun to understand why these ideas were entering my head.

But the photograph—when I saw it, it put all these fantasies out of my head. It was her in the photograph, but she wasn’t alone. There was a man with her. Someone tall and muscular, with a French beard and a slightly balding head. The moment I saw him, a strong feeling arose in my mind, and I was surprised to note that that feeling was of hate. Today I know better—that feeling was envy.

“Who is that man?” I asked her pointblank when I came back into the sitting room.

“Who?” she asked.

And I pointed to the inner room.

“He is Alex Morrison,” she said.

“His face seems familiar.”

“Yes. He used to direct movies. Not any more though.”

“Oh! Do you know him?”

“I used to work with him once. As an actress,” she said.

I then recalled seeing his face in my mother’s movie magazines sometime long ago. “Which movies did he direct?”

“You must not have heard of them,” she said. “They were not meant for children.”

“Oh, those kind of movies?” I felt a strange excitement well up within me.

“What do you mean—those kind?”

“Come on, Marlena, I know. Johnny tells me about those adult movies. Porn, right?”

She clammed up immediately. “Maybe I should now serve you your dinner, Jeff,” she said.

***

The next afternoon, when school left, I caught up with Johnny and his group. Being seniors, they didn’t walk with me. I had to run quite a bit before I found him and I had to separate him from Sam and Rusky and the others.

“What is it, Jeff?” he asked impatiently when I had managed to take him privately at a distance from the others.

“I want to ask you something Johnny,” I said with the right amount of hesitation for the thing that I was going to ask. “Please don’t get angry with me.”

“Why would I get angry?” he asked.

“Okay, look,” I said. “You remember you and Sam were talking about those movies?”

“What movies?”

THOSE movies.”

“Oh fuck! We don’t have any movies.”

“Johnny, Johnny, please don’t say no. I know you have.”

Sam walked in at that time, followed by Rusky. “What does the little squirt want, John?” he asked.

“His little weenie’s been talking!” Johnny said. “He’s asking for the movies.”

“Oh!” Sam said and his eyes went round in eagerness. “Someone just discovered why he gets a stiffy!

“Guys, calm down,” I said in a very grownup voice and it did calm them down. “I don’t want to watch those movies. At least not all. Look, can you find out for me if a man named Alex Morrison made any of those movies?”

“What the hell?” Rusky said. “You wanna do research on this, pip?”

“Seriously, what’s with you?” Johnny asked.

“You gay?” Sam said.

I knew what gay meant and I had figured out by then I certainly wasn’t one, but I wasn’t inclined to retaliate. “Let me know if you find out, Johnny,” I said, ignoring the others.

“Keep away from this ’mo, guys,” Sam said and shoved the others away from me. Johnny looked at me quizzically and followed Sam, and so did Rusky.

***

The days immediately following the discovery of that photograph, Marlena did not seem very cheerful. I thought she would forbid me from coming to her house altogether, but she did not do that. The next day she received me into her home, with her large amount of makeup intact, but I could make out that her smile had faded a little. She served me the food my mother had prepared for me, and I ate it in relative silence. I even did some homework that day. She read a book too, and she did read out a few lines to me from it that she found interesting, but that was it. We had only a bit of general conversation that day, no personal talk at all.

The ice hadn’t thawed the next day either. She continued her book and I did my homework and I ate in silence and watched a little television.

But when the silence continued for a third day, I thought that I should stop visiting her place. Maybe I was making her uncomfortable but she was too polite to say that to me. I thought I would put an end to her misery if that was the case. But what would I tell mother? She would ask me all sorts of questions if I refused to go to her place. She would jump to some bizarre conclusion that would make matters worse for poor Marlena and me.

So I went there again, all prepped up for a fourth day of silence, but this day something very strange happened.

It was around 9 in the evening, when I had just finished dinner, that there was a heavy knocking at the door.

“Oh, I was afraid of this,” Marlena said and got up immediately.

“Who is it?” I asked, frightened at the sudden noise piercing the silence of her house.

“Look, Jeff,” she said, “Will you do one thing if I ask you?”

“Anything, Marlena.”

“All right then,” she said. “Please hide in the kitchen for me, and don’t come out whatever you hear.”

I didn’t understand that, but she was my host and I was just a guest. The ethical thing would be to do whatever she wanted.

“All right,” I said.

“Thanks. I will try to fend him away as soon as I can.”

I wanted to ask who, but the knocking happened again.

I sat on the kitchen floor and Marlena closed the door. “This is the last place he will come,” she said. And then she opened the door, and it was a strong male voice.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said.

“Nothing, Alex,” Marlena said and I heard her bring in the visitor.

I had to see this Alex. But there was no way I could do it from inside the locked kitchen. Then I noticed there was a little gap under the door. If I left my inhibitions and lay down on the floor, I could see just a glimpse of the sitting room.

So I lay on the cold floor and pressed my left eye as close to the gap as possible. It gave me a good enough view, and I had a first look at the legendary Alex.

He was nothing like the man I had seen in the photograph. The French beard was still there, but the muscles were all gone. So had the hair. He was a shadow of what I had seen in the photograph, and I began feeling my envy for him slowly converting into pity.

“Do you have anything to drink in this godforsaken place?” he asked.

Marlena walked up to the cupboard and poured some alcohol into a glass. She brought it to Alex. He took it and made her a sign to sit next to him. She obeyed.

Then he did something that really shocked me. In fact, it would not be wrong to say that it traumatized me, scarred me for life. Holding Marlena’s arm with one hand, he used the other to open the zipper of his trousers. And then he pulled her down, forcing her mouth on his thing. “Not today, please,” Marlena said, but he tugged at her hair making her wince, and forced her down all the same.

I was thankful that I was watching this disgusting sight only through a sliver of space; if I had seen it in its entirely, I would have puked. It was horrible—he was definitely hurting Marlena, and I wanted to go out and do something to him equally horrible, but I knew I shouldn’t go out. So I stayed there, and fumed, and finally tears flowed down my cheeks (I didn’t understand why at all) and eventually shut my eyes tightly to save myself from any more mental damage.

When Marlena came to open the door, I was seated in the farthest corner of the kitchen, pretending to have seen nothing, heard nothing. But her expression bore it all. She had not repaired her tainted makeup; she had not even bothered to touch her marred lipstick; and just like that I knew—Marlena was ready to open up to me.

 

Continue to Part 4.

She Lived Next Door – Part 2 of 5

My mother had a mother of whom I had heard very little in those first thirteen years of my life. But, around the time I met Marlena for the first time, I also began to hear more of my grandmother. My mother took me to visit her once too—her house was in a remote corner of the town it took us three hours to reach—and made me talk to her. Not that the old woman understood half of what I told her about my school, but that conversation helped transform the notion of an abstract ‘grandmother’ to a more concrete ‘Grandma’ in my mind.

“Grandma is sick,” my mother told me on the way back home.

“What has happened to her?” I asked.

“Age has gotten to her. She cannot remember things. She fails to recognize people. It is good that you spoke with her now at least.”

“Why did I not speak with her earlier?”

“You don’t want to know about all those things. They are too far back in the past. Only remember this. It was not your fault that you did not meet her before today. Not my fault either, nor your dad’s. It was her own fault. But now she is old, she is sick, and such things should be forgiven.”

My mother spoke that like the true Christian she believed she was. I nodded.

And then when Grandma began to fall sicker, Mother had to visit her more and more. She could not take me with her all the time, and she did not trust me to be alone at home either. She always had the paranoia that I would keep the television running and doze off and the television would explode due to the heat. So, she began to scout for people to babysit me.

One day she asked Aunt Mercy, a neighbor of ours, to keep me at her house. Aunt Mercy had another sister named Candice and they spoke all through the afternoon as I pretended to bury myself in my books. Their talks were full of gossip, which was guarded at first owing to my presence in the house, but then became looser as they realized I was not interested. If only they knew how sharp my ears were! I could hear them even as I read the answers aloud to myself.

In the evening, they were joined by another old hag, Aunt Janet, and the threesome had a merry time chatting about anyone and everyone. Except my mother, of course, for I was right there.

And then the discussion veered toward the inevitable topic of Miss Nose in the Air. And no sooner did I hear that name than my ears stood up on end.

“I have heard she is an actress,” Janet said.

“No, no, she has a daughter who is an actress,” Mercy said.

At that Candice let out a little snort and said, “Judy told me… Judy, that choir organizer… anyway, she told me that she has a husband without marriage.”

This brought out sufficient oohs and aahs from Janet.

“He is some kind of movie director,” Candice said with effect.

“Oh, these Hollywood people!” Janet said as though she had been living in Hollywood since the earliest times in its history.

“He comes to visit her sometimes,” Mercy added.

“Does he now?” Janet said. “I wonder when he comes.”

“It’s always after rosary time,” Candice said. Rosary time for the Catholic families in The Seabird meant 8:45 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

“And…” Mercy said, casting a furtive glance at me and lowering her voice, “he leaves in the mornings.”

More oohs and aahs.

And that night, when I was back home, I don’t know why I found myself imagining Marlena with the unknown man who was supposed to be her ‘husband without marriage’. I could not clearly understand what they would do for a whole night—maybe watch those late night movies that were prohibited for me? I thought of asking Johnny about it, but somehow I didn’t want to tell him anything about Marlena. I wanted to keep all information I knew about her to myself. I don’t know where that possessiveness came from, but I wanted Marlena all to myself.

***

Then one day, mother couldn’t find anyone to keep me with. Aunt Candice had herself fallen sick and everyone else was busy with something or the other. Finally, she knocked at the one door she didn’t expect she’d ever do.

When Marlena opened the door, a whiff of jasmine assailed my nostrils even before I saw her. She had just had a bath. I could tell from the moisture in her ringlets. But she still had had time to put on her makeup. “What does she put makeup on for, if she is alone at home all the time?” my mother had asked me that night after she returned, and I had no answer to that.

“Marlena,” my mother said, “I have come to ask you for a favor today.”

“Sure, Edith,” Marlena said, “anything.” And she clutched the sides of her robes together, but not before I had caught an eyeful of her milk-white skin underneath. It made something happen to me in my groin, but I had to check that as I was in the presence of not one but two women and one of them was my mother.

“I’d like to know if you could allow Jeff to stay at your place for today?” my mother asked, holding my arm tightly. “These are really difficult days for me. You see, my mother has got Alzheimer’s and she is quite alone. I could bring her here and look after her, but she refuses to budge. I am appointing a nurse for her today, and will be at her place till evening. I mean… it is all right if you are busy or something; then I’ll just have to take him along.”

There was a moment’s silence, and I began to feel that I’d lose this wonderful opportunity to spend a day with the woman of my fantasies.

“No, no, that would not be a problem at all,” Marlena then said, and I felt butterflies moving in my guts. “Geoffrey can stay here with me. Will you be okay with that, Geoffrey?”

“Call me Jeff,” I said with a smile that was probably as goofy as I thought it was.

“Thank you so much Marlena,” my mother said. “I’ll send him right away. This really means a lot to me.”

Back home, I dressed up almost like I did when going for mass on Sundays. I put on long pants and the white full-sleeved shirt that my father had got stitched for me from his tailor.

The day with Marlena was quite unlike any other I had ever had in my life before. Here I was, sitting like a gentleman on her couch, facing her, and attempting to actually make conversation. I had carried my books along, but I did not feel like reading them that day. I wasn’t going to waste even a moment of this precious time.

I looked at her painting her nails. I wanted to break the ice with her, but I was worried I would say something that she would laugh at. I usually did those things. Normally I was a good speaker, even on stage, but when it came to one-on-one conversations with people who mattered, my tongue deceived me on the best of occasions.

Finally, she sensed me looking at her and broke the ice.

“What do you do, Jeff?”

It was a meaningless question—and I was sure it meant nothing to her—but it was a wonderful conversation-starter. There were lots of things I did, and I began talking about them. I told her of my one gold medal and three bronze medals in athletics that year, and my A grades in Science and English, and my tryst with interschool debating. The best part was that she seemed suitably impressed. Like other elders, she did not just grunt ‘hmm’ at the end of each sentence I said, but she actually asked questions that showed she was listening and not just hearing.

“You know I can make portraits,” I told her enthusiastically. I never told anyone about this budding talent of mine, not even my mother. Or maybe I told my mother once and she had waved it away. Anyway, I deeply felt like I should tell Marlena this.

“Oh, how wonderful!” she said and her eyes went round in eagerness. It instantly made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. “Could you paint me?” she asked.

“Sure!” I said almost too loudly. Painting her would give me free license to ogle at her without feeling ashamed. It would be better than taking a photograph. “But I am just learning how to do it,” I added, just to keep my options open.

“It’s okay,” Marlena said. “You could practice on me.”

Those words did something to me I cannot quite explain. Especially the last two words. If Johnny and the others would have been here, they would have made an obscene innuendo about it and sniggered to high heavens. And that put a thought in my head—what would Johnny and the others say if they saw me alone at her house?

So she gave me a writing pad and a pencil. “Would that be enough?” she asked. The equipment was not quite appropriate for an artist—the writing pad was actually a letterhead pad that so unromantically had the name of an unpronounceable medicine on its masthead and the pencil was one with a dull unsharpened lead. But I, with all my manners intact, said that it was perfectly fine.

“Where do you want me to sit?” she asked.

I moved a chair to a spot where the light from the window fell directly. “This will give better natural light,” I said.

“Good idea,” she said like a schoolgirl and enthusiastically sat on the chair. Back now when I think about that day, I don’t know what was in her mind exactly when she surrendered to me in that fashion. Did she do it because she really thought I would create a masterpiece for her? Did she do it because she was curious to see how I saw her? Or did she do it because she thought I was a child who needed to be patronized?

But I think we can strike off the last option—the times we had in the subsequent days left no doubt in my mind. Thinking of me as a child was the last thing she did.

 

Continue to Part 3.

She Lived Next Door – Part 1 of 5

Life for a thirteen-year old boy is extremely excruciating. There are things you begin to understand and desire, but for some reason they are kept just out of your reach. It is a pity that our societal norms do not keep pace with our hormonal development. You do not understand the reasons that adults give. In your mind, you know much beyond your years, and you can handle everything, but there’s never an elder around who believes in the truth of your feelings.

Being a single child growing up with mostly my mother (father used to come home late at nights from work), I developed a vivid imagination. I believe I hit puberty early too; by the time I was in seventh grade, I already had pimples on my face and was much taller than my peers. Stronger too. The sports teachers prided in placing me at the forefront of all athletic events, and I don’t remember a time when I disappointed them.

Those were the days of no electronic distractions. It was the year 1988, when all we had to fuel our imagination were books. Satellite TV hadn’t made inroads yet. I could read one book a day; I read anything and everything, from my mother’s cookbooks and movie magazines to my friends’ novels of detective fiction and fantasy. Everything held my interest till I finished it, and then I was back to feeling bored. Then, one afternoon, when my mother was having her little siesta, I climbed up the stool to reach the upper shelves of my father’s bookcase. And that’s when I began to discover the joys of things that were not meant for me yet.

My father, a man of varied interests, kept a stash of almost all kinds of books in his wooden bookcase. The books I hit upon were more of a medical nature—those that spoke of the human anatomy with the somber intentions of disseminating information. But for my curious mind, even that somber language was enough. I read on, page by page, fascinated by each picture of the human body, grasping each nugget of information, understanding why my body had begun acting the way it did at times.

And then, when my adolescent mind had reached such a peak where it was flooded with fantasies that had no outlets, I became aware of Marlena.

***

Marlena (I never knew her last name) was our next-door neighbor in the three-story apartment building that we lived in.

Our housing society was known as The Seabird because of its closeness to the sea. It was a cluster of 24 houses. We had a little garden outside the building, which was a garden shared by all the children in the building, and there were park benches, where mothers could sit and monitor their children and chat with each other. For that reason, I knew most of the boys and their mothers that I grew up with. I found most of my peers annoying and less-informed. No one knew the stories that I did, and they held me in awe for a while whenever I spoke to them of things I had read in books. But that did not last forever. As my friends grew up, they had other things to interest them than my stories. The aunts were insufferable too. I remember most of them pinching my cheeks even when I was eight, and always chatting about the most ordinary things with the greatest amount of enthusiasm.

Marlena, however, was an enigma. The only thing people knew about her for sure was that she lived in our building. She had just moved in a few months ago that year. People only saw her when she went on her small trips to the market, and she didn’t seem to be interested in the other women’s topics of discussion. Or perhaps she just felt herself to be a stranger. Yet that aloofness was easily interpreted by the other women, and they began to variously label her as Miss Snooty Hotpants and Nose in the Air and Hoity-Toity and Twinkle Toes. I never did understand those names.

I also did not understand, at first, why my older friends acted crazily whenever she passed by. They kept looking at her as she walked out of the gate, making comments and remarks that I thought I understood and even laughed appropriately at them, but wasn’t sure what they meant.

“She’s hot,” Johnny always used to say.

“She makes me clean my whistle,” Sam would say and everyone would laugh.

“She is heavy,” Rusky would say with the emphasis on the ‘is’.

I did know, however, that they were things I could not repeat at home, and definitely not ask my mother about it.

And then Sam asked me one day, “Hey Jeff, doesn’t she live next door to you? Don’t you ever catch a glimpse?”

I laughed with the other boys, not really understanding what kind of glimpse he had meant.

The enigma named Marlena began to unravel slowly one night when I was preparing for a Science test at school the next day. It was well over 9 o’clock and there was no sign of Dad yet. He would come back much after 11 in those days, and so there was nothing out of place. Then, when I was busy studying the different kinds of induced magnetism, there was a sharp bell at the door.

Mother was watching Lucille Ball when the distraction occurred. She asked me to open the door, and I did. I was dressed in shabby home clothes—an Addams Family T-shirt that I had outgrown two years ago and blue shorts that had begun to fray at the hems. I went to the door expecting nothing, but the moment I opened it, I was in for the most pleasant surprise I had that evening.

It was Marlena at the door, in a short home dress, clutching a Buddha statue.

“Is your mother in?” she asked.

That was the first time I had heard her voice. I felt it to be a bit raspy, not the way I would have pictured it (not that I had ever felt inclined to do so until then), and that stalled me a bit.

“I asked if your mother is in,” she repeated.

“Who is it?” my mother asked from inside.

“It is the woman from next door,” I said.

At that, mother immediately downed the volume of the TV and came rushing to the door. It was certainly a surprise for her as well.

“I am Marlena,” the woman said, “I live next door.”

“Yes, I know,” my mother said. “I am Edith. Wouldn’t you like to come in, Marlena?”

She moved in gingerly, looking all about the house. At close quarters, the woman seemed quite exotic. She had that tanned Mediterranean skin that I knew would drive Johnny and the others crazy. But the one thing that attracted my attention was the copious amount of makeup that she had on her face.

“Edith…” she said, “may I call you that?”

My mother nodded.

“Okay, Edith, I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Of course, of course,” my mother said as if she lived for doing good turns for random people.

“I want you to keep this in your house for a few days,” Marlena said, and held out the Buddha statue to my mother.

My mother wasn’t exactly superstitious but she held some strong views about curious things that belonged to other religions and cultures. She looked quizzically at the serene statue of the founder of the South-Asian religion.

“Is that a gold statue?” my mother asked, not mentioning her actual concern.

“Yes, it is,” Marlena said. “It is a kind of family heirloom.”

“All right,” my mother said. “But why do you want me to keep it?”

“It’s okay if you are concerned,” Marlena said, taking back the statue. “It won’t do you any harm, if that’s what you think. The actual matter is that I don’t want to keep it with me for a few days. There are some people who might try to take it away from me.”

“Oh, so you want me to safeguard it?”

“Yes,” Marlena said. “I will take it back from you next month.”

Mother mulled over it. It was not that she had to spend any money on this; if she had had to do that, she would have politely declined right away. She only had to keep a statue. Well, that she could do easily, and earn some brownie points in the process too.

“Okay,” my mother said eventually. “Give me the statue. I will keep it in such a hidden place that even my own husband will not be able to get it. Not that Roger knows a thing about this house anyway!”

“Thanks,” Marlena said. “This means a lot to me.”

I had been sitting there the whole time, listening to the conversation with rapt attention. All the time, I looked at Marlena’s beautiful form. She reminded me of those Italian goddesses our History teacher had shown us on video. She had that perfect glazed look and those hair in ringlets. I am sure Da Vinci would have painted her if she had been available at that time.

Then I realized that she was about to leave, and I could not have allowed that to happen without getting introduced to her.

So I went into the kitchen and put out some cookies in a tray—the good Danish cookies that mother had bought ‘only for good guests’—and brought them out to her. Averting my mother’s befuddled expression, I walked up to Marlena and held out the tray.

Marlena was taken aback at that too, and I immediately realized I had done a very stupid thing. “Oh, how nice of you,” she said. “What’s your name?”

That was enough to dissipate my humiliation. I put out my bony chest as much as I could and said, “Geoffrey Haines.”

But my proud moment was deflated like a punctured balloon by my mother (who must have got a hang of things with her unnatural instincts). Waving her hand like she usually did, she said, “Jeff, haven’t I told you not to wear those torn shorts anymore?”

Just like that, I felt lower than a caterpillar’s belly button. With the tray still in my hand, I retreated from the hall and stayed firmly put in the kitchen till Marlena left for her home.

 

Continue to Part 2.

She Lived Next Door

AUTHOR’S NOTE

She Lived Next Door is quite different from other stories that I have written, and hence it holds special meaning to me. The story is mostly told from the eyes of a 13 year old. At that age, our vision is restricted to the things we wish to see, our thoughts are confined to what we want to think. We do not ask questions we need to ask. We do not see the larger picture. This is the story of the first infatuation of such a young boy.