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

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.

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.