"KEANO"

ONE

She considered her beauty to be like a disease
Transmitted by her ancestors
And her own good fortune
For didn't Prabalika have a bad case of acne?
And why was it that she couldn't possess that melancholic ugliness
Of Mrs Ahuja of 15-B


But Paripriya just didn't have any imperfections
No dark circles, no visible gums on smiles,
No upturned nose,
No dry palms, not a single mole


All her life, she had been sun-burnt by men's long, uncomfortable glances
All her life, she had been judged
All her life, she had wanted to shed her skin off like a snake
Or peel it like a cucumber; or hang it like an overcoat after the rains
But she just, couldn't


Was it because of that, that she could find no satisfaction?
Was it because of that, that she couldn't sleep at night?
It was perhaps because of that
That she fell so hard for him


TWO

Funny it is that I should have fallen in love with your voice
Before I even saw you
I remember it was a slight cross connection off Aligarh East
Those were still the days of those analog instruments you needed to hook your fingers in to dial
And shout into to get your voice heard over long distance


I really needed to speak to Captain Mehta that night
But it was just a matter of a seven in place of an eight
That led me to you instead
You had not said, “Hello” in any of its variations
You had just said, “Hmm?”
With equal parts of sexiness
And pain


Through the seven months that followed, you answered every call with a “Hmm?”
Giving away, absolutely nothing
So it became one of my passions to try to imagine you exactly
For example, during our last conversation
I had pictured you-


The exhibitionist on the balcony
Wearing the black cardigan Randy had given you
With your bare legs dangling from the railing
You would be cradling the receiver between your left ear and shoulder
While elaborately painting your nails
In any of your eighty three shades of red


By then I had begun to recognize your breath
The vertical, hot, cutting- tea sound of it
I don't have that sound with me anymore
But just the memories; reinvented as pain
Of conversations, stopped in mid sentence
And the voices in the dark


THREE

“Or should I rather tell you that I'm feeling very Keano today?..”
That's how he usually started his conversations
In mid sentence; without pretext or preamble
So the listener would start to grope for clues
To unlock the genesis of one story
While listening to the next


He was always like that
Till date, I don't know whether he did it intentionally
Or on purpose:)


And his endings were as abrupt
In fact, I used to dread each moment of his calls
Not knowing when they would suddenly end
Because of a slow response or after a silly question
He would leave the dial tone screaming in my ears
Like the trepidation of a heartbeat


I recognized his silences
The silences-
That seemed interminable sometimes
His feudal, obstinate, passionate silences
And the scream in them


Sometimes, he would often ask me to describe the room
To describe what I was wearing
And I would do exactly that
Like the night I said I was in a black cardigan
I was really only in my shorts


FOUR

And then, as suddenly as they had started
The phone calls stopped
For days after that,
PD wondered if she had done anything wrong
Said anything offensive
For nights she couldn't sleep
She picked up every call before the third ring


She didn't even know his name
Or what he did or where he was from
But she did tell him all about her love for methadone
And her hatred for Pooja's photographs
In turn, he told her all about Keano
And the history of mankind


Sometimes, exasperated, he would just say to her,
“Gigsy, I'm giving up”
Paripriya would like to think he didn't
She would like to think he found peace at last
She would like to think
He survived


Whoever he was