GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2024/25

SHASTRI AKELLA

‘what Trevor saw’

THE SONG ON HIS LIPS and his fingers – fiddling with the straps of his schoolbag – fell still when he saw the Foreign Man: perched atop the milestone nicknamed Sanam Bewafa, Unfaithful Beloved, because it read Delhi 793 even when the road didn’t take you anywhere near Delhi and because it was an excuse to name one more thing in Chamba after a Salman Khan film.

Foreign Man noticed Gagan and stood up. He was tall and long-limbed. Wind mussed his hair and nuggets of sky-blue appeared between his strands, the color of wheat. Gagan wanted to touch his chin, to learn the texture of his scruff. Gagan could touch him. They were both outside caste. The gora, the Dalit.

The recently-turned-thirteen Gagan knew he was ineligible to face a camera according to Common Chamba Knowledge that said (i) at thirteen you stop being a child, and (ii) Foreign Men only photographed children. But he wasn’t surprised when Foreign Man pointed to his camera. He had no facial hair that would betray his age. Almost all his classmates had begun to comb each other’s incipient moustaches with four fingers and Gagan would scoff, telling his sister that, really now, they’re behaving like the monkeys that have colonized all of Chamba’s trees but in his heart he nursed a left-out feeling that he shared with the second lead of Bollywood love triangles, the one Hero Sir said ta-ta-bye-bye before marrying the star heroine.

After he heard the camera’s click he realized that his oversized shirt ended at his thighs and now his Dirty Knees Business would show in the picture. For ever-and-ever-and-ever. Even after he became a man and had children and they had Dirty Knee Business. It was what Bollywood fathers called Kismet ka Khel. The tricks fate plays.

Gagan watched Foreign Man pluck five notes out of a wad of rubber-banded rupees as he spoke in a Hindi as broken as Gagan’s. Hindi was a subject Gagan learned at school. They were both outsiders to India’s national language. A flock of hornbills, flying low, honked as they left Chamba for two seasons. Foreign Man named himself as Trevor.

‘Nice to meet you, Friend,’ Trevor said as he offered the money that Gagan took.

Had they – Gagan’s hairy classmates or those prissy convent boys who swung their prissy beige uniform bums like big-assed birds – had they been called Friend by a beautiful Foreign Man? Not a chance.

‘Want to go to there?’ Gagan asked, emboldened. He pointed to the Chamunda Temple that sat on a hill.

Trevor said, ‘Tomorrow. Nine?’

He held out a notepad and pen and signatured the air. Gagan put his name down in his mother tongue. Each Pahari letter separated from the next. Like the holes of a flute.  He agreed to meet Trevor at Durga Inn, waved Trevor goodbye, and took to his feet. He was late.

He ran through the flea market of baubles and beads and anklets and baskets heaped with cowries, blue and green. The tar and mud roads turned to patchworks of cracked earth. The leaves dusted from the chinar trees crunched under his bare feet. 

He went and sat next to his sister and opened his fist, breathless and bright-faced from the sprint. The notes uncurled and rustled in the breeze. Aarti lowered her head and smelled them. She shot Gagan a hardened look.

‘I know,’ Gagan said. ‘But that’s one fifty. There can be more. I’m doing it for money.’

Aarti said, ‘When you lie your smell goes from Orange to Lemon.’

Gagan frowned and tried to think of oranges.

Aarti leaned closer and whispered, ‘Be an Orange. Don’t be a Lemon.’

There was no school for girls in Chamba but Aarti was the smartest human he had met. Every new moon they projected a film at the village square. The two upper castes sat before the screen and Aarti and Gagan watched it from behind, sitting close to the screen with children from the other castes. Aarti mimed the Hindi dialogues as she listened to the village interpreter, cry out the Pahari translations. That was how she learned Hindi, well enough that one day she told Gagan, as they walked through the night after the screening – the path so familiar that the absence of streetlights and the dim glow of the sliver moon didn’t slow their steps – that she could follow the story without Kiran’s interpretations.

Gagan perked up: Kiran always went quiet when Hero-Heroine broke into song, but Gagan wanted to know what they said. He was convinced it was Jadu Tona because one moment they would start singing in Dilli, Kanpur, or Hardwar and the next they would be running around in Foreign Land.

Upon his request, Aarti sang a Pahari translation of one of the film’s thirteen songs. To his dismay, Gagan realized the song would teach him no witchcraft. Going from India to Foreign? That, Aarti said, was Dream Sequence.

‘One day I’ll be the interpreter and I’ll translate the songs also and everyone will clap for me,’ Aarti said.

‘Good for them,’ Gagan said bitterly. ‘No passport, no paisa, go anywhere in the world. How do I get this Dream Sequence?’

Now a train's whistle tunneled up the hills. In the silence that followed, the children heard Papa’s sheep bleating. Then, the indistinct forms of the beasts appeared, hazy in the backlit wilderness, followed by their father’s figure, standing as erect as the staff he held, his white turban distinct in autumn’s rust foliage.

Foreign Men, Aarti once told Gagan, make you believe you have a place at their table but they take what they want and leave and after that your world will never feel enough.

Trevor will turn out different, Gagan told himself. 

*

After they waved each other goodbye the next morning, Aarti left for work, the construction site of a shopping mall on the town’s outskirts where, for six hours a day, she carried bricks on her head, and Gagan, his back saddled with a schoolbag, went to Durga Inn.

Crows stood still on the inn’s slanting terracotta roofs like they were meditating. Its vermilion walls were doused with morning’s drowsy shadows.

Trevor came out at nine as promised. He scanned the street. His gaze, forest-green, swept over but didn’t spot Gagan. The boy didn’t wave, didn’t raise a hand. The forest gaze returned, paused, settled on him. He walked up to Trevor.

‘Gagan,’ Trevor said slowly. ‘Correct?’

Gagan smiled, pleased that Trevor had shown someone his Pahari note and learned his name. A feeling of tremendous generosity surged within him and he held out his hand. He meant to hold Trevor’s hand and lead the way. But Trevor took his hand, shook it, returned it. What kind of behavior was this? Foreign Men are strange, Gagan thought. Beautiful, but strange.

They went up the winding road that wove through the market. Gagan pointed to the vegetable shop that sold Shame Beef on the sly in black plastic bags to dodge the men who prowled the bazaar with saffron scarves and lathis, ready to smack anyone who dared to even think of the Holy Cow as a meal. ‘One. Tight. Slap!’ they called their campaign, which, frankly, Gagan thought, was more melodramatic than all Bollywood Papas put together.

They walked past the convent that separated the fruit bazaar from the brass shops that sold deities of different sizes, Hindu mostly, some Buddhas in between, benign-faced, cross-legged. Once Gagan had stopped before a shop to play a game of Spot the Buddha. The shopkeeper raised his stick and shooed him off. ‘As if I’m a crow,’ Gagan had sulked. Aarti explained that Dalits were bad news for those in God Business. ‘Who’ll buy his gods if they see you there, hmm? He’s just doing it for his paapi pet,’ she’d said, rubbing her belly. Gagan never understood why Bollywood Mas said greedy belly. It’s the human, the Belly Parent, who’s greedy, no? The thought made him feel smart. He was convinced he had a bright future. ‘A future without a paapi pet,’ Aarti sagely added.

‘Your school?’ Trevor asked, pointing at the convent.

Gagan shook his head. His lessons, he said, were held under a banyan, the blackboard pinned to its bark. Its thick canopy kept the monsoon showers at bay. But sometimes raindrops trickled from leaf-tips onto their slates, erasing words they’d just written.

‘Take me there someday,’ Trevor said.

‘Tomorrow? Same time.’

Trevor looked at Gagan’s satchel and stopped short. I skipped school, Gagan thought, and Trevor caught me.

Trevor frequently paused and brought his camera to his face. But only rarely did Gagan hear the camera’s click. It was late morning by the time they reached the hilltop Chamunda temple. The coconut and garland vendors outside its gate were on siesta breaks, the rude chorus of their snores audible even with the thatched awnings drawn close.

Trevor pointed to the sign outside the temple. ‘Only Hindus beyond this point’, it read in English, Hindi, Pahari.

‘Those rules for Indians only,’ Gagan said. ‘You go in. I wait.’

‘You not Hindu?’

‘Not correct kind of Hindu,’ Gagan said, pointing to Trevor’s sandals.

Trevor took them off and ducked as he entered the temple: suspended from the already low ceiling were a hundred copper bells. When he arrived at Chamunda’s statue, he turned to Gagan for directions. So Gagan squatted on his knees, joined his hands, closed his eyes.

‘Chamunda,’ he said, ‘is the Goddess of children.’

Trevor produced an odd sound, something like a whimper. Gagan opened his eyes and found Trevor squatting sideways. His face, visible in profile, was marked with a frown. After a moment he opened his eyes and blinked.

Then, he stood up a little too swiftly. His head struck a bell and it gonged. He nursed his head and smiled sheepishly at Gagan and thumbed his damp lashes.

*

‘You take me to home with you?’ Gagan asked Trevor later that day. They sat on a charpoy outside the chai stall. From the corner of his eye, Gagan watched the owner, Big Bhola, glower at him from behind the counter. He will wash or burn the charpoy I am sitting on, Gagan thought. His hatred of Dalit children was World Famous in all of Chamba.

‘London?’ Trevor said, placing between Gagan and himself the camera. ‘You can go anywhere. Berlin, New York…’

Berlinnewyork is a place with a long name and no Trevor in it, Gagan thought. He didn’t want to go to this Berlinnewyork!

‘What you will do with photos?’ Gagan asked, picking the camera up. He brought it to his face and pressed the lens to one eye and screwed the other shut.

‘I’ll make a book,’ Trevor said. He turned to face Gagan. Gagan met Trevor’s gaze, but he didn’t meet Gagan’s. The camera came in between. He tucked his red hair behind his ear and looked away.

‘Give me that book?’ Gagan asked.

‘If you want to read, you shouldn’t cut school.’

It took Gagan a moment to understand what the phrase meant. Cut school. He clicked the shutter button. Trevor disappeared for a fraction of a second. He turned to Gagan, his startled look melting into smile.

They heard the peal of a conch. Followed by shrill human howls. Minutes later, a thicket of smoke lumbered past the gate of the inn. Cocooned in it were masked figures: four tigers with smoking censers. They chanted Goddess Chamunda’s name.

Trevor gathered his camera and trespassed the procession. Gagan followed him, but he lost Trevor amidst all the gyrating adult bodies, made taller by their masks that rose above their heads. The smoking brass censers, suspended from their wrists, swayed around Gagan’s face. He pressed his hands to his burning eyes. Someone grabbed his wrist and pulled him to the side of the street.

‘Stupid,’ Aarti scolded. ‘If they see you, you know what they’ll do?’

Gagan pictured his skin, his odor, something about his flesh betraying his to the godmen whose sentiments would turn from bliss to rage. He had the gall to enter their sacred celebration? One. Tight. Slap!

The procession left in its wake a smoke curtain. From it emerged Trevor, holding his camera aloft. His skewed button-down bared his left shoulder, his nipple, his underarm hair. It was the most Trevor had seen of a Foreign Man’s flesh.

Trevor squatted before them. Gagan noticed a gash above his eyebrow. He placed his hands on Trevor’s shoulders and leaned forward. He smelled Trevor’s perfume: sweet, with a hint of spice to it. As if his perfume had been cooked on a kitchen flame. He blew mouthfuls of air, his lips inches from the cut, flower-red. He placed two fingers on Trevor’s neck and found his pulse.

‘Now you are okay,’ Gagan said.

‘Thank you, doctor sahib,’ Trevor said.

Aarti laughed. Gagan joined his hands above his head with a loud clap and twirled on one foot. Once, twice, three times. The three of them shared, miraculously, another moment of giddy lightness. 

*

The days started to get colder as the week came to a close. Aarti stopped warning Gagan about Foreign Men but he knew she wasn’t pleased about all the time he spent with Trevor. He told her every night what Trevor and he did during the afternoon. He wanted to provoke her out of her silences. If she doesn’t start scolding me again she will leave me, Gagan told himself. That was what happened to Ma. First she stopped yelling at him, then she slept for days, then she went away. But Aarti didn’t react to his anecdotes.

Pointing, one night, to the trunk tucked in the alcove, high above their heads, Gagan said, ‘Want to share Ma?’

Maybe their mother’s shawl, wrapped around their bodies, would melt Aarti’s silence?

‘Well, you’ll have to wait a week. You know the rule.’

Her tone, cold and harsh, stung him.

‘I told Trevor about Ma,’ Gagan lied.

Gagan sensed Aarti’s body go tense. ‘What did you say?’

‘What happened to her.’

‘Like you know anything.’

‘I do.’

‘Because I told you.’

‘Not everything is about you.’

‘It’s not your story to give away to strangers.’

They lay with their backs to each other. Gagan heard her sniff.

‘He’s not a stranger,’ Gagan said. ‘He picks me up at school.’

‘So you have a big brother now, huh?’

‘Not brother,’ Gagan snapped. He tried ‘boyfriend’. Bollywood heroines said it with an easy poise. Gagan’s tongue thickened and refused the word. So he settled for ‘friend’. Insufficient, but it had do. ‘He’s my friend.’

A moment later, he turned and leaned over Aarti to see her reaction. She was fast asleep, her face moonlit and expressionless, her breath a steady cadence. 

*

When classes ended the next day, Gagan found Trevor outside his school fence to which some of his classmates had tethered their sheep, goats, cows.

‘How did you know I study here?’ Gagan asked, his voice beaming with pleasure.

Trevor winked but didn’t sate Gagan’s curiosity. His classmates gathered around Trevor. He placed a hand on Gagan’s shoulder.

‘My best friend,’ Trevor said to them, and their hairy lips parted as they watched Gagan with respect that was thick as aloo-paratha, cool as ice-goli.

That was what he should’ve told Aarti, Gagan thought. Trevor is my best friend. 

*

On her birthday, Aarti climbed up a stool, brought down the trunk and took out Ma’s shawl. She bundled it around her shoulders. Gagan stood on his toes. She lowered her head. He kissed her forehead.

‘Let's share Ma,’ she said, holding out one hand. From her forearm, the shawl drooped like a wing.

Aarti crouched to match Gagan’s height and rearranged the shawl across their joined shoulders: his left, her right. Giggles spilled from their mouths as they scrambled out the hut's damp darkness and into Chamba's cold blue morning.

They ran through the vegetable bazaar, shoulder to neck.

‘Slow down,’ Gagan said, but Aarti didn’t.

They bolted down the slippery winter roads that overlooked Sago Lake. It was sheeted in mist. To their left was a park. In between the legs of the children who ran about, playing Chase, Gagan discerned the figure of a man who sat next to a boy, his pale hand perched on the boy’s shoulder, the wind mussing his wheat-colored hair. Gagan’s feet went unsteady.

‘Trevor?’

The word left his mouth – clear, loud. He stopped short abruptly. The shawl, tangled around the bodies of the siblings who were now separated by a few inches, tugged at her, then at him. They wobbled on the ice-slick road, lost footing, and went tumbling down the slope.

Aarti looped an arm around a boulder they went skidding past. Her other hand reached for but missed Gagan’s wrist.

In the thick of winter, Sago Lake was a fat slab of ice. When Gagan went spinning across its surface it was the beginning of the season. To the sound of cracking glass, nerve lines formed on thin ice, grew wider, gave way.

Black water bubbled to the surface. First Gagan’s legs, then his torso went underwater. The bank sank out of view.

The lake’s cold water drenched him, burned him, left him lightheaded. Deep belching sounds clogged his ears. His screams became blue bubbles that exploded above his head. A shoal of yellow fish swam past, eying him with suspicious round eyes.

He heard the guttural sound that water makes when it swallows objects. Trevor is here to save me, Gagan thought.

He saw Aarti tumble down the lake, surrounded by a cone of urgent bubbles, one leg stretched and taut, the other bent at the knee, her hair scattered above her head. Gagan met her gaze across a blue shiver. She sank to the lakebed. Unsettled sediment billowed up. The water darkened then paled. The lake was inside Gagan with all its old taste.

Aarti rose up, fighting against the weight of the water. She bridged the distance between her and Gagan. She grabbed him. He gasped. She held him in place over her shoulder with a hand looped around his waist. She started to swim upward.

The distance between them and the surface seemed unending. But at some point, their heads rose noisily out of the lake. Water dripped hurriedly from Gagan’s hair, onto the lake’s thinly frozen surface. His body bobbed on Aarti’s shoulder. All around them: the sound of cracking ice.

Finally came the solidness of earth under Aarti’s feet. She laid him down and took off his clothes and pumped his chest. Water sprang from his mouth, leaving an aftertaste of mold. She slid a hand under his neck, made him sit up, scrubbed his palms. His shoulders throbbed, his limbs ached. He thought of his bed, of warmth. Of Trevor. Why hadn’t he come to my rescue? Gagan wondered. Didn’t he see? He turned to the park, a little uphill. He didn’t see Trevor anymore. But that hair was unmistakably his. The golden-brown of wheat stalks.

Aarti was shivering. She couldn’t open her clothes because she was a girl. Someone passed on their shawl to them. Aarti wrapped it around Gagan and nestled him against her body. 

*

On the eve of Trevor’s departure, Gagan and he went to the Chamunda temple with a marigold garland. Trevor wore a jacket and a neck warmer, Gagan a sweater that belonged to Baba. The air had gotten crisper, the wind’s bite sharper.

‘Are you feeling better now, little man?’ Trevor asked, and Gagan nodded.

Gagan had told Trevor about the accident. It was impossible to tell from his expression if he had seen Gagan sinking into Sago’s womb. ‘Glad you’re safe,’ was all he’d said.

Before they entered the temple, Trevor held the garland close to his face and moved his lips inaudibly. Some petals moved under the weight of his breath. He went in, wrapped it, per Gagan’s instructions, around one of the bells above his head.

‘What you asked Child Goddess for?’ Gagan asked from the entrance.  

‘John,’ he said.

He spoke a long English sentence and stood still for a time.

As they walked back home, Gagan pressed a slip of paper into Trevor’s hands.

‘My address,’ Gagan said.

‘I’ll write,’ Trevor said, secured the paper in his wallet.

‘I’ll read it, because I won’t cut school,’ Gagan said.

Trevor showed Gagan his thumb, his other fingers pressed to his palm. An almost-fist: what did that mean?

The town center, a faint glimmer from up the hill, grew brighter as they approached it. A clinking sound rose from a dustbin. Child-sized shadows pottered around it. A dog barked. An old Bollywood song played from someone’s house. Some men walked past them, punching each other’s arms rowdily, calling each other names.

‘Maybe I’ll come to Dublin on a Dream Sequence and meet you,’ Gagan said.

Trevor laughed, placed his hand on the side of Gagan’s head, and drew him closer and pinched his ear. It felt like a punctuation to the fourteen days that they’d spent together; it’s time to go, the gesture’s unexpected intimacy said.

*

After dinner that night Aarti washed the vessels and spread out their straw beds and put the lantern out. They lay down. The night was alive with the humming of peepers. Gagan didn’t know the name of the train that took Trevor away, but he knew the time, and when the time came, and he heard a far-off steam engine whistle, the heaviness in his eyes seemed foreign, beyond the margin of sleeplessness. He bit into a rag to muffle the sound he made.

Aarti woke up. She raised his head, pressed it to her shoulder. She laced her fingers over the nape of his neck.

When his throat was emptied of its lump he brought Aarti’s hand to his forehead. He asked her to see if he was hot. But words were marbles in his mouth: they rattled and produced meaningless sounds. In the blue daylight, she slowly laid him back down. Outside, their sheep started to shuffle and bleat.

* 

The lake’s surface became a slab of ice, thick as a tombstone. Then the seasons changed again –icicles slow-burned by sunshine; entire banks of snow then turning liquid, producing music more beautiful than birdsong. Every day, the postman cycled past their house. Every day there was no letter from Trevor.

School closed for summer. Gagan came second in his class. His teacher gave him a Letter of Appreciation. He took it to Lake Sago. Its waters reflected the blue sky and the cumulus clouds that stood up there, placid as Father’s sheep.

‘What gift do you want?’ Aarti asked, looking at the Letter of Appreciation, unable to read it, her face swelling with pride.

‘Teach me how to swim,’ Gagan asked. 

*

He spent hours in the lake, occasionally rearing his head to gulp some air before returning to the water’s womb. As if searching for something but couldn’t find it.

It was dark by the time he gave up and came out and sat by the bank, breathless, his fists clenched.

At some point that night, Aarti came and sat by his side. She threw Mother’s shawl around his shoulders. The warmth made Gagan realize how cold he was. He tilted his head skyward, seeking warmth from the stars.

‘The moon is swimming across the sky,’ he said, rocking back and forth.

Aarti said, ‘It’s the clouds. Clouds swimming across the moon.’

*

The Sanam Bewafa milestone may have lied, but Gagan did find himself in Dilli. His bachelor’s degree and an English-Speaking Course landed him a job at call center where he worked from midnight to nine in the morning, receiving calls from American customers, introducing himself with the name he had been assigned. Mason. ‘An American name makes Americans feel more comfortable talking to you,’ his manager had explained. Having a Foreign Man’s name, Gagan thought, made his caste immaterial to his employers and peers.

*

what Trevor saw. By Trevor Whelan.

The poster for the book event was in the window of Landmark Bookshop in Khan Market, an area that had become Gagan’s favorite in the city. There was very little he could afford but the clothes laced with sequins, the colorful ceramic pots and pans shining in shop windows, and the handicraft store that he could enter and ask to see and touch any Hindy deity’s statue he pleased brightened his eyes with a promising future, an apartment he could one day afforded to rent without a roommate and populate with all this beauty.

Gagan pressed a hand to the glass, to Trevor’s name, the only word in the title that had a capital letter. His fingers left an oily smudge. With the cuff of his shirt he scrubbed it clean.

*

There was a decent crowd at Landmark, some gathered around one table piled with Trevor’s books, other chatting around a table stacked with glasses of wine white and red, cheese blue and Swiss, and crackers plain and salted, some. A screen, lit blue, fluttered whenever someone opened the door. The few chairs that were there were all occupied. Gagan stood to the back next to a man with a backpack.

Someone, the bookseller perhaps, introduced Trevor. He is from London, and this is his first book was all she said. Gagan was disappointed. He had hoped to learn something about Trevor he didn’t know. 

Trevor got up from a chair up front and walked up to the lectern. There was polite applause. The light above his head cast a shadow on his face. Gagan didn’t realize that Trevor was already in the room. How did he not notice the stalk of wheat in a sea of sesame-black?

‘I’m what you may call a hobby photographer,’ Trevor said. ‘My pictures raked in no dough, which, by the way, I made working as a postman, doing overtime at the dock in the weeks before Christmas, sorting gifts that streamed into England from all over the world.’

The lights in the room dimmed as Trevor continued, ‘So I’m pleased to release a book of my photographs from Penguin no less.’

The screen darkened again and a dedication appeared.

‘For little John. I’ve known you so few years. I’ve known you a lifetime.’

There appeared on the screen an assortment of Trevor’s monochromes shot in India, each preceded by a place name. Silchar. Rangpo. Chanderi.

Then, Chamba.

Children with fruit baskets. An infant held at a stone deity’s foot. A blunder of schoolboys squatting on the ground, their eyes fixed to slates, chalk-sticks between their fingers, some with their tongues sticking out in concentration. Gagan. his Dirty Knee Business captured forever in Trevor’s photograph. 

‘The next few images might be disturbing,’ Trevor warned from someplace unseen.

Aarti with her hands thrown out, her teeth bared. Gagan felt heat coat his skin like a layer of winter clothing.

Some spectators laughed. Perhaps it seemed like she was having a good laugh as she took a dip. Then, they must have noticed her eyebrows wound tight, and all around her, the frozen expanse of Sago Lake, interrupted by a circle of blackness that was swallowing her. Laughter retreated to the throats that released it.

A close-up of her face appeared next. Grainy. Her terror apparent.

In the next image, a black Sago hole bubbled, its water rippled, as Aarti’s head tore its dark surface. She lumbered towards the bank, Gagan’s body draped over her shoulder, his legs slapping her chest, his head behind her, his hands swinging in and out of view, one photo to the next, his fists clenched.

In the final image, Gagan sat crouched and naked, his boy-penis shriveled like some fruit on the verge of rot.

The heat in Gagan’s body rushed to his face and his limbs went cold.

The screen faded into a blackness. The silence in the room felt saturated with something else. The lights came back on but were kept dim.

‘Why take a picture instead of trying to help?’ someone asked. Her voice trilled with hatred.

‘Because photographers are witnesses,’ Trevor said. ‘A war photographer doesn’t stop the soldier who kicks an unarmed civilian lying on the ground.’

‘Something’s at stake in war. What’s at stake here – other than the poor drowning kid?’

‘A social ecosystem. How would the townspeople behave if I was absent, or present like a ghost? I wanted to watch unseen. Like a ghost.’

‘And what a social ecosystem,’ someone else said, ‘Look at the brave girl rise to the occasion.’

‘Exactly,’ Trevor said, and applause followed.

A room full of strangers clapped for Aarti. Gagan decided to tell Aarti about Kismet ka Khel. But it was tricky to reach her. He had to really time his call to the phone shared by all the residents of her chawl. If he tried early, when her daughter was at school, the phone was perpetually engaged, but if he called too late, after his niece was asleep, the watchman scolded him: the ringing wakes the children up, he’d say and hang up instead of setting the phone aside and going to fetch her.

The applause drew him out of his reverie. The screen had the title of the book. what Trevor saw.

‘They saw you too,’ Gagan said.

‘What was that?’ Trevor asked, scanning the room.

‘The children – they saw you too,’ Gagan said. ‘You weren’t the only one who saw.’

The room’s lighting returned. Gagan squinted in the sudden brightness. He realized his lashes were damp.

‘Who made that excellent observation?’ Trevor asked.

Gagan didn’t identify himself. He sensed the man with the backpack turn and look at him.

Trevor said, filling in the silence, ‘My author pic is by one such friend. You’ll see.’

*

People lined up to have their books signed. Gagan stood at the end and watched himself make his way to the front. The back of the book had a side profile of Trevor: his head lowered, the sky behind him blue. Underneath, it said: taken by a friend in Chamba.

He had imagined many versions of his reunion with Trevor. In one he received instant recognition despite the years that passed and the changes they wrought. In one they shared a box of Dominos pizza.

When it was Gagan’s turn, he held his book out. Taking it, Trevor asked, ‘Your name?’

‘Mason.’

‘Where you from?’

‘It’s for my boyfriend. He’s a hobby photographer – like you.’

‘Where you from, though?’ Trevor asked again.

‘This coastal town in south India,’ Gagan lied.

‘Never been down south. What’s it like?’

‘More of the same. Hotter days maybe, and smaller hills.’

Trevor smiled. On his face rose a tide of wrinkles that aged his allure like good wine. He signed the book then held it out.

Gagan took it, strode out the door and leaned against the brick-wall. He remembered to breathe. It was drizzling and the air smelled of wet roads and the sound of traffic. Gagan opened the book. He looked at the photograph in which, before his eyes, he was drowning again. A droplet fell on the page, forming a damp, wrinkled circle. The drizzle became a downpour. Gagan shut the book and popped his umbrella open but didn’t leave. People left the bookshop and walked past him, some single, many in pairs. 

‘Hey,’ someone said.

Gagan tilted the umbrella back. That someone was Trevor.

‘Where are you going?’ Trevor asked.

‘You?’

‘Need to get the metro back to my hotel,’ Trevor said, ducking under Gagan’s umbrella. Gagan shifted slightly and they started to walk. Gagan breathed hard and his shoulder rose and fell against Trevor’s arm. Trevor was taller than him. They had never spoken in English before. Gagan responded to Trevor’s questions with more fabrications: what he did for a living (Python programmer), how many siblings he had (two, a sister, a brother). Good thing he wore his cologne, Gagan thought. Its strong fragrance will make it impossible to tell if he smelled of oranges or lemons.

‘Who’s John?’ Gagan asked.

‘My son,’ Trevor replied. ‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘If he was here today he’d be your age.’

It took Gagan a moment to realize the fact contained in the statement.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gagan said. ‘What happened?’

‘You should come to London someday,’ Trevor said. ‘You might like it.’

‘Mason thinks we should go to America or Berlin,’ Gagan said.

‘Maybe. Where do your siblings live?’

‘Mumbai.’

‘I’m going there – later this month – the 19th of April,’ he said. ‘Have a little book event at Strand. Ask him to pop by?’

‘My sister didn’t get an education and my brother dropped out,’ Gagan said. ‘Luckly, I didn’t cut school.’

Trevor gave a knowing nod, as if the anecdotes that he’d gathered along with staged and candid snapshots of his subjects amounted to an understanding of the lives he never looked back at, of the people whose names he had forgotten.

‘Why India?’ Gagan asked.

Trevor turned and looked at him, the green of his eyes bright even in the dimly-lit street.

‘Did you ask that question earlier – about my subjects seeing me?’

Gagan shook his head.

‘My marriage didn’t survive after John,’ Trevor said. ‘I had to get away. Why India specifically? I don’t know.’

Gagan knew: he wanted to photograph children who bore no resemblance to John. Guilt narrowed his options down the countries his ancestors had colonized. He could’ve gone to Bangladesh or Pakistan but perhaps the knowledge that India’s territory gave him access to more subject made him choose this country instead.

‘Will you buy yourself a fancy house with your book money?’ Gagan asked.

Gagan expected Trevor to say something in the vein of wanting to donate the money to the places where his photos were set. He felt a tide of resentment rise within him, prepared to meet that response, prepared to meet the glow that he imagined on Trevor’s face at the notion of giving back.

‘If the book makes any money at all, and that’s a big if, I’ll get new lenses for my camera instead.’

The selfishness of the response granted Trevor some humanity, allowing Gagan to feel that the boy that he was wasn’t a complete fool.

Around their bodies it rained. Wind lashed them with water. Trevor shook his head. Droplets flew off his hair, onto Gagan’s mouth.

At the station they went up a flight of stairs. Gagan didn’t lower his umbrella. Trevor didn’t ask him to. Their bodies continued to remain bound by the necessity of special tightness.

They waited on the platform. When the train pulled in, Trevor turned and gave Gagan a hug. One of Gagan’s hands held the umbrella above their heads, the other hung stiffly by his side.

Trevor said, stepping out from under the umbrella, ‘Say hello to Mason. Beautiful name.’

The metro doors opened and Trevor stepped in. Gagan put his umbrella down. The tube’s glass doors closed. Trevor met his gaze and smiled. Gagan pressed two fingers to his neck, he joined his hands above his head with a clap and twirled on one foot. Once, twice, three times. First a mild confusion, then an urgency filled Trevor’s face. He pressed a palm to the glass door. With a honk, the train whisked him away.