GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24

MOHINI SINGH

‘Seven, Eight, Nine’

RAJAN AND RAJANI WERE MADE FOR EACH OTHER. Not just because of the limp ‘i’ hanging off at the end which turned his male name into her female one, but also because they both were self-obsessed enough to believe they could truly love someone and be utterly loved in return. As though they were better than the rest of us and deserved more.

Perhaps that’s why he killed her.

Mother called to give me the news, and I told her I wasn’t surprised. We were three. One too many. It was inevitable that one of us would have killed another, if not both.

I know, she said. I’m just glad it wasn’t you who did the killing. Or the dying.

I wasn’t so sure. I’d done plenty of stabbing and died as many times. Just not literally, like Rajani.

And wear something white to the funeral, Mother warned. If I see you in denim, I’ll disown you.

I have white denim.

She hung up.

—-

I knew Rajan from before anyone could ever know him, excepting his mother. In our gated community, his house shared a wall with ours and his mother shared a love of gossip with mine. And as they sat together, both heavily pregnant, bump rubbing against bump, exchanging notes on Number 156’s maid who’d been arrested for stealing a set of dentures or one of the Spinster Sisters in Number 79 getting married to an ex-priest, Rajan and I sent each other a Morse Code of hiccoughs and gargles through the thin walls of our mothers’ uteruses. I was born two days before him. Mother said I had waited silently and gave my first cry at the same time as him. Even as babies we were inseparable. Crawling after each other around the courtyard, sometimes out of the gate, when our mothers leaned in to whisper some other resident’s misfortunes. I always looked out for him. Grabbed his chubby ankle if a drunk rode his bicycle too close or heaved myself on top of him to stop him from trailing into dog turd. He always gave me his mango’s stone which was my favourite bit. Sometimes he threw it at me when he was angry.

As we grew, our neighbours named us Seven and Eight. Our house numbers. I was Eight which made sense since I was older, even if by only two days. They’d say, Seven and Eight stole all the lychees off the lychee tree in the middle of the night (Rajan’s idea.) Or, Seven and Eight took Number 62’s moped for a joy ride (my idea). Always Seven and Eight, never Eight and Seven. Plus, Rajan was a boy and had a crooked nose which gave him a thuggish appearance. The boy is leading the girl astray! So it was Rajan who bore the consequences. While his father beat him, I would point and laugh. He’d quietly count the number of strikes and later climb into my balcony, climb over me and thump me as many number of times. Really hard too. Then lay down beside me, exhausted.

With the sweet smell of our wounds filling the room, and our bruises the colours of the rainbow, and our bodies as hot as the tarmac in the summer heat, we whispered and planned our next adventure. Even that young, I knew, as clearly as the white patch on his skin where I’d struck him with a sparkler on Diwali, that we’d be the death of each other. He did too. Even though Death to us was like Colombians or Venus flytraps — things we knew existed but very unlikely to come across in person.

—-

Rajani moved into Number 9 when we were thirteen. Rajani with her sable, sibilant, hip-skimming hair and a dark mole, like a sunspot, above her top-right lip. The moment I saw it, I wanted to touch it. Rajan too, but when he looked at her for any length of time his crooked nose twitched, as though in pain.

Rajan is my boyfriend, I said.

He didn’t deny the claim, which thrilled and angered me equally. Until that moment, I hadn’t thought of him as anything other than Seven to my Eight, but this new and sudden elevation of our relationship, because of Rajani’s arrival or not, was exciting. He, however, seemed indifferent. Gormless cretin!

This is Rajani from Number 9, I continued with the introductions. She’s joined my school. We’re in the same class. She hates geckos, likes qawwalis, and is hopeless at Maths.

More than hopeless, she was plain dumb.

I don’t understand why x and y keep dancing around the =, she’d said to the teacher.

When God was handing out brains, she must have arrived with a sieve. She ought to put a To Let sign on her forehead. I laughed aloud and they both looked at me strangely. I decided to tell her our favourite joke, Rajan and mine, which would work even better with her there.

Why’s everyone afraid of 7? I asked.

She shrugged.

Because 7 8 9. 7 ate 9! Get it?

She didn’t. Fell down the thick tree and hit every branch on the way down.

You should call yourself Nine, I suggested, giving her a last chance. Then we can be Seven, Eight, Nine.

She refused, and I decided we should ditch her, but Rajan said she deserved another chance on account of me being like buffalo milk and not easy to swallow.

—- 

First, we took her to play badminton. I had never seen anyone focus so hard on the shuttlecock and yet miss it every time, always swinging the racquet a second too late. When Rajan and I played, she sat on the side and plucked the feathers off my shuttlecocks. I kicked her, then Rajan kicked me. He suggested we try something less taxing, like taking photos of kissing couples and blackmailing them for cigarettes. But Rajani kept giving us away by tittering or coughing; one time she asked the kissing girl if she’d painted her henna by herself. We had no choice but to fall back on our favourite pastime: watching rude videos on Number 28’s guard’s phone. Just when it was getting steamy with the woman biting her lip and the man asking for the umpteenth time if she wanted it, Rajani declared the video fake.

I’ve watched my mother do it countless times with Mr 15, she said, and it’s very sweaty and over in ten minutes.

She soon took to pouting at all our suggestions and walking away with her long hair swishing-swashing. Rajan always followed. Wussy asshole! After sulking a while, I ended up joining them at the park. There she sat on the swing and talked about student’s revolution and how we should all rise up and unseat the teachers and headteachers and governors and mayors. Give up this life of education and ruthless attainment of knowledge for nothing more than a job. It made sense for her considering she was at the bottom of the class, but Rajan ate it all up. Standing up on the swing, shouting Inquilab Zindabad, at each zenith of his swinging parabola. While I burned petals and leaves and pieces of plastic and once a dead cockroach to see the different-coloured forms fire can take. When I couldn’t listen to their bullshit anymore, I left. At which point they hurried after me. Indeed, the days I couldn’t join them, Lecture Queen and her Faithful Dog stayed put at their respective homes. Yet, the neighbours began calling us the Seven-Eight-and-Rajani trio.

Can you believe it? I said to Mother. Dumb Rajani pretending to be our leader? And Rajan follows her blindly.

Rajan and Rajani, Mother said in a sing-song. It’s just meant to be.

A refrain started by Mrs 43 who claimed to have been Cleopatra, Mumtaz Mahal and Elizabeth Taylor in her previous lives. When I pointed out that she was born long before Elizabeth Taylor died, she replied, Soul is a mysterious thing. Clearly dissatisfied with her current unromantic reincarnation — her husband’s special power was to piss into a bottle from six-feet away without spilling a drop, something he was keen to demonstrate at all religious festivals — Mrs 43 took pleasure in romanticising Rajan and Rajani’s friendship.

Sajan and Sajani, she’d say. Lovers! Right out of Bollywood.

Which was stupid because the two barely looked at each other. They’d sit on either side of me and look at me instead, with the intensity of laser beams. I felt their vision burn through me and land on the other. When I stood up, they’d turn away. Sometimes, I’d catch Rajan trying to look at her sideways, as though she were an eclipse. And she’d only see him as part of a wider view, a spot on a panoramic picture. Never directly.

Then, during the summer of our fourteenth year, Rajan did something unexpected which bent my heart out of shape.

On a warm evening, the journalist in Number 135, who only spoke in headlines, called out to us: Seven, Eight, Rajani! Heatwave Expected! Water Plants, Get Fifty Rupees!

Easy money, I thought. But Rajan said, Not Seven. My name is Rajan.

Rajani smiled at me, and I stamped on the journalist’s marigolds.

From that day on, we came to be known as Eight, Rajan and Rajani. It never occurred to me to remind everyone of my name too.

Another change came about during that time: whenever in public, Rajan put his arm around my waist. He didn’t want to at first, so I reminded him of the promise he’d made to me when we were ten.

It was Holi. The roads a psychedelic river; faces unrecognisable behind streaks of colour. Through this rainbow scene, ten children travelled in a Maruti 800 to a diner which had opened specifically for Number 34’s daughter. It was her tenth birthday. She was adamant on having a party, so her father had piled two children in the front passenger seat, four in the back and four in the open boot, which included Rajan and me. Our legs hanging out into open air, we observed and exchanged information on the different calibre of water pistols. Then, just as Mr 34 was negotiating a knee-deep pothole, a water balloon whizzed through his open window and burst open on his face. The right wheel dipped into the massive hole and the top half of Rajan’s body flung forward, out of the car. For a few seconds he was facing downward on to the road, plastic bags and cow dung whizzing past under him. The reason he hadn’t hit the road and got crushed under the van behind us was because I’d slipped an arm around his waist and grabbed him. There was a moment there, a mere fraction of a second, when I’d thought of letting him go. Possibly to see what would happen. I was only ten. With difficulty I pulled him back inside the boot. Face flushed with blood rushing to his head, he had said, You saved me. I promise to devote my life to you.

So now I asked him to devote just his arm and slip it around my waist, like I had done to save his life. It was difficult to walk, given the difference in our heights, but I didn’t care. It was worth it to see Rajani’s face twist into a scowl, her beauty spot disappearing into a deep furrow as she curled her lip. We kept that up for a month, through Rajan’s whiny protestations, until there were fewer mentions of Rajan and Rajani being together forever.

—-

That Rajan and Rajani needed me to be with each other became apparent when I came down with bird flu. (I’d found a dead crow in the balcony two days earlier, its feathers a pale blue. I’d felt sorry for it and buried it in the park. Look where it got me! High fever, diarrhoea, eyelids nearly caked with pus.) Informers I had plenty and used them I did. Each and every one said the same thing: the two had not laid eyes on each other, not once.

On the third day of my illness, they came to visit. First Rajan and then Rajani, both with white masks on. They sat opposite each other, on either side of my bed, as though I was the table to their dinner date. Even from under their masks I could feel their wide smiles, their eyes shining.

How are you? Rajani looked at me.

Rajan replied, I’m fine. How’re you? He looked at me too.

I’m all right, now that I’ve seen you, said Rajani, still looking at me.

What the …? What was going on?

I missed you, said Rajan, eyes on me.

I missed you too, said Rajani, eyes on me.

What the fuck’s going on with you two? I shouted. Look at each other. Just look at each other, dammit!

So they did. Right into each other’s eyes. Without the filter that was me, Rajan saw himself in Rajani. Not physically, but in the dark space below her heart, between the lungs, where the soul lives. Two bodies but one soul. A singularity, like a black hole, and each of their cells strained to fill it. Tore away to unite with the other. To be one. Their masks turned red with blood as it flowed freely from their noses and their eyes. Their hands rose slowly to touch the other and blood from under their nails spattered over me. A ringing started in my ears, as though a pressure cooker had gone off inside me. Mouth wide open, I began to laugh, let all that pressure out. They bled and I laughed and laughed some more, until Rajani ran away. Rajan remained with me, until he stopped bleeding and I stopped laughing.

When I got better, I refused to see them together. A point-blank no. I still saw Rajan on his own. We still lay beside each other and planned adventures, but it wasn’t the same. Now, he always smelled of blood. I saw Rajani too, on her own, when she needed help with school work. Not her fault that she was stupid. But if either of them mentioned the other, I threw them out of the house. They tried others — Mrs 43, the toddler from Number 99, Number 81’s tenant who was out on parole, even the night watchman — but they all turned out to be opaque. I was their only conduit. The Suez to their Asia and Europe. The Eight to their Seven and Nine.

Then the doorstepping began. The star-crossed lovers waited outside their gates, faces averted from each other, until I stepped out of my house and they joined me on either side. I ran, they ran with me. I sat down in the middle of the road, they sat next to me. I walked up to a tree and banged my head against it, they did it right beside me.

They’re stalking me, I complained to Mother.

Don’t be ridiculous.

They wait for me and pounce.

Then hide.

They’ll find me.

Stop going out.

I have to go to school.

Stop going to school.

Please refrain from giving un-motherly advice.

Run away. That’s your only choice.

The next time I went to play badminton, they followed me to the sports centre. I lost all my matches, badly too. Outside, the two were waiting patiently on either end of a bench under the peepal tree. What came over me then was less like rage than a blindness to reason. I wasn’t angry, not quite. Just didn’t know any other way out, and I didn’t want to run away. I pulled out my racquet, charged at Rajan and brought the rim down on his forehead, bending the graphite. Rajani screamed and rushed to his side, taking his bleeding face in her hands; the first time she’d touched him. The next moment, her own skin ruptured and Rajan pushed her away. They both lay there, curled up in mud and blood. Like the last two survivors of an extinct species which bleeds to live or lives to bleed. Damned either way.

—-

After exams, I asked to be sent to a boarding school. Mother cried, having already forgotten that running away was her idea.

Are you not happy here?

No.

Have I not been a good mother?

I thought about that. Along with everyone else in the neighbourhood, my mother had noticed and frequently commented on Rajani’s hair losing its lustre and Rajan’s nose looking more crooked in his sunken face. But no one, not even she, had noticed my own suffering which was erupting as eczema all over my body.

You should eat better, the neighbours advised me. All that cola is ruining your skin.

Cola! Cola? It’s Seven and Nine who’re doing this to me.

There’s eczema in her head, they tittered.

Mother asked again, Have I not been a good mother?

No. If I’m honest, you’ve been pretty useless.

A stinging slap across my face and the next month she packed me away to a boarding school in the mountains. Only low clouds and tea gardens for company, and classmates who called me by my name.

—-

I didn’t see Rajan and Rajani for over two years and pretended I didn’t care. I knew from Mother that they had applied to the same university as me, but I’d kept my college of choice a secret.

Towards the end of the first year at university, at the annual festival, I saw Rajan again. The whole year he’d been looking for me, college to college, festival to festival, until he found me competing in a piggy-back race with my then-boyfriend. We hugged and we cried.

I missed you.

I missed you more.

He had grown much taller and his crooked nose made him look almost handsome.

I’m studying law. It’s going well, he said.

I’m studying physics. It’s going even better.

I dumped my boyfriend after accepting the second prize in the race.

This is Seven, my real boyfriend, I said to everyone.

Rajan didn’t object. Neither to the name or the title.

We were invited to a party that evening where I regaled everyone with stories of our wild dates and romantic escapades, all as I had imagined in the intervening years away from him. He listened with as much interest and awe as the others.

When the room grew crowded, we stepped out into the balcony. I imagined the constellations hidden behind the smog and city lights.

Have you seen Rajani? he asked. She lives not far from your college.

I suppressed the urge to throw him off the balcony and turned to leave. He grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

Please, help me. Help us.

No.

Please.

This time, instead of his words, I focused on the lips forming them. So full and dark.

Kiss me, I demanded and reminded him of his promise.

He did. First limply, then passionately. It was more wonderful than I’d imagined. I led him to a small bedroom upstairs. No bed, just a desk, a chair and a rough carpet. I stripped and lay down, waiting for him. He stayed by the door and wouldn’t even look at me.

Must I remind you of your promise every time?

He undressed slowly and as he touched my breasts he grew. Then there was no stopping him. We did it three times: front, back and on the chair. He muttered Rajani’s name with every thrust and cried when he came. The first time he spoke her name, I kicked him away. But he crawled back, kissing the arch of my foot, the top of my ankle, the inside of my thighs. I kicked again, but feebly. When he entered me, I clamped his mouth shut and looked away from his eyes which continued to scream her name.

After that night, he’d turn up outside my flat every few days, fuck me, mutter ‘Rajani’ throughout, cry and leave. The sex was so good I chose to put up with it. Not much of a relationship though, I pointed out to him. So he started coming to the café where I worked part-time. At closing time, we’d have coffee together, I’d talk about my week, he’d listen with his feet bouncing under the table, then, as soon as my cup was empty, he would ravish me on the table or the counter or in the kitchen against the sink. The crying had stopped. He’d probably run out of tears after so much sex. But ‘Rajani’ he still muttered. It became harder to ignore, so to drown him out I’d taken to shouting ‘Nine’. And that was how we both climaxed, to screams of ‘Rajani’ and ‘Nine’.

—-

During the first term of the second year, Rajani turned up outside my Electromagnetism class. I tried to pretend I didn’t know her, but it was hard when she grabbed me from the back around my waist and buried her head between my shoulder blades. I introduced her as Nine to everyone and she didn’t object either. Very pliable. And not very tall. But the hair was still long and beautiful and she was still stupid. She had failed her first year of Sociology and was repeating it, she told me cheerfully at the café where I fucked. After quarter of an hour of listening to her boring routine and boring classes and boring friends, I decided to put both of us out of our misery.

How’s it going with Rajan?

I see him every week, she said. Sometimes twice a week.

I knew that. I also knew he came to me right after he saw her.

What do you guys do? Sit back to back on benches like spies and exchange notes? I laughed.

We go to the cinema. It’s dark. Once, we went to the planetarium.

What else? You can tell me. No need to spare my feelings.

Her eyes widened with anger. What do you think we can do? Kiss each other while screaming in pain? Have sex while fearing a brain haemorrhage?

I stopped myself from laughing, but my shoulders shook with effort.

We can’t be together. We can’t be apart, she said. We’re slowly dying.

Then let me have him. I can be with him and he with me. That way, at least two out of three are happy.

Will he really be happy?

No worse than now.

—-

I told Mother of our conversation the next time I spoke to her. I don’t know why. Perhaps because the three of us had, once again, become tightly wound together. Seven, Eight and Nine. I needed an outside opinion, maybe even a way out.

So I told Rajani she’s the one in the way of his happiness, not me, I said. I’m not the villain of this melodrama.

Mother sighed so loudly I could almost feel her breath through the phone. You were born the wrong way round, legs first, she said. Now, you only do wrong things.

I could be forgiven for thinking she was not my real mother. I remained in bed for a week, sent away Rajan, capitulated badminton matches, and missed three workshops on semi-conductors. The rage from all these missed experiences slowly fuelled my indignation, until my entire body was covered in eczema and I scratched myself raw.

On the eighth day, I decided to help Rajan and Rajani. I didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, but I was determined to prove my disloyal mother wrong.

—-

The next time Rajan visited me at work at closing time, he found Rajani seated beside me. His expression flitted from extreme joy to gratitude to anguish back to delight. Don’t know how Rajani felt because I wasn’t looking at her. They came as close to each other as possible without turning the place into a crime scene and, once again, sat on either side of me and looked through me at each other.

Shamelessly, breathlessly, they began uttering assurances of love. Described in painful detail their torment at being apart, the crushing loneliness. Like diary entries, they monotonously recounted every day they hadn’t seen each other since I left for boarding school. When I shoved ear-plugs into my ear, they complained that it was interfering with the waves, corrupting their words before it reached the other. I tried reading a book, but their soppy sentiments soured the words. So I had no choice but to limit these meetings to half-an-hour, sometimes even less when I felt like I might be sick. At each ending, they’d grab my hands and plead for a little bit more, and I had to shake them off like beggars.

This went on for weeks, months. After every meet-up, I’d call Mother and tell her what Seven and Nine had said to each other, verbatim. She begged me to stop, but I didn’t. After all, it was she who had urged me to do the right thing. We must suffer together.

By the nineteenth or twentieth get-together, things began to heat up. Until then the pair had kept things PG, sometimes skimming 12, but recently it had started touching 15. Then one day, perhaps it was the sweet smell of Jasmine from the nearby park or the middle-aged couple being frisky under the next table, which turned the mood. Rajan began by saying how much he wanted to kiss Rajani’s mole and she replied that she wanted other things kissed too. Like a physiologist’s inventory, he began listing her body parts and she moaned at his every utterance. I frantically scratched the skin behind my knees and elbows, couldn’t decide which was itchier.

It was Rajani’s hand I felt first, sliding up the back of my top, over patches of dried, flaky skin. Then Rajan’s long fingers were under my skirt, stroking my thigh. Their mouths close to me, their breaths condensing on the top of my ears. The itchiness soothed and soon my skin hummed with pleasure. I had never been touched like that. Delicious! Instead of piercing through me, his skin met mine, gliding onto hers, like electricity rushing to complete a circuit. We were whole. Seven, Eight, Nine. My body throbbing with delightful pain, I barely suppressed a moan.

Then Rajani whispered his name in my right year. And in my left, Rajan breathed hers. My eardrums screamed and my stomach sank, as if in freefall, and I tumbled into reality. The eczema stung with renewed aggression and their touch turned clammy, like slithering snails.

Get off me, I shouted and jumped out from between them.

Immediately they looked away from each other.

What is the matter with you two? Is this truly love or some kind of foolish fatalism?

I don’t understand, Rajani said.

No, you don’t, do you? I turned to Rajan. Is this what you love? Does the hair and the mole make up for the absence of any intelligence? Is it stupidity that excites you? I turned back to Rajani. And you. Do you know that after each one of these meetings, he fucks me, right here, at this very table, on that seat?

Rajani looked down, stroking the plastic seat.

Yes, I shouted, right there. Last week, he sucked at my breast for nearly half-an-hour, like a hungry child. Then he went down and licked me.

At that, Rajan swung around and grabbed Rajani’s face. I only thought of you. The whole time. Whatever I did, I was doing it to you, to your body.

The bleeding had begun. Eyes, nose, ears.

I know, Rajani said. I felt it. Here, she touched her breast, and here, she put her hand between her legs.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream or bash their heads in. I spat at the table and walked out.

—-

Three months after that, Rajani died.

She’d bled out. Beside her lay Rajan, himself covered in blood, but taken to the hospital just in time.

Perhaps he’d persuaded her, using lawyerly logic. Or they had both decided that a few moments of being able to see and feel each other completely was worth anything, even death.

—-

I arrived at the funeral in a white stonewashed pinafore. Mother made a face, but then she hugged me and cried. She had to cry for me too because I couldn’t shed a tear. My eyes itched constantly, and I kept rubbing them. But then the wind changed and the smoke from the funeral pyre blew towards us and everyone had to rub their eyes.

Everyone except Rajan.

He was blind. His eyes had dried up from lack of blood.

Now I see her all the time, he said. She’s always here. It’s wonderful.

I linked my arm through his and felt nothing. It was a relief.

One of the women, possibly Number 128, looked at us and incorrectly reminisced, They were such good kids. So close. We called them Seven, Eight and Nine, remember?

Mrs 43, for whom this was a most fitting end to a tragic love story, called out to me. Wait a minute, Eight. There’s so much I want to talk about.

I turned around. The pyre was still smouldering, as orange as the sun setting over the river. And said, Not Eight. My name is —

MOHINI SINGH studied Computer Science at Cambridge and worked as a software engineer for eight years before deciding it was not the career for her. She took evening classes in creative writing at City Lit and completed a diploma in Novel Writing from Birkbeck. Her short story ‘Starlings’ won the highly commended prize in the Bridport Short Story Competition 2023. Her other stories have been published in Long Story, Short, The Wrong Quarterly and The Good Journal. She is currently working on a novel. In her free time she learns Japanese and does voluntary tutoring in English and Maths.