Kashmiri Pulav. Fiction by Abhishek Udaykumar

Kashmiri Pulav

But when I reached Honia’s street I saw that the power was out, and that the evening there seemed duller than the rest of the city. The heat had slowed me down. There was a skinny shopkeeper with spectacles dropping fish food into his tank, his pet store was invisible beyond the entrance and its birdcages and shelves of fish bowls. A woman stood in the corridor outside her flat and spoke to a woman in the balcony of the next building. A group of children took turns running up a concrete slope, showing off their skills in the lightless gully. I reached the corner with the iron lady and her cart, but I still couldn’t remember where Honia lived. The street looked different there, it seemed less chaotic than the rest of the locality. The old apartments sat on an elevated plaza, their ground floors had been turned into barber shops, pharmacies, jewelers, bakeries and grocers, breaking off at intervals where the street was intersected by finer alleys. A staircase ran through the heart of each building, leading up to the flats. I was fatigued when I finally found her waving from her third-floor balcony, it was darker now and it struck me that she had yelled my name when I was on the street, I didn’t realize it until I turned into her landing and heard her say my name again.

‘I’ve started collecting candles now,’ she said, leaning against her kitchen counter and biting into a breadstick. ‘I use the plain ones mostly, though. I sometimes don’t realize when the power comes back.’

She snacked on a few more breadsticks before we went up to the terrace. I could see that she had been working all day and I wasn’t sure about when to tell her. There was a plant growing out of a crevice and a pink plastic ball in the corner that caught my eye.

‘It’s out again,’ she said, gazing at a puppy in the opposite building as it ran around in circles in a square balcony. ‘It’s growing up fast.’

‘Do you remember the time we went to the pipe factory for your last photobook and the white dog there that played with us?’

Honia was still watching the puppy. She let out an enormous sigh before she smiled a little to cheer herself up. Her straight hair fell with ease in the humidity and sat evenly on her eyebrows as she spoke to herself.

‘Yes.’

She began to pace along the perimeter. Honia and I were the kind of friends who met once every six months. We had been closer a few years ago, until I realized that she had just needed a subject for her photo essays. I sat behind a flowerpot and let my feet dangle around it. The sky was illuminated by a light source beyond the world, and we looked up at it like marine creatures enraptured by the ocean’s surface.

‘There’s a swimming pool nearby. I discovered it when I went out to buy some beer. And you know what, I’m going to start going. Today. They close at ten.’

I seemed to consider the pool for a long while.

‘I wanted to ask you about what you said the other day when I called. That monochrome is a timeless cliché of photography, and that it renews itself each time someone picks up a camera. And yet, it reeks of pretension, like why do…’

‘I just meant,’ she had begun to make her way up the ladder to the tank when she stopped midway to cut me off. ‘That black and white pictures are great for presentation, whether they work in favour of the idea or not. And presentation isn’t the point of photography.’

Honia looked like she wanted to pace up and down again but the tank was the limit and if she took a step further, she would fall of the building.

‘I’m hungry, have you eaten much today?’

I was about to say that I had eaten my lunch when it occurred to me that Honia faced a power cut and that she couldn’t have cooked anything.

‘Shall I go down and look for something?’

‘No.’

Honia got busy on her phone, scavenging for food inside it. All I could see was her face, as I craned my neck to look beyond the ladder, with the sky stretched behind her like a slender plum peel.

‘Have you ever observed an old person and tried to imagine how they must have looked when they were young.’

She hadn’t heard me but I continued.

‘It’s the central idea in my new story. And I’m writing it in short phrases, with no description. I’ve realized that most of what we produce as work tends to be expressionistic. We’re conditioned that way, I think, it’s the contemporary ideal.’ I stopped to watch a lone stork as it glided past her, capturing the world’s silence and turning it into a deeper hole of desire. ‘I think the cliché of photography, or any kind of visual representation is that it is expressionistic, and being monochrome is just a part of that.’

‘Look who’s the cynic now.’ She hadn’t looked up from her phone and it seemed as though she was talking to it, or trying to make it speak. I ignored her abrupt remark.

‘And then I realized that…’ I wanted to say that I had drunk two glasses of white rum before I had left the house that evening, because I wasn’t sure of how to be myself around her, and because we always ended up talking about things besides ourselves, and I felt like nobody in the world knew me no matter how much I tried. The rum had worn off along the way and I had to stop at a local pub and top myself up with a double brandy; there was a little boy there playing by himself with a toy car, as his father drank his beer at the bar quickly in his three-piece suit – and kept turning back to tell his son to stay inside the grey line.

Honia seemed to have made her order. She scaled down the ladder and hung around me in her heavy black shirt and ill-fitting sports shorts, kicking the pink ball around and being noisy. I took a deep breath and thought about how courageous she was to follow her instinct and do what she believed in. She looked disoriented and seemed to be thinking about little beyond food. I felt a surge of affection for her and took her by the arm, leading her downstairs as she grumbled about her dying battery.

She had left the candles on. The shadows that had danced about the walls in our absence dissolved as we made our way across the hall. I flipped through a journal of Raúl Cañibano’s photographs of Cuba and stopped when I saw a man in a hat with his face bent down behind an open window, as the sun beamed on his wooden house and cast a big shadow of the clothesline against it; I thought about how it never felt adequate to live in the city, though the whole world wanted to be there.

‘So what else do you do when you have a day off?’ Honia asked, smiling a little and coming into herself as she saw my involvement with her book.

‘I try to write.’ I felt the need to repeat myself. Then I adjusted my body to face her, resting my shoulder against the sofa, and letting myself relax. ‘It isn’t easy to do something when you finally get a break. All you want is some peace.’

She nodded but she didn’t take her eyes off me.

‘It’s hard to do anything other than what somebody else wants you to do for them,’ she whispered. ‘In exchange for a little life.’

‘We live in a poor country.’ I wanted to say more but the idea sounded self-explanatory.

‘But time is short,’ she murmured. Her voice was so low that I thought I had imagined her speak. She lost herself in thoughts and stared at the dying candle and its dramatic flame, her shelves and desks of books and pens and lenses and prints subdued in the granular dark.

‘I’ve gotten a transfer to Japan,’ I whispered back, doing my best not to disturb the stillness, as though it could extinguish the flame and drown us in an abject blackness. She turned towards me a little, tilting her head and letting her hair fall heavily to one side. I had never seen her in anything but a half-pony tied with a black rubber band.

‘You should go,’ she said, as though I had asked for her approval. ‘You should go.’

I blushed and readjusted myself, becoming momentarily self-conscious in her presence. Her existence belonged to a mental geography I had of the city, and our detachment over the months had made me doubt if I would miss her more than I would miss the idea of friendship with her. Until that day. Her passion for her friends wasn’t different to an innate talent. She didn’t need to think about it; and she never spoke about the past.

The food arrived. Honia had already kept the plates ready and a big bowl for the main dish. It transformed the old flat into a rustic dhaba, waking the ceramic idols on her mantlepiece and the crockery in the lower shelves of her bookcase. She emptied the package and shovelled a sizeable portion onto her plate, eating quickly with her hand. She didn’t like eating on the sofa and preferred laying the food on the mantlepiece and sitting around it on the floor. She watched her food intensely as she ate, her forehead sweating as she licked her fingers. I held my plate on my fingertips like it were a flower and ate a little at a time. I had to make a joke.

‘You fasted all day and finally ordered pulav, that too Kashmiri pulav. You could have at least ordered a gravy with it. It’s as good as eating curd rice.’

She couldn’t help but smile, and she didn’t stop smiling till she finished her first serving. We both knew that her choice of food emerged from her need to keep herself light so that she could work for longer hours. I watched as she saved the raisins for the end; and measured her hunger as though it were a recipe. She had a show coming up and a publication due later in the year. I knew I wouldn’t be there to witness either of them, but I had a feeling that she wouldn’t live in the city much longer either. It was impossible to tell when and where she was headed, but she was nobody’s person and the world would find her a place, if she didn’t find one by herself.

‘There have been a few people seeing me off late,’ she said, grinning mischievously at herself. ‘But nothing has really stuck.’ Her eyes gleamed for the first time that evening, as I grew a little tired and felt the alcohol wearing off. But I didn’t need another fix. I had considered leaving after the meal, but it seemed like our time together had just begun. I watched her dig a spoonful of rice and twitch her eyebrows at me, speaking solemnly with a hint of drama.

‘There’s a shop down the road that has swimsuits. Wanna go buy one for yourself on the way to the pool?’

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Abhishek Udaykumar is a writer, filmmaker and painter from India. He graduated from Royal Holloway University of London with English and Creative Writing. He writes short stories, novels and essays and makes documentaries and fiction films. His narratives reflect the human condition of rural and urban communities. He has been published by over half a dozen literary journals, and has made thirteen films and several series of paintings.