Immersion Night

Farhad Irani has been telling me for twenty years that my kheema is oily, and tonight at eleven o’clock he walks across the lane to tell me again.

I am alone in the kitchen with the shutter pulled halfway down. The police have closed the main road for the immersion processions, so nobody has come for dinner since eight, and I have spent three hours scraping the tawa and listening to the dhols working their way down toward the sea. I have a pot of mutton going for tomorrow and a towel over my shoulder. When the shutter rattles and a man ducks under it, I do not even turn around.

“It’s dripping again,” says Farhad.

“What is dripping.”

“Your exhaust. Onto my awning. Into my customers’ tea.” He straightens up inside my kitchen with his hands on his hips, a big man in a creased white shirt, with his belly pushing at the buttons. He has the loudest voice in Dhobi Talao. “Twenty years, Imran, I am asking you. Fix it.”

“Fix it yourself. Move your awning.”

“My father put up that awning.”

“My father put up this exhaust, and your father was already dripping butter on the British.” I turn around then, wiping my hands, and find that he has come all the way to the middle of my kitchen and is standing very close to the steel prep table. “Why are you here at eleven at night, Farhad? You could shout this across the lane.”

“The procession is shouting across the lane. I could not hear myself.”

This is true. The first dhol-tasha band has reached the end of our street, and the sound comes through the shutter in waves, a deep boom you feel in your breastbone and then the sharp rattle of the tasha over the top of it. Men in saffron are going by out there with the idol’s lorry lit up like a wedding. The lights swing in under the shutter and slide across Farhad’s face, red, then yellow, then gone.

We have a history, Farhad and I, and most of it is shouting. His café has stood on the north side of the lane since 1934, with cloudy mirrors and bentwood chairs. My kitchen has stood on the south side since 1961, with a coal tandoor my father would not let anyone replace. We fight about his awning and my exhaust. We fight about the one parking slot between us. We fought in 1998 over a remark I made at a dinner, and we have never entirely stopped. Last monsoon when the power went for two days and his ice melted, I sent my generator across the lane with a cousin, and we neither of us ever mentioned it.

He looks at me. I look at him. We are both breathing a little hard, which is stupid, because neither of us has done anything.

“Your kheema,” he says, and his voice goes strange, “is not oily.”

I put the towel down.

For twenty years I have watched this man through my doorway. I know how he carries a tray of tea with his belly out in front of him like a prow. I know he sings under his breath when he thinks nobody is listening, old Hindi film songs, badly. I have told myself that what I feel when he shouts at me across the lane is irritation. I am a sensible man and I have run a kitchen for thirty years.

“I have been saying it for twenty years because I had to say something,” he says. “I stand at my counter and I watch your door and I have to say something. So I say oily.”

“Farhad.”

“I have eaten your kheema pav every Sunday since 2004. I send my waiter for it. He thinks I am buying it to study the competition.” He lifts his chin. His ears have gone dark red. “Tell me to leave and I will go back under that shutter and never come in here again. I will pretend the whole night is the drums.”

I think about it for exactly as long as it takes the lorry to pass.

“Stay,” I say. I turn off the gas under the mutton and haul the shutter the rest of the way down.

“Oh, thank God,” says Farhad, and crosses my kitchen in three steps and takes my face between his big palms.

---

The first kiss tastes of cardamom tea and cigarettes, and he kisses the way he shouts, with everything. His stubble is rough. His hands are huge and warm on my jaw. I get one arm around his back and feel the whole broad warmth of him through the damp cotton, the soft heavy belly pressing into mine, and I let out a sound I have not made in fifteen years.

“Arre,” he says against my mouth, delighted. “Imran. You make noise.”

“Shut up.”

“No, I like it. Do it again.”

I pull him in by the shirt and do it again. The drums are in the floor now. His hand slides down my back and over my hip and grips my backside like he is judging a melon, and I laugh into his mouth, and he laughs back, and then neither of us is laughing. His other hand finds the front of my kurta and the knot of my pyjama string.

“Wait,” I say. I take his wrist, gently. “Say it plain. Everything. What do you want?”

He blinks at me.

“I am fifty-four,” I say. “I do not do guessing any more. You tell me, I tell you, and if either of us wants to stop we say stop and we stop. Nothing else.”

“You are the most irritating man I have ever met.”

“What do you want, Farhad.”

He takes a breath. Then it comes out of him all at once, in that enormous voice. “I want to go on my knees on your kitchen floor and get my mouth round you. And after that I want you to bend me over that table and fuck me until I cannot shout. I have wanted it since the monsoon of 2004, when you were standing in the lane in a wet vest. I have thought about it with my own hand in my own bathroom more times than I will say in front of a man I have to see every morning.”

My legs forget their job. I put a hand on the steel.

“Do we need anything?” I say. My voice has gone rough. “For the second part.”

“I came to complain about your exhaust,” says Farhad. “I have nothing.”

“I have.” I take the first-aid tin down from the shelf over the sink and put a tube of water-based lube and a strip of condoms on the steel.

“In a first-aid tin. Next to the burn cream.”

“It is a kitchen. Burns are what we have.”

I laugh until I have to hold on to the table, and he is laughing too, red to the collar, and then he sinks to his knees on my kitchen floor with a grunt, because he is a big man and the knees complain, and takes the string of my pyjamas in his teeth.

---

He is slow, which I did not expect. He pulls the cloth down and my cock comes out already hard, thick and dark, and he looks at it for a long moment like he is reading a menu somebody has promised him is good. He kisses the tip, then rubs his stubbled cheek along the shaft. My hips jerk.

“Farhad.”

“I am admiring,” he says. “Let me admire.”

“Admire faster.”

“Twenty years I am waiting, and you want fast.” But he opens his mouth, and takes me in.

It is wet and hot, and he does not hurry. His tongue works the underside in long strokes and his lips close tight around me and slide down, and he takes more of me than I think he will, down until his nose touches the grey hair at my belly. He makes a deep sound around me, a hum, and I feel it in my balls. I grab the edge of the table behind me. My other hand goes into that grey, unbrushed hair.

“God. Your mouth. Farhad, your mouth is a crime.”

He pulls off, breathing hard, and looks up at me. His eyes are shining. “Good crime?”

“The best crime in Bombay. Come back here.”

He comes back, but first he rests his cheek against my thigh, breathing hard, one hand still working me lazily. “You taste the way I thought you would,” he says. “Salt and smoke. I have had your kheema every Sunday for twenty years and not once did it taste like this.”

“Farhad, I will finish before you are done if you keep talking.”

“Then let me tell you what I think about when I cannot sleep. This table. The shutter down, the whole street going by outside, and your hand over my mouth.” He shuts his eyes. “I am only telling you.”

“Tonight the shutter is down,” I say, and my voice is rough, “and there is a street full of drums. Finish what you started.”

He grins up at me and takes me in again, and this time his fingers dig into my thighs and he moans around me in earnest. His hand wraps the base of me and pumps in time with his mouth, and the drums boom, and every time the tasha rattles I feel him swallow around me and my thighs shake. I know I am close, closer than I want to be.

“Stop,” I say. “Stop. Up.”

He lets me go at once and looks up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and I pull him to his feet by the shirt.

“Take this off. And everything.”

He does it clumsily and fast. The shirt goes onto a sack of basmati, then the vest, and he undoes his trousers and steps out of them, big and bare under my tube light. I drag my kurta off over my head and kick the pyjamas away from my ankles. His belly swells over his thick, curving cock, and the silver hair runs thick across his chest and down his thighs. I have seen him from across the lane, in shirts, for twenty years. I had no idea.

“What?” says Farhad, because I am staring.

“Nothing. Turn round. Hands on the table.”

---

He puts his palms flat on the steel and bends, and the whole broad length of his back opens out under the tube light, with the white-stubbled nape and the wide shoulders and the round soft curve of his backside. I kneel behind him on my own tile floor and put both hands on him and part him and just look, and he groans.

“Imran. I can feel you looking.”

“Good.” I put my mouth to the back of his thigh, and bite, not hard. “You looked at my door for twenty years.”

He laughs, shaky. Then my tongue finds him, and he is not laughing at all.

“Oh— arre baap re— Imran—”

“Hold the table.”

“I am holding the table!” His forearms are shaking. I work him open with my tongue, slow and wet, circling and pressing, and every flick draws a louder sound out of him, all those years of shouting gone to broken syllables. His hips push back against my face. I take the tube, slick two fingers, and slide one in beside my tongue, and he makes a noise I will hear in my sleep.

“Too much?”

“No. More. More, you slow old man, give me another.”

I give him another. I work them in and out, curling, and find the spot, and he flattens down on the steel with his cheek against it and cries out so loudly that I think for a moment the street will hear. The street cannot hear. A whole band is going by with forty drums. I add a third finger and he is pushing back onto my hand, swearing in three languages, and I stand and tear a condom off the strip and roll it on.

“Farhad.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me again.”

“Fuck me.” He turns his head on the steel, red-faced, hair wild, gasping. “Imran Sheikh, fuck me now, or I will go back across the lane and tell everybody your mutton is cold.”

I slick myself, take him by the hip, put myself to him and push.

He opens slowly and tight and hot, and I go in slowly with my forehead against his back, breathing in sweat and cardamom, until I am all the way in and we are both shaking. He is saying something into his arm, over and over, and when I bend close I hear it is my name.

“Farhad. All right?”

“Do not stop. Do not stop, do not stop. You are right up in my belly.”

“You are very tight.”

“Twenty years, what did you expect?”

I hold still, all the way in, my chest against his sweating back, and breathe. His body clutches and releases around me in slow pulses. “It is the best feeling I have had in a decade,” I tell him, and he groans and says, “Say more,” so I do. “You are hot as the tandoor,” I tell him. “Soft as dough. I am going to take my time, and I will fuck you until the tea in your café goes cold.” When I start to move again he is begging.

I start to move. Short slow strokes, then longer ones, the whole table rocking, the pots on the shelf above us chiming against each other. I take him by the nape and hold him down gently against the steel, and he moans like I have given him something. My other hand slides around his hip to his cock, thick and slick and leaking onto the table, and I stroke him in time.

“You like that? Being held down?”

“Yes. Yes, hold me. Fuck, Imran, hold me down and use me, I am yours, I have been yours since the awning.”

“Since the awning,” I pant. “Idiot. You could have told me.”

“I did tell you! Every day! I said oily!” He starts to laugh and the laugh turns into a long broken groan as I keep driving into him. “Oh God. Oh Imran. There, there, there. Harder. Break the table, I will pay for the table.”

I do. The slap of my belly against his backside is loud and wet, and the tawa rings on its hook and the water drips in the sink, and the kitchen is full of the noise of two big middle-aged men going at each other with no shame. Outside the drums are rising and rising. There is a roar in the lane, a crowd, a thousand voices shouting together as the idol’s lorry comes level with our shutter. Ganpati Bappa Morya, they shout, and then the long call for next year, and the sound shakes the metal. And with that sound pounding at my back, I feel it coming up my spine.

“Farhad, I’m going to come.”

“Yes. In me. Come in me, give me everything.” He is pushing back onto me every stroke. “Together, you bastard, I am nearly there, touch me, touch me—”

I grip his cock and pump it fast, and I drive into him three times, hard and deep, and the crowd goes up like thunder, and everything in me lets go. I come with a cry that nobody hears, pulsing into him, and he comes in my hand with a roar that outdoes the dhols, long hot streaks that spatter the steel and the floor. His whole body locks. His arms give way and he goes down flat on the table with me folded over his back.

We stay like that for a long time. The procession passes. The drums slide away toward the sea, getting smaller, a boom and a rattle and a boom, until I can hear the water dripping in the sink again and the tube light buzzing and the two of us breathing.

“Imran,” Farhad says into his arms.

“Mm.”

“Your kitchen smells like mutton.”

“It is a kitchen.”

“I am only saying.” He turns his face on the steel and looks at me sideways, his eyes soft and drowsy and wet. “It is a good smell. I would like to be here at six when the dough comes.”

I put my forehead on his shoulder blade and laugh, and he shakes underneath me, and neither of us moves until the cramp in my knee forces the issue.

I help him up. We clean the steel together with a wet towel and no conversation, two grown men wiping down a table at midnight, and when I hand him back his vest and trousers he holds them against his belly and watches me tie the string of my pyjamas, and says nothing, and smiles at the floor.

---

At two in the morning we are sitting on sacks of rice at the back of my kitchen, Farhad in his vest and trousers with his shirt still on the basmati, me in my vest and pyjamas. The shutter is up a hand’s width to let in the night air. We are eating kheema pav out of the pot with one spoon between us, and each of us has an enamel mug of my chai.

“You were right,” Farhad says, mouth full. “About my bun maska.”

“I said it was greasy.”

“You said it was greasy in nineteen ninety-eight, at the Chamber of Commerce dinner, in front of everybody. I never forgave you.”

“I am sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. It was greasy.” He licks his thumb. “My father used too much butter. I have been using too much butter for thirty years because I thought it was the recipe. I will cut it.”

“Do not cut it,” I say, surprising myself. “It’s good.”

He looks at me for a while with the spoon halfway to his mouth. Then he puts the spoon down, leans over the gap between the sacks, and kisses me, slow, tasting of masala and chai and butter, and I lay my palm against his grey head and hold it there.

“The awning,” he says into my mouth.

“I will fix the exhaust.”

“I will move the awning.”

“We will fight about it tomorrow.”

“Of course. Every day.” He smiles at me, a wide, ugly, wonderful smile. “What else will I say across the lane?”

---

At six I haul the shutter all the way up. The lane smells of wet marigolds and diesel and the sea, and the street is littered with petals and the paper cups of the night, and the first light is coming in grey over the rooftops of Dhobi Talao.

There is one parking slot in front of our two shops, a patch of cracked tar about the size of a scooter. For twenty years we have gone to the municipality about it, and to the police, and once to a man who claimed to be a lawyer. This morning a red Vespa is parked in it, and beside it, half on the footpath with its front wheel against the Vespa’s rear one, is a black Activa that I know very well.

I stand there with a bucket in my hand and look at the two of them for a while.

Across the lane the café shutter goes up with a bang, and a big man in a creased white shirt with the top button undone steps out, scratching his stubble. He sees me. He sees the scooters. He folds his arms and says, across the lane, in the loudest voice in Dhobi Talao, “Imran, your Activa is on my side.”

“Your Vespa,” I call back, “is on mine.”

He grins. I put the bucket down and walk across the lane to get the tea.