Chapter 2: Esha — 1978

The first time I kissed Esha Sharma was behind the Jallianwala Bagh, in the narrow gali that ran between the memorial's outer wall and the back of a sweet shop that made the best peda in Punjab, and I tasted cardamom and sugar and the particular electricity of doing something that both our families would have classified as a disaster.

She had pulled me into the gali. Not the other way around — I want to be clear about this, because the narrative of the boy pursuing the girl was the one that everyone assumed and nobody checked, and the truth was that Esha Sharma pursued what she wanted with the directness of a guided missile and the precision of a surgeon. She wanted me. She wanted me the way she wanted everything: completely, intensely, with the particular ferocity of a person who had been told her entire life what she should want and had decided, with absolute clarity, to want something else.

"Stop thinking," she said, her hands on my collar, her face tilted up, the too-large eyes close enough that I could see the flecks of amber in the brown. "You think too much. It's your worst quality."

"I thought my worst quality was being impractical."

"That's your second worst quality. Your worst quality is thinking about being impractical instead of just being impractical. If you're going to be useless, at least be useless with commitment."

She kissed me. The kiss was — I was eighteen, I had kissed exactly two girls before this, both at Lohri celebrations where the kissing was more collision than intention — different from anything I'd experienced. Esha kissed the way she argued: with total engagement, zero hesitation, and the implicit understanding that she was right about this and any resistance was a waste of everyone's time.

The gali smelled of peda and old stone and the particular dustiness of Amritsar's back streets in late afternoon, when the sun had baked the walls all day and the stone released its stored heat like a slow exhalation. Her braid had come loose — the end of it brushed my hand, the hair thick and warm from the sun. Behind us, through the memorial wall, the sounds of the Bagh: tourists murmuring, a guide reciting the history that everyone knew but that needed repeating, the particular weight of a place where something terrible had happened and the weight had never fully lifted.

"My father will kill you," Esha said, pulling back. Not far — just enough to speak, her hands still on my collar, her breath warm on my chin.

"Your father is a professor of comparative religion. Surely he appreciates cross-cultural exchange."

"He appreciates cross-cultural exchange in the classroom. In his daughter's love life, he appreciates Brahmin boys with engineering degrees and family property in Jalandhar."

"I have none of those things."

"I know. That's why I like you."

The relationship — if it could be called that, if the word "relationship" could encompass the particular chaos of two eighteen-year-olds meeting in secret at Pushpa's Dhaba, in the galis behind the Bagh, in the back row of the Regal Cinema where the darkness provided cover and the films provided alibi — was a conspiracy. We were co-conspirators, Esha and I, plotting against the expectations of two families who had never met and who, if they had met, would have found that they agreed on precisely one thing: that their children should not be doing what their children were doing.

Balli knew. Of course Balli knew. Balli was my confessor, my counsel, my early-warning system for parental suspicion. He covered for me when I was late for dinner ("Farhan was helping me with my Gurmukhi homework, uncle-ji"), provided alibis when I disappeared on Saturday afternoons ("We went to see the new Amitabh film, aunty-ji — it was three hours, very long"), and offered unsolicited advice with the frequency and gentleness of a monsoon.

"You're going to get caught," he said, for the fourteenth time, as we walked home from the Dhaba one evening. The sky was the particular pink-gold of an Amritsar sunset — the colour that happened when the dust in the air caught the dying light and turned the entire city into a watercolour. I wanted to paint it. I always wanted to paint it. "And when you get caught, her father will come to your house, and Bauji will have to decide between defending his son's honour and admitting that his son has been secretly courting a Hindu girl, and Bauji will choose option three, which is to pretend you don't exist until the problem goes away."

"Bauji won't find out."

"Bauji already suspects. He asked me yesterday if you've been spending time with 'that Sharma girl.' I said I didn't know any Sharma girl. He said, 'The one with the loud opinions.' I said that describes half of Amritsar's female population. He was not amused."

I should have been concerned. I was not concerned. I was eighteen, and I was in love, and love at eighteen is not a rational faculty — it is a weather system, a force of nature that operates on its own physics and regards logic the way a hurricane regards an umbrella: with indifferent disregard.

Esha's home was on Maqbool Road — a respectable street in a respectable neighbourhood, the house a two-storey structure with a small courtyard where her mother grew tulsi and where her father, Professor Sharma, held court in the evenings with his academic friends, discussing philosophy and politics over whisky that he drank with the particular care of a man who believed that moderation was a virtue and that virtues should be practiced visibly.

I went there once. Only once. Esha had decided — with the strategic miscalculation that occasionally accompanied her otherwise flawless tactical instincts — that introducing me to her parents as a "friend from college" would normalize my presence enough to reduce the secrecy required for our meetings.

The evening was — "catastrophic" is too strong. "Illuminating" is more accurate. Professor Sharma was polite. His politeness was the particular politeness of a man who could see exactly what was happening and had decided to give the insects enough rope to hang themselves. He asked about my studies. I said English Literature. He asked about my father's profession. I said retired havildar. He asked about my plans. I said I wanted to paint.

The silence that followed was the silence of a courtroom after the defendant has confessed. Not to a crime — to an inadequacy. An English Literature student. A havildar's son. A painter. In the vocabulary of Professor Sharma's expectations for his daughter's companions, I had scored zero on all three metrics that mattered: caste, income potential, and seriousness of purpose.

Esha's mother — a small, quiet woman named Kamla, whose quietness I would later understand was not passivity but strategic patience — served chai and namkeen and studied me with eyes that were identical to Esha's: too large, too observant, too capable of seeing things that the person being observed would prefer to keep hidden.

"Your mother," she said to me, with the particular gentleness of a woman who was about to say something devastating and wanted the cushion of kindness to absorb the impact. "She must worry about you. Being so far from home in your ambitions."

"I'm not far from home, aunty-ji. I live on Katra Ahluwalia."

"I didn't mean geographically, beta."

I left the Sharma household with the understanding that Esha's mother had assessed me, classified me, and filed me under "temporary." Not with malice. With the particular pragmatism of a woman who had watched daughters and their temporary enthusiasms before and knew that the enthusiasm would pass as reliably as the monsoon.

She was wrong, of course. But she was wrong in the way that practical people are often wrong about impractical things: she had assessed the probability correctly and missed the magnitude of the outlier.

Esha walked me to the gate. The courtyard was dark — the tulsi plants dark shapes against the house's lit windows, the smell of them green and peppery and sacred, the particular scent of Indian domesticity that I would carry with me for the rest of my life.

"That went well," she said.

"That went terribly."

"Terribly is a type of well. Now they know you exist. Existing is the first step."

"The first step toward what?"

"Toward everything." She held my hand — briefly, in the dark, where her parents couldn't see from the window. "Go to Pune, Farhan. Get into Fergusson. Become someone that even Daddy can't dismiss. And then come back for me."

"You could come with me."

"I can't. Not yet. Daddy would — it would break something. Between him and me. Something that I'm not ready to break." She squeezed my hand. The squeeze was — not gentle. Esha did not do gentle. The squeeze was fierce, the grip of a person holding onto something that the world was trying to pull away. "But I'll wait. If you're worth waiting for."

"Am I?"

"I'll let you know."

I walked home through Amritsar's evening streets. The galis were cooling — the stored heat releasing, the stone exhaling, the shops closing one by one with the rattle of shutters and the click of padlocks. The gurudwara's golden dome caught the last light — a single point of brilliance in the gathering dark, the colour that I could never capture, the experience that resisted canvas.

At home, Amma was cooking rajma-chawal — the smell hitting me at the door, the particular warmth of a kitchen where food was not nutrition but love's most reliable language. Bauji was reading the Tribune on the verandah, his reading glasses low on his nose, his face carrying the permanent expression of a man who found the world generally disappointing but had made peace with the disappointment.

Madan was not home. Madan was — Amma said, with the particular tone reserved for her youngest son's absences — "out with friends." Which meant: nobody knew where Madan was, and nobody was surprised, and the not-knowing had become so routine that it no longer registered as concern but as background noise, the particular frequency of a family that had accepted one of its members as unpredictable and had adjusted its expectations accordingly.

I ate my rajma-chawal. Bauji said nothing. Amma said everything — about the neighbours, the sabziwala's prices, Taya-ji's kirana store, the weather, the state of the nation — without saying the one thing she wanted to say, which was: where were you, and were you with that girl?

I went to my room. Took out a sketchpad. Drew Esha's face from memory — the wide forehead, the sharp chin, the too-large eyes. The drawing was bad. All my drawings of Esha were bad. She was, like the Golden Temple's light, an experience that resisted reproduction.

But I drew her anyway. Because the attempt was the thing. The reaching. The almost-touching.

At eighteen, I didn't know that this was the last year of something. That the city would change. That Esha and I would be pulled apart not by our families but by history — the particular, terrible history that was building like pressure in a vessel whose lid would not hold.

I drew. The pencil scratched. The rajma sat warm in my stomach. And outside, Amritsar went to sleep, not knowing what was coming.