Excerpt: The Remains of the Body

Back when they were both in grade three, Avik had told Kaustav he had seen his brother do something very strange the night before.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and they were lying in bed in Avik’s house, the place where Kaustav always found himself whenever the walls of his own house crushed him. Avik’s house was old and beautiful, always breaking and peeling off at the edges. Big, beautiful, clueless, just like Avik. No one seemed to know where the rooms were, spacious and messy holes that managed to hide from people every now and then. If you could find one of them at the right moment, whether it was Avik’s parents’ bedroom or the deserted old study next to the third-floor terrace, no one could find you till you decided to go looking for people.

Lying on his parents’ bed, Avik had told Kaustav that very strange thing. ‘He started moving so fast like he was dancing in bed. The bed was shaking so bad that I woke up.’
‘Was he crying or something?’
‘I was terrified. I thought he was going to die.’
‘What time was it?’
‘I don’t know. Middle of the night?’
‘Did you call out to him?’
‘I tried to. But I don’t think he heard me. He kept on moving like crazy against the pillow. He was kind of groaning, and then he groaned kind of loud and stopped.’
Avik’s older brother was not quite like other people. He was tall but looked spindly and under-nourished, and he rarely spoke to people. They didn’t know whether that strange thing he did that night was one of his nocturnal habits or one of those strange demands of growing up, the kind of demand to which only a boy like him had to give in. Sometimes his pyjamas were wet in the morning and Avik wanted to die of shame thinking he had to share his bed with his fourteen-year-old brother who peed in his clothes at night.

‘It’s like he’s like an animal or something, something creepy. But I don’t know what to tell my parents. I don’t want to.’

Those days it felt that Avik and Kaustav shared a body. Every weird thought or feeling that came into one’s mind came to the other’s too, or if it didn’t, it had to be shared till the other person sensed it like his own feeling and they forgot who had felt it first. Kaustav didn’t want to talk about the chaotic, half-awake life of his parents who didn’t know where he was most of the day, parents who didn’t care about each other’s whereabouts. But in the end, he always told Avik.
Avik was thoughtless and distracted like a child but he had a warm, earthen affection for the world, and love for Kaustav was a slow flame in his heart. Before him, Kaustav was a scared, scheming rat, and his speech was broken, mixed with lies which Avik always saw through, and asked him to cut the crap, while Avik spoke about the strange things he saw and felt, just like a baby, a big baby who had started to grow hair in hidden parts of his body, which made him very keen about those places. It had to happen as he was the kind of person who liked to pause under stairwells and sniff at odd smells because he had no real idea where to go. And he had to tell Kaustav all about it. Kaustav would snort in disgust, ask him to shut the fuck up. Avik went on like he hadn’t heard Kaustav say anything. Greedily, Kaustav gulped it all down.

There was a light, floating expectation that Avik would become a doctor as his father was one. But it was a bit of a joke also as his father was really not much of a doctor even though he spent several hours of the day in the clinic attached to his house, where his friends gathered to chat, but patients rarely showed up. Avik had received his father’s feudal sociability which was now out of place—and this made him confused and aimless. Also, you had to ace exams to become a doctor, and while Avik got okay marks, no one would mistake him for being brilliant. An absurd sense of humour drew a crowd of friends but he had deep anxieties that he liked to push under the rug—that only Kaustav could bring out because Kaustav liked watching people, especially when they were confused.

Their feelings about Alpana, the maid who cooked and cleaned for Kaustav’s family and made nasty remarks about his father’s drunkenness, gave them shame for very different reasons. They were thirteen at that time. Alpana’s dark knees, Avik said, made him hot and hard, especially when she pulled up her sari to sit down with the pile of dirty dishes. How could he say that? Kaustav felt a disgust that he couldn’t quite admit. ‘That’s kind of sick,’ he said feebly. ‘The dark legs and the hard scrubbing,’ Avik said. ‘And have you seen her nails, they are crusty and gnarled.’ Kaustav wanted to say that he found dirty and smelly women disgusting, and all the maidservants were dark and smelly and dirty, and how could you get turned on by them, but a lump of shame choked his own throat and drowned the words.

But nobody could stop Avik. He was a child who wanted to suck and bite and crush his lollipop. ‘I want to follow her around when she mops the floors.’ Avik seemed unnerving at such moments but naked in his honesty, as if he had nothing to hide from Kaustav. He could even tell him that his own father, under all his laughter and good looks, barely made a living with all his pretence of a medical practice. He could bare all his confusion and his arousal, perhaps even pull down his pants and show him everything as he had nothing to hide from Kaustav. That thought was frightening and strangely comforting at the same time. Loving Avik was a like thing of nature, the air and the sun, a boy wide open like the elements, around Kaustav always, touching him but unpredictable, vulnerable to hurt, a crumbling decay. Avik would be very interested in watching Kaustav get aroused—he loved to punch and squeeze and make fun of him—but he was bored by the kind of girls that made Kaustav dreamy.

These were also the kind of girls who in college would want nothing to do with Avik, the big brawny brute who said offensive things and then became dead quiet, red and embarrassed and angry, wandering away. That’s when Kaustav wanted to hug and pull him back and shout to the world that Avik was a lovely, sweet boy who was a clumsy idiot. But Avik was hot and raging. The women who studied chemistry, he said, looked like they had crawled out of lab experiments gone wrong, while the sleek girls were all studying sociology with Kaustav and laughing at his slimy jokes and wrapping themselves around him like flags around a pole. But the boys’ bodies were tuned together and Kaustav immersed himself in women for the sake of both.

Avik listened to his stories and that was enough for him. Especially when Kaustav got to persuade his female classmates to let him touch them. Movie halls were great for such business, holding hands, toying with the fingers, sliding under the T-shirt and feeling the terrain, but what creeped Avik out were the stories of Kaustav getting naughty on the move, in taxis and occasionally in city buses, where he and the girl usually tried to find seats in the back where he could unzip the jeans and dig inside. Creeped out in a delicious, heart-popping way. ‘Man,’ Avik would pinch and slap Kaustav, ‘Your stories are getting too horny these days.’ His voice became hoarse, and Kaustav could almost feel Avik growing taller, harder, rapt-skinned.

Avik’s quick breathing did something to Kaustav. It was as if Avik trusted him with his body, as he trusted him with his life. It was an unlikely, brutal breathing, his football-pumped chest rising and falling, his eyes growing smaller, sleepier, as if his body was melting at the edges. Kaustav loved that body like he had loved no one, not his dazed parents who never kept track of his life, not the girls whose bodies felt creamy and restless in his hands. Despite his fidgety attention-span, Avik knew every inch of Kaustav’s life and never forgot a strand. Kaustav, too, started breathing heavily like Avik, and the hardness rose between his legs, at the thought of the beads of sweat that he knew had appeared everywhere on Avik, on his upper lip, flesh he knew without touching, from its language of helpless desire.

With all his offensive humour, Avik was shapeless with love. He couldn’t say no to people and fell in with all kinds of guys, particularly the rustic and unkempt ones with a brutal sense of life, with whom Kaustav wanted little to do. But only Kaustav could twist out some hidden truths from Avik, who couldn’t get away from Kaustav. He didn’t want to. Such truths had sealed their friendship.

Excerpted with permission from The Remains of the Body by Saikat Majumdar (Penguin Random House India, 2024)