ISSUE 10 | FALL 2011
BLACK DOG Shruti Swamy There was a woman with small, yellow teeth who had framed her head with her arms on the pillow as she lay on Vikram‘s bed with her breasts small and bare as a girl‘s. She was a student at Sophia Ladies‘ College, and Vikram, a student at IIT Bombay, had never made love to a woman before, a fact he feared was obvious. The terror of bungling the whole thing had given way to the exhilaration of the act itself; after, for a handful of precious minutes, giddiness had come over him. She seemed on the precipice of sleep, even with her eyes half-open. When her breathing slowed, a mixture of habit and impulse made him reach for his Polaroid camera. He hesitated, then arranged the shot of her naked torso, taking care not to include her face, and she didn‘t wake, hardly stirred, as the machine spat out her image. At dawn they sneaked past the guard at the gate who pretended not to notice. By the time Vikram had put her in a taxi, the giddiness was gone, replaced by an animal fear, and then a strange feeling in the throat and mouth. He spat. Had he allowed it, the photograph of the breasts would have been continuously passed around Hostel 7; he would be made a hero among his peers. Instead, Vikram tucked the photograph between the pages of his physics book and inspected it in spare moments. She had a mole in the hollow of her throat, and her nipples were large and dark as candies, but the photograph washed out her skin and could not capture its delicate texture. Then he put it away. After class, he studied for hours alone, without stopping to eat or to use the bathroom, sometimes late into the night. He thought of this work as a kind of penance, like a monk‘s. Down the hall his friend Raju practiced the flute in the evenings and Vikram put down his books to listen. When night had fallen and spread out the hours, Vikram broke his evening fast with Raju, wildly eating snacks. ―I‘ve heard that New York is just like Bombay,‖ said Vikram. Outside the trees, jacaranda, and jasmine were all in bloom, scenting with the heaviness of a jungle. ―I‘ll live in New York only.‖ Raju wanted to be a poet. He was much shorter than Vikram, but that was only because Vikram was exceptionally tall, tall and pale, with dark features, like Frankenstein‘s monster, and had a stooping walk. Raju was heavy; not plump, but his body was dense with muscle. He cultivated a fashionable moustache on his upper lip, and dressed in tight polyester shirts and bell-bottoms. There was an amulet in the shape of a silver bullet that he wore around his neck on a piece of black thread. ―Aree, then why leave Bombay at all?‖ Vikram would have liked to live in Paris and be a bohemian, though by that point it was too late. They knew, already, they would both become engineers. Still Vikram smoked cigarettes, despite his asthma. ―Maybe Chicago,‖ said Raju. ―My father has an uncle there.‖ ―San Francisco,‖ said Vikram, dreaming. ―London, Prague, Berlin, Boston.‖ ―Will you come with me?‖ 17