Murali’s therapist was the one who suggested that he read erotica. “Erotica,” she’d had to repeat it. In session, he’d laughed at the word, a surprised, nervous laugh, so she dropped the idea, all fluttering lashes, looking down into her notebook, as if she were flirting with some private self, some image nude and seductive in a mirror.

The session then went on, like any other. Murali complained about work, a safe, perennial theme. The therapist asked him to describe “self-care practices”, without innuendo. The only reason she’d mentioned erotica – generically, without inflection – was in response to his mentioning, offhand, “how low his libido was lately.” How much less he was enjoying “intimacy.” And she’d made the suggestion of erotica merely in passing, not prurient, yet also not embarrassingly clinical – the idea staying in his mind for days after.

And afterward, when he started Googling words like “story of O” and “Ottoman sex slaves” and “high kink priestess fantasy island” and “local boy gets hogtied and bitch-slapped”, he told himself it was a hopeful sign that she could tell he had desires he wasn’t talking about, that she knew him to be a word-person, turned on by text — that he could be seduced by abstract touch. She might not know, per se, that he was gay. But she knew his sensibility. She’d never have proposed some garish Times Square peepshow, some phone sex with a stranger who was likely a sex worker, or God forbid, steer him to places where someone beckoning through a curtain could be a child pornographer.

Murali supposed his therapist (whom he thought of as “my therapist”, rather than by her name, though she’d said to simply call her Radha and not doctor anything) really did know him, although he had not come out to her in these three months of “working together”, as she called it, leaving his identity unspoken. Silence was a kind of rebuke, he thought, to all the pressure he felt with his parents to “explain why he’d never kept a girlfriend longer than a few months”. Why was he forty and not married “yet.” Refusal of identity politics. Though he still might. Come out, that is. All the while rejecting identity. And obviously not marrying anyone.

Marriage was a catacomb. Hidden underground, from public view, made up narrow crisscrossing dead-end passages the married were forced to walk and walk, for monotonous nights and days and years until they reached the site of their own burial.

Murali’s broken engagement was what led him to therapy, he would tell anyone who asked, thinking it a generic, good reason, though there wasn’t anyone in his life who’d ask, and he hadn’t told his therapist about the end of the engagement either, and even though all he recalled now was relief, so much relief, that his good Hindu arranged marriage fiancée Seema intuited he was gay, without his having to tell her, and found the courage to back out, even though they’d gone all the way through the lagna patrika, Sanskrit for engagement ceremony, mainly consisting of food, jewelry, and stubborn, ancient, foreign muttering.

She’d ended the engagement with a single voicemail.

“Sorry, eh? I am so sorry, but I want no part of this. Of any kind of arrangement. I don’t know what you thought, when you agreed, but I would never marry someone…who does this. But don’t worry about it. You needn’t do anything. I’ve told them I just changed my mind and wanted to marry someone else, my college boyfriend who is still available, and Iyer too, so it is fine, the match is off, my parents wrote yours a letter. And I won’t tell them…what I realized about you. There is no need.”

So tonight in his apartment, here was Murali, alone, wobbly and in front of his kitchen sink, reading in the dim light from a book balanced on the edge, in pages that looked no different, to the distant observer, than any other old book from a serious library, but had sex scenes from a concubine’s initiation into a seventeenth-century Ottoman sultan’s harem.

The door of the unfamiliar, lavish room in which she’d slept, opened. It was the eunuch from Yemen who’d been assigned as part of her entourage, the man who would supervise within her small but protected section of the palace. The eunuch was one of the few who weren’t traded and sold from Africa in Istanbul, whose comrades in the other entourages were all Black eunuchs. Like them, he had survived mutilation of his most personal anatomies. His brother had risen to the status of eunuch of one of the sultan’s princesses, living in a grand mountain villa Ayse would likely never see. Now the Yemeni eunuch informed Ayse that the sultan was on his way; then brought a young female house slave into the room. She would help Ayse bathe and get ready, then either leave or stay to watch the two of them, at the sultan’s pleasure. The eunuch stayed in the room to confirm that both women stripped nude. 

Murali definitely did not need visuals. No, Murali didn’t need some fake-tanned porn fool playing a nude Turkish sultan. He liked the description of the sultan’s sun-weathered, warrior body that followed the opening passages, the way the man smelled to the concubine, the words he used to relax her. “Words alone are certain good,” came to Murali’s mind, from Yeats, a phrase Murali first read in high school, during four strenuous years of pretending to be straight, even for his beloved, young, Abercrombie-model lookalike English teacher, whose subtle cologne was maddening, whom he kept safe distance from.

With his ex-fiancée Seema, sex never came up anyway. Theirs was a chaste, daylight, semi-arranged meeting, “a modern re-envisioning of arranged marriage”, he’d told his boss, who sat on boards of two conservative think-tanks and was the publisher of a pretty much right-wing, insular imprint of a Big Five. His boss, whose family was Orthodox Jewish from Long Island, strongly approved of Murali’s “choice.” If he’d known of Murali’s true desires, he’d have consigned him to Sodom, Gomorrah. Biblical disgust. Murali surely wouldn’t take the chance of telling his boss any true thing. There was no point. So, Murali smiled and bowed his way through his job every day, glad for his promotion, scanning constantly for other jobs. For now at least he had some kind of paid job in publishing, though he felt very far away from any epicenter of culture. On a daily basis, his colleagues weren’t trying to be terrible – they brought in homemade pies, laughed along with Seinfeld episodes playing on the TV in the cafeteria, and shared their sentimental stories about beloved dogs that weren’t hard for Murali to listen to. But they did this while tsk-tsking about “the inner city” and “Third World countries” and even dropping the occasional f- slur while telling their jokes. It was the summer of 2001 already, and Murali felt that his twenties were spent surviving a decade of righteous and insistent intolerance, that had begun with ACT-UP activists chasing George Herbert Walker Bush to lead a die-in at his vacation home, and that ended in Matthew Shepard being beaten to death, in 1998.

He’d let his parents and grandmother pluck Seema from other matrimonial candidates, not because of her sleek page of respectable, even impressive biodata – great headshot, slender body, good schools, “loyal to her parents” kind of thing, but on account of the rumor he’d heard from a trusted source, a gossipy friend of his cousin, that she was bi- and even sort of out in Indian party circles. That fellow expressed the gleeful hope that Murali might wander into a threesome, maybe even on his wedding night. But at Seema’s first lunch date with Murali, she’d made it clear that she didn’t actively nor on a daily basis want to be with a woman, that she believed in “family values” and “fidelity.” He didn’t have to ask her who she voted for. Still, a little coy, a little desperate to find a woman he could say “open marriage” and “mutual privacy” to, Murali pressed on.  “You’ve never thought to, so to speak, go out of the box? Maybe with other girls? And let your husband – I don’t know – maybe try with girls and sometimes men?” he asked, trying and failing to stay vague in his eagerness to know if she could make his dream life possible, one in which he never came out to anyone, in which he satisfied his parents’ rage for him to marry, “maker’s rage to order,” he called it, after Williams –yet on the down low had plenty of lovers, friends, plus men who were both. She could have plenty of her girls too.

She’d only stared at him, then laughed, abrupt. “Oh, that was just a few incidents here and there. It’s sort of like encountering, I don’t know, like, cocaine at a wild party, y’know?” she said making the phrase rhyme with suno, the Hindi word for “listen”, reminding him in that moment that their accents, when they spoke English, were entirely different – hers happily still so Indian, Delhi Public School elite, and Murali’s own accent more of a mix with Indian lurking underneath bland northeastern American. Yes, he realized, “lurking” was the word. He lurked, holding his identity – selves? – in reserve. Waiting for – he didn’t know what. Hoping to be invited out.

“Come on, playing around can’t be part of anyone’s real life,” Seema told him blithely. “Experimentation, what have you. Giddiness, na? One cannot build a life from all that irresponsibility. It’s wrong. How could I do that as a mother? Don’t mistake me. This isn’t a judgement or a moral thing. It’s just – doing silly things would hurt my family.” 

His hopes about Seema all dashed now, but with the stigma of a broken engagement at least buying him some time, and no one “pressurizing him”, the matchmaker promised, for at least a few more months, to get married. Murali savored the fact that he was alone in his apartment this evening, and for the near future. He should feel free, he thought, at least in his own kitchen, the way he’d never been free in Seema’s home, never been free in his parents’. Soon he’d have to go to sleep to be on time for work, so Murali hurried up now with his therapist-recommended sex experiment. a half-consumed Turkish soda in one hand, the book in the other. Rubbing his own dick with vigor he looked down and sighed; everything still worked fine, but he felt no emotion when he came.

Even the orange soda was so-so. It was from yesterday, a present from his latest not-really-friend, a younger man who’d followed him home a month before from a coffee shop, a man he’d carefully confirmed was not at all Indian. The soda was from overseas, not Fanta but some equivalent that this young man, who risked his life daily as a bike messenger, but seemed to have stayed cheerful about it, had found at a Turkish store in Queens, near where he lived in Astoria. This was the soda that Fehmi had drunk in his youth, five years before, in Istanbul by some bench near the Bosphorus, feral cats slinking around his legs, college students smoking French cigarettes. Along with these brief reminisces of post-Ottoman Turkey, Murali’s new eager lover brought the stickiness of liquid on skin, a sensation meant to add to their pleasure that night. “Now I lick it off you,” Fehmi whispered, probably expecting Murali to turn breathless, but instead the soda with its artificial colors just made Murali itch. But Fehmi didn’t seem to notice Murali’s lukewarm response. When Fehmi smiled and got busy, Murali found his own face troublingly blank in the bathroom mirror, expressionless though Fehmi was so devoutly kneeling down, below the sink, head bobbing at Murali’s groin.

As Murali watched his own reflection, he was surprised to see, despite his competent and expected O-face, again that deadness that seemed to be sucking his life away, that premature form of old age and exhaustion that thus far, the therapy was failing to ameliorate. Did hiding, did lying really do that to one’s soul? But Murali could not remember having any relationship which hadn’t involved lying about who he was, on the regular. Not even one. In the past month, he’d been with Fehmi nearly every night, though for such a short, terse time, each time, Murali still wasn’t sure of the street where he lived, exactly how old Fehmi was, whether he had any family locally, or even where he worked doing deliveries. He didn’t even know if Fehmi’s parents knew he was gay. Or if Fehmi had ever been married. Or was now. Maybe to a woman.  Murali knew only enough to keep on wanting to open his door, whenever Fehmi knocked. Two firm but discreet knocks, the same each time. And Fehmi, on those few occasions Murali walked outside with him, knew not to kiss or touch in view of anyone. He seemed untroubled by Murali’s unspoken rules.

“Erotica,” Murali’s serene, wiry therapist repeated, after Murali had let out a long, frustrated sigh during their session last week, coming close to telling her everything but still, always, holding back.  

The therapist clarified: “Written descriptions of sex acts, only, so no people were harmed or coerced in its making. For stress relief. For possibilities. Try giving yourself that permission.”

“And don’t think you have to go low-brow. A little Anais Nin would fit the bill,” she’d said, “unless you consider that low-brow too, I suppose,” and Radha the therapist, the sixty-year-old, Nepali-born woman in her loose, nunnish black pantsuit, her thick tendrilled silver hair down to her waist, cheeky smile, as if she were her namesake, a divine consort of Krishna the cowherd, Radha the celestially sexy dairy maid. But Murali didn’t let himself assume anything about her character. For all he knew, she had once made fun of some Nepali “lady boy” or gay classmate at school. He knew not to assume she was safe.

Nothing changed for Murali when things started with Fehmi, whose last name he still didn’t know, Fehmi the young Turkish man who approached after barely a minute of intensely admiring, mutual stares over lattes but, Murali somehow felt, would’ve been satisfied if anyone around, and not just Murali, had smiled back up at him. Cute, Murali readily conceded. Then Murali beckoned for Fehmi to follow him home. It was unfortunate that Fehmi was handsome but way too tentative. Murali wondered if erotica might exert more pull. After all, he wanted to make a steady living out of other people’s words – taking the flux and emotion and contingency of what they wrote, transforming words to permanent things. He wanted a publishing job where he could make an impact. Find the next Baldwin, the new and modern Sappho. 

2001, in publishing. Twenty years before, Toni Morrison had already left. There were a small handful of other Black women editors, but Murali couldn’t get meetings with them. There was Sonny Mehta, of course, but few if any other brown faces in major editorial, in publishing. Still, simply because Mehta existed where he did, the head of an entire, revered publishing house, Murali still hadn’t given up. One new job he had learned about might be as junior editor at a big fiction imprint, for which he was waiting to hear back, but in the meantime, at his current right-of-Republican imprint, Murali was made to understand that he ought to be grateful for being let in thus far.

Staff meetings at his current job, at the fancifully-named Equitable Building, always went a certain way. “Your Indian perspective would be so interesting, for this book,” Murali was told, though he was born in Michigan. He would be handed business manuals, “spiritual” self-help books for readers who wanted to “get ahead in the workplace,” or the occasional overtly crank book railing against the destruction of “Western civilization” in American public education. Or various tech guidebooks, though Murali didn’t even know what was involved in “writing code,” except that it struck him as an oddly disconnected, even alien kind of substitute for simply writing human words.

No one connected to the business of print, or to his family, really knew him. Even Paul, the friendly Indo-Guyanese guy who sold him the occasional magazine at the kiosk on the Equitable Building’s first floor, had no idea that Murali far preferred the inept but still hot Fehmi to any of the sloe-eyed women on the covers of HOT ASIAN BABES or LOWRIDER or other exotic titles with half-naked women on cars the news seller would often try and tempt him with. Although “for moral reasons”, Paul whispered once, behind the back of a disgruntled customer, he “would never let filthy gay degenerate porn disgrace” his precious store.

Not that Murali was in a position to buy gay porn anyway; not in public, and not when his family might descend on him just with a few minutes warning, bearing food, intending to do his laundry, and only during daylight hours. Not when he was so rarefied, his therapist guessed he could get off on literary erotica, not graphic images, but still, he would have cherished the option. The potential fun of looking at gay porn with a lover. Trying things. Open. But none of his encounters went as far as leisurely conversation or laughter over coffee in cafes – all of them at night, in parties or clubs or else his apartment, where he made it clear, before getting naked, that there was no room for a guest. He couldn’t risk family coming over unannounced and finding him out. Not that he explained all that to new acquaintances he fucked.   

Murali remained at an age when his grandmother, who’d lost her memory, tried to conserve her strength for pestering him about marriage. Still the age when he could ask his mom solicitously about her arthritis, only to have her turn her lens on him, examining his skin, weight, hair, or cleanliness of his apartment, with anguished, vocal discontent. “God, please tell me, why isn’t my only son married,” her rants started. Those never ended well, even though he never told her that tantalizing, true fact about himself and who he was that would have led her and everyone else in his family to excommunicate him completely – just as they had the cousin who married a Muslim, the woman who divorced a man who beat her up, the aunt who refused to ever wear saris or indeed to marry at all. But now his mother’s arthritis was gripping enough, her panic (so like his) on whether there would be enough money for the future paralyzing enough too, both topics protecting him only sometimes from her enervating confrontations, from her rants about the sin of how her good genes would sadly die out with him.

His spry but post-menopausal Nepali therapist whom he went out to see in Williamsburg reminded him of his mother. Part of him initially dared to hope she was a lesbian, thereby creating the possibility that his mother would accept his coming out. But no, there was the usual photo, in its place, of Radha the Boomer suburban therapist, pictured in front of some big house, smiling with a six foot two, blue eyed white man with graying brown hair. Another photo too, from much longer ago, of what must have been their wedding. Her husband was the kind of man Murali once believed he’d meet and marry by age 35, two years from now, if he could just figure out a coming out “journey” that could be undertaken in private.  

Husband. The kind of man who smiled at him admiringly, whenever they saw him sitting at a bar, seeming to savor Murali’s presumed Indian petiteness, until he stood up and such white men realized he towered over them, like a Brown-skinned, long-lashed giraffe. The way they giggled up at him, becoming girlish and confused, was nice at first. But after the first few years of rushed one-night stands with a myriad of men, though he had never ventured into even a semi-public bathhouse or drag club, Murali realized he wanted one thing that white men couldn’t give him – an intimate, implicit history, some lover with a secret accent underneath the American English he was forced to speak at work to get along. He wanted someone who’d remind him of family, make him believe that they could form a tribe. What then? If it wouldn’t be illicit one-night stands, “high altitude fucks”, like the doomed couple call their meetings over years, in “Brokeback Mountain” – if it wouldn’t be the opportunity created by his female fiancée leaving him – what then would liberate Murali for good?  He didn’t know.  He didn’t like contemplating the question. Perhaps that was why he found it comforting, to read the erotic memoir of an Ottoman Empire sex slave, this virgin Ayse, a girl from the Hindu Kush region who’d been stolen, traded, and with her green eyes, reddish-brown hair and nearly white skin, gotten mistaken for a person from Turkey’s Circassian region, along the northeast shore of the Black Sea, a place of light eyes and lighter hair, the Ottoman Empire’s preferred region for sultan’s concubines (while Black slaves from Ethiopia, from what would become Angola, Chad and Cameroon, called “Nubian beauties” or even “yum yums” the old racist Turkish slang for cannibals, were often pushed into domestic work at the palace, mansion, villa — though some were seized upon as well, for their beauty, like the Black concubines freed after they were sold to Turkish masters at Mecca, after pilgrimage, who then offered to marry them or marry another man they chose. The law giving them full status as wives. Making them no longer secret. These women’s legal and social high status never affected, not in the slightest, if while in the harem, they had made love to scores of women.)

Murali paged through the afterword, which talked about the thousands of Afro-Turks in Istanbul, in the modern day, the free and fully Turkish descendants of Black Ottoman Imperial slaves. But this long-ago memoir – a seventeenth-century sex diary in parts, and also a political document, of this Ayse’s rise in the harem—was just sexy enough. Book sex was different from real sex. His therapist must’ve understood that. Not that he’d mentioned it in his therapy, but during real sex, versus book sex, Murali wanted to be tossed into a thresher, tamed, bitten, savored, pushed down hard. With book sex, he wanted to be titillated, lulled.

The sultan knew, and had obviously verified, that Ayse was still a virgin. She had been captured unexpectedly, sold as a novelty by traders who had heard of this particular sultan’s fondness for novelty. Here was a girl from the Hindu Kush who looked Circassian, Slavic, but her features were almost indefinably different – her lips just a shade fuller than usual, almost as full as those of the Nubians, eyelashes black without cosmetic enhancement, the skin pinkish-light brown, the hair a different reddish than even reddish-blond girls from the Caucasus who were traditionally prized. Ayse, unlike Circassian slave girls who’d come to the sultan’s household at the age of seven, at most twelve, was already sixteen. Old enough to marry, the female slave had whispered, if she could give the sultan unique pleasure, but also demonstrate intelligence, courage, and skill. The sultan himself could not have been more than eighteen. In bed he was playful, whispering that she was beautiful, but that her hair was so long, far past her waist, so abundant, that the curls were tickling him everywhere. To mimic what that felt like, he kissed her all over her soft naked skin. He drew apart his robes; her fingers found his long, tender organ of their mutual delight, and then…

 

Murali closed the book, feeling a mixture of sleepy and possibly aroused.  

That night he slept naked, first dreaming he was in the bed with lithe Ayse and her sultan but just watching them, without pressure to tell them anything, not even that he was watching, let alone that he desired the sultan, not the girl. In another corner of the room, his therapist sat watching the young couple too. At some point, Murali had the conscious thought, surprised, that the sultan could see him; that somehow the man had Fehmi’s face.

But then his phone rang in the middle of the night, and Murali was still too blissed out from the dream to realize he should’ve dreaded this call. 

“What? What?” Murali said, mumbling, so many times that whoever it was calling him asked, with impatience, if he “even spoke English.” It was a nurse, a male nurse, or maybe nurse manager. The man was calling Murali from a nearby hospital.

It wasn’t his grandmother, it wasn’t his parents, they were fine – Murali tried to catch his breath, thinking of them. But no. Who then? “Serious accident, surgery, trying to locate his next of kin,” Murali made out. Then finally the name of the person the hospital was calling about. Fehmi. In the dark of his small, tidy bedroom, Murali sat trying to make sense of what the stranger was saying, concluding he would have to go to the hospital while the person was still only halfway done explaining the reasons why and what had happened to Fehmi.

To wake himself further, Murali reviewed the messages on his answering machine. Loving but worried voices of  his mother and grandmother. Not a word from Seema, his ex-, of course. A cryptic “congratulations, I have news for you” from his boss, who asked him to come to his office first thing tomorrow, but that didn’t hold a thrill. Murali already knew he might be getting assigned the new book by an Indian-American right-wing natural law demagogue from Princeton. Finally, Murali’s father’s terse affectionate words, “Sleep well my dear son,” then a click.

These all took only a few moments to delete. He changed into fresh work clothes as if it were morning and he were going into the office. Then Murali checked his hair in the hall mirror and slipped on his loafers, reassured by the familiar molded shoes on his long feet, grateful Fehmi was still alive, mulling over the man’s last name, which Murali hadn’t known, before the call. Kocak, spelled with a c but pronounced like a j. This was a small fact, but Murali was suddenly grateful to know it.

Grateful to have someone outside of family or work to be concerned about. To be nervous about. Grateful that he could delete his entire family’s messages, yet not be alone in the world. Grateful to not need a ride from anyone, to get to where he had to go.

A stunned, sobered Murali pressed the button for the hospital elevator. Fehmi had been injured in a hit-and-run accident, his bike totaled. “It could’ve been a targeted attack, the police are looking into it,” the voice on the phone had explained, without any more in-depth explanation. Ending the call before asking if Murali had any questions.  

At hospital registration, Murali said he was Fehmi’s “boyfriend”, since “friend” wasn’t enough to get him in. Just in the one moment – he’d had to come out, to anyone besides another gay man, besides a person he was planning to sleep with. For the first time in his life. 

Fehmi hadn’t yet woken up. It was only because Fehmi had Murali’s number on a piece of paper in his pants that Murali was even here. That there was a chance of his being in the room when Fehmi came to. Someone had wrongly assumed Murali mattered. Who was he to argue against this?

For a moment, in the elevator, Murali pictured his therapist and her tall husband smiling down on him, like adoptive parents. As if his therapist knew, had always known, and accepted him without question. He felt a strange joy, and less alone, but the feeling evaporated when the elevator doors open and he felt all eyes upon him, nurses and techs padding across gleaming, polished floors, white faces looking at him with suspicion. He was dressed well, he reassured himself. Even for uptown, in the middle of the night.

“D’you sign in at security downstairs?” the woman asked, her voice loud at the word “security”, the nurses and other hospital workers milling around the desk pausing to stare at him, none of them asking if he needed any help or if he had come to see a patient here.

Murali kept his voice impeccably polite when he explained to her that he was an after hours visitor. He smiled in a way that showed he was legitimate, not coming to disrupt or to steal from the hospital. Not likely to hold up a knife to anybody’s throat. No assassin who’d come to the harem, with a sword.

The woman nodded and looked away from him but didn’t get up, didn’t help him locate Fehmi’s room or volunteer any information about how he was doing. The best that could be said about her: she was completely indifferent and didn’t get in his way, as he searched, increasingly worried that Fehmi would never wake up, or that he’d die before Murali was able to find him.  

It annoyed Murali that any form of racism could still startle or unsettle him. Hadn’t he seen it? Didn’t he know?

Fehmi knew. Fehmi had been in the US less than a year. A heavy pipe wielded by a group of white teenagers who knew Fehmi was foreign and gay, punishing both. Was it simply because Murali knew he didn’t deserve punishment, that Fehmi deserved beds covered with roses, baths of milk, to be fanned with endless patience, draped in silks, that Murali had rushed to this place without question? Was everything Fehmi had gone through enough reason for Murali to not hide who he was?

Murali finally found the right room and picked up the clipboard next to the bed that someone named “Ludwig Smith MS III Mt. Sinai” had left there, neatly labeled, next to a binder labeled, “Introduction to Clinical Medicine: Autumn Rotation.”

Murali read the words quickly, aware that the experience was not like any other reading. They told a story he realized he needed to know but couldn’t bear. Even if he had known the language these medical notes he held were written in.

     Assault

     Humeral and parietal comminuted fractures, multiple

     Slurs

     Witnesses

     Loss of consciousness

     Subdural hematoma

     Turkish national

     Hate crime report to the hotline

     Neurorehab

In the narrow white hospital bed raised almost too high from the grey linoleum floor: Fehmi with his head bandaged, heart beating steadily to the tune of a monitor overhead, fingers moving, transmitting some plea in an unreadable code. Long body frail looking but warm. Pink-lipped. Marble pale flesh, his soft black chest hair visible.

A man in a cloth cap tied behind his head, wearing scrubs identical to those on any generic hospital TV-show, pushed his way into the room when he saw Murali sitting there. He barely raised an eyebrow. “You’re family, right?”

Fehmi was expected to wake up “very soon,” the doctor told Murali, as if this were indisputable. Surgery had drained what the man matter-of-factly referred to as “brain bleed”, a phrase that made Murali grope around for an empty chair near the bed and sit down. “You can stay here for another two hours or so, until about six in the morning, but make sure you call a nurse right away as soon as he wakes up, and above all don’t move or jostle him.” the doctor – a surgery resident – instructed him, not waiting in the room with Murali to check whether his words were understood. He spoke as if merely saying the words provided care.  Though it was something, Murali supposed, that nobody was saying anything about health insurance, though Murali strongly doubted Fehmi had any to speak of. Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in, he remembered.

Murali knew there was no point, necessarily, in speaking much to this nonchalant doctor. In speaking at all to anyone. But he supposed his body spoke, in its affinity for Fehmi’s body in the bed. Murali didn’t wait for the doctor to leave before taking Fehmi’s hand in his with utmost care, saying nothing, leaning forward in the chair. Waiting for over an hour. 

Dawn came, making Murali aware he must have drifted off. Then Fehmi: waking abruptly, blinking but then smiling when he saw Murali. He was able to reach up, and press his hand against Murali’s, when Murali stroked his shoulder gently. He shook his head no when Murali asked if he had any pain.

That was when Murali realized he had no other desire than for Fehmi to wake up and look at him. Squeeze his hand precisely the way he was doing now. A steady pressure that, yes, did feel erotic. For the first time in a long time, Murali had no need to read or write a single word yet couldn’t shake an intense yearning for story. The story that was starting now.

“You,” Fehmi whispered, and Murali moved his chair closer.