It is just past sundown. He is fast asleep with no desire to wake up until way past sunup. But, his eyes are forced open as he feels something wet slide between his thighs. He groggily takes in a lurid face bent over him; red, reptilian eyes, a slight moustache, clipped, oiled, and a thick shock of hair, middle-parted, combed according to the fashion for youth. In the dim night-light, he can see that the man has the fall of his own kameez underneath his chin, an erect penis jutting out from under, and the man’s knees straddle his yet half-awake form. He can also feel his own nakedness from the waist down, the man having pulled down his night pajamas while he was in deep slumber.
The man sees his opening eyes and says with an obscene leer, “well then, here I am”, while spitting on the fingers of his own left hand, and attempting to rub it between the buttocks of the body underneath. “What the fuck are you doing, you son of a whore? Get away from me,” he retorts in what is at best a loud whisper, while straightening himself from the half-prostrate position the man had placed his sleeping body in. “Shh, shh, you don’t want them to find out, do you? We are friends, aren’t we? You know this is not going to hurt. It never hurts. Please. You have eluded me far too long,” the man says, half-reassuringly, half menacingly, but frozen in place. “Get off me, get off my bed, you filthy motherfucker!” he whispers aggressively again, kicking the man in the stomach with all his might. The man, now resigned, clambers off the bed, ties up his shalwar, the erect penis still sticking out underneath the fabric, and mouths, “you will regret this; you will pay for this; we were supposed to be friends.” As soon as the man is off of him, he jumps up off the bed, pulls up his pajama, and rushes to the bathroom to wash off the man’s saliva.
Upon returning from his frenetic self-purification, which never worked, because he only ever felt dirty, he sees the man perched on the first-floor sill, trying to figure out how to climb down to the ground. “Why don’t you go through the door and down the stairs, you fucking bastard?” he mocks, mustering all of his unseasoned sarcasm. The man only scowls back. In that moment, epiphany strikes. All he needs to do is to push the man sitting on his haunches at the sill, and he could be rid of him forever. He is tempted to dash towards the man, hurling him headlong two floors down. ‘But no. They might find out. They should never find out. I will never be able to explain myself.’ The man finds a foothold against a drainage pipe, and in a split-second, is gone.
He lies back down on his bed, more angry than scared or hurt. There are tears in his eyes, nonetheless, although, he doesn’t wail or sob. “Please help me, god” is the last thing he thinks before drifting off again, not waking up until long past sunup.
