Give Me Sweet(ness)
“Hello Jia,” he says to me, “Hello Jia, will you please give me sweet?” Rustom says this over and over again, till I have no option but to respond.
“No, Rustom, no more sweet.”
“Please say yes, no Jia? Please say yes to sweet.”
I concede, handing him a stick of gum from my pocket. “No,” he insists, “sweet.”
“Ok, Rustom. Here’s your sweet,” I say, taking out the emergency stash of cigarette mints from my bag. Rustom makes to grab the sweet from my palm, but I pull away, asking him to take it gently. I unfold my fingers, revealing the green plastic-swathed jewel and he puts his hand on mine, his eyes fixed not on the grand prize like usual, but rather on my eyes. There’s a slight smile on his lips, and as I realize his hand is still on mine, and he realizes I’ve noticed this, he giggles spasmodically. His body quivers with fits of naughty glee, a quiver very similar to one he shouldn’t know about, but it seems to be a familiar pleasure. As innocent as he is, I’m sure he knows there’s a perversion in this lingering act…a perversion not I, nor anyone else, suspects of him. I get a little scared by his stiff muscled twenty-two-year-old body towering over me and I pull my hand away.
“Hello Jia, no more sweet?”
“No,” I say, embarrassed. “No more sweet.”
***
I remember when we were little and played in Dalhousie, where we met every summer. We were let loose on the sprawling hillsides and played catch-and-catch with each other, while our parents hid in the shade, sipping Blood Marys and secretly smoking the local blend of ganja. Rustom was sent with us but never joined in. He didn’t speak much either, just stared vacantly at the daisies that grew wild. I would take his hand and pull him into the group, but he stayed put, digging his heels into the ground. I would get annoyed and run off to my brother and our summer siblings, and he would continue to stare, confused at my anger, unable to articulate whatever it was that made him hesitant to join our afternoon divertissements. I used to feel bad, but after a while I’d forget he was even there.
One day I asked my mother why he was so weird.
“What do you mean, weird?” she asked.
“He doesn’t speak to me, he doesn’t play with us, he just stares. He’s weird,” I concluded my diagnosis.
“He’s special, Jia.”
“How is he special?” I asked. She took her time to answer, figuring out how to explain why he was the way he was, such that it would be comprehensible to a six-year-old.
“He’s in two places at once,” she started. “His body may be here now, with you in Dalhousie, but his mind is back when he was younger.” She seemed satisfied with her explanation. It didn’t make much sense to me, but I reconciled myself to the idea that maybe we could be in two places at once.
“I want to be special too!” I decided. My mother laughed.
“You are special, Jia. We’re all special.”
My mother’s explanation for Rustom’s condition should have sated my questions. Instead it whetted my curiosity for him. I’d sit with him and look at the things he’d look at, even when they were nothing. I’d take his hand in mine and try to play clapping games, but he’d pull away, or play them wrong on the rare occasion he indulged my persistence. His head always slanted as though one side of his neck was shorter than the other, his light Kashmiri eyes distant, his mind on a trek down some narrow path my limbs couldn’t maneuver. I was jealous of his ability to mentally transport himself to somewhere I didn’t have access to, and I often wondered why no one else appreciated this strange power. It was them, not Rustom, who were lacking.
My fascination for Rustom began to fade as I grew older and realized that he wasn’t as “special” as my mother made him out to be. Rustom was different, and we had no place for different in our severely stratified teenage world. At parties he would hover over the adults’ table looking for some kind of attention, while the rest of us teenagers sat away from the adults and the under-ten-year olds, sneaking beer into our Cokes and using “fuck” like it was the currency for coolness.
One Dalhousie dinner party, we sat at our table in the TV room and began to play a game of Monopoly. Our parents were sitting outside around a bonfire, listening to Dylan and Joan Baez—music that we violently objected to because it lacked the requisite heavy beat and profanity.
“Hello Jia…” Rustom came up to the table and poked my shoulder.
“What, Rustom?” I replied, pained.
“Hello Jia, will you please give me sweet?”
“Here, Rustom.”
I handed him a rolled up piece of paper napkin. He looked at it, realized it didn’t have a sweet and said, “Jia, sweet. I want sweet.”
I ignored him and the others laughed. My brother, the eldest and therefore our leader looked at me and said tauntingly,
“Come on Jia, give your boyfriend a sweet.”
The others burst into howls of laughter, and Rustom looked at me with a confused expression, not understanding why I didn’t give him a sweet like I normally did, and partly laughing along with the others because he thought he’d been the source of this great amusement.
“Go find your mother, Rustom,” I said quietly, furious with my brother for mortifying me, but more so with Rustom for coming up to me and publicly demanding the bounty of sugar I provided him with when no one else was around. I was terrified he would expose my clandestine acts of sympathy. As I saw him bounce back across the room in search of his mother, I tried hard to suppress a smile. It was really sweet. He never used his heels, and so his walk resembled a sort of clumsy rhythmic ballet.
* * *
I was seventeen the year my brother left for college. My parents and I drove up to Dalhousie at the end of the summer to catch one last week of rest and relaxation before I went back to school. Being the only one of the “kids” who was allowed to drink, I would end up spending evenings with the adults, while the rest of the people my age sat inside and played cards or watched TV. They ignored Rustom, so he would be out with the adults, hanging around the bar waiting to dupe yet another person into pouring him his fourth or fifth glass of Coke.
One night, I leaned against the bar, waiting for my parents to get drunk enough so they wouldn’t notice me sneak off for a cigarette. When the singing started around the bonfire, I figured I was safe and walked off behind the house to my spot. Just as I was about to light up, I heard Rustom calling out to me. I stuffed the cigarette back inside its pack and into my pocket, and he jogged up to me, panting, the thin cold air making him breathless.
“Hello Jia, can I have Coke?”
“I don’t have any, Rustom.”
“No, Jia. Coke.”
“Sorry, Rustom. I don’t have any Coke.”
“Sweet,” he demanded, sticking out his palm.
“No sweet, Rustom. Go find your mother.”
“Hello Jia, give me sweet.”
I put my hand into the back pocket of my jeans and found a breath mint. I held it out in my palm, and as usual, Rustom tried to snatch it from me. I pulled back my hand, reminding him to take it gently, and once he nodded, I extended my palm again. He approached my hand, his fingers slowly sliding over mine towards the mint. As he reached it, I saw that he was smiling again, enjoying the tingling sensation at the ends of his fingers that I felt at the ends of mine. I pushed my fingers through the gaps in-between his. The mint fell on to the cracked cement drain below our feet, the hard translucent green specked with wet flicks of brown grass and dirt. I pulled him closer to me, guiding his hand to the top of my forehead. He moved it down my face, touching my eyebrows, my lashes, my nose, my lips, the cleft in my chin. I leaned my head back as his fingers softly grazed my neck and found the warm gap between my breasts. He began giggling wildly, and I snapped out of my momentary frenzy, realizing suddenly what I’d just done. I pushed him away and ran back to the party, and he came following behind me, saying
“Jia, give me sweet. Where’s my sweet?”
“No sweet, Rustom.”
“Please say yes, no Jia? Please say yes to sweet.”
“No more sweet.” I snapped back at him, pulling out my pockets to show him. They were empty
