Blood Sugar

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION

The delivery boy smelled of O positive and diesel, and Arjun could tell, without opening the door, that the boy was lying about having change for a thousand.

Arjun stood in the darkened hallway of 3B, his bare feet spreading on the cool tile, his lungs working like bellows against the weight of his own chest. Through the wood, he could taste the boy’s blood—bright, adolescent, thin. He could taste the boy’s fear too, a metallic edge that had nothing to do with hemoglobin. Someone had warned him about the man in 3B. The shut-in. The monster who hadn’t left his flat in three years.

The boy knocked again. Three raps, impatient.

Arjun had ordered the same dinner every night for eight months. Two pieces of ilish, rice, dal, a slice of lemon. He wanted to eat it in front of his computer while a streamer in Mumbai opened Pokémon cards. He wanted the fish to be moist, the rice separate, the dal sharp with mustard oil. He wanted one evening without shame. He wanted to be invisible. He wanted to be a normal man having a normal dinner, instead of a hundred and forty-six kilograms of loneliness that delivery boys ran from.

He opened the door a crack. The chain bit into the jamb.

The boy saw one eye, one slab of cheek, the darkness behind. He thrust the bag forward. Arjun pushed the thousand-rupee note out. The boy took it, dropped the bag, and ran. He didn’t bring change. He didn’t bring the food he’d been told to bring. He brought fear instead, and Arjun could taste it lingering in the hallway like cheap incense.

Arjun pulled the food inside. The bag’s wire handle had snagged something. A single drop of blood on the threshold, bright as a bindi.

The boy had cut his finger on the staple.

Arjun stared at it. He should wipe it. He should feel disgust. He should call the building supervisor and complain about the delivery service. Instead, he knelt, slowly, his knees cracking like gunshots in the empty flat, and touched his tongue to the drop.

The taste was nuclear. Not just blood. The boy’s whole afternoon rushed into his mouth: the argument with his girlfriend about money, the fever he didn’t know he was incubating, the debt to his cousin, the specific shame of delivering food to ghosts. Arjun swallowed. His eyes watered. He had not known another person’s interior in three years, and now he knew this boy completely, down to the platelets, down to the lie about the change.

He sat on the floor and ate his fish. It was dry. The rice had clumped. He chewed without tasting it, because his mouth was still full of the delivery boy.

Through the wall to his left, he could taste his mother. Mitali was seventy-two, bird-boned, fierce. Her blood pressure was high tonight. She had used too much salt in her own dinner. She was worried about the rent, which tasted in her blood like copper wire. He could taste her disappointment too, a flat, papery note that had been there since his father’s funeral three years ago, when Arjun had stepped inside and never stepped out. He could taste her love, which she never spoke, and which tasted like overripe banana, sweet and slightly alcoholic.

He remembered his father’s body at the funeral, how it had looked small under the white cloth, how the mourners had sung and wept, and how Arjun had stood in the corner, unable to look, unable to touch, unable to bear the weight of their eyes on his body. He had eaten six samosas in the funeral hall, in front of everyone, because eating was the only shield he had. Then he had gone home and stopped leaving.

This had started three weeks ago. A fever of forty degrees. Two days of delirium where the walls had breathed and the ceiling had pulsed. When he woke, his tongue was new. He could taste the neighbor’s tuberculosis two doors down—sweet, rotting fruit. The old woman’s dementia on the first floor—milk left in the sun. The pregnant girl above him—hormones bright as lemons, a whole orchard of them.

He had not told his mother. He had not told anyone. He had simply stopped sleeping, because sleep meant letting go of the tastes, and he was starving for them. He sat in his chair, which groaned under him, and watched the streamer open cards, and tasted the building instead.

At midnight, she brought his laundry. She didn’t look at him. She hadn’t looked directly at him since he was nineteen, since he had stopped going to college, since he had grown too large for the doorframes she measured in her mind.

“Eat,” she said. She put a plate down. Fish curry. But he could taste what she had added. A tablespoon of her own blood, stirred in while it simmered. He could taste her intent—fear, love, resignation, a ritual older than his understanding. She had been doing this for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe since the fever.

“Why?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. She left.

He didn’t eat the curry. He sat in the dark and tasted the building. Twenty-three people. Their dreams had different flavors than their waking blood. The man upstairs was having an affair; his blood at 2 AM tasted of guilt and adrenaline, a chemical brightness like petrol on pavement. The child two doors down had leukemia; the blood was wrong, copper and overripe mango. The pregnant girl’s fetus tasted of salt and potential, a new flavor that made Arjun’s teeth ache. The building supervisor, who lived in the basement, tasted of whiskey and kidney stones, a brown, gravelly flavor that made Arjun thirsty. The old woman on the first floor, who had forgotten her own name, tasted of violets and rust, a flavor from before the war, before the partition, before Calcutta.

Arjun was hungry. Not for food. For the affair. For the leukemia. For the salt. For the violets.

He had not spoken to another human being in three years, except his mother and delivery boys. But now he knew them all, intimately, biologically. He knew their organs better than they did. He knew the affair before the wife did. He knew the leukemia before the doctor’s appointment. He knew the fetus was a girl before the mother. He knew the old woman had killed a man in 1947 and buried the memory so deep only her blood remembered.

At 3 AM, he stood. He opened his door. The hallway was dark, lit by a single bulb that had been flickering since the monsoon. He hadn’t walked this hallway in three years. The paint was the same institutional green, the color of hospitals and government offices. He could taste the man who had died in 2B last year—his blood still lingered in the plaster, faint, sweet, peaceful, like lilies left too long in a vase. He could taste his own fear, which tasted like cold aluminum.

He climbed to the roof. The door was unlocked. The Calcutta heat at 3 AM was still thirty-five degrees, a wet blanket that smelled of the Hooghly and diesel exhaust and the jasmine his mother grew in rusted cans. The city spread out before him, Shyambazar’s tram lines silver in the dark, the Ambassador taxis sleeping under torn tarps, lakhs of people stacked in concrete like bricks in a kiln. He could taste the river, brown and holy, full of ashes and soap.

He opened his mouth.

He tasted thousands.

It should have overwhelmed him. It should have driven him to the edge. His father had stood on this roof, his mother had told him once, years ago, and had looked down at the street and wept. Arjun understood now. His father had tasted the whole city, and it had been too much noise, too many heartbeats, too much blood, too much life for one man to hold. His father had jumped not because he was sad, but because he was full.

But something else happened.

Arjun was not alone. He was inside ten thousand bodies. He was the fishmonger’s gout, a sharp cheddar ache in the big toe. He was the student’s Adderall, a chemical blue that tasted like electricity. He was the priest’s diabetes, a syrupy thickness that coated his tongue. He was the beggar’s starvation, which had no taste at all, only a cold wind where flavor should be. He was the prostitute’s morning-after pill, a chalky regret. He was the city, and the city was him, and for the first time in three years, he was not lonely.

He heard the roof door creak. His mother. She was holding a kitchen knife.

He thought: she is going to kill me.

But she cut her own palm. She held it out. The blood ran down her wrist, black in the sodium light from the street.

“Your grandfather had it,” she said. “Your father too. I thought it skipped you.”

He stared at her. The knife glinted.

“Drink,” she said. “Before you go to the street. You need to learn the taste of family first. Strangers will make you sick.”

He didn’t want to. But his mouth was open. He took her palm. He licked. The blood was hot, thin, ancient. It tasted of her whole life: the village in Khulna, the train to Calcutta in ‘71, his father’s hands, the miscarriage before him, the shame of his body, the love she could not show, the rent receipts she kept in a tin box. He wept. The blood mixed with his tears and ran down his chin.

She pulled her hand back. She wrapped it in the hem of her sari.

“Now,” she said. “Go down.”

He shook his head.

“You’ve tasted me,” she said. “Now you have to taste the world. Or it will taste you first.”

She pushed him toward the stairs.

He walked down. The building was waking. The old woman with dementia saw him in the hallway and smiled—she recognized something in his blood, something familiar, a flavor from before she forgot her own name. The pregnant girl touched her belly and looked at him, frightened. She could feel him tasting her. He could taste her fear, bright and sharp as green chili. The man having the affair stepped out of his door, saw Arjun, and stepped back in, ashamed, because Arjun tasted like truth.

He stepped into the street.

Shyambazar at 4 AM was already moving. The tram clanged its bell. A hawker sharpened knives against a wheel, sending sparks into the dark. The heat was a wall you could lean against. A dog barked. A man coughed blackness from his lungs. A woman threw wastewater into the gutter.

He could taste everyone. But now, something else. They could taste him too.

He was one hundred and forty-six kilograms of blood and sweat and loneliness. He was a feast. He was a beacon. The shut-in of 3B, the ghost, the monster, was suddenly the most delicious thing on the street. People turned. They didn’t know why. They just wanted to be near him. To know him. To taste him back. A cycle rickshaw wallah stopped pedaling. A woman in a nightie stepped out of a doorway. A policeman lowered his lathi. A student with exam bags stared, tasting Arjun’s solitude, which was richer than any coffee.

He stood in the middle of the road. A crowd gathered. Not touching. Just standing close. Breathing. Tasting. Consuming him with their nostrils, their pores, their open mouths. He could feel their tongues on his arteries, their noses in his veins. He was being eaten by a hundred invisible mouths.

He raised his hand. The crowd flinched. He pointed to a tea stall. “I want a chai,” he said. His voice was rust. “With milk. And three spoons of sugar.”

The tea stall owner nodded, trembling, honored. The crowd parted. Arjun sat on a plastic stool. It groaned under him, then cracked. He fell. The crowd gasped. Someone helped him up. Their hands touched. The taste was nuclear. A complete exchange. Arjun tasted the man’s childhood malaria, the quinine bitterness still lodged in his liver. The man tasted Arjun’s three years of silence, a flavor like dust and closed windows.

They stared at each other. The man didn’t let go.

The chai came in a clay cup. Arjun drank it. It tasted of the milkman’s tuberculosis and the sugar vendor’s joy and the clay’s river-mud and the boy’s blood still faint on his tongue. He finished it. He stood. The crowd waited. They wanted him to stay. They wanted to taste him more. They were hungry for his loneliness, which was the only thing he had in abundance.

He walked back to his building. The crowd followed, but didn’t enter. They knew the building now. They knew him. They would wait. They would always wait.

He went back to 3B. His mother was waiting with the knife. She cut her palm again. “Welcome home,” she said.

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

He opened the window. The whole city breathed in. He breathed out.

He sat in his chair. The fan was still broken. But he didn’t need it. The city was his fan, a thousand lungs breathing him in and out. His mother stood in the doorway, her palm wrapped in cotton, watching him. She did not speak. She did not need to. He could taste her pride, which was new, and her grief, which was old, and her hunger, which was endless. She had fed him her blood. Now he fed the city. This was the family business. This was the inheritance.

He opened his mouth. He did not speak. He only tasted.

And three floors down, the tea stall owner looked up from his cups, licked his lips, and waited. The sun was rising. The trams were starting. The city was awake. And it was hungry.