Triangle of Light
I am going to be very surprised if you know where this story is going...
Air coolers are such a north Indian thing. I had never seen them anywhere else; they were definitely not something I had come across in all the different parts of the country I had lived in till then. Maybe that’s why it never even occurred to me that I should get one when I moved into the new house in Delhi. My new flatmate, Daniel, who had lived in the city longer, hired one almost immediately.
Arjun and Daniel were friends and classmates of my colleague Meenu from IIMC, the journalism school in south Delhi. I had told her about my crummy flat at Katwaria Sarai, a rather slum-like colony behind IIT Delhi, and Meenu had immediately mentioned her friends who were looking for someone to share a three-bed flat. While a lot of my friends from university had moved to Delhi, I was the only one in the group who was working and could afford anything other than student accommodation. I didn’t ask too many questions before Meenu put me in touch with the two of them.
“They are really nice,” she said. And I believed her. I think I was at that age of “trust first, verify as you go.”
The house they had found was on the top floor of a three-storey building in the southern half of Lajpat Nagar. Except for cupboards, fans and a furnished kitchen, the house didn’t have much. There was a bedroom right next to the entrance which was followed by the kitchen, the bathroom and another room which would have been used as a living room if a family was renting the place. And at the end was another bedroom which opened into a large terrace.
The room next to the terrace was the one all of us were eyeing, so we drew lots to see who got which room. Daniel got the first bedroom while I got the other one. Daniel wasn’t too unhappy about this – he was the only one with a local girlfriend and had the room which was cut off from the rest of the house - it was the most private room in the house.
I assumed Arjun was single till he casually mentioned his girlfriend would be in town the following weekend. The two of us were in the kitchen where I was attempting to make some tea and cereal for breakfast.
“Hurricane Gloria!” Daniel piped up loudly from the next room, overhearing our conversation. The walls were thin.
Turns out, Arjun had been seeing Gloria for more than three years, starting at university. Daniel and Arjun had both studied in Madras which was why Meenu had thought they would get along with me, as fellow south Indians!
There was something in Daniel’s tone which indicated he didn’t really like Gloria. Isabelle – Daniel’s girlfriend whom we called Isa – walked into the kitchen and added her two cents. “She is lovely. You will love her,” with the same cheeky tone that I had detected in Daniel. I didn’t know she was staying over.
“Right!” I responded in the same voice.
Arjun was an intelligent fellow who would not have missed the nuance in that exchange. He didn’t volunteer anything further though. He did say that he was going to get a cooler for his room too.
“Ya man! The finer things in life for Gloria!” Daniel had one last shot before Isa and he retreated to their room.
The new cooler was hired and placed in Arjun’s room the day before Gloria flew up from Madras, where she worked with a PR agency. The cooler in Daniel’s room was loud but at that distance, it settled into a loud buzz and I hardly noticed it after a while. Arjun’s cooler, though, was in the next room and I did wonder if I could sleep through that ruckus.
Gloria walked in the following Saturday afternoon when it was running and took an instant dislike to the contraption. “Turn that off! I can barely hear myself think,” I heard her shout in the next room. The cooler was immediately switched off before she started telling Arjun about her flight, her cab from the airport, the heat, her colleague who was a jerk…
It wasn’t all that difficult to see why Daniel had appended “Hurricane” to her name. She was a force of nature and I could imagine Arjun doing everything he could to just hang on. There was a knock on my door. Arjun was giving Gloria a tour of the house.
“Hi Amit! I have heard so much about you!”
I had barely responded before she pushed through to the terrace.
Arjun followed her, and I went back to my book. I could hear Gloria complaining about the sorry state of the terrace. I had my friends over the previous night. They are a mostly rowdy bunch bunch, 11 of my batchmates from college who had joined various schools in Delhi for their masters. As the only person with my own place, my terrace was the common meeting ground for everyone. I don’t think I had cleared out all the empty bottles and cigarette butts from the previous night which is what Gloria must have found. I stayed put; I could sense that Gloria was someone who would take some getting used to.
When they came back in, I apologized for the state of the terrace and said I will clean it up. I had been too hungover all morning to think about that, I added. Gloria gave me a big smile and waved my apology away. Arjun added they were heading out to the market and dinner afterwards.
I was still reading my book when they returned. Arjun poked his head in through the open door to say good night and added that he will be shutting the door. I heard a switch being flicked and the cooler putt-putted to life, slowly rumbling its way into a proper roar that drowned out pretty much any other noise.
That lasted about five minutes before it was switched off.
It took me a while to get used to the silence, but I could soon hear the two muttering in the other room. Gloria was upset that Arjun had been so thoughtless in getting the noisy cooler. Arjun was softly agreeing with the lack of foresight on his part and said he will move the cooler to the terrace the next day. Gloria was having none of it and wanted it gone that very moment.
There was some shuffling around followed by a knock on my door. Arjun opened the door and looked in. “Hey…so…the cooler is a bit too noisy. I am going to move it to the terrace. Sorry.”
I said “sure”, and Arjun opened the door to the terrace and wheeled the cooler out. He didn’t look at me on the way back and closed the door behind him. The house was silent again.
I was getting nowhere with the book, having stopped to listen to the lovers’ tiff next door. it was one of the Harry Potter books, one I had read a couple of times already. I didn’t have a TV and the only other distraction I had was the CD player. Somehow, I didn’t think playing music was a good idea after Gloria’s noise complaint.
With nothing else to do, I decided to turn in and switched off the light.
I couldn’t sleep though. It was way too early. My work hours at the newspaper were different each week – noon to 8 PM one week and 2 PM to 10 PM the next. With the latter though, we usually ended up staying past midnight, especially when there was a developing story that had to be included in the later editions.
Rather than trying to sleep at different times each week, I just started sleeping at 2 or thereabouts every week. I had slept much later, though, the previous night. My body felt tired but my mind hadn’t accepted this yet but it was close to getting there. That’s when I heard it.
I wasn’t sure what it was in the beginning. It sounded like a moan. A very soft moan. Gloria was moaning. Gloria was in the middle of a particularly long moan when she suddenly stopped. I heard her whisper, “do you think he is asleep yet?”
I was wide awake.
“His light is off. I think so,” Arjun clearly wanted to get back to whatever he was doing.
The moaning resumed. Before long, it was accompanied by some new sounds.
It was exciting, sort of. I don’t think I had heard anyone having sex before. Everything I knew about sex came from Harold Robbins novels and porn video cassettes.
Excitement made way for amusement. Amusement gave way to indifference. Indifference to sadness. There had been plenty of times when I had felt lonely. For the first time, I felt a very specific loneliness, from that realization of the empty spaces in my life. Maybe that is what Adam felt when he ate the apple for the first time.
I didn’t want to be there anymore. As quietly as possible, I rolled up my mattress, bedsheet, pillow and blanket inside, and carried it out to the terrace and unrolled it on the far side where the noises from the street below overpowered everything else.
Maybe for that one night, despite the light polluting the sky, it looked like every star was out there, like someone out there knew I could do with a distraction. With both palms under my head, I soaked it all in.
I wouldn’t say it came out of nowhere.
As much as I would have liked nothing but the sky in my field of vision, there was the top floor of my own building to my left, with the large PVC water tank above it as well as the two satellite TV antennae for the two houses below us. I could see something similar for the house next door. We shared a wall with the three houses on the other side and someone had decided that wall should be 12 feet tall.
The triangle of light emerged slowly from behind the water tank, on my left. It was bright but not in a way that lit up the entire neighbourhood. It wasn’t that it had a lot of light bulbs on its hull. No, it’s body was the light, like a firefly, a soft light-emitting object that slowly made its way through the air without a sound. It couldn’t have been more than 200m above us but I couldn’t hear a thing, not even a hum.
It wasn’t fast. It was taking its time, slowly gliding over one of the biggest cities in the world, like it had nowhere else to be, without a care about who could see it. As it passed over me, I couldn’t see flames, an exhaust, a contrail, nothing anywhere which indicated what was propelling this craft forward or keeping it up.
It had glided quietly to the other edge of my vision and I had to sit up and peer over the parapet to see the craft. It didn’t change course, flew in a straight line, due east, till it became just another speck of light, indistinguishable from the stars in the night sky.
I stared behind it for a long time, hoping it would come back, that I would get some indication of what I had just witnessed but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. When I lay down on the mattress again, my heart was light again.
I didn’t need an explanation. I had an explanation. A UFO was explanation enough. And I was happy I had seen one. Nobody would believe me, of course, even if I made the distinction between UFOs and aliens. This was my secret. Mine and every other lonely soul in Delhi who happened to be on their terrace, looking up at the stars, wondering why they were alone and realizing…we are not alone.