The autopsy report confirmed Josh had died in his room on Christmas, all alone, of natural causes, and never having left his last breath.
No, he held that one. A little too long. And, in the end, he decided to hide it for someone special in a place where it’d keep glowing, even in his afterlife. An afterlife where the camera shutters wouldn’t click him out of privacy, where the press wouldn’t sharpen their pens every day to make him bleed on their papers.
I, Armando, loved that man and wanted to save him from himself. But death picked me up twenty-three years before it took him.
Armando, imagine me taking your hand and asking you to a dance. We whirl and pirouette. Later, exhausted and with drinks in our hands, we sit at the bar counter. I ask you—how many times do you think we were at centre stage? And at which points of our dance were our feet tapping on that exact centre where the spotlight burns brightest? You’ll most likely spill your drink at the absurdity of that question.
I’ve been on the centre stage long enough to know the seasons make it grow and shrink. Sometimes, the centre stage encompasses an entire country and beyond, and at other times, it crumples into the thin red line of the contract you signed with a record company.
Remember I took them to court? The record company. And lost the case too. Miserably.
But you tell me, Armando, what was I supposed to do? I’d become their private whore. They’d stripped me of my choices. Wanted me to speak for my songs, rather than letting my songs speak for themselves. Wanted my face, not my voice. Wanted me to make money rather than peace with myself. Peace with your loss. Peace with that private corner of my mind and the darkness of music that was my only light.
Will you visit me in that dark? Dance with me once again? Maybe, with you beside me, I’ll once again get to write songs instead of manufacturing them.
On his last Christmas E ve, Josh thought about the woman named Lana. I hope Jesus’s been kind to you, he thought, and smiled at you like a child. In a way, he reminded me, too, of Lana, a woman I had never known in my lifetime. To be fair, neither had Josh, except for that one time eight years ago. He never told me if he believed in miracles. He believed in us, that much he stood by even up to the last day of my life. So, maybe he believed in Lana too. Maybe he really, really wanted to hear from her again.
The last thing Josh remembered watching was fire—a procession of flames outside his window, dancing down the street. I, too, stared out the window from the shadows of his room. The villagers at Goring-on-Thames with torchlight in their hands passed his house, singing noels, like they did every Christmas Eve.
He waved at them. They waved back. And his entire past waved too. His mum and dad, his sisters, friends, tens of lovers, thousands of critics, millions of fans, and one Christmas decades ago—the most frightening one.
That Christmas, he knew a worm named AIDS was eating through me. And he didn’t know if it’d nestled inside him, too. He toasted with his family, opened gifts, celebrating life and good times, not knowing if he was living in a mirage, a sandcastle, or a fading dream.
Twenty-three years later, he knew for sure that’s exactly where he was living; that was precisely what his life had turned into. Only it no longer frightened him like it had once . I wish it did . But he was older. Like rust eats iron, his patience had gnawed at his fears, unveiling an untraversable indifference. And a memory that, despite never covering anything beyond the few months fate had allowed us to be together, contaminated every solitary moment of his life thereafter.
He wanted to let go of that memory. Shake it off his being. He tried. And forever tried.
That small, insignificant meeting with Lana a few years ago helped him, in a way. He wanted to live his own unspoken dream through her.
Armando, imagine a visage. Just another man, wearing a smile on his face, an invitation in his eyes. And then, that face ripples as if a reflection in the water is disturbed by a memory gliding into it. That face ripples like an unbuttoned shirt fluttering off your body in the salty breeze from the sea. That face ripples and turns into yours, and that smile into the one you gave me while I was performing in Rio. How could I forget seeing you for the first time in the audience that day and trying my best to stay away from that corner of the stage, getting so fucking distracted by that smile on your face?
I gave in to that face again. To the stranger that had turned into you. I followed him right into the public bathroom where the walls receded and faded until it opened up to the beaches of Brazil, where we spent time basking in our little secret. I gave in to the man’s skin that suddenly exuded that distinct aroma of Corsage Orchid that accompanied you.
In a way, Armando, my first love accompanied my first arrest. I came out in handcuffs. I came out of the bathroom. I came out of who I wasn’t.
It wasn’t planned. It never was. I won’t lie to you. But in a time when love is not enough, perhaps this is the best we can do. Maybe, this was the best gift among all the others you left in your absence.
And since that day, I knew you were luckier than most of us. I realised our definitions of love are only as skin deep as our definitions of skin itself. When the red rashes appeared on your skin, those would’ve redone people’s definition of you.
“You’ve been careless,” they’d have whispered into your ears. “God can’t turn a blind eye to such acts, Armando. You’re a freak.”
They called me that, pretty regularly, since the arrest. Overnight, I turned from a heartthrob to a freak. “Caught in the middle of a lewd act in a public toilet,” the media reported. You should’ve seen the headlines they came up with. I thought they were more creative in their insults than I could be curative in my songs. Fucking geniuses who could’ve changed the world if they’d focussed on the real issues that needed them. At least they never got to redefine who you were , who you’d forever be.
Your mother always remembered that, you know. “Never give up on God,” she told me every time we met to take you flowers. “Love has touched you.”
No, I never gave up on God. Nor on your mother. Only couldn’t save my mum.
Cancer is such a bitch. Always on a dog race with HIV.
There was no point in hurrying. I waited beside Lana’s bed the entire night. While she slept, I caressed her forehead. There’s much of him still living in you, I told her. You don’t know that, do you?
She smiled in her sleep.
Before dawn’s first light broke, I returned to Goring-on-Thames, promising the dozing Lana that I’d be back soon. Outside Josh’s home, I gently nudged awake Badi, the last of Josh’s substitute lovers, in his car. Nudged him awake from a night of disturbed sleep. Of course, Badi didn’t realise it was me who woke him right at dawn. For him, disturbed sleep was nothing new, nor was waking out of those abruptly. The rough patches in his relationship with Josh were, at best, peppered with moments of genuine warmth and understanding. Last night’s argument was just another instance of the same. At times, Badi felt as if Josh was deliberately shutting him out and himself in.
I wish Badi had realised in time that it wasn’t him that Josh was pushing away, but his very own existence. That it was not him that Josh had started to detest but his own self. In his inebriated state, Josh always whispered, I’m happy. If Badi had indeed learnt to see things, he’d have known that the closed-door between them was the bridge that held their relationship together. If he tried too hard to force that door open, he would’ve burned down that bridge, too.
Yet, on that fateful Christmas morning, that is exactly what I needed Badi to do. Break that door open only to discover that the bridge had spontaneously caught fire and burnt itself down. It was as if Josh had borrowed a splinter of fire from the torchlight procession under his window the previous evening, to burn the only invisible bridge that led to him: his breath.
For the next hour or so, even as Josh lay in an unending slumber, Badi looked all over the place, searching for the last breath that Josh, in an act of mischief, to teach him a lesson, must have hidden somewhere in his bedroom. But neither Badi nor the doctor who issued his death certificate could ever locate that last breath that Josh never left.
Yet, it was glowing where it was always meant to.
How could you find it if you’ve been blind all your life and never realised that you were?
Armando, imagine a brightly lit apartment filled with useless luxuries—even a private swimming pool—and no way out. If you turn the lights off, the entire world goes blind. If you don’t, the unbearable brightness burns your eyes and sears your soul. A tough choice? Not quite. All you need is a blindfold—a really thick one—and bingo, the reality turns pitch black.
I plunged into the pool of drugs for that blindfold. And I found it at the very bottom, waiting for me. Happily, I put it on. Such a sound plan, except I never accounted for the fact I needed to swim to the surface with my blindfold on.
Suddenly, I was blocking traffic and plowing my car into storefronts. Apparently, I managed to kill no one but my own innocence. I may as well have bought myself an exclusive cell in the prison I visited more religiously than Sunday Mass. And I was doing community service that did no one any good. Once again, genuine creativity was resurrected on the news. Yes, I contributed that much. News that was sold off as drugs down the street corners, just as harmful if not more than crack, but no one cared.
But what do you do if the media has forgotten their real job? What do you do if they’ve forgotten to tell you the other side of the real stories?
I picked up the newsboy cap they’d tossed away on the pavement and did the only thing I could: wrote songs. But no, I couldn’t help those songs from sinking in the oil wells in the distant land they sprung from, couldn’t keep them from getting stained in the blood of the poor when the rich invaded their country with another one of their dirty excuses to rob the natives of their worth, couldn’t even help pull the pieces of tied cloth s off of the eyes of the willfully blindfolded back home.
Instead, the media cut me with news stories, hacked me to pieces with paper. I guess you were right about paper being sharper than knives that way. I didn’t see it then. And I still wish I could unsee it now, unremember their criticisms of me for speaking out, undo the hurt of being called an ungrateful bastard for dropping flak on the very people who made me, on the very nations where my songs had always topped the charts.
“You make a whole lot more sense when writing songs of love. Leave politics to the wise,” they said.
But tell me, Armando, how can you love with so much to hate? How do you tell them who you are when you aren’t even allowed to introduce yourself without money sticking out of your pockets? I’ve always wished to empty my pockets , just not in front of them. The only thing I could empty in front of them, the only thing worthwhile, the only thing I still had traces of, was my soul.
The story of his soul goes back in time—a time before we met. A boy band sensation, deciding to go solo, found himself drenched in soul. Soul music. It poured deep into his heart, made it bleed out songs—songs that fetched him a few awards. That’s when all hell broke loose. “A white man has no business here,” they said.
Josh told me later with a tear in his eye, recounting those days, “Sometimes, your soul isn’t yours. Sometimes, you’re busy paying tribute to the people you revere with your songs, and when you look up you realise you’ve ended up dancing with your enemies.”
There comes a time in every artist’s life when your critics glow brighter than your audience. All you see on the collar of your shirts is the smear. Your room paints itself the apt shade of cruelty. And your piano sounds like incessant cussing.
The last Christmas of Josh’s life was no different. He found himself tracing his footsteps back to me, growing younger, falling in love for the first time all over again. That night, lying in the dark, he could not let go of the words he’d penned decades ago—A kiss and a smile is all that heaven’ll ever be.
And then, at that precise, indivisible moment, holding his last breath back, he knew, without a doubt, he was through.
Armando, imagine a merry-go-round. You’ve been sitting on it for years. At times people get up on the wooden horse beside you to keep you company , then, they get down and return to their own definitions of the future. But you’re stuck on your horse , your ass glued to it. You sit and watch the world spin around you.
One day, you realise that although the merry-go-round is stuck in space, it travels in time. After every circle, the world around you changes, and effectively, it never takes you back to the same scene.
And now, there’s a crowd. They’ve come to watch the man stuck on the merry-go-round , to cheer for you, ready to pay if you promise to keep your ass stuck on the wooden horse. Forever. And fucking forever!
Would you let the money they throw at you define who you are, when all you wish to do is retreat to your room and spend time with the people who’ve stuck with you all your life, the ones you’ve lost along the way, and yourself? And not on some wooden toy?
Every banknote that was pushed into my hand made me hate myself a little more. Every time they thought putting my face onto a sheet of the printed page, a moving image on the TV, could make money, I wished my face was transparent, that it reflected no light at all, sucked it all up, and emit a glow of infinite darkness. And every time they mentioned “promotion”, I couldn’t help but hear “prostitution.”
I knew I had to jump off the merry-go-round, somehow, somewhere, even though that wheel never stops spinning. Not for a second.
I had to say goodbye. But only to the ruthless crowd. I’ll return to you, Armando. You know that.
After making sure Badi had discovered Josh’s body in his apartment, I went back to Lana. No, she, too, had never known Josh in his lifetime, nor was she an ardent fan. But she had the exact positive aura glowing around her that I needed to experience right then.
There was none of that positive aura when I heard Josh mumble her name for the first time, eight years ago, sitting in front of a TV set.
Lana and her husband had landed in a game show to win themselves some money. As was customary, the host asked them why they needed the prize amount, and they mentioned their struggle with five-years’ worth of failed IVF treatments that had left them cash-strapped. Yet, they didn’t wish to give up.
Their story touched Josh but didn’t make Lady Luck smile. They didn’t win.
The tears in the corners of Josh’s eyes that day made me realize how much he’d craved a child himself, but never said so. Not to a soul.
Eight years later, on Boxing Day, a tweet from the game show host shook the ground beneath Lana’s feet. It took the death of a man she never knew in-person to learn that Josh had called up the host the very next day and made an anonymous donation of thousands of pounds, equalling the prize money they would’ve won, to be sent to them soon after.
All these years, even without knowing their benefactor, they’d spent the entire amount on nine more rounds of IVFs. Yet, Lady Luck still made no exceptions for them.
At the age of fifty-three, Lana wanted to make one last visit to the clinics.
She didn’t have to.
On that very Christmas morning that Josh passed away, she found she had conceived naturally.
After that Boxing Day tweet, Lana sat shell shocked as news articles began to surface, one after an other, of the millions and millions of pounds he’d donated to the hospitals and charities with the only condition that they never reveal his name.
Why would you stress about people finding out , Lana wondered, when your image was being regularly and shamelessly tossed out of the window? Even as the media was busy making you the rightful villain, next only to Satan? Why would you need to die for the world to know who you really were?
I sat down beside Lana, put my arm around her shoulder, and whispered into her ear: if he had his way, he wouldn’t want you to know that, even in death.
I remember all those years ago, Josh had written—“and charity is all but a gown you wear twice a year.” If you ask me, that man never understood the meaning of charity. How can you do charity when what you have is not yours? For him, it was no different from finding a paper bill slip off someone’s pocket on the street, picking it up, and returning it to the person it belonged to. His locker was a lost-and-found counter. And nothing more.
You’re about to give him the best gift, Lana, that no one ever did, I told her. And I thought she heard me. I saw her nod.
Josh’s songs played on the radio when she went for the first scan, when she was in labour, and his song—to a child, like Jesus—aired when she held her little boy for the first time.
Seth Logan Josh Hart was born, not knowing the first breath he took out here in the open was the continuation of someone’s last.
Abhishek Sengupta uses magical realism to write novels about world issues, even though he is stuck inside a window in Kolkata, India. His writing has appeared in some periodicals and anthologies around the globe, and won a few international prizes, including the Bristol Short Story Prize 2023. Twitter/X: @AbhishekSWrites.
Translunar Travelers Lounge 