by Mahesh Rao
She could not put it off any longer.
She had wanted to avoid a long evening of chat and possible awkwardness or recriminations. At first she had accused herself of cowardice and then persuaded herself that she was merely being practical. They planned to meet in front of the cinema at the mall, and then Dimple would reveal all to Ania over a quick drink after the film. There would be no time for a long and difficult conversation. She would tell Ania, breezily, confidently. All would be well. But the film times had changed, and at the cinema they discovered that they had missed the show. The evening gaped before them.
Ania led them out of the building and onto the terrace. They sat at a table by the fountains, watching the jets rise and fall in concert, changing color from silver to lilac to purple. Banners fluttered above their heads. Children raced around on skateboards, their parents hurriedly in pursuit. The sky was clinging to its final moments of deep blue before dusk.
Dimple had called Ania as soon as she had seen news of Nikhil’s arrest, but the conversation had been brief. She was wary of bringing it up again, but it was preferable to the strain of revealing her own news.
“The whole thing with Nikhil, I still can’t believe it happened. But maybe you don’t want to talk about it. I understand a hundred percent,” she said, her look as earnest as she felt.
“It happened, I guess. I still can’t believe it either. I’ve never felt so stupid in my life.”
Dimple put her hand over Ania’s arm.
“But how were you supposed to know? He fooled everybody,” she said.
“You know what, you were right. I don’t think I want to talk about it.”
And another silence fell. Dimple stole a glance at Ania and tried to find the words she had come to say. Her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She took a sip of her drink. Ania appeared not to have sensed her unease.
The sky was dark now and looked clear, the stars unusually bright, ablaze like distant fire balloons. Earlier that day Dimple had read the poem that was e-mailed to her by a poetry subscription website. She received one every day, and she read it repeatedly on her way to work, the meaning becoming clearer as the train pulled in at each station. That morning’s poem had described the Brazilian custom of launching fire balloons into the sky to celebrate a festival. They were delicate objects whose paper chambers were flushed with light as they drifted over the mountains, at the mercy of the wind. An observer on the ground would mistake them for a star or a planet, beautiful in the night sky. But the poem revealed the truth: the fire balloons had no business being in the sky. A strong gust would turn the whole structure into a fireball, spewing smoke and ash, falling to the earth, the whole endeavor ending in destruction. The splendid planets and stars had their places in the dark sky. There could only be danger in floating toward them as a fire balloon in an unpredictable wind, no matter how bright the fire.
Dimple blurted it out. “I’m getting married.”
“What?”
“Ankit proposed and I said yes.”
“Oh my God.”
Dimple searched Ania’s face for whatever it would reveal: anger, heartache, disappointment. But Ania had stood up too quickly, and she couldn’t see her expression.
Ania bent down to give her a hug. Dimple still could not see her face. Ania’s arms held her tightly, and the warmth of her cheek came up against Dimple’s ear. Dimple had put her arms around Ania too, and they stayed motionless, in their tight embrace.
Ania whispered in her ear, “That’s great, Dee, that’s really great.”
It was far more than Dimple’s mother had said.
Muffled sounds still reached them: the shouts of the children, the fountains gushing. Dimple told herself that she would not cry. And she didn’t.
* * *
—
AFTER DIMPLE HAD left, Ania stayed seated for a long while. The fountains were more sedate now, and there was only an occasional spurt high into the air. When Dimple had told her, she had felt a surge of annoyance and betrayal at the fact that she had been told at the final hour, after a ring had been produced, when dates had already been considered. The long discussions with Dimple, the trips, the plans, the description of men’s bodies and tastes and odors, the gasping laughter, seemed to belong to a distant, uncomplicated time. Ania would never have believed it possible: Dimple on her way to marry Ankit, while she burned with her own humiliation by Nikhil.
She pictured him with Nina. It seemed unendurable that there were days, weeks, months ahead of her, when she would shudder at the thought, angry tears pricking at her eyes. It felt as though a huge tidal wave of shame had broken over her head. Everything decent and safe had been swept far out of reach. She felt an overwhelming desire to unburden herself to the one person who could sympathize. But it was too soon to tell Dev.
His words came bobbing to the surface again; he had called her friendship with Dimple a mission civilisatrice. She would have to prove him wrong. Even if this marriage wasn’t what she would have chosen for her friend, at least she could act with what he would consider a kind of grace.
The stars had glowed like sparks of fire earlier in the evening but now they looked dull and indistinct, pale points about to be shrouded by the returning smog. She stirred what was left of her drink and pushed it away. The fountains had been turned off. Chairs were being lifted and upturned onto tables at the far end of the terrace. Ania stood up to leave. She was determined to be pleased for Dimple but, in that instant, she was glad to be alone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
MOST PEOPLE MOVED on quickly from news of Nikhil’s downfall. The mechanics of his scam seemed so grubby and sordid: running an Indian call center that persuaded thousands of people to invest in unfamiliar financial products; charging credit cards without authorization; pilfering small amounts from middle managers and hairdressers and flight attendants. The particularly greedy and gullible had been stung for large sums. But the details of the fraud held little interest in the drawing rooms of South Delhi. There was none of the pizzazz and pyrotechnics of the great financial scandals of the day, embezzlements that brought down venerable institutions, scams that shamed Hollywood celebrities into admitting their lack of business acumen. Nikhil’s name would not resonate in the swindlers’ hall of fame; many of them could barely recall it by the end of the week.
Renu had refused all invitations and had been going out only when absolutely necessary. She would rush home, uncharacteristically urging the driver to speed through the side lanes or sneak up a one-way road. It felt as though all of Delhi was stuck in a ball of mucus at the base of her throat, and she could spit and spit and never expel it.
As she came home from the doctor’s, she realized that it was a bereavement. The staff were sent home early. She thought it best to cancel the newspapers for a few more days.
She had absentmindedly been drinking cups of tea all day, taking a few sips and then leaving them to get cold. In the kitchen she made another cup, the loud stream of water from the kettle shocking. She laid the teaspoon in the sink, making the faintest clack.
She glanced into the sitting room. The colonel was still in the armchair, his back straight, hands on his knees, feet flat on the floor. It was how elderly men sat. She seemed to remember that she had seen her father in his armchair in the same position.
She took a sip of her tea and left it on the table. She settled into the sofa opposite him, and the minutes went by.
“I read about his victims,” he said. “The report said one man had attempted suicide. Some of them worked all their lives and lost everything. There was a picture of a lady, a close-up, gray hair, glasses on a cord, I can’t describe the expression in her eyes. She looks after her disabled husband, and now she has to try to return to work at the age of sixty. My age.”
His eyes were deep in their sockets, his pallor ashen. He worried a button on his shirt, his fingers twisting at it, pushin
g it back and forth through its hole. In a moment he would pull it right off. Renu moved his hand gently away. He laid it flat on the table, watching its slight tremor.
“Somehow we have become monsters,” he said.
* * *
—
FOR FAHIM, the fraud became an obsession. He bristled at the lack of fresh information, repeatedly finding that new reports regurgitated old facts. It was a matter of great satisfaction that someone from a charmed circle could meet such an ignominious fate. He clicked on image after image of Nikhil being led away in handcuffs; the photo where his head was covered in a blanket was particularly gratifying. He had never met Nikhil, but he knew all about his connection to the Khuranas. He imagined the family conferences in the Khurana reception rooms, Dileep’s anger, Renu’s anxiety, the way in which Ania would try to brush it off as nothing that concerned her.
But in the end he exhausted himself. His interest petered out just as suddenly as it had blazed. He had his own concerns: financial worries that would rear up even when he felt he had achieved a measure of calm; anxieties about his lack of appetite and weight loss, which only made him put off a visit to the doctor.
* * *
—
DILEEP THREW HIMSELF down on the mat and looked up at the ceiling. Sweat stung his eyes as he waited for his heartbeat to return to normal. His trainer had left the room, and the only sound was an occasional ghostly click from one of the machines. He was allowed a five-minute cooldown before he resumed the next stage of his regime. He tasted the salt in the dip above his lip, and it gave him a small jolt of satisfaction.
The news about Nikhil’s fraud had not interested him much. He had been surprised to see the amateur nature of the scam and the gullibility of the poor wretches who were drawn into it. He knew Nikhil had been friendly with Ania and had been to the house a few times; so had any number of chancers. He was Renu’s nephew, and it was for her and the colonel to manage whatever talk they heard. There would be no reputational damage to Dileep. Contrary to what some might have thought, it mattered as much as one of his gardeners cheating at cards on his day off.
Dileep’s preoccupations lay elsewhere. His wife continued to appear before him, and through Mr. Nayak’s mediation, he had finally recognized the full measure of her regret. He sensed her in a room now only as a benign presence. But there were new anxieties. It felt as though each time he met Mr. Nayak a niggling doubt would emerge, which in a couple days would turn into the beginning of a new obsession. Only Mr. Nayak could assist with unknotting the matter, since he was the one who had noticed it in the first place.
There were concerns about his health, his businesses, his friendships. And above everything, Mr. Nayak had indicated that there could be trouble after Dileep’s death. In the past he had mocked the conservative outlook of men in his set, some of whom were younger than him: their obsessions with fathering sons, their anxieties about settling their daughters, the way they cowered before tradition. He reveled in the fact that he was more reflective and responsive to change, another mark of his essential juvenescence. Ania had never shown an inclination toward the Khurana enterprises, and he had believed it foolish to press the issue. Her future was secure, whatever she chose, and the soundness of their foundations and personnel meant that his businesses would succeed long after he had gone.
It was Mr. Nayak who mentioned his assets getting into the wrong hands and then refused to elaborate further. All his life Dileep had heard of this threat. Now he realized that he had reached an age when they had come to haunt him too: the wrong hands.
His increased reliance on Mr. Nayak had made him irritable and possessive. He felt a surge of annoyance when Mr. Nayak was unable to take his calls, and resented the time he spent on his other clients. Dileep had even distanced himself from Serena. Inevitably, they would discuss their experiences with Mr. Nayak, since it was a secret they shared and had become the dominant factor in their friendship. But Dileep no longer wished to share; he did not even want to be reminded of the fact that Serena was aware of this new intimacy in his life.
He decided to offer Mr. Nayak a generous retainer to act as his exclusive adviser.
“But that will not be fair to my other poor clients, isn’t it? They all have needs and worries,” said Mr. Nayak.
Dileep raised his bid. Mr. Nayak said he would think about it but no more was said. Dileep managed to refrain from contacting him for a few days, in order to demonstrate his pique. When he did call Mr. Nayak, it was to offer him even more money.
He had wondered whether to confide in Ania, but he knew that she would not be capable of understanding his dependence on Mr. Nayak. She would pity him or, worse, mock him. The closeness with his daughter—a camaraderie of equals—that he had depended on all his life could vanish in an instant. It was all that he had ever really had.
The trainer returned to the room and shook his head.
“You were supposed to be stretching, sir,” he said.
“I was stretching,” said Dileep with irritation.
“Okay, if you’re done, sir, five minutes at the speed bag,” he said.
Dileep put his gloves back on and took up his stance. His eyes narrowed. He jabbed at the bag, once, twice, and then tore into it with a ferocity that surprised even his trainer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
IT HAD BEEN one of the strangest and most unsettling fortnights of Ania’s life. First, there had been the revelation from Dimple. A few days later in a café she had run straight into Fahim. They were both paralyzed in the doorway, equally uncomfortable, leaning away from each other: there was nowhere to duck or shrink away.
“It’s been ages,” said Ania.
“Yes, not since that party,” he said.
“Always some party,” she said.
Even to her ears, her laugh sounded forced.
“How’s Mussoorie?” she asked.
“Really well. She’s gone to England for a little while. But she’ll be back soon.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
They moved into the street as nannies with strollers tried to maneuver their way around them. In the bright sunlight, Ania could see that his jacket sagged off his shoulders, and his cheeks had retreated so far that his face had taken on the dark stare of a skull.
“Anyway, you look well,” she said.
“So do you. I’ll let you know when Mussoorie’s back. We could do something. Get together.”
“Great, I look forward to that. Let me know.”
“Definitely, definitely.”
“So, lovely to see you, don’t be a stranger.”
“No, we should all do something.”
“Definitely.”
She had walked down the street, knowing that he was watching her, feeling those sunken eyes boring into her back. What she hadn’t expected was to come out of the pharmacy a quarter of an hour later and find him standing in the same spot, hands jammed into his pockets, his fists agitating the fabric in a strange and precise rhythm.
Ania went home and did what she had done constantly over the last few days. She retraced her steps. The evening she had first met Nikhil, the conversations in hotel bars and on flights, the easy hours by the pool, the clues he might have inadvertently dropped, a calculating look perhaps, an imprudent brag or an unnecessary explanation of some aspect of his life. But there was nothing she could recall that could have alerted her. She had been blind, foolishly blind. She felt another hot surge of shame. But then she reminded herself of what had really happened: she had lost a little self-respect; many hundreds had lost everything.
On the ground below her window smoldered a cigarette that she had tossed out in anger at her loss of self-control. A thin wisp of smoke drifted into the faultless flower beds.
Once these matters were unearthed, it was common practice in Delhi to raise a beautifully threaded eyebrow and inquire in baf
flement: “Didn’t you know?”
Ania was able to admit that she did not know, that she would not have imagined it for a second, that many of her certainties were splintering and landing where she dared not look. The differences between genuine and false, decorous and improper, known and unknown, would have to be learned all over again.
There was certainly a grim kind of symmetry: she had taken great pleasure in telling Dev how wrong he had been to trust Kamya; she had been sure that he would waste no time in telling her that he had predicted Nikhil’s despicable actions. But the day after the story broke, when Nikhil’s name was on every news channel, Dev had given her a grave look and shaken his head. But he had said nothing more.
In the square of the window, flowers dipped and swayed. A wooden tray on the sill contained an assortment of mementoes whose significance had long been forgotten and now simply formed an attractive still life. A flat stone speckled blue, a piece of driftwood that might have been pilfered from Dev’s house in Goa, a cork from the bottle of champagne that Dimple had brought on Ania’s birthday, a signed photograph of Altaf Masood, cricketer-turned-politician. Propped up against the driftwood was a postcard from Saint-Tropez, an illustration of a woman getting into a boat, the tail of the scarf around her head fluttering in the breeze.
Ania sat cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, bent over her laptop. She read for a third time the last paragraph that she had written. Some of it she recalled but most of it seemed alien, as if devoid of any connection to the rest of her novel and inserted there by some curious glitch in the software.