Low

by Jeet Thayil

  She was beholden to speak to him. But how? In any case, this impulse too was residue. She did not have to follow through. How did it matter? Not long ago it had mattered terribly. Now everything had changed. Stripped of urgency, everything that had seemed important was revealed at last in its true aspect. Her grief at being abandoned as a child and left for months with an aunt; her reinvention of herself as a school bully, who exacted from the weaker students a daily payment of fear or obeisance; her first love affair, in graduate school in Florida, with a boy who was engaged to someone else, whose wedding she helped to organise; her own marriage to a man she hardly knew, plunging into it without caution or consideration; her education, her career, the accumulation of objects, the paying of taxes, keeping account of income and expenditure – all of it insignificant, hieroglyphs on sand, old concerns that slipped from her like garments she no longer wore.

  Even the last argument with her husband, which had seemed hopeless at the time, came to her now like a scene from a play whose premise she couldn’t remember, a scene in which actors simulated anger while negotiating Delhi’s murderous traffic.

  He was driving her to the office as usual, as he had done for a year, to the Connaught Place high-rise where she worked.

  “I’m done with working here,” she’d said. “I’m not doing it any more. I’ve been meaning to tell you but I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Just say it the way you do.”

  “They’re hiring someone new that I’ll have to report to.”

  She was shaking her head and she wouldn’t look at him. She knew what he was going to say and she resented it already. He had no right.

  “It might not be so bad,” he said. “Might even be good, someone to share the responsibility? How can you decide you hate it before it’s happened?”

  She stared at the traffic and refused to look at him.

  “You don’t get it,” she said, quietly, hopelessly. “I’ve been the boss and they’re hiring a new boss. Someone I don’t want to work with. It’s finished here. I want to start my own publishing house.”

  “If it were that easy to start a business …” said her husband. “Don’t rush into a decision.”

  “I’ve already decided.”

  “Let’s think about it for a minute. Remember how hard you worked to get this job.”

  They were stuck in eight lanes of traffic around the India Gate. Ahead of them a driver had got out of his car to yell at a motorcyclist. A traffic policeman had arrived to make things worse. Her husband tried to reverse but it was impossible. On either side of them cars honked and idled. A pall of smoke hung over everything.

  She hadn’t seen the sky in weeks. She had forgotten there were stars above them. It was as if an impenetrable veil had fallen between her and the heavens. She couldn’t imagine why people lived like this. For what reason did they submit to it? Surely there were alternatives? Unrelievedly ugly men and women surrounded by unrelieved ugliness. This was the truth of the city. All around her the mean minds idled in their pollution machines. There was not a face she could like. In the midst of it all, she and her husband, fighting, wretched, undistinguished.

  “I’m red meat,” she said. “Someone’s done for, don’t you see who it is?”

  “What?”

  “If meat is my destiny why don’t you see it in my face? You’re my husband.”

  “Why are we talking about destiny and meat?”

  “I can’t do it any more. I can’t allow myself to be bullied. It’s horrible to work for someone you don’t admire and hope never to resemble. Whatever happens, I’m quitting,” she said.

  “So why are we having this conversation if you’ve already decided,” said her husband in the tone he used when he was angry, the condescending, withering tone that made her feel like a worthless child.

  She let her frustration show. In a controlled monotone she told him she had expected better, she had expected him to be supportive. She had not thought he would question something so important, so fundamental to her wellbeing and mental health. She spoke without once raising her voice. She told him he had exceeded his responsibility as her husband and fallen short at the same time. He had no right to tell her what to do when he knew what the alternative would cost. If this was the way he was going to respond to a crisis, by telling her not to do anything, by saying she should keep it going because that was the comfortable thing to do, because there were bills to pay and they needed her salary, well then, there was hardly any point in being together. She went on in this way for five or ten minutes. He tried to interject at first and then he fell silent. She noticed how badly he was driving, grinding the gears and leaning on the horn. She was still talking when he made his outburst.

  “Stop, stop, or I’ll crash the car,” he’d said, surprising only himself. She liked the idea. It was something that had occurred to her. What if they were to die together in a crash, or fall from a tall building, or succumb to a gas leak in the kitchen? Together. Die as they lived. Wouldn’t it solve all their problems at once?

  But they made it to the office in one piece, crash-free, still alive. Even as she left the car and gathered her handbag and phone, she refused to look at him. She didn’t say goodbye or kiss him. She took the elevator up to the eighteenth floor and walked past the empty reception desk and fled into her office, where she sat on the couch for five minutes with her head in her hands. Then work had taken over. She’d put aside one set of frustrations and taken up another. A shipment of books had gone missing. The receptionist called in sick and an intern had to fill in. There was a shortfall in the petty cash box. There was a call from New York for which she had had to sound energetic and intelligent. She just about managed intelligent. There was a meeting with the distributors, strapping Delhi boys who spoke not a word of English and seemed only slightly put off that a woman was in charge. There was copy to write and copy to reject. There was a phone call with an author, handholding and reassurances on her part, anxiety and whining on his. And there was nothing unusual about any of this, the routine crises of a Monday morning; but in her head something had shifted, she could feel it, a change in the weather.

  At lunch she and Amung ordered Mughlai from Ranjit da Dhaba. As usual Amung asked impossibly intimate questions. As usual Aki painted her husband in the best possible light.

  “How often does he kiss you?”

  “Every day,” she said truthfully.

  “How often do you sleep?”

  Aki squeezed lime on the cut onions and sprinkled salt and pepper.

  “Everybody sleeps, Amung,” she said teasingly. “I try to sleep every night. Don’t you?”

  “Not like that, yaar, Aki. You know what I mean. How often do you sleep?”

  “Not every night like we used to, but often enough.”

  “How often?”

  “Every other night and first thing in the morning.”

  “Hemant is the same. Morning is the best time, he says, when you’re fresh and all. Is he good, your hubby?”

  “What a funny word, Amung. Hubby. Yes he’s good, a proper gentleman. He always lets me go first.”

  “No!”

  “Always.”

  “Hemant is not so considerate, but.”

  “Never marry a man under the age of thirty-three,” said Aki. “They aren’t like us. They’re handicapped and, what’s the word, stunted.”

  “Stunted?”

  “Yes. They take longer to develop into thinking adults and sometimes it never happens. Go for older. At least then they take a bit of time. It’s a minimum requirement, time and talent. You should insist on it, in my opinion.”

  “How much time he takes?”

  “Hours. He says things to prolong it.”

  “Hemant also says things. ‘Oh God, yes baby yes,’ he’ll say. Repeats himself, yes, yes, yes, like he won the lottery.”

  “Dom says poetry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Aki watched Amung’s lovely eyes widen in al
arm.

  “He says poems, recites poems from memory,” she said. “Sometimes it will put me off. Not sexy, I tell him. He says that’s the point. The words pull you back from the brink and start you over.”

  “Like? I want to hear. Please tell.”

  “Now? Over chicken dopiaza and butter naan? Before ice cream? Before coffee?”

  “Tell!”

  “There’s one that starts like this: Rose, thou art sick, the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling something, something. I said, Dom, are you calling me a sick rose? You know I don’t like roses. I think they’re boring and obvious and only boring and obvious people like them.”

  “Better to be a sick rose than an invisible worm flying in the night.”

  “You know, Amung, I never thought of it in that way. You’re right. There’s a chance the sick rose may get better. Invisible worms are invisible for ever.”

  Amung stopped chewing and gave Aki a look of appraisal.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, you may be a sick rose but you’re my sick rose.”

  “Aki. So sweet!”

  She was surprised she still remembered these things. The pull of emotion was gone but she remembered everything. The look on Amung’s face, like a snapshot curling slightly at the edges. The smell in the conference room, of food and flowers. She remembered but she took no sides. Her feelings didn’t get in the way of her memories. Nothing remained but the relief of distance and a recollection of what it meant to be alive: the need to communicate, even if the need lessened consecutively and waned like the light at the end of day.

  She would find a way to talk to him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When you’re high, time dissolves like powder in a spoon. It melts and bends to your will. When the high is gone, time returns in the company of boredom to punish you with the time you killed.

  It had been no more than twenty minutes since Ullis’s sojourn at the toilet of the Lila, where he had weighed the benefits of cocaine versus heroin and decided to postpone the reward of H until later. He had never done such a thing, scored heroin and not ingested it immediately. Like all junkies, he knew that gratification delayed was gratification denied. But he had done it, firmly and virtuously. He’d just said no. Instead he’d snorted a fat, if not obese, line of cocaine, which put a shimmer in his head, a hurt on his nose and a grind inside his teeth. It was blissful and now it was gone. Only twenty minutes had passed since that essential nasal intervention and he was already in the market for another. Either the cocaine was not as good as he had thought or his tolerance was increasing from one snort to the next. He looked forward to it, incremental leaps, ruinous progression, a mathematical dance unto death.

  “I say, Payal?”

  “Yes, darling, of course you can borrow a pair of slippers when we get to the house.”

  “No, no, I mean yes, but the thing is, I was wondering if we could make one more stop, a last one for the road? I think it’s going to be one of those days.”

  “Look, is this about, like, powdering your nose? Because we don’t need to stop for that, you know, Ulysses darling. I mean, if you haven’t noticed? The windows are tinted?”

  “And what about …?” said Ullis, inclining his head in the direction of the driver.

  “Bharat?” There was a throaty laugh. “He’s not going to mind, are you, Bharat?”

  “No, madam,” said Bharat, his eyes meeting Ullis’s in the rear-view mirror. Under his peaked white cap the driver’s hair was the same shade of silver as his mistress’s. Was it a prerequisite for gainful employment with Madam Payal?

  “Bharat used to work for the government, didn’t you, Bharat?”

  “Yes, madam, garment of India.”

  “Ah,” said Ullis, who had once delighted in the linguistic excesses of his countrymen, “and why did you shed the garment and turn to other forms of cover?”

  “Why do you think?” said Payal. “Because the pay is better. Also darling, don’t be mean to the servants? Bharat, turn up the AC. It’s so warm. Don’t you think so?”

  Bharat turned up the AC and opened a console near the front seat. He passed to the back a square mirror. Somehow he managed to accomplish this without taking his eyes off the road, currently a broken stretch that teemed with cars and handcarts, scooters and autos, dogs and pedestrians and a sedate shaggy camel.

  “Thank you,” said Ullis, momentarily uplifted by the unexpected resourcefulness of the fellow in the peaked cap. Before the black maw returned to suck on his brain and spit out the husk, he got to work. He dropped a small rock on the mirror, and flattened and chopped it with some adept wielding of his debit card. Fashioning two lines, he offered the mirror to Payal with a rolled-up note.

  “God,” she said, “I was beyond mortified, beyond, that I snorted your ashes, I mean your wife’s ashes. Gutted! And now I feel so connected to her, like, seriously, bonded. Still and all I am sorry, darling, honestly, I can’t apologise enough.”

  She snorted both lines and passed the mirror back.

  Ullis crushed the rest of the rock. Inspired by Victor’s precision work, he made three tiny lines that he vaporised with a rapid back and forth movement of the note.

  Payal had indeed seemed mortified when he told her what she had done. She had burst into tears and covered her face with her hands and coughed exaggeratedly. Then she paced the room, patting her breastbone.

  “No, no, no,” she said, fanning her face with her hands like the heroine of a black-and-white Bollywood potboiler. “I feel terrible. Truly I do. It was so good I thought it was primo stuff.”

  And it was, thought Ullis: primo Aki.

  Payal said, “Bharat, could you put the window down? I need a cigarette. I think I might be shaking a little bit.”

  “I thought this was a non-smoking car,” said Ullis.

  “But you smoke, don’t you, darling?”

  “Not if there’s no point to it,” he said, as his phone buzzed. He picked up without looking at the screen.

  “I called the house and nobody answered,” said his mother. Her voice was unnaturally loud in his ear. “Are you okay? Why don’t you pick up when someone calls?”

  “I didn’t hear,” said Ullis. The lie came easily. He could lie without guilt only to his mother. “I must have been in the next room, listening to music or reading or something. I might have been in the shower. Yeah, probably in the shower.”

  “What?”

  “The shower, I was in the shower.”

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m at the market buying groceries. Wonderful pomegranates this time of year.” Perhaps he’d gone too far, perhaps some dialling back was in order. “I mean,” he said defensively, “I have to eat.”

  He had no idea why he didn’t want his mother to know he was in Bombay. He understood, instinctively, that it was a good idea to be less than forthcoming about his whereabouts. And there was the matter of habit. He’d become so adept at hiding the truth from her that he did so automatically. Besides, she wanted to be lied to. She even expected it, particularly when it came to the big things. The least he could do was oblige. It was the duty of a dutiful son.

  Beside him Payal lit a cigarette. From a small fridge hidden in the console between their seats, she retrieved a can of diet cola and a can of lager and held them out to Ullis. He pointed at the lager.

  “You’re a saint!” he told Payal, forgetting to cover the phone.

  “It’s true,” said his mother. “I had to become one. But I never expected to hear you say so.”

  “No, no, not you. I was talking to myself.”

  “Oh,” said his mother dejectedly. “Are you sure you’re okay? Since when did you start talking to yourself?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with a bit of talk. I think I’ve always done it. It’s a matter of conversing with someone I know fairly well.”

  “You used to walk in your sleep, did you know that?”

  “
Yes, I did. You’ve told me many times.”

  “Once I heard a noise and you were shutting the front door, waiting for the elevator. I don’t know where you thought you were going in the middle of the night.”

  “I think I might have been pretending to sleepwalk. I might have been making a break for it.”

  “You were wearing a raincoat.”

  “Well, was it raining? Sometimes there’s a reasonable explanation for things.”

  “Now, Dominic, we were thinking it might be a good idea for you to come and stay with us for a week or two. What do you think?”

  He remembered the ringing quality of the silence when he got home on the night of his wife’s death. He had felt it the moment he crossed the threshold: a kind of stillness, or staleness. He rushed through the rooms as the dread grew, the air already full of it, knowing what he would find and praying he was wrong. The entire hideous sequence played itself out in his head several times a day. How would he live there again? How would he go from one room to the next? Aki had installed bamboo screens on the terrace because they lived in a top-floor flat in Defence Colony that was susceptible to intense heat in the summer. She had found a man who constructed made-to-order screens backed by cool green fabric, which had transformed the terrace into a haven of shade and breeze. The screens had hardly been up for a week when she died. He hoped never to see them again.

  “Well, what do you say?” his mother was asking.

  He made what had become his standard reply to most, if not all questions asked of him since his wife’s suicide: “I don’t see why not.”

  “You’re not back on the drink, are you? Please don’t start that all over again. Appa says it is when a person’s character is tested that you show the world what you are made of.”

  “I’m made of clay,” he said, “in particular my feet and heart.”

  “Answer me, are you drinking again?”