by Pasha Malla
‘Oh,’ said Matt.
And Mieke sighed.
Dinner came, then. A second table had to be provided to accommodate the spillover dishes. While Mieke spooned noodles onto her plate, Matt gazed at all that excess with shame and revulsion. So much food. Too much food. His appetite vanished.
Mieke ate in silence. Matt sipped his beer. At the neighbouring table, the Indian guy ordered a bottle of rum—to celebrate, Matt thought grimly. But the Russians covered their glasses with their hands.
After a while the first man returned. It was his friend’s turn to go upstairs.
‘Frig this,’ said Matt. He pushed back from the table, rocketed to his feet and stormed the elevator. Rule #17: Be the best man in every room.
The button for the top floor—the penthouse suite—was illuminated. The doors closed and up they went. Matt’s fellow passenger seemed cut from the same portly, moustachioed cloth as Sumit. But he lacked the charm, the twinkle. His hair was styled haphazardly, as if by rival barbers. His shoes were green.
The floors moved into the teens.
Matt’s voice filled the elevator like a foghorn: ‘So! What’s your name?’
‘Barat.’ Said with a pause between syllables, as if it might be retracted midway.
‘Nice to meet you, Bar-rat. I’m Richard Gere.’ They did not shake hands. ‘Your night’s going well, I hope. Though it’s about to get a lot better, am I right?’
Barat stabbed the lit button.
‘Penthouse, pretty swank. You must have paid good money for that room.’ Matt moved a little closer. ‘Though I guess it’s not the room you paid for, so much, is it?’
Barat coughed.
They were into the twenties now.
‘Nearly there,’ said Matt.
They eased to a stop. The doors opened with a digital chime. Yet Barat didn’t exit.
‘Go on,’ said Matt in a soft voice. ‘She’s waiting for you.’
Still didn’t move, just rocked slightly on his heels.
The doors began to close. Matt pried them open. Across the hallway, on a marble dais, sat a carving of figures entwined in either combat or coitus.
And Barat bolted.
Matt laughed and followed, standing behind him while he pounded on the penthouse door.
A lock unlatched.
‘All yours, hero,’ said Matt.
The door opened. As Barat ducked inside, Matt, too, pushed into the room.
The girl was dressed in a robe, her hair knotted in a loose bun. She stared at Matt.
‘Okay,’ said Matt, moving between proprietor and client. ‘This ends now.’
The girl took a cellphone off the nightstand.
‘No, wait, who are you calling?’
She rolled her eyes, turned her back.
Matt came at her over the bed, seized the phone. ‘I’m trying to help you.’
She blinked. At most she seemed mildly inconvenienced. Perhaps even bored. Not how this scene was supposed to go at all.
Meanwhile, Barat was backing out of the room.
Matt wheeled. ‘Hey! Don’t you go anywhere.’
For a moment everyone froze.
What came next? Matt sat on the bed with the phone in his lap, thinking how he might regain control of the storyline. Barat hovered by the mini-bar. The girl stood with crossed arms, her back pressed to the window. Where Matt sat the covers were rumpled: the bed had been made hastily, belying the recent transaction within its sheets.
The phone came to life. Matt dropped it on the floor, where it trembled and purred.
‘They will come up,’ said the girl simply.
‘Wait,’ said Matt. ‘How much?’
‘Pardon?’
‘What are they paying you? I’ll double it.’
‘Double?’
Matt kicked the phone at her. ‘Tell them.’
With a sigh she answered, playing absently with the tassel of the robe. Matt tried to chase meaning out of the torrent of Russian syllables that followed. But it was hard enough to think in English. The girl regarded him so casually, so mockingly.
She moved the handset away from her mouth. ‘All right, enough. You get out now.’
‘Wait!’ Matt cried. ‘We don’t even have to blast. We could just talk. I’ll pay you double just to sit here. You don’t have to do this, you shouldn’t—’
‘No. You, leave.’
This emboldened Barat, who crossed his arms.
‘Come on, please.’ Matt lowered his voice to a whisper: ‘I’m trying to help you.’
The girl smirked. ‘He’s trying to help me,’ she said into her phone in English. And laughed—such a cruel, bitter sound. ‘And we say go fuck yourself.’
Matt rose with difficulty from the bed. Lugging his body from a scene of defeat always made his size feel so cumbersome. But had he been beaten? Barat was nodding—dismissive, victorious. With one arm Matt lifted him off the floor and said, ‘Looks like we’re not wanted here, bro.’
Though he squirmed and kicked, effortlessly Matt carried him into the hallway. The door closed behind them. Matt set him down.
‘You bloody can’t do this,’ Barat sputtered. ‘We have paid!’
‘Yeah, and that’s pretty gross. She’s a kid, bro. You’re lucky I don’t staple your head to that wall with your own frigging teeth.’
Barat took a step back, reaching for his pocket.
‘Don’t even think about calling anyone. We’re going downstairs, and you’re going to collect your buddy, and then you’re going to head home to your wife, and you’re going to cuddle her brains out and tell her how sorry you are. Understand?’
The hand retracted. A nod.
Matt went to call the elevator, but it was already rocketing from the ground floor to the top level—Russians aboard, Matt imagined, screwing silencers to their Kalashnikovs. ‘What say we take the stairs?’
So down twenty-four flights they went, emerging cautiously into the lobby: clear.
‘Wait here,’ said Matt, depositing the guy on a couch by the front desk.
From behind a pillar, he glanced into the dining room. The Russians were gone. And so was Mieke. Matt went to the ladies room, knocked, stuck his head in, called her name. No reply. He checked his phone: nothing. He was alone.
He was in India, he’d crossed the mob, and now he was alone.
Matt had heard stories of how these Siberian maniacs enacted revenge: genitals chewed off by huskies and stuffed into their still-living owners’ mouths, acid baths and eyeballs vised free like seeds squeezed from a grape. Or they’d lash their rivals spread-eagled to a bedframe and lined up horny Swedes to have a go at his butthole.
Defeated, terrified, exhausted and lost, Matt slunk out to the parking lot.
Bitu and the Jeep were nowhere in sight.
His date had stolen his ride home.
—
NONE OF MATT’S TEXTS to Mieke got responses. He tried explanations, excuses, apologies—nothing back, not even a . And working his phone with those sausage-sized thumbs on the taxi ride to Ash’s cousin’s place (‘Just head toward the airport,’ were Matt’s instructions. ‘I’ll figure it out.’) was no easy task. Never mind finding the right words—soothing words, mending words—amid the lingering haze of jetlag and three days without weed, amid the constant, strained search for some familiar landmark, amid frenzied glances out the back window to make sure he wasn’t being tailed.
They circled Gurgaon’s business parks and interminable sprawl, the metre ticking upward. Here was a mall that Matt thought he recognized. But no tree-lined lane threaded past the parking lot, just a mound of dirt. And here definitely was the billboard he could see from his bedroom window—except, no, this one bore a different Bollywood star lounging shirtless on a motorcycle. Around they went, the cabbie watching Matt in the rear-view, Matt peering desperately at the passing scenery, everything both foreign and familiar, the orange wash of streetlights lending it all the uncanny shimmer of a dream.
; Lost, he was lost. Deserted and sold-out—by an alleged friend and conceivable bedfellow!—on the dark side of the frigging planet. What time was it? Matt’s phone said one. But was that here or home, late or early, night or day? Hopeless. He collapsed in the backseat, playing out his options: move in with his driver, use his cab to start some sort of arms smuggling syndicate into Afghanistan, go to war with the Russians, end up executed by Taliban operatives in some dusty mountain cave.
‘Oh, wait,’ Matt said, sitting up. ‘That’s the gate right there. Hang a left?’
Ninety seconds later, he was home.
From the stool outside Matt’s bedroom door, Sumit sprang to his feet in a panic. Clearly (red eyes, muffed hair, drool-shoulder) he’d been sleeping. ‘Sir, I sent Bitu to search for you! Where have you been?’
‘Just trying to make some memories, bro.’ This felt false. So: ‘Honestly though?’
Sumit’s head jiggled like an asymmetrically weighted ball.
‘I think I’m out of here tomorrow.’
A less enthusiastic wobble. Hesitant, dubious.
‘Me and Mieke are heading to Goa—’
‘Sir, no.’ Sumit’s voice trembled. ‘You have only just arrived. Please. How will you go there? It is very far. Very dangerous. Goa is very murderous for westerners.’
‘I think we were thinking about taking the train?’
Sumit closed his eyes, made a tsking noise; the wobble was now doleful. ‘Many robberies on this train. Very long, three-four days. Very bad food only. And cockroaches!’
‘Well we could fly, then.’
‘No flying from Delhi. Very expensive to fly.’
‘Wait. There aren’t any flights or it’s just pricey?’
‘You will die there. You will drown. Or be poisoned. Very dangerous!’
‘Really? I thought lots of tourists—’
‘You will be murdered. There are sharks.’
‘Listen, I should be getting to bed.’
Sumit seized him by the elbow. ‘Who is this Mieke.’
‘You met her. At the mosque. Remember?’
‘These people are often up to no good. Working for gangsters. In cahoots.’
‘Whoa, what? Mieke? Cahoots? Cahoots with who?’
‘You are a good person, Mister Matthew. India is full of danger. No one is to be trusted.’ Sumit’s hand stroked Matt’s arm up to his shoulder, back down. His eyes were plaintive, imploring. ‘You must trust me when I say this.’
—
THE PROBLEM, MATT THOUGHT, packing up the next morning, wasn’t that he’d done something wrong, but that he hadn’t done enough. He was a man of action. He was the hero of his own story. (Rule #9: Be the hero of your own story.) So what else was there to do but track Mieke down, and win her over, and the whole fabulous tale would end happily with the two of them frolicking naked on some sugar-coloured beach while dolphins danced in the surf. Cue sunset, roll credits.
First he’d have to sneak out without rousing Sumit. He found Bitu in the kitchen, drinking tea. With a finger to his lips he performed a little mime of their impending escape: steering wheel, choo-choo train, Matt sailing off into the great brown yonder. When that didn’t work, he dumped Bitu’s tea in the sink and hustled him out to the Jeep. As the gates were closing, Sumit appeared on the front step in his pajamas. ‘Sir!’ he cried, clutching the railing. ‘You are actually leaving? Why? Why?’
‘Drive,’ Matt told Bitu. And didn’t look back.
A block from Nizamuddin Station Bitu pulled up to the curb and gestured vaguely ahead. He seemed to be instructing Matt to continue on foot. Ditched again! Fine, Matt thought, digging his backpack out of the trunk. Forty minutes and several baffling conversations later he joined a line-up designated for Elderly, Invalid and Foreign Travellers. The couple ahead of him reached roughly to his waist, a pair of collapsed question marks who took turns horking into a greasy handkerchief.
The line didn’t so much progress as clot and burst. Things were stagnant and then suddenly surging ahead, and everyone scrabbled forward like twigs swept downstream. More people appeared, looking neither particularly foreign nor elderly nor invalid, and wedged themselves in line, and after twenty minutes Matt found himself further from the wicket than when he began.
Another hour to reach the ticket counter. Where the agent seemed to be gloating.
‘One for Goa.’
‘Class?’
‘First, please.’
‘A/C class?’
‘A.’
The agent stared.
‘When does that leave?’
‘Ten minutes. Nine-twenty.’
‘And arrives?’
‘Madgaon, half past eight.’
‘Jesus. What is that, eleven hours?’
The agent roared with laughter. ‘Half past eight tomorrow!’
‘So nearly twenty-four hours, you’re saying.’
‘Sir! Tomorrow evening.’
‘Good sweet lord.’
The agent’s head wobbled.
‘Fine,’ said Matt, thrusting a fistful of bills under the glass. ‘Just give me the most expensive ticket.’
‘Most?’
‘Yes!’
‘Not paying now.’ The guy ducked away and returned with a form. ‘First fill please.’
‘What’s this?’
‘Request form for ticket.’
‘But…I just told you what ticket I want.’
‘Fine. Must first fill form.’
Matt resisted an urge to smash the glass and rake that haughty grin through the shards. ‘You have a pen?’
‘No sir.’
‘Then?’
‘Pens you may purchase at kiosk.’
‘And then? Line up again?’
Wobble. Smile.
‘Are you kidding me? But that’ll take another hour!’ Matt checked his watch. ‘And I’ll miss this train! When’s the next one?’
‘Eleven a.m. Must hurry.’ The agent looked past him. ‘Next!’ Racism, thought Matt, stalking across the departures hall to the gift shop. Or some postcolonial payback. He’d seen Gandhi. He knew retribution was fair—what with those folks gunned down in that courtyard and the whole salt ordeal—but he was a far cry from some twirly moustachioed dandy whipping coolies with a switch. His family was Canadian as far back as it went! And Canadians were good. Given the chance, Matt could do good here. His whole plan to beat up rapists, e.g., and the business with the Russians. Why was India foiling him at every turn?
From a little bin in the train station gift shop he selected a pen and was charged some arbitrary, exorbitant fee by the shopkeeper. Finding it nearly dry of ink as he scratched out his travel details on the form, the ever-present muddle of jetlag and weed deprivation fogging the edges of things, Matt stood back and took stock.
He was still letting India happen to him. This wasn’t his way. Nope! Life was the thing you bent over and held by the earlobes and rogered like a champ. You kicked life in the guts or clutched it fast and smooched it hard lip-wise. You made memories out of your days—or you went forgotten.
So he shouldered his way to the wicket, slapped down the form and snarled, ‘There you go, bro. Now fire off my frigging ticket.’
It was printed in silence. No head wobbles, no grin. Just a dead stare from the agent and a faint scuffling among the old folks and invalids Matt had plowed through in line.
Ticket in hand, Matt check his phone: 9:30. Ninety minutes to kill. And he would frigging murder them.
First he’d eat something—anything he wanted. There were food stalls outside: one guy stuffing oversized Rice Krispies with Bits & Bites and some pesto-looking sauce, another hawking chips and bottled drinks, another stacking phosphorescent pretzelish things on newsprint. Delhi belly be damned; Matt would not be bullied by it or Ash or anyone. This trip was his. It was time to make some goshdang memories of his own.
But after scarfing a pair of samosas piping hot and grease-drenched from the fryer, it wasn’t even ten ye
t. And the train station didn’t offer much in the way of adventures. So he found a phone booth.
Ash answered, his voice stiff with indifference until Matt filled him in on his previous night’s adventures.
‘The mob?’
‘The Russian mob, bro.’
‘In Delhi? I’ve never heard of anything like that before. You’re sure?’
‘Yeah, so I’m cutting town because, frig, what if they come after me?
‘Right. What if.’
‘This girl though, Dhar…Man. I could tell we really had something, you know?’
‘Which one is this, the prostitute or the lesbian? The one you’re fleeing or chasing?’
‘Hey, you know these phone booths are called STDs?’
‘Subscriber Trunk Dialling, genius.’
‘Sexually Transmitted Dialling. You punch out numbers with your knob. Just make sure you wear a condom!’
‘Stop it.’
‘Hey, I ate some street food. Was that bad?’
‘I thought I told you not to do that.’
‘What’s the worst that could happen? I can handle the scoots. I’ll just hang my rump over the train tracks like everybody else. You seen this? Bunch of guys just dropping deuces right off the platform. And then they go snuggle in the park. What a country!’
‘Anyway.’ Ash’s sigh was full of melodrama and dismissal. ‘The worst thing I’ve ever heard of from food in India is a brain parasite. But that was from raw vegetables, likely washed in dirty water.’
‘A brain what?’
‘Parasite. Happened to a cousin. At first they thought she was having a stroke—migraines, slurred speech, amnesia, seizures. Took ages to figure out what was wrong. She’s okay now, though not exactly back to normal. Kind of…touched.’
‘Seizures? I’ve got a headache! Figured it was jetlag but—’
‘You sure that isn’t just THC withdrawal?’
‘What if it’s not? What if I start seizuring all over the place and chew my tongue off or smash my head on the curb and get run over by a camel stampede? Or the Russians find me passed out on the street and sell my organs to al-Qaeda?’
‘Unlikely. Possible, but unlikely.’
‘Possible? Honestly?’
‘Considering all the crap you’ve put into your body over the years, that you might be taken down by a samosa? It’s kind of beautiful, when you think about it.’