Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  “Wow,” spits Nil. “Crack is for villagers.”

  “Please, Nil,” replies Ferang with great indignation. “I doubt they could afford it.”

  “Anamila also wasn’t there. She got dengue, or so I’ve heard.”

  “What else do you expect if you go live in the New Territories?” says Nil. “No matter how nice your apartment may be.”

  “You mustn’t be judgmental towards those who live in those areas,” goes Ferang, shaking his head. “It’s not the fault of the poor if they can’t afford anything better—believe me, I know something about it. Plus, you just have to use some mosquito repellent.”

  “What else?” Nil asks, and then trying to conceal his craving for gossip, adds, “The last five days have been so demanding and I have had no time to keep up with what’s been happening to our batchmates.”

  Ferang smiles. “Rahul could not attend because his father was elected in U.P. and—what else?”

  “Abdul wanted to come but his folks didn’t allow him,” Mel says turning the page.

  “Right, his folks are quite the religious kind, aren’t they?” Ferang pauses. “Aren’t they, Nil?”

  “So it seems.”

  “Maybe a little too much,” prompts Ferang, perhaps a little too eager.

  “Maybe.”

  Silence.

  “What do you think of Muslims, Nil?”

  Nil shifts on the seat. “I have nothing against them,” he says. “I mean, I have many Muslim friends...”

  “But?”

  “But nothing.”

  Ferang chuckles and opens the notebook and scribbles something.

  “Do you want to stay over for dinner?” Nil asks after a while.

  “No, thanks,” goes Ferang. “After the last few days, I have to go take a look and see how my people are doing.”

  “And I have to go home,” says Mel, looking up. “My father expects me for dinner.”

  Nil realizes he hasn’t eaten anything all day. “I’m starving,” he says.

  “I am sure the maid left you something warm.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Is she the same as before?” asks Ferang.

  Nil has to think about it. “No, it’s a new one.”

  “Yeah,” says Ferang, “because she was a Dalit and you couldn’t eat her rotis.”

  “I don’t eat rotis,” Nil turns his head sharply. “And—and I have no problems with Dalits—I don’t believe in the caste system and shit like that, you know that.” He knows Ferang is just pulling his leg. He means no arm.

  “Children, children,” Mel says.

  Ferang playfully punches Nil on the shoulder.

  Each of them return to in their own pastime and Nil pours some Perrier water in brandy glasses while the driver honks like a madman in the irrational hope of moving through the traffic and Ferang makes a joke about weddings that has to do with love or lies or something, but Nil doesn’t pay attention.

  “You want to go home, sir?” the driver asks when the tower of Scheria emerges majestic into the leaden sky.

  “Mel first,” answers Nil.

  “To Scheria, ma’am?”

  “Yes, Manuj.” Nil inhales, patiently.

  “You want something else to drink, sir?” The driver glances in the rearview mirror.

  “Yes, thank you.” Nil loses his fists thinking about all the times he has told the man to serve them without asking.

  The driver takes a bottle of Old Monk from the minibar and, steering with his elbow, he pours the golden-brown liquid into Rajasthani hand-carved cups made of oxidized copper and serves them on a Patchi silver tray worth a hundred thirty thousand rupees. Nil drinks and glances at Mel sideways, but when she looks up and meet his eyes he looks away.

  “Manuj,” Nil says, his voice hoarse, and the driver looks at him through the rearview mirror but Nil doesn’t have anything to tell him and so, staring at him for a few seconds, he goes, “Music.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Spiegel im Spiegel” fills the air and it’s a piece by an Estonian composer, Arvo Part, the beauty of which Nil couldn’t initially understand, but which is now in love with, and Mel turns to flash him with one of those rare, dazing smiles, and Nil smiles back, his heart beating thrice as fast, a delightfully painful rhythm. Mel touches his thigh with her hand and he stiffens at first, but then relaxes and returns her touch by pushing his leg against her hand, but when he looks up to see her reaction, Mel is back to her book.

  The driver pulls over in front of the gates of Scheria and Nil curses him and his whole family under his breath for his uncanny timing, and Mel opens the door before the driver can do it for her and she is about to get off but she stops and turns and, almost as an afterthought, leans in to hug Nil, whispering incomprehensible words in his ear, but before he can react in any way or dwell in their dream-like proximity, Mel is gone, kissing Ferang on the cheek, disappearing in a puff of ocher dust, for objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

  “Sir, I take you—”

  “No, Manuj, thank you,” says Ferang. “Don’t bother.”

  Nil shakes his head. “Are you kidding? Manuj will take you home as well.”

  “Never mind, Nil.” Ferang places his hand on Nil’s shoulder and presses lightly. “Go take some rest, getting married is no mean feat after all.” He chuckles. Then, serious, he goes, “WhatsApp me if you need me.”

  Ferang smiles. He has contagious smile. Ferang’s eyes turn to slits when he smiles, almost disappearing into his eyelids. Nil feels Ferang’s smile climbing onto his chest and spreading out over Nil’s own lips. It’s both reassuring and upsetting to be in awe of someone who fancies himself as more of a charmer than he actually is.

  “I still—I think it’s better if we drive you.” Nil says with hesitation. “It takes forever, and then... with all those people.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m used to the bus.”

  Ferang falls back on the seat and gets comfortable. Ferang’s decision is final, Nil knows that. Finality, he thinks, is something that both he and Mel seem to have in common.

  “I like it,” Ferang adds. “Traveling with the crowd, I mean. Sharing the hardships of the masses, it makes me feel alive.”

  Nil shrugs. He activates the built-in massaging device in the backrest. He wouldn’t mind being a little more like Ferang.

  “Did you meet Aishaniya at the wedding?” Ferang asks, the Mercedes stuck in the traffic again.

  “From the University?”

  “No, Rai.”

  “Sure, I saw her talk to Raj Kapoor.”

  Silence falls. Nothing but the driver whistling away can be heard. The driver doesn’t understand classical music.

  “Are you sure that Raj Kapoor was there?” Ferang asks.

  Nil focuses. He tries to evoke the image of the reception. The attempt leaves him bewildered. It is as if the mere recollection of it is enough to alter his senses. He presses his index and middle fingers on the bridge of his nose in an attempt to ward off an headache. And he realizes that he has no idea whether he was there or not. He looks out the window but there’s nothing to see.

  Candil, the colonial district, welcomes them tenderly. The heritage building that Nil calls home shines in the dim light. Nil thinks about the cupboard filled with booze, the cupboard waiting for him in the living room, and wipes the sweat off his palms on his trousers, and when the driver takes the ramp to the underground parking, he feels the start of a panic attack, and thinks of asking Ferang to stay for the night, but, by the time he makes up his mind to do it, they are already in the air-conditioned lobby, hugging sideways, and then Ferang heads towards the exit and disappears into a whiff of humidity.

  “Good morning, sir,” says the doorman.

  Nil ignores him and walks to the elevator where he brushes the touch screen pad for the second floor. In front of the reinforced door of his apartment, he punches in the access code and the apartment’s lights go on automatically as he passes through th
e entrance and past the kitchen and the open space living room and dining room, and speeds up through the hallway to barf his guts out in his sophisticated crapper—imported from Italy for the rootin’-tootin’ low price of one hundred thousand rupees. The rumble of his own retching scares him to death, but he can’t get up and wonders with horror at the possibility of the tip of his nose touching the inside of the toilet bowl while he pukes out what appears to be the entirety of his own wedding feast.

  With his head in the toilet, Nil makes a mental note to ask Kamat for a packet of powder. Right now it seems the only way out of this.

  Back in the kitchen, Nil lights a Benson and rinses his mouth chugging three shots of Old Monk and then he walks into the smaller bathroom—the one covered with basalt tiles—and turns on the Jacuzzi. While waiting for it to fill he quaffs some more Old Monk. Some of it trickles down his chin.

  “Well,” he says to no one in particular.

  He dips into the bath with his clothes on and closes his eye and, taking one more sip in a half hearted attempt to battle the pervading sense of physical dissatisfaction, he tips his head into the steaming water. Down here, he thinks about how cool it would be to lose consciousness in the Jacuzzi after drinking his mind wasted like a troubled rock star hunted by his genius would. Or he could be the new John Pilger, if the investigation succeeds, and bring justice to this city and show Dad that there is another way, his own, where past mistakes would not have a say in everything he does anymore.

  He has to come up to breath though, and suddenly the water is too hot and the bath too small and Nil gets the hell out of there and, helping himself to another drink straight from the bottle, he drips all over the red oak floor imported from the UAE.

  He undresses and opens the refrigerator door, looks inside, and then slams the door shut. The kitchen peninsula looks too bulky, an odd mismatch with the rest of the neatly designed kitchen, and for sure this mismatch must be the source of his discomfort and so he thinks about calling up Dad to redecorate the kitchen, but instead he pours himself some more Old Monk into a British era glass left to him by his grandfather. He drinks it straight.

  Hell, yes. This is the life.

  Caught by a paranoia attack, Nil looks through the peephole of the main door at the empty hallway as if waiting for the arrival of someone at any moment. For a second he’s sure that Kamat is watching him through the peephole in the opposite door. The thought makes him freak out. Nil holds the glass to his mouth, but when he notices the smudge of condensation his lips left on it, he knows that there’s no way he can have another sip without throwing up again.

  He takes a Xanax and turns on his MacBook to continue writing about the Water Mafia, but he has no new information to work with and finds himself re-reading the same, old, extremely vague articles offered by international media, and then he ends up watching videos of autopsies till first light, and then he takes a shower and shaves and wears a linen Berluti suit and drinks a cup of black coffee imported from Jamaica for another hundred thousand, and then he calls the driver on the intercom and tells him to get the car ready in front of the building and gets chauffeured to college.

  ***

  In the half-light of the cafeteria in the basement Nil can’t help but notice a resemblances between the other students and mites. Many of them congratulate him on the marriage, but they do it with prissy tone and smarmy manners. The mites parading before him sure have their own purpose and full-fledged lives made of friend-and-boyfriend-mites and exams for which to study, and thanks to these individual peculiarities of theirs, they all look substantially alike, and in the hundreds of individuals Nil sees the same set of ten-to-twelve personalities and movements and even noses: the bits and pieces mixed together in a macabre collage.

  Nil doesn’t mean to diminish the fluid course of chance and destiny that conspired for them to be born and end up together in this cafeteria, in fact, the thought makes them regain almost human connotations, but before they lose their imaginary antennas, Nil remembers that he doesn’t give a fuck and wouldn’t even if all of them disappeared; and that their existence, and their chance, and their destinies, and even their congratulations make little difference to him. The absence of a few of them would, on the contrary, make for a world far more peaceful and quiet and respectful. How is it possible, Nil wonders, to both love and despise humans so much?

  “Congratulations,” chirps Sahana, showing up in front of him. “But please, no children.”

  “No way.”

  “I mean, come on, the world is already overpopulated—”

  “And the resources are running out, I agree with you,” goes Nil. “When is the next Club of Intellectuals?”

  Sahana laughs. “The name is Club of Change,” she says and then, glancing at the people around them adds, “but we might as well call it that. Will you be there next Thursday?”

  “How could I not be?”

  “You know, when your mother came by to give a speech that day? That was the most motivational afternoon of the last semester.”

  Nil tries to hide his sense of pride. Perhaps not everyone is a mite, after all.

  “Yes,” Leena intervenes, “your mom is one example to us all. I always follow her blog. Did you read the last post, the one on the rights of untouchable women?”

  “Of course,” goes Sahana. And then, to Nil, “How brave.”

  Nil smiles.

  “But my favorite is the one against Article 377. Brilliant,” she says.

  “Oh, sure, that one had unprecedented resonance across the country. I’m sure one day you’ll write, too.”

  “We have to start preparing the material for the march on the 17th,” Nil cuts short. “We will abolish this barbaric law. Everyone should be able to love whom they feel like.”

  “You can bet on that, bro,” goes Leena, giving him a high-five. “If we don’t, who will?”

  “With all the bullshit of the Republicans—now that they feel invigorated—we have to work twice as hard to defend the minorities.”

  “Republicunts, you mean?” Leena winces sagaciously.

  Everybody giggles.

  “Fucking stop it,” spits Careena, passing by them. “You are not even Americans.”

  Nil frowns and thinks of something to say back but can’t think of anything.

  “Don’t bother with her,” says Leena with a knowing look. “She has a problem.”

  “Anyway,” sings Sahana, “I’ll prepare the material for the billboards, and then we can split the cost.”

  “Done. And then on the 17th we give the billboards to the demonstrators.”

  “Yes.” Sahana wavers. “Will you go?”

  “At the march?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need to study,” says Nil.

  “Yeah, same here.”

  “Me too,” goes Leena.

  Silence.

  “So I’ll see you on Thursday?”

  Nil shakes hands with both of them.

  Ah, the bliss of proxy protests.

  Scanning the cafeteria in search of Ferang, Nil thinks that this University is a place of pure enlightenment. And here is Ferang, as always surrounded by a number of females. Nil starts towards the group, but then decides to enjoy the show without disturbing the weaver at work.

  “I won’t tell you the whole story,” Ferang is saying. “But I can assure you that those kids are giving me more than I could give back in a hundred lifetimes.”

  “Aw, that’s so adorable,” chirps the fat woman in front of him. “You really are doing good for them.”

  Ferang just smiles and touches his chin and his lower lip with the tip of his fingers. “If there’s anything I’ve learned is that we won’t change the world,” he continues, and then, after a dramatic pause, “But we can change the world for one person.”

  “So India for you is like a second home.”

  “Home is not a place, but other human beings.”

  “Dude, take me with you,” goes one of the gir
ls. “It is my great desire to help others, you know? To put my privilege to the disposal of the weak.”

  “They do not need your selfies, Vidya,” says another student, without taking her eyes off him.

  “Of course you can come,” says Ferang, his eyes warm and bright. “In fact, I invite you all to see the real life beyond the fiction of these walls, where a group of barefoot kids is waiting for me—although some days it feels like I am the one waiting for them.”

  Shaking his brown forelock, he glances at the Kashmiri beauty who’s passing by, slowing to listen to him.

  “Aren’t you ever scared? I mean, traveling by bus and all—”

  Another girl speaks up, her eyes full of horror. “Plus, in the Pit... I mean, ew.”

  “I’m as mortal as anyone else,” he answers. “There is much to learn from the dark side as there is from the bright side of this world, but by ignoring what is wrong you give it strength.” Ferang sways his head, almost as an Indian would. “I play my humble part in exposing the phenomena that no one can ignore, for if we stop listening because we think we know everything already, then we become accomplices.”

  “You’re doing oh so much good, Ferang.”

  “There is a lot to do. Together, one step at a time.”

  “You restored my faith in humanity,” said the first girl. “Now, let’s please have some pasta?”

  “Prove to me that will can defeat fate,” says Ferang in mock farewell.

  “Send me pictures next time you go see your children.”

  When the group disperses, Nil sees that the fat girl with whom Ferang was talking and smiling is Savitri ma’am, the professor teaching Communication Theories, who’s typically a bitch, but who now listens to him as if he were Narendra Modi himself. She spells out the words as if she were speaking to an idiot or an African, Nil tells himself, but her eyes are wide open and shiny, magnetized by his charisma, and soon after she’s swinging her head and calling him “Beta”, and Nil feels a sense of pride being his friend.

  Someone is going to score full marks in the next test, Nil thinks.

  He is approaching the two of them when his gaze meets Mel’s in the opposite corner of the cafeteria, and he feels that she has been studying him till now. She returns to talking affably to a group of strangers. Nil can’t hear what they’re saying, but the sight of her trying so hard to fit in with just about any brown skinned person saddens him. Even when they were children, that was always her main concern, hiding the white half of her genes.