Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  “A mango smoothie,” goes Nil, approaching the juice stall.

  “Kya?” asks Nobody.

  “No Hindi,” says Nil shaking his head.

  The juice guy looks down and slices a mango, and Nil turns back to first look at Mel talking to those random Madrasis and then at Ferang and tries to drive away a hint of jealousy that pierces through his gut when he catches Mel meeting Ferang’s eyes and smiling a little at him across the hall. Ferang cracks a joke and Savitri laughs wholeheartedly, though, Nil knows, she didn’t actually get it.

  “Ferang is a scam,” says Careena, popping up at Nil’s side, as if talking to herself. She’s sipping an iced coffee with a straw.

  “Fucking junkie,” says Nil and walks away.

  Nil goes to History of Cinema, taught by a white guy from Texas, and his senses are strangely heightened and his written notes polished, or at least that’s what he believes, but when he tries to go through them once the class is over, it turns out that they make no sense at all.

  Then he attends Specialized Reporting where a Bombay-based journalist talks about his experience in Afghanistan or Iraq or something, and Nil, sitting in the last row, falls asleep only to wake up when half the class has left.

  Rape has become a political tool to instill fear in this country, is scrawled on the whiteboard, sending chills down Nil’s spine, as the gurgling noise of water running in the pipes—the same sound he heard as Jiya took a bath in their hotel suite—rings through his ears.

  Nil gets up and walks out, craving right away for the air conditioning that he’s left behind, and he walks through the hallways to the bathroom where he hopes to find Imal. As he opens his zipper and urinates, he hears the sound of a scraping snort rising from behind one of the closed toilet doors, and he knows he has hit the jackpot. His testicles ache at the relief washing over him.

  Imal gets out of the toilet and if his brain does register someone else in the room he sure as hell doesn’t show it, and instead he looks in the mirror and puffs out his chest and rustles up a Groucho Marx kind of step. He turns on the tap, rinses his nostrils and sighs with satisfaction. Nil turns towards him even before zipping up his fly, and joins him at the sink, washing his right hand and, staring at the drainpipe, he casually asks, “Good stuff?”

  “Rupesh’s stuff.” Imal’s tone leaves room to no objections.

  Nil dries his hands with the spotless, warm towel hanging from the steel towel rack above the sink.

  “Do you have any extra?”

  Imal seems amused. “When did you start blowing?”

  “Since I got married,” says Nil, without really knowing where the joke ends and where the truth begins. Imal gets serious and nods and fishes an envelope the size of a matchbox from his pocket.

  “Today I don’t have enough to give you, but we can bump some together.”

  Imal spreads his fingers pouring a hump of blow on the flap of skin between his thumb and forefinger and with savoir-faire he tilts his head and inhales and then repeats the process giving Nil a knowing look and offering his own hand to snort upon.

  The coke is immaculate and Nil wonders if there is anything purer in the world. It shines from the inside, almost. Nil prepares to snort, but then remembers Mel and her mouth pressed against his hair, in the bathroom of the Taj Hotel, and so he pulls back.

  “I can’t,” he says, shaking his head. There is a dramatic charge in his voice.

  Imal shrugs and without thinking twice he does this line as well, and when he raises his head, his eyes sparkle and his irises have taken a softer hue and his cheekbones appear more pronounced and his eyebrows more defined and his ears more proportionate and, perhaps, Imal seems even taller than he was five seconds ago. He smiles confidently.

  “So I’ll catch you at the party?” he says.

  “It’s tonight?” Nil asks, despite knowing well enough when it is, just like everyone else in this fucking University.

  “Tonight, tomorrow night,” says Imal with a smirk. “Anytime you want, brother.” And he’s gone.

  Nil turns the tap on again and washes his hands, he washes them seven times, telling himself each one is the last one, and when he can finally bring himself to stop, he grabs the towel from the towel rack, but the cloth is now moist and gives him a feeling of unpleasantness.

  Nil lunches on a plate of hummus in a vegan restaurant near the University and, after the scarce portion, for a moment longs for the chicken tandoori his family cook used to make when he was a child, but then he remembers that he dislikes the Indian cuisine and gets up with self-importance and, waiting for the next class to start, he reads five chapters of Tell Me No Lies by John Pilger. He stands up when the teacher enters. He dozes to the sound of two classmates discussing the war in Kosovo as if they actually know something about it.

  Nil wakes up with the usual sense of loss girding his skull and realizes that the class is over and people are getting out but they do so moving backwards, and Careena huffs but, instead of coming out, the air goes back in and fills her lungs, and Imal grinds his teeth together but his bone crunches first and then moves, and Nil is the only one moving as he should, but he’s not quite sure of that, and then he wakes up, really wakes up to the same two, Nitesh and Shubhankar—he thinks they are called—still talking, now about cinema, agreeing that A Serbian Film should have won at Cannes.

  Nil crosses the main gate on his way out, meeting the flock of the design students, all of whom are losers and hoes, and the business students, all cokeheads and whoremongers, and the school kids, who, despite their young age, are already one or the other.

  The Mercedes, along with an array of other cars with their respective drivers, is waiting on the roadside, and Nil’s driver says something that Nil doesn’t even attempt to decipher and, circling around the car, he throws his eighty-five thousand rupees Fendi bag in the trunk and then, sitting in the back seat, pours himself a glass of Old Monk on the rocks listening to “Cheap Thrills” by Sia.

  Thank god, the driver starts the engine without talking so Nil can enjoy the coolness of the AC after the two and a half muggy minutes he took to cross the campus. The sight of the traffic out there though is so unbearable to him that it prevents him from enjoying the music or the rum, and so he checks the news on the BBC app: the US has occupied Syria in response to a terrorist attack by the Islamic State in Los Angeles; and 2Pac’s concert in New York has broken every turnout record.

  “This is fake news,” he murmurs between one sips and the other.

  “What?” asks the driver.

  Nil ignores him.

  “At 9 o’clock,” he says when the driver pulls over in front of Candle Cove.

  “Yes, sir,” says the driver, smiling coyly in the rearview mirror. The white and gold Mercedes waits for Nil to disappear inside before leaving in a cloud of dust.

  Nil climbs down the steps at full speed, fleeing from the chaos of dust and noise and smell on the road, and lets the semi-darkness suck him into the bar, and he has to force himself to calm down and not run through the tables as he crosses the Smoking Woman sitting at the counter among the hat-shaped lamps towards their usual spot in the far-left corner, and only after adjusting his chair and sitting down, does he realize that he has covered the last few meters rushing. Candle Cove feels more like home than home itself.

  “Children,” Mel is saying, “they are the most beautiful act of selfishness there is.”

  “Wow,” goes Nil pretending to be shocked by what she said. He isn’t.

  Mel greets him with an inscrutable glare and looks down to the blue folder resting in the middle of the table. It reads “Unicorns and shit” scrawled in Ferang’s juvenile handwriting. What a witty way to hide their Water Mafia investigation.

  “We don’t get summers like we used to,” says Ferang glancing at him.

  Nil smiles a little and asks about the folder, but both of them cut him off.

  “I was saying...” Mel goes.

  “Mel was going to tell
us something quite unpopular,” goes Ferang.

  “I expect nothing less,” says Nil smiling perhaps too openly, and then tries to restrain himself, interlocking his fingers on the table.

  Mel is drawing an imaginary rangoli on the veined wood of the table and for the first time Nil realizes that the table is just a door laid horizontally, probably dating back to the Victorian period and it’s old but nonetheless beautiful.

  “Let’s face it, having children is the most beautiful act of selfishness that a person can commit,” says Mel and waits for a reaction, but none follows. Nil leans towards her, propping himself on his elbows.

  “The reason why the world is going to hell,” she continues, “is that children are a reflection of their parents, and losers breed more often than the others. The planet is overpopulated, the resources have never been so scarce, injustice is everywhere around us—the middle class is slowly disappearing.”

  “Not in India,” goes Nil with a hint of disgust, but he doesn’t know why he said that and feels stupid.

  “Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, while the others suffer,” says Mel. “I’m not saying anything new. I just think it immoral to deliberately choose to throw a new individual, who has no say in the matter, into the world, without thinking twice, putting him in the same shit you’ve been through—in fact, probably worse, since the world has suffered your doings and those of your generation in the meantime.”

  The waiter appears with a tray and three drinks. Nil dives into his Sazerac.

  “Thank you, Percy,” say Mel and Ferang almost in unison.

  “Thank you,” mutters Nil in turn.

  Ferang, avoiding the black straw, takes a sip of his Gin Rickey and curls his lips but then smiles and rests his right arm on the back of the chair next to him.

  “There is no better thing than to bring...” Ferang stops searching for the right words. “Than to bring life into this world and try to make it the best possible version of itself, and of you. Think about it,” he says stretching his arms. “When you leave from here, you will have left something behind you. Something that will change the world, a little. I mean, what if by not having children we deprive the world of... the next Picasso or the next Martin Luther King?”

  The jukebox is playing a song unknown to Nil.

  “Certainly.” Mel has not yet touched her Chai Russian and observes the tea blend with the vodka like a stormy cloud hovering inside the tall, narrow glass. “A Picasso could very well be born from a violent family, true that, or from an environment of ignorant losers, but Picasso is one in a million.”

  “It doesn’t matter—”

  “Children are used as shortcuts,” she interrupts.

  “In this meaningless life raising a creature gives you meaning, Mel. Purpose.” Ferang shakes his head passionately, but his voice sounds light years away.

  “That’s the problem, that’s why the world is falling apart.”

  “Yes, there are parents who are, let’s say, addicts, but when they have a child, they are motivated to change.”

  “Bullshit,” spits Mel, her voice lit, her fingers gently pressed around her glass.

  “I’m not saying it happens everytime,” goes Ferang. “I’m saying that a child would give them a reason to do it.”

  “Not at all. Parents project their own shortcomings on their children, so that they grow in the same conditions, and often they take it out on them, because their children are in their total control. They own them.”

  Nil drinks the bottom of his drink. He always listens to their debates with utmost attention.

  “I know you cannot understand what I’m about to tell you,” says Ferang, a hint of condescension in his tone. “But you have to experience poverty to understand the pleasure that the poor receive from the interaction with children.”

  “A selfish pleasure,” corrects Mel.

  “And above all, Mel, it is for the world that you do it. Babies bring joy to the world, for they may even be an example to follow. They can make us better human beings.” Ferang clenches his fingers on the back of the chair next to him.

  “In fact, this system has worked wonders in the last ten thousand years,” goes Mel sarcastically. “As if having children is a something new.”

  “The world has always gone forward.”

  “The world sucks.”

  “I know the world, Mel. I live near a slum, I work with its inhabitants every day. We distribute condoms to kids, we teach sex education in schools.”

  “What I’m saying is that having children should not be a right but a privilege.”

  “And who gets this privilege?” Ferang runs a hand through his hair.

  “The worthy ones.” Mel raises her Chai Russian and takes it to her mouth only to place it back on the table without even moistening her lips.

  Nil is craving another drink.

  “Yet the parents of my children are poor as church mice,” says Ferang. “Often alcoholics, sometimes with AIDS, and yet, I assure you, those kids are small miracles—”

  “And yet, nine out of ten will become criminals.”

  Silence.

  Ferang chuckles and plays with the droplets of condensation on his glass, and when his laughter subsides, a sardonic smile lingers on his face.

  Mel takes a sip of Chai Russian and dries the edges of her lips with her fingertips.

  “Percy, what do you think?” asks Ferang.

  The waiter sticks his head up from below the counter and hesitates before answering.

  “I say... have children,” he goes, carefreely, putting on the table the usual platter of cheese pizza.

  “How many great men and women have had horrible parents?” Ferang bares a triumphant smile, as if the opinion of the waiter is in any way decisive.

  “And how many great men and women are out there?” says Mel, frowning. “I’d rather have a more conscious world, made of a mass more just, instead of a few extraordinary cases. The world cannot stand by the existence of a random Picasso, if what everyone else is doing is a collective eating, defecating and fucking contest.”

  Ferang feigns surprise hearing the cuss word. “But this will not happen,” he says with affected calm. “You can educate people, but you cannot expect from them that they stop reproducing. Having children is the only light in the lives of many. Sometimes the happiness of a single human being, however insignificant it may be, is more important than the big picture.”

  “More important than the entire human race? Please, Ferang.” Mel takes another sip and touches the corners of the blue folder on the table. “Here,” she goes, her eyes closed. “This implies that the only person you care about in the universe is yourself—”

  “What do you mean,” he goes, “I’m the most selfless—”

  “I’m not talking about you,” she says. “I mean in general. They only care about themselves, not even their own offspring, who because of you will have to endure a worse world than the one in which you have lived.” She opens her eyes and looks tired. “You see how fucking selfish man can be?”

  “Listen, mankind has survived to this day and, despite how shitty the circumstances, continues to do so thanks to... a very simple factor.” Ferang pauses in a perfectly calibrated fashion, then says, “Hope.” He finishes his Gin Rickey and with a nod he orders another round. “If we all start being this cynical, then there is no reason for our race to be there at all.”

  “So you’re saying that our rise is driven by hope?”

  “Yes.” He shrugs.

  “Do we also count the Holocaust among its effects?”

  “It is because of hope that we overcame—”

  “No,” Mel spells out.

  “Because people hoped for a better future, they fought to...” Ferang pauses, again choosing the words with a dreamy look on his face. “Conquer it. I’ll give you an example, many of the women I work with have abusive husbands and they know that they will never escape from their situation, and then—”


  “This is exactly the point.”

  “Let me finish my argument,” goes Ferang, but then he looks up and stops as the waiter serves them their drinks. Mel finishes her Chai Russian and hands the empty glass to the waiter, smiling faintly at him.

  “These women,” resumes Ferang, “as you said, may either surrender to their fate or even end their lives, but with hope they can build a better future instead, for themselves and for others.”

  “Okay,” Mel says. “Let’s make this example a little more concrete. Hope is a fairytale which, according to you, comes to life with the birth of a child.”

  Ferang nods.

  “In a nutshell, you, wife, are ready share the weight of living with a violent husband with a guiltless creature.” Mel smiles a bitter smile.

  Ferang smiles back. “Your way of reasoning, rationally speaking, works. But the point is that the world is not rational, and in such a chaotic place people need fairy tales. We cannot survive without...” He trails off. “Children are our small personal fairy tales.”

  “Is it better to have hope or to have the truth?” Nil whispers almost to himself, and then startled he pulls himself together, eying the two of them, fearing he has interrupted their conversation with something silly.

  “It is better to have hope,” Ferang says, “or to have the truth?” His gaze fixed somewhere on the table, Ferang repeats the question several times and seems to be impressed by it, and Nil waits for him to say something, to comment on it, anything really, but he simply blinks and drowns the words in a hearty swig of Gin Rickey.

  “Life has no meaning, Ferang,” Mel resumes. “You said it yourself. To think that there is a purpose greater than ourselves is foolish. The sole purpose out there is the one that we mold for ourselves, which is a fair and good thing to do, I mean, you can’t live without a purpose, but the catch is—to achieve your own made up goal is fucking hard.” Mel slaps the air. “If you feel your purpose is to become a great singer, or a doctor, or the president, it’s damn hard—”