Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  In the canteen, after three unbearable hours of Business Journalism, Ferang is talking to a group of girls and smiling as he makes casual physical contact and leans toward them when they speak and then backs off and laughs, throwing his head back, and then he gets serious and sure enough he’s telling them of this or that time when he saved a bunch of orphans from a fire or when he resuscitated a baby giving him a heart massage, and Nil is not in the mood to hear him out. Mel might be home to sober up, though he has always seen her in good shape, even after the toughest nights.

  A WhatsApp message: Jiya. Nil feels tears welling in his eyes. She’s sending him pictures from London. She writes, “Shopping at Harvey Nichols,” with a smiley. A goddamn cheerful, yellow, threatening smiley. His hands are shaking as he archives the conversation and tucks his iPhone away.

  Nil has a burrito at a Mexican restaurant on the corner of the road, then gets back to college to attend Ethics of Journalism where he thinks he’s taking notes, but by the end of the two hours he double-checks them and it turns out that he has drawn stylized tiger footprints on thirteen notebook pages. He feels very moved at the idea that this magnificent animal may be in danger of extinction.

  At Candle Cove, after telling the driver to pass by and pick him up an hour earlier than usual for the pleasure of having him wait on the roadside, Nil is trying to drown his stomach in a series of neat Sazeracs, while still seeking to focus on Mel’s words, who is stunning in her casual Alexis Molly twenty thousand rupees dress. She briefs them about the rise to power of the Hijra, and though his brain burns with every breath, Nil assimilates the new information with surprising lucidity, and for a moment he has this stark impression of inching closer to the truth.

  “We need to make sure he does it, the transition,” Mel says.

  An instrumental version of “Always On My Mind” by Elvis Presley resonates in the background. Nil recognizes it and it’s quite an achievement, he feels.

  “If we want to get justice for these people,” Mel carries on, “we need for the public to be indignant, and to make that happen, we need to stimulate the interest of the media. The leader of the Pit changing sex for the sake of his people is a damn fine story.”

  Silence falls. Nil, his eyes closed, gobbles down his Sazerac in a sip.

  “I’m next,” says Ferang, clapping his hands.

  “What will you ask him?” Nil gestures to the waiter for another round.

  “Isn’t it obvious, bhai?” answers Ferang, a broad smile on his lips. “I’ll ask him who is his hairdresser.” He laughs patting him on the back.

  Despite himself, Nil smiles back.

  At home that evening, when the bell rings and, approaching the peephole, Nil sees but a hand blocking the view and he thinks it’s the police, they are here, they have finally arrived, and so with trembling hands he opens the door and yes, this must be the end.

  “Choose,” says Kamat marching in the apartment, thrusting his iPhone under Nil’s nose. On the screen, a WhatsApp conversation with a series of photos of girls in provocative poses, their asses jutting up in the air, fingers on their groins, lips parted. In spite of the lump in his throat, Nil can’t take his eyes away.

  “What the fuck are you waiting for, man?” says Kamat. “The Nepali or the Punjabi. Don’t you tell me the Tamilian because she is black.”

  Nil points his finger at the Nepalese and winces when the photograph is automatically magnified occupying the entire screen, and his finger is on her vagina.

  “Perfect. Fucking white,” Kamat cries, typing a message with a feverish surge. “Val’s girls,” he announces. “The best whores in Ayodhya.” His grin takes up almost half of his face.

  Kamat returns to his own apartment, which is opposite Nil’s, and leaves the door ajar and Nil follows him like a fucking robot, and Kamat pours some Dom Perignon in two Persian crystal glasses and toasts, “So we’re gonna fuck her,” and Nil, sitting on the enormous sofa imported from France, downs the champagne and burps and feels the onset of nausea and glances at the door.

  “I’ll send you the pimp’s number,” says Kamat, “so you can enjoy them at your own leisure.”

  “I don’t want it,” says Nil.

  Kamat ignores him and types away. A WhatsApp message. Despite himself, Nil takes his iPhone out of the pocket. It’s the phone number with a kissing emoji.

  “Don’t give it around,” Kamat says. “Took me ages to get this pimp’s number. He’s the fucking best, you know.”

  Kamat turns the Bose sound system on and some horrid house music fills the room. They don’t say a single word for twenty minutes. Then, when the bell rings, Kamat starts dancing around singing the jingle of a famous ad, only he replaces the words with “slut”.

  The door opens and Kamat shakes a male hand covered with thick, black hair, whose owner Nil can’t see. A green-ringed hand shaking in mid-air, that’s it, no visible body attached to it, but peddling bitches around nonetheless.

  The whore, amidst the opulence of Kamat’s living room, looks around with a dreamy expression plastered on her face. Kamat’s folks are brokers at Dalal Street, Nil remembers.

  “Take off your clothes,” Kamat barks, once the man is gone. Then he turns. “How is she? Dude, look at that ass. Touch it.”

  Nil stiffens. “It’s okay,” he says, “I’m fine.”

  Kamat ignores him. He looks transfixed. “Wiggle it around, yeah. Raise those arms. What if... yeah, just like that.”

  An involuntary “Wow” slips out of Nil’s mouth.

  “Right? But I’m telling you, she’s damn tight.”

  “Objects in the mirror are closer—”

  “What?”

  Nil doesn’t answer, and though he wants to look away with all his might, his eyes are fixed on the whore’s ass like it’s the center of the universe.

  “Bend. Like that. Quite flexible, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah.”

  The slut kisses Nil’s knees.

  “Eat him.”

  “I...”

  “Come on, then she’ll suck your feet.”

  “Kamat.”

  “Look, man—”

  “Wait—”

  “She’ll drive you crazy, I swear.”

  “Kamat, really...”

  “Do it!”

  “Kamat!”

  Kamat goes serious and straightens his back and his face reflects the abnormality that he’s glimpsed in Nil and so, panicking, Nil takes off his fifty thousand rupees Prada shoes and offers the whore his foot, and she pulls his sock off with her mouth and begins to suck on his big toe, and Nil feels her tongue encircle it and then stimulate the gap between his fingertip and nail and then she starts sucking the length of his big toe and Nil exhales and Kamat is smiling with satisfaction, but Nil is breathing ever so deeply to ward off the overwhelming sense of nausea gripping his throat and, fearing he might barf on her head, he withdraws his foot, keeping the big toe lifted away from the parquet, and in less than no time the saliva covering it cools down and Nil feels a chill throughout his body but responds to Kamat’s glance with a knowing nod.

  He convinced him. His secret is safe. It is, of course it is.

  Kamat already has his dick out. His sex is semi-erect and he holds it at the root with two fingers, waving it in what seems to be an invitation, and so the whore goes up to him on all fours, and “Dude, she’s a vacuum,” goes Kamat, throwing his head back. “Oh, wait. On the underside as well... Yeah...”

  “I should...”

  “Come on, dude, get your ass back here!” says Kamat when he opens his eyes and sees Nil opening the front door still. “We’ll take her to bed, right?”

  Nil looks back at him.

  “Close the fucking door and we’ll take her to bed, okay?”

  Nil closes the door and precedes Kamat and the whore into the bedroom. He doesn’t know why he does it. He just doesn’t know.

  “Come on, you piece of ass,” he hears Kamat say behind him.

  The r
oom is dipped in a blue light, like a porn movie set, and this is fucking reality check for Nil and he turns, looking for a way out of this, but Kamat closes the bedroom door.

  “Come on, you know you like it,” he says. And to her, “Move.” And the idea of touching the whore is revolting to Nil.

  He is seized by an attack of vertigo. In the corner of the exquisitely furnished room, there is a brown, plastic chair. Supporting himself on the antique mahogany wardrobe, Nil sits down and closes his eyes waiting for the room to stop whirling around him. His big toe is freezing cold.

  Kamat seems to have forgotten his presence and, stripping, follows the whore on the waterbed and when Nil opens his eyes, he has already taken a Viagra tablet, and after having sniffed dope from her vulva, after having taken her with his blow-strewn member, after having penetrated her forcefully from behind, he starts screwing her and there seems to be something satanic, demonic in the act itself, which represents, in a way, the fate of the whole damn human sexuality.

  Half an hour later, when Nil hears Kamat ejaculate, he gets up and leaves the room tiptoeing through the clothes scattered on the ground and sneaks out the front door and punches in the passkey to his own place, and when the lock snaps behind him, Nil is covered with a sheen of sweat, and the air conditioning left on at full speed freezes his armpits and the back of his neck.

  He sighs and leans against the door, but the contact with it makes him wince and so he rushes to the kitchen, where the automated lights flood the open space, and he rummages for the bottle of Old Monk among the other rums and whiskeys in the cupboard, groaning with relief when it touches his thumb.

  Nil can’t quantify the number of drinks he has had when the front door opens and light footsteps rustle in the living room.

  He almost drops the Old Monk bottle. He has to focus to relax the muscles of his jaw and anus. He pours himself another glass filled to the brim, but then he drinks from the bottle instead, his tongue rubbing the glass as he opens his throat to accommodate gush after gush of the vanilla flavoured rum. A pleasant numbness washes over him.

  In his shirt pocket, the dope is pulsing.

  Nil looks at the maid out of the corner of his eyes and puts the glass down on the kitchen counter, pouring himself another Old Monk. He starts toward the living room, where he drops on the couch, turning on the 78-inch Samsung TV. He wonders about what the hell she’s doing here so late at night. But then again, he might have called her himself over the intercom, just after leaving Kamat’s apartment. The idea of this woman jumping up in the middle of the night to answer his call gives him a sweet kind of inebriation.

  On TV there is the re-run of the Euro Cup. He zaps to one of those post-match analysis sessions and then to The best of Manchester United Goals from last night’s match and again to Pune vs Bangalore—nothing worth his interest in the sports section, so he shifts to the documentary channels and after zapping back and forth a bit, he settles for a show on the mating of whales off the coast of Japan.

  It seems, Nil finds out sipping his Old Monk, that when the large cetaceans are in love, they become more daring: their newfound estrus pushes them into warmer waters, where groups of zealous fishermen await their arrival with mercenary passion.

  “Despite what you may think, however,” says the reporter with a soft voice, “the consumption of whale meat in Japan is unusual.”

  Nil zaps and sips his Old Monk and then back he goes to the goals on replay. He finishes his drink without even noticing. He would stand up to pour himself another, but the subdued presence of the maid relaxes him, and so he lets his body sink deeper into the burgundy leather cushions of the sofa.

  He lights a Benson. The first puff is as always something sublime and, starting from his throat, the smoke spreads to his whole body, up to the tips of his hair. It feels like centuries ago when he smoked the last cigarette, and wondering how he has managed to resist it this long, he takes a second drag. But this brings with it a bitter aftertaste that lingers on the lips, and licking them, Nil can’t whisk away a taste similar to what he thinks gunpowder would be like. Despite this, turning the old Dupont lighter in his hands, he rises the Benson to his lips for a third time. What a shame, he tells himself, that all good things in life last but a drag before turning dull.

  He puts the smoke off in the ashtray and tucks the Dupont back into the pocket of his Gucci trousers, his gaze fixed on the big screen in front of him. He blinks thrice when his eyes unfocus involuntarily.

  The maid, looking melodramatically exhausted, is rubbing the entrance floor with a cloth, her weight distributed between the palms of her hands and the soles of her bare feet, her stubby fingers spread wide, her every move accompanied by the tinkling of her faux-silver anklets. Squatting, keeping her head and back low as if to go unnoticed, her torso is stretched out in a somewhat distracting fashion, her sari askew enough to reveal a considerable portion of her dark hip.

  Nil wonders if she’s wearing a bra.

  “Our aim is to get where we deserve,” Enrique is saying on TV when the maid finishes polishing the entrance.

  After a hint of hesitation, she starts working in the living room, beginning from the opposite side of the couch, crouching below the TV, her exposed hip now bathed in the cold light of the screen. Distracted by the sight of the servant, Nil glances at the woman and at the screen, at the screen and at the woman, wishing he had something to do with his hands, and so he scratches his thigh through the blue fabric of his trousers, but then withdraws his hand and hides it between the sofa cushions, trying to focus to the TV.

  The maid moves the table, the pyramid of decorative wicker balls threatening to fall off, and then she lifts the black and amaranth Persian rug and rubs the parquet on one side of the sofa. Nil looks at her inching forward centimeter by centimeter, her head bowed to the point that some strands of her hair escape from her bun and brush over the floor, and he waits in silence for those hands toughened by peasant work to come closer, and it’s then that he realizes that his stretched legs are blocking her way. Licking his lips he gets that bitter aftertaste again. He casts another look at the TV but it no longer holds any interest for him, and he glances back at the maid whose back is strong, skinny where it connects with the ribs but muscular where the shoulder blades meet in a mechanical rhythm, and a-something, a-something in the way she moves tells him that she does indeed feel his eyes on herself. She stops in front of his legs and keeps her eyes on the ground, waiting for Nil to shift his legs, the golden chain hanging from her neck the only object left in motion, swinging past her flat chin and over the folds of the sari, on her breasts.

  As if awakening, Nil makes room and turns the channel hoping to find the documentary about the whales again, but the documentary is over and now there is something about South American aboriginals grilling a couple of tarantulas and eating them as if they were chicken. He thinks about lighting another cigarette but decides against it, and the maid is mopping the floor in front of him and her gold chain oscillates at a faster pace. And Nil can’t help but stare at her arched back.

  Nil stretches, lifts his legs and rests them on the maid’s back, thinking that this is the perfect place to place one’s feet.

  She freezes instantly—the gold chain the only moving object in the entire room—her eyes fixed at the parquet floor at a precise point between her hands on the wiping-cloth. The cloth is frayed and gray with discoloured red edges and her arms are slender but muscular and remind Nil of the gnarled branches of a banyan tree.

  Nil relaxes and can finally enjoy the documentary. Moments later though he begins to feel the maid breathing through her back muscles and gets back to look at her and her chain is still swinging before her breasts and face, which is so everyday and devoid of every expression and aimed at the floor as if she were never to raise her head again.

  The bitter taste of smoke still in his mouth, Nil fears being sick on the burgundy leather sofa and feels the urgent need for another glass of Old Monk, but he holds hi
s position, staring at the screen with all his might, but the maid keeps on breathing under his feet, drawing his attention, and Nil can’t concentrate on the TV. Her imperfect stillness prevents it.

  Nil slides his left foot from the maid’s back to her side, feeling up the cheap fabric of the sari covering that hot skin, and then down he goes touching the exposed hip, where her dark skin shines with youth.

  A shudder goes through the maid’s chin, just a little movement, but Nil can’t ignore it, and the house seems to become huge, the space between the walls almost infinite when Nil’s foot slips under the sari and wanders over her protruding ribs tracing their contours, climbing higher up, caressing her small breast and titillating her nipples. She lets out a sob.

  Nil awakens from this state of trance and withdraws his legs and pulls them to his chest, and the maid’s eyes flee and she rises and rearranges her sari so that it covers her hip, and then she goes into the sleeping quarters, where she cleans the bathrooms, vacuuming the carpet and making up the beds in the bedrooms. Then she leaves, those soft steps of hers fading away in the hallway.

  Nil gets up to pour himself some more rum and, taking the bottle with him, he smokes and drinks in front of the TV and finds a channel where the whale documentary is still airing and is relieved that he can see it from start to finish, at long last. It’s a great documentary.

  Later, well into the night, Nil goes down to the garage to pick up the Mercedes and the driver tries to dissuade him because Dad doesn’t want him to drive alone and because, well, he has no driver’s license, but Nil laughs in his face and starts the engine and almost hits a pillar darting into the street.

  He’d like to gun it like Imal does in his stories and Mel does in real life, but cannot, as his parents’ warnings keep echoing through his mind: “It’s the driver’s responsibility to look out for others on the road” and “It would be bad PR if the press comes to know that you’re breaking the law.”