Nil lets out a horrified “No”, one that scratches his throat, grinding his teeth, dancing on his lips.
In the fountain, prone, the hat still on his head, floats the pusher, lifeless. Across his throat, a scarlet smile.
“Slaughtered like a pig,” someone says.
The water is red with blood.
“They put a fucking bindi on his forehead,” growls someone else, pointing to the red mark running down from the hairline to the chin of the corpse. And then the people start looking at Nil, for he doesn’t belong and he looks like a Hindu, and a rich one at that, and—
Someone grabs his arm and pulls him back and Nil loses his balance and crashes into the onlookers, and the men, with their dirty beards, surround him, their teeth bare, and Nil keeps his eyes on their hands, ready for when they will dive into the folds of their clothes and take the blades out, and then Mel, a scarf around her head, appears in his face, hissing.
“Get out.”
Back in the street, Mel drags him past the car and in the alley. The screams of the crowd behind them grow in intensity and Nil looks at the dead dog, and Mel rests both hands on his shoulders and grips as if to keep him on the ground, to give him stability. Nil gasps. She hugs him. He doesn’t hug her back.
“I’m sorry,” she says, once they’re back in the car. Her voice sounds distant.
Nil is shaking his head, impetuously at first, then slower, and finally he stops. Only now he realizes he’s sitting on the passenger side. In Mel’s hands, the wheel.
Silence. Mel’s iPhone flashes in the darkening car.
“Don’t tell Ferang,” says Nil. “Please.”
Mel looks at the message. “It’s not him,” she says.
“Who is it?”
Mel shows him the screen.
“Damnit.” It’s the reporter they called. “Well, he still has a story,” goes Nil, bitter, pointing at the crowd in front of the mosque.
“He says it’s not his beat.”
“And what would his beat be?”
“Us.”
Nil’s nostrils swell. “Did they send a fucking lifestyle reporter for this?” Nil grips the door handle as if it would break.
“None other than Ganguli, our predecessor on this case.” Mel opens the door. “I have to go.”
Nil looks at her, in his eyes an unspoken question.
“It’s the only way to keep him from writing that the two richest brats in the city have started playing detective close to the Pit.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No need,” says Mel, without conviction.
Nil is already out of the car.
***
In silence, the two enter the cafe and Mel takes a place at a table on the side opposite to the mosque and Nil does the same two tables away, covering his face with the sandwich menu.
“Won’t he join us?” asks Ganguli, less than a minute later, sitting down with Mel, nodding at Nil.
Found out, Nil snorts and lowers the menu and orders an Old Monk but the waiter tells him that they serve no alcohol in this cafe, “Sori, sir,” and Nil stares at him and then orders a coconut smoothie and gets up and goes to the bathroom and does all the cocaine he has. His face looks haggard, translucent in the mirror, and he wants to punch his reflection but the fear of pain prevents him from doing so.
When he returns to the table, Mel and the journalist are conversing, and he looks like an old uncle, those innocuous-looking men who feel women up between their legs on the metro, and Mel gives him smiles in the right amount and intensity sipping a black tea that, Nil knows all too well, the reporter will end up paying for.
“Dad is a very busy man,” she is saying, “and although I don’t know much of the company, I know that thanks to the cooperation of the government we’re changing people’s lives.”
The reporter nods and writes, then he stops and looks at her and wobbles his head. He might be as smart as it gets, but she has him, she has him with her mouth and eyes and fingers.
“I know that because Dad gave me a new Versace two days ago,” Mel says, her voice shrill, frivolous. “To celebrate.” Her voice is filled in money.
The answer seems to satisfy the reporter. “And what about love,” he asks, a forced smile surfacing, “can you give us some gossip?”
Mel sighs and rests her chin on her clasped fingers, rolling her eyes. “To tell the truth, there’s this special guy. He’s my favorite bespectacled person.” She chuckles, a sound that could be interpreted as either coquetry or derision.
Ganguli writes on his notebook and glances at Nil.
The interview ends and the journalist stands up and looks happy, but then he stops. “You guys have no idea what you’re doing,” he says.
Mel, an unperturbed smile on her face, nods and shakes her hair, and goes, “Thank you, Mr Ganguli.”
A great journalist who has fallen into the disgrace of lifestyle reporting and thinks he still has a say. How depressing.
Mel motions to Nil to follow her and he gets up and pays with Paytm without having even touched the coconut whatever-that-is.
In the Mercedes, Mel sits again on the driver’s seat.
“I took a taxi,” she says after a pause, as if to justify the absence of the Enfield.
Nil thinks that leaving the bike at home is unlike her, but then realizes that being unlike her is what she does best.
When Mel starts driving, Nil thinks of lighting a Benson or pouring himself a drink but the dope has taken away any desire or weakness from him, which is fair and good.
“He always seems to be a step ahead of us,” he murmurs, almost to himself.
Mel says nothing. Nil starts to hum the tune of a song of which he doesn’t remember the title, trying to distract himself from his overcharged brain. But he mistakes the pitch of the chorus and punches hard the windshield. A web of cracks covers the glass. Mel doesn’t even flinch. Nil looks at his knuckles and, finding them intact, keeps on humming with more decision.
The song, he now remembers, is “After Every Party I Die”, again by IAMX.
Nil sends Imal a message asking if he has more dope but receives no answer. Five minutes later he sends another, in vain, and again, and then he pours himself a glass of Old Monk which gives him no pleasure nor pain, and, without saying a word, lets Mel drive up to Scheria, and here, while he waves goodbye, he vomits in the ashtray, and then he’s back in the garage of his building, and there is no trace of the driver, and then he remembers that he gave him the night off. He vows to have him executed along with his family.
Nil calls an SUV from a luxury taxi service and is waiting in front of the main gate, walking back and forth and trying to ignore the trembling of his hands, but in doing so he keeps on thinking about them, which makes them shake harder, and then the gate opens and Nil hops in the car and ask the driver to take him at Imal’s. Meanwhile, he message-bombs his own driver, asking him to kindly Bring your ass back here. Then he adds, At Imal’s.
He enters the compound undisturbed and reaches the top floor penthouse and rings the bell and hears Imal cursing under his breath as he looks out of the peephole. Nil wills himself not to look back at him.
The door opens. Imal looks kind of grim.
“You have stuff?” spits out Nil, forgetting the pleasantries.
Imal’s gaze is tinged with anger.
“Imal—”
With a stride, Imal steps out of the door pushing his chest against Nil’s, and although shorter by far, he puts his face in his face, just like a black thug from a second-rate movie.
“You fucking asshole,” he growls.
“Imal—”
“You crazy piece of shit.” Imal pushes him toward the elevator.
Nil backs away.
“Listen...” he says.
“How the hell do I get my stuff now, huh?” Up close, Imal sports a handsome beard, thick but orderly.
“I’m out, too,” says Nil, blushing.
“But I need it,” N
ilal barks.
Imal pushes him again. Nil spreads apart his legs and Imal bounces against his chest, the shadow of puzzlement crossing his face. They both realize how much taller Nil is. He looks at Imal in silence without knowing what to say, wondering whether he should apologize. No, he wants the drugs more.
“The next time I see you,” says Imal,” I’ll kill you, do you understand?”
The elevator doors open and Imal looks up and his expression changes. “Hey,” he says, as meek as a lamb.
In front of the elevator, Priyal looks at him with reproach.
“Do you want to come in?” he asks her.
“We’re late,” she says.
Imal closes the apartment door behind him and smiling walks past Nil and both he and Priyal disappear swallowed by the sliding doors, and Nil bends, barfing into the umbrella stand, but his stomach is empty and nothing comes out.
He lost. How could he even think his plan would work? He is out of dope. He failed, and he’s out of dope.
Pulling himself together, the only thing Nil feels is hatred toward the fucking umbrella stand, with that presumptuous faux-antique attitude, and so he lifts it up, dragging it in front of the elevator, but when it takes too long for the elevator to get back to the floor, Nil becomes conscious of the cameras pointing at him from every angle and so he puts it back in place.
In the parking lot, he feels depressed, wondering when was the last time he slept or ate something substantial, and yet the idea of doing either makes him uncomfortable, and then he sees the driver and the Mercedes with the cracked windshield and golden stripe and the relief he feels angers him, and he gets in the car, slamming the door and lighting a Benson, and there’s nothing he can do except staring at the fire slowly consuming it.
“Home,” Nil says. “Drive along the Fence.”
The driver starts the engine, his eyes glued to the rearview mirror both while maneuvering and getting out of the parking lot, and even out in the street, his eyes are on Nil. At the thought of smoking the cigarette he’s holding, Nil feels his own lips pucker and for a moment he considers the possibility of quitting, but the thought alone exhausts him. He has to control the sudden desire to disfigure his own face.
The Fence parades past the window. Beyond it, Nothingness.
Nil leans against the door and, squinting, for the first time he looks beyond the Fence. He feels silly for looking where there’s Nothing. And the Nothingness spreads like a sooty carpet, devoid of light, not even a glimmer of something existing under it. It’s horrendous, and watching it makes Nil feel like he is falling, like the earth under his feet has failed him, but before he can open the minibar, patches of existence emerge from the darkness. It’s bulldozers he sees, bulldozers clearing the area of metal sheets and plastic and shit and humans.
“Here,” Nil says, and the driver gives him another of his pathetic glances and when he shows no signs of wanting to slow down, Nil kicks the driver’s seat, and then the driver pulls over and Nil feels his eyes, his fucking eyes on him as he opens the door and gets down, his loafers sinking into the garbage on the roadside, to reach the Fence.
From where he stands, he can distinguish two bulldozers at work and a couple of spotlights bathing the area in a cold glow and a row of shacks so close to him to keep him from seeing anything else, but he has to see, and so skirting the Fence he looks for a better viewpoint and it’s then that he finds a slit. Nil studies the severed net and the signs of human passage on the soil beneath it and the thought of those people entering the Ring fills him with dread. He looks up at the barbed wire on top the Fence that should keep them at bay, and then back to the bulldozer in the distance, and the driver is following him, he can hear the annoying sound of the Mercedes right behind him.
Nil slips into the opening, gliding through the Fence and diving into Nothing, and inside of him the Whole rises in an uprising, it foams and fills him.
Nil crosses the darkness, following the headlights and, after the first row of shacks, this is what he sees: children naked from the waist down huddled around small trash bonfires, their eyes lost in the flames; next to them, women cry and tear their hair and kneel down banging their fists on the ground; men are lying on the ground, in a row, their arms tied behind their backs, their faces in the mud; the police towering over them, their back to the fires, their faces turned to the headlights mounted on film studio-like tripods; and then there are these two mobster, thick gold chains around their necks tucked into prominent bellies, designer belts—the Mafia.
They monitor the work, bribe the police and make sure the slum dwellers will fuck off without making too much a fuss about it.
And the bulldozers.
In all this rottenness and shameless misery, the bulldozers sparkle with modernity, brand new, a beam of civilization among the savages. Yet, Nil thinks, their function is uncivilized, their mechanical arms dropping like the hammer of a judge on the tin roofs and the walls of the semi-collapsed shacks, which crumble like dominoes with a disappointed groan raising a cloud of dust, and the arms fall again and again and soon the fucking slums will be a distant memory, and Nil can’t decide whether it’s good or bad, he doesn’t know whether to listen to the government speaking of development and clearing poverty, or to the lecturers at the University speaking of social equality while they wear Armani, or to these families, screaming and staring at the fire and eating tear-ridden mud.
Then his eyes fall on the side of the bulldozers, showing off the logo of the owning company, and the Whole explodes, and although it does so on the sly, Nil feels pervaded by it and staggers back and nearly falls to the ground and crawls and runs, crossing the Nothingness with a blind desire to weep, and he can’t find the way back through the Fence, and oh god, will he be trapped here forever, but there it is, and so he slips in it and the net tears the back of his shirt, and he jumps into the Mercedes and sees the driver in the mirror and feels like smashing his head with the bottle of Old Monk, and then, when the cars moves and the bulldozers disappear, he fears he might be truly about to cry. But the terror gripping him fades off as the Pit fades away.
The sense of horror and anger ceases, replaced by a stiffness, a deafness, such as that of one who is in shock, yes, that’s right, just like who was raped and is now mourning the humanity that was ripped from her. Nil pours himself a glass of Old Monk but can’t really taste it, and he lights a Benson, licking his lips, but there’s no bitter aftertaste nor anything else, nothing. In his mind everything is quiet: that same terrible silence that followed her screams three years ago.
Once home, everything feels light years away, and in the elevator, reaching out, he wonders if his fingers will ever touch the touchscreen panel to select the desired floor, and the idea that his hand has to travel a seemingly infinite space to do something so elementary amuses him.
On the landing, the lights are too intense and the marble tiles too impersonal and, careful not to step on the intersections between a tile and the other, Nil walks to the front door of his apartment and, as he punches in the access code, he turns around.
Something inside him knows that Kamat, through the peephole of his door, is staring at him. Nil looks away. Motionless, Kamat’s eyes on him, he feels violated, harassed by that look scouring him from head to foot, almost groping him, feeling up his body in the most intimate areas. Kamat is watching him from behind that door.
Nil settles his erection and slips into his house and claps turning on the lights and he does that in every room and checks them one by one, pulling the shower curtain and looking inside the closets and under the beds, making sure the balcony door is locked, and only then does he light a Benson, pouring himself a glass of Old Monk, increasing the intensity of the air conditioner. He’s sweating and he finds it hard to breathe.
The Whole warbles inside him, erupting lava like a volcano, trying to fill him with it.
He drinks one, two, three, four glasses in quick succession, turns on the TV and, marching back and forth acro
ss the living room carpet, watches a few seconds of a documentary on climate change, but it’s not enough to take his mind off, and so he opens the water in the jacuzzi, anticipating the bath he’s going to take, but still it’s not enough.
Nil runs to the intercom and grabs it and laughing presses the button again and again to call the maid, that bloody monkey. He pours himself another glass of Old Monk and lights another Benson and he notices that the ashtray is full of half smoked cigarettes and wonders who the hell came to his house and wasted good smokes.
When he thinks he heard the footsteps of the maid, he remembers the jacuzzi and goes into the bathroom and undresses and plunges into the hot water groaning with pleasure, but then the puffs of steam make him feel uneasy, imprisoned. He gets out and wears a thirty thousand rupees Gucci bathrobe.
Nil walks around the house with his bathrobe untied, his chest, sex and legs bare.
The maid is in the hallway. She drops her head just like every time they are in the same room, and when she glances at him her eyes linger a second longer before bolting away, and Nil can see her tense up, her tiny, cheap body stiffening, as if a gun was pointed right at her. And maybe, Nil thinks looking down, it is.
Nil stands in front of her and for the first time he notices the disparity in their stature, and the eyes of the maid stay low, staring at a spot on the floor, and her breath is faint, her chest barely daring to swell at all. Nil smiles and inhales the rustic smell of the her skin. He moves aside, letting her pass. He called her without having first created a real need for her services.
While the maid, her head ever-bowed, goes to the kitchen, Nil follows her, ready to give orders or make up an excuse. Under the damp bathrobe, his skin cools down.
An idea lights up his mind. He shows her the door of the freezer but when she gives no sign of having understood, he opens it, showing it to her again, nodding and gesturing for her to get closer. Hesitant, the maid obeys, taking from a drawer a plastic spatula. After removing the power supply to the machine, she starts de-icing the freezer walls, and Nil watches her skinny arms revealing a bundle of muscles running along her bones from her wrist up to her back, and as he stares Nil feels some sort of empathy, as if, after all, after almost three years in his service, a bond has developed.
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