Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  Nil nods. She takes a step back to give him way to take the iPhone out of his pocket, but he hesitates, looking at her like he never did before, a mixture of fear, desire, dread, and then Mel takes his hand, pulling him towards herself, squeezes those long fingers in her own.

  “Really,” says Nil, fishing out his iPhone. “Don’t bother.”

  “I love Candil in the morning,” she simply says.

  Before leaving, Mel wears the first clothes she can get her hands on, brushes her teeth, slips in her bag a box of tampons. It’s a tin box with Marilyn Monroe printed on the cover, her knees flexed, a kiss blown, behind her the Eiffel Tower. Garish no doubt, but also graceful, in a way.

  On the Enfield, Mel can feel Nil sitting stiff behind her. His thighs, close to her buttocks, are hot, tensed, inexperienced. Mel drives and on the first straight road she takes his hands, puts them on her hips looking in the rearview mirror, her shit-blond hair whipping his face.

  She knows she shouldn’t if she wants to keep this up, but she can’t help it and chuckles in the wind. It smells like carbon monoxide. It smells like home.

  “Should we tell Ferang?” Nil asks, leaning forward.

  Mel heard him but pretends otherwise, and Nil repeats the question getting a little closer, his lips brushing against her earlobe. “About our parents, I mean.”

  “No.” She turns around. “And don’t feel guilty about it. You know Ferang himself rarely lies, but rarely he tells the truth either.”

  Nil straightens his back, then giggles.

  “What?” She smiles, too.

  “The eternal conflict between personality and persona,” says Nil.

  “You respect him too much.”

  “He’s my best friend.”

  Mel swerves to avoid a car parked in the middle of the street. “Right,” she says.

  All around them, Candil Causeway thrives unaware of the transition from night to day, its clubs still open from last night, and the students, the tourists and the businessmen alike still crowded in front of the half-down shutters, exhausted but with one last drink in their hands. Across the street, in stark contrast, early rising street vendors are preparing for the day’s work, laying on the ground their plastic bags, the goods they sell neatly placed on top.

  Mel pulls over in front of Nil’s house. The guard, sitting on his mattress in the adjacent alley, has just woken up.

  Nil gets down, looks at her, looks at her without saying a word.

  “Let’s take a walk?” Mel says.

  “Please.”

  Strolling among splendid libraries and Victorian mansions in the throes of abandonment, the streaming crowd growing with every step, the shutters rising, a guy with a swastika on his shirt parading by their side, they walk in the heat growing more insistent minutes by minute.

  “Mel—” Nil starts, but seems unable to decide on what to say.

  Mel takes his hand.

  “Mel,” he resumes, greater confidence colouring his voice. He speaks in one breath. “Do you think the psychological disposition to commit murder is enough to make someone evil?”

  Mel looks down at the tips of her shoes appearing and disappearing under her eyes. She grabs his hand before answering. “The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that the former presents the facts while the latter provides the truth.”

  He squeezes her hand in response. “I don’t understand.”

  A legless boy slides next to them, dragging his tattered body on a wheeled board. He looks up at them but doesn’t beg.

  “If a bad man does a good deed, is the goodness of the action itself undermined by the very nature of the man?” Mel turns to look at him but keeps on walking. “If a bad man does two good deeds, is he still bad? If a bad man does three good deeds, was he ever bad at all?”

  Mel lifts her gaze to the sky, the light shining bright grey through the leaves, the trees breaking the sidewalk, cracking the front of the old buildings, sprouting in the cracks of the walls. The premises of a wonderful day.

  “What I’m trying to say is that the truth is never that simple,” says Mel. She can feel his gratitude pouring from the sweat of his hand.

  “True,” Nil goes. “Many think that the opposite of truth is lying, but it’s not. The opposite of truth is silence.”

  Mel smiles. “Every profound spirit needs a mask, Nil.”

  “Proust?”

  “Nietzsche.”

  “Always.”

  The air fills with the jazz from an extremely early morning or extremely night-owl-ish club. It’s only a moment, and then it’s gone.

  They walk side by side, holding hands, in silence for a few minutes, a silence, for the first time, weightless. They walk past a slum rising not far from a huge Porsche dealership.

  After a while, Mel knows she has to resume talking.

  “We are the children of the last, of a generation who loved so much and built skyscrapers to tickle the sky, contaminated the land, raping it, and from the height of their palaces here they are charming us into inching closer, yet burning the road before and behind us at the same time.”

  “Why should we change our parents’ world when we can borrow their mistakes?”

  “We just want to be free,” she goes.

  Walking around the block, they get back in front of Nil’s home.

  Lingering in the touch of her hand, he looks into her eyes.

  “Everyone goes around saying that they’re willing to die for love,” he says in one gulp. “So I’ll take one more step—for love I’m willing to live.”

  Mel points her smile in his face like a gun, gripping his hand one last time before letting it go, and Nil looks down at his own abandoned hand suspended in mid air, and he nods, turns, walks to the door. His back is slender, she notices, curving attractively above the ass.

  “You know, Nil,” says Mel. He turns to look at her, eyes lit up. “I can’t get out of my head what our parents are doing.”

  Nil takes a step back toward her as if to hearten her, but before he can touch her, Mel speaks again. “Somehow, I feel like what you found out gives us leverage, don’t you think?” She takes a step toward him, puts a hand on his chest. “Think about it, the crux of the matter is water, yet around Ayodhya there is no groundwater within a radius of hundreds of kilometers. Chandra must be involved.”

  Nil freezes.

  “I guess,” Mel resumes, “we need a lot of water for construction—Worlds United, I mean, and as much to deal in the Pit, which means access to substantial resources, perhaps a dam, but the only dams big enough to sustain this kind of smuggling are in other states, and this, I guess, is when Chandra comes into play. Interstate transport is what he does, but that requires the endorsement of the government and that would definitely leave a paper trail, you know, and if only we had someone from the inside...”

  Both are silent, Nil looking away, Mel staring right at him, seeing it blossom, the flower of an epiphany, and then his heart sinks like lead in his chest, the noise of the traffic turning up, the smell of Thai cuisine from a nearby restaurant polluting the air. He got it, at last. Good boy.

  “Jiya,” he whispers after what seems an eternity.

  ***

  Mel throws herself into the morning traffic, smiling wide. She sees a child in lurid pajamas leaning against the window of a high-town bakery, his breath fogging up the glass around his mouth, his small hands pressed between wooden frames of the door and his emaciated body, on his face a dreamy, almost ecstatic expression. Beyond the glass, cannoli.

  Mel pulls over, gets off the Enfield, but in the meantime a guard comes hustling the child away, standing on doorsteps to make sure the boy doesn’t have the bad sense to go back. Mel intercepts the infant, tells him to wait for her, goes in and buys him a soda. At first wary, the child takes a sip and walks away happy. Mel drives off, feeling lighter that she has in forever.

  In the Scheria parking lot, a new valet boy welcomes her with an innocent smile, wobbling his head and wa
tching her with that fawning look of his until the golden elevator doors close between them.

  At home, “How High The Moon” by Ella Fitzgerald.

  Henry sits in an armchair. The dimmest light, despite being mid-morning, envelopes the living room, and his fine features shine bathed in the iPad’s light. As usual, he’s reading the news in that charismatic, friendly attitude of his. A true intellectual.

  Without turning on the light, Mel sits in the armchair next to his, clinging to the large armrests to avoid sinking into the cushions, feeling engulfed in the aroma of her childhood, his cologne, the old leather of the sofas and the slight mustiness of a room that begs for ventilation but respects the discretion of its owners.

  Henry finishes the para, his bright eyes cutting the screen as he reads faster and faster, then rests the iPad on his thighs, and crosses his legs.

  “So, was that Nil?”

  “Yesterday we watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s in college,” says Mel.

  “What a great study of human frivolity.”

  Mel smiles a childish smile. “The soundtrack is truly something,” she says. Too eager. Almost desperate.

  “Absolutely. It’s splendid.” Henry smiles in turn, but not in her direction, his head tilted toward the darkness of the sleeping quarters.

  Silence falls. The room is warm, the air conditioner to a minimum. Mel feels safe. Leaning on the armrest, she looks Henry in the eyes, feeling her muscles relax, but he looks away again, back to reading on his iPad, simulating great concentration.

  “Yes,” she goes, “it was Nil.”

  Henry nods, reads on.

  Mel pinches the skin between her fingers.

  “Won’t you ask me why I’m doing this?”

  Henry lifts his gaze, meets her eyes, drops it again. “I know why,” he says.

  The iPad’s light turns his eyes into glass balls, his fingers bouncing on the screen while he goes through his fucking news with ostentatious interest.

  “Then stop me,” Mel says.

  No reply.

  “Stop me.” A note of panic in her words. “There’s still time.”

  “You’re my daughter.”

  Mel laughs, but there is no trace of amusement in her voice. “Am I, now?”

  Henry looks up again, his pupils shooting as if looking for a foothold, a farther, safer land. And back to the news.

  Mel feels something hardening inside her, feels the mass of her own being thicken, become even heavier than it was. “I feel so old,” she says, sinking into the pillows.

  “I’m sorry.” With urgency, he spits out the words, but his eyes remain glued to the screen.

  “You’re sorry for the wrong thing.”

  “I’m your father—”

  “Then you shouldn’t have abandoned me, Henry. I needed you. I still need you.”

  “I’m here.”

  “No. You are not.”

  Henry runs his hand over his face, he does it ever so slowly, his long fingers massaging the temples, then the eyelids, the nose, down to his cheeks, jaw, and neck. Mel follows every movement. When he sees her stare, he drops the hand, hiding it between his side and the armrest. He looks back to the iPad.

  Mel bites the inside of her cheek to keep herself from crying. She tastes blood. “Henry,” she whispers, “I’m sad.”

  Henry shakes his head.

  “Will you sing me our song?” she begs.

  He flinches. A beat. “The world is on fire,” he intones, a mighty voice, “no one can save me but you.”

  Mel relaxes, closes her eyes, opens her lips as if the tune of her father’s voice could filter inside her.

  “Strange what desire makes foolish people do.” His voice is deep, nuanced, pregnant like that of someone who has spent most of his life with a glass in his hand.

  “I never dreamed that I’d,” she sings along, “lose somebody like you.”

  Carried away by the notes, Mel sways following the rhythm, then leans toward him, again over the armrest, placing her head on his knees. He winces.

  “What a wicked game you play, to make me feel this way.”

  The memories’ door left ajar, Mel closes her eyes and finds herself in the shadow of a past lost and long-sought.

  “What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you.”

  Mel’s dream turns into a nightmare, a nightmare where you are forced to kill the one you love to be reborn.

  “Nobody loves no one,” sings Henry, finishing the song in a whisper.

  The melody lingers hovering in the twilight of the room, then off it goes, giving way to an uneasy silence, tense, almost angry between them. When Mel gets up, Henry has already returned to the news on his iPad. She walks toward the sleeping quarters.

  “You know,” goes Henry behind her. Mel stops. “We too had dreams once.”

  Mel doesn’t turn around. “And then what happened?” she asks.

  “Your mother died.”

  Filled with blind rage, Mel paces into the darkness. She lets it swallow her. And in the room, iPhone clutched in her hand, she calls Val.

  “When?” she asks as soon as she answers.

  “Soon.”

  “Now.”

  A hoarse sigh from the other side receiver. “Now is not the time. Let me do my job.”

  “Five thousand more if you make it happen tonight,” says Mel, an itch in her voice. Then she adds, “Dollars.”

  A beat.

  “I’ll call you back.”

  ***

  Mel wakes up after sunset. In the bathroom, she feels exhausted as if her body is struggling to fight the force of gravity, as if the height of the tower is attracting her to the ground hundreds of meters below, making her movements difficult, like someone wearing an armor and pacing upon a humongous magnet. Even the light bulbs seem gloomier, and the sound of the water jutting out in the shower has melancholy to it. Mel does a line on the sink. Everything brightens.

  She chooses her clothes carefully, a sober sundress and a cotton jacket, a pair of flat shoes she bought one summer in Spain, and pantyhose, all of it to the rhythm of “Voyeur” by Kim Carnes.

  In the underground car park, Mel greets yet another hands-folding, head-wobbling new guard, who smiles galore while he hands her the keys of the Enfield.

  Driving in the night, Mel experiences Ayodhya forgiving itself. Forgiving the diurnal chaos of the streets and the noise of their crossroads, forgiving the piled dirt around the corner of rusty shacks, forgiving its very own beggars and street kids and prostitutes. The night straightens the city’s errors, its sins and imperfections. The cloak of darkness spreads over all things, and Mel drives through its folds, enjoying the illusion of a mendacious sweetness, of a melody that ended even before it began.

  Once at the Breach, Mel parks next to Bapu, pays off the two children who accept the bill with nervous hands and bags under their eyes, and heads to Budhwar Peth.

  “He’s inside,” Val goes, waiting for her on the brothel’s doorsteps.

  On the second floor, the Madame opens a secret corridor hidden to most but known to rats and whores alike. Piles of excrements grow along the wooden walls; the only object in the corridor, an old, colonial chair. Mel can picture its owner as either a decadent Portuguese poet or a proud British alcoholic. Mel can also picture Val sprawled on the rotting cushions, between the fingers a long vintage-looking cigarette holder. But Val doesn’t smoke, of course. Smoking is impure.

  Val turns on a light bulb, to which at the same time a turbine comes into action, cleaning the air off the stench of stale human breath filtering from the rectangular eye-level slits looking onto the rooms. Her fat ass bobbing, she dusts the old armchair, slamming her ringed fists on the cushions. Ghosts of dust soars into the air.

  “Please, be seated,” she says, pointing at the chair. For the first time Mel notices her gold teeth peeking from behind the healthy ones.

  Mel touches the backrest of the chair with probing fingers, but instead of sitting turns her
gaze to Val, asking, “When?”

  “Patience, my child.” Val urges her again to sit, baring a nasty smile. Mel holds her eyes.

  Val’s smile gives no signs of faltering while opening one of the peepholes in the wall, her disproportionate head covering it completely as she bends to look through it. Before Mel can get closer to watch, she shuts the tiny door, turns with a half-pirouette, and drops in the chair, which cries with horror under her weight.

  Mel lights a bidi. The smoke is raspy in her throat, bringing her to full alertness, making her ponder the possibility of dropping the cigarette, setting this hell on fire before her soul is lost forever, but then she thinks of these women fighting with their lives to keep alive the hope of a better future. Women with torn nails. Women who are not fully women, yet.

  Before the bidi is over, the next room comes alive with softened sounds. In the beginning is steps on the wooden floor, the dull sound of human feet beating the ground with frequency, like a dance; then against that same floor, the legs of the bed scrape, again a rhythmic sound, like a code to be deciphered; and then come the screams, acute but filtered by the wall, reduced to muffles by it, the primitive way of communicating of a lesser being.

  Fishing a Canon from her bag, Mel turns the camera on. The battery is full. Val gets up, opens the slit, steps aside. Mel leans over to look in.

  The cat is the first thing she sees, a mutt without infamy or praise, its dusty fur grey where it used to be white and even grayer where it was grey since birth. Plump, it sits on the windowsill; behind it, a shutter left ajar. A pair of eyes both alert and disinterested, it watches the scene playing before it. On its muzzle, a broad, pink nose sticks out like a colored bulb on its dingy body.

  Darkness cloaks the room except for a solar lamp in the corner. Abandoned on a chair, a khaki uniform complete with metal badge and baton, a hat and a brand new belt. The garments, forgotten there without any care, look heavy, and every piece of furniture in their presence different, more circumspect, perhaps. Cries fill the air in flashes.

  Sitting beside her, Mel hears Val fidgeting, trying to be quiet.

  Then comes the bed. Mel has to lean to see the entire canopy, the wooden legs first, and the scratched floorboards beneath them; the mattress, hardly covered by the beautiful brocade sheets that she herself brought from home, tremble with every hump, the sheets dangling in mid air; the mosquito net hangs from the ceiling, open like the petals of an upside down flower, hosting a play of shadow and lights, in which the shadows, two of them, rise and fall, grow and shrink, the bed squeaking, and the cries, now more intense, hover in the room. The most imposing shadow is that of a man, an adult, while the other is one with the mattress, a shapeless mass, and yet, there’s no doubt in it, it is smaller.