Mel lifts the camera. Places the lens against the peephole. Starts recording.
The Police Commissioner is raping Chameli, and the child, a bundle of expensive fabrics, jewels and young flesh, lies prone on the bed, her face buried in the pillows. Her screams, muffled by the mattress, have already begun to fade, full of resignation and disbelief.
He is revolting, his flabby body shrunk by pleasure, his back covered in sweat, his hairy ass pulled in and committed to maximizing his carnal gratification, his toes curled, his hands clasped around her small wrists in sign of domination. His face, turned to the head of the bed, doesn’t appear in the video yet, but Mel doesn’t care, she knows that soon the Commissioner will feel carried away enough to get creative.
Chameli is barely visible, crushed by the flaccid belly of her assailant, her body sunk in the sheets, a glimmer of her afflicted face, a grieving mask. Mel zooms in on it. On her tongue Mel tastes her own bile.
The Commissioner, as expected, gives in to inspiration, or perhaps he just feels tired and throws himself on his back, dragging the girl with him, tearing her from the cave of pillows and sheets that had confined her, arranging the little body over his own as if she were a doll, a mannequin. Free from the gag of the bed, fed by fear, triggered by the renewed physical pain, her screams raise clear, lacerating, bouncing between the ceiling and the floor, saturating the room in an uninterrupted flow, an almost unbearable cacophony.
Startled, the cat gets the hell out of the window, but Mel doesn’t let her own trembling hands ruin the shooting. Zooming in on the face of the Commissioner, his eyes bulging like those of a baboon, his cheeks swollen like those of a trumpeter, lips curled showing a row of surprisingly white teeth, he looks silly, almost. His hands move on the minute belly of the girl, pausing on it as if they’ve actually found something on the unripe surface.
A laugh. A frantic laugh echoing in the room. Mel jumps, loses the frame but regains her composure right away, and back she goes to the subjects of her film. Val, her breath laboured, must have had half a stroke because of the sudden start. Mel focuses on the identity of the man, including in the same shot, unfocused, the uniform in the foreground. Great camera work, if only the mirror wasn’t in the frame, and reflected in it, her face crimson, the Little Girl.
The Commissioner changes position again. Chameli loses and regains consciousness often.
Her hands on her belly, doubled by a fit of hilarity, the Little Girl keeps her eyes wide open on the bed, transfixed as if watching television, but moment by moment her laughter loses gaiety, turns hysterical, and then the tears begin to flow. Mel tries to concentrate on the rape, isolating her sense of hearing from that of sight, changing the exposure to darken the edges of the frame.
“Filthy bitch,” screams the Little Girl, laughing.
Mel shuts her eyes, grips the camera hard so that it won’t shake. The Little Girl keeps shouting.
“Enjoy it, you slut.” Sobs interrupt her laughter.
Opening her eyes, Mel can’t help it, she drops her gaze on the mirror where the Little Girl is squatting, arms clasped in her lap, her neck stretched in a bundle of veins and tendons, the skin of her face pulsing with blood, a path of mucus connecting the nose and the lips, a dense mixture of salt and tears. She’s still laughing.
“You like that, huh? Whore,” she shouts. “This is the happiest day of your life.”
Mel starts humming. It’s their song, the one that always sends tremors down her spine, giving her goosebumps, and Mel sings it in a whisper, and though the moans in the room are strong enough to cover it, the head of the Little Girl shoots towards Mel, green eyes staring at the peephole, and the laughter and the tears and even the insults stop. The shock on her face is immense. Mel hums it out till the end of the recording, stopping the video before the Commissioner is done with Chameli, placing the camera back in her bag, and then she walks out, into the hallway, without turning around. Val follows her outside, in her eyes something feral.
With deliberate slowness, Mel rummages for the envelope, finds it right away but lets her hand wander away, feeling the bottom of the bag, pretending to have forgotten it before grabbing it and shoving it under Val’s nose. The fat fingers of the Madame huddle around money, stroking the bills, counting them, making love to them.
“What will you do with this?” Mel asks.
“This?” Val keeps her eyes on the bills. “Why, dear, what do you want me to do? I save them. You never know what can happen in life.”
Mel stares at the parting in Val’s hair, where the skin is visible, and the skull can be imagined, and the brain soft and vulnerable, then she climbs down the stairs. She turns once before heading out, to see Val counting the bills again and again, her face haggard, still in the exact spot where she left her. Again, she considers burning all of this to ashes, but then, she tells herself, someone else will, soon.
Just outside the brothel, something catches Mel’s attention, a haunting murmur, a mantra repeated over and over on the concrete steps in front of the building. A little boy sits with his head encased between the shoulders, his eyes staring straight ahead and a plastic bag in his hands.
Mel takes three steps, she counts them in her head walking away from him before she stops and walks back. “Are you okay?” she asks.
The little hands shake around the plastic bag, and bringing it to his cracked lips, the child holds his breath, then inhales, a big breath, a breath bigger than the capacity of his lungs, then goes into apnea, keeping the glue fumes inside, letting them poison his blood. When he exhales, the light in his eyes has fallen by a joule leaving his face in a state of apparent relaxation, a cloud darkening his features.
Mel lays a hand on his shoulder, but before she can utter words of comfort, the child snaps, “One doesn’t simply eat one pistachio.” He lifts his head, his eyes vacant yet sprayed with the energy of a madman, staring at nothing in particular, and yet as if he was studying a subject of extreme importance, floating unseen between them.
“One doesn’t simply eat one pistachio,” he repeats, again and again, opening his mouth by inertia, the interval between the sentences increasingly dilated. He takes another drag of glue from the bag. Mel’s hand still on his shoulder, she realizes that the touch of her hand feels to her more like mockery than actual human contact.
“One doesn’t simply eat one pistachio,” goes the child, and this time his gaze falls on Mel, his neck twisting like a spring. Mel tries to conceal her growing anxiety, wills herself to keep her hand on the child’s shoulder, but those eyes, those eyes made bleary by cheap drugs are the biggest she’s ever seen, and they’re accusing, and mighty sad.
Mel gets up, turns tail, winds her way back through the dark alleys of Budhwar Peth.
“One doesn’t simply eat one pistachio,” is the last thing she hears, leaving that place forever.
***
At the Bapu statue, Mel gives the kids a hundred rupee note, which they accept in watchful silence. Around their eyes, just like the child in Budhwar Peth, dark circles. They stare at her as she lifts the stand of the Enfield pushing the motorcycle onto the road, before gunning the engine and leaving Old Ayodhya in a cloud of dust.
At home, Mel goes right for the drugs, fishing in a music box she keeps in plain sight on the bedside table of her room next to the empty vase in which she used to grow daffodils, and does a line every thirty minutes for three hours reading Tibullus.
Crouching on the parapet of the roof of Scheria, she pops a Xanax and waits for dawn, rocking herself and reading Gayatri Spivak.
She wakes up hours later, lying precariously on the same narrow concrete balcony, her head heavy under the relentless sun. She drags herself to her room, where she smokes some excellent hashish that Henry bought in Himachal two weeks ago, before falling on the blankets and pillows with the idea of masturbating. Self-hate has become an accessory in her life, like those oversized earrings you buy but never wear.
At sundown, when the corrid
ors darken again and the silence echoes more authoritarian, and he has not yet come home, Mel takes some LSD that she’s been saving, then wears a light cocktail dress and flees from Scheria.
Handing her the keys of the Enfield, a new boy wobbling his head and smiling just like the last one, and the one before him, and the one before that. Mel puts her earphones on, turns up the volume at full tilt and starts the engine on the jazz notes of Henry Mancini. The gates slide open, the metal touched by an orange sunset, and she flows into the traffic enjoying the cars moving with greater care as they cross the tower, stopping to let her pass. And off the Enfield slides on the sun-bronzed tar with its holes turned into puddles of molten gold, and the people stroll on the sidewalk and they are poorly dressed, and yet they look elegant. Ah, the effect of good music.
Mel considers Candle Cove but just thinking about the place gives her the chills, and so she steers along the Pit, speeding in the evening traffic, trying to defeat the passage of time as if by driving fast enough she could save a couple of extra minutes for the darkest times to come.
Beyond the Fence rise a sea of dark coloured shacks, the twilight turning the rotten wood a beautiful brown, colouring the fumes from the huddled huts a splendid silver, and the rancid waste liquids filtering through the soil a fashionable Apple’s Jet Black. All of which is a stark contrast to the beautiful residential complex on the opposite side of the road, where the predominant colors are the white robes of the residents, the golden hair of their Retrievers, the silver metallic bodies of imported cars parked in their overpriced garages. Ayodhya is a schizophrenic, old whore.
“Yet you shine,” whispers Mel, looking at the road bathed in the last rays of sun.
On her aimless wandering around, Mel comes across a cafe by the name of Nap Coffee, the porch of which recreates a glimpse of Provence, faux-old lamps hanging low on the tables, exposed brick covering the papier-mache columns, synthetic but oh so pretty flower beds marking the perimeter, and waiters moving among the tables with caution, the customers speaking softly. On the tables, stuffed baguettes accompanied by glasses of orange juice, gleaming cutlery disappearing between refined lips, lounge music in the air—not at all French but the kind you would expect from a French cafe in India. Perfect.
Sitting at a small wooden table near a French window, Mel observes the people. They are all beautiful, straight out of a high-end clothing advertisement, the men with their fashionable haircuts, the women wearing dresses they could never possibly wear anywhere but at a fake-but-cute French cafe in Candil. They smell good, Mel knows that for a fact, no spices on their breath. Years of TV-made foreign sarcasm has turned their humour cold and dry and classy. But it’s an act, beyond the flower beds, the traffic still hammers the smoky street, and sellers swear and spit on the ground, and the hollow-faced beggars await on the other end of the road, not daring to approach the cafe for a few rupees thrown at them by people who don’t touch them nor look at them in the eyes.
Despite the elegant music, the horns punch the air. Behind the textbook furniture, chaos refuses to die in a kitchen in perpetual disarray, a closet full of brooms and mops ready to fall as soon as someone opens the door, and beneath it all, mountains of rats and roaches and low caste sewer men sucking it all up.
Mel sips her tea, undeceived by the choreography yet able to indulge in it, letting herself, even just for a moment, be persuaded by the trinkets and frills.
A chair slams to the floor with a crisp bang. Mel and the other customers turn to the source of the noise to find a boy and a girl, the former tall but not too much and muscular only from the waist up, and the latter, a piercing look in her doe eyes, her face fair, ostentatiously naive, totally anonymous. All the onlookers go from annoyance to bewilderment to surprise to dreamy interest, all except Mel, who looks at the scene sipping her tea—or maybe it’s a smoothie, hard to say.
The macho leans forward, flexing his muscles, swaying his head, his hair neatly falling on his Fair-and-Handsome-ed forehead while she turns away, yet she parts her lips, and he whispers something in her ear, and again she draws back, bows her head smiling, shy like a schoolgirl, and he clicks his tongue, clapping his hands and returning to an upright position, his small ass squeezed into tight designer jeans.
“Accha,” he says, snapping his fingers, starting to sway, the heels of his all-too-shiny shoes punctuating a rhythm, and so he points at a shorter and less muscular guy sitting alone at the next table, whose face goes, “Who, me?” only to stand up, another chair slamming upside down, and start dancing, too.
The girl, not at all embarrassed by the performance, keeps on smiling, hiding her face behind her shoulder so as to show off her perfect teeth without looking like an unmarried slut, on a date, alone, at twenty-three.
The young stalwart and the next-table looser throw themselves into a frantic dance that mixes incompatible genres, making up new one every few steps, going hip hop with their feet and tribal with their arms, showcasing pelvic movements that seem like a reverse twerking, then they turn to each other, shaking their nipples, almost touching in a homoerotic yet still macho way.
The stud, pushing the loser out of the scene, makes a half-pirouette and holds out his hand to her, who in no time goes from third grade to Budhwar Peth without a hint of hesitation.
She moves close to him, hugs him, goes around him, looks like she’s sniffing him, touching his neck with her lips. Her hair floating in the stagnant air of the cafe—and she starts singing. Or rather, she lip sings without any background music.
He looks dazed showing off his one and only facial expression, and she writhes, twists, pressing her body against his, she eyes him from below, her hair in the wind, the neck bent like that of a cat. Several times, their faces are close, her lips brushing on his cheek, his lips on her forehead.
Singing and circling him, she stares at a spot on the wall, as if speaking to someone or something invisible.
The other customers seem delighted, accompanying an imaginary rhythm with small movements of their heads, and Mel smiles following the dance while the girl rubs against the guy like a cat in heat, a movement so explicit as to be comparable to petting—but kissing is still a no-no.
Looking at him, in her eyes a hint of ingenuity, the crazy bitch starts moving in slow motion, opening and closing her lips without making a sound, her glare focused in the distance, shaking her hands in the air, her hips swaying, wobbling her head without any artistic fashion, and he is reduced to a strip tease pole—but no stripping, of course.
Glued together, their sexes sandwiched through their pants, eye to eye, the faces frozen in their best and only expression, they finally go off in a musicless lip-sync. And together they dance.
All customers of the cafe, both inside and out, jump up, follow their movements in a perfect synchrony, no flaws, they join the stunning choreography of the unconventional, so very unexpected love between the girl and the dude.
Everyone dances and Mel enjoys the show, sipping her milkshake—coffee—whatever—, shaking her head to the beat.
The dancers move out on the porch, dancing non-stop, She looking at him coquettishly, He kicking around with those chicken legs of his, the beautiful smiles nailed on both their faces, a living advertisement of Fair and Lovely.
He takes on the patriarchal role he deserves by grabbing her by the hips, making her bend backward, beaming, then, raising a hand to the ceiling, He bends over her, pretending to kiss her only to run out in the street with her in his arms and all customers and waiters follow them and dance, dance, dance.
Everybody dances together facing Mel without seeing her, all staring at a spot on the wall behind her, and she can’t help but smile, downing her tea, applauding when the performance moves back to the porch, on the benches, on the tables, and then, suddenly, they are in Switzerland - or behave as if they are - and are kind of rolling on the floor as if it was the side of a hill, and He picks up the real mud from the fake flower beds and gently rubs it on her face, as i
f it were snow.
He and She embark on what appears to be the last stanza, and, locked together, almost kiss.
Cut.
Mel claps. On second thought, this is not entirely nonsense, she tells herself, since, framed on a wall, hangs a photo of the Swiss mountains, because why not.
Satisfied, still shaking her head while the people go back to their business as if nothing happened, Mel pays the bill, guns the Enfield, and leaves. And then, the LSD kicks in.
On the street, everything breathes. The cars, the trees, even the tar, everything is crossed by a continuous flow of energy, inanimate objects swell with buried life making them worthy of a sacred kind of respect. The windows multiply on the buildings, the trash repeats itself in identical piles forming an endless plot on the edge of the lane, and the people walk backwards. Mel realizes that everything is moving in reverse, except her. People talk backwards, dogs vomit unchewed garbage, and in a small temple on the corner of the road, an incense stick sucks in the smoke filling the air. Night has fallen.
Under the Dome’s dome—yeah, quite imaginative—you can see the music. In a synaesthetic effect, Mel sees the noise coming from the audio system rising and collapsing on the dance floor, trampling the bodies like an intangible tide. The bass manifests itself as a blue current that flows between people, embracing them in slow, deep reels; the drums, a reddish gold, rain like flames, sparking over the heads of the dancers; the voice, purple, expands and contracts ineffable as a ghost, like a big jellyfish. Mel reaches out to touch the colors but they have no substance and go through her as if she doesn’t exist.
Objects in the Mirror Page 29