And of all the bad things that could happen to him, this is the worst. He shakes and spills blow on his thigh, and then a drop of blood falls on his shirt and, overwhelmed by the Whole welling up inside him, Nil opens his arms wide, shocked, disgusted and amused by this life, all at once.
He bursts out laughing, and it’s at first a thunderous, enjoyable laugh, but then his throat clenches and the laugh stifles and collapses into a rattle, but even then Nil can’t stop, it’s just so fucking hilarious, and so he slip down on the seat, the husky cackle of drugs tight in his fist, and silently he goes on laughing, his mouth gaping, begging for some fresh air. He laughs because, like any other farmer out there, he’s married to a woman he doesn’t love, and like a fucking call center operator, he is in the worst part of town and, like his father back then, he must decide whether to destroy all that he has in the world in the name of love or bow his head, for the objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
When he opens his eyes again, the canine face of the driver looms a few inches away from his own, and his own cheek, struck by the brute’s hand, burns with shame and insult, and the first thought that crosses his mind is to get back in the small clinic and order Ameen to kill the driver here, in the street, right now. But then it occurs to him that perhaps the driver saved him from the dark abyss he was slipping into, a place where the fury of the Whole is not only inside but also above and behind and all around.
The Whole, he realizes, has subsided now. For good measure, however, Nil pushes the driver away from him, closing the door in his face and then knocking on the glass when the idiot just stands there, looking at him from the outside.
The Mercedes starts moving. The driver keeps his gun-shy eyes on him.
“Siri,” goes Nil, his voice hoarse. “Call ‘Mom’.”
The pain of a worn-out throat. A Benson lit and put off as soon as Mom picks up.
“Hello, darling,” she says, “Did you buy the new Vogue?”
“Mom—can we meet for lunch?”
“Sure,” she says, the interest in her voice fading fast. “Saturday works? I have an interview with Cosmopolitan on Wednesday and with a Fanfare on Friday and in the evening the new personal trainer is coming home and you know that—”
“Actually, I was talking about today.”
“Beta, you know that Mom needs two days notice.”
“I know,” says Nil rubbing his eyes.
“It has never been easier,” says Mom, clicking her tongue. “You can send a message to Lakshmi on Whatsapp and she—”
“Who’s Lakshmi?”
“My secretary, baba.”
“I thought it was Nivetha.”
“Who’s Nivetha?”
“I don’t know...”
A pause.
“In any case—”
“Mom, it’s urgent,” he spits. Than adds, “I don’t want to be with Jiya.”
Silence.
“Excuse me?”
“Today lunch at the Gymkhana, then?” he says.
For a moment only Nil’s heavy breathing fills the receiver.
“Nil, it’s nine o’clock in the night.”
Nil swallows. “Right,” he says. “Tomorrow?
“Alright. I’ll fly there with the company’s plane. At one o’clock, sharp.” She hangs up.
At home, seeing the beautiful colonial buildings populating the neighborhood, Nil feels on the brink of commotion but drives away the tears snorting some coke and editing the article for hours on end, and finally, at dawn, before pouring himself yet another Old Monk, he falls asleep on the kitchen floor, where he wakes up sobbing but without shedding a tear, six hours later, and it’s already time for lunch.
Without bathing or changing his clothes, Nil rushes out of the house and into the elevator and then into the car and over half an hour later, here he is walking through the doors of the well-guarded Gymkhana, which is calm and quiet and exclusive, and the air perfumed, an irresistible mix of air freshener and leather sofas—but all of this makes him feel no better.
Mom is sitting at their table, reading Vogue, on whose cover she shines, smiling and tastefully dressed, eating diamonds from a cup.
“So, how was Vogue?” he asks, sitting down, trying to pacify her for being late.
“Oh, they realized their mistake.” She’s casual about it. “They called Dutt for the interview and Joshi for the photos. And they postponed Deepika’s piece to make room for mine.” Mom swings her self-satisfied head. “Lovely people, really.”
“It must have been magic.”
“It’s precisely the right word, darling. You’ve always been good with words, just like your dear Grandpa. You know?”
“Who doesn’t? In fact, here I am, a journalist.”
Mom frowns. “Yes, honey. You know, I heard the government considered including some of Grandpa’s works as part of the school curriculum a few years ago.”
“Mom—I’ve almost finished the article I told you about.”
“Oh? That’s nice.”
“You remember it, yes?”
“Of course I do, dear, the one about poverty in the Pit. You should mention our charity campaign. No, don’t. Self-promotion is vulgar.”
“Yeah...” Nil crosses his legs under the table.
“So that’s it?” asks Mom. “I mean... this?” She can’t hide the impatience in her tone. Then she smiles a forced smile. ‘Well, it’s good you called me, after all. We should celebrate your first article, baba.”
“I’m not sure I want to publish it, Mom.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s controversial.”
“Always remember: the truth can get you one step further away from other human beings but always one step closer to God.”
For a moment Nil feels his heart open up again, feeling that, yes, mom would understand. Of course she would, because she is good. She is. He grimaces, though, when a question emerges in his mind.
“Mom,” he says, “what do you think of transgenders?”
“What?” she goes, glowering.
“Transgenders. What do you think about them?”
Mom blinks. “They are people, of course, just like us,” she says. “But don’t trust them, beta.” Mom starts playing with the silver knife next to her plate. “Their physical distortion in the long run diverts their minds, that’s science. This is not to say that they are evil creatures, it’s the circumstances that make them such.” She lowers her voice. “Think that once your father was cursed by one of them—it must have been some ten years ago.” Mom places the knife in perfect symmetry with the rest of the cutlery. “In any case, treat them with respect, but from a distance.”
Nil looks at her. She used to be a beautiful woman. So fair. Her English so good and polished. Does she know about Gabriel?
“You know, Mom,” he says, then stops. He looks at his blurred reflection in the blade of his knife. “You taught me everything I know about caste, gender and religion equality.”
“Beta, I taught you to be a good human being, that’s all.”
“Right.” Nil removes his hands from the table and puts them on his knees. Tries to take a breath but his throat is shut tight. “So why do destroy the people you pretend to defend?”
Mom’s face falls a little. She looks older. Meaner. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I know everything, Mom.”
“Sorry,” she goes again, “what did you say?” She’s hissing now, throwing furtive glances at the other tables.
“Worlds United, the Cartel, the Mafia, Chandra, Ameen, even my marriage to Jiya, I know everything, and you would have been able to keep it from me if only you had bothered to read my work before it was finished.”
Mom bares her teeth. “Be careful how you talk to me, baba.”
“It’s just too late, Mom. It’s too late.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Her laugh sounds like shacks falling to the ground. “You kids are making up a cons
piracy theory at your own expenses.”
“But what you’re doing—that’s at the expense of the thousand of people who have been thrown on the road so far this year, at the expense of the dozens killed or died of starvation or driven to suicide by blackmail or devastated by the drugs.” Nil hits the table with his fist and Mom gasps, eyeing around to see if others are looking, and Nil enjoys this, it makes him feel good.
“We gave you everything the world has to offer,” she says, her eyes tinged with sadness. “You never had to fight for anything, and yet, look at you—you lousy, ungrateful boy.” She says the words like someone singing a lullaby. “And we loved you more than our own lives. Everything we do, we do it for you.”
Despite everything, despite the anger and the betrayal, the sound of his mother’s words sink deep inside Nil, making him feel like a piece of shit.
A long silence falls.
“If you love me,” he asks in a low voice, “why am I dying?”
Mom clicks her tongue with sympathy. “Come on, now, dear. Let’s forget about all this, let’s eat something nice, and then we’ll go back to our lives as usual, okay? You can even take some time off college and visit Jiya in London. Would that make you happy?”
Nil raises his head. “I don’t love Jiya.”
“So what?” She says, contemptuous again.
“I’m going to get a divorce.”
Mom presses her fingers hard against the blade of the silver knife. “You won’t do any of that. You will graduate, and you will live with her and, when the time comes, you will take your father’s place in the company, and you will do that because it’s what we taught you, and we taught you to do the right thing.” Mom smiles like she would at the cameras. “Privilege entails enormous sacrifices, my son, such that, if those beggars down in the Pit only knew anything about it, they would prefer to die in the street, as they do every day, than be us. Trust me on that.”
And so, sitting in front of him, sits a woman Nil has never known.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she says with a light laugh, looking around at the other people. “After all, you can’t really pass any judgment, can you, after what you did to that poor girl, three years ago?”
Nil closes his eyes and falls back onto the backrest. He can hear Mom call for the waiter, ordering for the both of them, but Nil can’t quite understand what.
“They have no water?” Mom says after a minute of silence. Nil opens his eyes, finding a wan smile on her lips. “Then let them drink Coca-Cola!”
Eating a dish of boiled duck marinated in orange and honey, Nil, his heart turned into lead, breaks the silence. “You know, Mom,” he says, “the Whole is this thing I have inside. I don’t really know how to describe it except the beast and the fury and the huge void that has always accompanied me and that dwells in the depths of my being, ever since I have memory. It’s sadness and anger and loneliness and fear and violence and nostalgia for something that I’ve never had, and all this together, all in one. It’s the unbearable weight of an imperfect world perceived through the perfection of the beholder.”
From the way Mom is looking at him, Nil makes a mental reminder to change the house code to avoid being dragged into a mental hospital overnight.
“The Whole is the inexplicable fear of something looming and massive and irrevocable. Something perceptible but never knowable, and whose perception vanishes only when drowned in alcohol or drugs or violence, which, in this shit city, certainly don’t come in short supply.”
“Know that I will not stay here a minute longer if you plan to use certain words,” Mom says, her mouth full of salad.
Nil cuts the meat in his plate, feeling tears welling up in his eyes. He pushes them back and apologizes to her.
At dessert, Mom goes back to be joyful as ever and is talking with a friend sitting at the next table and, when their cups of creme caramel are empty, Mom touches Nil’s hand, startling him.
“What about Jiya, then?” she asks.
“Nothing,” he says, looking away.
“Good.”
Silence.
“Are you sorry for the things you said?” Mom asks.
“I’m sorry I said them.”
Both get up and walk down the grand staircase and reach the street where Mom wants a hug, and despite the great discouragement that dwells within him, among those familiar arms, Nil feels safe. Here comes the driver with Mom’s BMW, but once she gets in she rolls down the window and seems hesitant and leans towards him, speaking in a low voice, in spite of the traffic jam clamouring all around.
“It’s not Dad,” she says.
“What?”
“Ameen. He’s not Dad’s man. He’s Henry’s.” She stares at him in the eyes as if waiting for a response. When none comes, she fishes for her purse inside her four hundred fifty thousand rupees Hermes bag. “Here you go.” She drops something in his hand. “Your father is a good man, but his friends? Never liked them one bit.” Nil opens his hand. A ring. Green gold. On it, a chiseled eye, shut. “It’s mine, but I don’t want it. Never did. If it’s justice that you seek, go get the right man, dear.”
And off she goes, swallowed by the Candil afternoon traffic, and Nil finds himself standing there, on the sidewalk, dazed in the heat, still staring at the ring, unable to decipher its role in this mess, feeling like all the world’s doors are closing simultaneously around him. All of them, except one. And Nil walks in. And it was just there, out for grabs, all along. Beyond this door it sounds like pop rocks. It smells like melted caramel. It feels like fever-borne chills.
Nil fishes out his iPhone, scrolling through the damn contacts, but it’s not there, so he switches to WhatsApp, looks for Kamat’s conversation but it’s not there either, did he delete it? No, he didn’t, he wouldn’t, and sure enough he finds it archived and goes through it fast, it’s only a few messages after all, and here it is, the pimp’s number. Nil copies it, he pastes it into the dial—calls.
His heart hammering. The day gone freezing cold, yet still hot and humid. The green ring shining in his hand. The same ring the pimp wore at Kamat’s when he brought by the whore. Those same hairy hands.
“Hello,” says Ameen, picking up the call.
Everything is quiet. Everything is still. The cars have stopped, the people turned to stone. Nil looks up. Birds in the leaden sky.
“Hello?” Ameen goes again. Nil couldn’t mistake his voice among a hundred thousand. Ameen is everywhere in this city. Ameen is the city. He hangs up.
“Scheria,” says Nil, jumping in the car, hugging the driver’s seat from behind. “Now. Please.”
***
It takes forever for Scheria to appear, tall, imposing, looming before him.
In the elevator, “My Funny Valentine” by Chet Baker drives him insane, so Nil sticks his hand in the pocket of the blazer he wore to see Mom, and there he finds the coke packet and it’s empty but it makes no sense because he has not touched it for the whole day, except maybe in the car, before or after meeting Mom. It doesn’t matter, anyhow, not now. Neel feels the green ring around his third finger. It makes him feel safer.
The golden doors open and darkness reigns inside the house, except in the kitchen where a beam of light springs free, and Nil feels his stomach clench and energy seems to abandon him at every step but on he carries, until Henry emerges from the kitchen.
“Oh,” he says, friendly as usual. “You’re here.”
“Sir,” Nil goes, stopping cold in middle of the hall.
Henry looks at him in silence, on his lips the shadow of that European courtesy Nil has always appreciated, since he was a child, but this time, reflected in his glasses shines something new. But then again, it might be Nil’s imagination and the after-effects of the coke, or of the absence of it, whatever the case may be.
“So,” says Henry. “What are you doing here?”
He’s simply clothed, in an almost casual but still refined way.
“I have to see Mel.”
“I want...” Nil looks around, then he wills himself to hold his gaze. “I want to.”
Henry smiles a cold smile.
“You’re a good kid, Nil,” he says as if in the preamble to a more complex speech, but he leaves the sentence unfinished.
“Is she in her room?” Nil asks.
“She’s in her bathroom.”
His answer, Nil can’t say why, destabilizes him, and when he moves a first step towards the sleeping quarter, his strength fails him and so he stays put, an array of darkness-soaked sofas separating him from the kitchen.
“Would you like some tea?” Henry eyes the room behind him.
“I’m fine, to be honest. Thank you.”
Henry smiles again. “Isn’t it sweet, this visceral attraction that we feel towards what promises to disappoint us?”
This makes Nil snap. “What are you trying to talk me out of, exactly?” There is courage, or at least the projection of it, in his voice.
“Talk you out of what?”
Nil says nothing.
“For one who pursues the truth so strenuously sure you’re full of secrets.”
“We look for what we lack, don’t we?” Nil feels pleased with himself for the wit of his answer.
Henry nods, and steps aside, half-swallowed by the jamb of the kitchen door. “I won’t stop you,” he says.
Nil starts walking.
“I just wanted to ask you to take care of my daughter.”
Nil stops, a surge of gratitude warming him up.
“But then,” Henry says, “I thought of that unfortunate episode from three years ago. That poor girl, did she ever regain control of her arms?”
The Whole. The Whole. The Whole. Nil keeps on walking.
“Remember, Nil, when you look in the mirror, the mirror looks right through you.”
“Oh, fuck off,” says Nil, before stepping into the sleeping quarters.
He finds the bathroom door ajar, a warm light filtering out, the dandling sound of open taps filling the air. Nil pushes the antique door open. Inside, the temperature is perfect, not too hot nor too cold, and Mel is waiting for him wearing a blue silk nightgown, her hair left loose, her feet bare, the most intimate version of her Nil has ever seen. She doesn’t smile. Their eyes lock. She holds a cordless phone in her hand.
Objects in the Mirror Page 34