“Them? They will go back to the shit they belong to. In fact, they’ll be even worse off. May this be a lesson. You challenge Ameen...” He slams his palm on the table. “You lose it, your head.” He starts laughing, but the laughter turns into a phlegmy gasp, forcing him to bend, heaving for air.
He’s high on triumph. His childhood flashing before his eyes, all the people who shut him down when he was growing up, all those who said he would never make it out while he was growing larger, all of them telling him that he was not enough. Ameen is high on their present tears, on their pleads to come, because he won. He won the game, says the sound of his laughter, and Mel can’t but smile.
“And of course, we’ll be by your side every step of the way,” he says, once he recovers, “both economically and in terms of human resources.” He moves to fish his phone out of the pocket of his jeans.
The Commissioner stops him, a hand on his arm.
“What about all the poor people who will die in the meantime?”
Ameen eyes him weird, you can see it from the way he spreads his chicken legs, as if waiting to see the seriousness of his friend break into laughter. When it doesn’t happen, he says, “We are breeding a better world, brother.”
At a loss for words, the Commissioner glances at Mel.
“A scapegoat would be enough to pacify the Pit,” he mutters, stumbling over the words, trying to give a semblance of randomness to his comment.
Something cracks inside Ameen, a bell ringing, a warning light, it’s obvious from his posture, how he stiffens his back a little, how he tries with all his might not inspect the room with his eyes.
Trying to minimize the noise, Mel lowers the handle.
“How did you kill him?” The Commissioner’s voice goes a pitch higher.
Ameen winces, raising a hand before his face. He seems on the verge of turning, but he grins instead. “Actually,” he lies, “I own the fucking hospital, you know.” As he gesticulates, the merry clinking of his gold bracelets sings a vaguely hostile song. “I just walked in, that was all, I walked in like this and strangled the Hijra. I looked him in the eyes, you know, and then I left. Just like that. At this time the body has already been burned.” He clicks his tongue, his hand resting again on his side.
The Commissioner drops his eyes, he stares at the ground as if looking for a lost treasure, then he exhales, looks up, his voice flat, funereal, and says, “Actually, it has not.”
A pause. They look at each other.
Ameen turns and meets Mel’s eyes, standing right behind him. He gets up, in his throat a strangled scream, his chair tipped over with a crash, his hand running to the gun tucked into his jeans, but the Commissioner kicks the table against Ameen’s thigh and something breaks, his knees buckle and he falls to the ground, the pangs of pain distorting his mouth. His gaze fixed on Mel’s face.
He is kneeling, struggling to get back up, when the truncheon smashes his head. Ameen collapses on his back.
The Commissioner, in tears, lifts his friend’s convulsing body and puts him back in his seat, but Ameen, limp, slips on the plastic chair, his bony ass hanging in mid-air, so the Commissioner has to grab him by the armpits, lifting him, cuffing him behind his back to make him stay put on that chair. He avoids his eyes, a hoarse sound rising from his throat. Ameen sounds like a toad.
Mel didn’t move an inch, didn’t miss a moment, taking in every movement, and when the Commissioner looks up at her, he seems about to ask her to leave, but he can’t and so he waits and breathes heavily, and Mel holds his gaze, looking from one to the other, from one to the other.
“Make it look real,” she says.
Ameen comes to when a slap smashes his teeth. He manages to only open one eye, and doesn’t do a great job at it. He swings his head, vomits a bucket of blood and bile on his own shirt, on his belt and crotch. Shivering painfully, he looks at them both, frowning, and doesn’t seem scared, not really, just absent.
Mel nods at the Commissioner.
Ameen looks at him, too. Perhaps because of the blow to his head, there is mockery in his gaze, in a harmless 80s TV series bully kind of a way. It’s almost comical. Of course, when the truncheon strikes next, splitting his left eyelid in two, fear returns big time.
Ameen is crying now. His wailing, however, unlike that of the Commissioner, is mute, and with each stroke his face ripples like a marsh pond, his features blurring, almost losing their intrinsic human shape, reflecting all the shades of the physical pain he is going through. Once the chair shatters under his weight, Ameen lies with his face in the dust, his arms behind his back, one leg bent in an unnatural position, more odd than creepy, hissing for breath.
Mel crouches beside him to hear the words soaring from his throat. He mutters, almost delirious, trying to speak, in his eyes a placid despair. Having witnessed a couple of these choked attempts, she shakes her head, stands up.
Before the Commissioner hits again, Ameen speaks. “I don’t understand.”
Mel observes him, intrigued. She kneels beside him once more.
“Why?” Ameen shouts. And then, crying, addressing to the Commissioner, “We’ve paid you handsomely.”
“Because I own the single most powerful currency in the world,” says Mel. “Fear.”
The Commissioner, his mouth reduced to a slit, his nostrils dilated like those of an ox, grabs Ameen by the scruff, pulls down his pants with a jerk, baring his surprisingly hairless ass, and thrusts the truncheon up his anus. Then, opening a cupboard, he takes a second baton, a thicker one, quite new judging by the absence of rust, and gets closer to the body of his friend, and he seems one of those fat cop heroes from the movies when he grabs the first truncheon protruding from the trembling butt, and describing an arc over his head, he crashes Ameen’s coccyx, shattering it like porcelain.
Now he’s screaming. Pissing himself. He kicks on the floor inching forward like a mad worm, banging his head again and again until the clink of his teeth bouncing on the floor merges with the yells.
“That’s enough,” says Mel then.
The Commissioner nods, wipes his tear-streaked cheeks, takes a bottle and a syringe from the cupboard, the needle sinking to suck the colorless liquid, and pushes to expel the residual air. It spurts out, just a few drops. Watching his friend on the ground, he drops to his knees, pulls out the truncheon, and injects thinner into the swollen flesh around his anus.
Mel wills herself to watch every second of the process.
“I left you everything you need in a desk drawer,” she says, when Ameen’s eyes close. “Release his confession to the press, then all the records concerning Worlds United. Name names.”
“Are you sure no one will come looking for me?”
“You do your job right and nobody will ever see that video.”
She walks out. She stops. “The Nepali child,” she says, “have her sent back to wherever she’s from. Make sure she has everything she needs. I will have your cock if you don’t.”
Outside the station, the golden light of the street lamps and the smog haze and the darkness welcome her, and Mel feels reborn. On the Enfield, waiting for the traffic to flow, she lets her eyes wander on Grand Trunk Road, the cars cutting each other off, at the same time slow and hectic in the way they struggle to win over centimeters of tar, battling against the yellow and black rickshaws, zigzagging, noisy like old crows. Mel observes the wonder of a perfect jam in all its mighty chaos, observes the headlights filtering through the dust, and she guns the engine, scraping her flip-flops on the black road.
“The wonderful horror of being,” she says, but there is no one to hear.
Lightheaded, she glides through the city. She doesn’t speed, she takes her time to savor every turn, slowing down to enjoy the sight of a street corner known but never explored, taking detours, wrong roads only to turn around, drinking hot puffs of wind.
Despite the block imposed by the authorities, she drives along the Fence, meeting the barricades, waving at the offic
ers. “It’s not safe, madam,” they say. “Go back home,” they say. And against the horizon lit by the fumes of the unrest, Mayhem Boulevard is populated by the usual couples dressed in Gucci, the usual families with their underpaid drivers coming from and going to the multiplex, strolling in the park, guarded by plentiful yet invisible guards.
Splitting the tar, a huge shopping center rises wider than any palace, people boarding their spacecrafts to and fro, unaware that beneath these golden fortresses jabber away swarms of debris, sewage, human flea infestations, waste, remnants of things that have been and gone and are now lying down there because no one knows what to do with things that have no longer a shape nor a name.
Mel parades next to the Ayodhya Central Station, a magnificent Indo-Saracenic building.
Scheria, a light pillar in the distance at first, now crests over the city in all its glory. Mel drives to the parking lot, turning the engine off on the slope so that the Enfield moves by inertia, stopping in front of the guard, a new, head-wobbling, fearful-smiling boy who takes the keys careful not to touch her, and when Mel smiles back, the kid looks away, to the ground, pushing the bike, entering that dark parking maze that only the valets know how to navigate, the secrets of which, according to the legend, are handed down from generation to generation, week after week.
Mel enjoys even the journey in the elevator, studying the details of the cabin, the brass finery, the faux-antique mirror, the stucco framing the Schindler touchpad. It’s the perfect cage. From the speakers, “Nessun Dorma” by Pavarotti.
The doors open, Mel tries to reduce the noise to a minimum while pacing on the parquet, focusing on the tactile perception of her foot, feeling the toe, the heel and eventually the whole sole brushing the floor, again and again. She moves forward.
Across the hall, Mel touches every object she meets, her index finger tracing the contours, her eyes lost in the gloom enveloping the house, and for a moment she closes her eyes, moving like the blind, absolving herself from the responsibility of seeing. Under her fingers, Henry’s Egyptian lamp, which, according to him, was “on sale because it lacked a genie”; his Congolese ashtray carved “from the skull of a colonizer”; the shell he “smuggled by canoe” in Chile. Mel knows their shape perfectly, as well as she knows the amazing stories that accompany them. Henry, Henry, Henry—always him and only him.
Her eyes closed, Mel walks around the sofa, touching its fine leather. At the threshold of the main hall, she stops, opens her eyes. Henry sits in his armchair, the iPad in his lap, his face wet with the cold light of the screen, reading, aware of her presence yet not acknowledging it. Something on his face betrays a hint of anguish.
Mel watches him for a moment, leaning against the jamb, then moves across the room, her eyes wide open and fixed on him, trying to avoid blinking so as to watch him without respite. She comes to the center of the room where sofas, armchairs, carpets, tables stand between them as barricades.
Henry looks up. He looks at her, silent, but indeed he looks at her, stares straight in her eyes, and Mel, steady, her nails sunk into her palms, stares back, returning his gaze like a statue, and there, in those eyes, Mel sees something undefined, unnamed, unknowable to anyone but her.
Mel starts undressing. She strips with deliberate slowness, freeing her neck from the scarf, dragging it on her shoulders, dropping it behind, a silent cloud brushing over her shoulder blades in its descent; she unbuttons her shirt, button after button in mechanical, measured movements, the fabric revealing her chest, her ribs, her abdomen, the shirt falling to the ground hovering like a butterfly; Mel ignores her candy-colored bra, unbuttoning her jeans, those baggy, faded jeans, and she bends to take them off, unveiling her buttocks wrapped in a white thong. She gets up again, lets the jeans slide all the way down her legs, stepping out of them.
Mel and Henry look at one another without a word, the impossible silence of the house begging them to speak.
Mel takes off her shoes and socks, again she does so blindly, without taking her eyes off him, kicking the shoes away on the floor. Sighing. She folds her arms behind her back and with a fluid motion, she undoes her bra, she slips it off, drops it, feels like covering herself but resists the urge, letting her arms fall to her sides, her chest swelling as she lifts her chin high, showing him her swollen, mature breasts. Henry stares at her in the eyes. She bends again, grabs the elastic of her underwear, and without hesitation lowers it to her ankles, lingering for a moment, breaking the eye contact to free herself, raising one foot and then the other. She stands upright again, her eyes on him, stark naked—a veil of hair under her arms and on her legs and between them.
Mel holds her breath, glaring at him. Henry stares back, the iPad in his lap, he stares at his daughter, and then his eyes slide, just for a second, down her body. Mel breathes out, waiting for her father’s gaze to meet her own again.
And then she walks away, deliberately slow in her steps, bending her knees, savoring the floor with her feet, heels and toes and soles, she leaves the room.
She doesn’t turn around. Entering the sleeping quarters, she strolls in front of the terrace doors, where, beyond the glass, the heart of Ayodhya, usually pitch black, shines scarlet with flames. The Pit turned a pyre. The chaos, the ugliness, the horror.
Mel enters her room and stops, finding the Little Girl lying on the bed, her face turned towards the opposite wall, her small back shaken by sobs. Mel gets closer, observing her for a few seconds, seeing how small a thing she is, how helpless, and sits on the bed, the Little Girl stopping cold, not turning, visibly nervous while Mel lies beside her, behind her, spooning her, wrapping her arms around her to lean her chin on her head, her knees behind her tiny legs.
After a moment of silence, the Little Girl takes a breath, Mel holding her, holding her tight, and she stops crying, not even a tear gushing out of those green eyes, not even when the elevator doors cling open, not even when the sound of steps fill the living area, not even when the contrite voices of the policemen echo throughout the house, taking him away.
The work at the Trump Towers has stopped. Climbing the stairs, they drink imported wine, passing the bottle around.
She starts climbing the stairs faster, leaving them behind, humming a tune of her own invention. She leaves them in the womb of the East Tower. The other two keep on drinking, now with greater vigor, avoiding each other’s gaze, climbing the steps charmed by her mermaid song.
The wine’s over. After two flights of stairs, in silence and with the empty bottle in his hand, one of them throws it against the wall and the glass breaks into a thousand pieces, the sight of the destruction making them both laugh and then look away. There’s something the matter in the way they move.
“Let’s go see the stars,” she shouts into the stairwell.
The two hurry up.
“Your nose is bleeding,” goes one.
“I know,” says the other, without wiping himself.
The Trump Towers construction site lies dark and empty.
From the seventeenth floor, her bodiless voice echoes in the stillness.
“Come,” she says from a corridor, doors dotting the walls on both sides. Seventeen doors.
Dust. One of them says he’s allergic to dust but, on a second thought, he can’t remember if it’s true or make-believe. They follow the voice. They find a room, the door ajar. Dust on the floor. On the chairs. On the furniture wrapped in cellophane. It twirls around in the flashes of light filtering through the glass window wall. The noise of an open beer can. Her voice extinguished. Silence sneaking in along with them. They raise the cans.
The imported beer drips refreshing down their throat, a hundred rupees per sip, and she laughs, and there is something strange in her laugh, and her laughter turns is something resembling a gasp. She’s drunk.
He kisses her. He plugs her wet lips with his own for fear of her talking. She hesitates, glancing at the other. Then she responds to the assault with everything she has.
The other j
oins, their hands everywhere on her amber skin, doing every inch of her, their mouths alternating, insufficient to satisfy and be satiated at the same time—it’s happening, yet it’s inconceivable.
They move from one room to another, and while one snogs her, the other plays a trivial song with his iPhone, but nobody really minds the grating sound coming from the speaker, the device lying on the ground, the three of them stretching and exploring their bodies, his hand on her knee sliding up to her thigh and beyond, meeting the severity of a belt, and so the fingers grip the button of her jeans, paving the way in.
The countless hands investigate, conquer her body centimeter by centimeter, impatient, greedy on her skin, between her legs, and she sighs on their faces, exchanging kisses. Their clothes hiss as they’re pulled away from their bodies, wiping their skins, scraping their nails.
One goes down and becomes mouth, tracing a path of kisses on her belly. Down from her navel. He bites the rose. A scream.
They swap, tracing saliva streets, feasting on the sweetest food, stopping to meet halfway, lingering in the pleasure of what is still unexpected.
Again, they change room. It looks just like the others, a kingdom that belongs to no one, where shadows play their audience.
She pushes one against the wall crucifying him with her lips while the other closes the door behind them, a puff of dust rising, and this room is the innermost part of the tower, a place only they know. The three of them take refuge in a corner, laying on the floor, dressed in the bodies of one another, and the decision is unanimous, and one of them withdraws, flees, leaving the other his moment, at long last.
“Are you sure?” he says.
In spite of everything, she hears a hint of sweetness in his voice, and so she kisses him, pressing her teeth against his teeth, clinging to him and drawing him to herself.
He looks at her and tries to enter and fails and how embarrassing it is, yet he doesn’t lose his temper, and she guides him and then he plunges inside her and the universe explodes screeching like metal falling apart, and he feels his own identity fade and it hurts, but at the same time there exists no sweeter annihilation.
Objects in the Mirror Page 38