by Akhil Sharma
“What happened?” Father Joseph asked.
The slight guilt I felt at being there without Anita’s knowledge made me feel as if I had caused the tears. I went and knelt beside Asha. “Everything is all right,” I said. She did not remove her hands. I put my arms around her. Asha cried more loudly. Father Joseph stood near us with his arms folded across his chest. “My little mango, you’ll get salty crying.”
“Mummy is all right?” Asha asked, gasping.
“Yes.”
She surged around my neck. I lifted her up. “Mummy came to the school to tell me Daddy died.” Asha continued crying and I continued holding her. It took ten or fifteen minutes before she calmed down.
“Have a cold drink,” Father Joseph kept muttering. Asha drank the Campa and went back to her classes.
“She cries often in class,” he said. “We send her to walk around the grounds. Sometimes she spends the whole day outside. The teacher goes out during recess and finds Asha asleep on the ground. As soon as she wakes, she starts crying again.” Father Joseph said this with exasperation. “She has to leave her sadness at home.”
I looked at him. He looked back into my eyes. This is his revenge, I thought. The room vanished and all I could see was his round face. Without realizing it, I had moved close to him. Father Joseph tilted back. He had a series of tiny white bubbles growing to the side of one nostril. “Asha’s very sensitive,” I whispered.
“Yes,” he said, and speaking released some fear onto his face.
“Please take care of her.”
I took Asha to a restaurant across the road and we ate ice cream. She said almost nothing, except when we were returning to school. “Don’t tell Mummy,” she asked.
“Why?”
“She’ll be angry.”
For a moment I wondered if Asha meant that Anita would be angry at me for coming. Then I understood she probably thought Anita would be angry at her. “Why would your mummy be angry?”
Asha only looked ahead at the road we were crossing.
Perhaps we inherit the way we respond to grief the way we inherit height or skin color. The form of Asha’s sorrows was so similar to how I had responded to my mother’s death that almost instantly I loved her.
When I was young, the first sign of love was fear, the fear of appearing ridiculous or incompetent to some friend I had loved for a week or to the first prostitute or to Radha. The first sign of loving Asha was joy. Instead of climbing onto a bus, I jumped on. The joy explained everything. The dirt field outside my office window existed as something Asha might perhaps see or whose dust might inspire some sentence in a conversation we had. I never believed I could harm her.
If I had told Anita that I was visiting Asha at her school, she would have forbidden it. But I wanted to help Asha and believed it was not possible to do so with Anita nearby. I began going to Rosary School during Asha’s lunch hour.
Waiting for Asha in Father Joseph’s office, even knowing that I would not touch her or harm her in any way, I still felt ashamed and even criminal. Walking away with her beyond the reach of the school windows, I had the feeling that hundreds of eyes were watching us. But I never asked Asha to keep anything secret from her mother. She must have sensed Anita’s hostility toward me and acted on her own.
Usually we went across the road only to eat dosas or chole baturas. I would eat half of mine and Asha would eat her own and what part of mine I did not want. As we talked, Asha drained two or three bottles of cold drinks. Sometimes other students in Asha’s class escaped from the school and appeared at the restaurant to spend their change on cold drinks. To win Asha protection and friendship from them, I paid for their drinks or ice cream. Often when I visited Asha, a dozen boys and girls appeared at the restaurant and asked, “Uncleji, will you buy us something?”
My love for Asha made me candid. “Remember when we went to Mr. Gupta’s for the wedding reception?” Asha nodded as she chewed. “I asked you if your father used to buy you ice cream and you said no, but that you liked to imagine he did.” Asha continued chewing, though now she looked down at her plate. “Why do you like to think that?”
Asha did not answer for a while. “I miss him,” she said finally.
It was harder to go from there. “But why do you like imagining that?”
“I don’t.”
“Were you just saying it, then?” When Asha did not answer, I said, “Your principal says you cry in school.” Asha remained quiet.
“I cried all the time when my mother died.” The silence continued. “You know why little babies weep?”
Asha shook her head no.
“The little babies are missing their families from their past lives. The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies. The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they’ll forget.”
Asha looked up. Her eyes were shiny. She took a sip of water.
Asha was full of perplexing guilts. Once she said, “Mummy thinks I’m a thief.” This was so strange I laughed. We were in the dosa restaurant. “She follows me around.” I thought Asha could be referring to how Anita tracked Asha and me when we were in the flat simultaneously. “I’ve stolen two things only in my life. One was a candy, the other was a pencil.”
Making Asha laugh was often my goal. “You are too little to steal the refrigerator. That’s the only thing worth robbing. How big are your pockets?” I made her stand and turn out the pockets in her skirt. Then I stood and asked, “Can I fit in them?” I walked around her and lifted one foot toward the pockets. “You can’t get a mouse in those.” Asha had started laughing loudly. I sat down. “Your mother is strange. She follows around the people she loves. When she was in higher secondary, she loved her home economics teacher. She loved her so much she found out where the teacher lived and walked circles around the block where the woman lived.”
Asha also wanted to learn magic spells so that she could bring her father back. But she was so afraid of ghosts that she hated the dark.
“Why would a ghost be here instead of in America?” I asked. “You think a ghost wouldn’t get bored watching you in Hindi class?”
The more lunches I had with Asha, the more certain I became that Asha’s oddness might have been exaggerated by Rajinder’s death but was not created by it.
“If you can see something in your head as clearly as in life, then what’s the difference between that and life?” she once asked.
“Close your eyes and imagine being pinched,” I said. She did. I kicked her leg.
“Oh,” she answered. Asha had not considered this.
Because of her oddities and since I loved her, at first I thought she might be a genius. Helping Asha with her schoolwork, I soon realized she was not. She was slow with math. Her spelling was terrible.
Among the things I hoped to offer Asha was an adult viewpoint of her thoughts. “You’re not stupid. Everybody thinks he’s stupid. Besides, you don’t have to be smart. You only have to be smart enough. How much is seventeen plus thirteen?”
“Thirty.”
“That’s more than enough brains to be a doctor.”
At another time Asha said, “I think I am bad.”
“Why?”
“I think if Mummy died, I would be an orphan and everybody would feel sorry for me and I would like that.”
“People think anything. That’s all right. It’s good to think. Even strange thoughts. When I was your age I used to think I would sail a ship alone to England and steal back all the things the British had taken from India. I had never been on a boat in my life. I thought all the jewels and gold they had taken were in one room in a palace and I used to worry how I would be able to carry all these things to the boat by myself. Sometimes I thought I would be caught and killed and become famous.”
“But I don’t like Mummy. That’s why I don’t mind being an orphan.”
“Did you like me six months ago?”
Asha laughed at this, and I felt bad that she had not liked me six months ago.
One week I went to see her four times. I went because I cared for Asha and helping her was an easy task that made me feel good about my generosity. But the idea of wanting to see Asha, remembering that I had rubbed my penis against her back, made me anxious, and the next week I did not go at all.
I also began talking more with Anita. Each night I confessed my political sins. These recountings began because I once returned home and found something intimidating in Anita’s sullenness as she mended a sleeve of Asha’s school jacket. Sensing her lurking anger I decided to deflect it and told her what crimes I had committed that day on Mr. Gupta’s behalf. I thought that providing her with something to rage about openly would be a way to keep us from the topic of what I had done to her.
My confession usually occurred in the living room, after the English news. I would sit alone on the sofa beneath the fluorescent tube light. Anita and Asha sat across from me on the love seats. Sometimes I confessed in the common room with all of us sitting on the floor. And at least twice I did so on the roof, where Anita and Asha slept because it was June and load shedding meant there might be no electricity and no turning ceiling fans for fourteen or twenty hours at a time.
“I went to a hotel this afternoon,” I might begin, as if reciting a list of facts. If I started with anything more complicated than a fact, I became nervous. “The Oberoi. A five-star. Mr. Bajwa was already there, waiting in a room.”
“How did you know which room?” At the beginning of my confession, Anita was also anxious, and this manifested itself in interrogation which appeared intended to catch me in a lie. I did not mind being questioned, since it allowed me to show I was hiding nothing.
“I asked for the hotel manager’s party, because rooms and meals given out free are budgeted under the hotel manager’s name.” I looked at Anita to see if she had more questions. “The Oberoi doesn’t let autorickshaws enter the driveway, only taxis, so I had to get out in front of the hotel and walk up the driveway, which is sloped. The lobby is four or five times bigger than this flat. It’s sealed on one side with glass and you can see their swimming pool.”
“How big is a swimming pool?” Asha asked.
“As large as our entire compound.” I think Asha was allowed to witness these confessions because Anita wanted her to dislike me. But I met Asha often enough during her school lunch hour that I think she saw those nightly confessions as part of a larger conversation.
“It is full to the top with water?”
“Yes.”
“Is it as deep as the compound’s buildings are tall?”
“No. Maybe three or four meters deep.”
“How many people were in it?” Confessions for Asha, despite her mimicking her mother’s serious expression, appeared as much travelogue as anything else.
“Two or three.”
“See the waste,” Anita said to Asha. “Your people,” she then accused me. Asha nodded. I wondered how she felt at keeping our lunch meetings secret and whether some part of her enjoyed lying to her mother.
Although I did not mind being questioned, I was afraid of accusations where fair condemnation of my corruption was conflated with something I had never come close to doing. I took bribes, but nearly all went to Mr. Gupta. I could not afford water in bottles, let alone the Oberoi and its swimming pool. “I’ve seen, I think, seven swimming pools in my life,” I said. I waited for this information to be absorbed and then continued.
“The room was no bigger than this living room. It was very cold and it had a sealed smell, perhaps because of the air-conditioning. The curtains were drawn so that the light was dim. There was a view of a road. There was a bathroom to the left, near the door. There were two beds. Mr. Bajwa was lying on one, drinking whiskey and watching TV He was the only one there. His beard hid his kurta buttons and he had his dagger on, but he was wearing black office shoes. Mr. Bajwa had arranged for property developers to see what we were selling to increase interest.” Anita made a noise as if she had caught me at something. “I think he also wanted to show off before the people who had ignored him when he was in trouble. Mr. Bajwa spent a long time arranging the grandest hotel possible for the meeting. A little after I arrived, Mr. Mittal and his brother came. His brother looks just like him. Then Mr. Verma and Mr. Satchu came together. Mr. Poon and Mr. Rajan followed.”
“We don’t need to know their names,” Anita interrupted. “How many people in all?”
“Eleven. Mr. Bajwa kept pouring whiskey for everyone. Johnnie Walker Black.”
“That costs how much?”
“Maybe four thousand. After the developers began arriving, Mr. Bajwa stayed on his feet. He had the bottle in his hand all the time and would fill a glass even after only one sip was taken. He wasn’t paying for the drinks, so why should he care. Mr. Bajwa started smiling as soon as the first developer came and didn’t stop till near the end. As he talked and poured whiskey, Mr. Bajwa kept going to the phone and ordering food, which arrived on carts. Samosas, roasted peanuts and cashews, toast, lamb cutlets. The hotel was paying. When the waiters lingered for their tips, he would say, ‘It’s all paid for by Manager Sahib. I am a beggar.’ He was talking so fast, I remembered how crazy he was even before the corruption investigation. He used to lie about everything. I introduced myself to all the property dealers, but mostly I sat on one bed and watched. This meeting would make my job easier, but I was being presented as less important than Mr. Bajwa.”
“You do a bad job, you get replaced.”
“Mr. Bajwa is a better moneyman than I am,” I agreed. To make sure Anita’s anger was actually being consumed, I tried always acknowledging insults and responding as candidly as possible.
“That’s like saying he’s a better poisoner than you.”
“Yes. I am an incompetent poisoner. I give people bad headaches instead of killing them.” I waited to see if Anita was going to respond. When she did not, I asked, “Am I less bad now because Mr. Bajwa is taking over?”
“No, because you didn’t give up your sins voluntarily.”
“I think you are better,” Asha said. I ignored this, as I always did compliments from her. Instead of harming me in her eyes, the confessions were making me interesting and, because of my frankness, trustworthy.
“Not much work gets done when there are more than two people in a room,” I continued.
“And when you are one of these, not even a little bit,” Anita said.
“Normally I am lazy, but I am working hard these days. Still, almost nothing was done at the party. Everybody in the room knew everyone else, but they don’t get to meet regularly and so were enjoying themselves. There was food. There was drink. Mr. Bajwa had brought diagrams of the properties, white sheets with black print. He unfolded them on a bed, the one away from the door, and on a table. This meeting was a good idea. It’s rare for so much land to become available at once, and someone who might at first think that it isn’t possible to build on property obtained this way will think again if he sees another person considering buying.”
“Why aren’t you smart like Mr. Bajwa?”
“He’s bolder,” I said. “As people drank, it became something of a party. I didn’t even finish one drink.” I inserted mention of this restraint because I knew Anita felt threatened by alcohol. “I put it on the night table and left it there. Everyone appeared to actually like Mr. Bajwa. They kept hugging him, grabbing his arms. This surprised me, because it made me realize how unimportant relations are that these people could have dropped him so quickly despite liking him. Mr. Bajwa told a good story about his wife.
“‘My wife is my boss. It’s because she never gets excited and she never lies and so I can get excited and lie. When we were first married, she asked me how tall I was. I said five feet six, but that I wasn’t sure. I must have known the truth, because I said I wasn’t sure. But I liked the number, because you can round up. You can think, I am nearly six feet tall. Ri
ta decides to measure me. She does, and she tells me I am five feet five and a half. I hate this, because now I have to round down. I am a dwarf. I kept waking up the next few nights thinking of this. And I am going to get shorter as I get older. When she told me, I said to her,”If in my twenty-six years I had wanted to know the truth, don’t you think I could have found out before this afternoon? Is this the only tape measure in the world?” I sometimes make her lie to me. “Tell me we have ten rooms in the flat.” And she will say, “On the ground floor or on the top?”’
“People were getting drunk. People always use the bathroom more when they are drinking, and a line began forming. Finally they began pissing in the tub and sink. Even when something is free, people want more, and when it’s free, the only way to get more is to harm it so other people can’t use it. After a while Mr. Bajwa decides to order wine. Wines are more expensive than whiskey.”
“How much more?” Anita asked.
“I don’t know, but Mr. Bajwa placed his order and a few minutes later the phone rang. ‘Hello, Manager Sahib,’ Mr. Bajwa said. This I knew meant something, because why would we get called back? Mr. Mittal was sitting beside me, asking me about arranging to get his son into a good school. Mr. Bajwa talked for one or two minutes and hung up. I could tell something bad was going to happen. People were drunk. Mr. Bajwa, Mr. Poon, and Mr. Rajan had spent some time looking over the list of wines, which I think meant they had picked very expensive ones. Then this young man came. He was maybe thirty-five and wearing a blue suit. He introduced himself as the assistant manager in charge of client services. I wondered why the manager had not come himself. Mr. Bajwa introduced him to Mr. Poon and Mr. Rajan. Everyone was watching this now, of course, because his introducing the assistant manager to people would make any rejection of his request especially personal.