But when I’m with him there is only the truth of his apartment, his car and the city in which we move. I see his eye on me above all things. In his living room, with the lights off, in the glow of the TV, watching movies: Pickpocket, Hiroshima Mon Amour, La Jetée, Night of the Living Dead. He fixes his eye, follows my face for every twitch, each smile, each moment of delight and surprise, sadness and pain, he says he’s never seen a face like mine, he could watch it all day. All those years of eyes on me, all that fear, and it has come to this, this desire that is in me alone.
Lying on my back. He comes into me. His eyes flutter behind their lids. I say, I knew you were watching me in the café. I knew it long before. I was sitting there for a long time. I could feel your eyes on me. I smile at the memory, say to myself, Your beautiful face. I pull him close, reach round to feel the scars on his back, ask where they came from. He barely acknowledges the question, his breath is shortening in concentration, he’s losing the power of speech, slowly rising, slowly falling into me. With his eyes closed he finds the breath for it, tells me they’re very old, from his childhood, they grew up with him.
There are long moments when nothing exists. She lies on her back. Their heads are touching, their bodies drifting apart in a V. They look at one another. The AC fights against the oven outside. They catch their breath awhile.
Smiles fade and the thoughts remain. She says, Let me see them again. He rolls to his side and she examines his scars in the cathedral light. He’s not ashamed. She’s fascinated by their texture, by their memory of pain. She places her fingers upon them. This is inevitable. It’s inevitable too that she brings her mouth close, kisses them, touches them with her tongue, moves her tongue along their ridges. He opens his eyes to this, she can feel it happening, she can hear him holding his breath. She says, Does it hurt? and he turns to her, cups her face in his hands.
Out on the street nothing stirs. It’s too hot for anything now. The city is disappearing from view. We lie in bed and we barely move, we hide from the bleached white weight of the sun that throbs like a migraine on the land. In this darkened room I hold his cock in my hand, and for hours we are like this in half-sleep.
Then night is here. The wailing of the dargah begins. The tree-tangled temples glow with their flags and their bells inside. Sounds change in the dark, some imperceptible quality of the air alters them, a quality of thickness, permeability, as if the sun has been an infinite wall and the darkness an absence that amplifies. Voices clamour from the pavement. Trains come and go from Nizamuddin station. I hear the longing in their departure. I’ve started to smoke his joints with him, see their curls that are lit by the headlights of cars. I listen to the horns on Mathura Road.
Lodhi Road joining Mathura Road. The curious witchcraft of junctions. The ruins of Neeli Chhatri in the middle of the traffic circle, connecting us. We walk around it. We talk through our story all the time. We talk through our story and make a myth of it, let it solidify, see it cool in the bed. Over and over I ask him, What did you see that day? What were you doing in the café? We celebrate ourselves this way. I like to hear it when it comes from his lips. He says, I saw a blank slate, a lump of wet clay.
With me, like this, he’s the happiest he’s been. I give it to him, I raise him up. He pulls me down, puts his lips to my hole. The balance of this goes on for hours. For hours I’m consumed, and when I leave he remains a mountain in his shadow room.
But very early on he gives me a sign of how it will end, if I’m wise. We’re sitting on the sofa in his living room, looking at the empty bookshelf against the wall. Looking at the boxes full of books by its side. New ones, old ones. He’s been to Fact and Fiction in Vasant Vihar, bought a hundred books; he’s hauled two hundred more from New York. The day is white-hot outside. We’re naked, and I’ve told him that a bookshelf without books is a terrible thing. So he says, Fill it up, go ahead, the job is yours.
It takes the whole morning. A perilous operation. One false move and the spell is broken. Naked he sits on the sofa with an icebox of beer by his side, and naked I stalk the room. He watches me crouching and opening the boxes, placing the books on the floor, and he drinks as I run my fingers along their spines.
I stop at a book now and then, leaf through its pages. Sit down and read before deciding where to place it. I debate how to arrange them, whether they should be done alphabetically, by size, by style, or some clever combination of it all. I take pleasure in whispering these questions to myself. He says, You whisper to yourself all the time. I never noticed it before. He wants to know what I say, I say it’s nothing, just words. Reassurances for myself.
Every now and then I go to take a sip of his beer. Sometimes I take a book of photography and sit with him, and we look through the images together then, I spend hours like this, with Araki, Prabuddha, Moriyama and Klein. With black-and-white photos of naked women he’s culled from magazines, Kate Moss and tribeswomen and Japanese girls bound in rope.
When I find a passage of text that I like I read it out to him. He never interrupts. He listens to me, tells me to speak and we get lost in it, in my own voice and in his listening to me. There are goosebumps on my arms and legs, the soft hairs stand on end. I come over to the sofa and climb into his lap, continue to read, watch his hands sliding over the tautness of my skin, dipping in. And all the time he continues to drink.
Then it happens that I forget him entirely. The performance stops and my work goes on. For an hour or more I lose myself so completely in the task and I’m the same girl I’ve ever been, the tongue poking out of the corner of my mouth, the same as I was when I was six years old, pensive, curious, not fit for the world.
When it’s over I stand back to admire my handiwork. And proud, calling out to him, turning around, I discover he’s passed out from the beer, twelve in total, one after the other without pause. And unable to keep control or wake, he’s pissed himself; there’s a wide dark patch on the sofa dripping to the floor between his legs.
Like my grandfather he is a godman. Like him, he has things to say. He speaks of Shiva to me, and I have become his disciple on the dusty road. Convincing, persuading, cajoling me. He gives his sermon as he speaks, of another future, of revolution in the villages, in the towns and cities, the revolution of technology, the Internet, new connections and networks. Revolution in India, this is how it will be: no war, no guns, only technology, this he truly believes. He tells me how these connections will occur, how the poor will see and hear, how there will be empowerment for all, how Shiva guides him, and of this world he will be the king.
Like my grandfather, who spoke in tongues. Who had the light of God in him, barefoot from town to dusty town. Who roamed the lands that are the future now, the townships and malls and garbage dumps.
He worked in a bank when he lived in the world, a shy, nervous man. He worked quietly there for years behind the metal grille, behind the screens in the back room, counting money, making copies of copies of forms by the crumbling yellow walls. And then every so often he would get up and start to walk.
Straight out of the door, across the fields to the horizon. He’d walk for days sometimes and sometimes weeks, give all his possessions away. Lose his clothes, find new ones, wear rags, not shave, grow his hair and his beard, get that desert look in his eyes. They’d find him beneath a banyan tree in a far town, holding forth with a crowd, giving sermons, reciting the Gita and the Upanishads by heart. From where he learned them no one knew. They seemed to have been carved on his heart with a blade.
At the start they went out to find him, to bring him back like a wayward teen. But every time he walked right out again. Soon enough they grew to indulge him, to leave him alone, they stopped searching, they washed their hands of him, they cursed him and sighed and said, Let it be his fate. He’d always wander back in the end, walk in through the door one day. Like everything, it was just allowed to go on. The bank kept his job for him. He’d go back there every time, turn up for work and no one would say anything, thoug
h it’s hard to believe. So there were two men in him, one hidden at home and one forever wandering the plains.
But it’s the history of women that’s the history of migration. Men hold the line and they remain. They go to war, they go for work, they travel the land, but they remain. Their name remains, their land remains. You can follow their line into the dark. How to trace the line of women, how to find from where we came? Every generation stripped away. Passed to another name. Gone the line and the name. They never belonged to us anyway. The earth doesn’t belong to us. We disappear, we do not remain.
When I left his apartment the day I learned of his death, Ali was alone a short distance away on the road, despondent, full of grief, his body hanging limp in the rain with his long fingers around his thighs as if he were preparing to be sick. I was halfway to my car before he saw me there and it was only then that he came to life, running after me and calling out, shouting, Madam, madam, please stop.
Ali is standing outside my car door, I can see him. He’s on the street, knocking on the window, trying the handle, saying something that I cannot hear. The rain has become heavier, bouncing off the front of the car, and his face is covered in tears, his eyes are red with crying and drink. He is begging me to please open up, to speak to him, to wind down the glass and open the door so he can speak to me, Please, madam, please. He is drenched, rain has dishevelled his hair, rain is dripping from the beak of his nose. And he is snivelling in a way that I cannot bear. He begs, he starts to slap the glass, struggles with the handle, his face is twisting out of shape. People on their balconies are watching. Guards are stepping out into the street. They know what this is about. From the balcony the fiancée is shouting, ordering Ali away. I can’t take it. Can’t look at him. I start the engine and drive.
I drive for hours. Numb, my whole body shivering, teeth chattering, an ashen face looking at itself in the mirror when it dares. I try to think of a place I can go, somewhere or someone to whom I can turn, a street where I can park without memory, some quiet colony where I can clear my head. But there is nothing, nowhere. Every time I stop, accusing faces look in at me. Maids and servants walking by, housewives and aunties, guards telling me to move. Through the blur of rain I can barely see the road.
At some point a calm descends. It comes at the limit of exhaustion, from something being extinguished. I turn the car around and I begin to drive home. On the way I stop one last time by the Purana Qila. I pull to the side here, take out the SIM card from my phone, bend it in two and throw it in the road.
We wait for the monsoon to break. The black clouds are gathering over Humayun’s Tomb, the kites ride the thermals above its domes. We run our hands over the sandstone walls, walk the boundaries of Nizamuddin. The morning is already swollen, in the middle of the day it dims, it might as well be dawn again the way the light drops out and the clouds roll in, cities themselves, blotting the sun.
Then the first big drops of rain descend. Plop, plop, plop. Bombs of rain one day, big as insects, splashing up the choking red dust, sending it into the atmosphere, trowelling nostrils in the thick cake of earth, and in the smell of wet tarmac rising up we rejoice. People have come out to stand in the streets, on to their balconies to soak themselves in it. We lie on his balcony as it turns to a deluge, as the drops grow together and the thunder cuts the air.
Rain pours down, the city floods. Thunder and lightning fill the sky. And the junctions, they’ve become waterlogged, silt has clogged the drains that are never cleaned. I still go on visits with Aunty here, in a car with water up to the axles in places, stuck in traffic, carrying gifts. I still sit with her at dinner, see Uncle trotting in and out of his room, still answer her questions, listen to her prattle on about the NRI. All this life goes on. But I don’t remember a thing of it.
I remember him instead. He’s following me in the street. The rain-slicked pathways, potholes as puddles, the pools created in the roads, sunlight breaking through the cloud sculpting deep shadows, bringing colour and heat and bouncing light from the sheets. In the evening the headlights graze upon black umbrellas open at crossroads, disembodied toes avoiding the splash of cars and autos. Auto drivers queued up outside Khan. We play games like this: I message him, tell him which market or colony I’ll visit, where I plan to shop, South Extension, GK I, Sarojini Nagar. And he will be there, hidden among the crowds, searching to find me there. I’ll catch a glimpse of him from the corner of my eye. Sometimes I’ll never see him at all. I’ll walk from shop to shop, conscious of my straightened back, my breasts, the arch of my neck. I’ll go back home and undress as he tells me where I’ve been.
Then I arrive at his apartment one day and there are clothes laid out for me on the bed. Clothes he has bought, which he wants me to wear. He says they’ll suit me, that it’s time to become someone new.
He watches as I examine them, measuring my response. They are cool clothes, clothes from the parties in Goa, clothes from the raves: tight T-shirts, cargo pants, a psychedelic T-shirt of Shiva, another with Ganesh. Fluorescent colours. He says, Try them, put them on, and the authority in his voice that is always so absolute is cut with something else. I do it for him without complaint. I undress, I take off my jeans and T-shirt, stand in front of him naked and put them on.
He watches while I dress, and as I do so he holds his breath, getting hard, and when it’s done he comes towards me, puts his hands on me.
In Delhi it was the time of the Cyber Mehfil. A small window of belief, an explosion of parties and raves at the turn of the century, voices celebrating the new millennium, the opportunities it held, the freedom, the new technology on offer, the hope with the music filtered in from abroad, filtered through Goa via the dargahs and temples, the riverbeds and the mountains, becoming Delhi’s own. A small window of celebration and joy in the farmhouses and the disused spaces, before the police got wind of it and shut it down, before the moral panic set in. These parties broke the barriers and stormed the city for a while.
These were the places he went to in the night when I went home to Aunty and lay in bed wrapped up in our love. These are the places he went to dance, take acid, MDMA, where he thinks he is Shiva, Shiva in the flesh. Dancing this new reality, dancing the destruction and the chaos of the world. Everyone was delighted with him, he was well loved. He the one who never held back, who danced through the night like a shaman, a dervish, like a god. Who went on his hands and knees and howled, roared like a lion, tore off his clothes. He was famous for it.
I knew none of this. This part of his life he kept away from me, he didn’t let me into this world, he wanted me all for himself. But for a time these people held the bloom of something new, something no one had seen here before. Like everyone who sees such things, they saw a new consciousness, the end of one world and the beginning of a more enlightened age.
He dresses her up in these clothes and it transforms him much more than her, he becomes hard, he’s hard just watching her slip them on, a storm has risen in his eyes, the air has changed. It’s not the girl that he desires, it’s this possession of her, what he’s made, the dressed-up thing. He puts her in front of the mirror, stands behind her, his hands around her waist, feeling across her, passing over every inch, rising to her ribs, beneath her breasts, under her arms, her shoulders, her neck, kisses her neck, slides his hands back down between her legs over the fabric. He watches her as he does this and she watches his hands. He says, Look at yourself. And she looks. Admire yourself, and she does.
Fall in love with yourself. This is you.
He talks about Shiva to me. He fully reveals this part of himself that had earlier only been hinted at, and which in its distant orbit had been charming, little more than an affectation. But Shiva, he says, is all. Shiva in his aspect as destroyer.
After I see his family I tell no one of his death. I give no sign. I carry on with my daily routine. My exam results arrive and despite everything they are good. In the absence of marriage offers it is agreed I should look for a job. On the sur
face it is as if nothing has happened. If I maintain this I will be a bright young girl.
But slowly things come back to me. They come in dreams at first, nightmares of him that are hard to place. I tell myself not to remember as I wake, but in the corner of my eye they remain.
He has something for her now: a few drops of acid left in a bottle in the fridge, a gift, wrapped in foil, kept in the dark, still potent, waiting for an occasion to be used.
He drops it on the back of my hand and I bring it to my mouth. He has another drop for himself. Now it’s done there’s no going back.
I’ve made my excuses with Aunty: I’m staying over at a friend’s house. It’s quiet in the colony. In the darkness outside good people have retreated to their beds, but we won’t sleep. He says I’ll see things tonight, the world will open up to me. I’ll see it for the illusion it really is.
We leave the flat and go down to the car. He says we’ll drive into the night out in the desert towards Jaipur.
Driving through the city, nothing happens for a long time. I say, Maybe it’s not working, maybe we should take some more? And he laughs and says, Trust me, it’s coming, you just have to wait.
A Bad Character Page 8