It begins on the Gurgaon road. Yawning, each one sucking in a lungful of air, but it’s not tiredness, it’s something else, as if bubbles are rising and the atoms of the body are breaking loose. The buildings at the side tingle and shudder. The tail-lights of cars leave tracers of red in their wake. And in the belly, there’s this feeling of butterflies, the compulsion to bring it all up, the impossibility of it, and the knowledge that if you could, it would be nothing less than the universe, a projectile stream of galaxies from the mouth.
But this is only a whisper, a small wave, it comes, it goes. Relax, he says. Relax, and his voice comes to me from far away. I close my eyes and focus on the dark throbbing music he plays, the low hum of the engine. We’re on the highway in the desert.
I open my eyes to a carnivalesque world. Unhinged, the trucks come roaring at us with their painted faces and vicious mouths, the cheap flashing statues of neon gods that adorn their dashboards leading the charge, dancing into the void. Real objects slide on the surface of things. Solid spaces bend. What I once knew to be true is only a canvas to be painted on and torn apart. I turn to look at him and he’s a black beast with a grinning maw. I can’t help laughing out loud. I laugh at him for what seems like hours. There’s a panic somewhere there.
On the stereo the sheer terror of Vivaldi.
Haunting corridors and cloisters, bales of straw across fields, sweat cooling on the skin.
She loses speech, hearing.
Her sense of self, always so certain, so fearful, begins to fall away. Her personality, so fixed and inevitable, reveals itself to be entirely open to change.
Here it peaks.
And then it breaks.
Like passing from a raging torrent into a vast and eerie lake.
He pulls the car over at a dhaba. The engine dies, the music stops. She can hear it ticking as it cools. The silence is unnerving. His face is watching hers; his eyes drift like coracles tied to the dock of his nose. He insists they go in.
She says she won’t go in. He goes in. It’s 3 a.m.
There’s nothing left but the tremor of the tyres, the horns going off like ships leaving port, horns like the charges of matadors. In the trees the tube lights hang at odd angles, the broken limbs of angels. The insects of India swarm, drawn to the brightness that is a gas fogging the eyes.
He returns without a word and we are driving again. We might never have stopped. We drive for ever and turn around and drive back again.
We end in the birthing fields of Gurgaon, among those infinite constructions that have become ruined cities to me, the emptiness of history reflected in the stars above. I don’t know how we got here, how much time has gone and what has been lost.
Ahead there is one building site framed by bamboo drenched in an artificial light with workers crawling across the concrete and steel.
They look like ants devouring an elephant’s corpse. Only the corpse will devour the ants in the end, devour them and grow up tall.
We fall down before it, are silent in awe of it. He makes love to me on the desert floor. I see other faces in him; he changes before my eyes into an old man, a demon, a little boy. The birds circle around to pick at our bones.
Light falls from the sky, the stars fade, the horizon grows grey and real. The drug wears off, sadness leaves a mist. The men in the distance carry on their work, oblivious to any of this. We get in the car and drive back into Delhi without words. As the morning stirs I see men and women who have slept all night rise from their beds, enter the streets again, sweep the earth, go about their work. I thought I’d be free, released of my chains. Now I only see how it will end.
But oh! I’m meeting the NRI today. Oh sweetness and light and what joy! The day has finally arrived. He is here for me, my ticket to the Promised Land.
He’s waiting in the coffee shop of the Taj Mansingh, he sees me and puts up his hand, recognizes me from the photo Aunty sent. He’s buttoned up and bland, this American. Just like an American should be, in a lime-green polo shirt and chinos, side parting and perfect white teeth. A nice guy I’m sure, but at this point nice means nothing to me, I can barely tell if I’m awake or asleep, and I can only take so much of sweet.
Aunty laughs and trills like a bird of paradise when she’s getting me ready to go. She’s overseeing the game of dress-up we play. She’s certain about this one now; she knows that he is the one for me.
He greets me like an old friend at the table. He clumsily tries to kiss me on the cheek. Tells me I’m much prettier in person than he imagined on the phone. We sit down and order nimbu-pani, but when it comes it’s too sugary, so he sends it back and asks for a Diet Coke instead.
He complains about India awhile to me, about how slow and inefficient it is compared to the States, how customer service is zero here, how the taxi drivers don’t know where to go. But he’s almost signed the papers for a new apartment in Gurgaon. His parents are going to move there when they get old, back to the motherland, and there’ll be a room for us there as well.
He places his palms on the table in an emphatic show. It’s so good to finally meet you. He asks how college is going, and tells me he’s been looking into courses around New York for me, advertising or marketing, a way to make use of my degree. He believes in a joint-income family after all.
I see his eyes on me, decent and dull, and I know what he wants from me, that he wants to turn me into a good girl. That he thinks he knows who I am.
I tell him I’d like to study film maybe.
And he says, Have you seen American Beauty? It’s a masterpiece.
And even though he is dead I still call him on his phone. I sit in my room and I pick up my mobile to dial his number that I know by heart. Only his voicemail comes through, but his voice is beautiful on the line. He has a separate voice, one he puts on for this role. None of the madness is there. He’s reasonable, perfectly calm.
The message isn’t long. He says his name and the fact that he’s not here right now, but he’ll get back as soon as he can. In a deep and resonant voice. A voice full of easy confidence. A voice that doesn’t match his animal face.
In August college restarted, my final year coming so abruptly upon us that the dream of the summer was at an end.
He said he’d do my work for me, write my essays, he’d do whatever, it was easy for him, he’d make sure I passed with the highest grades. I wouldn’t have to do a thing.
In college, in the lectures, I look around at my classmates, at the girls who I’ve been out with before, whose fortunes had been read alongside mine, and I feel apart from them, superior, changed. I see the life they lead, the things they do, the direction they’re heading in, and I want none of it. My old sadness is worn as a kind of arrogance now.
In bed, in the living room, driving in the car, it’s much the same. He says, It’s just you and me now, and I say, Yes, just you and me. No one else in the world. Fuck them, he says. Fuck everyone. We’ll go crazy, we’ll show them all. And I say, Yes, yes, we’ll do it. Show them all. He says it’s time to leave that world behind, leave Aunty behind, leave marriage behind, leave society behind, and I say, Yes, yes. When he’s inside me I say yes. He says, Move out of that house, move in here with me. And when he’s inside me I say yes. I will. I’ll go get my things, I’ll tell her, I’ll shock them all. He says, Do it, do it now, you don’t need their hypocrite world any more, their safety, their ignorance, their preservation. You have me now. And I say, Yes.
It’s a heady world of make-believe.
But I am a coward and I’ll never leave.
A month passes from the day I hear of his death; I call his voicemail all the time. Ten, twenty times a day, I call him just to hear what he has to say, but it’s always the same. Even as I’m going about my vacuumed life, I step aside and dial the number to hear the only part of him that remains.
Out of hiding, almost imperceptibly, I begin to drive the city again. Routes are muscle memory and Delhi an extension of him. So I drive to the places we hav
e been, grief-stricken but free. I drive the streets at night looking for him. I drive through Lutyens’ Delhi. I go to the American Diner and drink a Bloody Mary alone.
We’re sitting in the American Diner, me and him, drinking Bloody Marys, eating chili dogs. We’ve commandeered the Tabasco sauce. We sit on the stools at the bar, watch what’s happening from here, keep an eye on the red-and-white Formica room, to the right of the cash register with the door behind. Good for conversation, good for getting little extras from the barman. Chili dogs, onion rings, Bloody Marys and later a glass of beer. Our glorious playground Delhi. He whispers in my ear.
A family comes in and sits at the far corner of the bar on the side that leads to the hotel exit. Father, mother, daughter. The girl is about fifteen. I see her right away and she sees me too. She’s watching us, curious. I tell him this and he casts his eye over her. He leans into me and says, See, she’s another you. The only difference is that she knows it already. It’s true, you can see something in her, that curiosity, that restlessness, the disobedience. The arms so thin they might break, with that body and the long black hair, very straight, sitting erect and still as a coal in a fire. Her parents are nothing like her, their surfaces have dulled, and who’s to say she won’t dull too. But right now she’s aflame. And we’re staring at her.
We can’t stare for ever. I tell him to watch me instead. He looks at me. But she knows she’s been seen, that she’s the object of our attentions, our curiosity. So there’s the three of us now, watching, and no one else to know, and she’s looking at me, asking telepathically, What are you doing with this monster by your side? And I’m saying to her, I don’t know. But you should try it some time.
Delhi, yes.
Black bilgewater out of every orifice. Water flowing from the drainage channel. The cops have cordoned off the underpass from Lothian Road. Lothian Road to the Red Fort, stray dogs are eating a corpse down there. They’re using rocks to chase them away but the dogs don’t scare, they keep coming back for more.
In September we take to walking after college, walking Old Delhi as the sun goes down. The monsoon has left its glory behind. This is the height of us. It will never be like this again.
We see another dead body here, before entering the old city at Mori Gate. He is leading me through the streets with him. I am letting myself be led. We’re heading across from the slumber of Civil Lines where we’ve parked, heading from the red-brick charm of Court Road up to Mori Gate, past the police parade ground, up to the edge of the walled city. Each broken brick arch in the distance houses a person, a family, a way to stay alive, the alleyways beyond holding a million lives. People living here the way weeds live in ruins and make flowers. Millions of them, people in the mazes of alleys beyond, where the sun barely shines, through the gaps, with the temples and the minarets and churches, along paths that are labyrinthine. Inside the old city, there’s the smell of engine oil, mechanics with their spare parts, with their shops for screws, brackets, car stereos, flashing lights. A wall of tyres stacked ten metres high, stinking of rubber, towards the Old Delhi station, obscuring the golden dome of St. James’s Church. And kerosene, this is the smell of Delhi too. The gas burners for the bubbling oil, for the samosas and pakodas in their wide-bottomed pans. But in the crowds of open road before the old city this young man is dead. Dead, face up on the pavement, whose cobbles have shaken loose as if they’ve been through an earthquake.
You can see it from far off. There’s something unmistakable, entirely separate from sleep. From drunkenness or unconsciousness. This young man, this Raju, bus passenger, cheap groper, son to a mother, friend, thief, piece of meat. In his early twenties maybe, he’s clean-shaven and not long dead, wearing a black plastic jacket. Cheap and dead with no tale to tell. The mouth, as you get closer, it’s been ripped open on the left side, torn as if caught on a fishing line so it gives an awful grin of skeletal teeth behind the veil of cheek. And the eyes are wide open, staring up in disbelief. Soon the crows will have them, they’ll pluck them out. There are only socks on his feet. His shoes are gone. Someone must have already stolen them.
Everyone is walking around him, acting as if he isn’t there. Thousands of feet, no one seems to notice. We keep walking too. He says, Look, don’t stop, there’s nothing else to do. A cop is directing traffic down on the Tis Hazari road. We all know not to approach him, he’ll happily take us in, question us, come up with an absurd theory, some trumped-up charge. Why are you so interested in a dead man? What does it have to do with you?
My memory always enters Old Delhi at Mori Gate. No matter where I am, it enters into this maze from here, which I have learned through him by heart. Into the medieval stone and commerce, and the din of daily voices in their treble shriek, words swamped by film songs on old radios, battered TV sets and the urgency of porters with heavy loads yelling for people to get out of their way.
Through this maze and out into descending night to the scene of Hamilton Road, past the queues of cycle rickshaws and the toilet blocks, and families with young girls in make-up and cheap clothes, over the railway bridge, just like a fairground, the colour and bustle, the ephemeral joy of the lit-up. A dentist is sitting cross-legged waiting for customers, kept company by pliers and a pile of orphaned teeth on the side of the road.
Into the bazaar north of Chandni Chowk we plunge, to the market inhabiting the centuries-old stone, plastic toys, calculators, computers and games, stationery, manuals. Everything you could hope to find has its place here, junk piled up high into rooms which tiptoe into blackness, passageways that fork and vanish into crypts, double back on themselves. Above ground or underground, inside or out, it’s unclear.
We emerge without warning into the pavement of Chandni Chowk. He pulls me across a gap in the road, past the cycle rickshaws. The Red Fort is glowering at one end. The sound of so many bodies swallowing us. And the fort is gone.
Then a measure of peace, a side alley where nothing stirs. Turning back you can see people marching past the crack of it. It happens like this sometimes, some lanes remain forever hidden away.
He walks me deeper into the walled city, twisting down narrow passageways and alleyways, knowing the way by heart. Suddenly we’re in the place where lives are spent behind walls, in courtyards where the walls are front doors. It’s where the Muslim girls roam, in twos and threes, heavenly girls of milk-white whose skin the sun does not see—they glide past us in silence with their painted cat eyes framed in black.
Turning into another alleyway, he slows our pace to follow a pair moving arm in arm ahead. Suddenly I see them with his eyes, feel his obscene desire, the sport he makes of them. My sisters and me. Because I love him we follow them like this, see their sashaying walk, seek the plaited hair peeking below the waist. Beneath the blackness of their outer world there are gaudy colours, there are sequined and embroidered clothes of pink and blue, pierced ears and noses, rings and studs, necks clamped in jewels, arms in bangles, legs in anklets, feet in heels. I taste the hunger he has for them, for their enormous kohl eyes etched in black, for their lips made up with ruby-red and lashes rising to the moon.
Somewhere, behind closed doors, in cramped and barren rooms, in happy rooms of austere stone, they’ll lie down in their splendour and a man will make love to them, beat them for a look or a word, for no reason at all, will despise them, ignore them, be blind to them, somewhere someone will caress them, whisper secrets in their ears, buy gifts to appease them, make them smile, coax a laugh from their lips from which love trickles like a brook. Her eyelids open and close in the heat of the night, overlooking the masjid.
In his room we hold Old Delhi inside us, the things we’ve seen: the torn cheek, the teeth, the clicking heel on stone, the fleeting eye, the hair beneath the veil. He talks it to me, he fucks me slowly with his words, takes his pain out on me from the city he’s consumed, merging limbs and lips, doing it to me again and again. I beg him. He wraps his hands around my throat and sinks inside. He wants to be with me every
where, wants to follow me through the streets. I’d walk for him and he’d obliterate me, take everything but my eyes. I’d cover myself, in devotion, and know that I was owned.
But it’s the same old problem, the one we come back to every time. He says, Leave, move in with me, and I say I will … but I can’t. I ask him to wait awhile and he says, What for? He gets angry and stalks the apartment, calls me a liar, a coward, drinks some more, says I’m boring, just like everyone else. He wonders why he’s wasting his time. I’m a tease and a tourist. He becomes angry because I leave, because of the way I guard myself, the way I never let go, as if I’ve learned nothing from him. But it’s OK. He’ll show me if it kills him, he’ll carry me kicking and screaming through his world.
Driving home I feel everything that’s been lost, I feel the sudden fear of a life out of control, knowing it’s too late to go back and that I’ve already gone too far. Going home I think how I can escape, how I can get away from what we’ve done. And then I get inside Aunty’s static world and I can’t wait to run back to him.
Under the pretext of looking for jobs I drive around the city all the time, spend hours driving around in my car alone. Then go to his apartment and sit outside and look, waiting for something to happen.
Finally something does happen: a family appears, a smart-looking corporate type with his wife and small child. I watch them on the balcony and through the living room window from the dark of my car. I keep coming back for more. I watch the husband leave for work in the morning. I watch the wife standing on the balcony as he goes.
A Bad Character Page 9