I meet him two or three times a week. In hushed hotels in the daylight I become his girl. He calls me to the room, leaves it for me when we are done. Nothing attached to it, no demands, though he likes to bring me expensive clothes, diamond earrings, more cocaine. Cocaine that strips the world away. Pares it to a point, trims off all fat, increases pleasure, numbs my pain. No past, no future. All inwardness gone. And a thirst like no other to consume.
One night he takes me out to Gurgaon and shows me what he is building there. He says it is the future and he owns it all.
His wealth is immense. It weighs on him sometimes. He tells me things about the land he’s acquired, the real estate that he holds, the luxury apartment complexes, the miles and miles that are being built. His father is a failed man, a gambler, hot-headed and paranoid, he made rash deals in the past, almost lost everything the family owned. But he sent his son to study in Europe, and when his son returned he went to work building the business again, ruthlessly, brick by brick. Luck had played a part, the right place at the right time, but after that it was skill, talent, willpower, hard work. A certain lack of morals. He talks about the things that have to be managed, police and politicians, how every party must be appeased, groomed, positioned on the board, how bribes must be paid, how rivals have to be disappeared or destroyed, how every day is harder than the last, how there’s never any peace, how life is war. I say nothing, I make no judgement at all.
The hotel room is hushed and sealed. The AC is on. It’s 4 p.m. I undress. Stand naked above him.
Now the sun has risen outside and all the coke is gone, her mind is clogged, has reached the point of saturation, can go no higher. But she still tries, searches for every packet, looking for one that might have been missed, fingering the insides of the empty ones, turning them inside out, rubbing them on to her gums, something to make it all numb, to make the aching go away.
Searching through his clothes she puts her hand on his gun. She holds it, feels its weight, raises it up, points it at his face, holds it to her own. Caresses the trigger, pretends to squeeze.
Later, in the bathroom, grinding her jaw, staring down the mirror, she takes a pair of scissors and starts to cut at her hair.
Late November in the world in which he’s still alive. Winter is coming, Diwali is here. The city is lit up at night, fireworks explode in the chill, wedding venues are crammed to bursting, bridegrooms on horses ride in the presence of drummers, elephants march along the highway in the mist, the markets are overflowing, their cash registers are ringing. Strings of red-and-gold tumble down the front of buildings, twinkling, gift-wrapping Delhi.
I called him from college and said I wanted to talk. I’d made a decision, I was tired. He told me to come over but I refused, I said I’d meet him in another place, so we agreed on a Chinese restaurant we both knew, a family place in Green Park, frayed around the edges with Formica tables and frosted-glass booths. He sounded amused on the phone. He said he’d be there in an hour. When I got there he was already waiting for me, looking half wild, puffy in the bad light, plain ugly, at once familiar and unknown to me. I sat down opposite. He went to touch my hand. I pulled it away and this caused him to laugh. He lit a cigarette and he asked what this was all about. Had I left home, was I moving in with him now? The smile on his face said he knew that wasn’t the case, but I shook my head anyway and told him, No, nothing like that. I said I couldn’t see him any more, that was all, it was too painful for me, too much to take, I was worn down, I couldn’t trust him, I didn’t know who he was any more. I had college to think about, my exams, my future. He listened to me patiently and then he told me it wasn’t the case, because he was my future, and he wouldn’t let me go.
I shook my head. He asked me very casually what happened to the NRI. The smile that grew around his mouth suggested he knew more than he let on. I stared at him a long time and in a whispered voice I told him to leave me alone. I got up to go to the bathroom. I left him sitting at the table, watching me.
But walking along the soiled tiled corridor at the back of the restaurant I suddenly heard someone behind following fast. It was him, he was bearing down on me with an excited look in his eyes. I hurried forward, pushed open the door and tried to make it into a cubicle to lock myself in, but he was too fast, he followed me even there, caught me before I made it through, pushed me into the cubicle with him and put one hand over my mouth to stop me crying out. Then he took his hand away, fell to his knees and removed my jeans.
I said no. But I couldn’t pull myself away from it. I’m there again and he’s going down on me. He’s moving his tongue between my legs and I’m bracing my arms against the walls, closing my eyes and biting my lip until it bleeds.
THREE
Delhi in the winter is colder than a person from the outside can possibly imagine. There was a time when the sun would shine, but that time has gone. In its place there is the grey of pollution and the dirty clouds of freezing fog that roll into the buildings, like cotton wool wiped along the back of a filthy neck, clinging to the city in a frozen, depthless sky.
To not feel the sun, to see it only as a faint disc, like a silver tablet dissolving into water. What a terrible thing.
The moment comes, sometime around the middle of the day, when you finally feel that the sun might come. And then it is gone again.
This would be fine if the houses were not built exclusively for the heat. If they were insulated you could retreat indoors and wait. But there’s no insulation, no radiators, no carpets, and the walls that stay mercifully cool in the summer are icy now, the windows and doors let the unchecked cold seep in through their gaps, their porous borders inept against this dread. It is impossible to get warm. The cold goes into your nerves, invades your bones. It feels as if animals are gnawing at them. You sleep in silence, in blankets, fully clothed.
Despite all this happening year upon year, no one seems to have learned; everyone is surprised. In the summer, when the heat can kill, an old man goes out in a vest, shirt and sweater and cycles to and fro in the midday sun without so much as breaking a sweat. In the winter he just freezes to death.
Even sitting in your car you just cannot get warm. The engine blows out artificial heat, only giving a headache, inducing you to fall asleep at the wheel. As if poison is being pumped in. The word “filament” repeats in your brain.
And the men crouch in blankets, unmoving, lining the streets.
December and January, suspended animation, when the fire of north Indian blood is dimmed. Rage crawls inside itself. I crawl inside myself too. As if I’ve been placed inside a matchbox, in a doll’s house.
The end, when it came, was unexpected. It was all tied up with the girl in the other tower. She never made it to Canada. She didn’t even make it out of Delhi. She died right there on the day of her escape. I’d lost sight of her for a long time, I didn’t think of her at all. Then I came home from college on a freezing afternoon and she was at the bottom of her tower, a crowd around her body and a pool of blood around her head.
Aunty is ablaze with the news. She shepherds me into my room. From my window we see the bedroom and a trail of sheets still coming out of it like spilt guts reaching halfway to the ground. She’d made a rope of them but had fallen almost as soon as she’d climbed out. She’d fallen, fallen all the way past the balconies with pot plants, frightening the pigeons—a short intake of air, a scream, and then silence, her brain open on the concrete.
Her father must have found out about the affair, about her boyfriend, about her plans to elope with him. Something must have happened, he must have stopped her from going, maybe he locked her up like Aunty used to say, and the window was her only escape. It made the papers, February 2001. The boyfriend, who had been waiting at the bottom of the tower with tickets and passport in hand, and who had then seen her fall, was arrested on the influence of her father. He spent two months as an undertrial in Tihar Jail.
That same night I drove to him in a daze. I had no one else to turn
to. I told him about the girl in the window, what had happened to her, how she’d fallen trying to escape and how she’d died. I was distraught, unreasonably upset. My distress seemed to animate him. A spark was triggered in his eyes. We got drunk and smoked and held one another, talking about the shortness of lives.
The next morning I woke early, hung-over and unsure of myself. I left quietly, and on a whim went shopping. I took an auto to South Extension. Shopping to forget. To be like any other girl.
But I saw her brains on every piece of pavement I stepped on and her blood in the strands of every stranger’s hair. Even so I bought a pair of jeans I liked from the Levi’s store.
She sits with the Businessman in the club. They’ve cordoned off an area in the dark. There are indulgent waiters exclusively for them, segregation created through orbiting bodies of lesser wealth. The music is loud, people know who he is. She is known by association. And even those who don’t know understand they must be very important. People to be reckoned with. She is seen here as a still life, painted in the chiaroscuro of carefully concealed lights that bring out a feature here and there, plunging it back into the velvet dark. In the middle of all of them she looks imperious, and with the coke in her this is how she feels. Yes, to anyone watching this girl she must look cold as moonlight, marble hard. She barely moves, just sits beside him as he talks and drinks and plots, before she goes to the bathroom for another line.
Waking with no memory. Fear from the belly up. Then remembering. Driving the car through red lights, speeding at dark through the fog, a brain overloaded with coke. These mornings alone are the worst. Wrapped up in a ball, trying not to remember myself.
But if there was anything left over in the packet I’d do it right away. And you can’t live without your shades. You can’t live without your blacked-out car. You can’t live without your driver and gun. You can’t live without the five-star rooms, without the guarded compounds. The houses of the rich are sealed compartments, and the houses of the poor are open to the world. Everything you want, anything at all. Delhi is the sound of construction, of vegetable vendors and car horns. Of crows bursting up out of the blackness and diving back down.
I am at his place, back from shopping for my jeans. It’s about midday. For a moment I waver, think to go home, to leave him there, but instead I go inside.
He is sitting in the living room waiting for me. Immediately I know something is wrong. The look on his face has changed, the look of the previous night has gone. Right away he sneers at me, he says, Do you know what I was thinking? That it should have been you who died. At least she had the courage to leave.
I stand looking at him for a while without words, then I walk to the bedroom. But he gets up and follows me, comes into the room, snatches the shopping bag from my hands and says, So what did you buy? He dumps the jeans out on to the bed and with a look of disdain he walks out of the room. Before I know what’s happening he comes back in holding a pair of scissors and he’s taking the jeans and slicing into them, jerking slits all down the legs, stabbing them in a frenzy until the jeans are in shreds.
But that doesn’t satisfy him, so when he’s finished with the jeans he goes to the wardrobe where my things are kept, the clothes he’s bought for me, my books, my keepsakes and souvenirs, and he’s taking the scissors to these, flailing without reason, slicing through anything that’s there, jabbing at them with such violent intent. I try to stop him, I run his way and pull him back, but he’s too strong for me, he turns and throws me to the floor. When he’s done cutting my things, he scoops the remains up into his arms and carries them to the balcony. I run after him in time to see him throw them over the edge. I’m screaming at him, I’m crying, shouting incoherent words, beating with my fists. He’s standing there delighted with his work. Goading me, saying since I won’t leave, he’ll expose me, he’ll show everyone what I am, what I’ve done, he’ll send the photos to my family, he’ll paste them on the college walls.
He looks at me, panting, grinning, laughing out loud, laughing at our entire world, and the scissors are in his hand. He holds the blades up in the air and brings them down to his other hand to cut into his own flesh.
I don’t remember much of what happened next. I know I was trying to pull the scissors away and at the same time he was grabbing me by my wrist, spinning me around, shoving me to the ground. Then he was kicking me over and over in the stomach, the chest, in the legs, my head. Lifting me up by the throat, almost holding me in the air. I’m looking into his eyes and I can’t see anyone I know. The ball of a fist closes, springs forward from the hip. There’s an ocean of white spray, and a body is on the ground, and a hotness that tastes of metal blood.
Scrambling to the door, falling down the stairs, out on to the street, crawling around on my hands and knees, palming the concrete, he’s kicking me as I go. This is where Ali intervenes. He turns up from nowhere, pulls him away, enough for me to stagger to my feet. And Ali is shouting out, Run, madam. Please. Run.
Fumbling for my keys, climbing inside the car, getting the engine started, driving away from him. In the rear-view mirror he’s stripping off his clothes, howling at the sky, dancing naked in the road.
Open your eyes. Open your fucking eyes. He touches my face with his fingers. Kisses my cheek, kisses my temples, kisses my nose— Close your eyes, he says, kissing the lids.
She told the Businessman in the end that she had money trouble, that she needed a job. He said he could put her on the payroll, give her a salary and a position in one of his companies. She didn’t have to turn up; she only had to take care of herself.
The fact of this job she relayed to Aunty and Uncle, and Aunty relayed it to everyone else, and soon everyone was placated when it came to the surface of things.
After he beat me the police came. Ali had run to the outpost and called them before returning to pull him away from me. When they turned up I had already gone, but he was still naked in the street, laughing, beating Ali in my place. He tried to beat them too when they came, he knocked one to the ground before they managed to overpower him. Then they beat him with their lathis until he fell unconscious.
It was Ali who also called his parents. It was his parents who used their money and influence to make the police disappear. His parents, living only a few miles away in south Delhi.
They committed him to a psychiatric ward the next day. He was inside that place for three months, February to April. Locked up and tied down.
I drove home to Aunty that afternoon and cried into her arms. I cried without restraint and she cleaned the wounds, put ice on my face, washed the blood off me, took the bloodied clothes away. The guards downstairs and some neighbours had seen me and come to the door, but Aunty curtly shooed them off. Later, when Uncle came home, she told him someone had tried to rob me near college, had tried to steal my car and I’d fought back stupidly but had escaped. Only the face had been touched, nothing more. She was at pains to point this out. A silly girl, that’s what she is. A foolish girl. She told me this would happen one day. She always hated that car. But never once did she ask what really went on.
Terrified, I waited the rest of that day for him to call, for him to turn up at the door. But nothing came that day. And the next day nothing came.
I sat in my room. My body stopped hurting, my bruises healed. Then I went with Aunty on visits, watching the street outside, smiling politely to the other women when we arrived, answering all their questions with a nervous smile. But bracing myself every time the phone rang at night, imagining Aunty’s face reacting to his voice, his words. I checked my own phone, held it in my hand as I slept. Waiting for the call. But there was no call, no knock on the door. Nothing came.
We live in luxury now. Unable to hold the pain of Delhi inside, it is better to orbit it from space. I sit in the back of the Businessman’s car, climate controlled, inoculated, floating beyond the city in a blacked-out throne. We glide through traffic, accelerate round corners, move past red lights as if they’re not
there, through the charred streets of the tombs of my ancestors, the flaming oil drums and the ragged men, and all the places we have known. At night it’s as if we’re underwater, lights quivering in the haze of coke, glowering buses pulling across the lanes. Ghosts drift by in rickshaws, women dangle babies from the edges of motorcycles. Drowning in light and fog and noise, men stream into the road. They look into the window when the traffic stops, but no one sees me at all.
Inside the hospital they fed him their drugs. They tied him to a bed and injected him with many things. For days he was raging, incandescent. Saying Shiva was with him in the room.
Then he was calmed, put under their control. They began to counsel him. They challenged his beliefs. They talked to him about what he knew and what he saw. They wore him down this way, and he grew compliant. He believed what they said to him and recognized that what he believed was not the truth. Later, when they agreed to release him, it was on the condition that he renounce what he’d always thought. They made him sign a piece of paper that said Shiva did not exist.
A Bad Character Page 12