I had come to Delhi eleven months before to revise a novel. After college in America, I had lived for a couple of years in England, working as a reporter on an American news magazine. There I met an American journalist who read the novel I’d written in college and sent it along to an agent in New York. The agent wrote back a few days later, saying, ‘Finished your novel this weekend and was mightily impressed. You are a wonderful writer – hyper-observant and able to convey real emotion… I was totally involved with the narrator’s experience and the prose alone kept me riveted. Alas, the plot didn’t develop enough and sort of veered off course for me when I least expected it… But a voice like yours comes along rarely and I would love to work with you on this, or any other book you are working on. It is worth fixing!’ She also sent a separate editorial letter with a detailed list of suggested changes. I don’t know if I really believed in the book; what I did know was that I wanted to leave Britain and return to India.
My mother had argued hard to make my stepfather pay for college in America, and more for her sake than his, I didn’t want to return empty-handed. The agent was the ideal cover. My family in India didn’t know much about the workings of publishing, but they knew about advances; everyone knew about advances. And just flashing the edge of this golden ticket before the eyes of my mother, who in any case wanted me back, was enough. A wider circle of friends and family was persuaded that my time abroad had not been misspent. I, in the meantime, signed a contract with the agent and told her I was leaving my job. This alarmed her. ‘Go with your heart,’ she wrote. ‘Just remember there are no guarantees on advances (from passes, not interested to six-figure advances… everything is game), so take that out of the equation.’ I did; and in less time than I thought possible, I found myself on one of the new Jet Airways flights from London to Delhi.
The reading lights in the cabin were icy white. In the darkness, they refreshed a childhood memory of playing with torches under blankets. The spotlit whiteness; the knobbed, dark blue headrest that could be adjusted into a gorge for the base of the neck; the personal screens in economy; and the staff – young, polite college graduates – drifting by in blue and yellow, offering red wine as if they’d stolen it from their parents’ bar; these were the thrills of India’s first private international airline.
I ordered some wine and watched a new film. It was about four college friends who lead an idle life, drinking beer, skateboarding, riding fast bikes in an old Delhi ruin called the ‘classroom’. They are discovered by Sue, a young English girl trying to make a documentary about a group of Indian freedom fighters executed in the last days of the Raj by her grandfather, a British army officer. The grandfather had left behind a journal in which he had written of the courage the men showed and his own disenchantment with the colonial enterprise. The empire over, his granddaughter, six decades later, wants to use the group of young friends as actors in her documentary. But they resist her. And it turns out that their idle life and Western ways are more like a fear of life, a disillusionment with modern India. In a stolen, romantic moment, one of the boys says to Sue in Hinglish, ‘It’s been five years since I left university, but I’m here only. I just want to stay in university. On campus people know me; I have status. People say DJ will make something of himself. But out in the world, better DJs than me have been ground down in that crowd of millions.’ Another says, ‘What freedom, Sue? Have you seen the state of this country? No one believes this bullshit.’ But Sue prevails; the documentary is made; the young men begin to rediscover their history. They travel around India; they shoot the documentary; they run through fields, tearing off their T-shirts; sepia sequences of the documentary, with them playing the historical parts, are spliced into the film.
It must have been the altitude, the wine, or maybe just homesickness, but I suddenly found that I was crying. A kind of frightened euphoria at seeing India like this seized me. I muttered indistinct words to myself, tears ran down my face, my jaw hardened.
I reopened the screen and finished the film. It ended in carnage and nihilism. Just as the group of friends rediscover their country, a fighter-pilot friend of theirs dies when his MiG crashes. They watch it live on TVDelhi at a tea stall. The Minister of Defence, instead of taking responsibility for having bought bad parts, blames the pilot for the crash. This is too much for the group, so recently restored to idealism. They decide to assassinate the minister. One crime of passion and patriotism excites others and the film ends in further assassinations, patricides and the takeover of a radio station. In the closing scenes, commandos besiege the station where the friends are holed up, explaining their bloody deeds to the nation and welcoming callers. One by one – and on air – each of them is killed off; they bleed, laugh and sing as they die. Sue, in a taxi, listens to the broadcast.
I put away the screen and tried to sleep.
When I next opened my eyes, two flight attendants were walking past. They spoke in the dawn whispers that precede waking up the cabin for landing. Through a half-oval window, past dark sleeping figures, a thin fire burned precisely along the edge of a colourless sky. One of the attendants was a young woman with brown lipstick and hair held firmly in place by a wide clip. Her colleague was a tall man with darkening circles round his soft, attentive eyes. They were courteous, ambitious and bilingual. How different they were from the Indian Airlines ogres of my childhood. Those women with their boiled sweets and matronly tread, the stench of stove and state woven into their clothes, weary at serving men other than their husbands… were they the mothers of these bright, beautiful children?
Peering out of the white light at the two attendants, I attracted their attention.
‘Sir, may I serve you with anything?’ the man with dark, soft eyes asked.
The woman attendant smiled benignly, like a politician’s wife.
The cabin lights came on.
‘Lime water, please.’
‘Sir, right away.’
The attendants went off.
I was flicking through the last of the channels when, a few seats down from me, I noticed a large woman with black, dimpled arms transfixed by what she saw on her screen. Thin clouds raced across the video display, then a patchwork of fields in changing shades of green appeared, dotted with cement roofs, swimming pools and corrugated-iron sheds. Pale quarries with green water and coppery edges came into view. The wandering eye of the camera caught slum roofs, a blue and pink polythene waste dump and brownish, algal rivers choked with hyacinth. A red earth road ran like a vein through the land. The widening bulge of train tracks, the yellow and black of taxis and, at last, the striped walls of Delhi airport.
The camera pulled the land closer and I saw what I loved most about Delhi: its trees. They managed a surprising unity, declaring themselves the first line to touch the city’s white sky. Not so white today. As the land came close, I could see a dust storm rage, blurring the camera’s vision. It stole through the trees like a spirit, ready to pounce on the city below.
Delhi vanished, the camera swung down and the runway’s bumpy, oil-stained surface came into view. The large dark woman, watching peacefully until now, let out a cry.
At home, in my mother’s study, Chamunda sat behind a silver tea set in a green chiffon sari. When she saw me, she extended a sharp, jewelled hand and clutched me to her breast; I tried to reach to touch her feet. ‘Welcome home, baba, welcome home,’ she said to the tune of may-you-have-a-long-life.
Then pulling away as if overcome with emotion, she poured me a piped column of tea. In her other hand she held the silver strainer’s handle. One wrist had green bangles on it, the other a Cartier watch and two inches of red religious threads, tight and damp from a shower.
‘You’re wearing so many,’ I said, amazed at the thickness of the red threads.
She glanced at them as she finished pouring the tea. ‘Politics, baba, all from politics.’
‘Oh, of course. Congratulations. How long has it been now?’
‘Nearly four years. Elections next year, baba. I want you to come and help me. Your mother will come too. It’ll be hectic, but we’ll have some fun. They’re early in the year, so the weather will be lovely.’
Chamunda was my mother’s best friend, and my girlfriend Sanyogita’s aunt. She had been married into a small princely state, but her husband had deserted her just months after their marriage. She had joined politics as a young bride, defeated her husband in his own constituency and risen steadily. She was a member of the legislative assembly in the 1980s, an MP in the 1990s, a junior minister in 2000. Then four years ago, she had gone back to the state as its chief ministerial candidate and won. It had made her the Chief Minister of Jhaatkebaal, a small breakaway state on the border of Delhi, important for its twin satellite cities, Sectorpur and Phasenagar. I had no idea what she was doing in my mother’s flat.
‘Chamunda massi, Ma is in Bombay, right?’
‘Yes, in Bombay. She asked me to be here to welcome you home.’
This was doubtful. Chamunda was busy and selfish; I couldn’t imagine her welcoming Sanyogita home, let alone me. And besides, I’d spoken to my mother on the way into town and she’d said nothing about Chamunda. I noticed that the edges of her hair were wet.
‘Can you imagine,’ she said, handing me a cup of tea, ‘me in politics? Who would’ve thought it?’
‘Is it difficult, being a woman and everything?’
‘Yes, very,’ she replied, pleased to be asked. ‘But there are advantages.’
‘Such as?’
‘I like to take advantage of, exploit one might even say’ – she smiled, showing little teeth and mischief – ‘the very things that make it difficult to be a woman in politics. So for instance, I always dress the part. I always wear beautiful saris, never any ethnic crap. I always wear make-up and jewellery. I make a point to look like the Maharani of Ayatlochanapur. And if I’m talking to some bureaucrats or opposition leaders, or even treacherous elements in my own party, and my pallu accidentally falls…’ She pushed the green chiffon end of her sari off her shoulder to demonstrate what she meant. Her cleavage showed soft and brown, dimpled in places. ‘Then I may let it stay fallen for a few moments till I’ve finished my point and sweep it up when I’m done.’ In one motion, she swung it back over her shoulder and the breasts were once again half-concealed behind a papery chiffon screen. ‘And inevitably the response in these cases to what I’ve been saying is…’ She paused, altering her accent to a strong Indian one and moving her head from side to side. ‘ “Yes, yes, madam,” or an emphatic “No, no, madam, of course not.” ’ Chamunda chuckled wickedly, her pert comic-book lips arched. ‘Or, I’ll lean forward and let the pallu drop, very slightly.’ She did; her breasts collected warmly, and though they remained hidden, the cleavage became long and dark. A gold chain with a Kali pendant dangled hypnotically in front of the tunnel.
Then suddenly, she was in a rush.
‘Baba, I can’t stay long. You might have heard, I’m having a small rebellion in my state. Bloody Jats. I have to go back and deal with it.’
‘Jats?’
‘It’s a sub-caste. They want reservations in government jobs and schools. I tell you, the Congress Party has let a monster out of the bag with this reservations business. Women, dalits, scheduled castes, Muslims, now Jats… Soon the Brahmins and Kshattriyas will be saying, what about us? Then we can go ahead and carve up the country and no one will have to do a day’s work again.
‘I can’t lose the election even before you and Sanyogita have come to stay with me. But enough about politics, tell me about your book.’
‘No, nothing, massi. There’s just interest in a revised version. Now I have to actually fix it.’
She smiled placidly.
‘And your relationship with Sanyogita, all good there?’
‘Yes, very good.’
‘She’s moved back too, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Does she know what she wants to do?’
‘She wants to write too.’
Chamunda looked serious. ‘It’s a racket, this writing business. You’re writing a book, my friend Jamuni is writing a book, now Sanyogita wants to write a book…’
‘What’s Jamuni writing about? She hasn’t written anything in years.’
‘I don’t really know. She wants to do a funny book, a rehash of her earlier book, but about Indian ostentation.’
‘And Sanyogita?’
‘She doesn’t know yet.’
Chamunda bit at a cuticle.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘No, nothing. Nothing.’
‘Come on, Chamunda, tell me.’
‘It’s just that these girls, you know, these privileged girls, like I once was, I suppose, and like Sanyogita is – they feel that because these are modern times, the world owes them a job, a career. Your mother and I, we never thought this way. If our husbands hadn’t both been such rotters, we would have been quite happy to settle down and produce a brood of children. We worked because we had to work. You want to learn something about women in India? Learn this: India is a country where women work right from the top to the bottom, but they work because they have to work. And it’s the best kind of work. Always be suspicious of these rich and middle-class girls who go off to college in the West and come back feeling that the world owes them a living just because they’re modern women. I say this about my niece too and I’m saying it because you’re a smart boy, you understand these things; I want you one day to marry her, but don’t put up with too much of this silliness.’
‘Come on, massi, she can’t stay home and make me lunch and dinner.’
‘Tch,’ she spat with irritation. ‘Is that what I’m saying? Do I look like a woman who would say something so stupid? No. All I’m saying is that you’re setting out to be a writer, you’ve worked hard at being a journalist, you’ve secured a book deal -’
‘An agent.’
‘Whatever. All I’m saying is I don’t like the sound of my darling niece Sanyogita, who is basically just following you back, also wanting to write.’
There was a knock on the door. Shakti, my mother’s servant, came in with a cordless phone. She took it from him. ‘Yes, yes, Raunak Singh. Yes. Tell them I’ll be there very soon.’ She punched the lime-green button and looked absently at me, as if for a moment forgetting where she was.
‘Right, baba. I’m off. Come and see me soon with your mother, or with Sanyogita. Welcome back.’ With this she was gone, leaving a trail of tuberose perfume behind her.
I wandered about my mother’s flat for under an hour. Its familiarity, its inevitability, far from comforting me, oppressed me, seeming to force our old association. It made my few foreign possessions – a red Old Spice deodorant stick, an electric toothbrush, a Lush soap – appear out of place, as though I’d brought unwelcome friends to dinner. ‘It is my mother. This flat is my mother,’ I said, almost aloud. ‘I’ll have to scrape her off the walls if I’m to live here.’ And so, just hours after I arrived, I escaped the flat for Sanyogita’s.
The hot months before summer were months of flowering trees in Delhi. The silk cotton, a stony, shadeless tree, was among the first to bloom. I passed one on the way to Sanyogita’s flat. Its fleshy coral flowers had appeared like women’s brooches on its thorn-covered branches. Though I could have gone through Lodhi Gardens, I chose instead to take Amrita Shergill Marg, a laburnum-lined crescent that ran along one boundary of the park, connecting my flat with Sanyogita’s.
The storm I thought I had seen from the plane turned out to be only a wind. It tore through the city that morning. Many of the trees were losing their leaves even as new ones grew. The wind swept away their old leaves, littering the streets with an autumnal scene. Bees and ladybirds crawled through the debris. The leaves that remained, though new, were in some trees brown before they were green. So it seemed like spring and autumn had come together in one afternoon.
The quiet on Amrita Shergill Marg was broken at even intervals by the tinkle of a cycle bell and the wail of a man in a lilac shirt collecting junk from house to house. At the end of Amrita Shergill Marg was a busy main road. Black and yellow taxis, now with green stripes across their flank that read CNG, rumbled past, their colours clashing with the black and yellow of the lane divider. Everything beyond was the post-independence Delhi of colonies; Jorbagh was among the first of these.
I entered through a tall iron gate and walked past low white houses with clean simple lines and small lawns. On my right, there was a narrow lane under a dense arbour. The cool and shadows of that lane had transfixed me as a child. I used to come here with my mother in our green Suzuki. Halfway down it was Chocolate Wheel, where a jovial woman sold bread and fudge brownies. Ahead was the Jorbagh florist, still selling yellow gladioli. The pan shop. The Jorbagh colony market.
Sanyogita’s flat was on one corner of a U-shaped garden with houses on three sides. Her building was white with a narrow plaster screen built into its façade. It ran down the building’s entire length and a pink bougainvillea hung like a hive from its floral hollows. Outside there was a single dark mango tree with long twisting leaves and greenish-yellow flowers. I saw Sanyogita on her balcony watering plants. She hadn’t grown up in Delhi; she was from Bombay. And to see her in so distinct a Delhi scene, I felt the special joy people feel for the migrant who masters their ways. Sanyogita, as if aware of her triumph, blushed when she realized that I was standing below.
The white marble stairs were dim and dirty. A green stone skirting followed them up to Sanyogita’s flat; blue and red wires swelled out of an electricity box; the banister shuddered.
Sanyogita had planned a surprise. I saw her, with her back against the door, as soon as I reached the top of the stairs. She wore tattered tracksuit bottoms and a faded T-shirt. Her wavy black hair was twined into a rope and pulled forward.
‘Baby,’ she breathed.
She was large and shy and beautiful. That’s not to say she was fat, she wasn’t; but there was a prominence about her bones and joints, and a softness in her limbs and breasts. When she hugged you, you could feel her architecture. She had broken her thigh bone as a child, skiing in Kashmir. A man had crashed into her, leaving her crumpled in the snow. She had a scar from where they put pins into her leg. It was a great smooth-backed caterpillar crawling over her pelvic bone. Which itself was so prominent, and strong, that whenever I saw the scar I felt the force of the collision.
The flat inside, almost as if the squalor of the staircase were a deliberate part of the aesthetic, was a sanctuary. Its high ceilings, its rooms overlooking a secluded balcony, its shade and screens of twisted matting hanging like wet tobacco in front of the windows, faintly scented and cool, were like a preparation for summer. Though much of the flat was still empty, an entire wall of white shelves had been filled with colourful paperbacks. Seagrass carpets and runners with dark blue borders had taken their places in the bare rooms and corridors. So even empty, the flat seemed ready to be lived in.
Sanyogita led me by the hand down one of these shaded corridors. Past black metal grilles, I could see a small terrace with vine roses, potted frangipani and giant yellow and maroon dahlias. We came to a brightly polished double door with an old-fashioned bolt and a brass Godrej lock. Sanyogita took out a key she had kept pressed in her hand. It went loosely in and the lock fell open. We entered a long narrow room, the most furnished I had seen so far. It had a thin red rug, a black wood and cane chair and a maroon leather-topped desk with a green banker’s lamp on the far end. A window on one side overlooked the garden terrace. Sanyogita, standing on the balls of her feet, watched me take in the room.
On a wall covered with bare white shelves, one shelf contained new books. There was a dictionary of Islam, something called Infidels by a Cambridge professor and bathroom books: Oscar Wilde’s epigrams, a Second World War American soldier’s pocket guide to France, Elements of Style. On the desk’s maroon surface, marching along its gold border, was a family of blue and white porcelain elephants. I picked one up.
‘Be careful, baby,’ Sanyogita squealed on his behalf. ‘He’s the smallest!’
I sat down at the desk, slowly comprehending the surprise. Sanyogita watched with tense delight. At length I opened one of the desk’s drawers. The lamplight obliquely struck a neat pile of letterheads and envelopes. They were held in place by a paper band that read: ‘Alastair Lockhart. Fine writing papers, etc., Walton Street, London SW3’. And on the thick cream-coloured paper, under a faintly raised margin, it said Aatish Taseer in burnt red letters.
‘Baby, a present for your book,’ Sanyogita said, slipping her hand over my collarbone.
The room was the surprise.
She didn’t have one to spare; she had writing ambitions of her own; and though her flat was barely ready, she had made me a present of a study. I was speechless; it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me.
Sanyogita’s face shone with my delight. She became organizational: ‘Vatsala could make you coffee. I’ve just bought her one of those Italian things.’
‘Who’s Vatsala?’ I asked, trying to recover myself.
Sanyogita’s eyes brightened. ‘Vatsala, baby, the little goblin who brought me up?’ She stuck out her teeth and flared her eyes.
Vatsala Bai! I did remember her: she was a devious little widow in white who had moved with Sanyogita to Delhi. Her family had been with Sanyogita’s for centuries. She was devoted to her and suspicious of me, always taking every opportunity to remind me of how old and grand Sanyogita’s family was. We stayed in the room a few minutes more, then Sanyogita locked it and pressed the brass key into my hand with a kiss.
The flat, but for one small terrace and drawing room, had its back to the park. The bedroom was still bare, but for a low bed. Cane blinds shut the room off from the terrace and a modern steel light, with a salon drier head, drooped over the bed like a flower.
Sanyogita sat on the white lace bedcover, her toes hanging off the edge. She was full of Delhi news. She told me of my old friends, her new friends, gay men she’d had lunch with, fashion parties and the agitation in Chamunda’s state. It was Holi in a few days; she broke the sad news to me that my mother’s sister was not having her party this year, as the metro had claimed her house. She’d organized instead for us to go to the Times of India party with Ra.
‘Ra?’
‘Ra. Rakesh. My friend the jewellery designer.’
She wiggled her head. Two earrings dangled happily. They were long, with a line of glassy, rectangular diamonds set around a many-faced greyish stone in a paisley shape. There was a single, prominent ruby at the ear. The effect of that colour, like a sudden red light on a misty day, was startling.
‘He gave them to me as a present,’ she said. ‘You know, that way people see them around as well. He’s just getting started, but he’s good, I think.’
‘Have I ever met him?’
‘I think so. Short, squishy, like a pincushion? Adorable.’
‘Maybe. And Delhi? What’s been going on here? Any new things?’
‘Delhi? Everything’s new. New roads, new buses, new metro, new restaurants, new neighbourhoods, new money, everything except new people.’
Then I saw that she felt bad. This was not the arrival she had planned. Our stilted conversation seemed to trouble her. She began flipping through the pages of the Times of India. Her hair fell around her. I thought of the study, and then I felt bad; I saw that she might have wanted to make love.
I got up from where I lay at the head of the bed and crouched behind her. For a few minutes we sat like that, like two pods about to hatch; I read the paper over her shoulder. There was a picture of the new green buses. Their orange electronic displays transformed their destinations. Saket, Rajouri Gardens, Sectorpur and Phasenagar, running across a black screen in English letters, seeming suddenly like international places, places people ought to know of. The passengers, once just a crowd, became distinct in the bright modern buses, with their sunny yellow grab handles. In the background was a weary colossus from the old days containing distressed passengers. It was grey and yellow with deep scratches along its flank and an exhaust pumping out brown smoke.
Some bureaucrats had decided that the new buses should have bus lanes. They imported whole a model from Bogotá. It advised that bus lanes be driven through the middle of crowded arteries. And so blue lanes, with little brushed-steel bus stops appearing at even intervals down their length, had been threaded through long stretches of roaring traffic. But what had worked in Bogotá was not working in Delhi. The crowds that mob the bus when it approaches in Delhi blocked traffic. The cars, already squeezed for space, were further deprived of a lane. They refused to adhere to the new rules. Young boys with orange vests and flashing batons were hired to enforce the new system. There were delays into the night. The picture showed a late-evening scene in which a car owner was abusing a policeman. The car’s headlights shone in his face. It was dark, haggard, on the verge of breakdown.
I was still looking at this scene of frustration when Sanyogita ran her fingertips along the edge of my face. I felt her body easily through her faded clothes. It was broad and soft, slightly damp. Her fig perfume mixed with Delhi smells of food and grime. I kissed her shoulder and came near something stronger.
‘Baby’s hard,’ she said with laughter and surprise.
I hated it when she laughed in these moments.
‘Why don’t we go to the big room?’ I said.
‘You want to!’
‘Yes.’
We walked to it through the corridors, reaching for each other in the afternoon gloom.
We made love simply and quickly in that outside room, overlooking the mango tree. She felt big and roomy. I longed to have her close around me, for there to be more friction on the edges. She was also dissatisfied. When I was finished, she climbed on top of my thigh. We did this often. I held her as she rocked up and down my thigh, moaning and muttering, ‘Baby, it’s so good,’ as though I was somehow responsible for what was little more than masturbation. Finished myself and oversensitive, they were minutes of disgust for me. When it was over again, we lay there with our legs spread out, the sun coming in. I felt fat. I squeezed my stomach into a mound with both hands.
‘I’m going to lose all this.’
‘Why, baby? You’re not fat.’
‘Perhaps, but now that I’m here, I’m going to join a gym and get a trainer.’
‘Really? What else are you going to do now that you’re here?’
‘Get an Urdu teacher and learn to read my grandfather’s poetry.’
‘Baby! I didn’t know your grandfather was a poet. The turbaned gentleman who was in the army?’
‘No, not him. My father’s father. He died when my father was six.’
‘Oh.’
Sanyogita didn’t like hearing about my father. She felt that his absence from my life was an unspoken source of pain whose emotional consequences she had inherited. To speak of it casually was almost to belittle the wrong she felt he had done my mother and me. She could be unforgiving in these matters.
I had thought I would return to my mother’s flat that evening, but Sanyogita dissuaded me.
‘Yes, stay here, baby,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re doing staying in my aunt’s sex pad anyway.’
‘What?’
‘OK, this is totally confidential, and comes from my mother, who you know hates my aunt, but she told me that Chamunda uses your mother’s flat to meet lovers.’
‘What lovers?’
‘She has tons. There’s one in particular whom everyone calls the “French lieutenant”.’
‘Does my mother know about this?’
‘Of course, baby. Your mother’s the fixer.’
‘Fuck off.’
Sanyogita laughed out loud, then smiled thoughtfully as if she’d said something with more truth in it than she’d intended. ‘I think it’s great. If I was a high-profile politician, I’d like my close girlfriends to make sure I had some fun in later life, especially in this hypocritical society.’
‘Well, it’s settled, then.’
‘What?’
‘I’m never going back.’
‘Don’t! I’ll tell Vatsala to send for your bags.’
‘Junglee?’
‘Yes, yaar,’ the voice boomed down the telephone. ‘It’s a very sweet place. Not too expensive and the trainers are damn hot. I used to go myself in the promiscuous days.’
‘And now?’
‘Not so much now. Hubby doesn’t like it. What to do?’ She laughed uproariously. ‘I was a big slut, but just a one-man woman now. So sad! No?’
Mandira was a Bombay friend of Sanyogita’s now married in Delhi. Her father had died when she was a teenager and she’d had a difficult transition into adult life, namely a string of bad relationships through which Sanyogita had been a constant support. She was one of the people whom Chamunda had in mind when she sometimes said of Sanyogita, ‘She likes birds with broken wings.’ And it was Mandira who recommended Junglee when I was looking for gyms in the area.
In the days after I moved in with Sanyogita, I became anxious about routine. I had never worked as a writer before. I was back in the place where I grew up, supposedly writing about another place. I was worried that my ideas would slip away from me. I sometimes woke up with nightmares about having to call the agent in New York with the news that I had gone blank.
My imagined routine consisted of waking up at seven; being at my desk by eight; working till one, then having lunch. After that, I would sleep for half an hour, read in English till three, then from three to five read my grandfather’s poetry in Urdu. (I still hadn’t found a teacher but had spoken to someone at the Ghalib Academy, a crumbling, art-deco building with pink walls and smelly carpets, who promised me a teacher would call in the next few days.) At six, I would either do yoga with Sanyogita in the flat or go for a walk in Lodhi Gardens. I wanted to be in bed by ten or eleven. I refused to go out at night until I had made a start with the revisions.
But a few days into the routine, I realized there was a flaw. The exercise was too late and too little. By lunchtime I was longing for release. Sanyogita was doing errands and Vatsala buying vegetables when I stepped out from the study into the noon emptiness of the flat and decided to call Mandira about a gym.
Junglee was in Sundar Nagar, and like Jorbagh, an early post-independence colony. I had known it as a child for its antique shops where I had also come with my mother. I called Uttam, my mother’s driver of many years, a gap-toothed Inspector Clouseau lookalike. He was downstairs a few minutes later.
We took a busy road past one edge of Lodhi Gardens, then another along the edge of the Delhi Golf Club, also with tombs dotting its putting greens and bunkers. We passed the Oberoi Hotel, the Blind School and a purple domed tomb marooned in traffic before Sundar Nagar appeared.
Its two- and three-storey houses were ranged, like Jorbagh’s, round gardens with pale thin grass. A warm breeze made scraps of paper and heaps of dust race over the surface of the road. Uttam turned right and went down a grimy alley. Blackened cauldrons from a restaurant lay in the middle of the road along with groceries in white polythene bags. A man stacked cold Cobra beers into a fridge.
Uttam was staring longingly at them when I indicated to him to stop.
‘Here?’
‘Yes. I shouldn’t be more than an hour. Have lunch and come back.’
I got out in front of a brushed-steel door. Painted on it was a pair of angry red eyes, scowling at the chaos of the little alley. A Nepalese security man in a light and dark blue uniform stood outside, holding open the door. Cold, incense-filled air tumbled out.
The light inside was dim but white. When my eyes adjusted, I saw dark plywood steps leading up. On the first landing a terracotta Ganesh basked in a fluorescent alcove. On my right, there were large framed pictures of shirtless movie stars.
At the next landing, a priest in white and gold prepared offerings in a steel tray. He stood between a line of red bulbs in clear plastic orbs and a temple on the reception desk with an orange porcelain Ganesh. There were fresh flowers and burning sticks of incense.
The priest rang a little bell and muttered prayers rapidly. He waved a brass lamp in a circular movement, its smoky yellow flame cowering in the blast from the air-conditioner, before the deity. Then he raced across the gym’s rubber floor and tied a charm of chillies and lemons to a cross-trainer. He had returned to his silver tray and begun another cycle of chanting and tying when, on the way to a treadmill, a trainer in black stopped him. He gave the trainer a cautioning look. Loud music played in the background; the trainer, bobbing lightly, irreverently mouthed the words of a Jay-Z song.
My appearance at the top of the stairs gave the trainer his chance. He moved the priest aside and came up to greet me.
‘Hello, sir. Welcome to Junglee. How may I help you?’
I assumed from his welcome that he spoke English. But when I asked him to show me the gym in English, his fluency vanished. A cold formality entered his manner. It was as if the English song and the greeting were part of a rehearsed role, creating the illusion of affability. In Hindi, he was intense and restless.
His skin was dark, dark to his gums. His colour was what Manto describes as blackish wheat. It meant that a paler second skin ran under a dark patina. The fineness of his bones, his large, mud-coloured eyes and small, slightly hooked nose, along with the fullness of his dark, faintly pinkish lips, gave me an intuitive sense of high caste.
He noticed me looking at him, but focusing at once on me, on the priest, on the other trainers, on a half-dozen people exercising in Junglee, he filed away the observation without a word.
The priest in the meantime made his way back to the reception desk. The trainer watched him as though about to strike a fly. And just as he was skittering towards the preacher curls machine, armed with a charm, the trainer grabbed him. The priest made a show of his arrest, contorting and shaking his fine-fingered hand. He ignored the trainer, appealing instead to the deity, then to the gym’s ponytailed owner. The trainer draped his short, powerful arm over the priest’s frail shoulders with mock affection.
‘You see this?’ he said, lifting up the thick rope of red and black religious threads, entwined with silver chains, round his neck. ‘You see these?’ he said, flashing a pearl, a meanly cut ruby and a diamanté band on his wrist. ‘And you see this?’ He took out a single white thread from deep within his black T-shirt. The priest looked at all of these things like a child shown treasure. ‘So you understand then. I’m a Brahmin too. Now, go and do your dramas elsewhere and let those of us who are really working work.’ The ponytailed owner had disappeared, and the priest, perhaps taking this as a sign of disfavour, began putting his devotional equipment away into a black and neon green bag.
The trainer gazed intently at a Hindi newspaper. A smile ran over his face. He seemed to arrange his thoughts. His dark, pinkish lips flowered with amusement.
‘Pandit ji, there’s a photo of one of my clients in today’s paper. Would you like to see?’
The priest looked bitterly at him.
The trainer held up the paper for everyone to see. Below its red masthead was a painting of Shiva. It was a popular rendering of the god astride a white bull with matted hair and a trident, a tiger skin covering his loins. But in place of his once soft, gently protruding stomach, there was a blue six-pack. His sprawling chest showed firm but discrete pecs. And a bulging vein, like the trainer’s, coiled down from his bicep over his forearm.
‘And all without supplements.’ The trainer laughed. ‘Protein yes, but no anabolics.’
A few trainers guffawed, some clients laughed openly, the ponytailed owner reappeared on the stairs, smiling indulgently at the scene. The trainer, his joke successful, now warmed to the priest, putting his arm round him again. The priest smiled weakly. Junglee resounded with happy laughter.
Shiva’s new body focused my attention more closely on the trainer’s. Its proportions, the small of the back pulled up as if by a hook, the narrowness of the waist next to the prominence of the chest and thighs, the large arms but fashionable slimness, a shaped body and yet so clearly not one of a bodybuilder, seemed somehow to imply a knowledge of the world: of the Internet and TV serials; of protein milkshakes and supplements; of Shakira and Beyoncé; of drinking perhaps and sex before marriage. It set him apart, in the values it contained, from millions of thin-waisted figures in baggy polyester trousers and smoothly worn chappals who roamed Delhi’s streets. It gave him a solidity and weight that could not easily be dismissed.
Lost in these thoughts, I heard his voice through a fog of white fluorescent light tinged red.
‘Sir, sir,’ he said, as if I had been holding things up, ‘would you like to see the gym now?’
I nodded absent-mindedly and we began making our way through weight machines with their pink, yellow and orange plates. On the back of the trainer’s T-shirt were Junglee’s red glowering eyes. His tracksuit bottoms were of a slippery, black material with silver piping running down the side. Before going upstairs, the trainer looked at himself in the mirror. He had looked every few seconds so far. It was more than a look of vanity. He looked with such depth that he seemed really to be facing his reflection. It was hard not to look for what he looked for.
Junglee turned out to be a small gym with two floors, mirrored walls and dark plywood cornices, from which red light escaped. At this hour the main clientele were housewives and out-of-shape male models.
We saw the ‘men’s wet area’: lockers, ‘loos’, a changing room and a small slimy steam room. We passed the women’s. The trainer said with a short laugh that he couldn’t show me that wet area.
The second floor was fuller than the first. Young women on treadmills held mobile phones in their jewelled fingers.
The trainer’s arrival spread tension through the floor. The women trainers, small, slim girls in tracksuits, scattered to their stations, whispering cautiously.
‘Cardio,’ the trainer said, with a wave of his hand.
‘What’s got into all of them?’ I asked.
‘They don’t like me,’ he replied in English, almost with pity in his voice.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, switching back to Hindi. ‘They’re always talking behind my back, carrying tales to the bosses. I’ve never said one word to them.’
Our tour over, we walked past a group of men in T-shirts like the trainer’s, but grey to mark their being sous-trainers of some sort. They were small men, very dark, with bad teeth. To see them was to be made aware of what the trainer might have been without his good, clean teeth, his attentiveness to fashion, his rehabilitated body, and the confidence that came with these things. He spoke to them like an officer inspecting a regiment. They beamed as he went past and for some the thrill of being spoken to left them dumbstruck. I had a feeling the trainer wanted me to see his popularity among them.
Only Moses the Christian – Mojij, as I later discovered, to his friends – a tall, slim sub-trainer with longish hair, had the courage to make conversation. We were standing near the gym’s tinted windows. Below were the antique shops round the pale grass square. A myna sat fatly, unmoving, on the tin ledge. Moses smiled at us and without a word pointed at the bird. The trainer looked puzzled, then smiled back. With great difficulty, he managed to say in English, ‘She is pregnant.’ Moses choked with laughter. The trainer, again in English, said, ‘That is the labour room.’ Moses bent double. He lacked the trainer’s good looks but had a Christian’s comfort with English. ‘I’ll inform the father,’ he said. The trainer, now really feeling the pressure of so much English, said, ‘Who is name is Praful.’ The two exploded with laughter. They looked at a tall, reedy sub-trainer, who smiled frailly back as though used to being the butt of their jokes.
Then the trainer suddenly became serious.
‘Sir, would you like to try out the gym before you make up your mind?’
I decided I would and thanked him for the tour.
‘I’m downstairs if you need anything.’
This line, delivered in English like the first, sounded rehearsed.
I finished a short cardio warm-up and went down to the weights floor.
I watched the trainer with one eye and felt myself similarly watched. His jokes continued as if one of the duties of charisma. Two or three young men had come into the gym. The trainer moved rapidly between all three of them, muttering numbers to himself. As the sets advanced, inspiration seized him. His eyes seemed to fix on some distant goal. Like a painter reaching for new colours, he ordered the men who worked below him to bring him plates. When the clients’ muscles failed under him, he threw off the coloured plates in levels, imploring them to continue, even if only with a bare iron bar. And with repetitions, he pushed them to the heights he had wished them to attain with weight. If left untended too long, the clients called to him, their voices filled with urgency. The trainer ran back with encouragement: ‘Come on, man. You’ll give me two more.’ Then suddenly, he withdrew support. The clients, now feeling narcotic levels of fatigue, asked for more. But the trainer, by then aware of satisfactions beyond theirs, said, ‘No. Done done-a-done done.’
After the sets, he rested on the edge of a red exercise bench, dropping his arms forward. It made his shoulders seem long and expansive. His eyes rolled back and his eyelashes sank under their own weight. The gym had a large flat-screen television. It played a loop of half-a-minute-long programmes, horoscopes and fashion shows. At present, two animated girls called Kitty and Witty were on. The trainer watched with half-closed eyes. Witty, a blonde in pink, said to Kitty, the brunette, ‘What is the laziest mountain in the world?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kitty replied.
The trainer watched with one eye.
‘Mount Ever-rest!’
He was mystified, then a moment later his laughter rang through the gym.
I was doing some light weights on my own. I didn’t really know anything about them, but someone had once taught me to do sets of fifteen, twelve and ten repetitions. I felt the trainer watch me as I walked over to the bench press. It was not the brief, suspicious look from before, but a frank, open gaze. It reminded me of the way he looked at himself in the mirror. Then the music changed. A Hindi pop song came on with a single English line: ‘I will always love you, all my life.’ The trainer, still looking at me, sang with great feeling, forming every word carefully. He seemed to take pleasure in the illusion of fluency, in the long first line and the rapid ‘all my life’. He was totally absorbed in his role, but when the song ended, he was no longer a romantic hero; he was Shah Rukh Khan belting out the words of a super hit song. The trainer pressed his forearms between his legs, moved his upper body forward, bobbing on the balls of his feet. As the music quickened, he twisted his forearm in a downward movement, uncoiling a dark vein.
When I reached twelve repetitions, my arms began to fail. I looked up in time to see the trainer swing one leg over the bench and yell, ‘Thirdeen, fordeen…’ He had been counting through the songs. ‘We’ll do it slowly,’ he ordered, adding with triumph, ‘Fifdeen.’
I expressed my surprise that he had been counting my set.
‘Man, whaddyou saying? I’m a professional person,’ he said in English, and switching to Hindi, added, ‘And anyway, us Brahmins, we look out for everyone. You see that man there?’
He pointed to a tall fair man, with a handlebar moustache and a white towel round his neck.
‘That’s Sparky Punj, one of the country’s top lawyers. All the biggest industrialists and politicians turn to him for advice. But who does he turn to?’
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘You? Really? Why?’
The trainer smiled sadly at me, then said, ‘Never mind. Come sit down.’
We sat at the desk from where the trainer had seen off the priest over an hour ago. In that short time, I had decided to become a member of Junglee. I now watched the trainer fill in the form in careful, rounded handwriting. He did it like a schoolboy with a fountain pen, waiting for every word to dry. Seeing the English letters appear, his large, athletic form poring incongruously over the page, a tongue flickering out in concentration, I felt about the trainer as I had with the Jet Airways attendants: he struck me as someone who couldn’t have existed ten years ago. Not just that; his world, complete as it now seemed, could not have existed either.
‘Three months or six months?’ he asked, looking up.
I couldn’t make up my mind; it was a question with deeper implications than he knew.
‘Take three. Why should we bind ourselves to these fuckers? Right?’
I nodded unsurely. He gave me his small calloused hand, with its many religious rings, to shake.
‘Name?’
‘Aatish, A-A.’
He put down his pen and looked at me in amazement. ‘Sir! Whaddyou saying? Double A like me!’
He slowly repeated, ‘My name is Aakash, A-A-K-A-S-H. Aakash Sharma.’
At Junglee, the Hinglish-speaking trainers began referring to me as ‘writer saab’. It was Aakash who coined the hybrid and it stuck. He quickly wanted to know what my likely advance would be. He put it to me as concern for my survival in the city. But really he wanted to know what to charge me for personal ‘trainings’.
These trainings began without my knowledge. The day after becoming a member I arrived in the gym at noon. I was drifting about when he caught my eye and flashed ten short fingers at me. I went up to him in confusion. He was overseeing the recovery of an out-of-shape male model. ‘Cardio,’ he whispered, making the form of a running man, ‘ten minutes.’ I went upstairs and did as I was told. When I came down, he ignored me. He sat on the edge of his red bench, muttering numbers to himself like a Yemeni contractor. For some moments I stood over him, his face knitted up with concentration. Then theatrically, it cleared.
For the next hour he was in a fever. His mud-coloured eyes narrowed; his darkish pink lips tightened; his small, powerful body hovered over mine, the rope of black religious strings hanging down like a noose. ‘No support, no support,’ he began. ‘Very good no support.’ Then, ‘Fix your balance, fix your balance, bring it all the way down. Don’t worry, I’m here.’ And at last, ‘Thirdeen, fordeen, we’ll do it slowly, fifdeen.’ He sprang back with the end of the set. His face remained closed, lips moving, calloused fingers calculating, the eyes with their heavy lashes sometimes shooting around the room for inspiration.
And for that one hour of the day, Aakash’s world became mine. Far from feeling that he was employed to help me attain something, I felt I was an accessory to whatever hunger was driving him. He would run his axioms for success by me. The most basic were: ‘Whaddyou saying, man? I’m a professional’ and ‘I’m an ad-ucated person.’ Then in Hinglish, ‘Getting a person fit, what greater dharma could there be!’ Sometimes the hard materialistic world would prevail. Then he would say, ‘Man, I just need that one golden opportunity, then I’ll put this idea I have in me into effect.’
‘What idea?’
‘Ash’s! One place where a man can get his whole image set, his hair, his clothes, his body. Right now a person has to wander from place to place, getting this, getting that. He might trust one element, but how can he trust all? At Ash’s, he’ll get everything, a whole image.’
‘What will you need to set it up?’
He looked at me as if we were about to do the set of a lifetime. ‘Sixty lakhs!’
I nodded weakly, considering the enormity of the sum. The intensity of his gaze trailed away. Before I could say anything, he snapped, ‘Come on. There’ll be a gap. The whole workout will be ruined.’
And almost as if they were necessary to offset the brightness of his star, there were detractors: people who wished to see him fail.
He quickly drew me into the politics of Junglee. Everyone was his enemy. The ponytailed owners were drunks. They had made the gym with forty lakhs of their father’s money. The female trainers were screwing the owners and were against him. The male trainers wanted his job. Montu especially, he muttered, was a chooda, and damning him for the highest form of amorality, said, ‘Man, he is someone who will eat pork, beef, whatever you give him. That is the kind of chooda he is.’ He looked irritated at my indifference to his food neurosis. ‘Man,’ he pressed me, making an allowance for the possibility that one of the two might be permitted me, ‘would you eat both pork and beef?’ ‘No, never,’ I lied. He nodded gravely. But his main rival, the Iceman to his Maverick, was Pradeep, a fair, bulky, mild-mannered man and Junglee’s only other full trainer. ‘He looks like bouncer,’ Aakash would say with disgust. ‘He has bouncer’s body.’ Then switching to Hindi, he would add, ‘They’re all together against me.’
Pradeep supplied Junglee with its protein shakes. This was a long-standing arrangement. Aakash advised I buy the protein powder and told me to ask Pradeep. But when Pradeep approached me on the treadmill, Aakash glowered at us. As soon as Pradeep was gone, he trotted up.
‘What was he saying?’
‘Nothing. Just telling me that I should take two scoops…’
‘One scoop.’
‘OK. He said two scoops twice a day.’
‘Once a day.’
‘I’m just telling you what he told me. And to mix a banana in.’
‘No banana.’
‘Fine.’
‘What else?’
‘You know, just that he was married, used to live in Bombay, has two kids, that he liked Bombay.’
‘Fucker,’ Aakash spat, ‘trying to cut my clients.’
I laughed. Aakash imitated my laugh, then laughed himself and walked away.
Soon I was paying him four thousand rupees a month on the side. Junglee itself for three months was twelve thousand. He justified it to me as a personal training hour. I justified it to myself as still less than what I paid in London. Besides, I wouldn’t have gone without it. I felt that his passion for what he did strengthened mine. I had very few people like that in Delhi.
A few days later than the Ghalib Academy had promised, Zafar Moradabadi called.
Himself a poet, his name twice echoed the names of poets before him: Zafar, like the poet-king, Bahadur Shah Zafar; Moradabadi, like Jigar Moradabadi, the other, more famous product of the brass-manufacturing town of Moradabad.
Zafar didn’t like coming to me through the academy. I felt he was embarrassed at having to teach. Even on the telephone, he seemed to want to establish a reason other than financial need for teaching me.
‘Aatish? Aatish Taseer?’ he asked in his papery voice. ‘But that’s a poet’s name.’
‘Yes, sir. My grandfather was a poet. I want to learn to read his poetry.’
‘Your grandfather was M. D. Taseer, the poet, and you don’t know Urdu?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it appears I have something of a duty to teach you.’
He came to see me a few days later in Jorbagh. He had a light, gliding step. He wore a safari suit, a white woollen cap and finely made spectacles. He was of medium height with a slight stoop. His eyes were yellow, his skin dark, he had a pencil-thin moustache and sores, black and bleeding, ate away at his scalp.
I saw them when I asked if he would like to take his cap off.
‘I wear it because the wool from my head has come off,’ he said, and laughed throatily. Then he folded away his cap and revealed his bald head.
‘I can’t take the heat,’ he apologized when he saw me notice the sores. ‘And in the conveyance I’m forced to use, auto-rickshaws, it’s very bad.’
He sat there with his hands discreetly by his side. He didn’t ask any prying Indian questions about how much money I earned and spent. He didn’t look around the flat. I asked him if he would like tea.
‘I don’t normally. My constitution is quite sensitive.’
We started badly. I said I didn’t want to learn to write, only to read.
‘You can’t take a language, break it into pieces, keep what you like and leave the rest for the Pakistanis. What if you find you need to write?’
‘But I always write on my computer.’
‘Yes, but what if you’re in a poetry reading and you want to scribble down a couplet.’
‘I can write it in Devanagari.’
His face filled with placid disgust.
‘Then perhaps you should learn Hindi.’
‘My grandfather’s poetry…’
‘I could have it transcribed for you in Devanagari. Problem solved.’
‘Listen, please, I want to read Faiz, Manto, Chughtai…’
‘All available in Devanagari.’
‘I’ll learn to write.’
His face bloomed with affection and concern. ‘You know you have a responsibility. You’re a poet’s grandson; your great-uncle was Faiz; you have a tradition to uphold. I’m not saying that you should write poetry. I would never send you into poetry. It’s finished. Look at how I’ve suffered. I tell my children all the time that poetry is finished. But what’s been done is still there for you to read and know. You say you want just to read, but even that will only come easily when you can write.’
I offered tea again. He said he didn’t normally, but he would.
When Vatsala came in with the tea a few minutes later, Zafar was saying that life had forced him to become an intellectual mercenary. Our first thrill as teacher and student were those two words, neither of which I knew in Urdu. We stumbled about for a bit, coming up with ‘mental soldier’, then I was sure I had it. ‘Think tank!’ We backtracked and gave up. It was only when he explained further that I understood what he had meant.
Referring obliquely to the dissertations he had written for money before he wrote his own, he said, ‘I gave birth to nine PhDs before I was born, and after my birth I have given birth to three more. It’s dishonest, I know. I take money to write people’s theses for them, undeserving people. It’s wrong, I know. But I only ever did it from need. I feel that makes it less wrong.’
‘How did you start doing it?’
‘I used to work as an accountant,’ he replied, ‘but that slipped away from me. The accounts were computerized. I needed money badly. I even had a breakdown, you know?’
‘What kind of breakdown?’
‘A nervous breakdown. I was lucky. A south Indian doctor helped me. Only he knew what it was. Without him, I wouldn’t be here today. There was a danger of brain haemorrhage.’
‘Can that happen from a nervous breakdown?’
‘Yes. My head used to become so hot my wife couldn’t touch it.’
I began to think of his sores differently.
‘He used to tell me, “You have to stop thinking.” I said, “Doctor saab, it is my nature. Can you order a flower to stop giving off its scent? It is God-given.” ’
He shook lightly with inaudible laughter, finishing in a wheeze.
‘At that point,’ he said, ‘a PhD candidate came to me. He had a famously strict adviser. A man who used to tear up theses if he didn’t like them. He asked me to help him. I said, “Listen, I can’t do this. I haven’t done your research. I don’t know what you wish to say.” But he went away and came back with all his books, begging me. I said, “Let’s just try it. If he likes it, then we’ll continue.” He agreed and I wrote the thesis.’
‘Did the professor like it?’
‘He said it was the best thing he’d read in twenty years of advising. After that,’ he added bitterly, ‘word spread. Would you like a cigarette?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, though I wasn’t really a smoker, ‘but outside.’
We smoked a Win cigarette on Sanyogita’s front balcony. There, overlooking the single mango tree, he brought up money.
‘I can’t accept less than five thousand,’ he said, taking back the blue and white packet.
‘A month?’
‘Yes.’
My face became hot with shame, but I said nothing. Neither his sores nor his haggard face could have expressed his poverty more extremely. He wanted five thousand rupees for two to three hours, five days a week. I didn’t know how to say I wanted to give him more. I didn’t want to upset his calculations.
Then there was a soundless disturbance in the air and a splatter. I turned to Zafar and saw that a moist indigo wound had appeared on his safari suit. I followed its dripping to the floor. A red rubber hoop lay among the drops. Zafar’s face screwed up like a child’s about to cry.
A white sedan with tinted windows drove by, leaving behind a trail of hiphop.
‘Holi,’ he spat, and dropped his cigarette into the colour. It fizzled and ran blue.
‘A water balloon. Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry?’
‘I don’t know, for bringing you out here.’
Just then the front door rattled and Sanyogita came in. She had been Holi shopping. The wooden ends of steel water guns stuck out from the bags she carried. I tried to signal to her to put them down. Zafar saw and looked irritated. I think he felt I was portraying him as a Holi curmudgeon.
‘By all means play,’ he said, ignoring me and addressing Sanyogita, ‘I’ve played too. But these balloons are not nice. Spoiling people’s work clothes when they’re not prepared. Zafar Moradabadi.’
Sanyogita smiled, suppressing greater amusement. She held out her hand. He seemed unsure what to do with it. He dropped his head in greeting. Then he said he would call me after all the madness was over. It was Holi that weekend.
‘Baby’s found a creature!’ Sanyogita said after he had left. ‘He seems so sweet.’ She made her eyes big and sorrowful and scrunched up her mouth in imitation. ‘How old do you think he is?’
‘He said he was born in ’51.’
‘But he’s young, then!’
‘That’s what I said, that he was nearly a decade younger than our parents. But he said life had made him old.’
‘Oh, you must keep him. Where will we put him?’
‘Sanyogita, he has his own house. He’s only coming for a few hours in the afternoon.’
‘But it’ll be so nice to have him here, in the evenings, when all the other creepy-crawlies come out.’
I suddenly felt very sad, thinking of him going home: the ‘conveyance’ he mentioned, an auto-rickshaw; through the smoke and roar of Connaught Place; past naked bulbs and into the evening congestion of the old city; his safari suit stained blue; his wife and her acknowledgement under dim fluctuating light that it couldn’t be saved.
Sanyogita thought I’d taken her joke amiss. She pulled me towards her.
‘Come here, baby. I’m only joking. I think he’s the sweetest man I ever saw.’
Before the metro claimed her house, my aunt had a Holi party every year. The house was in the centre of Delhi with a large lawn and the party was famous. Hundreds of people came. And armies of children, of which I had been one, attacked them at the door, shooting jets of blue and pink paint on to their white clothes. They shrieked, shielding cold glasses of beer and Bloody Mary. Their starched muslin clothes caved in and clung to their bodies; paunches and lace bras appeared through the cloth. Then grown-ups who had already been coloured came with handfuls of green, yellow and pink powder. They smeared the faces of the newcomers, who put up token resistance but knew that there was no isolation greater than being left uncoloured. By noon the colours began to coalesce into a single rust red. As the sun climbed higher, the festival became more adult. Clay cups of bhang and small portions of food in leaf plates went through the crowd. Glasses of beer were traded in for full bottles. Musicians appeared with drums around their necks. By lunchtime, as the children wandered around vagrantly, the dance floor began to fill. The sun’s blaze fell on the yellow bungalow and its pale reflection appeared in steel tubs of red water. These late-afternoon hours, a painted crowd with gleaming eyes and teeth, dancing on the lawn, were difficult for me as a child. I think, though I didn’t know it then, that I felt their menace. My good memories of Holi were formed by those hours that came before.
But at the Times of India’s Holi party, there were no hours that came before; it began after lunch. In the years since the metro claimed my aunt’s house, it had become the city’s main party. It was also in an old bungalow with a lawn, but had an impersonal quality. At the door there were bouncers in black T-shirts with pre-splashed daubs of green and pink on them and ‘It’s Holi!’ written in rubbery white letters below. One held a clipboard with a list. Sanyogita’s friend, Ra, slid ahead of us, saying, ‘Princess of Kusumapur and her boyfriend.’ I didn’t mind, but Sanyogita was embarrassed. She was not the Princess of Kusumapur, her mother was; and technically, even she wasn’t any more. The bouncers looked blank but waved us in. Ra turned back, rolled his eyes bitterly and whispered, ‘Happy Holi.’
We came into a large lawn protected by dark, heavy trees with strangler roots. On one side of it, a dance floor was full. A multi-headed sprinkler system spat clear water clockwise, then anticlockwise over the crowd below, making their colour run. A DJ with a goatee sat on a high stage, fortifying old film and Holi music with dull, electronic thuds. Beyond the dance floor was a wide makeshift bar crowded with people. It was the first time I had seen so many people since I arrived. My eyes played with the faces like with a hologram, but no one was recognizable. They were younger and more beautiful than I remembered them; many more Junglee-made bodies – and freer with each other. Couples kissed openly in the sun, the pink of their tongues showing like exposed flesh against their smooth, purple faces. Around us, forming a faintly threatening girdle, were additional security men in black, the splashes of pink and green on their T-shirts seeming to mock them.
Sanyogita knew many more people than I did. She had spent her teenage years in the city while I was in boarding school; she went out more often than I did; and her family, especially Chamunda, was well known. She liked to play the role of a protector when we went out together, making me seem unfriendly for her amusement. She now flashed me an urgent look as her friend Mandira came towards us. She had a strong, masculine face with prominent gums and small filed teeth. She carried silver paint, screeching ‘Sanyo!’ as she bounded up.
‘Mandira, please, no. Not this chemical stuff. It makes my skin break out.’
‘Don’t be silly, yaar. It’s Holi.’
Sanyogita dodged her and hid behind me.
‘Fine, then,’ Mandira said in her slow, booming voice. ‘Maybe your boyfriend won’t be so pricey.’ She laughed loudly, showing her stubby teeth, and with a silver finger drew a cross on my face.
‘No, not on his face,’ Sanyogita yelled, pushing away her hand.
Mandira laughed, flared her eyes and threw her muscular arms around Sanyogita.
‘So do you live in London?’ she asked me abruptly.
‘No, I’m here now.’
‘London has the best food. I love London. We go every summer,’ Mandira said. ‘Nobu, Zuma, Santini’s. So, yeah, I know London pretty well. Then I love this one place called Pucci Pizza. So sweet. You know, I just wish there were more restaurants in Delhi. Every time there’s a new place, like the Chinese at the Hyatt, it’s full because everyone has to go there. One doesn’t even want to go because you have to say hello to so many people. So much kissy kissy. No time to eat. How d’you like Junglee, by the way?’
Sanyogita grabbed my hand before I could answer and took me in the direction of the bar. The sun fell sharply on a line of cane pavilions with people lazing on white mattresses inside. The party here was at a more advanced stage. At a buffet nearby stainless-steel dishes shone like helmets in the sunlight. We settled down in one of these pavilions and soon I was sipping Sanyogita’s bhang from a clay cup and taking small bites of a potato cutlet.
The party affected each of us in different ways. It made Ra set off into the crowd with a pouch of coloured powder, which he patted lovingly on to the cheeks of people he knew. In Sanyogita it produced a kind of arousal. It was as if the sudden thrill of bhang and anonymity worked on her. She was normally fearful of Delhi’s reputation for malicious gossip. But now, as if playing with the excitement of masks, she pressed her open palm against my leg and groin and said, ‘Baby looks so good blue.’
Ra saw and laughed garishly. It made what was a frank but affectionate advance seem somehow humiliating. I gently moved her hand away. But perhaps not gently enough; she seemed wounded.
The afternoon wore on. The sun blazed, making the colour feel like a second skin. I was hot under it. And this heat was like anxiety. The grass on the lawn was stained. Coloured water dried in the mud. Clay cups lay about in broken pieces and the sun’s pale reflection slid into a puddle of muddy purple water.
Just as the sun was leaving the lawn, a flood of newcomers poured in. Among them was a fashion designer in a white suit. He was Kashmiri with red hair and blue eyes. He had slightly pointed, gapped teeth, which he displayed like fangs when he laughed. He was followed by three men of great beauty.
The first was tall with sharp features, high cheekbones and a prominent nose. He seemed vain and distant. The one next to him was shorter, darker and bare-chested. He had an open, friendly face and a horsiness that suited his solid figure. The third, the most beautiful of them all, was tall, with longish hair and a softness around the mouth and eyes. His features, like his physique, were strong and well defined, but covering the prominence of their lines, as if the work of their creator’s thumb, was a gentle effacement. It carried over into the clothes he wore: low, loose jeans and a close-fitting, faded T-shirt, threadbare in places. His beauty seemed to embarrass him, and as if nervous of its effect on any one person, he kept moving about, distributing his attentions. The only person he looked frankly at, with his dark, doting eyes, was the designer. He seemed to need the little red-haired man like a circus animal its trainer. And the designer, though he passed like a ball between the men, laughing and bowing, at once an object of fun and their leader, exhibited something of the showman’s coldness towards their beauty.
‘Mateen Butt’s models,’ Ra, emerging from nowhere, whispered in my ear.
‘The one with the long hair is pretty amazing-looking,’ I said, finding it difficult to be open about male beauty.
‘And guess where he was found?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘In a village in Punjab. Not a poor boy, but straight from a village. Mateen literally drives through Punjab, pulling boys like this out of their homes.’
‘And they come readily?’
‘With their legs open,’ Ra laughed, and seeing me recoil added, ‘No, seriously, why wouldn’t they? It’s a golden opportunity. That one, for instance, was a full Sikh, bearded and turbaned. Mateen had him transformed overnight.’
The models now danced in a circle around Mateen. The sprinklers rained down on them. They taunted Mateen with their dancing, moving clockwise for a few steps and then, in time with the sprinklers, anticlockwise. The handsome model danced with his arms in the air, moving just his shoulders. It was a folk dance from Punjab. His faded T-shirt rose, the holes in it stretched and the pale inner portion of his arms showed. With every shoulder movement, he flicked his straight black hair off his face. Mateen laughed fearlessly as the model closed in on him and drew back. In his hand he carried a packet of light blue powder. He now took some out, and like a genie, blew it in the model’s direction. The model closed his eyes and let the powder cover his face. When he opened his dark eyes, their sockets free of colour, he looked like a clown. He seemed to take a special pleasure in the desecration of his beauty. He smiled, then laughed at tasting the colour on his lips. But Mateen, as if he’d hurt him without intending to, pulled his neck under the sprinkler and the blue powder ran from his wheatish complexion.
It was difficult for any observer to look away or feel indifferent to their taunting. There was something equalizing in their physical beauty. It seemed to cut through the barriers of money and language. In Delhi, where these aspects of status had been encoded in people’s looks, in their bad teeth and skin, their shabby clothes, their scrawny bodies, this flowering of physical beauty, people rehabilitated, and the licence that came with it, felt like avenues had been driven through the city’s closed quarters.
A final arc of sunlight slipped away. The designer, his suit still mostly white, left the dance floor with a female model. She was in velvety tracksuit bottoms, and he drunkenly clutched her long, slim body. They staggered towards us, the designer speaking rapidly and the model responding with languid, filmy replies. I watched them vanish past the wall of our cane pavilion, their voices still audible.
‘How do you do it, Mattu? Tell us your secret, no?’ the model said.
‘Nothing to it, Oozma,’ the designer replied. ‘I just keep my eyes open and when I see a hot little country boy, like this one here, I say, “Oh gawd, you have such a hard life. Why are you slogging! Come on, tell me, where is aunty? We’re going to go and take her blessings. You are going to be the face of my new collection, Sher-e-Punjab.” ’
‘And then,’ Oozma asked, ‘what do they say?’
‘They come panting.’ And I heard an imitation of a dog panting, followed by raucous laughter. ‘Now, take this fellow,’ the designer continued, ‘short, pretty dark, hairy. But sexy eyes, great features and hot body. We give him a little stubble, mess up his hair, have it coming over the forehead, do up the eyes and wa-lah those black pink lips will…’
‘No, Mattu, stop. He can hear everything.’
‘Oozma, if he could understand, what use would he be to me?’
At this point I heard a third voice. ‘Ey-ey,’ it said in dialect, ‘we’ll see what aunty does when you bring this langur into my house.’
The voice made me sit up.
‘Oh no,’ the model moaned, ‘I told you! He understood everything. Now he’s going to bash you up.’ Then laughing, she added, ‘Dishoom, dishoom.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the third voice answered, now in English. ‘Whaddyou think? I am an ad-ucated person.’
‘Oh gawd,’ the designer said, ‘and I thought you were a villager. Sorry. Ta-ta.’
I swung my head round. The designer was staggering away when a small, calloused hand pulled him back.
Through the cane lattice, I saw Aakash in a black T-shirt bedaubed pink and green. His lips were dry and his pointed tongue scraped over them as he spoke. He was standing close to the designer, his mud-coloured eyes burning with contempt.
They were in a grove of trees that had been wrapped in white satin. Where the Holi colour had stained the satin red, they looked like bandages. The shrill voice of a female playback singer broke through the afternoon.
The men in their pre-splashed T-shirts had stood out for their facelessness. It was what had struck me about them. Seeing Aakash reduced to this factory line jolted me. I hadn’t thought of his world beyond Junglee. I hadn’t thought it could include moonlighting at a security agency. The designer’s assumption about the security had hardly been different from mine, but seeing it now misfire, I felt some shame at my blindness. The designer had been wrong, and though he could see his mistake, he wasn’t willing to hear too much about it.
His little blue eyes flamed. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he screamed. ‘How dare you, you two-bit little man?’
‘Leave it, Mattu, no big deal,’ the model said in her languid way.
A few people turned around and looked. A man carrying a tray of Bloody Marys stopped and watched. Aakash saw them, and though his face didn’t show fear, a passivity crept into it. The designer yelled for the head of security; people were gathering round him, nodding obediently; and even as the head of security walked over, Aakash seemed to know he would be forsaken.
Outside Junglee he was bigger and his skin somehow darker. He seemed to be fighting to remain the person I knew. He had a hunted look in his heavy eyes. It was as if he needed to be reminded of who he was. And this was all that I did for him. I left the pavilion and appeared in the grove of bandaged trees.
In a few short moments, the situation had deteriorated. The fashion designer’s anger had grown into a performance; the head of security listened sympathetically; Aakash, every line in his face inflamed, couldn’t say a word. My appearance, but more importantly Sanyogita’s behind me, shifted the balance and rescued him from the worst of all Delhi fates: being a man with no connections.
I slipped my hand through the tangle of people and prodded Aakash’s pectoral. He fell back slightly and smiled with relief and fatigue. ‘This, Sanyogita, is my trainer at Junglee. The man I wanted you to meet.’
She took some colour from her pouch and streaked his face yellow. ‘Nice to meet you. Happy Holi.’
The intervention of two English-speaking guests broke the tension. Mateen and the model greeted and kissed Sanyogita. Ra had appeared among them. The head of security slipped off. Only Aakash stood where he was. He shuddered and came out of one of his trances, as if he’d just been planning my workout.
‘Ash-man!’
‘Yes, man,’ he replied, pinching my sides as he did in the gym. ‘Looking good, man. Looking like me, man.’
His confidence returned, but his face gleamed unnaturally.
We drove home through empty streets. Every now and then we encountered a car full of people like us, coloured, crowded, satiated. Only Aakash was in black clothes, with a single yellow streak. I had asked if we could give him a lift; Sanyogita pointed out that we ourselves were taking a lift with Ra; Ra happily agreed to have him dropped off.
‘Where do you live?’
‘Sectorpur,’ Aakash replied.
Ra’s face went blank. ‘I’m sure my driver knows where it is.’
The car was quiet. The avenues swung past us like the spokes of a wheel. A kind of evening static, hushed and colourless, settled over the city. The trees acquired a violet tint. Weak outdoor lights came on in Doric-columned verandas.
‘So quiet, no? Can’t believe it’s already over. I’ll sing a song.’
Mandira sang a film song about Holi. It was spirited but sounded like a dirge for coming at the wrong time of the day. We were dropped off first.
‘Ash-man.’
‘Yes, man,’ Aakash smiled, half-closing his eyes.
‘See you, tomorrow.’
They drove off.
Sanyogita bathed me that night. I sat on her fifties marble-chipped bathroom floor under a naked yellow bulb. She sat on a red plastic stool, using a bucket and mug. The colour ran in stages from my body, leaving areas of uncoloured flesh ringed blue and pink. The bucket bath, the dim bulb, the colour running from my body to vanish in a vortex over a stainless-steel drain cover – these things, coming now at the end of festival in a new and altered city, each conspired in dredging up the Holis of my childhood. And it felt as though Sanyogita had put together this ritual knowing the effect it would have.
A few days later, Aakash was restless throughout our workout. We were exercising my legs, ‘doing squats,’ he said, rhyming it with bats. The exercise made me nervous. I didn’t like the bar resting painfully on the back of my neck. I didn’t like unhooking it and suddenly feeling the weight on my legs and lowering myself from the hips. The muscles in my thighs trembled and swelled. They had to fight to bring me up again. Thinking of them failing was terrifying: the bar with its pink and orange plates pushing me into the ground. Aakash, like a syce with a reluctant horse, belted a broad back support around my waist. Then pressing two corners of a white hand towel against the centre of the bar, he whipped it into a tube-shaped cushion. When it rested on the back of my neck, he gripped me under the arms, his short-fingered hands softening the surprise of the weight.
He remained quiet and intense throughout. There was no screaming, ‘Come on, you’ll give me two more,’ no ‘Done done-a-done done.’ And when I was leaving the cold, incense-filled room, he said, almost threateningly, ‘What are you doing later?’
‘Nothing, I’m around,’ I replied, surprised at the urgency in his voice.
‘Good. I’m coming over. I’ll call you to get the address.’
I went back to my mother’s flat that afternoon. I was embarrassed to be meeting Aakash outside the gym. But the plan, coming so spontaneously and arousing my curiosity, felt part of the ease of Aakash’s manners, his endearing overfamiliarity; to resist, I felt, would be to hold on to an imported idea of propriety. On the drive home the streets were filled with the forerunners of the May flowering: the silk cotton’s coral corresponding to the gulmohar’s burnt orange; kachnar’s purple to the jarul’s wispy mauve; and the oleander’s yellow trumpet-shaped flowers, a deceptive but poor imitation of the laburnum. Just before South End Lane, a giant pilkhan towered over these slender flowering trees. Its dense canopy fanned black against the spring sky, now whitening with every degree of approaching heat.
I lied to Sanyogita about needing books in my mother’s library, ate lunch on a trolley alone and sat down to wait for Aakash. At about three thirty, his name flashed on my phone. A few minutes later he was at my door.
I had only ever seen him in uniforms. Now in his own clothes, his attention to style was apparent. He wore low, loose jeans and a striped grey and black T-shirt. Its long sleeves were pulled up to the elbow. A small black backpack hung from his shoulders and a hands-free wire sprawled over their great expanse. Like at the Holi party, he seemed bigger and darker outside Junglee.
He was in a lighter mood than he’d been in at the gym, but watchful. A look of delight entered his eyes as they scanned the flat.
‘You live here alone?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Man, what peacefulness! I have never, not even for a minute, been alone in the place where we live. Not once, not for a minute. Do you get scared sleeping here at night?’
‘No, I sleep at Sanyogita’s. Do you live with your family?’
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘My father’s an auditor in the defence ministry and so we have a flat in the Air Force Colony in Sectorpur.’
‘Do you have any siblings?’
‘Two brothers,’ he replied, then seeming to read a question in my eyes, added, ‘We’re very close, but,’ and now in English, ‘they are very differ from me. My whole family are very differ from me.’
The kitchen door swung open and Shakti appeared with a glass of water on a tray. Once fresh from the village, the city and the job had turned him cynical. But though he’d never met Aakash before, his dull eyes brightened at seeing him. Aakash took the water and registered the interest in his face. Shakti watched him as he drank, the dull look returning to his eyes. Just as his gaze had drifted away, Aakash clamped Shakti’s vast stomach between two fingers. Like a huge toy, Shakti exploded in laughter and surprise. Aakash smiled, holding on to his stomach while wiping his lips, then said, ‘That wife of yours must treat you really well. What’s this stomach hanging out? Too much rice?’ Looking to me for approval, he added, ‘Give me two months with this guy and I’ll whip him into shape.’
‘Shakti, Aakash,’ I said, and for coming so late, the introduction made Aakash laugh out loud.
He was handing back the glass when his gaze landed on Shakti’s feet. His face filled with concern. ‘Why are you wearing those blue chappals?’ he asked. ‘They make you look bad, man, these cheap chappals.’
Shakti stared in amazement at his feet, as if the rubber chappals were the work of some conjuror. Bata’s blue and white chappals were like a symbol of domestic servitude in India. I must have seen them smooth and worn on Shakti’s feet all my life. But they never struck me as strange on him. I had not seen Shakti grow from being a slim man into a fat man. It had happened while I was away; and in a sense, no one was better placed than me to notice the change. But I had seen nothing. Aakash, without a trace of piety, looked as I couldn’t. He didn’t restore Shakti’s dignity; he flung it at him as if forced to defend something that wasn’t his. And Shakti was star-struck. He stood there, disturbed and intrigued, like an old woman who’s just been whistled at in the street.
In his morose way, he said, ‘Aakash bhai…’ (He never referred to me that way; he called me sir.) ‘How did you make such a good body?’
‘With a lot of effort,’ Aakash snapped, and sent him off to get him beer and sandwiches.
‘Beer?’ I asked.
‘Yes, man, feeling thirsty. You’ll have too, no?’
I looked at my watch, then outside. Afternoon sun poured into the flat.
‘No. Not yet.’
Aakash was offended. ‘Our first beer and you won’t join me?’
‘It’s a little early.’
He said, ‘I’m the kind of person who can wake up in the morning and brush my teeth with beer.’
A level of comfort entered his manner, as though, after surveying the flat, he had found it suitable and now wanted to settle down for a session. When Shakti returned with a cold Cobra and two glasses, I felt as if I were being drawn into an unfamiliar drinking culture: of hotel rooms, curtains drawn, a bottle on a plywood table with some nuts, an ashtray filling up quickly. Seeming to read my thoughts, Aakash asked if I had any cigarettes. I didn’t but knew that there were some in the house. Chamunda insisted a packet of Dunhills be kept for her in the bar. I brought these out. Aakash looked at them admiringly, then pulled one out and lit it with cupped hands. He inhaled, inflating one cheek, then with the cigarette at arm’s length, blew on to it, watching the end brighten through the smoke.
The Cobra was amber-coloured. Its pretty colour in the glass, catching the light in the room filling with smoke, made me want to have some. Aakash poured me one with great aplomb, exaggerating the tilt of the glass. I asked him how he’d come.
‘Motorbike,’ he said, letting out smoke from the corner of his mouth.
‘What kind?’
‘Hero Honda,’ he replied, now inhaling strenuously, making a pained face as if it were difficult to talk.
‘Nice.’
He smiled ironically, ‘What to do, saab? I’m not a rich man. But this I can say, the bike was bought with my own hard-earned money.’
I feared some conversation about privilege when he surprised me. In English, he said, ‘I’ve never sucking dick,’ and laughed.
‘What?’
‘Yes, man. You know Sunil, he’s the other trainer at the gym…’
‘The big beefy guy?’
‘No, no. Someone else; I think he comes after you leave. Anyway, he was called for a personal training to the house of a gay. They took him there blindfolded and brought him into the gay’s office. The gay puts sixty thousand down on the table and says, “Sucking.” Sunil ran out from there, but they had bodyguards and Alsatians and Dobermanns, and they say if you don’t sucking, we’ll let them out and they’ll make keema out of you.’
‘What did he do?’ I said, now more horrified at the recounting of this wild story in the middle of the afternoon than at its bizarre, filmy details.
‘He’s sucking, man,’ Aakash said matter of factly. ‘He’s sucking, sucking, for one hour, sucking…’ He screwed up his dark lips so that their pink interior was more visible than ever.
‘Aakash, come on, this is not true.’
‘It’s true, man,’ Aakash insisted. ‘It’s true.’
‘Did he take the money?’
‘Why not, after he’s sucking…’
‘Yeah, yeah, please.’
Aakash laughed. ‘He bought a Hero Honda.’
I was sure the story was a lie, but I couldn’t gauge his motive in telling it. Was he trying to suss me out, see how appalled I would be? I was surprised at his own indifference; the story seemed hardly to make a dent in his notions of morality, as if all vice, no matter what its nature, was a luxury item.
He drank the beer quickly and yelled for Shakti, who appeared with another one. Aakash was enjoying this mid-afternoon revelry in the little-used flat. He poured me another glass without my asking for it. I had been under the impression that Aakash worked from five a.m. till late at night. I wondered how he’d found this block of free time in the middle of the day; I also didn’t expect a trainer to have these habits. Most of all, I was surprised at how his earlier urgency had given way to such complete repose. I asked if drinking beer damaged his physique. After taking a large gulp, he put down his glass, stood up and walked to the middle of the room. Then he removed his grey and black striped T-shirt, and standing in a grey vest, flexed his chest and triceps. His skin now seemed lighter and his physique more proportionate. Where the muscles had been expanded near the chest and the arms, there were stretch marks, pale and hairless, like knife wounds. A fine layer of hair ran over his shoulders and back, culminating in a thick chasm between the pectorals. Red and black religious threads, entwined with a single silver chain, disappeared into the chest hair.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘that if you were a businessman, you would take no interest in me.’ He glazed his eyes and made a snooty face. ‘You’d think this guy lives in Sectorpur, he drives a Hero Honda, he’s not someone I can sit down with. But because you’re a writer, you look at me and you want to dig inside, to discover what there is in this guy. Aren’t I right?’
‘Perhaps,’ I replied, embarrassed.
‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to tell me, I know. And in my lifetime itself, I’ve seen a lot of change. I’ve upgraded myself. When I was seventeen, eighteen, we were a group of three best friends. Our shoes were torn, soles coming off, we walked in the street in the heat, we took buses, we sometimes ate nothing more than a few toffees in a whole day. I remember you got two for fifty paise. The vest I worked out in had holes in it.’
He put his index finger to his thumb, indicating holes the size of one-rupee coins.
‘I wanted to be a mechanical engineer,’ he continued, ‘I got the marks for it, but my father couldn’t pay the bribe for the admission. You know, it was some seventy, eighty thousand. He said, “I’ll borrow it from somewhere. You go, just go and get your degree.” But I told him no; I’m going into fitness. I started working in one gym in Panchsheel Park, earning fifteen thousand. And slowly by slowly,’ he said, ‘I started picking up personal trainings, people liked my work, they liked that I got results, and so when Junglee opened I was hired there. I started on thirty thousand and in a year I doubled my income with personal trainings. I bought a bike, started buying good clothes. I upgraded myself. Man, and I know now for sure that if I get this one golden opportunity, I’ll never look back. There’s something in me, I know it. When I was born, our astrologer looked at my eyes and said to my mother, there’s something in his eyes. He’ll either soar or he’ll destroy himself.’
It was strange to think of the eyes, which I had thought of only in terms of beauty, as signs of providence. His ambition had also blurred into an idea of religious duty and what I thought of as vanity seemed almost like a homage to the work of fate.
‘But, you know,’ he said, ‘you might look at me and think, this guy, he’s a trainer, his father’s an auditor and that’s all: they’re low-grade people. But that’s not all we are.’
He spoke in a mixture of Hindi and English. The speed with which he recounted his personal history was startling. It was ready on his lips. He carried it around like one of the dented and blackened silver amulets he wore round his neck. He changed lenses effortlessly. One moment he was himself, striving, feeling the heat of the day and the fear of failure, the next he imagined himself as me, considering his achievement, wondering if it was something I could write about. It was as if he wanted to show me his making, show me a measure of worth different from the one that had humiliated him at the Holi party a few days before.
When he said, ‘That’s not all we are,’ I had thought he was referring to some intrinsic human worth, but he meant something entirely different.
‘My great-grandfather was a famous priest in a village in Haryana,’ he began. ‘When he was very old, he was faced with a scandal. It led to him renouncing his life and drifting down a river. He disappeared and wasn’t heard of till years later, when someone saw him in Kanyakumari.’
Kanyakumari, once Cape Comorin, was on the southernmost tip of India. It was some three thousand kilometres away.
Hoping to ground the story, I asked, ‘What form did the scandal take?’
Aakash’s eyes shone. ‘There was an army officer’s wife. She used to regard my great-grandfather very highly. She would work for him in the temple, help him with the prayers, clean the idols. Even before serving her husband, she would serve my great-grandfather. And so people in the village began talking.
‘Then one day, her husband died. But despite this she went that morning to the temple. So you can imagine, the village went wild with talk. A crowd gathered outside the temple, chanting, “Abolish these corrupt priests.” My great-grandfather heard their cries and appeared outside. Though he was heartbroken, he didn’t say anything. He just told the woman to make sure that the following day her husband’s funeral procession should pass by the temple before it went to the cremation grounds. Then he went back into the temple. The crowd was enraged, but they agreed to wait until the next day before acting.
‘The following day, as he had asked, the dead army officer’s funeral procession passed in front of the temple.’
‘Aakash, when did all of this happen?’
He looked blank, as if I had asked him a childish question. ‘Fifty to a hundred years, maybe two hundred,’ he replied, ‘maybe more.’
‘More? But he’s your great-grandfather, right? Your father’s grandfather? Were the British here?’
‘Yes, yes,’ Aakash said, ‘it was definitely the time of the British Raj. So anyway. When the procession comes by the temple, my great-grandfather appears outside, and addressing the corpse of the dead army officer, says, “Your death has disgraced your village and your community. And so I, as your priest, give you my remaining years. Rise now. I have renounced my life.” ’
The light in the flat had diminished. Aakash had smoked and drunk continuously. I stood up and turned on a few lamps. Aakash looked sombre, too moved by his own story to speak. I avoided his gaze, unsure of what to make of this afternoon visit. His conversation had included tales of forced blow jobs, social mobility and now magic. And though he himself had a hazy idea of time, his family’s history in roughly three generations mapped perfectly on to the country’s transitions: from its old religious life and priesthood, to socialism and his father’s work as an auditor, to now and Aakash.
He lay back on the sofa, still in his grey vest, his wide arms sprawling behind him.
‘Did he come back to life?’ I said in the lamp-lit softness of the room.
‘That evening!’ Aakash replied. ‘That evening he rose as if from a deep sleep, and when the people went to the temple, they found that my great-grandfather was gone.’
I wanted to ask any number of questions that would expose the story as untrue, but before I could he abruptly said, ‘You know I’m telling you all this for a reason?’
‘What reason?’
‘I want you to come somewhere with me. My family go every year to the village where all this happened. We take food and offerings. People come from all over. I want you to come with us.’
‘Why me?’ I asked.
Aakash smiled, and draining his glass, said, ‘Because I think it’ll be good for you.’
And those words felt like reason enough. Aakash had broken into my afternoon with a gesture of friendship, made possible by its spontaneity; and from its success seemed to come this second invitation, now given rather than taken. Like the first, it was an acknowledgement of the mutual appeal our lives held for each other. But because it was instinctive, and inarticulate, and because behind that appeal I sensed some vague contest for power, it had to be taken for now – like certain childhood friendships – on trust.
I accepted his invitation and he gave me a date a few weeks later on which to be ready. Then looking round for his T-shirt, he rose to leave.
He had put his arms in as far as the sleeves when he stopped. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s been so peaceful here this afternoon. I really needed it.’
When he had gone, I felt that he had come with one intention and realized another. I went home smelling of beer and cigarettes. And that night, on Sanyogita’s garden terrace, I noticed that the potted frangipani had died.
When I came back to Jorbagh, Sanyogita was in the drawing room. She wore her faded T-shirt and tattered tracksuit bottoms. Her legs were up on the sofa and the room was filled with pools of lamplight. They reached to the far corners of the high ceilings and emphasized the evening darkness. Sanyogita’s small, squat toes gnawed the edge of the sofa. She had her computer in her lap and was tapping away thoughtfully.
‘Baby!’ she said when I came in. She observed me carefully and seemed to sense something strange in my manner, smelt something perhaps, but said nothing directly. ‘Where have you been? I must have tried you half a dozen times.’
‘I’m sorry, I ran into my grandmother. I must have left the phone upstairs. What are you doing?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ She smiled. ‘Vanity Fair has an annual world bazaar issue and I know this girl who’s doing it. She wants me to handle India. I may get a byline.’
‘That’s great. Do you want to have a bath?’
‘Yes! It’s just what they need,’ she said, wiggling her toes.
‘They?’
‘Baby, them!’ She gestured to her toes; they wiggled happily.
We had an ongoing joke where we ascribed human characteristics to her toes.
‘Oh, them!’
‘Yes, they would hate to be left out!’ They fanned from side to side as if they were about to get up and follow me into the bathroom.
‘OK, but come quickly.’
‘Baby, don’t make it too hot.’
I walked towards Sanyogita’s room, past my study with its red carpet and the garden terrace with its dahlias. There was no moon and the night filled the little terrace. I was about to enter Sanyogita’s room when, from the light of a naked bulb, I made out the shape of a potted frangipani. From where I stood, its leaves seemed to droop and its trunk and branches had an unhealthy, pulpy texture. I pushed open the door to the terrace to take a better look.
Even before my eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness I could see that the tree was dead. Its trunk and branches had begun to soften and their ends were shrivelled. The large broad leaves hung on like the open eyes of a corpse. We hadn’t planted the garden ourselves; we had inherited it. And the death of the slim-limbed frangipani only weeks before it was meant to flower gave me a terrible intimation of the whole garden dying on our watch.
In the time between leaving the terrace and opening the bath taps, I came to blame Sanyogita for the tree’s death. It was not because she was in charge of the garden – I was – but because I had noticed and I knew she never would have. I worked myself into thinking that her not noticing was an aspect of a deeper complacency: how almost two years after finishing college she had no more idea of what she wanted to do than when she graduated; how she preferred cities like London and New York, with their cinemas, restaurants and Sunday papers, to all that India had to offer; how she was always late for everything; and how she now sat in her drawing room, wasting her time doing someone else’s work.
I got into the bath, full of irrational rage. I knew that Sanyogita, in her mulish way, would carry on doing her work till the bath went cold. But I didn’t want to call her because I enjoyed letting my anger grow. The water was hot and burned my skin. I sat there until it became tepid and seemed to cling to me. I felt a sick excitement when Sanyogita came in at last. I said nothing about the bath’s temperature. I just lay there looking up at the saucer-shaped ceiling light.
When Sanyogita took off her clothes, I watched her. I saw her pale skin, her big bones, the caterpillar scar that ran across her hip from the skiing accident and her low-slung breasts. She saw me looking at them and became shy about the way her nipples had expanded. She dipped her hand into the bath so that she could harden them. It was then that her frank smile turned to confusion. Why was I lying in a bath that had gone cold? She could see that all wasn’t well with me, but she was happy to get in the bath anyway, happy just to add some hot water and bear it for my sake, happy just to be in the bath with me. But as soon as she put one foot in and then the other, letting her large, smooth body sink into the few feet of soapy water, I got out of the bath and left the room without a word.
I saw her face as I left the bathroom, the smile, the confusion and at last the hurt.
When Sanyogita came out of the bathroom a few moments later, she was crying. She always cried silently, but her face was wet with tears, a different wetness from the glisten of her body. She lay down on the bed, just as she was, and wept.
I lay down next to her, noticing the things I found beautiful about her: the straight, strong bones of her shoulders and the paleness of the skin that collected over them now that her arms were raised; her smooth shiny black hair that dropped in steps down her back; the single skin-covered mole on her back which, if I ever touched, she asked me to be kind to as it was the only one.
Sanyogita, as if acknowledging the seriousness of the fight, didn’t push me away when I lay down next to her. She seemed to be considering what the real problem might be. With the side of her face pressed against the bed, she said, ‘Baby, is it necessary that you revise your novel here?’
‘In Delhi or India?’ I asked.
‘Both,’ she said, the conversation calming her down.
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Because I’d like to go away for a while. And I want you to come with me.’
She seemed at once to warn me and to bring me in. The fact that she had already read into the deeper vibrations of our fight, and felt no need to state them but had moved on to a solution, gave her an authority over me.
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘The summer.’
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Europe, America, anywhere. This place gets to me after a while, that’s all. I need to be reminded that there’s another world out there, a world where I feel better about myself.’
I didn’t want to, but I gave in. I felt paralysed by the onset of the heat. I wanted to drink lime waters all summer, wear white salwar kameez and finish my revisions in my new study. My life in Delhi had acquired a serenity beyond all my expectations. The revised version of the novel was seeming much better to me. I wrote early in the mornings. Vatsala had learned to make coffee in the Italian percolator. It spat out a thick dark liquid. She mixed it with hot milk and brought me two mugs a morning. The effect of the coffee and the quiet work made me restless for Junglee. I’d spend an hour there and come back to a light vegetarian lunch with Sanyogita. Zafar came every afternoon. After he was gone, I’d walk three rounds of Lodhi Gardens. The park at that hour was filled with overweight women in salwar kameez and sneakers, slim-bodied young men hanging on each other, couples canoodling and old men in white shorts. There were also faces from the area: the Sikh gentleman who owned a bookshop called The Bookshop; the feuding brothers who owned The Music Shop in Khan Market; and an Australian woman who wore pink turbans and flowery dresses and bred beagles. After the walk, I’d read over my writing, drink a glass of wine and resist efforts to make me go out. I didn’t want the slog of life in the West; I didn’t want cosmopolitan life. I was tired of subtitled movies and Sunday supplements.
But almost as soon as I agreed to the time abroad, our relationship revived. The days that had seemed to run into each other now led up to a final date of departure. The heat that had seemed like a preparation for June’s deathly white skies was now only enervating, somebody else’s problem: Zafar’s, who struggled under it every day, his elegant white umbrella providing hardly any protection from its exquisite blaze. It had made his dark red sores bloom and brighten so that he seemed to sweat blood. The heat was Aakash’s problem, who left home even earlier now to avoid the worst of it. And though he was too vain to ever smell bad, his clothes now emitted the odour of cotton fibres baking in the sun.
Zafar took the news of my departure with gloomy resignation. He would feel the hole my five thousand rupees would leave in his monthly income. He feared that without practice, the Urdu I had learned would slip away from me. Aakash didn’t even entertain the idea that I might be able to stay in shape without him. ‘We’ll have to start again,’ he said, ‘from scratch.’ He was at first curious about my going off to the West and he liked telling the other trainers, but soon his supreme belief that anywhere he wasn’t was of no interest took over. A look of pity entered his eyes every time the subject was brought up. He now spoke of our trip to his village, which was only days away, as if it were a send-off, a final celebration before my months of obscurity began.
I had told Sanyogita about the trip and feared she might react badly. But in her excitement about the summer away, she took it well and in fact became curious herself to meet Aakash again. He in turn said that I wasn’t his client any more, I was his friend, and that it was wrong for me to keep him away from his bhabi. They both seemed in their own ways to be digging at an unspoken desire in me for them not to know each other.
Then, one morning in May, the day before I was to go with Aakash to Haryana, Sanyogita rang while I was in Junglee. Aakash, who always held on to my phone while I worked out, answered it: ‘Hello, bhabi. This is Aakash, sir’s personal trainer…’
This was all I heard. I was unable to move and could only see Aakash drift off to the far end of the room. He stood under the dark plywood cornices, red light falling on him, chatting away happily. When he returned, he said, ‘Plan is set. We’re all going, you, me and bhabi, to Hookah. Man, you’ll love this place. It’s my favourite restaurant. It’s just like in Ali Baba’s time, with tents and platters and apple-flavoured tobacco.’
‘But aren’t we going to the village tomorrow?’
‘Yes, so? We’ll take bhabi’s blessings before going, no?’
I knew the plaza where the restaurant was; I had come to the cinema there many times as a teenager. Fifteen years later, change had not so much come to the plaza as grown over it. It still had its same two- and three-storey pale yellow buildings, with their exposed drainpipes and black water tanks. There was still the cinema’s original structure, low and wide. The plaza was still surfaced with uneven squares of red sandstone. At the centre was a large banyan with a circular cemented base; in the tree’s shade, there were still food sellers, amidst mountains of leaf plates and sprinklings of flies; just near it, a ‘Keep Delhi Green’ dustbin still stained red with pan spittle. And still present among the groups of young men, apparently pulling off a miracle of inconspicuity, were a family of cows. But over this scene, over a portion of the pale yellow buildings, had grown the silver and red façade of a Puma shop with large glass windows. A new company, with gold-lettered branding and multiplexes all over the city, had taken over the old cinema. Its baggy shell had been carved up into smaller, more compact cinemas. The attendants all wore purple and gold uniforms. And where there were slim-limbed, moustached men in dull-coloured polyester trousers, eating from the leaf plates, there were now also groups of young boys, with headphones, gelled hair, black T-shirts and low jeans. It was this group, overweight and dull-eyed, that slipped into the apple-scented shade of Hookah.
The restaurant was arranged on two floors. The street level was virtually empty and the bright afternoon light disturbed its dim ambience. In the windowless basement, lit by spotlight, tents had been set up in alcoves by draping red satiny material over four-legged metal frames whose joints still showed their welding. The floors were of linoleum, the walls brushed gold, and in each alcove there was a gem-encrusted mirror. Boys sprawled on red and gold satin mattresses and bolsters, smoking water pipes and welcoming large brass platters of Middle Eastern food. The girls, their hair blow-dried and their faces made-up, sat primly on chairs. Some sipped bright-coloured drinks, others smoked joylessly. Only their handbags vibrating against their legs quickened their movements, causing them to reach hurriedly for their phones and make fresh plans.
Aakash sat alone at a table. His colour, his physique, his carefully picked clothes, his decorum, made him seem of a race apart from the people around him. And yet he was nothing like the moustached men under the banyan outside. Seeing him in this new environment, selected by him, I had a sense of how much more marginal he was than I had first realized. He had said the restaurant was his favourite, but I had a feeling he hadn’t been there more than a few times.
His eyes brightened when he saw me, then became quiet and respectful at seeing Sanyogita. He seemed nervous, as if welcoming us to his own house. He asked if we’d like to sit in an alcove and yelled ‘excuse me’ in a loud voice; Sanyogita thought it would be better to stay at the table.
‘I thinking the same thing,’ he said in English.
I was worried our conversation would continue in English, but Sanyogita switched to her precise genteel Hindi and Aakash responded with characteristic fluency.
‘Who wants to sit with that tribe of assholes anyway, right?’
Sanyogita laughed with surprise at the use of the word in the context and I sensed her relax. Aakash, as if the formality of the foreign word freed him from all other constraints, yelled for the waiter with another loud ‘excuse me’. The man came over and Aakash ordered beers, hummus, salad, kibbeh. He treated the man with a rudeness that felt experimental, on its way to becoming habitual. The waiter was impervious; when he brought us only two glasses, Aakash said, ‘And my bhabi here? Has she come all the way to look at your face?’
Sanyogita didn’t like this, but tolerated it, as she did the restaurant, perhaps unsure of who should be the true beneficiary of her noblesse oblige.
As is so often the case when two people meet through a third, they inaugurate their new acquaintance by making light fun of the person who brought them together. It was in this vein that Aakash began to mock my gym clothes.
‘Bhabi, I tell him to change those long-sleeved baggy shirts, you know those blue Lacoste or God knows which company’s, but he says he can’t because bhabi likes them.’
We had never had this conversation, but Aakash winked at me to play along. It turned out this was one of Sanyogita’s favourite subjects and the two launched into a happy repartee about my sartorial missteps.
‘I tell him keep them for the house then,’ Aakash said, ‘where bhabi can see them. Please don’t wear them to the gym, where they conceal my hard work.’
‘I hate those T-shirts,’ Sanyogita said disloyally.
‘But bhabi, you have to confess, he is looking better, no?’
‘So much better, unrecognizably better. All this is gone,’ Sanyogita added, pinching my sides.
Aakash noted the physical tenderness between us, and for an instant I saw a cold, unreadable expression on his face. When Sanyogita looked up he was smiling again.
Sanyogita was not a beer drinker and after the first glass she stopped. Aakash looked at me urgently.
‘Bhabi’s stopped,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean you will too, no? You’ll drink with me tonight, won’t you?’
Sanyogita laughed at his filmy language. Aakash glanced at her, then turned back to me, and as if making light of his own intensity, said, ‘But what does it matter! Tomorrow you’re going to see my village. No friend of mine from Delhi has ever come with me to my village. It makes you like my brother. You don’t understand. We’ll have so much fun – people will come from all over. Truck-loads of people will come, women with their dupattas down to here.’ He held his hand to just below his chest. I looked over at Sanyogita, something I found myself doing less and less, and saw that her face had become small. Aakash’s passion for the outing seemed designed to exclude her. But then, turning to her, he said, ‘Bhabi, why don’t you come as well?’
A smile brightened on her face. She had felt Aakash’s subtle exclusion, then the excitement of unexpectedly being included. But his invitation – whether intended to do so or not – produced an ugly reaction in me. I didn’t want Sanyogita to come. Whatever world Aakash was taking me into, I wanted my responses to it to come up spontaneously. I didn’t want to have to think about how Sanyogita was responding. I said nothing at the time, but noticed Aakash watching me intently. Then his face cleared and he smiled. I thought he knew she wouldn’t come.
I hadn’t considered that Sanyogita, who knew me better than anyone else, would also have made something of my silence.
On the way back, a dirty orange sun slipped smoothly behind low sprawl and satellite dishes. A long straight road took us out of the city of colonies. Its small houses and patches of garden appeared in flashes. It seemed without centre and featureless. The bland stretch of road was interrupted by snarls of new flyover with orange railings. They dwarfed the city below, exposing the meanness of its proportions.
Uttam was driving. I leaned forward and said to him, ‘We have to go very early to Haryana tomorrow. It’s not far. Be ready by six. We’ll go first to Aakash’s and then they’ll tell us where to go from there.’
He nodded and reconfirmed the time. From the corner of my eye, I was aware of Sanyogita listening carefully. Just before I sat back, she turned away.
A moment later, she said, her eyes dully focused on two boys with painted moustaches who, after doing cartwheels and bridges, had approached the car for money, ‘I didn’t know it was tomorrow. I can’t come anyway. I’m having lunch with Ra.’
When we drove down Amrita Shergill Marg, the trees in the darkness seemed to burn with a strange, cold fire. At first I thought it was the effect of the yellow street light. But looking closer, I saw that the texture of their canopies had changed. They were featherlight and ablaze. Sanyogita’s mood alchemized.
‘Baby, look. The laburnum’s out!’
Aakash’s house! I knew he left it at four thirty a.m. after eating some ‘brad butter’. Then from five till two thirty, he was in Junglee. From two thirty to eleven, he covered the city on his Hero Honda for his lucrative personal trainings. After eleven, he returned home, perhaps only to sleep. I knew he lived there with his father, mother, two brothers, sister-in-law and year-old nephew. I imagined him picking his way through the darkness so as not to wake anyone. It was where his steel tiffin wrapped in blue polythene came from. Most of all, it was where I imagined Aakash on Sundays, the day we didn’t meet, the day he had an old-fashioned regard for: of curtains drawn, of not waking till noon and of eating unhealthy amounts of greasy food. And though I knew the points of this routine exactly, I couldn’t imagine the kind of place he lived in or even what the streets looked like. And without an image of this other place, this counterpoint to Junglee, Aakash’s existence seemed fictitious, a figment of the Delhi sprawl.
It was a city with a fragmented geography: a baggy centre of bungalows and tree-lined avenues, the British city; a walled and decaying slum to the north, the last Muslim city of both Zafar the emperor and Zafar my teacher; a post-independence city of gated colonies, with low houses and little gardens, stretching out in all directions; and beyond, new unseen cities, sometimes past city lines. But the sprawl was being slowly sewn together by new roads, buses and metros; the road to Sectorpur was part of a network of new, elevated roads, shooting out from a central stem, connecting city with airport and the construction sites and coloured glass of Gurgaon. These slab-like roads, with their orange railings, leaning white lights and marked, numbered exits, a concept until recently unknown to the Indian road system, performed infrastructural stunts, now splitting, now swooping down on unsuspecting neighbourhoods. Sectorpur was such a neighbourhood, a place to which the good road had brought life in the form of a property boom. And signs of this life, dull and bright, appeared close to its periphery: grey metal sheets concealing a metro station under construction; red highway tollbooths with newspaper still covering the windows; a city of concrete towers, dotted with the bright figures of Rajasthani women labourers.
The road swung right for Sectorpur, overshooting the turning for Aakash’s house. It was necessary to get off the elevated section at a further exit, make a U-turn past families sleeping and cooking under the flyover and drive back at ground level. In this short drive, the city beneath the highway returned with force in the form of cattle, fenced-in plots of overgrown land and roadside fruit sellers behind bright walls of produce. ‘Make a left just after the fruit sellers,’ Aakash had said.
The road took on the distinct aspect of an army neighbourhood. High walls on both sides with rusty iron spikes held back pink bougainvillea; girls in navy-blue and white salwar kameez waited for the bus to the Air Force School; and blue and white signs with the colours of the Indian flag in concentric circles like a dartboard, read: ‘16 Base Repair Depot’ and ‘Photography Prohibited’. Where the high walls retreated, there were keekar trees with thorn-filled canopies and gnarled black branches. They reached out into the road like a sinister, vegetal extension of the dawn mist.
The thin, bumpy road ended abruptly at a sky-blue metal gate. Uttam turned the car right and drove into a colony of three- and four-storey government flats.
I had seen these blocks of flats, with their little balconies and drainpipes on the outside, all over Delhi. In a country which couldn’t even standardize nuts and bolts, they were a rare achievement. Their squalor lay in their homogeneity and was not the Indian squalor, which was various and surprising. Small signs of that sunniness competed with the Sovietized scene. Coloured lights hung over the cemented verandas, a faded film poster could be seen through the iron bars of a window, and in the little patches of garden grew the Hindu sacred plants: banana, tulsi, a red hibiscus, its petals resting limply on the rusted points of a barbed-wire fence.
I stood outside for some moments, taking in the place. I noticed the yellow and black sign of a self-service convenience store, the clutter of motorbikes outside each little block of flats, the clothes drying on nylon ropes. I noticed these things because I thought this perhaps was where Aakash bought his ‘brad butter’, that one of these several bikes was possibly his and that on one of those nylon ropes I might see his fashionable clothes. It was this awareness of particularity, of feeling invested in Aakash, that broke the colony’s drab uniformity.
I had thought I was alone, but Aakash’s sudden appearance on the landing made me wonder whether he might have observed my arrival. Since we were visiting temples, I wore Indian clothes, an off-white kurta and a white pajama. Aakash now appeared in faded jeans and a striped beige and white knit T-shirt. My embarrassment was not easily explained. All I knew was that Aakash wore the Western clothes because he could. It was like so much else about him.
‘Hi, man,’ he said, reaching in to give me a hug. ‘Looking fit.’ Then, laughing and switching to Hindi, he added, ‘Yaar, my house is very scattered. Please don’t take it badly. I’m ashamed that you’re seeing it like this.’
But I realized as we climbed the cement steps that the embarrassment would be all mine and none his. Aakash didn’t know embarrassment; it was an aspect of his confidence. My embarrassment, which he would draw out, did not offend him as much as it aroused his curiosity. It was as if he wanted to know every detail of how his world would look once he’d left it behind.
The room we entered past a wire-mesh door and then a full metal door had powdery pink walls. Immediately in front of us was a large cloth hanging of Radha and Krishna and a blue sequined cow against a black background. The room was small and full of people. I couldn’t take it in at once. There were some men, a large woman in a bright yellow and orange sari, someone held a baby. As soon as I entered, everyone quickly greeted me and dispersed. They did it with such alacrity that I had the feeling this was a standard courtesy extended to anyone who brought guests to the little flat.
These men were also in trousers and shirts, and seeing them, I began feeling unprotected in the loose, light clothes I wore. Once the room emptied, only Aakash and his father, a man with a youthful face and heavily dyed hair, white at the roots, remained. I looked for Aakash’s face in his, but it lacked the fineness of his features, and though lighter in tone, was a flatter colour. For some moments no one spoke.
‘Will you have tea and biscuits?’ Mr Sharma asked.
‘Sir, you’ll have to ask my trainer,’ I said, trying a joke. ‘I never eat or drink anything without his permission.’
Aakash’s father smiled proudly. Aakash swelled with laughter, which, at once self-deprecating and vain, filled the room.
The noise drew out a large toddler from behind a curtain, separating the sitting room from the rest of the flat. He came charging in, breaching the unspoken barrier between guest and family, and threw himself into Aakash’s arms. His mother, the daughter-in-law, ran in after him, holding a bottle of milk. She was short and quite wide, with dark skin and silvery red lipstick. The gold jewellery she wore on her wrists, neck, nose and ears stood out against the colour of her skin. Dark blue flowers grew over her pale blue and white chiffon sari. Greeting me with an embarrassed smile, she tried to retrieve the child, who had already crawled on to his uncle’s shoulders. Aakash reached behind him, and exactly as though performing a two-arm dumb-bell extension, lifted the child from his shoulders and swung him in front of the Krishna-Radha hanging. He pointed at the blue cow; the toddler’s face shone with delight. It extended an unsteady finger in the direction of the animal and said, ‘Tawoo’. Aakash guffawed, and turning to me, whispered, ‘Cow,’ the English word more magical to him than to the boy.
His mother reached again for him. Aakash ignored her, swinging the child back into his lap. Without looking up, he took the bottle from his sister-in-law’s hand. She looked to me and said, ‘He’s very attached to his uncle.’ Mr Sharma who was silent until now said, ‘Yes, watch this.’ He called to the child, who craned its neck to see him, then hit Aakash on the shoulder. An expression of fury came over the child’s face. He did it again and the child jumped up, then held by Aakash, advanced on his grandfather, gnashing two tough little teeth and swinging his arms and legs. When Mr Sharma hit Aakash again, the child let out a piercing scream.
Aakash calmed him by rubbing the boy’s face against his. Then lowering him on to his back, he put the bottle in his mouth. His ease with the child and the sight of it drinking contentedly from Aakash’s heavy, dark arms riveted everyone in the room. Aakash, aware of the unsettling beauty of the scene, turned to me and said, ‘I’m a trainer, but I can do these things as well.’
I watched in silence. This brief, physical scene in the small room, with the hidden flat beyond, made me feel that certain boundaries were being preserved on my account. A tension built on their edges, while the thought of their loosening unnerved me.
The child’s mother, as if forever dismissed in this way, showed her guile as a daughter-in-law. She feigned a huff, making it seem that Aakash instead of showing her up before a guest was doing her a favour. ‘Then you feed him, nah?’ she said, and flounced off.
It was this child, who wore a neon-green T-shirt with a string of unconnected words on the back – ‘Yo, yo graffiti’ and ‘Come out, let’s play’ – whose long curls, I discovered, were to be offered up that morning at a village temple.
Until now, my heightened awareness and inward concentration had made it difficult for me to take in the situation around me. But now I wondered what the delay was. Why were we sitting here in the first place? Some preparation seemed to be under way in the flat, but I couldn’t tell what.
Aakash yelled at the curtain, ‘Ma, come on, hurry up. We should leave quickly. Papa, please tell them to hurry.’
Mr Sharma nodded, rose and disappeared behind the curtain. I wanted to see the rest of the flat, but was somehow unable to ask to be shown it.
When we were alone, I said, ‘Aakash, can I use the bathroom?’
A look of dismay ran over his face. He seemed caught between his host’s willingness to satisfy any request of mine and an opposing desire to keep me in the visiting room. He said, ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ and then, as if submitting to the inevitable, added, ‘I may as well show you the rest of the house.’
He flicked aside the curtain. I was faced suddenly with a short, dim length of corridor. It ended so abruptly that it was almost as if there was no flat behind the curtain. On my left, there was a tiny strip of kitchen crowded with three busy women in bright clothes. It had a purple fridge and a gas stove. A faint light came in from a frosted-glass transom over an exhaust fan caked in grime. A few steps further, there was a darkened bedroom with a single red bulb and a low bed.
‘This is one room,’ Aakash said. ‘We’ve given it to my brother and his wife.’
The door of the other room was also open. A tube light with a black underbelly glowed brightly. Every inch of the room was covered in mattresses. It answered my questions: three in one room, four in the other.
Maybe feeling we’d come too quickly to the end of the flat, Aakash pushed open a further door to reveal a small terrace. It was cluttered with the skeletal remains of an old cooler and stacks of bedding, perhaps for when relations came to stay. Beyond a spiked wall, there was a large field of parched, uncultivated land, where a village of blue plastic tents had sprung up. The haze was burning away, the sky blanching fast.
We withdrew into the passage. Aakash pulled aside another curtain, revealing a sink and a cemented area with a tap, a plastic bucket and a metal door.
He opened the door for me. I stepped inside and slid the cold iron bolt into place. Only then, in the damp, dark confines of this cement strongroom, did the full force of my reaction break violently over me. I wished with all my heart that Aakash didn’t have to live here. It was too ugly to think of someone with his charisma and ambition, and yes, physical beauty too, spending those treasured Sundays on a mattress on the floor. Was this where he crept in late at night to find a space among the sleeping bodies?
These thoughts had prevented me from focusing on the stained ceramic basin and the squalid circle of water I stood over. I wondered if, while holding my breath, I’d kept my eyes closed as well. I knew now that I stood at the source of the smell that pervaded – and always would, no matter what incense was lit or food cooked – the air in the flat. And just before I pulled the flush, a detail impressed itself on me. On a narrow cement windowsill below the paint-splattered glass, there was a thick accumulation of a hard yellow and red substance. Its colour and appearance made me curious enough to touch it. It was smooth and layered. When I dug my nail into it, a little flake came off easily. Wax! The remains of candles, red and yellow candles that had burned to their base. Their blackened wicks were embedded in the pat of wax. No sooner had I realized what the coloured substance was than a looming feature of life in the flat occurred to me: blackouts. It was to long hot nights dotted with red and yellow candles, burning into the morning, that Aakash returned.
I opened the door and found him waiting. He turned the tap in the little sink for me with one hand and held a towel in the other.
In the room outside, the family was ready to go. Five bags of food, offerings and water had been brought out. There were three women, Aakash’s mother, aunt and sister-in-law; and three men, his two brothers, one younger, one older, and his father. And there was the toddler, whose hair was to be offered up, sitting heavily in his father’s arms. I waited for the room to empty. Besides the religious hanging, there was a painting of a Chinese scene, fluorescent green palms, pagodas and bridges on a black felt background. The only other decoration on the pink powdery walls was a narrow framed picture of a red rose, which for all its shabby sentimentality, was somehow affecting.
Aakash’s father, as a testament to its importance, knew every stage of the fifty-kilometre journey from town to temple. He knew the last of the city’s satellite towns with their single-storey constructions gathered close to the road and their multitude of chemists, automechanics and call booths. He knew when the land would become fields dotted for as far as anyone could see with the clay minarets of brick furnaces. He knew the Air Force base with its high walls of bougainvillea that came just before the Haryana border. He knew the flat green fields and pale blue sky of Haryana, once bare save for the odd red-brick construction, but now covered with uncooked bricks drying in the sun and chimneys evenly emitting black smoke. As if in homage to his destination, he spoke of magic on the way.
He spoke at Aakash’s prompting. Since we’d left Delhi, Aakash had become protective of me. He put his elder brother, mother, aunt and sister-in-law in one car, and in my van-like car he put himself in the front next to Uttam, his little brother Anil far in the back and his father and me near each other in the middle row so we could talk. He would turn back every few moments, facilitating the easy flow of conversation and checking that I wasn’t getting bored of the stories. When, occasionally, I looked ahead, I saw the side of his face pressed intently against the seat, his bright, arched eyes ready to wink.
The stories were not simply religious. At the heart of them was not just a reward or a moral intervention from the gods, but rather an emphasis on the powers of Brahmins, the Siddhis, continuing to this day despite the decay of modern times. They seemed designed to expand on what Aakash had said a few days before at Junglee: ‘There’s something in us.’ The message, beyond proving the existence of these powers, was not always clear. In one story, Aakash’s grandfather, killed in war, went to his father before leaving on his fatal mission. The father was old and perhaps sensed something. He asked his son to ask whatever he would of him. The man said, ‘I have so many daughters and only one son. I am not rich. How can I be expected to marry them off?’
‘Over the next six months,’ Aakash’s father said grimly, then chuckled, ‘one of my sisters died every month.’
‘My aunts?’ Aakash asked not with horror but simple curiosity. ‘I have an aunt in Rohtak…’
‘The only one!’ his father said, chuckling again. Then turning to me, he added in Hindi, and cryptically, ‘Sometimes the truth of things has come out of my mouth as well.’ He described the predictions he’d made of transfers in his office, of purses stolen and found where he said they’d be found, and of investments made at opportune times. ‘The place we’re going to today honours the memory of my grandfather, who renounced his remaining years for the sake of his family and community. It’s a story from the last days of the faith. If it were not for him, people would have stopped believing.’
To hear Aakash’s father recall the story made it even stranger than when Aakash had spoken of it in my mother’s flat. Only two generations apart from him was this magical ending to a life.
Aakash knew all the stories. He prompted his father to tell more. Soon Anil, thinner and fairer than Aakash, with uneven teeth clambering over each other, was also prompting stories. I imagined them first told in the small bedroom covered in mattresses, the long nights of summer darkness, the smell of the bathroom, and yet the resilience of people to these things, the stories told anyway, the family life carrying on, the making of Aakash continuing unstopped.
He seemed to have an intimation that beyond the brief new friendship that had arisen between us, my interest in him had other depths. If ever he saw me watching him or I asked him a question about his personal life, his face would brighten as if from the amusement of a private joke between us. ‘You’re writing a book on me, aren’t you?’ he’d laugh, using the English word for book as if a book of that sort could only have been possible in English.
Before arriving at the village temple where the offering of hair was to be made, we stopped at a small town. While his family bought snacks, rearranged their offerings and went to the bathroom, Aakash pulled me into the shade of a teashop. The man, who always made a point of smoking Marlboro Lights, now asked the teashop owner for a single Gold Flake. He spoke in the Haryana dialect, with its threatening inflections, to make me laugh. His eyes blazed mockingly, his manner became at once aggressive and comic. The owner didn’t catch the city joke and handed him the cigarette. Aakash lit it from the roaring blue flame that cradled the steel urn’s blackened base, keeping its contents forever close to a boil. He put it in too far and half its short, cylindrical body blackened, with scattered orange points burning through. Its paper fell from it like dead skin. Aakash handed the cigarette to me after a few drags and slipped his arm around my shoulders. He seemed to take great pleasure in watching his family one by one load into the cars as he smoked with me in the gloom of the teashop. Then he bought one of the many silver packets of pan masala hanging in front of the shop, tore open a corner, and after blowing into it, emptied its contents into his palm. He gave half to me before slapping the rest into his mouth. After a short lull, the brown liquid in the urn seethed.
Our closeness in the teashop faded as the day wore on. It was replaced by a kind of aggression, as if a fault line formed between the recent fact of our friendship and the acknowledgement of difference. And though we forged the common ground on which a friendship might grow, neither of us yielded any easily.
The change in mood began on the way to the village temple, or perhaps even some minutes before, when Aakash’s nephew discovered us in the teashop. He ran in like a hound following a scent, then looked around in confusion, his eyes adjusting to the darkness. Aakash caught him and swung him into the light; the child let out a screech of delight; I winced, reminded of babies on planes and indulgent mothers. Aakash indulged the child too, letting him gnaw at the side of his face.
Sensing my discomfort, he archly said, ‘With us, children are everything.’
The child now travelled in our blue van, being passed through all three sections of it depending on his fancy, his long, soon to be cut locks flying this way and that.
Before leaving the small town, we hit traffic. Orange-faced trucks with large loads crowded the narrow street. On the petrol tank of one, there was a drawing of a palm and dune. Below, white letters read: ‘Iraqi water. Drink frugally, my queen.’ For many minutes, the line of trucks didn’t move. Aakash admired a new house: ‘Look at the kind of houses people are building.’ I had thought at first the remark was a sneer, but I was wrong; it was a compliment. The house was narrow, four storeys high, in beige sandstone, with red grilles, balconies and silvered windows.
When the traffic didn’t move, Uttam tried to slip ahead of the queue. The minute the van nosed out of its lane, it was honked at angrily by oncoming traffic. The queue had closed behind us and Uttam was left with no choice but to take the car to the right, across the oncoming lane, as far off the road as he could. As soon as he did, the tyres caught in deep black mud. One by one, they confessed the futility of their revolutions.
Aakash jumped out to push, as did Anil; I hesitated, then got out too. At first they thought putting bricks under the tyres would be enough for them to catch, but soon it was clear that they would have to push the car on to the bricks. My position on the left was not ideal; the patch widened where I stood, I was wearing sandals. Despite my uncomfortable angle to the car, I pushed. The car broke its inertia, but just as the wheels left the deep grooves they had made, they splattered black mud on to my white pajama. My right leg was covered from my sandals to the hem of my kurta. Aakash roared with laughter, not now that self-deprecating laugh, but a harsh, instinctive cackle. Uttam appeared and began to wipe furiously at the mud, making things worse. I buried the anger I would normally have shown him for fear of being singled out as soft and privileged.
‘You should have left it,’ Aakash said, when his laughter subsided. ‘There’s a technique in pushing.’
I wanted to hit him. Uttam saw this and brought out a bottle of water from the back. Aakash took it from him and poured it down my leg, squeezing mud and water out of my pajama. Then he washed my feet, looking up at me the entire time. It was a difficult gesture to read. I couldn’t tell if it was like the tenderness he’d shown me in the teashop or whether, by tending to me so thoroughly, he was further asserting his power as a man who could do anything.
After a short drive on a country road, past flat fields of ripened wheat, their arrows hard and golden like wasps, heralding better than any number of flowering trees the approach of summer, we arrived at a small open-air temple in the shade of a peepal tree. A pool of green water lay some metres below, surrounded by pale land.
‘This first temple,’ Aakash’s father said as we got out of the car, ‘honours an even older ancestor than the one I spoke of in the car. It is from him that we derive our caste.’
‘How old?’
‘Oh, I can’t say!’ Aakash’s father said. ‘Three, five, seven hundred years old. All I know is that it was even before the British time in India. It was during the Mughal time when Akbar was emperor.’
‘So, in the sixteenth century?’
‘Yes, maybe. Anyway, in that time, this ancestor did paltiyans from here to Jagannath Puri. When he arrived, the temple doors were closed. So he says, “If I have shakti in me, these doors will open.” The priest there said, “These doors will never open. Jagannath, Lord of the World, will not see you now.” My ancestor said, “Move aside. You’re just a priest; I speak directly to my god.” And, phataak, the doors of the temple swung open, Jagannath himself appearing. He said, “Ask, if you ever meant to ask.” My ancestor fell to his feet and asked the great Lord of the World that no one in his family or subsequent line should ever suffer from, how do you say, kodha…’
‘Leprosy,’ Anil inserted.
‘Yes, no one should suffer from leprosy.’
After this explanation, Aakash and Anil disappeared, followed by their older brother, Amit.
Men and women of Aakash’s caste had come from all over the area. Some arrived in open-backed trucks, the women’s faces covered by the long fall of their saris; others arrived in low sedans. The temple was so small and basic that it was hard to imagine people coming from a distance to visit it. It was long and tiled and open on three sides, through which the tranquillity of the green pool and the heavy shade of the tree entered freely. Below a brass bell were Aakash’s ancestor’s feet in white marble. Directly in front of them, also in white marble, was a large pineapple-shaped structure, draped in lavender muslin. A wet temple clutter of rose petals, grain, coins, blue polythene and yellow laddus with smoking incense sticks lay at its base.
A mad toothless country cousin, with thick spectacles and a long white plait, ran towards the women in Aakash’s family as soon as they entered the temple. The two women met and instantly began to dance around the pineapple. The daughter-in-law waited to be invited and when she wasn’t, put a foot forward and joined in. Other women in pink, maroon and rose-coloured saris smashed cymbals.
I was watching the scene when from behind me the men in Aakash’s family appeared, carrying between them a white and gold muslin cloth. The sight of them, dressed in nothing but long, ceremonial dhotis, produced a kind of panic in me. It was the culmination of weeks of anxiety that had been building since I stepped on to the Jet Airways flight to Delhi. Seeing Aakash now effortlessly assume his caste robes made me, in a mud-splattered kurta, feel all the horror of my removal. He hadn’t meant to intimidate me, but he had terribly. He’d shed his wide jeans and close-fitting shirt and the effects of Junglee were on display. His sprawling shoulders and large arms were taut. The black religious strings entwined with red bounced lightly against his chest. They struck an unlikely harmony with Aakash’s colour, the dark gums, the blackish-pink lips, the still-darker nipples and the fine coat of hair that covered his arms and shoulders. A beauty spot was faintly visible on his stomach muscles.
This darkness, like that of a charcoal sketch, made Aakash’s body more than an object for aesthetic consideration; it seemed to have a kind of aboriginal power, as if issuing from the deepest origins of caste and class in India. But his brothers and father, with their paler, flabbier frames, did not unsettle. There was no regeneration visible in them: their gaze was placid; they were not gym Brahmins.
The men each held a corner of the white and gold muslin cloth, which they lowered over the marble pineapple, already draped in lavender muslin. It was filled in seconds with a shower of petals, money and garlands of rose, jasmine and marigold. Then the little boy was brought forward, and as a barber priest shaved a first inch with his blade, the boy began to wail. Soon long, dark hair was added to the moist mess of petals, polythene and money. The Brahmin men sat solemnly around the pineapple as the boy’s large head was shorn. When his scalp was raw and cleanly shaved, cut dark red in places, the priest smeared it with sandalwood paste. It was only then that his mother appeared to ease the day’s trauma.
I wanted to go back to Delhi, but there was lunch organized under the peepal tree and a second temple to visit.
‘Eat as much as you like,’ Aakash said warmly after returning from washing in the green pool with his entire family. ‘Today I’m not your trainer.’ He had changed back into his jeans and T-shirt and had a fresh, turmeric mark on his forehead. He slipped his little finger into mine and led me to a place where a priest was putting these marks on other people’s foreheads. He exchanged some words with the priest as if negotiating a special rate. The priest asked him a question I didn’t catch, but Aakash replied, ‘He’s my brother.’ The priest smiled, and slipping one hand behind my head, drew me closer, grinding the mark firmly into my forehead with his other hand. Under the tree, young and old men were coming around with metal buckets, serving warm puris and potatoes. I felt my exhaustion mirrored in the long afternoon light pouring on to the green pool and in my mud-splattered pajama, which had dried and become a dull brown colour.
That second temple, given to Aakash’s family by the old Nawab of Jhajjar, was no more than a house. It faced a Jhajjar backstreet split down the middle by an open drain in which black bead-like bubbles rose in even intervals. Still, strong sunlight fell on an afternoon scene composed of a fly-covered dog, half in sun, half in shade, the street’s blue doors and shutters, and a man on a stool, reading the paper behind half-filled toffee jars. The one sound was the jingling of a passing woman, in black, silver and red; the one smell, as powerful as the sunlight, as pervasive as the languor of the street, the stench of the drain. It eased its way past a PCO booth, through the blue grille gate and into the temple’s cemented sanctum.
But no one held their nose, the ladies did not worry about their saris getting dirty, no one minded taking off their shoes some metres before the temple’s freshly washed floors. We tumbled into its courtyard, fifteen of us, opening shutters and unlocking doors as if returning to a house that had been closed up for a season. Everyone headed straight for the sanctum and lay down, men, women and children, on an old carpet on the floor. Just ahead, half-buried in garlands of plastic flowers,were a black, beady-eyed Krishna and a white Radha in gold clothes.
Aakash took me aside and pointed to the painting of a sage in a glass case. In slow, broken English, he said, ‘He is my great-grandfather.’
Mr Sharma already stood next to the glass case, leaning lightly against its orange frame. The statue inside was of a large man with a paunch showing through his saffron robes. There were three turmeric streaks across his pale forehead; and his fierce, jowly face, in permanent afternoon shadow, bore a distinct expression of irritation.
‘I used to massage his legs,’ Aakash’s father said. ‘He was a great man. If not for him, faith in this part of the country might have disappeared altogether.’ Then an unexpressed sorrow, like that of the red rose against the black background in his flat, passed over his face.
I sat down on a low stool, despite the family’s appeals to join them on the carpet. I realized now that it was not so much the smallness of the Sharma flat or the smell but its communal quality that had unsettled me. And Aakash, as if responding to that, as if reaffirming that he didn’t want to live that way either, that he had meant what he had said about the peacefulness and privacy of my mother’s flat, got up after a few minutes and came to sit next to me, his head resting against my knees. The undeclared power I had had over him until now, gained in part from his being my trainer and in part from Holi, dwindled. I felt that there had been a reversal.
The toothless country cousin was taking orders, hardly an hour after lunch, for tea and samosas.
‘I don’t have the courage for a samosa,’ Aakash’s sister-in-law said from the place where she sprawled on the floor.
Aakash looked at her, then up at me with a contemptuous smile.
‘Kachori?’ the old woman asked with a smack of her lips.
‘No,’ Aakash’s sister-in-law moaned, rubbing her broad, dark stomach.
‘Then khir?’ the old woman shot back.
‘Yes, khir would be lovely!’ Aakash’s sister-in-law smiled, feigning childlike mischief.
‘Khir would be lovely,’ Aakash imitated and guffawed, looking up again at me for approval.
‘What?’ the sister-in-law snapped. ‘What’s wrong with khir? I can’t be like you, eating boiled food, boiled vegetables and protein milkshakes.’
‘That’s fine, but then don’t come running to me: “Aakash, make me thin; Aakash, tell me what to eat; Aakash, your body…” ’
‘Let her eat, yaar. What is it to you?’ Aakash’s elder brother, her husband, intervened.
His remark made me wonder about the tensions between them.
Aakash said to me in English, ‘See what I told you? She is very sharp.’
Then turning back to the family, he said, ‘Why don’t you stop thinking about eating for a second and pay attention to your son, who’s become a sweeper?’
The entire family, as if in an abs class, rose six inches to see what the child was doing. He was at the far end of the little courtyard, brandishing a short broom made of fine sticks.
‘Come here, you little jamadar,’ Aakash yelled.
The word he used was a caste word no longer in politically correct usage for cleaners and sweepers. A ripple of laughter went through the family of reposing Brahmins. The child, seeing he had the attention of his family, began splashing water in a metal bucket no bigger than him.
‘That water is dirty,’ Aakash said pointedly to his sister-in-law and walked across the courtyard to recover the boy.
‘Chee,’ he said, as he picked him up, ‘he’s smelling.’
His mother, now clearly humiliated in front of the family, rose with irritation. ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s wearing a nappy. We’ll deal with it when we get back.’
Aakash shrugged his shoulders and handed her the child. But as soon as he did, the child slipped away and clung to Aakash’s leg. He began touching his feet, saying, ‘Tey,’ every time he did. ‘He’s saying, “Jai”,’ Aakash said with delight.
Aakash’s father looked up at me and said, ‘See, unlike the Sikhs and the Muslims, we don’t have to teach them the religion. They learn on their own. For instance, no one taught him to say Jai. He just heard us saying it when we pray and picked it up.’
The boy, now in Aakash’s arms, was pointing unsteadily at the Nandi near the Shiva linga and saying, ‘Tawoo. Tawoo.’
‘He’s calling Nandi “Tawoo”,’ Aakash laughed, then, addressing the boy, said, ‘Not cow; “Nandi”.’
Tea and samosas arrived, along with a bowl of khir. Aakash put the boy down and rejoined the others.
We had all barely had a few sips of tea, Aakash’s sister-in-law had not touched her khir, when cries of ‘Chee, chee’, ‘Look what’s he’s doing’, ‘The little sweeper’ rose from the sanctum.
I had been facing the idols and turned round to see that the boy had removed his shorts, and now holding on to a tap as high as his arms could reach, was taking a happy pistachio-green shit in the courtyard.
‘His T-shirt will be ruined!’ Aakash yelled.
‘Let it be ruined,’ the boy’s father said with hollow aggression.
Within seconds, the family’s women, his mother and the old cousin, had pounced on him, while his grandmother looked on with a bitter smile. He eluded his mother and ran to Aakash, leaving a green trail behind him for his mother to clean up. Aakash grabbed him under the arms, swung him stomach down on to his lap and cleaned his bottom without any sign of squeamishness. Then along with his mother he inspected the child’s bottom closely.
‘Hai, look!’ Aakash’s mother said. ‘He’s got these big red dots there.’
‘Not cleaning him properly,’ her younger sister added slyly. ‘Have to put Soframycin.’
‘Have you seen the spots in his privates,’ Aakash exploded at the child’s mother, who was still sweeping up the mess.
She looked up, haggard. ‘I’m just coming,’ she managed.
Her husband, who had now taken the boy, was betraying her to the group. ‘I’ve told her time and time again that she’s not paying enough attention.’
Then Anil produced a wooden drum from within the sanctum. He started beating on it, and hearing this, the little bald child, who had been face down all this time, rose furiously and began to dance, shaking a small, angry foot unsteadily into the circle.
‘Put your right foot in, put your left foot…’ his grandmother sang, and the little boy danced as the group clapped and his mother swept away the last of the green trail.
We went home through flat land dotted with smoking minarets. The sky that had been pale in the morning was a pinkish brown on the way back. The thin, bumpy road that led past high, spiked walls, the ‘16 Base Repair Depot’ and keekar trees, as malevolent in the evening haze as in the dawn mist, finished at a sky-blue metal gate.
‘You know what’s behind that gate?’ Aakash said, putting his hand lightly on my shoulder.
‘No.’
‘The airport. We used to go there at night as children and see the planes and lights. It’s better than take-off point. You’re literally right there in the grass when the planes go by. Mind-blowing.’
I thought of my own arrival there a few months before on the Jet Airways flight. Then I thought of Aakash and his childhood memory of the airport. And even though a mood of inadequacy hung over the day’s outing, with this thought my great tenderness for him flooded back.
Aakash insisted the day needed its ‘super set’. I said, thinking of his bald nephew in the temple, that I was sure it had already had one. Then he wanted to know when and I had no answer for him. He searched my face for a moment and turned back to the task at hand. He was looking for a ‘pardy’ shirt. We stood in his mattress-covered room with its pink walls and fetid air. A green metal cupboard was open; many unsuitable options lay strewn on the mattress below. Presently he found it, a black shirt with silver pinstripes. Its thick shiny material glowed in the white light.
A few minutes later, we were on his bike, driving through the smoky Delhi night. It was my first time riding pillion on a motorbike and I felt exposed, embarrassed to be gripping on so tightly. We drove through areas I didn’t know existed. Broken, keekar-lined roads, open fields and a hyacinth-choked canal, with the red lights of a power station reflected in its dark water, appeared on our way.
‘Where are we?’ I yelled.
‘What?’
‘Where are we?’
‘In Sectorpur,’ Aakash yelled back, ‘just across the Jhaatkebaal border.’
We came some minutes later to an arrangement of tall four-square buildings surrounded by flat agricultural land. Though the buildings were new, marks of decay had already begun to appear on them. Pan spittle festooned their chalky-white walls, metal slats along their side had begun to rust and sacks of cement, plastic buckets and brooms cluttered their corridors. A white wooden bathroom door was open and from the grey marble interior toilet smells filled the lobby. We waited for the lift. Outside, a group of young boys chased a squirrel with an air gun. It ran up a tree and the boys stood below, firing aimlessly into the street-lit canopy.
‘Fucking it,’ Aakash said, when after many minutes the fat red number indicating which floor the lift was on didn’t move. ‘Let’s take the stairs.’
‘Listen, Aakash, are you going to tell me now who this friend of yours is?’
His eyes gleamed. ‘What, man? Don’t trust me, man? I told you, this is my very old friend. The Begum of Sectorpur. Now, come on.’
We ran up seven flights of stairs. The banister shook; there were broken panes on every landing, with sharp points of glass clinging on; below, rejoicing boys carried away the body of a squirrel; the land around was bare and dark, streaked with amber stretches of empty road. Halfway up, we were met by a thin young man with glassy eyes. He wore pedal pushers and a black vest. His small, dense armpits were exposed and emitted a wet, poisonous smell. He was overjoyed to see Aakash, and showing blackened teeth, kept monotonously asking how long it had been. Though Aakash paid him no attention, he jogged up alongside us, laughing and slurring. At every landing he looked back at me, his glassy eyes catching the light, and said, ‘Any friend of Aakash’s is a friend of mine.’
When we reached the eighth floor, Aakash slipped his arm around the man’s wiry frame, and whispering purposefully, took him into the gloom at one end of the corridor. They were still talking when the front door nearest to me swung open. A woman in a pale green kaftan stood behind a black metal gate. She was a warm brown colour, with straight waxy hair and slightly jowly cheeks; her smooth hairless skin and raised eyes made me think she was north-eastern or Nepalese. The outline of her large, full body was visible through the fine cotton she was wearing. She clutched the gate with one hand and under the white tips of her French manicure she had tiger-print nails.
She smiled broadly at me and laughed girlishly when she saw Aakash.
‘Suitors, Begum saab!’ the thin man sneered before vanishing down the stairs.
She snapped abuse at him. When it was returned with a wayward cackle, lost in the darkness, she looked back at us and was gracious once again.
The gate opened and we entered a clean brightly lit flat with tiled floors. The begum shut and bolted an iron front door behind us. Apart from the main lock, there were some five or six other locks crudely welded on. A tile of Ganesh near the door read: ‘May he bless every corner of this house.’
An Alsatian with cataract-clouded eyes bounded up to greet us.
‘Stop it, stop it, Zabar,’ the begum said, pushing aside the dog’s snout and showing us into a drawing room, which contained a glass dining table, white leather chairs and sofas under plastic covers. A partially drunk bottle of Diet Coke and a glass-cleaning spray, half-full of blue liquid, stood on the dining table.
Within moments of our sitting down, the begum had rushed off into the kitchen and reappeared with glasses, ice and a bottle of Seagram’s Indian whisky. Aakash looked at me and winked as she poured the whisky. The begum spoke rapidly, complaining about security, then about how Aakash never came to see her any more.
‘At one point,’ she said, looking over her shoulder at me, ‘it was all, “Begum this”, “Begum that” – “Begum, my friends will protect you”, “Begum, can I give you a lift somewhere on my bike?” but now, since he’s on his way to bigger things, since -’
‘Ah, ah, ah,’ Aakash said firmly.
The begum shut up, then a moment later looked mournfully back at me and said, ‘Begum’s been forgotten.’
When she brought us our whiskies Aakash took his, and quoting an Urdu poet, said, ‘An age has passed, and your memory has not come to me, but that I have forgotten you – it is not that way either.’
The begum melted. ‘Oh-ho-ho,’ she said. ‘Quoting back to me the couplets I taught you? How easily they come off your tongue.’
Aakash laughed and grabbed her through her cotton kaftan as she gave me my whisky, nearly causing her to fall over on to the sofa.
She moaned and recovered herself.
We drank two or three more whiskies. The begum spoke continuously. She made light flirtatious conversation; she complained about what a burden the Alsatian had become – ‘A blind guard dog! That’s all the begum’s left with’; she lashed out at women more debased than herself but protected by the false sanctities of marriage; she complimented Aakash on his physique; she said her son, who was ‘a carbon copy’ of Aakash, was working as a chowkidar in some rich industrialist’s house, couldn’t Aakash help him get a job in fitness? This request caused friction between them. Aakash cautioned her with a cold stare and her tune changed. She became maternal even as she trailed her tiger nail down his cheek: ‘How good and strong my little boy has grown up to be. I still remember when he was sixteen and -’
‘Begum.’
‘OK, OK, I won’t say.’
Aakash affected a macho silence, the whisky and the begum’s chatter seeming to relax him. But for the pinstripe ‘pardy’ shirt, he was like a man who’d just come home from a hard day at the office. To see him twice in the same day, and in such different ways, a hero among the people he grew up with, made me feel again the power of his position. His versatility was like a confirmation of how authentic and robust his world was. His Delhi was a city of temples and gyms, of rich and poor people, of Bentleys and bicycles, of government flats and mansions, of hookers and heiresses, and he asserted his nativity by moving freely between its varied lives. He made it seem like no less his right than taking one of the new green buses, riding the metro, seeing the sound and light show at the Red Fort or renting a pedal boat at India Gate and floating over the reflections of dark trees and pale sky in its sandstone water tanks.
He seemed to read my admiration, and perhaps helped by the whisky to see himself as I saw him, as many men to many people, here rubbing a baby’s face against his to comfort it, there performing the ancient rites of his caste, he suddenly made a grab for the begum’s breasts through her pale green kaftan, his mud-coloured eyes fixed on me. The begum wriggled joyfully, shrugging off her maternal instincts and becoming what she was. She had been sitting in his lap, but now she rose slightly and pushed her thighs and rear towards him. Her jowly face moved closer to mine while Aakash pulled hard at her breasts. She was inches from me, wiggling and gyrating, making a drama of her arousal. Aakash’s eyes followed mine, his arched lips taut with amusement. My first reaction was anger, feeling this could only be some kind of sexual intimidation. But when he squeezed the begum’s fat thighs and slapped her bottom, causing her to fall forward, her tiger nails clawing my thigh, a smile must have crept into my face. Aakash laughed loudly at seeing it. The begum tried looking behind her to see what was so funny, but Aakash turned her face back towards me, and taking her left hand from my thigh, pressed it into my crotch. It had no effect; I shrank with embarrassment.
Then Aakash lifted up the begum’s kaftan and began to roll it back. He did it with mock assiduity, just as when he had prepared the towel as a neck rest during the squats. It formed a neat band just over her hips. I could see the outline of her exposed thighs and bottom. Aakash, making a face like a laboratory assistant or vet, raised two fingers in the air. When he was sure I had seen the gesture, he inserted them into her with the ease of a man sawing off a piece of wood. The begum groaned.
‘Not here, not here. Come on, to the bedroom.’
Aakash pushed her head down roughly. The Alsatian, who had been watching everything with its cataract-filled eyes, saw this action and jumped up, at once barking and wagging his tail. Aakash looked at the dog, then at me, and feigning confusion, offered the begum’s exposed bottom to the dog with a sweep of his arm.
The begum saw and her face filled with anger. She lurched up, pushing out Aakash’s fingers in the process and slapped her palm against his chest. Aakash nearly fell back.
‘Motherfucker. Bastard. Wretch. Limp dick.’
Aakash folded his hands and begged forgiveness. The begum stormed round the room, sipping her whisky, staring at blank spaces, swinging round to glare at us. The back of her kaftan fell down and hung like a pleated blind. We sat unmoving next to each other on the sofa.
‘Begum, please, forget it now, no? It was just a joke.’
‘Just a joke? You dare humiliate me in front of your rich friends! Me? Who has known you since you were sixteen. I know everything about you. I could destroy you with a click of my fingers.’
Her tiger nails snapped in the air.
Her anger didn’t seem real, but whatever threat she tormented him with had its effect. Aakash, prone to theatrical anger himself, looked around him for his phone and his bike keys, and rose to leave. He gestured to me to get up, and without looking at the begum, made for the door. The begum became hysterical. She clutched Aakash’s arm, which he pulled away. She shook and pulled at her hair. She grabbed Zabar, the Alsatian, and dragged him along until she was at our feet, weeping, imploring Aakash not to go, holding up the dog’s face, with its moonstone eyes, to hers.
I don’t think I believed her exaggerated show of female emotions; I just didn’t feel like leaving. I liked the flat’s anonymity, the whiskies coming easily; I liked seeing Aakash play the role of the Sectorpur boy who’d grown up and gone away. I was also curious about what the begum had said about destroying Aakash with a click of her fingers. Destroy what? How? And for all these reasons, I tapped Aakash on the arm and said, ‘Let’s stay.’
He scanned my face, seemed quickly to make a decision, then turning to the begum, said, ‘Ey, ey, listen, Begum. My friend here wants to stay. So out of respect to him we’re going to stay. But you try anything crooked again…’
The begum sprang to her feet, kicking aside the dog. It was as if we were arriving for the first time. She straightened her hair as she slipped past us to pour two more whiskies.
Aakash chuckled at her good nature. ‘Now she’s set. Should we get down to it?’
‘Down to what?’
He pressed what I thought was a packet of pan masala into my palm. When I felt its evasive hoop slide between my fingers I said, ‘You’re not serious? She’s quite old and not very pretty.’
‘She was my first.’
‘Maybe, but…’
‘It’s for us, man. It’s one of those things you have to do with your best friend.’
Before I could answer, he opened a bedroom door on our right and pushed me in. I was surprised at how domestic the room was, really like someone’s home. It had glass, almond-shaped wall lights, a single plywood bed with a white lace bedcover and bedside tables. A stand in one corner contained what looked like broken ostrich eggs but were in fact the begum’s foamy bras.
Aakash came in with her a few moments later. Her waxy hair was tied up with a pink scrunchy and instead of her kaftan she wore a satiny tiger-print slip. Aakash, seeing my alarm, began gently massaging the back of my neck. The begum walked towards the plywood bed, the dimples on her thighs forming new patterns with every step. There was something inoffensive to the point of attraction about her soft, hairless body. It seemed as though, once some original hesitation had been overcome, it would be possible to fuck her five times a night, in a way that would be less possible with more beautiful girls.
Aakash led me over to her by the neck, undoing his black pinstripe shirt as he walked. The begum had pulled out two pillows from under the lace bedcover. She rested her palms on one and her knees on the other. Her vagina was black, the hair around shaved clean, the thighs faintly powdered. As Aakash approached, she began to massage herself with her tiger-painted nails, and I noticed that on their yellowish-brown surface, interspersed between the black stripes, were also strands of red. I felt these details make too strong an impression. I knew that they would kill any possibility of sexual arousal.
Aakash at that moment had not only undone his own slate-grey jeans but was about to undo mine when I stopped him. I wasn’t erect and the sight of his small, pencil-thin penis pushing sharply against his underwear intimidated me. His ease, his hedonistic ease, even as I had thought myself out of my body, intimidated me. I knew all along that this would be a problem. Seeming to read my mind, he pressed my crotch casually, and finding it soft, looked urgently at me, as if to say, ‘Come on, man. Thirdeen, fordeen, we’ll do it slowly…’
The begum sensed a disturbance behind her and looked back, perhaps thinking we were making fun of her again. Aakash was forced to act quickly. He pulled down his underwear, slipped his penis into the white latex he held in his fingers, and rising to the balls of his feet, pushed himself into the begum. Once he was inside her, he turned his attention back to me, draping one arm lightly over my shoulders for balance. He was no different from a man giving blood or urinating, and I stood next to him as though there for moral support. We made light conversation. I noticed a picture on the begum’s bedside of a young man in a silver frame. He was dark-skinned and fine-featured, with amber Nepalese eyes and a cruel smile.
‘Who’s that?’ I whispered to Aakash.
Aakash looked over, readjusting his balance.
‘Her son,’ he whispered, adding, ‘my double,’ with a smile.
But for the colour of his eyes, he looked nothing like Aakash. The begum must have heard us, must have felt Aakash move in her.
‘What’s all this khoospoos you’re doing?’ she snapped.
‘Nothing, Begum,’ Aakash yelled back. ‘Just pointing out the photo of your son.’
‘Oh,’ the begum said, and lowered her head. ‘Poor boy, working as a chowkidar.’
Aakash put both his thumbs to his temples and wiggled his fingers in a child’s gesture of defiance.
When he was near climax, he rested his arm on my shoulder and began again to massage the back of my neck. His rough wrinkly fingers pressed painfully as he came nearer an orgasm. When at last he pulled out, in one movement tearing off the condom and thumbing out long strands of semen over the begum’s back, I could hardly stand the pain. I pushed his hand away and he fell forward, dropping his body over the begum’s for a moment and laughing euphorically.
‘Slowly, slowly,’ the begum cooed, as if glad to finally have some physical contact.
‘Begum,’ Aakash said in a broken voice, ‘can I ask you something? You won’t take it badly?’
‘Tell me, baba.’
‘I’m starving. Is there anything to eat? Brad, butter, a desi omelette?’
‘Baba!’ the begum said indulgently. ‘Is this even something to ask for! Of course your begum will make you an omelette. You’ll take green chillis in it, no?’
‘Yes, Begum. You’re the best.’
The begum rolled Aakash off her back, rose agilely and picked her way past me.
I sat down on the bed next to Aakash. He pulled his jeans back on and sat up. I thought that he spoke indirectly to me when he said, ‘Don’t mind what happened earlier. I have this problem routinely in my life. When I get involved with someone, I burrow into their mind. They can’t get me out and they start behaving irrationally.’
‘What was this deep, dark secret she kept going on about?’
‘Nothing, man, nothing. She’s mad. But let’s leave all these serious things. We had fun, right?’
A few minutes later the begum appeared in the doorway with a plastic plate. As she handed it to him, Aakash looked up at her with adoring eyes. ‘Food cooked by Begum’s own hands,’ he muttered, using Bollywood lines as he tore up the omelette with his fingers. She rested her palm on his shoulder. He sat crouched over the omelette, rolling up the long shreds he’d made before putting them into his mouth. Then lips glistening, chewing noisily, he looked up at us with the glazed contentment of cattle drinking. His self-absorption was that of a man who would have been truly amazed to learn that either of us had any plans other than to watch him wolf down a post-coital omelette.
My phone beeped. Sanyogita. ‘Baby, off to bed. Will you be home soon?’ I put it away, feeling an urgent longing for her bed and her warm, sleepy presence near me, washing clean the night’s exposure. Aakash, licking his chops, looked resentfully over at the challenge to his centrality. The begum’s nails drooped off his shoulder. The Alsatian had also now nosed its way in, and with its head edgewise, sniffed, and began licking clean Aakash’s empty plate.
Delhi in that last week of May, despite the great heat, was filled with flowers. There were burnt orange blossoms on the gulmohar’s fern-like leaves, mauve tendrils fountaining from the jarul’s thatched canopy, and the blaze itself seeming to reside in the laburnum’s yellow flowers.
On my last afternoon I sat with Zafar, reading the Urdu newspaper. The affection that had grown between us had softened his insistence on teaching me to write. I’d mastered the script’s meaningful single and double dots and mysterious elisions, and had started reading well. But if I ever confused an ‘n’ with a ‘b’, he would croak irritably. If only I’d followed his advice and learned to write first, none of this would be a problem.
The newspaper was a thin, oily rag with splashes of bright colour and ink that blackened your fingers. The sessions with Zafar had reinforced my vocabulary in definite ways. I drank in ordinary words like ‘often’, ‘perhaps’, ‘unintentionally’ and ‘complete’. Simple words; easy to take for granted till lost and regained in another language. The newspaper offered them up daily, and reading it also became a way for Zafar and me to discuss the week’s events.
For months now the country had been seeing waves of new motiveless crime. In Bombay, there were the beer-can murders. A bearded jihadi wandered the city’s streets, hunting down homosexuals. His calling card was a can of Kingfisher left by the bodies of his victims. Ra was hysterical about copycat murders in Delhi, now seeing its own incidents of brand-new crime in its satellite towns. In Sectorpur there was a flesh-eating serial killer in whose oven the skeletal remains of women and children had been found. And in Phasenagar there was a double homicide. A fourteen-year-old girl had been found with her throat slashed while her parents slept in the next room. When the police arrived, ready to arrest the servant, they found him face down in a pool of his own blood. The death of their natural suspect threw their investigation into disarray. A day later, the girl’s father was arrested. He was said to have killed her for threatening to expose a wife-swapping arrangement with his best friend. The TV channels fed the public each detail in hourly intervals; the city was mesmerized. There was in the details an inexplicable…
‘… vehshat,’ Zafar offered.
‘What?’
‘Vehshat,’ he repeated.
The sound that gave the word its ring was ‘ehsh’. It had the same casual violence of words like lash and stash, but the ‘eh’ sound was less direct, less open, oblique somehow. It was a word that seemed to convey meaning before I knew what it meant; it rhymed with dehshat, terror, and began almost like vaishya, whore. But Zafar was stuck; he looked through three dictionaries without finding a synonym I could understand. The badly printed Urdu-English dictionary offered ‘wild’ and ‘savage’, but when I translated that back into Urdu for Zafar, he said that was wrong. We often ended up in these hopeless circles. I didn’t understand his Urdu explanations and he didn’t understand the dictionary enough to confirm or reject its synonym. So vehshat lingered, full of suggestiveness but without clear meaning. And yet it seemed so right, detonating from Zafar’s lips as soon as he read the newspaper. The power of its effect on both him and me, and the lack of a synonym to describe that effect, made Zafar say more.
He seemed to measure me up before revealing what was on his mind. Then, as if resigned to the risk of being misunderstood, he said, ‘There’s a vehshat deep within this country. It comes, I think, from the religion. Or, perhaps, because the socially conscious religions, Christianity and Islam, never gained a firm enough footing. They could never close over the history of animalism and sacrifice. The land and people of this country retain this memory. And it gives them this capacity, a capacity for vehshat.’
Zafar treated me like a Muslim. The hunted-minority expression widened his eyes and stilled his lips. ‘The land is stained,’ he muttered. ‘It has seen terrible things: girl children sacrificed, widows burned, the worship of idols. The people in their hearts do not fear God. Their law is not theirs, you see. It was first the Muslim law and then it was the English. And because the law is alien, they can always shrug it off and the vehshat returns.’
I turned absent-mindedly to the paper and was leafing through its greasy pages when I saw a picture of Chamunda. It was a grainy image of her in red and green astride a lion. If not for the distinctiveness of her features, her comic-book lips, her vast eyes, I might not have recognized her. She wore a gold crown and carried a trident. At her ankleted feet, a priest knelt over a Shiva linga, smearing it orange. Garlands of jasmine, roses and marigolds were tied tightly around its base. I couldn’t read the caption and asked Zafar for help.
‘They have made the BJP Chief Minister of Jhaatkebaal, Chamunda Devi, into the goddess Durga and are worshipping her in temples,’ Zafar sneered.
I laughed, and before I could check myself I’d said, ‘I know her. She’s Sanyogita’s aunt.’
Zafar looked sadly at me, as if I’d let him down by this admission of closeness to the Hindu nationalist party. Though it was well before the usual time, he asked that we take a cigarette break. I was suddenly aware of how frail he was. This awareness, alongside the fineness of his manners, the umbrella, the little cap, the pen always in place, the safari suit impeccable, made me feel that I hadn’t so much offended him as manhandled him.
On the balcony, he took out his blue packet of Wins and offered me one. From inside the packet came a black windproof lighter with a near-invisible flame. He liked to tell me that the cigarettes were Italian and had travelled via the east, Burma in particular, to India. But today he just smoked quietly, looking out at the large trees shielding us from the sun.
Long black pods hung like many walking sticks from the branches of a laburnum. On the edge of the canopy, yellow blossoms pushed reluctantly through like paint squeezed from a sponge. Their bright colour against the black of the pods and the dull green of the canopy made them seem of a different material from the rest of the tree, more like points of sunlight than flowers.
‘Amaltas,’ Zafar said, ‘the true beginning of the heat.’
And as if retreating from its glare, he put out his cigarette and went inside. I was studying his tufts of dyed black hair, dotted with maroon sores, when my eye trailed along his neck to a point between its base and the shoulder blade. There, off to the right, and seeming to catch a different light, was a small but distinct swelling. I reached forward and touched it. Zafar winced in pain. It was hard and knobby, somewhere between bone and cartilage.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m becoming a camel,’ Zafar chuckled, his eyes betraying his fear.
‘This isn’t a joke. What is that? Have you shown it to a doctor?’
He took out a soiled and folded piece of paper from his pocket. It read:
Biopsy report: gross appearance, irregular greyish-white tissue along with dirty brown debris received, total measuring 1 x 1.5 cm
Histopathological report: microsection shows features of sebaceous cyst no e/o tb or malignancy seen
Diagnosis: sebaceous cyst
Dr Lipike Lipi, pathologist
‘They say it’s benign, but I’ll need an operation. I’ll have it while you’re away.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Only when touched. The problem is it makes my reading and writing work, which I do on the floor, quite difficult. You can say that it’s just part of old age.’
‘You’re not so old, Zafar. You’re younger than my mother.’
‘Yes, but life…’
‘… has made you old,’ I completed for him.
He laughed. Then as if wishing neither to alarm me nor to let me make light of what he had said, he added, ‘The place I live has made me old.’
The place he lived! How embarrassing that I hadn’t seen it. This attitude was a remnant of my childhood in Delhi, not so much a lack of curiosity as blindness. I resolved to go. Then a shudder went through me at the thought of this place that gave Zafar his sores, and now this new deformity. It was one other thing, like the heat, that he would bear while I was away.
The vehshat, the vehshat!
Sanyogita was part of a circle of creative-writing professionals called Emigrés at Home. Their weekly meeting coincided with our last night in Delhi. They met at a different group member’s house each week, and as Sanyogita had not offered hers so far, she decided to host this last meeting in the Jorbagh flat. Her friends Mandira and Ra were part of the group and so the meeting was also a farewell party of sorts. When I went to have a shower after my lesson with Zafar, Vatsala and Sanyogita were preparing the flat. Lamps were coming on; aubergine dips were being laid out; some light Brazilian music had begun to play. I knew that this kind of activity, reminiscent of her London life, meant a lot to Sanyogita. We had been through a difficult period that hadn’t been resolved as much as it had been presumed to end with our departure; I told myself in the shower that this would be the first active night of repair. It would start with my showing support for the creative writers. Her meetings with them were an assertion of her life in Delhi as separate from mine; but Sanyogita, who encouraged me in everything I did, would have liked nothing more than my endorsement for her ‘thing’.
When I came out of the shower the heat was breaking in a dust storm. It had stopped the day’s natural decline and cast a greenish-purple twilight hour over the city. After raging in the canopies of big Delhi trees, the storm entered the garden terrace, sweeping up fine dust off the floor, roughing up dahlias and denuding the dead frangipani of its last leaves.
In the lamp-lit room the meeting had begun. The people assembled were mostly older women in ethnic and tribal-print saris, with hair greying in buns for political reasons. There were also a handful of very tall, very thin young men with bad posture, as well as one or two older men in cotton kurtas and jeans. One dark, lightly bearded, young writer with sharp features sat at the feet of a woman with a red oversized bindi. She rested a wrist, heavy with silver bangles, on his shoulder as he stared morosely at the pages in his lap. His uncut toenails were visible in the blue rubber chappals he wore. The intensity of his stare, and a feeling that I knew him from somewhere, prevented me at first from listening to what the woman introducing him was saying.
In a far corner of the room, Sanyogita beamed at me, patting the empty space next to her. As I walked across the room, I heard the older woman, with her hand beating lightly against the young writer’s collarbone, say that he had attended a creative-writing programme in America; he was among the group’s most significant talents, best representing its theme, ‘Children of a post-colonial god: Indians feeling foreign in India’.
He was to read his story ‘The Assignation’.
The young man looked up at the room with dim, sad eyes. Prognathous, his smile, and later soft words, were almost lost in the cavity between his projecting lower jaw and face.
‘ “The Assignation”,’ he repeated in a south Delhi American accent.
‘Where’s your story?’ I whispered to Sanyogita.
‘I’m not reading today,’ she said, clutching my hand. ‘This is the last one.’
‘There’ve already been a few?’
‘Yes, a story and a poem. Now listen.’
Mandira and Ra, who were sitting next to each other, looked over. Mandira smiled; Ra clenched a fist into the air in a gesture of affection, then mouthed, ‘Pay attention to this. It’ll be really good. He’s a new voice out of Sectorpur.’
‘Has everyone read it already?’ I said to Sanyogita. ‘Shh, baby. No. Listen.’
The creative writer began: ‘Winter in Delhi. The street was enveloped in a stagy mist, harbouring pink bougainvillea. Men outside the teashop acted their parts, wrapping scarves around their faces and rubbing their hands. The hard-bellied owner, looking down at them over a roaring blue flame, handed out cups of tea as though moving chess pieces. An astrologically auspicious window to marry had opened and in many houses fairy lights hung from the trees, white shamianas sprang up and tinny music tore out of concealed speakers. I had lived unseasonably since my return, forgetting what the winter meant. But as the city awoke inevitably to the season, these reminders of my own long history there pierced the haze of the past several months.
‘I entered Lodhi Gardens through the park’s old entrance. Its British name, Lady Willingdon Gardens, was engraved on stone pillars flanking the locked iron gate. An unsteady, bright green turnstile had been installed next to it. White cars belonging to politicians, with red sirens and black cat commandos, were parked boldly outside where some variety of municipal work was forever under way. To enter the park, I had to sidestep thin ladies in bright colours, carrying shallow dishes of cement to and from a mound of mud half-filled with water, and men, despite the cold, in fraying vests, digging soft earth out of the pavement.
‘A path of concrete discs led down an avenue of white-trunked palms. On the left, the rough, red, crenellated walls of a tomb ran along a strip of clumpy grass. The tombs were bare, scarred and not beautiful, but faultless as ornaments for a park. One emerged now, with the remains of glazed turquoise tiles hanging like dead skin from its rough surface, evoking a Turkic memory deep within the Indian plain.
‘There were new faces in Lodhi Gardens, less serious walkers whom the summer heat had kept away. Among the usual women in salwar kurtas and sneakers, couples canoodling under trees and idle youth walking hand in hand, there were tourists crossing the paths of fast walkers, social ladies in velvety tracksuits and Delhi queens.
‘My walk was just beginning to gather pace, when passing one of the darker peripheries of the park, I noticed a slender young man watching me. I was struck by the fineness of his features and, despite his obvious poverty, his vanity and attention to style. He wore flared jeans and a close-fitting off-white shirt. He smiled first, not a bitter, gay smile, but a dark, malevolent smile. I returned it with a macho smirk saved only for bold advances from unlikely people. This seemed to register with the young man because he laughed out loud and approached in a dainty swagger. As he came out of the shadows, I marvelled at his physical beauty. His face had a Nepalese cast; he had dark smooth skin, a clean hairless neck and a small, precise mouth. His poverty though, was visible in his stained teeth and the murky whites of his light eyes.
‘As soon as he came near, I felt acute social embarrassment. Lodhi Gardens was full of fashionable people whom I knew, or knew a little, and I didn’t wish to be seen speaking to a man who was hardly better than a servant, especially a man as attractive as this one. He seemed to read my embarrassment and prolonged it. When I asked him for his telephone number, he responded with mock confusion: why would I want his telephone number?
‘ “Please, quickly,” I said, as if speaking to a servant. “I have to finish my walk.”
‘ “But first, tell me…”
‘ “Listen, I have to go. Do you have a mobile or not?”
‘The mention of that magic status symbol stopped the man’s playful delays. He whipped out his phone and held it insolently before me.
‘ “Give me your number,” he said.
‘I hurriedly gave him my number.
‘ “Name?”
‘ “Krishna,” I answered.’
Krishna! The moment I heard the name, though he went by Kris and not Krishna, I remembered where I had seen the creative writer. He also worked out at Junglee, but with Pradeep, the other trainer. He was a friend of Aakash’s top lawyer-client, Sparky Punj, and I had seen them many times, having a protein shake together after their workout. Aakash had taken an irrational dislike to him – linked no doubt to his choice of trainer – and called him Lul, literally dick, but more like limp dick.
‘He’s a gay!’ he would say every time Kris walked past, oblivious to Aakash’s hatred of him.
‘So what, Aakash?’
‘So what, Aakash?’ he would imitate in a girly voice and fall back into a sullen silence.
The thought of Aakash gave me a pang. I had hardly seen him since the night with the Begum of Sectorpur. He had cancelled trainings without notice, didn’t return missed calls and messages; he became moody at Junglee. His coldness, after the intimacy and excess of that day, affected me badly. I suspected that it was related to our episode with the begum. It was as if Aakash had rightly judged the unease it had left me with, but in a strange inversion, he pre-empted the possibility of my withdrawing by withdrawing himself. And in this way he had not only erased all discomfort I might have had from that day but also left me mourning his sudden absence in my life. I would find myself waiting for his text messages and phone calls. I’d reach for my phone first thing in the morning to see if something had come through. I thought up banal reasons to call him. If he didn’t show up at the gym, I wouldn’t work out, coming away feeling that not only had the hour been wasted but the day too. I cancelled plans made weeks in advance to see him, knowing full well that should something come up in his life, he would cancel me without a word. When I confronted him about his behaviour, he lied effortlessly. He had called, but my number was engaged; my text messages hadn’t reached him; his brother had borrowed his phone. If I questioned him further, he became upset and conversation shut down. His lying was also an aspect of his confidence, a supreme belief that even if the details of what he was saying were wrong, he couldn’t ever be wrong himself. His aloofness in that last week in Delhi put an added strain on my relationship with Sanyogita. She noticed that I was irritable and distracted and she sensed why. I couldn’t explain my exact condition because I didn’t fully understand it myself. I only knew that the euphoria I had felt on that Jet Airways flight back to Delhi, that cautious euphoria that reduced me to tears, had become tied up with Aakash and the world he opened up to me. But in the end, after many gestures of friendship, I’d stopped trying too; my last communication with him, to which I received no reply, had been a text message, reminding him of my departure and inviting him to Sanyogita’s party.
Caught up in these considerations, I found I’d missed some of the conversation in the creative writer’s story. The mention of his name drew me in again.
‘ “OK, Krishna,” the man said doubtfully. “I’ll give you a missed call.”
‘ “OK, OK,” I replied, in a voice that sounded as if I was instructing him to do some work for me, and moved on quickly. When I looked back, I saw that the man stood where he was and a smile played on his dark lips as he finished entering my number into his phone. He must have seen me because he looked up and waved his arm at me. “OK, Krishna. Remember me. I’m Jai. I’ll call you tonight.”
‘A few moments later, my phone vibrated in my pocket. I saved Jai’s number and carried on with my walk.
‘An assignation! I thought. I had made so many abroad, sometimes just walking past a man in the street: a suggestive look, a follow-up glance thrown over the shoulder a few paces later and an exchanged number. That was all. But now, despite being in my own country, exchanging numbers with another Indian, I felt on more unfamiliar ground than I had ever been on in the West, felt I couldn’t judge the man’s motives. This was what happened when everyone had a phone! It was amazing to think of the technology, available even to men like Jai, that brought us together and made possible the assignation, at once real but also indefinite and avoidable: the ingredients of anonymity.
‘I finished my rounds of the park. The winter brought clearer days and the sky, still blue on my first round and barnacled with scaly clouds, burned with scattered orange fires on my second. The subsequent rounds of the park, the dimness of evening and the drama of the second sky erased my memory of the encounter with Jai. I arrived back at my flat to tea and heaters. By the time I came out of the shower, a mild dusk had submitted to the curfew of a smoky night.
‘I ate dinner from a trolley in front of the television. The servants had gone to bed and I was checking my mail when Jai’s name flashed on my phone. His beauty had faded from my mind; the night seemed deep and inaccessible; I answered the phone reluctantly.
‘ “Krishna?” the voice said.
‘ “Sorry?”
‘ “Is that Krishna speaking?”
‘ “Oh yes, yes.”
‘ “Should we meet? Where do you live? I can come to you.”
‘ “No,” I said, asserting myself against the forcefulness of the voice on the other end. “We can’t meet here.”
‘ “Why?”
‘ “Because the servants are here.”
‘ “So? You can’t have guests in front of your servants?”
‘I realized the offence I caused. It was true: Jai was too much like a servant himself for me to have him over at the house as a guest. I felt my Hindi fail me.
‘ “My mother’s here too. It’s better we meet outside.”
‘ “Where?”
‘ “Can you come to the beginning of Tughlak Lane?”
‘ “You know I’ll have to come by rickshaw. It’s quite expensive and far.”
‘ “I’ll help.”
‘ “What?”
‘ “I’ll help you with the fare.”
‘A silence followed. “OK,” the voice said at last. “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”
‘Jai’s desire to come to the house unnerved me. I removed my Breitling before leaving the house. I was aware as I entered the night of a pretence on my part: that this was like assignations I had known before, in other places.
‘The depth of the night alarmed me. The haze compressed the yellow street light into tight orbs. The faces of the figures around the chai shop were wrapped up completely in their scarves, leaving only a little space for their eyes. They gathered around a shallow dish in which they’d started a fire. A bulb in the shop illuminated the grime in its windows. I could make out the owner’s vast silhouette, over a blue flame and an eternally boiling kettle. Walking past the shop and its damp washing area, crowded with gas cylinders, crates and a young boy cleaning dishes in a metal sink, I felt I was leaving some final outpost. Though Tughlak Lane was hardly a hundred yards away, the short stretch of road ahead was deserted and badly lit. Occasionally, I passed other figures, all invisible men in their woollens; scrawny bitches, with udders flapping, crept along the edges of the road, scalloped with yellow pools of light.
‘Between my street and Tughlak Lane, a single fluorescent lamp flickered in the darkness, interrupting the stretch of yellow lights. I waited under it for Jai’s arrival. For the first time since I had arranged the assignation, I felt a pang of excitement twist in me, harden and settle among nerves and uncertainty.
‘A few minutes later, the headlight of a rickshaw charted its way through the darkness like a submarine. Jai leaned out of it, alert and ready. As soon as he saw me, he swung out of the rickshaw and ran next to it for a few paces. His ease, his obvious street smartness, were intimidating. He seemed to take charge, and when I put my hand in my pocket, he signalled to me not to and paid the rickshaw himself.
‘ “He’d have given you a different rate,” he said disparagingly as the rickshaw drove off. “So where do you live?”
‘ “Just around here.”
‘ “Where?”
‘ “Will you stop asking so many questions?”
‘Jai smiled. His manner seemed to change. “Come on, then. Let’s go for a walk; it’s a beautiful night.”
‘I had been on the verge of calling the whole thing off, but now felt a little calmer. I chose Tughlak Lane for its nearness to me, but also its beauty. The low, full boughs of the trees lining the lane formed a tunnel and the street lights buried in their canopies burnished parts of the tree with a metallic lustre. It seemed almost to plate the leaves, giving them a solidity they lacked in the daytime. Even the disease, covering the leaves of all the trees on Tughlak Lane with white blotches, now at night seemed part of the light’s alchemic imagination. The Lutyens bungalows of Tughlak Lane were home to politicians, including the heir of the country’s political first family, and the road we walked down was bounded by green sentry boxes, sandbags and high barbed-wire fences. Over the bungalows’ low red walls were ochre houses with arched verandas and large lawns.
‘Jai was impressed.
‘ “This is a VIP area,” he said quietly.
‘ “Yes.”
‘ “Are your family VIPs?”
‘ “No.”
‘ “What does your father do?”
‘My irritation returned, but this time Jai caught it. “Leave it,” he said. “I don’t want to know. I’ll just say one thing. Today, when I met you, I felt I’d made a friend who could help me. You know I’m not a rich man or even middle class, but I have this desire to succeed that prevents me from sleeping. And I know that if I was given just a little assistance, that small lifting hand, I would make it.”
‘ “What do you do?” I asked, annoyed at the mistake I felt I’d made. Only in India could you pick someone up and end up with a gulf this wide between their intentions and yours.
‘Jai said he worked as a chowkidar; that his family in Nepal were high caste and had not always been poor; his mother lived alone in Sectorpur; he wanted to improve her life. I felt I’d heard all this before. I was wretched about my unreciprocated desire for Jai, which had grown with expectation. I noticed his dark smooth skin in the yellow light and experienced an angry sense of entitlement.
‘We passed a house where a wedding was taking place. The blackish-orange heads of mushroom heaters, halogen floodlights and colourful satin cloth that skirted the tent’s white roof were visible from the street. Indian bagpipers in kilts played over the din of voices and laughter. In the dark foliage on the edge of the party, fairy-lit in places, chauffeurs and uniformed banquet staff lurked among steel cauldrons and the light from naked bulbs. Jai wanted to go in. He guessed correctly that I knew whose party it was.
‘We had come to a crossroads on Tughlak Lane. Ahead was a busy main road; on either side, dark service lanes; and behind us, the tunnel of twisted, gold-plated leaves. I looked up and noticed sharp, razor-edged barbed wire coiled around the bent necks of Tughlak Lane’s street lights.
‘I slipped my hand over Jai’s shoulders and led him into a dark service lane on the left. We entered those little streets of Lutyens’s Delhi, devoted entirely to servants’ quarters and dhobis. In the now much thicker darkness, I ran my hand over Jai’s chest and stomach, feeling its slim firmness through the cheap, synthetic fabric of his shirt. Jai, who had spoken without stopping about his aspirations, said, “You know, when I came here tonight, I thought I would be spending the whole night with you.”
‘ “I know, but we can’t go to my house.”
‘ “Why?”
‘ “Because of the servants…”
‘ “But…”
‘ “Because you’re like a servant too,” I snapped.’
Many different things – my familiarity with Tughlak Lane; the need for respite from the story and its creative-writing theme; the blunt violent line bursting from the author’s dead lips; the memory of Delhi in the winter – came together to make me look up and around the room, like someone surfacing for air. The others were captivated. The older woman’s braceleted wrist was rooted firmly on the author’s shoulder; another tall, young man, also in rubber chappals, took notes; Sanyogita listened wide-eyed; only Ra noticed the disturbance near the door of the lamp-lit room, and by following his eyes mine came to Aakash in a red Puma T-shirt, leaning against his tricep in the doorway.
‘Ash-man,’ I breathed.
‘Yes, man,’ he replied, relishing my surprise, then puckering up his blackish-pink lips as if about to blow bubbles, mouthed, ‘Lul. Lul. Lul.’
I lowered my head, laughing silently, but Sanyogita saw me.
‘Baby!’ she hissed.
I pointed to Aakash. She looked up, smiled and gestured to him to come over. He hesitated, then made his way swiftly through the crowded room. A few silver-haired women watched him keenly; the men looked gloomy and irritated. The creative writer stopped his story, perhaps from wonderment at Aakash’s appearance so far from Junglee. As soon as he had sat down at our feet, the writer began again.
‘Jai didn’t mind. “I want you to know,” he said, “that any time, I mean any time, night or day, you can call me and I’ll come. If you have friends, whatever. See, the thing is, living in Delhi, I’ve developed a taste for money and I’m willing to do anything for it.”
‘ “Do you want money now?”
‘ “Man, what are you saying? You’re my friend.”
‘On our right, a village of washing lines appeared. The white clothes that hung limply from bamboo poles in the cold night had a morbid, ghostly aspect. Further on, a park with a thin grass cover and a sandy surface was coated in dew. Suddenly a pack of dogs leapt at the gate of the park, growling, barking, showing teeth and gums. I jumped back. But Jai, as assured as he had been with the rickshaw, raced forward, picking up a stone on the way. When the dogs didn’t run from him, he flung the stone with a fast side throw and hit one of the dogs on the cheek. I heard the impact of the stone against skin and bone and the easy cruelty of it chilled me. The dog howled at so shrill a note that the others melted into the darkness of the park.
‘Just ahead, there was a servants’ colony. In the open doors and windows televisions flashed. A girl in a red sweater combed lice out of the hair of another girl and the smell of winter clothes in need of airing arose. The walls of the servants’ colony were mildewed and blackish-green in places; some windows were bricked up; and in one the powerful, pythonic roots of a peepal tree slid into, and cracked, the front drain and wall.
‘I pulled Jai back into the darkness.
‘ “How much?” I asked.
‘ “For what?” Jai said.
‘I squirmed. I longed to be able to speak to him in English. I had no language in Hindi for what I wanted to say. At last, I said for a kiss, but it sounded absurd.
‘ “What a guy you are, you want to pay me for a kiss!”
‘I leaned forward and kissed him. His lips didn’t move; I tasted chewing tobacco on them.
‘ “Come on now,” Jai said, “what do you really want to do?”
‘ “I want to suck your dick.” ’
At that moment Aakash looked up at me, his eyebrows dancing with amusement. I had hoped he wasn’t following the story.
The creative writer’s tone became urgent: ‘Jai pulled me further into the darkness. We were near the washing village. He took me behind a grey electricity box; it had a rusting base, and a thick black wire, partly buried in the earth, spiralled out of it.
‘ “Then suck,” he said.
‘I was struck by his freedom; and opening Jai’s flared jeans and pulling down his baggy villager’s underwear, I felt I was dealing with a man who could always satisfy his appetites. And this was what had made me feel the limitations of being a Western-educated homosexual: in the love I had learned, there was a grammar, a language, living rules of conduct, all useless now.
‘Jai’s arousal grew; he undid my trousers and reached for my penis.
‘ “How come your dick is so much bigger than mine?” he said, holding it up from the base with his palm. “You must give your girlfriend a really good time. Does she suck you?”
‘ “Yes,” I lied.
‘ “Where is she?”
‘ “At home.”
‘ “Why? Doesn’t she take care of you?”
‘ “Her parents don’t allow her out late at night.”
‘ “Where does she live?”
‘ “Greater Kailash.”
‘Though I lied, I felt it was somehow necessary, part of a social pretence. Jai, now obviously aroused, suddenly grabbed me and pressed himself against me, rubbing and shaking in a comic way. His movements became instinctive. With the same ease, the assuredness that had intimidated me, he turned me around and wanted to enter me.
‘ “No!” I said. “Are you crazy? Don’t you think about protection or anything?”
‘He misunderstood. “Fine, you come inside me, but then you’ll have to give me something.”
‘ “What?”
‘ “Just a little money, whatever you have.”
‘ “This is not about money.”
‘ “OK then, let me just seat my dick on you,” he said, choosing a formal word used in relation to kings and thrones.
‘I had never considered how important the vocabulary surrounding a sexual act was. I submitted to the new word, as if working under a new law. It was only when Jai’s arousal grew further and he tried again to enter me that I fought him off.
‘ “Bas,” Jai said, “I’m about to drop.” I was also close to climax when Jai with some panic in his voice, said, “Don’t drop any on me.”
‘It was then that I caught a glimpse of his Brahmin’s thread, dangling from his shirt and vest. It tickled me to see this small notion of sexual cleanliness come out of him so late into everything. Somehow this unexplained barrier – a caste horror perhaps – had survived. Now, for the first time, I felt as though I had some power over this man who had flaunted his freedoms, whose strong sweat and polyester odour filled my nostrils and made me feel wretched. Close to climax, I slipped my right hand behind Jai’s smooth Nepalese neck, pressing it lightly, and with my left, in a single wrenching motion, sprinkled watery drops of semen over the shaft and uncircumcised head of Jai’s penis.
‘He recoiled with disgust and began furiously wiping his penis. I squeezed out the last few drops on to his small closed fist and the dusty edge of the road.
‘Then putting a hundred rupees in his shirt pocket, I began walking away. I wasn’t envious of him now, but worried he might follow me to my house. I felt him grab my wrist and turn it over.
‘ “You don’t wear a watch?”
‘ “No.”
‘He smiled bitterly. “A hundred rupees is very little.”
‘ “Enough for a rickshaw,” I replied, and turned away.
‘After a pause, and once the protections of haze and street light had settled between us again, I heard yelled down Tughlak Lane the words: “OK, Krishna. Remember, call any time you like. Jai is there.” ’
The creative writer folded away the story’s pages and rested his large veiny hands, with their fleshy, nail-bitten tips, on his kneecaps. There was no applause, but the room soon filled with praising remarks. ‘Bold theme’, ‘exploitative values’, ‘neo-colonial alienation’, ‘Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code’ were bandied about. Aakash listened with fascination; I read the gold letters on the back of his red T-shirt. They were the destination points of a Grand Prix: Sakhir, Hockenheim, Silverstone, Interlagos. A few minutes later, the creative writers disbanded for the summer. The Brazilian music picked up, dinner was laid out on the dining table – hummus, kibbeh, pomegranate salad – and vodka tonics in clear glasses sweated in dark hands.
Aakash drank purposefully, filling his glass two or three times. Whenever he’d catch my eye, he’d open his mouth wide and pour the remains of his drink down his throat. Sanyogita, drinking cold lethal vodkas straight, had slipped her arm into his and was taking him round the room, introducing him to Emigrés at Home. She could always include people, especially if she sensed they were important to me. The creative writers, especially the greying women, delighted in the attention Aakash paid them.
I heard one coo, ‘No, now what is left for me? I’m no spring chicken. How can I get in shape so late in the day?’
‘No! Whaddyou saying, ma’am? You’re still a very young, beaudiful woman. Aakash is there, no?’ I heard in reply.
Then Sanyogita: ‘Come on, you big flirt. Stop charming the chappals off these old women.’
I was scanning the room for the author of ‘The Assignation’ when I heard whispered in my ear, ‘Help, I’m Jai!’
I swung around and saw Ra.
‘Hello, darling. So good of you to grace our creative writers’ circle with your presence. So tell me, no? What’s happening?’
‘Not much. We’re off tomorrow.’
‘He’s quite the little dish, your trainer?’
‘Ash-man?’
‘Hash-man. What did you think of the story?’
‘You know, I know him a little, the author. He comes to Junglee as well.’
‘Really? Poor Kris. Always so down in the dumps.’
‘Why?’
‘Tch, you know, these Hindi-speaking gay types have a very tough time, hiding from the parents, sneaking off with chowkidars, the self-loathing – it’s all too squalid.’
‘He can’t be all that Hindi-speaking if he lives in Lutyens’s Delhi and went abroad for university.’
‘First generation. And he doesn’t live in Lutyens’s Delhi, he lives in Sectorpur.’
‘I thought you didn’t know where Sectorpur was.’
‘I do now. In the kingdom of the divine Chamunda! He just writes about Lutyens’s Delhi; it’s his creative milieu. His father owns Jorbagh Taxis, you know?’
‘How do you know so much about him?’
‘It’s not what you think; we’re like two sisters.’
‘Like three sisters,’ Mandira said, hovering up with a Scotch and soda. ‘Hi, Aatish, nice to see you out. Sanyogita tells me you’ve been being very pricey.’
‘No, just work, Mandira,’ I said, feeling a sudden dread at the mention of the word. ‘It’s not really coming.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But come out and have some fun, yaar. You’ll feel much better. How can you write anything if you stay cooped up in your flat the whole time?’
There was a lull. Ra looked nervously around the room, as if feeling the burden of keeping the conversation alive. Then his eyes glittered and he beckoned us closer.
‘Got some goss?’ Mandira giggled, taking a step forward.
Ra nodded his head vigorously. Then grabbing my head and Mandira’s as if about to bang them together, he wetly whispered, ‘Jai’s not just any chowkidar; he’s his chowkidar!’ And letting go our heads, he shrieked with laughter.
His laughter coincided with a disturbance at the far end of the room. The double doors overlooking the park and mango tree flew open. A wall of wind and spray blew through the flat.
The creative writers gasped in one voice, ‘Rain, unseasonal rain!’
The months before the monsoon were months of anticipation. The flowering trees, the glare, the blackness of shadows each played their part. The heat was to be endured and complained about, its dryness marvelled at; it was not meant to break like this, at the hands of a mutinous dust storm.
The older people, as if distancing themselves from an impropriety, said their goodbyes and began to leave. But for the young, rain was rain; what matter when it came. Sanyogita hitched up her long skirt and ran on to the little balcony. Of the four or five people who remained, only Aakash looked grimly on the scene, muttering, ‘Not good, not good for the fields.’
But Sanyogita was in a spontaneous mood. She was often so guarded in her show of feelings that sometimes the need for release, working together with the effects of alcohol, would make her boisterous, impulsive, unaware of her own strength. She now wanted all her remaining guests to come downstairs and run with her in the rain. There was something inauspicious about the idea. It was a monsoon activity, a childhood activity; if resurrected, it needed its time; it couldn’t be forced. But that night everyone felt the desire to please. After some token resistance the five of us, Sanyogita, Mandira, Ra, Aakash and I, ran down the darkened marble stairs into the rain.
It was warm rain, acidic and dusty. The earth was not parched enough to release the smells of the monsoon, the trees not thirsty enough to thrash about, blind worms not inconvenienced enough to appear from their holes on to Jorbagh’s wet streets, shimmering with street light. And yet we ran through them alone, jumping in puddles and singing film songs. We ran past the flower shop, the pan wallah, the arboured street holding the Chocolate Wheel, until we came to the gates of Jorbagh. Beyond was the main road and the border of Lutyens’s Delhi. A drenched guard in a canvas trench coat let us through before retreating to his green sentry box. The main road was empty but for the odd car hurtling home. We crossed it and walked along the periphery of Lodhi Gardens, its interior alive with white light and dark wet foliage.
Mandira and Aakash ran ahead. A sudden closeness formed between them, but Aakash seemed only to use it as a counterpoint to Sanyogita and me. He kept looking back, and if he saw Sanyogita with her hands draped about me, kissing me in the rain, he would find some way to hijack my attention. He was like a possessive best friend from the early years of puberty. His red T-shirt was soaked, and raindrops, each swollen with light, hung from his sharp features and bristly hair. Mandira was much more taken with him than he was with her, and with her hand curled about his face, kept yelling, ‘So good to be promiscuous again,’ into the night. Sanyogita, who had known her through her days of sexual promiscuity and only seen her find some stability after marriage, looked nervously at her regression. Ra, straggling behind, yelled, ‘Shut up, you drunk bitch. Or I’ll tell your husband.’ His white designer shirt was soaked and his small hairy stomach showed through.
It was Aakash who first saw the mouth of Amrita Shergill Marg. It gave him an excuse to run back, take me from Sanyogita, and resting his heavy arm on my shoulders, pull me ahead to see what he’d seen. ‘I want you to be with me when you first see this,’ he said overexcitedly, pinching my face. ‘I love you, man. I’m having so much fun.’ His drunkenness, his intensity, his affection, all coming after the distance of the past few weeks, were overpowering. In withdrawing, he’d made me aware daily of his absence, and now filling the empty space he’d created, he filled it completely.
When we were just near the corner of the street, he pressed the palm of his hand over my eyes, and standing close behind me, marched me up the pavement. I felt us step down into the street, walk forward a few paces so that we would have been close to the middle. Then I was swivelled around and made to stand visionless, facing down the length of the street. Aakash held me there, and using my left arm, raised himself on to his tiptoes and asked in my ear if I was ready. Then he tore away his hand to reveal a tunnel of laburnum, its many millions of blossoms bleached in rain and street light. Under each little tree, distorting my sense of space, were spheres of petals, dropping like petticoats down the length of the crescent-shaped street. It was as if Aakash had broken open the trunk of an old tree to show me a sanctuary of moss and cool. ‘I love you,’ he said again, with that same desperation with which he’d once asked me to drink with him. ‘I’m going to miss you, man.’ I couldn’t understand his urgency, but somehow it brought to this ordinary evening, but for the rain, an aspect of finality.
When the others caught up with us Aakash looked at me with such feeling that Mandira and Ra began teasing him. ‘And I thought you were in love with me, you bloody cheat. Here I am ditching my poor husband for you!’ Aakash was unaffected by their teasing; in fact, he was more fearless in showing his affection than before. But Sanyogita didn’t joke or laugh; she’d seen something, perhaps not so much in his eyes as in mine. She came close to me and whispered, ‘Baby…’ in the softest voice. Aakash’s eyes ran cold at the sight of her. He pulled me aside. I excused myself despite my embarrassment.
‘What is it, man?’ I asked when we were out of earshot of the others.
‘Are we going to take them both or what?’ Aakash said with fresh zeal.
I laughed out loud, then saw he was serious. ‘Aakash, one of “them” is my girlfriend!’
‘So what, man? I’m not saying -’
‘No, Aakash. I know what you’re saying and we’re not doing it.’
I walked back to the others, leaving Aakash with some words still on his lips. He looked incredulous, then his face showed a hurt, dazed expression.
Ra pranced up to him. ‘Come on, lover boy, stop being such a kebab me haddi.’
Aakash looked down at him, and his face clearing, he put one hand on Ra’s stomach and said, ‘I’m going to make you fit, man.’ They began to walk up the street. Aakash spoke to Ra with the same energy and interest with which he had spoken to me. Ra shed his cynicism and was slowly seduced. His eyes turned from playful and flirtatious to hungry; I heard him invite Aakash to a party while we were away. He kept prodding his chest and stomach with a single finger, and saying, ‘Hash-man, oh gawd, how disgusting, all veins and muscles.’ They spoke about Delhi being quiet and peaceful in the summer and how it was possible to do things one didn’t ordinarily do, like have breakfast in the old city. I heard all this and was jealous, miserably jealous. I knew now that Aakash wanted me to feel that way.
The rain, not being genuine monsoon rain, was sucked up by the atmosphere. An uneasy peace held between dry and humid heat, and the air, with its varying temperature, felt like a lake in spring. The drains clogged, and puddles heavy with dust and petals formed on the sides of the street. The double line of laburnums, prematurely stripped of their petals, the remainder discoloured, were like a regiment that had suffered a terrible defeat.
Ra’s chauffeur-driven car, which had followed us, making our run in the rain seem even more of a pretence, now nosed its way down Amrita Shergill Marg. Mandira who had grown tired of Aakash’s neglect jumped in.
‘Ra, come on, no? Drop me home. Back to hubbie.’
He seemed reluctant to leave, offering to drop us all back.
‘No, don’t worry about it,’ Sanyogita said. ‘I want to walk back.’
I would have liked the ride home, but something in Sanyogita’s mood made me feel it was better to stay. Aakash looked between the car and us, then specifically at me.
Sanyogita, with strange bloody-mindedness, intervened. ‘Stay, Aakash. It’ll be so nice. We’ll walk back together.’
Aakash, not to be outdone in this perverse show of strength, agreed. The car drove away, leaving us alone on Amrita Shergill Marg.
Having been a different man to each of us that night, Aakash now became in those final moments a friend of the relationship. He walked between us, in his soaked red shirt, his heavy arms sprawling over both our shoulders. His smell, deodorant thinly holding back a damp stench from his armpits, lingered, now rising up when he rested his head on Sanyogita’s shoulder, now meeting me as he leaned in to kiss my neck and tell me how much he loved both of us.
For those moments, he seemed to believe that even Sanyogita’s and my relationship was only possible because of him. He spoke of trips we would take together in the hills; he said he would make every effort to come and see us in Europe in the summer, but wasn’t sure he’d be able to get away this year. I knew he didn’t have a passport, but he spoke as if he travelled all the time. He insinuated himself into our lives and we didn’t stop him because it seemed harmless. But all the time, a mistaken idea of his importance was forming in his mind. When he slipped away a few moments later to take a pee, he went with the knowledge that the world turned on his axis. He peed brazenly, standing on the pavement, facing the street. Looking to see where he’d gone, we caught sight of him under a lamp post. He laughed joyfully, leaning back on his heels and pushing his black uncircumcised penis forward into the light. A smooth yellow sheen struck it and from its wrinkled nozzle, urine spirals fell to a puddle of spinning petals. His blackish-pink lips whistled the shrill tune of a film song.
His contentment was so deep and his exhibitionism so self-assured that the expression of fatigue it brought to Sanyogita’s face would have come as a shock. And before I turned away, before he masked it with playful rowdiness, I saw in his eyes the rage of an Indian man insulted by a woman. His next action came so suddenly that later I thought I had seen it before it happened, the way one feels one might have saved a falling glass. I had barely looked forward again when I felt solid muscle smash against the back of my neck and a hand wrench my shoulder down. The street zoomed up in front of me as I was pulled to the floor, managing to squat just before I fell; Sanyogita crumpled.
The moment I saw her strong body thrown on to the tarmac, my mind flashed to the image of the skiing accident that had broken her thigh and given her the caterpillar scar. As she lifted herself from the street, I saw her pricked palms and a four-inch graze on her elbow. The long, colourful Rajasthani dress, with its mirrors and tinsel, was torn at the knees. Seeing her childlike face, mystified at the injury done to her, and Aakash retreating in horror, I did something for which Sanyogita never forgave me. Instead of attending to her, I jumped up and yelled at Aakash, telling him to apologize and help her up. I did it because I thought that if in that instant he begged her forgiveness, it might come; later it would be harder, much harder. But seeing her wounds and her eyes now full of tears, he hesitated; and in those seconds of hesitation, there was no one to help her up. By the time I gave up on him, it was too late. Sanyogita’s pain had turned to anger. She slapped my hand away as I tried to help her up. Then she stood rooted in one place, the hem of her skirt hanging into the street, the crook of her arm exposed and softly bent where hurt. She stood perfectly still, breathing heavily, staring at me through her glistening eyes, wanting me to see what Aakash had done to her. Her head was cocked to one side and her long wavy hair glued in places to her face. She wiped it away furiously, looking still harder at me. There was an expression almost of curiosity in her eyes; it was as if she was trying to understand how I could have betrayed her. Then pushing me back, she turned around and ran. Despite her injuries and her flimsy slippers, she ran fast in the direction of Jorbagh. In seconds, she was swallowed up by the darkness and the steam now rising from the street. Aakash had gone too.
I left Delhi on a Virgin flight. The airport was in a state of great confusion. It had always had a makeshift quality: passages with tinted windows in peeling frames, grey stone floors coated in a fine layer of dust, idle men in olive-green uniforms. But now a private company, promising an airport of the future, had begun a renovation that left it barely standing. Cement and water dripped through the slats of a dented, white metal ceiling; a brown water stain crept across a wall hanging of a plump horseman; coloured wires grew out of their sockets. The warm, sweet Indian air infused here with government office damp, there with urine, now also smelt of chemicals.
On the flight, blonde air hostesses with jarring accents went past in red suits. Sanyogita sat next to me in a maroon velvet and white lace skirt. It hid the scabs that were forming on her knees. The grazes on her elbows were raw and visible. She made no display of them as she went about the small tasks of settling down for a long flight. She took down her magazines, rummaged in her handbag for lip balm, then reopened the overhead compartment and brought out an old toosh. Wrapping herself in it, she curled into her seat and slipped her long arms into mine. She had spent a miserable night, but she wasn’t angry any more.
I had returned to see her bathed and in her nightdress. Vatsala had woken up and was tending to her, cleaning her wounds with Dettol, making her tea. Sanyogita was quiet, and even smiled when she saw me, but Vatsala looked fearfully up at me, like a dog who had just been beaten. Whenever I looked back at her, she’d hurriedly lower her head. But as soon as I turned away, I felt her eyes follow me. She packed Sanyogita’s bag while I lay on the bed, making a point of taking down all her best suitcases, jewellery and shawls. She gave a short family history of each article, as if reminding me that Sanyogita was not alone, not without people. Just as we were about to go to bed, she tumbled in with her bedding, wanting to spend the night on the floor next to Sanyogita.
‘Vatsala,’ Sanyogita said, laughing, ‘it wasn’t him.’
‘Bebi,’ she said aghast, ‘then who?’
‘Just someone. But don’t worry about it. You don’t have to sleep here.’
Vatsala folded up her bed, smiled apologetically and crept away.
That night I received a number of text messages. At two a.m. in three instalments: ‘What I’ve done tonight can never be forgiven or forgotten. I think of you as my brother. I’ve had an amazing time with you in these past few months. I wanted us to be friends for life, but destiny had other plans. Please from now on, don’t call me, don’t text for a long, long time. I can’t be your trainer, but I will organize someone for you when you come back. I hope one day Sanyogita will find it in her heart to forgive me for what I have done. She will always be my bhabi. Ash-man.’ I replied, ‘Don’t be so filmy, just send her some flowers in the morning.’ At three a.m.: ‘Man, not giving film lines. If she forgives me, I’m happiest man in the world. What are her favourite flowers?’ ‘Lilies,’ I replied. At five a.m.: ‘My dear Megha, tonight I have lost my best friend in the world. Now, you are all that I have in the world. Your boyf, Aakash.’ ‘Huh?’ I replied. ‘Who’s Megha?’ No reply.
And it was like this that I discovered what, if my mind had been clearer in those last days in Delhi, I would have seen anyway: Aakash had found a girl. The next morning, just as we were leaving, the chowkidar brought up a little cane basket containing a great deal of fern and foliage, six pink gladioli and a note of apology in neat, rounded writing.
Months went by though I don’t know how.
The first two were spent in a village in the south of Spain. Sanyogita knew an English family who owned a hotel in the hills above Seville. They were of red earth, covered in orange, cork and olive trees. In the evenings, the long light and the silvery olive trees made the hills appear purple. The sky was cast in one pattern before evening fell. Then no matter how strong the wind in the hills became, it could never put the arrangement of clouds and clear sky out of true. Against the filters of this hung sky, the light distilled into darkness. From the semicircular window of the one-bedroom annexe we rented for 750 euros a month, we could see the white village of Cazalla. The red-tiled roofs on some of its houses were flat, smooth and new; and on others, rounded, mildewed, with browning stalks growing out of them. On all the bell towers and spires, great stork’s nests had appeared. The chattering from them at night, mixed with the croaking of frogs in a field below, and that most Mediterranean of Mediterranean noises, the whirr of a Vespa, kept me awake for hours.
It seemed at first that we had salvaged our relationship. The quality of life and produce in the village was deceptive. It briefly made the small, borrowed idea of our stay in a European village ring true. In the mornings, we’d have breakfast in a shaded bar with high stools. A stern, leather-faced man brought us long pieces of bread with tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, salt and fresh orange juice. We posed as regulars, watching two inches of black coffee drip into clear glasses. The bartender assembled a saucer, a spoon and a large sachet of sugar as the milk heated. His self-assuredness stood out against our pretence; to him it was just another morning, café con leche just coffee with milk. And when the milk had heated, the saucers slid across the bar with a brief clatter. At lunch, in another place with tiles and a high wooden bar, there was fresh fish, salad and giant tomatoes with flakes of salt; all things that we hadn’t tasted during the summer in India. They created the illusion of happiness, of the good life.
But it was also these things, and the settled world they spoke of, that made India recede. For as long as sensual pleasures lasted, it didn’t matter. But when those satisfactions ran out, I realized I had no way into this kind of life. There was no context for Indians in Spain as there was for the English or Americans. The falsity of my situation overwhelmed me. Sometimes, late in the afternoon, I would look out of the semicircular window in disbelief at the cobbled streets and red-tiled roofs. The heat in the village dwarfed the heat of the subcontinent and this also added to my sense of futility. The streets were empty all day but for the occasional figure of an old veiled woman in black. The image might have been emblematic of the little village, perfect down to the late-afternoon blaze on the white houses and the bronze-faced lion spitting spring water into a mossy basin, but I wouldn’t have known; I was on the outside, with too little knowledge, knowledge I took for granted in India, to enter that picture of village life.
I joined the village gym. It was a single room, with modern frosted-glass windows embedded in an old façade. A beefy, middle-aged man who taught spin cycling classes to the women in the village charged me thirty euros for the month. One half of the gym was taken up by old weights machines; the other by the spinners, spinning on through a haze of coloured disco lights and techno music. Teenage Spanish boys, with bad skin and short-sleeved T-shirts, worked out around me, eyeing me with suspicion. A metal wall fan circulated the warm, stale air in the room.
It was after one of these sessions, almost six weeks into my time in the village, that my mobile, now carrying Movistar, beeped with a voice message. I stepped out of the gym. It was seven p.m., but the blaze had not subsided. It was late at night in India; I could hear the beeping of scooters and the tinkle of bicycle bells in the background. ‘How’s you doing, man?’ the voice began in English. ‘I hopes you feeling good, man.’ Then in Hindi, ‘Yaar, I miss you a lot. What’s this going and leaving your friend? Please, man, come back soon. There’s so much fun still to be had. OK, well, call when you get a chance. Your friend, Ash-man. Oh, and please say my sorry one more time to Sanyogita bhabi.’
Walking back through these empty cobbled streets, with their narrow pavements and leather-faced men staring vacantly at me, I knew I had to leave. I just didn’t know how I would tell Sanyogita. Money had become a problem as well. In India my mother had helped me with a small allowance and the few thousand I had left in sterling from my job in London had gone far. The village was cheap, but many times more expensive than India. Every meal was out; Sanyogita always ordered fish; we must have been spending fifty euros a day at an increasingly unfavourable exchange rate. The only hopeful news was that the revised version of my novel was complete. It was not an inspired revision, but I’d had detailed notes and had followed them closely. The manuscript was already with the agent in New York and I was awaiting a reply.
That night at the village casino, which was really just a restaurant with red velvet curtains, deep leather chairs and tiled walls, I tried telling Sanyogita that I needed to go home. But I framed my reasons around my confusion at being in a little village in Spain. Sanyogita seemed receptive. She listened quietly, sipping a small glass of sherry and occasionally wrapping a finger around a piece of acorn-fed ham. When I’d finished, she responded with a sweeping gesture which left me, like with the study, reaching in desperation for adequate feelings.
‘Baby, listen, I’ve been thinking the same thing,’ she said, ‘and since this was all my idea in the first place, I feel I should do the cleaning up on my own. I wasn’t going to tell you this till later in the month, it was going to be a surprise, but since you’ve brought it up, I’ll tell you now. I have this friend, Nargis, who’s a publisher in the East Village. She’s like a big Buddhist and a Free Tibet person. And basically, she’s decided to extend the privileges of her citizenship, especially since America has done so little for Tibet, by marrying a Tibetan in Delhi so that he can escape the tyranny of the Chinese and come and live in the States.’
I felt the frost round my glass of Cruzcampo start to melt.
‘But if he’s living in Delhi, hasn’t he already escaped the tyranny of the Chinese?’ I asked, feigning concern.
‘Yes, yes, all right,’ Sanyogita said, laughing, ‘but Nargis doesn’t know that. She’s a big-hearted person, you know, a real do-gooder, so maybe she hasn’t thought of that part. It all seems the same from America, anyway. But that’s not the point.’
‘What is the point?’
‘That I’ve done a flat swap with her! She needed a place to stay in Delhi and so I’ve lent her Jorbagh for two months. In place of which, we have the most adorable little flat in the East Village with a cat called Kuku. You can work, I can do my thing. We’ll have breakfast at the Clinton Street Bakery, we’ll watch films, it’ll be so nice.’
It wasn’t that I didn’t have a flat in Delhi where I could return to; I had my mother’s. It wasn’t that Sanyogita, in feeling she had to clean up this summer mess, had already bought our tickets to New York; I would gladly have reimbursed her, thinking of the money I would save by not having to live in New York for two months; it was that I knew Sanyogita, and I knew the place from where the gesture had come. This was no entrapment; it was a heartfelt and hopeful gesture, from the depths of Sanyogita’s fairy-tale imagination, dreaming always of escape.
And so, despite great misgivings, I gave in.
After a summer of boredom and waiting, I left New York under these circumstances.
I had heard nothing from the agent. For two months, I waited, viewing every ending week with sinking hopes and every new one with fresh, but misplaced, anticipation. I checked my emails constantly, and if I was away from the computer for too long, I felt an ache at the thought of what news the little blue orb in my inbox might have brought. I tried to live my agent’s life, thinking of when she would come into work, when she might be having lunch with a publisher, when – shaking off the effects of a bottle of red wine – she would write to me to tell me of what he had said. I thought of how she would have half-days on Fridays in the summer, and of where and for how long she would go on holiday. I thought obsessively of these things even as my agent sat in an office barely a few miles away. But I couldn’t bring myself to contact her first. I felt certain that this action would turn good news to bad. I played games with myself. Every changing light – would I make it across the street while the little man was still white? – every arriving train – would the next train be an express train uptown? – every Sunday book review – would it contain any indication of what was popular these days? Indian writing still in? – became heavy with significance. I started to believe that the world around me, the minutiae of life in a big city, contained signs of whether I was to be a writer or not. If this feeling had come from a genuine wish to be a writer, it might have had a foundation in hard work and reading that would have given me solace. But it was an empty wish; it was like my novel, a wish for a lifeline.
One hot afternoon, when Sanyogita had gone to see an aunt in Long Island, leaving me to take care of Kuku, I stepped out to have an iced coffee. I felt in my pocket for the keys and let the door slam behind me. But even before its metal teeth had closed around the powerful cylindrical bolt, I knew that what I had thought were my keys was in fact loose change. I stood in an airless corridor, permanently lit by a yellowing fluorescent light, staring with aimless intensity at a floor of many tiny hexagons. I didn’t have a phone; I had only enough money for an iced coffee. I didn’t want to leave the building, as that would lock me out of the building as well as the flat. I could hear Kuku mewing, no doubt rubbing his scrawny body along the door, reminding me that I had to feed him. I felt an irrational hatred towards the cat for not being able to help me.
It was then that I had what I can only describe as a swarming of nerves. Already close to some kind of lip, they cascaded over. My body turned cold with sweat, I felt some kind of essential life-giving liquid drain from me and I had the desire to curl up on the floor by the door, with the strange belief that if I kept my face close to the centimetre gap of cold air between the door and the floor, I would be able to restart the flow of oxygen into my body. The city beyond terrified me. When I thought of it, I could think only of the crowds and commotion around Times Square. And it was like this, hardly able to walk, that I made my way down three flights of stairs, banging on every door in the hope that someone would be able to help me cope with the blackness rising around me.
On the ground floor, a girl in a summery dress opened the door. She had a garden flat, with an open window and a large white fan. I broke into the tranquillity of her room and collapsed on a purple futon, trying slowly to explain my situation. She listened, nodded, emitting a few comforting ‘uh-huhs’, then picked up a red telephone and called a locksmith. After a rapid conversation, she said he would be there in eight minutes.
The man who arrived was a Romanian, slim, blond, in a vest. He had been at a nearby café drinking an iced coffee, he said. He looked at the lock with dismay. He said that this was not the kind of lock his tools could open; he would have to drill it. Two hundred dollars. I had no choice. It was Friday and Sanyogita was not back until Monday. He took his drill to the brass lock and bore into a single point just above the keyhole. It was as violent a thing as I had ever seen; I could hear, as brass flakes flew, the lock’s interlocking components break one by one. Then he took a wrench to the lock, and after many failed attempts pulled its little brass face from its place in the door, leaving an empty hole. But the door didn’t open.
‘It has a double-lock,’ he said, ‘but you didn’t tell me.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘We’ll have to drill that one too. It’ll be expensive. It’s a good lock. Yeah, yeah. Another two hundred at least.’
He bore into the second lock now. The brass flakes flew and the lock’s components broke one by one; it was wrenched from its place in the door; a second empty hole appeared. The door fell open, the room reappeared, Kuku rubbed up against a sofa. But the door couldn’t be left like that; the locks had to be replaced. Two hundred dollars each. I gave him the money in two-hundred-dollar instalments withdrawn from an electric-blue ATM outside a deli. It felt like cutting away parts of my body. He gave me two sets of brass keys in return.
I went back upstairs and wrote to the agent.
The following week, once Sanyogita had returned, the blue orb in my inbox brought this letter, a letter within a letter, of which painful snatches remained with me:
Aatish – Since I had to go off on a long weekend after your delivery of An Internment, I asked a colleague here – formerly a highly placed publisher and now with us part-time as a reader – to read your novel, and below you will find his report. For reasons you will appreciate (since the report does not pull its punches), I have debated whether to send this to you – but, on balance, feel it will be more helpful than otherwise to you to contemplate a neutral professional judgement. Of course, you are entitled to reject the judgement, but I hope you will find something of value in it.
Best wishes, Marie
AN INTERNMENT – BY AATISH TASEER
Although Tasser can write with fluency and intelligence at times, An Internment is a seriously flawed novel. It is far too early for him – or us – to be thinking about securing a publishing deal for his work…
The line-by-line style needs serious attention. There are so many awkward and over-elaborate sentences. I’d encourage Tasser to be as ruthless as possible with his own writing – to stop trying too hard – and to work on developing clarity and simplicity in his style…
All in all – I wouldn’t recommend taking Tasser on as a client now – but it might be worth asking to see a substantially rewritten version of this novel.
As I finished the email, with its cruel misspellings of my name, I felt as though I had been set free. I realized that it was not so much the fraudulence of the literary effort but waiting for that fraudulence to bear fruit that had been the hardest part. I hadn’t found a way to write about my situation. I had the disarray of my situation to show me why.
Stronger now for being stripped of my pretences, I boldly approached Sanyogita about wanting to go back to India. She was not angry. She only said, ‘Baby, I hope you don’t mind if I follow in a few days?’