by Mahesh Rao
As Dimple waited for Fahim, she doubted Ania’s wisdom for the first time. There was no convincing reason why Fahim would be attracted to a woman like her, obviously provincial, still at times cloddish, when he had the pick of those sophisticated gazelles at media parties. Ania had kept insisting she could see the signs, but Dimple was worried about the dangers of being wrong. It had taken her months of discipline and training to calm the anxieties that assailed her—worries about her position as some kind of interloper—and now her equilibrium was again wrecked. Ania was too fearless and her friendship too effortless, spilling from her without consequence, leaving a trail of easy generosity and advice. For Dimple that same friendship offered elation and play but also apprehension and uncertainty, a fear that it would all collapse and crumble to dust. She felt a brush against her shoulder.
“Sorry, I’m a bit late,” said Fahim.
Dimple explained that Ania was unwell, and he showed the greatest sympathy.
“I think we should cancel,” he said. “It doesn’t seem right, merrily sightseeing like this when she is so ill.”
“She’s not exactly ill but, yes, I think you’re right.”
Behind them, a throat was cleared. In spite of their protestations, a guide had been foisted on them, and he was not going to be done out of this opportunity.
“What do we do? He came ages ago. Maybe we should just go. Ania really won’t mind,” said Dimple.
Fahim looked at the guide, who maintained his steady gaze.
The guide and Dimple headed off in the direction of the car. Fahim followed.
He seemed to sleep most of the way in the car, although the dimness made it difficult to tell. As soon as they arrived at the road approaching the fort, the guide began his recitation of its history, heedless of his audience’s attention. On Fahim’s side, the car door slammed.
They walked up the narrow path, Fahim shining a flashlight and turning to make sure Dimple did not need his help as she followed. Behind them, the guide continued to name dates of key battles and conquests. The first wash of light seeped over the battlements. Birdsong filled the air, dense layers of animated conversation; but as Dimple looked around, from the lush foliage of the neem trees, across the craggy outer wall of the fort to the scrub beyond, there wasn’t a bird to be seen. They stopped for a few moments to watch the light strengthen with a kind of guile, the sky taking on a little more pink, fine tints of ochre appearing across the towers.
The guide’s tale had moved on by a couple of centuries. They followed him through a narrow gateway and past an empty water tank. He scrambled up a little path toward the gaping arches of a row of caves.
“There is an underground spring that flows above these caves. It was first discovered some three hundred years ago,” he said.
He beckoned them over to the farthest cleft in the rocks.
“No matter what the season, the water flows right overhead and into a sacred pool in the cave. Of course, during the monsoons, the water pours down, but even in the driest summer, there is always a trickle. During our worst drought, the water never stopped. Truly, a miracle. You can go inside and see,” he said.
Dimple looked at Fahim and asked, “Do you want to?”
“You must,” said the guide, “never again will you get such an opportunity.”
Dimple took off her shoes at the narrow entrance and stepped into the cave. It was like slipping into a dark lake, the chill washing over her. The splash of the water echoed around the small space, making it difficult to know where it flowed, through some distant fissure deep in the cave or down the walls around her. She ran her hand across the cave wall, smooth and damp, broken by sudden knots and ridges.
As Fahim stepped in behind her, she discovered that he was close enough to smell. She caught a hint of citrus cologne and something else, a smell she imagined to be his warm skin, the night’s sleep not yet scrubbed off him. She turned, her shoulder grazing his arm. In the curve of light stolen from the day outside, she could see the paleness of his shirt, the way it creased over his chest.
“I think we have to crouch down and go farther if we want to see the water,” she said, her voice rushing at her ears.
He did not respond. They remained immobile, listening to the whoosh and gurgle. In that moment, all her doubts vanished. She knew that if she lifted her head up and closed her eyes, he would take her face in his hands.
Echoes sounded in the dark space: the burbling of the water, her own short breaths. The chill now rose up through her, beginning at her feet, a combination of desire and caution.
“I think we should leave,” he said.
He turned and ducked, making his way out of the cave.
She stayed for a moment longer and then followed him, certain that the long pause in the darkness, the silent contemplation, meant that he had felt it too.
* * *
—
ANIA TRIED TO catch up with her social media but gave up, realizing how ridiculous it was to dart from the balcony to the bedroom window and then out again to the staircase and then to the front lawn, all in an attempt to get a proper signal. She took her magazines with her to the verandah and flicked inattentively through them, her eyes drawn to the activity on the grounds. Already small groups were forming for little conferences under trees and outside the guesthouse. Several members of staff asked her whether she required anything, and even after she had smiled them on their way, she knew that they were keeping a watch on her, as though she was an unpredictable, skittish creature who could take a sudden turn.
Fahim and Dimple were still not back from the fort, which could only be read as a good sign. Ania wondered whether women often found flimsy pretexts to arrange appointments with the handsome journalist, made errors and forgot vital details as they lingered in his presence, addled with desire. He certainly aroused no such feelings in her: there was an odd gnawing presence about him that made him seem ill at ease, unable to tell when a conversation had ended or to register anything said in irony.
She had also noticed that he would proffer names—politicians, broadcasters, actors—as though he were testing people’s reflexes. He seemed to think that he was doing it with a winning breeziness, but it was all a bit pointless and hardly to be encouraged in the long term. She would have to think of a subtle way of bringing it up at some point. But for now, she thought it was oddly endearing. All this bluster, whether true or not, was obviously for Dimple’s benefit. He was confident that he could grandstand his way to her heart. Men were such unevolved creatures, and it was a matter of serendipity that women were often won over by their bungling guile. Certainly, Fahim was lucky that Dimple was impressed by famed personages, or at least had the good grace to pretend. Ania stretched her legs out in a patch of sunlight. Every time she thought about Dimple and Fahim, she felt a warm rush of gratification.
And in addition, Dimple excelled at something men prized in women: the ability to listen. She leaned forward and drank it all in, her eyes limpid, with barely a blink. She made her speaker feel extraordinary, essential. She was also surprisingly adept at plainspoken one-liners. Ania knew that Dimple did not even intend to be witty, but her lack of pretension often cut through the imperious bombast that surrounded them. The reason Ania had remembered her from their first meeting and decided to invite her to a brunch was because of her deadly but inadvertent diminution of the corporate blowhards who were running the event.
The birdsong that surrounded her, the rhythmic sound of a hammer wielded nearby, the rustle of the magazine pages as they fluttered under the ceiling fan, the occasional tinkle of wind chimes: it all gave a slowness to the day, lengthening the hours, keeping anything unexpected at bay. Ania was confident of success. She could already imagine the interest rising in Fahim, turning to love, the great churn of it all when they returned to Delhi. And when they mentioned it to her, Ania knew it would be proper to give them a modest shrug an
d deny that she had played much of a part.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DILEEP HAD THOUGHT the feelings would settle in a few days or even weeks, but he continued to be troubled by a vague malaise. He was happy for Renu—she had found a remarkable match in the colonel, an affable man who seemed to be able to get on with everyone. Did he miss her? He could not really say. But her departure had brought about a definite shift, a crumbling.
He was reluctant to speak to Ania about his feelings. She would feel sorry for him, chastise him for being silly enough to feel alone, and smother him with a sincere but distracted love. It would be humiliating to be pitied by his daughter.
He went up to Renu’s old wing and for some reason knocked on what used to be her door. He opened it and looked at the drawn curtains and the dustsheets on the headboard. Her books were still there, but the photographs had gone. He closed the door and went back down to the kitchen. The pantry spotlight splashed the tiles with a tinge of blue—it looked as though the room were slowly drifting underwater. He ate everything he could find: he cut himself wedges of Parmesan, emptied packets of cashew nuts into his palm, chewed on cookie after cookie, standing at the window. Later that night, he was in so much discomfort that he had to lie on the floor in the study, waiting for the stomach cramps to subside.
In the morning he weighed himself and spent forty minutes longer in the gym. And then he did what came most naturally during times of crisis. He called Nina Varkey.
* * *
—
DILEEP AND NINA had slept together on four occasions. The first time was on his eighteenth birthday; the second time was the following morning. Nina had claimed that they were both part of his birthday present but in reality she was taking revenge on a boyfriend whom she felt was treating her shabbily. Many years later they had tumbled into bed in a Los Angeles hotel after finding themselves on the same flight. And, finally, a few weeks after his wife’s death, Dileep had found himself at Nina’s door late at night, begging to be let in. She had taken off her rings and allowed him to lie on top of her, sobbing into her neck, his head hot and heavy. It had rained softly all night, the wind whimpering at the windows.
Nina woke up on most days expecting bad news. It took her hours to get out of bed, and it was only the thought of her lineage that managed to hold her up, like a corset. A catalog of careless investments and endless litigation meant that most of the family money was long gone. Her two divorces had left her with the small apartment in Vasant Vihar and an indifferent income, in addition to a few heirlooms and half a dozen Wikipedia entries. She often pursed her lips before spitting out the words “these days.” It was a trenchant expression of everything that had gone so horribly wrong in her world.
“Oh, these days,” she said, “the only way you can tell the difference between loud women in the cafés and their maids is by the quality of the diamonds in their ears.”
At the age of nineteen she had insisted on being allowed to spend a year in Paris. That summer she had been coming down some stairs near the Place de l’Opéra and was almost at street level when she had stopped to adjust the strap of her sandal. She had looked up in the instant that a photographer from Life magazine took a picture of her from across the street, a loose strand of hair over her eyes, her irritation with the strap giving her face a perplexed look. In the years since, she had given countless interviews about the photograph, changing the circumstances of the day as the whim took her. She had been a model in Paris; she had been a student of architecture; she had lived there for years; the photographer had been a friend; she had never set eyes on him before; she was adjusting her sandal; she was picking up a purse; she was nineteen, seventeen, sixteen.
“Is it true that you had many letters asking if you were Italian?”
“Yes, I answered them all explaining that some of us Indians are stunning too.”
As expected, she had matured into a formidable beauty with an elegant neck, unblemished skin, and the mouth of a vamp. Her first newspaper column was called “Dirty Laundry,” and she dictated it to a woman called Rose, who would come to her house every Tuesday afternoon. A prominent gossip column was an effortless hobby that she could use to torment her enemies. Rose would go on to become the editor of one of India’s first luxury goods magazines around the time that Nina’s first divorce was being finalized. A few months later Nina remarried, changing her surname and the name of her column. It became “Nina Varkey’s Grapevine.”
* * *
—
“OF COURSE IT’S an adjustment for you, but you really must try to pull yourself together.”
It was as close to a comforting cluck as Nina would ever be able to provide. She glanced at the clock and lit another cigarette.
“No one, absolutely no one, was as surprised as me. I mean, Renu of all people. I know she’s your sister, darling, but those hideous kurtas and that hair. She’s a terribly sweet thing, but who wants sweet these days, if they ever did. Luckily she found the one man in the world who apparently does. Anyway, good for them, and it could have been someone so much worse.”
“He’s a very fine man, Nina, I have no complaints with that at all. It just feels like everything changes so suddenly and so quickly. Before we know it Ania will be leaving too.”
“I should jolly well think so. I hope you’re not going to try and turn her into a Renu replacement and feed her all your awful butter chicken and strand her on the top floor.”
“We don’t serve butter chicken at our house.”
Nina began to do neck exercises, still smoking, barely listening to Dileep. He stayed on the phone for a little longer and said he wanted to drop by later. She said she had plans but she would call him.
She picked up the ashtray and took it back to bed.
It was extraordinary how a little thing like marriage had made Renu appear interesting to the whole world. She could certainly vouch for the fact that Renu had never been interesting. Clever, placid Renu, who had never even accidentally provided an amusing anecdote in her life. She had a vague memory of seducing one of Renu’s boyfriends many years ago, but perhaps it had been someone else. Now Renu had found herself a colonel. It would be so easy to sweep into her home and enchant her new husband. An elegant blouse and a dash of flattery was all it would take. But what would be the point? They were not twenty-one any longer.
And now she would no doubt have to suffer the visits of poor, idiotic Dileep and pretend to tend to his wounds. She wondered whether she should marry him—it would certainly ease her way in life. He had never asked her, but she knew that the proposition was there, had been there for many years, furled tight, ready to spring open at one touch. It was tempting: there was so much ground she could reclaim as his wife, so many scores she could settle. And of course, the security of all that money. But he would need so much attention and counsel, such constant reassurance, that even the thought of it brought on a huge wave of fatigue. She stubbed out her cigarette, picked up another one, and then paused, distracted, pressing its tip against the cushion of her finger.
* * *
—
DIMPLE’S OFFICE WAS on the second floor of a royal pink block in Shahpur Jat. It was difficult to know if the choice of color had been an adherence to some family tradition by its former occupants or whether it was a splash of deliberate kitsch. On the ground floor, a minimalist cupcake bakery was flanked by a dress-material store and a little grocery, sacks of black gram and red chilies propping open its ancient wooden door.
Across the narrow lane, Ania waited for Dimple in a new café, vintage birdcages dangling down from its beams, hand-dyed mosquito nets strung up against the walls. She had spent the past couple of weeks trying to persuade Dimple to take the initiative. But Dimple had said that she wasn’t the gritty kind of girl who invited men out for a drink: she would have no idea how to begin. Even more maddening than her obstinacy was Fahim’s diffidence. She had heard, main
ly from him, she now recalled, that he had skirted around land mines and narrowly missed being killed by a sniper. Yet it appeared that the intrepid reporter’s greatest fear was the prospect of rejection by a potential date.
And so they had all been to a Chinese restaurant in Defence Colony, steam rising above the hot pot, as they reminisced over their sublime weekend with Altaf Masood. Both of their accounts of the trip to the fort had been infuriatingly bland. Fahim had come over for Saturday afternoon beers, but neither he nor Dimple had got tipsy and disappeared to dangle their legs in the pool. There had been group messages and funny videos and long trains of banter. Ania felt like a researcher at a captive-breeding facility trying to cajole a couple of pandas toward a secluded spot under the bamboo. In spite of their mild deception, the colonel and Renu had acquitted themselves with so much more panache.
