At around the same time as I was weeping over calves, my father set about expanding his company, a project he pursued with such single-mindedness that even I could not fail to recognize it as his way of distancing himself from grief. Suddenly, he was always traveling. He went on business trips to Moscow and Tel Aviv. He flew to Houston, where he bought me a beer mug shaped like a snorting bull. He gave me our old Esteem and bought himself a sleek new BMW, and every Sunday night, he drove us in it to the same five-star restaurant, where he summoned the waiter with a subtle crook of his index finger—when exactly had he begun to do that?—and chatted easily with the head chef, who never failed to drop by our table to greet him.
It sounds obvious, I know, but it took me a while to see that my father, too, was changing in the wake of my mother’s death. Now he wore crisp linen shirts tucked into Levi’s, and his shoes, purchased in Milan, were of soft brown suede. Gone were his cracked Bata sandals, his old black rayon trousers, his faded T-shirts with yellow stains under the arms. He had turned into a reserved, polished version of the man I’d known all my life, and it was during those dinners that I saw him most clearly as others must have done: a handsome, tall, somber businessman of fifty-three, his hair not yet gray, leaning back in his chair, at ease with the world and his position it in. And I felt at these times a troubled wonder, the kind I imagine a parent feels for a grown child: pride, combined with the bittersweet notion that I had somehow, without noticing, without meaning to, lost him.
3
AT WORK, I KILLED midges. They floated up from the sewer in soft clouds, and I slammed them into my desk with a register I kept exclusively for the purpose. Otherwise I attended meetings, presided over by the agency’s founder, Ritu Shah. Ritu was tough and smart and had an MBA from Yale, where, she liked to keep reminding us lest we think her soft and privileged, she had been mugged four times, once at gunpoint. She drank oolong tea from a stained mug and was married to a World Bank man. The agency employed three other people, two bellicose women and a wilting boy. They were the ones who talked during meetings, vying with each other to offer ideas that Ritu listened to with her head cocked, rubbing her mug of oolong tea between her hands.
About a month after my twenty-fourth birthday and the calf, Ritu stopped by my desk to inform me of a meeting in ten minutes. “I’ll be there,” I said.
Gathering up some papers and a large file I’d never opened, I slunk into her room and sat at the back. The others were already there. Ritu clapped her hands. “Right. Let’s get started, people.”
The meeting turned out to about a new initiative to get roadside vendors—the ubiquitous stalls that sold tea or dosas or sugarcane juice—to stop dropping garbage on the pavement. Ritu rattled off numbers—thirty thousand vendors in the city center alone, dropping on average three kilograms of garbage per hour—and glanced at me, as if to verify the tragedy on a numerical level. I arranged my expression into one of grave despair. Ritu gave me a prolonged look then turned back to the others. “Got it?” she said briskly. “Now let’s brainstorm.”
One of the women thrust out a pugnacious chin and suggested marshaling a core group of vendors, who would form the nucleus of a proud cleanliness brigade. “Not bad,” Ritu said.
The other woman, not to be outdone, suggested that vendors be rewarded with stickers that proclaimed their commitment to hygiene. Ritu thoughtfully rubbed her mug of oolong for a while. “Yes, I see where you’re coming from,” she said at last, and the woman beamed.
Then the wilting boy, in the tone of someone announcing a coup, leaned forward and proposed that the vendors form an alliance with a group of artists, who would use the discarded garbage to create massive public art installations that would raise awareness. He did not specify whose awareness would be so favored but fell back in his chair, as if exhausted.
Then Ritu turned to me.
“What about you, Shalini?” she said.
“Me?” I looked down at the papers on my lap. “I’ll check the numbers.”
“No,” she said slowly. “I mean, do you have any ideas. Comments? Suggestions?”
“Oh,” I said. “No.”
“I see,” she said and that was all. The meeting ended, and I forgot all about the exchange. So when Ritu appeared beside my desk at the end of the day, I was idiotic enough to be surprised. She set her mug on the edge of my desk and coughed.
“I want to ask you,” she said, “if you’re happy here.”
“Yes,” I said.
“The reason I’m asking,” she continued, “is because you don’t seem, how shall I say, fully engaged.” Her voice changed, became, of all things, tender. “I know you’ve had a tough time since your mother died,” she said, as if she’d felt the toughness inside me like some kind of rock. And, before I knew it, I was sobbing at my desk. I dropped my head, mortified and shaken.
I heard her cough. Her hand brushed the top of my head, a touch like a breeze.
“I think,” Ritu said, “that you need some time off. Why don’t you treat yourself to a holiday? Then, once you feel ready, we can talk about where you fit in with the agency.”
It took a moment for her words to sink in. “You’re firing me?”
She picked up her mug and stepped back, surveying me and my midge-stained desk. When she spoke, it was with boundless pity. “Go home, sweetheart,” she said. “Go home.”
Twenty minutes later, I stood in the middle of our living room, my eyes adjusting to the dimness. I’d driven too fast; I could still feel the tingle of speed in my palms. From the kitchen came the sound of a knife thudding against a board—Stella.
“It’s me,” I called.
She came out of the kitchen. Compact, with oiled hair pulled back into a perfect bun, her gold cross lying on top of her crisp red sari, she looked impeccable, even after hours of housework.
“What happened? Are you sick?” she demanded in Tamil.
“No.”
She eyed me skeptically. “You look sick.”
Stella had begun working for us half a decade before my mother died, and I still knew only a handful of things about her. She had three children who could do no wrong. Her husband, a part-time salesman, part-time drunk, could do no right. She was devoted to the Virgin Mary and took her family on at least two church pilgrimages a year, for which she regularly requested money from my father, who gave it to her, but not before a lengthy lecture on the follies and perils of blind faith. She would hear him impassively to the end, then tuck the money into her blouse and proceed to do exactly as she pleased. But in her work, she was constant in all the ways my mother had been erratic. Even when my mother had been alive, it was Stella who remembered to buy the vegetables we needed, Stella who could recall when the gas cylinder had last been changed, Stella who knew which medicines were running low in the medicine cabinet.
Now I had the urge to follow her into the kitchen and tell her what had happened, but something prevented me. The idea, perhaps, that she was put out by my early return, that even though the house was ours, she might count on having these afternoons to herself, a spell of quiet before being sucked back into the clamor and claims of her own family life. I went up to my room and sat on the bed. Inch by inch, I slumped back until I was looking at the ceiling. I stayed that way until I heard Stella leave, and still I didn’t move. It was only when it grew dark that I dragged myself up. The house felt forsaken. There was a message on my cell phone from my father, saying he was with an out-of-town client and would be back late; I should go ahead and eat without him.
Stella had left our dinner on the table: four bowls covered with steel plates. Beside them, a strip of ibuprofen. I stared at all of it for a long time. Then I walked from room to room, flicking on every single light and fan. I turned on the TV and raised the volume as high as it would go.
Then I got into my car and drove off, leaving the house ablaze.
I drove, inevitably, to Hari Dinakaran’s. Hari was twenty-one and a photographer. I’d met him at a Japan
ese Buddhist ceremony a few months after my mother died. Someone, I’ve now forgotten who, had cajoled me into attending. The ceremony was in a bland one-story flat in Whitefield. In the main room a shrine had been set up, draped in a red velvet cloth fringed with gold tassels, a large Buddha in the center. We were greeted by a trim, elderly Japanese woman, the only real Buddhist there. The rest of us were merely young, wealthy, and quite obviously adrift. She took me to a back room and gave me a form to fill out. Someone else was already in the room, filling out a similar form. His whole lanky body seemed to be one nervous tic: his knees bounced, his shoulders shook, his toes curled. But his hand, I noticed, rested quietly on the bulky, complicated-looking camera beside him, as if it were an infant that drew comfort from his touch.
During the ceremony, the women were ordered to kneel in a row, the men behind them. As the trim Japanese woman moved amongst us, saying, “This is the seat of the soul in the body,” I was acutely aware of his constant shifting and fidgeting. When it was over, he jumped up and started photographing the Japanese woman beside her shrine. I watched for a while; then I went up to him. Looking straight into his eyes, I asked to see more of his work. He actually blushed.
Hari lived in a tiny rented room on the terrace of some family’s bungalow in Ulsoor. As soon as I saw it, I fell in love with that terrace. There was a warped, sun-faded ladder in one corner, which led up to a ledge with a black water tank, and many times I climbed up there when I was too drunk or high to remember how to come back down. I would sit with my back against the tank, my feet scraping air, while Hari sat below, editing photos on his laptop, the worm of a joint glowing in his fingers, glancing up now and then at me, his face, small and worried, lit up by the screen.
The saddest thing, I see now, was that Hari never understood what I wanted from him. I barely understood it myself then. We would get high, the two of us lying on his mattress, and eventually his hand would float up to rest on my breast the way it had rested on the camera, and I would let it build, let him lift my shirt, and then, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I would push him away and sit up. He would look wretched but never protest. And maybe that was it, the sum of us and everything I’m grateful to him for: Hari allowed me the simple luxury of resistance. He allowed me to push back—in a way that was small and mean and unworthy, yes, but nevertheless to push back—against a world that had shown me it could beat me down whenever it wanted.
Now I parked and climbed the outer cement stairs that hugged the building and led directly up to the terrace, pausing before the final one. This was the moment I cherished most: stepping onto the barren red tiles, the black sky opening above, and the lighted room like a beacon at the far end. Inside, I found Hari on his mattress, wearing one of his three Free Tibet T-shirts, surrounded by squares of rolling papers and a giant box of weed. He smiled as I entered then returned to his task.
There was no furniture in Hari’s room apart from the mattress and a low table, which was black with cigarette burns and ash. A small collection of books was stacked on a hot plate that he never used. The Motorcycle Diaries. A biography of the Dalai Lama. Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha. It was a bohemian setup, but there was no truth to it. Like me, Hari received a generous allowance from his parents, graduates of AIIMS and Harvard Medical School. They would have gladly bought him a spacious two-bedroom flat if he’d asked, but Hari took his role as poor, struggling artist seriously and accepted only the cash. Likewise, his photographs focused on the plight of the poor, of whom Hari, with no irony whatsoever, considered himself a part. He thoughtfully shot toothless old women huddled next to stray dogs on broken pavements; hijra prostitutes applying makeup in rooms that were closer to dungeons; malnourished toddlers chasing each other in gray construction sites while their parents carried backbreaking loads of concrete just outside the frame. The more picturesque the poverty, the more he loved to shoot it. But if I’d said this to him, he would have been crushed, so I never had. In retrospect, that was my only act of consideration as far as Hari was concerned.
I sat down on the mattress and waited. Eventually, he produced a pale, bloated joint, which he held up to the light. “Hopeless, man,” he sighed. Hari called everyone man, including his mother.
As we smoked, the night slowed to a crawl. At some point, I found myself lying with my head on Hari’s lap, half listening to him go on and on about a virtuoso Finnish drummer who was coming to play in Bangalore next month, “a total mindfuck, I’m telling you, man, you can’t even imagine.” His fingers tapped the ashy table without pause, and, at that moment, I was seized with the sensation of falling. I squeezed my eyes shut, but it only made the falling worse, so I opened them again. I still felt Ritu’s hand heavy on my head. Once you feel ready, we can talk about where you fit in. I knew I should stand up and leave, but I thought of our glowing, vacant house, and right then something cracked open within me.
Without knowing what I was doing, I reached out and began to fumble with the button of Hari’s jeans. My fingertips were freezing, the denim as pliable as rock. Hari gave me no help. He just sat there, weirdly still. I managed to get the button open, then awkwardly tugged down his jeans, along with his underwear. His cock lay across his thigh, half erect.
I got to my knees, running my tongue in vain over my dry, aching teeth. Hari’s eyes were fixed on the wall, a distant look on his face.
“Condom,” I croaked.
He didn’t move.
“Hari! Condom!” I couldn’t believe the harshness in my own voice.
Startled into movement, Hari got to his feet. He pulled up his underwear then his jeans. He zipped them up. Smoothed down his Free Tibet T-shirt. Stubbed the joint out on the table with an odd tenderness. “You can’t keep doing this, man,” he said finally.
“Doing what?”
He shook his head. “You know.”
“No. I don’t.”
“Yes,” he said wearily. “You do.” He looked away and said something I didn’t catch.
“What? What was that?” I demanded.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Just say it, Hari.”
He sighed and turned back to face me. “Sometimes you scare the shit out of me.”
I don’t remember driving back home. I do remember the house being completely dark when I pulled up, my father’s closed bedroom door. I remember banging my shin against my bedside table so hard the wooden animal clattered to the floor. I remember the pitching of my bed, the storm-tossed violence of it. I remember drowning, then surfacing, then drowning again.
I continued to leave the house in the mornings. Because I had nowhere else to go, I went to the club where as a child I’d learned how to swim, and where, for a few heady years, I’d even believed I might become a professional swimmer. In those years, I’d known each one the coaches, attendants, guards, and cleaners by name, but now they’d been replaced by strangers. I sat at one of the wrought-iron tables beside the pool and watched the new coach, a man with dark, bedraggled hair and a beautiful, tapering torso, as he conveyed nervous wives in frilly swim-suits across the shallow end, one hand under their stomachs, the other behind his back, like a careful waiter bearing a series of expensive trays. Later in the day, groups of children arrived, practicing their freestyle strokes on a long bench, then holding on to foam boards and kicking the water white, while at the tables around me, their mothers talked and laughed with each other.
When I first started swimming, the same year Bashir Ahmed came into our lives, my mother had sat at these very wrought-iron tables, ankles in the sun, the rest of her in the shade of a sagging umbrella, while I practiced pointing my toes as I kicked. The other mothers sat clustered together, but mine sat splendidly alone. For weeks, she talked to nobody. Then one evening, I saw her stand and walk casually over to them. By the time practice ended, twenty minutes later, she had them all in her thrall. “Oh my god,” I heard her drawl in a simpering accent that was not hers, “when I saw what he
r husband looked like, I’m not lying to you, my darlings, I fainted.” Fanning herself with her hand while the rest of the women giggled, titillated by whatever wicked, untrue story she had spun for their benefit. But when we climbed into an auto to go home—my mother had never learned to drive—she dropped the accent and caught me hard by the wrist. “Promise me,” she cried, her nails digging into my skin, hurting me, “promise me, Shalini, that if I ever become like one of those brainless, fat cows, you’ll take a knife and stab me. Promise!” I could see she was becoming agitated, her voice rising in pitch. “Yes,” I said, “I promise,” and only then did she let go of me.
The Far Field Page 3
