by Akhil Sharma
He began to find Nirmala incredibly beautiful. Her ears, small with little diamond studs, appeared both modest and intelligent. When she spoke, her soft insistent voice resounded as if it were inside his own chest.
In early June, they decided to have sex. They removed their clothes and stood in Nirmala’s dorm room.
“Don’t look at me,” she said, holding her hands over her stomach.
He knelt down and kissed her belly.
“Does it smell bad?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
In the days afterward, in the happiness of someone having chosen to have sex with him, he felt that he was growing more real, more substantial. Before, he had been only thoughts and emotions, and now he was becoming solid.
He found himself constantly thinking about Nirmala, how he teased her about her nervousness about her weight: “You are so small that you get lost in the bed.” He pictured some of the things they had done, him half sitting, with her on top of him, telling her that she was not heavy, that she was like a little girl. To be able to be kind to someone you loved seemed a fortunate thing.
Until then, they had kept their involvement a secret. Once, at a Holi party, a large, dark-skinned woman from Hyderabad had begun praising Nirmala in front of Gautama, as if inviting him to join in. Gautama had immediately become suspicious that the woman might be a gossip, that if he were to say what he felt the woman would then tell others and the information might somehow make its way to India, where it could be used to embarrass Nirmala’s family.
But now Nirmala began introducing him to people as her boyfriend. This felt dangerous to Gautama, as if they were taking on a problem they could have avoided. He wondered whether Nirmala was doing this so that he could not back out. He decided that he did not want to think such a thing about her, that she was simply declaring her love to the world.
He and Nirmala began to be treated as a couple. People would ask him what hours she was working. Once, a woman came to him and wanted to know if Nirmala’s aunt in New Jersey was going to be visiting India soon, because she wanted to send a blood-pressure cuff to a relative. There was a strain to being known as a couple. One man advised him to propose in the morning; that way he and Nirmala would have the whole day to enjoy being engaged. At a party, he talked to a woman who was a new Ph.D. student, and one of Nirmala’s friends stood nearby glaring angrily at him.
Because Nirmala’s parents were bound to learn about him, it seemed important to tell his parents first, so that they might reach out to hers and keep them from feeling shame.
Gautama sat cross-legged on his futon bed and Skyped with his mother. She started crying. She wiped her eyes with a fold of her sari while his father’s legs paced behind her. They were contemplating the dowry they could have negotiated, Gautama assumed, the elation there would have been in finding a match for a son who was educated in America. “I blame you, not her,” his mother said, and from this he understood that all was not lost. His father shouted, “I blame her, too!”
Afterward, Gautama went to the refrigerator and stood by it drinking milk to ease his stomach.
In the next few days, he got calls from his sister, from his favorite cousin, from an uncle whom everybody in the family was scared of because he was a small-time politician and gangster. The tension of this was constant, and Gautama felt that he could not talk about it with Nirmala, because he had had sex with her, and so she had tied her fate to his.
Weeks went by, and then months. He periodically told his mother that she should talk to Nirmala, that Nirmala was a good girl. “When I have to drink that poison, I will,” she said.
Some things about Nirmala began to irritate him. If they went to a movie, she would take the tickets from his hand after he had purchased them. When they went to buy groceries, she would check that all the items on their list were in the cart, even though he had already crossed them out on the scrap of paper they were written on. To Gautama, this behavior seemed to come from Nirmala’s belief that if she were not in charge things would go wrong. Sometimes he wondered what he had started.
What bothered him most about Nirmala was that, if he was incorrect about something, she would point it out immediately. If he did the same to her, she became sullen. Once, he told her that the argument she was making about genetics was probably not correct. When he explained why he’d said this, she became angry and asked why he was in such a bad mood.
September came, and the university became busy again. The weather was still warm, and every afternoon two young women on Rollerblades performed in Washington Square Park. They wore white shorts and skated around the arch while playing trumpets. Gautama liked looking at these women so much that he would try always to be in Washington Square when they were there.
ONE EVENING, ALMOST A YEAR after he was arrested, he sat at his desk and opened his laptop and went to Backpage. The screen filled with ads: lines of text, some words in bold, others capitalized, phone numbers written out as words. He felt as if he were floating, as if it were someone else’s finger clicking on an ad. A new screen opened: more text with images below, a Hispanic girl in a bikini, her face hidden by a flash, the picture taken in a bathroom mirror. Gautama recognized the photo from other ads he’d seen, and he suddenly became exhausted at the memory of calling prostitutes and then running away from his apartment. He shut down the computer.
A few days later, he came home and opened his laptop before he’d finished undressing. He sat on the edge of his futon and browsed through Backpage. He had his jeans at his ankles, and he remained that way for an hour.
The prostitute who walked into his apartment later that night was nineteen or twenty and black. She had white plastic beads in her hair. It was dark outside, and his studio’s wide window, divided into panes, was like a bank of TV screens in which the girl hung bright and tilted.
The girl stood at the center of the room, and Gautama’s heart pounded. Before she arrived, he had planned to tell her that she did not look like her photo and give her cab fare home. But she was much more beautiful than her photo, and he thought that the luck of getting someone so lovely might not occur again, and, since he would eventually end up having sex with a prostitute anyway, it was best not to waste this opportunity.
The girl was wearing a gray dress with thin blue horizontal stripes. Gautama handed her the money. He stepped away from her and again was amazed by her beauty.
“You’re pretty,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Could you take off all your clothes?”
She pulled her dress over her head. She was slender with big breasts. She looked as if she had been Photoshopped. Folding the dress, she put it on his desk, which stood near the head of the bed. She came back to the center of the room.
“May I hold your breasts while you jump?”
The girl laughed. “Sure.”
She was smiling as he put his hands on her breasts. She started jumping. Her hair flew up, and the beads clicked. Her feet made soft thuds when she landed.
His hands on her breasts, Gautama became happier and happier. He knew that tomorrow he would feel guilt and shame, but he did not care. The girl jumped, and he had the sense that nobody else anywhere could be leading a life of such adventure and delight.
A HEART IS SUCH A HEAVY THING
Arun Kumar had just turned twenty-four when he decided that he would marry the chubby, round-faced girl he had never met. Four months ago, he had gotten his first job, as a bookkeeper for Toyota Tonics. With his new employment, and its endless supply of tonic, he had taken to drinking many bottles of the sugary stuff every day. Arun, finally a man, a man with a job, decided that it was time he gained some weight. And, finally a man, a man with a job, Arun agreed to his father’s pleas to consider marriage. And so, late one evening, the word went around that Arun was looking for a wife, and in no time he and his family were playing host to a procession of fathers, almost all of them strangers, who appeared, one af
ter another, bearing black-and-white photographs of their daughters in various poses and with varying degrees of ugliness. This went on for three months. And then one day, Vinod Mishra, the father of Namrita, appeared. Namrita, Arun could see, was not ugly, just pudgy, and she had, as well, a sizable dowry, and Arun threw up his hands and said, “Why not? I get along with everyone. So why not her?”
Arun Kumar was still twenty-four, but he was now a twenty-four-year-old with a job and a fiancée. (The wedding would be next month.) And, finally, he was starting to gain some weight. What he now needed was a better job—that was just the thing before he got married—and his father, Prasad Kumar, had just the solution: he would make his son a teacher.
PRASAD KUMAR WANTED his son to meet Mr. Gupta, Prasad Kumar’s supervisor and the head of the physical education department at the Delhi municipality where they both worked. Mr. Gupta was a man of influence, and had promised that he might be able to do something for Prasad Kumar’s son. There was to be a wedding reception at Mr. Gupta’s home for his son, Narayan.
Strings of small blue and red lightbulbs hung three stories down the front of the Gupta house. Mr. Gupta stood at the gates of the courtyard greeting guests. Behind him waiters in red turbans, white jackets, and white pants moved among the visitors. Electric fans, five feet tall, stood every few steps along the courtyard’s walls. Arun and his father were there to offer their congratulations. “You want to be a teacher, Arun?” Mr. Gupta asked.
The answer was so obvious that Arun wondered whether he was being teased. Mr. Gupta had already made his promise. The only reason Prasad Kumar had brought Arun to the party was to make Mr. Gupta feel obligated to keep his word.
“Yes,” Arun said.
“Mr. Gupta can help,” Prasad Kumar said.
“I can try,” Mr. Gupta said modestly.
“If you knew all the people Mr. Gupta knew you would go mad,” Prasad Kumar said. Arun’s father could flatter people so extravagantly that he stopped making sense.
“Your father compliments me five times a day, like a Muslim saying his prayers,” Mr. Gupta said.
“Most Muslims are far from Mecca, while I sit just down the hall from you,” Prasad Kumar replied.
Mr. Gupta laughed. “See how far shamelessness will take you.”
A couple arrived behind them. The man wore a kurta pajama, and the woman had on a dress. A cosmopolitan mixture, Arun thought.
Prasad Kumar raised his voice to make sure they heard: “All Mr. Gupta has to do is look at someone and the person gets a job, a wife, a government flat.” He nodded at his own words.
“Go in, Mr. Kumar,” Mr. Gupta said, gesturing.
Prasad Kumar took a folded envelope with a hundred and one rupees inside and gave it to Mr. Gupta. “For your son’s new life,” he said, and shook Mr. Gupta’s hand one more time.
As they stepped into the courtyard, Prasad Kumar, who was fat and bald except for a ridge of hair on either side of his scalp, slipped an arm around Arun’s waist. “That is how you speak to powerful people, Fatso,” he said. “They know you’re exaggerating, but they like it, and you keep your pride because you also know you’re exaggerating.”
The rich, his father was always saying, may be better or smarter, but there are still ways to make them do what you want.
Near the courtyard they met Mrs. Chauduri, the municipality’s senior junior physical education officer. She was short—very, very short—but, in fact, just tall enough, technically, not to be a dwarf.
“Auntiji, how is your health?” Arun asked.
“It is as God wills,” Mrs. Chauduri sighed. Two years earlier, she had undergone a double mastectomy.
“God is testing you,” Arun said. The phrase pleased him, and he could see that Mrs. Chauduri was pleased to have her troubles made purposeful and dramatic.
“And you will pass,” his father added.
A waiter edged by, and Prasad Kumar exclaimed, “Tonight, I will drink only whiskey!”
Other physical education officers began gathering around them. They, like Arun and his father, wore only shirts and pants. Nearly all the other men in the courtyard wore suits.
At some point, Prasad Kumar decided to declare the closeness of his relationship with Mr. Gupta by getting drunk. “We should get crazy,” he said. Prasad Kumar promptly poured an entire glass of whiskey down his throat.
Arun and Mrs. Chauduri exchanged glances.
“You are a good boy,” Mrs. Chauduri whispered to Arun, as if to offer comfort. “I am going to tell Mr. Gupta that you are a good boy.” Mrs. Chauduri then slipped into the crowd and disappeared.
Of the three rooms abutting the courtyard, only the central one had its doors open. The food was in there, and the room was so packed that plates were being passed back out over people’s heads. They were shouting and laughing in the struggle. A woman holding a boy’s hand stood near the doorway saying, “Let us through.” No one did. Arun stood a few feet from the woman. He was finding the undisguised greed unsettling.
A waiter passed, and Arun ordered a drink. “Can you fill the whole glass?” he asked. He had drunk perhaps five times in his life, and hated alcohol, but because it was free he felt obliged to consume as much as possible.
“All you have to do is ask, sir,” the waiter said, and Arun immediately knew the man would want a tip.
Nearby, he saw a fat woman wearing a sleeveless maroon blouse and gold bangles on both arms. She was eating from a plate piled high with cubes of cheese. Since this was the hottest time of the year, when the cows produced very little milk, cheese was very expensive. It occurred to Arun that this cheese must have been scattered carefully throughout the trays of food hidden in the press of bodies, and the fat woman must have gathered it with care. The way she was hoarding this delicacy made Arun think of his father flattering Mr. Gupta for favors: they were both petty, desperate acts of greed. Such desperation was everywhere. The fat woman noticed his stare and turned her face to the wall.
The whiskey came, a full glass. The waiter stood beside him for a minute and in a low voice repeated, “Reward, sir, reward.” Arun avoided his eyes.
The first sip of the bitter stuff made him gag. He continued drinking, though, standing in a corner near a fan, with the whiskey hidden between his hands.
“Happy?” his father boomed from somewhere in the courtyard. He often greeted people this way when he was cheerfully drunk. Arun could not see him. “Happy?” came the voice again.
There was a stir in the crowd, and Arun spotted his father standing close to an extremely thin man. Alcohol had turned his father’s face red, making him look angry. As a child, Arun used to be so afraid when his father came home drunk that the only way he could sleep was wedged against a wall under his cot. He felt that fear now, but instead of paralyzing him it made him angry, even eager to fight. Arun was pleased by the anger.
The man said something, and Prasad Kumar shouted, “How happy?” The man responded, and Prasad Kumar, lifting his arms as if he were about to dance, began singing the words “Listen, love, listen.” Prasad Kumar was a good singer, and even when he was drunk his voice had personality, a patient whimsy. The crowd shifted again. Seeing his father’s talent, Arun’s anger diminished.
A second room edging the courtyard was opened, and inside, sitting on red thrones, were the groom and the bride. The groom wore a blue suit, and the woman wore a red sari, a fold of which was pulled up to cover her face.
As Arun moved to join a queue that was forming to offer the couple congratulations, he felt a hand on his arm. It was Mr. Gupta.
“Your father wants you,” he said, and pinched Arun’s sleeve to direct him through the crowd. From the tightness of Mr. Gupta’s face, Arun knew what had happened: his father was already unmanageably drunk.
He found his father outside, on the side of the road, standing close to a short, dark-skinned businessman named Mr. Maurya. When Arun was a child and Mr. Maurya was struggling in his business, he used to visit their flat wit
h bottles of rum and whiskey and spend the night on the roof wheedling his father for favors. Now Mr. Maurya was trying to get into his white Ambassador sedan.
“You weren’t too busy to come see me when your only business was recycling the paper from schools!” Prasad Kumar was saying, so loudly that Arun could hear him from the courtyard gates. Arun crossed the road.
His father persisted. “You should let me do things for you.”
“If I have work, I’ll call you,” Mr. Maurya said, looking Prasad Kumar in the eye. Arun stopped about ten feet from his father. Fright kept him from going any closer.
Mr. Maurya opened his car door and got in, but Prasad Kumar suddenly lurched forward, wedging himself in front of the door before Mr. Maurya could shut it. Ignoring him, Mr. Maurya slipped the key into the ignition and started the car. Prasad Kumar climbed into the sedan, shoving the smaller man aside. The engine whirred. For a long moment, Mr. Maurya and Prasad Kumar sat crushed together in the driver’s seat. Then, suddenly, Prasad Kumar got out again. Mr. Maurya quickly repositioned himself behind the steering wheel and shut the car door. Prasad Kumar stood breathing heavily and looking at the ground. Arun was frozen in embarrassment, with the alcohol in him vanishing in a flare of fear. He stood there immobile, beside his father, as the sedan rolled away.
THE 100 BUS back to the Old Vegetable Market, where the Kumar family lived, was nearly empty. Prasad Kumar and his son sat in the back. They had not spoken during the wait at the stand and were silent now. Arun was thinking of his forthcoming wedding, how disappointing it would be for someone to be married to a man as confused and ridiculous as himself.
“Mr. Maurya has seen me drunk before,” Prasad Kumar said at last. “He used to bring me bottles of Old Monk Rum.” They passed the fenced fields of the police academy. The fields were empty and wide.
“What does Mr. Maurya care? I do anything he wants.” A little later he began gasping as he prepared for tears. Arun’s father usually cried after getting drunk.
