by Jeet Thayil
The women too had come under the hacker’s sword and not a face or breast had been left unharmed. But the destroyers had been in a hurry; some loveliness was still visible in the parts that remained.
Later they drove through the streets of the old city to the Lal Qila. Goody asked the driver to put the windows up. She felt the pollution in her chest and throat. She would carry a handkerchief to spit in, she thought, like a consumptive. She would be one of those women who walked around with a perfumed hankie pressed to the nose, asking for smelling salts. The taxi had to make a U-turn and then it stopped in a crush of autorickshaws, trucks, and Blue Line buses. Ahead of them was a black Ambassador with a sign painted on its back in rural red and yellow. ‘HORAN PLEEJ’. They were trapped in a corridor of cars and buses and the driver pressed pointlessly on the horn.
A woman came to the window with her pallu over her head. She had big lips, like Goody’s, and her lipstick was a similar shade of brown. She stared and Goody stared back. In one expert glance the woman took in their clothes, the car, their potential generosity. There was a blond boy of two or three on her hip, a thin child playing with a rubber band. Her blouse was wet from two spreading stains where she’d suckled him and Goody had a sudden desire to taste the woman’s breast milk. The extended family was camped on the pavement. The men lounged at their ease and smoked, healthier and cleaner than their wives who sold trinkets and begged and raised the children. A girl of three or four left the group and went to a Maruti with a couple in the front. The woman with the blond baby shook her head and the girl moved to a bigger car. The woman came to Xavier’s window but she didn’t ask for money. She held her baby to him as if in offering and Xavier gave her a note. Her smile was sweet and shy.
Then the traffic cleared and they neared the walls of the great fort, its ramparts converted into a traffic underpass. At the entrance they squeezed past a crush of loiterers and guides and in a corridor of shops she found a framed painting of Ganesh in the pose of a Mughal emperor. He had his arm around a seated woman whose veil had come undone and his trunk was in a state of semi-arousal. Goody considered buying it but the thought of haggling with the salesman was beyond her. She wanted a fixed price. She wanted a cold drink and air-conditioning. She wanted silence and a nap in a dark room.
They went to the pavilion where the emperor met with his public. A guard with a rifle and fixed bayonet stood in front of the only object in the fort that was still intact, the throne with its inlay of birds and green leaves. Some inlay remained at the Khas Mahal but most of the silver and gold had been vandalised. Near the octagonal tower where the emperor made an appearance every morning there was a latticework door that had rotted at the hinges. Goody noticed that its great feature had survived, two tiny brass elephants whose heads served as handles, the elephants and their mahouts superbly energised and bursting with detail. The trunks formed a loop into which she placed her index finger and she traced the head with her thumb and felt something of the power the artist must have felt as he worked.
The centrepiece of the building was a screen with the image of a pair of scales. Not a panel remained, only a set of discolourations on the wall. The mirror and marble inlay, the gold and silver ceiling work – all had been stolen. Goody asked a soldier if they could take a look at a roped-off section. Area is closed, he said. Then, addressing her breasts, he pointed out which parts of the palace were open for viewing. When she backed away he scratched his genitals with great care, as if the gesture would seduce her on the spot.
2.
The air was thick with emperors, warriors in the wainscoting and dead footsoldiers in the red cotton trees. The dirty sky brimmed with rain light. Everywhere she looked tired gods guarded a pile of ruined stone or a desecrated tomb or a collapsed place of worship visited only by cattle and bandits. She learned to love riding around the city. She ignored the modern and registered only the weather-beaten and ancient, the falling-down mud dwellings and dirt roads unchanged for three hundred years, the camel trains of myth, the veiled herders and yellow-haired babies encamped on the pavement, the blackened pots of cook fires, the nomadic labourers stained with the dust of desert quarries and construction.
They had moved from the winter wastes of Manhattan to the temperate clime of Bangalore to the extremes of a Delhi barsati, or two Delhi barsatis. The first belonged to an alleged officer in the Indian Air Force. He asked to meet at a bus stop near Air Force Headquarters where he waited in full uniform. They met him again to sign the lease – at the same bus stop. It struck her later that they had not seen his office or home and he had not produced identification of any kind. He may have been impersonating an Air Force officer for all she knew; anything was possible in the newly incredible India. They installed airconditioning, a bed and some of the art, and then they discovered why the apartment had been a bargain. There was no water in any of the taps. Xavier had asked all the right questions about air and light, he had asked if there was a park nearby, but he had not asked after water. He hadn’t known that in Delhi the presence of a tap did not indicate the presence of water and that the scarcity of water was the Indian future. When they confronted Yadav, the Air Force officer, he dropped in one morning with his wife and the phrases came so easily off her tongue that they knew they’d been had. Water harvesting. Tube well. Tankers. The Yadavs were con artists, slippery and brilliant. Goody visited the downstairs neighbours and the woman of the house said there was no water in the entire building sometimes for days at a stretch. She had two young children and they needed water for bathing and also for drinking. She said it apologetically, as if it was an unreasonable expectation. Later in the afternoon Goody found her climbing the stairs with a full bucket in each hand. The woman had gone across the street to borrow water. Xavier gave up the month’s rent and the deposit as money lost or swindled. They moved.
With Paro’s help they found a new apartment in a moderately noisy block in Defence Colony. In days Xavier had made it new. The way she thought of it, he made it New. He converted the bedroom into a studio and office. He put a double bed and a desk in the big living room and potted dwarf palms in the bathrooms. He had the terrace painted yellow, blue and green, so when you sat out under the curved bamboo rigging it was like being on a ship. The bamboo was a premium essential and before its cane sails were installed on the terrace they were woken each morning by extreme heat and light.
She didn’t know it then but the burst of homemaking would be the end of Xavier’s active phase. Soon he was inert, uninterested in sex, work, or conversation. His explanation for inactivity was simple. He was settling into the city and the city was settling into him. He was sifting and storing the architectural residue of adjacent centuries, tombs from the sixteenth, Victorian memorials from the nineteenth, stone and glass skyscrapers from the twenty-first. One afternoon he saw two women transporting a tree trunk to market, the heavy wood balanced casually on their heads. Their flared red and yellow skirts were tucked into their waistbands and their muscles were stringy and alive. It was an image from an ancient desert past and for someone from the coast, from the forgotten town of Forgottem, for example, here was an image to be stored for future use. Except, thought Goody, all he seemed to be doing was storing up the images. He wasn’t working; he was on medication; he was sane and sober and depressed.
Late one night she found him cross-legged on the terrace in the dark, puffing on a cigarillo and scribbling in the blue notebook he carried at all times. He was making a growing list of saints and soon he would need a new notebook. Cigarillo smoke issued in a complex system of rings and tubes. What was he doing exactly out there in the dark? And why was he smoking so much?
He said, “Smoke is a way to communicate with the dead, a more effective method than relying on a medium, whose presence, as in quantum theory, changes the nature of the communication. The medium brings his or her own vibration into the interaction to such an extent that the petitioner will never know how much of the subsequent communication has been influ
enced by said medium. This is not to say that all mediums are suspect but that a medium (as the word suggests) is a separation, a barrier between oneself and the vast sorrowful community of those who are unable to speak for themselves. Smoke is a better method of communication than words because there is no question of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and inaccurate articulation. For instance, if you examine this plume you will see that it sails upward in the shape of a dismasted galleon. There is a figure in the prow and she is waving but is she waving in farewell or in greeting?”
“I’ll always take hello over goodbye. You should too.”
“How much time do we have?”
“I don’t know, Newton.”
“This is not my life and I do rather wish I could get out of it.”
“But where will you go?”
“Back to New York, I don’t know.”
“You hated it there. You said you felt like a third-class third world citizen. You called it an exhausted culture on the verge of its inevitable decline and fall.”
“Well. That was before I got here. Have you seen a more exhausted culture than this one? It’s more racist than America. The fairness creams. Buri Nazar Wale Tera Muh Kala on the trucks. The jokes about Hubshees and Southies and Chinkies and Dalits.”
*
She heard a ping from her cell phone and reached for him as if she’d been doing it all her life, waking from a night of vivid dreams with the same man in her bed. He remembered nothing of his dreams, not a word or a picture unless he was woken violently. He lived only in the moment or in future moments and what he remembered he kept to himself; he had a private life. She did not, everything in her head she shared.
She had dreamed of Dracula and Mina, which made her remember a film they had seen once in Paris. The director was a woman Xavier had known when she’d been an assistant to a friend of his, a filmmaker with a reputation for drugs and violence. The woman had left his friend to make her own movie and its name was in the air a lot that summer and Xavier had taken Goody to see it. The first half was a fairly standard French art film. Careful frames of cities at night, lamplight on a bridge at dusk, a boat moving on black water, improvised street scenes in the style of documentary footage shot from a moving car with a handheld camera, parked cars on a boulevard and people in overcoats waiting on a pavement, and long sequences where a slender woman with a severe haircut smoked unfiltered cigarettes and a man with a square jaw and a three-day stubble committed petty crimes, and there was unhurried sex without dialogue in hotel rooms with standing ashtrays, in hotel rooms with faded carpets, in hotel rooms with indistinct lighting, and in an aeroplane toilet, all, as I say, fairly standard for Xavier though not for Goody, who had only recently begun to watch European art-house cinema. So when the movie, which seemed like a series of prepared stills that followed one after the other with no apparent purpose, turned without warning into a horror film it caught them by surprise. The scene where the film switched genres was one in which the lead actor performed cunnilingus on a woman whose cries of pleasure turned into screams when he began to eat her in earnest, eat her like a succubus, eat right through her panicked attempts to get away until she died on sheets that had turned black with her blood. The scene went on and on, pitilessly, until it seemed the director must take some special pleasure in the depiction, that it was her own excitement she was pursuing. There was more to follow, scenes of mass slaughter in which manacled women were eaten alive by men and women with dead eyes and sharp teeth, and as the movie progressed it became bloodier and bloodier, until, unable to watch, Xavier turned away. Later he said the film displayed the kind of split personality to be expected from a first-time director and he would have thought more of the exercise if it had been one thing or the other, art or horror, not six of one and half a dozen of the other. She understood that his critical comments were a way to mask his feelings because that night he couldn’t sleep. His head was too full of blood images, he said, and he finally dropped off only after he put on a nightlight. She remembered all this and felt a protective surge for him that was maternal and sexual at the same time.
There was another ping. The bamboo sails yawed slightly and in the air-conditioned bedroom the shaded light made a minute adjustment. It had always been this way with her; she had no boundaries. She remembered their first meeting at the Hauz Khas Village café with a view of a tomb in the middle of a lake. I’ll teach you how to sin, he’d said. Though he’d never followed up on this promise. She remembered a dream she had had of Newton, blind and exiled to a rock for his crimes. She remembered their first trip together. By then the English boy she’d been seeing had given up on India and on her and returned to London, and she and Newton were an item. Together they went to New York, her first trip out of the country since returning from the UK. In the apartment on Central Park West she learned to let go, she learned to fall. She rode the subway and took taxis. Mostly she walked, whatever the weather. The first time she slept with someone she was abashed and guilt-ridden. She told Xavier about it and he laughed. He said, I think at heart you’re a good Indian girl with a solid middle-class upbringing. She applied for a job and started to work and took another apartment and things were coasting along. She too developed a full-blown private life, with assignations, break-ups, crushes, heartbreaks. She was experiencing what she called her bicoastal phase, an uneasy period she would remember mainly for the stress of it. She had girlfriends because she’d always had girlfriends. Sex with a man was useful for the context it provided. You were able to compare penetration to being penetrated, awkward hanging appendage to sleek inward mechanism – there was no comparison really. But then came New with his renewed claim on her and she laid her own claim and now she was as hetero as a soccer mom.
She got up when she heard the third ping. She went to the study and unplugged her cell phone and found a message to herself. Tughlaqabad! They were to collect twenty-eight boxes shipped from New York and sitting in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city.
Xavier didn’t like to think of the move to Delhi as permanent, or even temporarily permanent. But it was a city she knew. She liked that it was mired in sex, a stunted society in which women were an endangered and sexualised species. She liked that it clarified and simplified social interaction. There was no room for murky ambiguity.
“I’m on a bus and I smile at a woman,” she said. “Anywhere else she’d think I was just being friendly. Here she knows I’m interested. In Delhi everything is sex. To clarify, I look, that’s all I do.”
“Everybody looks.”
“Everybody is so polite. We should be able to do more than look.”
“In Delhi?”
“Oh, rape. Men like to think rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman because they want to believe their puny dicks are weapons of mass destruction. Do you know that sometimes, not always but sometimes, I like it when you use me and you don’t care about my pleasure? I like it when you’re rough with me and you’re not trying to be a good lover, did you know?”
“No,” Xavier said.
And he changed his style, fucking her quickly, a half-dozen rabbit strokes and off he’d go. And she asked herself what she’d started.
*
“New, get up.”
“What.”
“Get up, we have to go.”
“Had a bad night, I was up for hours.”
“We’re going to Tughlaqabad.”
They left the house and drove for an hour past tombs and mosques in varying stages of disrepair. There was laundry slung across fifteenth-century stone and goats tethered to arched doorways and Mughal gardens dotted with dog shit and covered in graffiti. Even in a landscape of ruin Tughlaqabad stood apart, an expression of the element it stood upon, sand-coloured and sand-made, like a giant architectural drawing of a medieval fort rising from the scrub. Rising from or sinking into, she wasn’t sure.
They drove into a maze of triple-decker containers stacked like boxes, a city constructed by the insane
where the streets led to no conclusion and the windows illuminated nothing, a place without activity of any kind.
And that was when Xavier turned to her and said, “The past is never past, it’s present and accounted for. It is with me always, like your love. You keep me steady. Find a way to forgive me, Goody, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, “we’ll work it out.”
She spoke automatically but the words made her feel better.
The driver took them into an alley lined with the L-shaped skeletons of container-trailers. A graveyard of broken-necked vehicles lay before them, the engines and chassis at impossible angles. The alley was long and perfectly straight and at the end of it, at a right angle, another alley with more broken trailers. The driver parked outside a building that was only façade, the rooms shells, the toilets non-existent. There were flies and mosquitoes everywhere. The sign didn’t say England as she had thought at first, but Inland. She followed Xavier up a staircase and past several floors of abandoned rooms filled with gutted or burned furniture. Dental instruments lay in heaps on the floor, the metal tools rusted beyond repair. He asked for directions from a woman sitting cross-legged on a bench. She squeezed coconut oil out of a dented plastic bottle and rubbed it on her toes. This is room 123, she said, gesturing to a doorway. Then she went back to work on her feet. A man sat at a desk in the front of the room and another in the back. In between the two were deskless others collapsed into chairs placed haphazardly throughout.
Dev? Xavier said to the first man. It was the name he’d been given. The man said his name was Faisal and he pointed to the man at the other desk who was now talking into two cell phones. Faisal said they were to wait until Dev was free. Goody thought, what else would you do but wait in interiors such as these, where time had stopped? You wait and prepare yourself for more waiting. You come one step closer to understanding the earth-forged nature of the bardo, the waiting room the soul passed through on its interrupted journey to the realm of the eternal. Room 123 was full of people who had been there for an eternity, exhausted messengers, defrocked managers, couriers who had run out of hope, long-distance drivers holding checked towels to their heads. The drivers would be the former tenants of the stalled machines that lined the roads to the building. They waited with their eyes unfocused and limbs slack and Goody noticed a peculiarity that became more apparent as the day lengthened and they moved from one bombed-out landscape to the next: she was the only woman. Wherever they went she was the object of immediate attention and she resorted to the strategy perfected by the women of the city: she spread her dupatta to veil her hair and cover her breasts.
