In Bombay I hold her hand. I hold my father’s too on the local trains, hold on for dear life. He says if either of us lets go then that will be it, the beggars will have me, they’ll cripple my legs and send me to work.
Technicolor Bombay, that crack of hope, the heartbreaking city, clinging to the edge of India, falling off the century like a cartoon. We lived there awhile, not even a year—my father was posted from Agra for work.
When we moved my mother was happy at first, it breathed new life into her. There was that rotting fish smell, the salt of sea in the air, the trawler stench, the song of gulls, the relentlessness of jet planes taking off. It all held a breezy promise Agra never could.
In Khar West, it was an apartment building on the fourth floor, not the Delhi kind, not a mausoleum like Aunty’s but bright and crumbling, open to noise; you could hear the others, their music, their TVs, their arguments; everyone on top of everyone else, palm trees growing up past the windows, coconuts ripening and crows swaying on the branches like happy drunks. Often I forget we lived there at all, it’s a punctured dream of glossy print, clothes drying out on the balcony lines, blood oozing through Konkan saris in my sleep.
She dresses my hair with a Minnie Mouse bow and sends me outside to play with the other girls. Instead I climb to the roof to watch the ocean beyond the bald heads of the apartment blocks and the planes taking off in the haze.
I wait for Sunday all week. My mother is holding my hand on the way to the chicken shop with the money for the evening meal. It’s so sunny here. The meat is hanging in great mean lines on the hooks, and scattered behind there’s the scene of blood. Terrified, fascinated, I wait all week to see this flesh being chopped, but I pull away, almost close my eyes to it, when it comes. She buys one whole chicken, has it wrapped in paper, and at home she prepares it lovingly, with great concentration, with her tongue peeking out the corner of her mouth and a beatific look on her face. When we sit to eat in the evening, I’m amazed by the alchemy of this, the life made out of death.
There’s a birthday party in the building one day and the girl whose birthday it is, her mother has told my mother I’m invited. And she’s very excited, my mother, eager for me to go and be with the other girls, to dress up and play. I want to go too, to be accepted, to be with everyone else and adored.
So she bathes and dresses me. She puts me in a red dress with blue satin panels and ties a ribbon in my hair. Then I’m pushed out into the corridor and sent downstairs. But I never make it inside. I stand outside for an hour or more, unable to bring myself to knock on the door. When other people come by I run away and hide, pretend to be busy with something else. Eventually I escape to the roof. I cannot bear it, can’t explain it either. The agony of being alive, of functioning like a human being. Can you understand this? This is who I am.
When I come down from the roof my mother is excited. She wants to know how it was, wants every detail of it. And I lie, I tell her it was wonderful, I had such fun, I made many friends. She’s so happy for me.
But later she hears the truth from one of the mothers downstairs. She defends me at first, says it’s a lie, I went there. And the woman says, I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl of yours.
Father comes home to find her howling in a corner, me hiding in my room.
I’m eleven years old. Back in Agra, full of rage. But only with my mother do I show it. Twenty years old and nothing’s changed. Only the voice for it has been misplaced.
Twelve, looking through a friend’s brother’s porn smuggled in from abroad. He’s hidden them behind the cupboards though we know where they are. Playboy, Penthouse, we look through them giggling, pretending to be ashamed. But I sneak one home and read it by torchlight under the sheets. I like the letters pages best of all.
Now it’s night in the car. Night falls so fast here. From dusk it’s only a heartbeat away, a curtain that falls into place. The songbirds give their final note, giant bats flit between the trees, perforating the sky. We are driving through the wide boulevards of Lutyens’ Delhi, the colonial sweep of classical bungalows housing memories of order and rule, of radial roads and white cupolas shaded by tunnels of trees. Jasmine blossoms blow along the wind, the gulmohar glow like cinders. In the darkness I follow his tail-lights. He drives fast and then he coasts along, waiting for me to catch up. It’s a game to him. He heads through Lodhi Estate, where the rich and powerful crouch in their mansions, their guards poking guns from their nests at the street. It’s still very hot, a dry heat that sees men out everywhere on the grass, lit by the street lamps on the circles, in the scattered parks—men who’ve been stunned into torpor now stirring to put away their cards, light beedis, make fires, their bicycles propped up against the trees, some walking again. Women glide along the road, apart, single file, carrying babies, with baskets on their heads, impossibly erect, draped in frayed saris bright as Gauguin fruit. But none of this exists to me now, I can never be part of it, there’s only his tail-lights ahead of me. I follow them down into south Delhi, all the way to Vasant Vihar, no longer alone.
I’m always alone.
I’m thirteen years old.
My breasts are puffing up like crisp little puris, the blood flowing out of me so hard I think I’ll die. My stick of a body ripens, tightens, becoming newly curved. The flesh around my eyes takes on the purple of a bruise.
Such a spurt of growth that my clothes don’t fit me any more. And I can never again wear my tartan dress.
Around this time my extended family becomes secure, finds wealth. My father’s brothers, all moving forward in the world. Not spectacularly, not extraordinarily so, but more than enough to survive. The economy is opening up. Jobs are found. Land is bought and sold. Then come the cars, the washing machines, the televisions, the cousins sent off to America to study, to become doctors, accountants, lawyers and bankers. All the bases are covered.
But we do nothing, go nowhere. Though my father still sends money, we are displaced, shoved aside. I keep my head down in school and get lost in my dreams, but my mother sits outside it all, the exile, watching the rest of them in silence in the frozen halls of our home, becoming suddenly old, her hair getting tangled in knots. She removes her bangles. She doesn’t sit with the other women, she only sits by herself and smokes. She has her suspicions, she laughs bitterly, as if someone has made a cruel joke about the world.
When I’m seventeen she dies. It’s a short illness, there’s no time. She’s blown away like dust on the veranda wind. My father returns for the cremation. But they don’t let me see her, and he doesn’t take me back to Singapore with him. I don’t know why it happens. I can’t explain why I’ve been abandoned this way.
I’m avoiding him, that’s the truth. Avoiding coming to him, knowing that as soon as I do he will reach his end. And my mother, my father, my family—perhaps there’s no link to them at all.
Now the Delhi streets are sulphur and dead, the streets are bridled by fear. We go into Vasant Vihar, to sit in the Chinese restaurant, to smoke and eat chicken and drink beer.
Inside, the restaurant is red and gold; outside in the colony nothing stirs. The market is deserted except for the liquor store from which men scurry like rats with their twenty-rupee bottles of Doctor’s Choice, before vanishing into the darkness of doors. Crumbling dead Delhi, gasoline ghost town in the dark.
In the restaurant the waiters know him. They welcome him with their watery eyes and obsequious grins. They wear grubby waistcoats and bow ties. They show us to a booth at the side of the room.
I say I shouldn’t be here. She’ll be waiting for me.
Who will? He offers a cigarette. I decline.
Aunty. Where I live.
Aunty …
Yes.
Where do you live?
Over the river.
And your parents?
My mother’s not here. She’s dead.
And your father?
In Singapore.
He nods to himself, smiles slightly
, sympathetically. Lights his cigarette. Settles into the red booth.
What’s it like in Singapore?
I say I don’t know.
He flags down the waiter and orders two beers.
At home, Aunty would take me on her visits. For two years I’m dressed in my itchy salwar-kameez, sitting next to her juddering flesh, among the bags of clothes that are going somewhere, to be altered, to be gifted to someone else on the way, given away second-hand, untouched. This is the currency we trade in here, a great merry-go-round of unwanted gifts. The driver is looking at me through the rear-view mirror. He can’t help himself. He positions it so he can see me instead of the road. But what to do? Aunty doesn’t believe me when I complain, and the two of them, they’re as thick as thieves. We’re going round to Karol Bagh today, but first to Paschim Vihar. So many people to see. So many visits to be made.
During Aunty’s visits I’m often asked what it is that I am studying, then asked what, with this, I can hope to achieve. An MBA would be the smart option, one uncle says, or accountancy. And though education is a good thing, it’s true, it has its limits, just like freedom. Freedom and education, neither are to be abused, both should know their place.
And what about your marriage? Have you found someone yet? Aunty sighs and shakes her head. Then perking up, she talks about the NRI.
But today they discuss the servants, how they’re all controlled by their maids. How they’re slaves at their mercy, held ransom to their whims. I keep my head down and try not to think.
In college, in my lectures, it’s much the same. I write words but I’ve lost interest in what they mean. The lecturers don’t seem to care themselves; the students seem only to repeat what they’re told.
I have my own ideas about things and a couple of times, having coffee with the girls, I’ve ventured some thought close to my heart only to receive blank looks in return.
But I’m twenty and really there’s nothing wrong with my life. I have everything a girl could want or need, a modern girl like me.
In the restaurant I take one of his cigarettes. He lights it for me.
It’s starting to fill up inside. All around there’s the stench of cooking, the MSG, the smell of stale carpets, ashtrays, empty glasses, the stickiness of beer on plastic floors, the warm aroma of chicken and noodles and red chilli, the soy and turmeric that comes all the way from the Chinese of Calcutta, the gobi Manchurian that crowns their hard work far from home. The noise is a womb, waiters are shouting to the kitchen, the kitchen is sizzling in white light behind the swing door. On the wall in the corner there’s a cricket match on TV. Every now and then the waiters stop in clusters to watch a replayed shot, a wicket, drunken men shout at a decision. Out on the open floor around the big round tables people are drinking, arguing, stuffing their faces, making deals. Lots of cheap white-shirted businessmen in here, lots of Punjabis, Taiwanese, Malays, Chinese.
He asks what I’m doing exactly. I tell him, literature. When he asks why, what’s the reason behind it, I hesitate and he sees this and says it’s just a question, not a trap, he only wants to know what I think. I tell him that I don’t know why. Because it’s the only thing I was ever good at. I tell him about my mother and her books. But I say I hate it now. It’s nothing like what I thought it would be.
What did you think it would be?
I shrug. I don’t know.
What are you going to do about it?
A pause. I don’t know.
He smiles. You don’t know much, do you?
I must look hurt. He corrects himself, says he’s joking. It’s just a joke. He understands how I feel. Then he asks what I’d really do, if I could do anything.
A simple question, but again I don’t know. There’s a moment of silence where I feel nervous, and to fill it I blurt out, like a confession, that I’m stuck, that they all want to get me married off, but I don’t want to get married at all.
He lets this sit between us and I think right away how I shouldn’t have given so much, because I can’t be sure of him, I have to remember this, though already I want to trust him, already I want to tell him things. He looks at me out of his large, dark eyes. I’ve been starved of this look for so long.
The waiter comes to take the order. He orders chilli chicken, Hakka noodles, veg Manchurian, fried rice, two more beers. You have an accent. I say this when the waiter is gone. He leans back in the booth and smiles. He must know that it’s part of the reason I came with him, the security it brings. It marks him out as different too. Combined with his ugliness, his confidence, his dark skin, it’s intriguing. For someone who looks like him, it turns him into a mystery.
It’s from New York, he says. I picked it up there.
You lived in New York?
He nods. For seven years.
How old are you now?
Twenty-eight.
I put the cigarette out, push the ashtray away and sip some beer.
What’s it like in New York?
He says, Why, would you like to go? It’s too bad but it’s too late, I’m already here, otherwise I’d have taken you, shown you around, it would have been my pleasure.
From across the table I can smell his aftershave and suddenly I feel cold. We’re next to the AC. I see the hairs on his arms standing on end, and the thin, faded T-shirt he wears, washed so many times that now the threads show.
New York was the making of him. It was the place where his ideas took flight. First he studied film, later psychology. He pursued journalism on and off in between, worked in a restaurant, in a record store. It’s all connected. It’s one and the same.
But he says it wasn’t the lecture halls that did it for him. Instead it was the streets. In the streets he could see it all quite clearly, walking around the Lower East Side, Chinatown, SoHo, Washington Square in the winter sun, freezing cold, up Fifth Avenue, the skyscraper canyons so vast they cut out the glow, the razor air splitting your lungs. Through the park, through Columbia, round into Harlem. He realized here he could be anyone.
He suddenly talks about the light there. He says the light in the winter in New York is beautiful, it’s so thin. It’s nothing like the Indian light, which is heavy and dull, full of dust, involved with the gods. Their light has no gods, only Weegee, Trocchi and King Kong.
He tells me about Chinatown too. Bubble tea, dumplings and pork buns, about the escalators to get into the restaurants, the revolving tables in the giant banquet halls. How easy life is there. About Washington Square and Harlem jazz beyond the park. Do I like jazz? Do I know Mingus and Coltrane? He’ll play them for me.
If it’s so good, why did you come home? He inhales the question, taps his cigarette slowly, exhales smoke, looks at me as if deciding what to say. After a long time he tells me that it’s because both his parents died, they died together in a car crash on Mathura Road. On the way back from a wedding party late at night, a truck from Haryana came on to the wrong side, the driver was drunk or asleep, they never knew. But he veered across at a junction and ploughed straight into them. There was nothing anyone could have done. They were killed right away. Of course the driver and his boy left the scene, absconded back to their native village, never to be seen again.
I tell him I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. He shrugs and tells me it’s all right, I don’t have to be sorry, it’s life and it was a year ago now, there’s no more pain. Besides, I wasn’t driving the truck, was I? So why apologize?
He describes them to me. They were doctors in private hospitals—a heart specialist and a paediatrician. Serious people, cautious, they never touched a drop of alcohol in their lives, didn’t smoke, never went on holidays, never spent money on themselves. That’s why they could afford to send him to New York, why he could stay so long there, spend so much money. They paid for his education, they paid for everything.
But now they’re dead. He looks down and closes his eyes for a second, tries to smile. He suddenly seems filled with regret.
I was the only
child, he says. The prodigal son. I inherited it all, the money, the apartments, the ancestral land. I’ll never have to work again.
He leans back and says, But that’s not the real reason I’m home. In the end it’s very simple: this is where the world is going. India’s the future and America is done.
The food comes. The ashtray is full. The waiter takes it away. The waiters, they’re all hovering in the wings, casting glances. They know him, he eats here often, but he says he’s never been here with a girl before. Certainly never a girl like me. And now he’s a conquering hero in their eyes. He looks around, he knows it, he’s pleased. He says with satisfaction that he loves these places, the service, the food, the atmosphere, the sense of brotherhood one feels, the anonymity, the way they connect to the pulse of the city. He says he knows a thousand just like this, he knows them all, all over the city, he hunts them out, blends into them, he’s a connoisseur of low-down dirty joints, side-street shacks, roadside carts, the best paratha, the best chicken, the best bad whisky, the best dal. The best dal of them all, he says, is on the Jaipur road, at one of the dhabas out there. Dal like you wouldn’t believe. He drives on these highways in the night, all night sometimes, he drives to Jaipur and back when he can’t sleep. He drives up and down the highways until the sun begins to rise.
We eat hungrily with the beer. Spill on to the tablecloth. I ask where he lives, he says in Nizamuddin West, close to the dargah, the tomb of the saint, at the point where the neighbourhood goes from rich to poor—he can sometimes hear the singing in the night, the qawwalis, the voices, the harmonium, the devotion filling the alleyways from the inside out. He says he’ll show it to me some time.
A Bad Character Page 3
