He lives there alone, it’s just him. No family, no flatmates, no maid, no cook, no servant. No prying eyes. No sentiments to offend.
I’ve never met anyone who lives alone, not once in my life. It’s such a strange, alien thing, inconceivable in my world, where lives are piled on top of one another in a mass grave.
His apartment is being renovated now, he’s fixing everything, but it’ll be complete soon and then he’d like to show it to me.
He leans forward, offers another cigarette. And what about you? Tell me. He’s very curious, he wants to know. What was I doing in the café? What was that look on my face? Where had I come from? Where was I about to go? He was watching me a long time before I saw him there. He couldn’t help himself. There was something about me, something different, he knew it immediately, knew he had to speak to me, to know me somehow. I had a rare sort of power in me.
Embarrassed, I say I don’t know about that. I came from college, that’s all, I had nowhere else to go but home, and I didn’t want to go home.
Do you go there a lot, to that café? I say I do, no one bothers me there. Not usually at least. He smiles apologetically. Did I bother you? I’m sorry. Do people bother you a lot? I bet they do.
We fall quiet, he’s thinking about something. I say, Do you miss them? He looks at the table. Do I miss them, you mean my parents? He pauses, sketches a pattern quickly on the cloth. You know, when I heard they were dead it was evening in Manhattan. I was walking on Mulberry Street, north, through Little Italy, to Lafayette, up to Union Square, I had my set routes I liked to walk. There’s nothing like walking there, you never tire of it. I was just walking, it was very cold, damp, almost snowing, and all the Christmas decorations had started to be put up around the city. I could see my breath in the air, and the noise when someone opened the door of a bar or restaurant seemed to flood the street with light. I was walking up towards Union Square when someone called, a relative, my father’s cousin, I hadn’t spoken to him in years. I hadn’t spoken with my parents in a month. I kept walking as he spoke and then I stopped. He told me they were dead.
He stubs his cigarette out, lights another.
But listen, it wasn’t grief I felt when I heard they were dead. Nothing like that. It was the most incredible feeling of a weight being lifted. It was a feeling of being free. Of being beyond judgement. Of course I loved them, but I was afraid of them too. Love and fear equally. Fear more than love maybe.
What I knew right then was that I’d never be afraid of anything again, I’d never be embarrassed or ashamed, I’d never have to hide. I could live my life exactly as I wanted.
Our eyes meet, they hold awhile.
And now I’m here in this city that I love.
I look down. I say I hate this city. I hate it here. All I want to do is leave.
He’s surprised. He can’t understand it. It seems unreasonable to him, short-sighted. Go where? He says he wouldn’t trade it for anywhere else in the world. There’s only Delhi. It has everything you need.
I tell him, That’s easy for you to say. You went away, you came back, you saw the world first. You have money and you’re a man. You can do whatever you please.
He shrugs and sits back and watches me.
Silence again.
And suddenly serious, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, he says, Let me show you. Let me show you the city then. See how good it can be. I’ll be your guide. Make your mind up for yourself. Let’s make a deal. He holds his hand out.
It’s getting late. I say I have to go home, I’ll be in trouble. He pulls his hand back and watches me with a long, indulgent smile. He says OK, I understand. But just think about it, I don’t bite, and the offer still stands. He says he’s grateful for the evening regardless. I took a chance on him and that’s rare, he’s thankful for it, most girls would run away, boring, normal girls, but I’m different, he was right about me.
Calling for the cheque, crumpled banknotes fall from his pocket, with them a pack of tissues, a pen, his battered silver Zippo. He scoops the money into a pile on the table, starts to pick through it, gives up, doesn’t even count it properly, just sucks on his cigarette and throws money together into the mess in the middle. OK, he says, that should be more than enough. He stubs the cigarette out, drains his beer, puts the rest of his things away.
Outside it’s dead quiet. The liquor store is shut, the market is as pleasant as a ruin. The heat is finally bearable too. We stand for a moment facing one another in the yellowing light and only now do I realize how drunk I am, but also how alert to him. I want to say something. I can’t think of what it is. Instead he asks if I’m OK to drive. I say I’ll be all right. He nods and tells me to follow his car as far as Jor Bagh.
Lodhi Road, opposite Safdarjung’s Tomb, at the entrance to Jor Bagh, he pulls into the service lane at the side.
Nothing stirs beyond, inside the colony the gates of the small entry roads have been locked, the rich houses inside are packed up for the night, guards are in their cabins. A pack of stray dogs cross silently beyond us into Lodhi Gardens. We speak out of our windows. He says he wants to see me again.
When?
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow …
Tomorrow at noon, right here.
OK.
OK. He smiles. I’ll be waiting. It was good to meet you. Think about what I said.
It’s only when I’m free of him that I’m spinning out into space, racing back home as if I’m being chased in the fields, by the river with the barking dogs as the sun goes down, and my mother waiting for me inside.
I left Agra for Delhi in the middle of the monsoon, when the air was cool and sweet and teeming with life. Aunty sat with me in the train, outside we etched past the rubble bungalows of my childhood, past their fields of clothes lines with sheets already soaked by the sudden rain, falling in great drops, stinging when it hit, the noise it made on the blue tarp and tin of the slums drowning everything else. Rain on the grille, the cold air twisting through like a string of magician’s silk. A note of thunder rolling through the vault of cloud, the wind rattling water through the trees. And my mother, left behind in the river and on the wind.
Inside the train people shifted, chattered, gorged themselves on food. North towards Delhi we went, past the rotten towns of dhabas and trucks, towns of mud, brick and kilns, towns of dogs and cows shaped in half-light, dirt-road towns with names like Tundla, like the names of vegetables I didn’t want to eat. In each town God’s music grew louder, the music of horns and voices, loudspeakers and temple bells, like all the rivers coming together to pour into a chasm in the centre of the earth.
Now crows cry and dogs bark, the canopy of the day grows dim. Aunty is talking at me, telling me about her splendid college days.
She doesn’t tell me about her own daughter though, the one who was born the same year as I, who died when she was four years old from childhood leukaemia caught late. Aunty sitting with her through the radiation, holding her hand, the doctors trying to keep her out of the room. They can’t, she won’t leave, she gives them no choice. But it doesn’t matter because the treatment fails, and her hand is soon left on its own.
We entered the city late in the day, the train dragging along so slowly it seemed we were on the verge of a complete stop, where all the other passengers would just jump off and walk away. But we never stopped, we only crawled on.
And in New Delhi station the red-jacketed coolies dance among the crowds, piling luggage in their private rhythm, their teak-hard bodies absurd beneath the colour of their uniforms.
We are standing on the concourse beneath the white of the station light and the old ticking clock, Aunty uncomfortable in the crowd. We’re sweating, waiting for Uncle to appear. He’s corralled some coolies, now he’s leading us over the footbridge, through a thousand bodies, until we’ve reached the end of it and climbed down to the earth, spat out at the rear of the station where whole villages sit with sacks and boxes, chain-linked together ami
d the rubble, waiting for something to come.
The sun has squeezed its last light into the sky. There is an overwhelming darkness that carries no breeze, which traps the city in an avalanche of heat.
Uncle leads us through the wreckage of the car park towards the car that is gleaming and beautiful save for the dent in its side and the young man with the sly body leering there. Uncle barks at him, he doesn’t move at first, then he slides himself into the driver’s seat and settles with a smirk. We climb in, the luggage is packed away, Uncle dismisses the coolies with some notes. The driver’s eyes move over me as he reverses and I shift myself out of his gaze.
Past Delhi Gate, consuming blackness, splintered headlights through the scratched glass screen. The whine of monstrous buses pulling across the lanes. On the horizon factories ink their smoke into the deepening sky. Then driving out over the shrouded Yamuna, a demented pastoral scene in the river beneath, of medieval huts within the reeds.
We reach the other side, cross a busy junction. The first line of buildings gives way to a million more, the road lined with shops of all kinds, white lights selling kitchen appliances, clothing, sweets. The glow of hanging bulbs that crowd the pavement casts strange shadows on faces. A crowd throngs around a temple; many hands surge up to reach the bell.
In east Delhi, through the thicket maze of streets, we turn to come to a road with a security booth and a guard holding a barrier attached to a rope.
In the colony, the houses press in on all sides, big blocks of Punjabi wealth, three storeys high, gilded with business money inside. The narrow road ahead is heaped with piles of sand where construction carries on. The car slaloms through to an open space where three faded tower blocks rise. At the foot of one, a gang of kids play with sticks. A mound of rotting garbage is dumped further to the side.
Inside the tower, the doors of the lift close, its thin metal walls pop and groan. On the walls lewd graffiti is scrawled in marker pen, on the floor paan stains look like giant mosquito kills. The lift doors quiver open on the tower’s seventh floor. From the vacant square in the hallway wall the city shimmers north-east, the houses and slums forming a causeway out past Moradabad, running all the way out to Nepal.
Aunty’s apartment is just like her body. Lacquered. The air inside barely stirs. Statues of gods everywhere, in brass, gold, wood, furniture of the darkest kind, thick red carpets on marble floors. Uncle pours himself a whisky and strolls into his room. The maid is frying onions in the kitchen, singing film songs. Outside you can feel that it’s going to rain, a thunderstorm is coming, rattling the AC, making the pigeons babble nervously on the ledge.
She shows me to my room. It is long and thin, lined on one side with white plastic wardrobes. There is a desk and a bed and an old lamp, and just beside the bed a door into a bathroom of my own.
I sit on the bed for a long time. I press my palm against the window, try to connect it to the sleeping oven outside.
In the end I go into the bathroom, lock the door and close my eyes. Open them again in the weird medicinal light. When I look inside the mirror I see myself almost for the first time. Almost adult, almost there. On this monsoon evening all the electricity of the universe is in the sky. The storm outside is building very slowly, it won’t break for hours. And the muezzins start their call to prayer, minaret to minaret, erupting in faith, along with the bleat of a train somewhere else.
The city is close to me now, I think I know it. Millions of lives, hearts, lungs, arms flailing and stabbing, begging, beating, pleading, praying, pushing gums against teeth, teeth against flesh, tongues lolling, bodies rubbing in the dark, drunk, fraying, frayed hems on clothing, loose stitches, goats, chickens, one great cry, the scent of it, the red dust and diesel in my nostrils and my mouth. I think I know it all. Then it ends.
Aunty walks through the door with the tea that’s always cold. She says to hurry, the neighbours are coming, coming to meet me so put on my good clothes, pull my hair back off my face. There are so many people she wants me to meet. There’s no time to lose.
Later that night, at dinner, she talks about the girl in the window, in the tower block across the way. She says she’s locked up for days sometimes. That father of hers, he’s a beastly man, he drinks and locks her away, the mother died of course, the son ran off and won’t come back. He sends boys to get his liquor for him, gives them ten rupees to fetch it, it’s shameful, they come back with those bottles, the little ones.
Uncle shakes his head in silent disgust.
Quarter bottles, domestic.
Did you ever hear of such a thing? I say drink is a curse, I really do. I tell Ranjan to take water with his whisky, but does he listen to me? No he does not, it’s my fate to be ignored. It’s a real shame, but it’s how the world is these days, the modern world of course, the lack of morals. Well … just look at this city, look at him across the way, he’s a drunk, that’s very clear. His daughter too, no good will come of her. The way she stands in that window looking out at the sky with that moon-face of hers. Who wants to see a face like that? Better to keep your blinds down, don’t pay any attention to her. But all in all, yes, it’s a nice set of people here, a decent society, there’s only this one black mark against character. But what to do? We’re good people after all, and we don’t like to complain.
Things I remember from the first year in Delhi:
Someone is saying his morning prayers, his voice is echoing off the tiles, as if he’s in a bathroom, but he can’t be. I don’t know if he’s above or below me, in the same building or not. Monotony, it lasts twenty minutes or more. I use each one of them. As long as his prayers continue I allow myself to sleep.
From another direction, every morning without fail, a man retching, dry-heaving, putting his fingers down his throat to remove the blackness that blows across the city at night; pranayama maybe, three or four times, regular spaces. Twenty seconds only.
I hear the horns of the trains in the deepness of night, but when the light comes up they’re different, callous and shrill like cheap army bugles. Their noises collapse into the day. There’s no pleasure on a train after sunrise.
The same car reverses at the same time in the morning, always around 6 a.m. The reverse gear plays a song: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you. Over and over and over. Amplified around the towers.
I went to a tarot reader too, went with the college girls. This lady had set up in one of the bookstores in Khan, people had heard about her, they started to talk, saying she was the real deal, not a fake at all. She didn’t just tell you the good things, she told misfortune too. This is what caught my ear.
So we all go there, my classmates and I, and each girl takes her turn, coming out the other side with stories of marriage, academic success, minor setbacks, triumph in the end.
When I sit down across from her I’m surprised, because there’s no theatre to her at all. She’s tall, with long, flowing, white-tinged hair, kajal in her eyes, a red bindi, forty years old. She smiles carefully, asks me my name. It’s only on revealing the cards that her smile begins to fade, replaced by a look of concentration first, then hesitation, until her expression is cold and fixed. She slows down, seems lost in herself. When it’s finished she looks up as if someone new has sat down. She says, I’m sorry. She says nothing else for a while. Composes herself. Shifts in her seat. She says, almost to herself, I’m sorry, but I’ve not seen this before.
She looks at me again and takes hold of my hands, runs them between her fingers. Do you plan to go abroad? she says. I shake my head, I don’t know. She says, Perhaps you should.
Why?
She tells me, It’s better for you that way. Better you leave India as soon as you can. You should get out of the country and never come back. Terrible things are in your cards. If you stay here only bad things will happen. If you stay here the cards say you will die.
I stood up and walked away and I never told anyone what she said, though I
buried the words inside me where they lived on, like a splinter over which the skin has regrown.
Now Dirty Delhi. Ice cream in metal carts. Grapefruit, watermelon, cut open, surrounded by flies, packed in ice packed full of amoebic dysentery, held in the hands of boys with stunted nails at bus stops, holding them up to the window for a grubby note of exchange. Chunks of melting ice and the rind of fruit eaten by cows, dogs, rats, monkeys, rats the size of dogs. Exhaust fumes from the buses and the autos and the cars. From Indraprastha Power Station. Battered nimbu-pani carts, books on sale at the stop lights: Mein Kampf, Harry Potter, Who Moved My Cheese? Hijras with stubble flashing their comely eyes on the Ring Road near Raj Ghat, crows above the latticed balconies of Daryaganj, where they sell books on the pavements on Sundays and battered magazines, where they make juice in bright displays. Delhi, yes. Black bilgewater from every orifice.
The girl in the other tower fascinated my window dreams. Was she real? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t see her for a long time, didn’t even hear her, and then I did. Sometime in the brief autumn of that first year I saw her moon-face looking out of the open window at the sky. As soon as she appeared she turned back round, the way someone turns when they’re being called in a film. Then, like a new word you learn, I saw her often. And one day she was at the bottom of the tower, just as I was coming back from college. She was carrying a couple of saris in her arms, folded into their plastic sleeves, walking into my own block on some errand. It was strange to see her in the flesh and she didn’t recognize me. She was wearing shades, big black plastic ones on a frozen face. We walked into the elevator together and I half smiled. She gave a half-smile in return, but it was almost withering in disdain, or at least that was how it felt. I was tempted to speak but what would I say? She kept the shades on, was wearing blue jeans, a black sweater, very pale, quite plump, straight black hair. We rode up the elevator in silence until she got out at the fourth floor.
A Bad Character Page 4
