I met her another day and she recognized me then. We were in the car park and she offered me a lift. Where was I going? To college, I said. She said she’d take me some of the way.
We sat in a wary silence at first. Then without warning she began to speak, defiantly, almost scornfully, she said, I know you, you live in the other block across from me, I’ve seen you. I see you sometimes in the window. You always look so sad. Then she said, Guess what? Don’t you dare tell anyone. I’m going to run away. You’ll see soon enough. But don’t you dare tell anyone.
She tells me her story: her boyfriend loves her and she loves him, but he’s an Old Delhi Christian and the families will never agree, will not even meet. So they’re going to run away and start again, away from family, away from everything. They have a way out too. He’s a chef in one of the five-star hotels, nothing special yet, right at the bottom, but he has talent. He can chop faster than anyone she’s ever seen. And a chef can get work anywhere, that’s what he says. She says it’s all arranged. He knows an agent who specializes in these things. They’ll fly to Montreal. But before Montreal they’ll go to Nigeria, to Lagos—it’s a simple matter of passports, money, visas and bending the rules.
When I say nothing in return she looks at me with that bold eye of hers. You don’t believe me? Well, what do I care. As long as you keep your mouth shut. You better promise. I promise, and we drive the rest of the way in silence until she drops me off beyond the bridge.
He was there at twelve the next day, waiting as he said he would be, the engine ticking over, exhaust fumes paddling out over the scorched asphalt earth. No breeze in the sky, only the motionless blue, and the roads were all quite empty, stricken by the burning sun.
I pulled my car up behind his, sat for a moment, got out, walked to the passenger side, knocked on the window.
Behind the blacked-out windows, in the AC cool, there’s smoke around his head, curling in blue, the stereo turned up so loud you can hear it outside, playing Mozart of all things. He says it blows the cobwebs away.
Here he is with such a strange look on his face, fierce, almost tribal, caught unawares. Then a great smile breaks out, he opens the door and he asks if I want to go for a drive.
Inside, through the plastic blast of the AC, his car smells of cigarettes and aftershave. Lived in, a private domain, the inside of a brain. There are piles of books, computer journals, old copies of Crime & Detective, CD cases, junk food wrappers and printouts on the seats and on the floor. Throw them to the back, he says. Stuff them in the glove box, wherever, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t apologize for the mess, doesn’t care. Doesn’t try to be proper. In the back of the car it looks like someone might have slept there. I ask half jokingly if he did and he says, No, not last night, but sometimes, when I’m too far gone. It’s good to wake up sometimes and not know where you are.
I still have my misgivings about going off like this, about being alone here with him. He could be anyone, he could take me somewhere, hurt me. But more than this I have misgivings about his face, and what this means, the implication of the step I’m about to take, beyond which at a certain point I cannot return. The question of what it will finally say about me.
We’re driving through Lodhi Colony, around Mehar Chand, on the way to Lajpat Nagar, skirting the top of Defence Colony. He knows all the shortcuts, the alleyways. He cuts through the middle lanes, through inside lanes hemmed in by houses with back walls that have no windows to see the garbage piles, through the veins and arteries, then out on to a familiar road to my delight. He takes pleasure in dissecting Delhi, carving it up like this for me. And suddenly, in this certainty of his, I don’t feel afraid. It is as if I’ve slipped into another world, driving through a city unfurling like a tapestry, listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 in D minor.
He asks how it was, getting home last night. I say I didn’t realize I was so drunk. He nods and smiles. And how was this Aunty of yours? Did you get into trouble with her? I say I slipped in while she was watching her soaps, managed to get to my room and shower, change my clothes, brush my teeth, but came out to find her sitting on my bed sniffing the air.
I can just imagine it, he says. And what then? What did you do?
I’d told her I had gone for a movie with friends. She said I should have called her if I knew I was going to be out late, I know how she feels about me driving home in the dark.
Yes Aunty, I know, I’m sorry. You’ve told me a hundred times before, I must call, or don’t even stay out at all, come back before the sun goes down. But I have to be out for college, and it’s rush hour early on, I’d be stuck in traffic for hours if I drove back then, so it’s better that I wait until the traffic dies. You don’t drive yourself, so you don’t understand.
She sighs and shakes her head and says, Oh, you know how I hate that car.
It’s true that Aunty hates the car. At the breakfast table she says she doesn’t like to think of me alone, being alone is a sure sign of trouble, it attracts attention, it’s a provocation to some. And what if I were to break down? What if there was an accident? What would happen then?
There’s some truth in this, I know. But the real danger is of being out of control.
And though I stay in the library sometimes and do what I’m supposed to do, sometimes I also drive.
Sometimes I drive to the Grand Trunk Road and think about the mountains beyond. Sometimes I drive towards the airport to see the planes taking off. Sometimes I park near Kamla Nagar or go down among the old colonial bungalows of Civil Lines. But parking does attract attention. It has its own problems. What is she doing there? What does she want? Is she a whore? Is she waiting for a man? At traffic lights, in the middle of a jam. Stuck behind cages of chickens stacked in the backs of tempos, waiting to be killed. They do notice me, these eyes, discovering I’m all alone in this city of meat and men.
And filling gas at the station the attendant strokes my hand when I hold the money out to pay. But still I drive around the city tempting fate, fingering the walls of the cell for the point at which it will break.
When we drive I ask him more about his life, about America and New York. He tells me about the cinema, the theatre, the galleries, the music he’s discovered, the indie shows, the club scene. He describes the parts of the city; he walks me through the streets, peers across Manhattan from the top of the World Trade Center, from the Empire State Building, rides the L train to Brooklyn. He comes back to Fifth Avenue and the canyon walls there, blotting out the sun.
He tells me about something else, on Fifth Avenue, right by the Empire State Building. It’s January and he’s walking north, the crowds are at the crossroads, all starting to cross mechanically before the red of the traffic light, not waiting for the green man because there’s no traffic to be seen on either side of the road. Both sides of the crowd are stepping forward, they’re about to meet like two sides in war, when all of a sudden there’s a terrible scream in the air, as if someone has been stabbed, so terrible that everyone stops in their tracks, the entire crowd freezes still. It’s a bicycle courier riding right through the gap at full speed. His voice is the only thing that parted the crowd, his voice and nothing else, no pain, no knife, no gun. It was amazing, he says. It struck him right there, the certainty of the rider, the reaction of the crowd. How a crowd can be controlled. How the bike would have crashed if he’d failed.
Every day we meet like this. I skip college; I tell Aunty I’m in the library studying for my exams, but then we meet and we drive and we talk. We talk through everything that needs to be said. He asks a thousand questions of me, about my life, as if he’s reconstructing every scene, I tell him everything, my mother, my father, childhood, my suspended dreams. We meet in the same place every time. Like a good-luck charm: Jor Bagh, Safdarjang’s Tomb. I meet him here, park my car and we drive.
I never know where we’re going, never ask, never want to know. He drives fast through the traffic, drives as if the other cars are not there, says this
is the only way to do it, like you’re in a video game, as if there’s no one else in the world.
And in the car he watches me, has his eyes only half on the road.
One day I meet him at 8 a.m. and instead of driving we walk across to Lodhi Gardens in the pleasant morning heat. Feel the grass beneath our feet. Delhi has never been like this for me—I tell him so, I say I haven’t known moments like these, this city is a prison with nowhere to go, but now this, so strange, a morning’s walk, parakeets fluttering between the trees. Ficus infectoria, Plumeria alba, Latin names on signs. Along the rows of royal palm, on their bulbous bases, the carved graffiti of lovers’ names. We stroll with the joggers, the walkers, the well-to-do and well-heeled, the retired army men of Def. Col., the judges and politicians of Lodhi Estate and Jor Bagh, the movers and shakers, the same ones who shop at Khan, the ones who have guards with rifles at their gates.
And sometimes after the grass on our feet, after Lodhi’s regal ruins, below skies that are serene with cloud and touched by a tender breeze, we walk along to the Ambassador Hotel, inside to the Yellow Brick Road, for coffee and eggs at the breakfast buffet, for cornflakes and orange juice and toast, to sit in that bright sun-bleached room, poring over the menu and laughing at the words, pretending we’re on holiday, seeing the pale tourists and starched businessmen passing through. It’s a city transformed.
For three weeks it goes on like this. A quivering note sustained. He shows me this city, reveals it to me.
Back at home these days I can barely believe this is happening to me. When he drops me to my car at Jor Bagh and says good night I don’t dare look in the mirror.
In the fire of Delhi we drive down Janpath, past the Imperial Hotel, on the way to Palika Bazaar in Connaught Place. He says he wants to show me something here, something I’d never find alone.
We leave the blasted light of the day behind to walk the slope to the market underground, past the metal detectors that don’t work, into the throng of subterranean bodies buying things. So I don’t get lost he takes me by the hand and pulls me along. We navigate the shops, the people, the plastic, the video games, the men selling belts and hats and bags, the mountains of cheap bright junk that Delhi consumes. By the hand we steal through the crowd; he knows exactly where he’s going: a faceless electronics store with an open front, small as a bathroom, identical to the rest.
In the shop he pushes through the crowd to reach a spiral metal staircase at the back and climbs straight up without pause.
The room above, this attic, has barely enough space for one to stand up straight, no windows, only bare bulbs, a fan blowing the stale hot air, and walls lined with cupboards containing thousands upon thousands of pirate DVDs. That’s what he wants me to see, any film you need, anything you want. All the foreign films, going back a hundred years. The man who follows us up proudly says that all the foreigners come here, the embassy people, the film-makers too, actors, everyone, everyone comes to me. A black-market list of foreign films, Bergman, Kurosawa, Renais, Truffaut, Godard, the more obscure ones. They play a game with one another, he reels off a name and the man goes to a cupboard, picks out a stack, flips through it like a banker counting notes and hands over the correct plastic sleeve. He laughs, he can do this all day, he says.
They know each other well, he’s a good customer, he’s already devoured the list. Carnivorous in his tastes, he’s bought and seen everything. He says he wanted to show me. He says, Choose whatever you want, pick as many as you like, it’s my treat. The man slides open a cupboard and pulls out five piles. Shouts down the stairs for the boy to bring tea.
Out of the buried heat, at the stop lights on the edge of CP, pink-skinned tourists roam out of season on the pavements, on the short leash from the Imperial Hotel, ambushed by chess sets and peacock feathers and maps, swooped on by the hawkers and beggar girls. As we drive back south along Janpath, he motions over the wall to the Imperial, says, Do you know you can go into the hotel, leave your car with the valet, go in through the lobby, along the corridor, past the bathrooms, take a right at the bar, go outside along a pathway to the pool. At the pool you can give a fake name and room and you’ll be handed a bottle of water, a towel and be left completely alone. A day by the pool, away from it all. It’s possible. You just have to walk in as if you own the place, that’s the trick; it’s all about how you behave, and how you look, you have to go in with a certain disdain. It also helps if you wear shades.
I ask him about the PRESS sticker, the one on the back of the car—he says it’s not real, he bought it in Karol Bagh, it’s there to scare the cops, give them second thoughts at least, and also to open doors. A sticker and also a card. Any trouble and you wave it in their face, you buy some time with the right kind of talk. Another thing, he says, handing me his wallet. Open it. There, take out the top card on the right, the thick white one.
It reads: Deputy Commissioner of Police.
Do you know him?
No, he says, But I interviewed him once for a fake magazine, one I invented just for fun, to see what he’d say, to get hold of his card.
For three weeks it goes on. Three weeks like this, a glorious three. Giving the lie to the claim that time’s a linear thing, a simple proposition from A to B. He says, You’ll remember these days for the rest of your life. And though I laugh at him here, it’s true. I will, I do. These three weeks that are amputated and cauterized, preserved in memory’s specimen jar, lasting longer than the years before or since.
I still take refuge in their peaks. I watch the sun rise from them sometimes, sitting above the clouds before the avalanche of the present takes the ground from my feet. I’m still a girl here. My heart has not yet been broken in two. Everything has yet to happen, though it has already begun. He is still ugly, I am still beautiful. I am turned on. But if I stay here too long I get lost.
He tells me his story, talks to me about his exacting family, his schooldays, how he was a rebel with perfect grades, how his parents had schooled him beforehand, made him learn so many things, made him learn piano too, how the girls loved him for it, for his rebellion, his skill. How he could get away with murder if he wanted to.
He tells me about the girlfriends he had. About a girl he was with in school, how once she went away with her family on the train and he chased the train all night on a whim, drove after it in his car just to be at the station when she stepped off. Just to see the look on her face.
I ask him about the girls. Has he had many? With a casual smile he asks, Why do you want to know? And I say, Just because, that’s all. So he tells me, Yes, he’s had some. Enough to know. Would I like to know too?
We’re driving down past AIIMS towards Green Park, towards the Outer Ring Road; we’ve been driving around for an hour. He looks at me, considers my silence.
I tell him I want to know, I want to know about them all, each and every one. What they were like, what they thought about the world, what he did with them.
Every time we meet we talk like this, pick it up and carry on. Each time I ask him and he tells me more. He willingly talks, describes their bodies to me, their lives, their pleasures and pains, the sex they had, how they fucked, the way their bodies combined. He watches my reaction to that word, and I stir, and every time we meet I ask for more.
We eat too, we measure life by our meals in the places he shows me, the canteen at the Andhra Bhavan, Basil & Thyme, Alkauser in Chanakyapuri. We eat in Connaught Place more than anywhere.
In the decaying chandelier ballroom of the United Coffee House, we have our own waiter here, we don’t like to be served by anyone else. I tell myself that he knows something of us, that he’s complicit somehow. This waiter of ours, his face is gaunt, high-cheekboned, with thick black hair, an Alexander nose, hard soul eyes. He’s very handsome in a mountain way, Kashmiri, Himachali or Afghani, a killer, a nomad brought to earth, serving coffee and chicken à la Kiev. We decide he must be an actor in the end, one who is resting, or essaying a role, never just a waiter. His
arrogance is peerless, matched only by his consummate professionalism, his excellence in the role, his simultaneous mastery and disdain for it. No one flicks a napkin like him, with such insouciant grace. He glides around the hall, never hurried or flustered. When it comes to your order he’s almost disappointed by your choice, or else bored by the indecision when you can’t pick your plate. A doubtful eye is placed somewhere else in the room, a hairline sneer appears. No matter how much you smile, he never smiles back, only nods. No matter how many times you thank him, however big a tip you leave, there’s no reply. When he walks away we laugh. And yet he claims us every time, when we walk in he sees us and seats us.
In the restaurant we pore over the menu and gossip about the other diners, spy on them and make up their stories in this colonial relic, this memory of the Raj. We guess what people do, what they mean to one another, who’s conducting an affair with whom, a century of secrets clinging to the stucco vaulted ceiling. Old genteel Delhi. A direct line to the British days, Ludlow Castle and Court Road. Before they bring in plasma TVs, before our waiter vanishes, never to be seen again.
We drive and we drive and he talks. He wants to show me every inch of the city, wants to exhaust me, fill my body with it, he wants me to know. To know the Ridge, the tail end of the Aravalli Hills stretching all the way from Gujarat, bursting up through the city like a dinosaur’s back, one hundred and fifty million years old, older than the Himalaya itself, cutting across Delhi to die after the Hindu Rao Hospital and the Mutiny Memorial. To die without ceremony by the Yamuna.
A Bad Character Page 5
