Across boulders there are ghosts that haunt the Delhi Ridge. Across boulders, bodies of women have been draped rag-dollish, cut up, mutilated, their heads caved in with rocks, rotting to the earth, feeding the wild dogs. Bodies of men too, tumbled down in ruins of red, red rock. Across boulders, looming large, above and beyond, where the demons hide out in the scrub. We drive and we drive as the sun goes down, and here within the half-dead trees monkeys gather and men roam; they appear without warning at the side of the road, running out sometimes to flag you down.
It’s the Southern Ridge he loves the best, he drives me there, around Tughlaqabad, the ruins of the ancient city, its desolate brawn of stone. He tells the legend of the Sufi saint, how he cursed the emperor who built these walls, condemned the fortress to be barren for evermore, populated only by animals and goatherds.
From the wild heart of Delhi this lonely city stands. Intruded and built upon, abandoned. There are forgotten monuments here, lost dreams. We’ve parked awhile by their side. Look, he says, watch the trees. Murders happen all the time, people vanish, men, women and children, in such a barren spot, the desolation of madmen, mystics, whores. A place as wild as anywhere in the world. Isn’t it wonderful? He says he walks inside himself sometimes, there’s nowhere else like it in the world.
Each day, as if our time is running out, we drive and talk. From Vasant Kunj to the farmhouses of Chhatarpur, through ancient Mehrauli.
Back again, overlooking Nehru Place. He stops to park at the side of the road, lights a cigarette. The scars of the twentieth century, the brutal Soviet blocks brushed in fine, choking dust, the crowds swarming in the gaps, charging the black market of computers, hardware, software. I’m worn down by him. He says, Look at what we’ve built. How wonderful it is to be alive.
Crepuscular. Delhi creeps as we go, the sun sinks behind the earth once more, bathes in the rotten Yamuna, drowns there. The temples erupt, the mosques, the droning of men’s voices, the keening of every faith, the desperate plea for the sun to rise again, the bats and the birds, the great tambourine shake, a bedsheet shook over the balcony to the street. And the beasts of the Ridge are going wild, making a noise of pylons and wires, a cassette being rewound, unfurling tape against magnet, the madness of the dying sun, inducing ritual panic as old as the earth.
In a city such as this you still know the sun. You know the moment it appears, you hear the bells ringing madly in praise, hear the chanting and the call to prayer leaping into the sky, the wild dogs barking in the alleyways, rising from their beds of construction sand and dirt.
Driving to Vasant Vihar, where Baba Ganganath Road meets Nelson Mandela Marg, he stops the car at the high circle of rock that forms a roundabout there. Houses are built up there the way teeth grow from gums, hewn rock cemented on to ancient stone to make squat rooms painted in blue, pink, green, painted with advertising for soft drinks and petrol and butter. A cluster of families are living as if they’ve been shipwrecked, marooned. He says he goes and talks to them sometimes, spends hours sitting with them, telling them about the world, asking questions about their lives, making them laugh with his strangeness, with his wisdom, wandering in and out of them like a holy fool.
Further and further, more tangled in these lines, into the inferno night we go, into the reeling streets with the windows down, south past the pharmacies that leech on to AIIMS, past the families of patients waiting outside, past the narrow shopfronts and signboards of Green Park to the Qutb Minar, beyond the tombs and scrub into the desert, free of bodies and cars and rupee notes. Into the foundation emptiness of Gurgaon, to the construction sites that stretch monolithic, as far as the eye can see. He wants to show me the future. He wants to share the new world with me. We drive down these long, straight desert roads, built with nothing at their ends. They suddenly fall away around girders and steel poles. Construction appears, towering shells of concrete with sodium vapours illuminating the workers in the sky.
He gets off the road, turns the headlights out. Behind on the horizon Delhi is seething. And south, nothing but the vast nameless black of India exists. He says this is where the future lives. Apartment complexes, offices, townships, golf courses, malls, whole cityscapes not yet built, with names like Green Meadows and Marble Arch.
There’s barely a sound out here. Only the distant echo of hammered metal. He lights a cigarette and touches my hand.
Holi. Here and now, as I write this. It’s the end of winter, the beginning of spring. This morning the moon is the fullest it has been in eighteen years. The dogs are barking outside, going crazy. They’ve been barking since three in the morning without rest, echoing through the valley, in the courtyards, the front yards, the compounds, the jungle, the alleyways, the lanes.
Since three I’ve been awake.
I can feel my body being pulled skyward, or else the moon is about to fall on to me.
They play Holi in the morning, take the coloured powder and throw it about, smear it on your face. But I have nothing to do with that any more.
The Holi of my childhood, still laughing and running down the dry channels of the ditches, along the parched raised pathways between the fields, running with a paper windmill in my hand, colour scattered everywhere through the sky, laughing. But colour is used for revenge too, for spite and for power. For the lack of it. Under the cover of celebration a fistful of colour can smash against bone. Swarm upon a girl in an alleyway.
I’m remembering Holi in Delhi now. In the first year, a stubborn refusal to go outside as the men drink bhang and whip each other into a frenzy. The way trouble can start real fast. Semen dyed a dozen ways. All under the cover of colour. In the marketplace, hunting for prey, the spurned lover, the jilted heart. All under the cover of fun.
Holi just before him, Aunty is chastising me, cajoling me. Telling me I should be joining in, calling me difficult, saying it’s tradition, it’s who we are. But she’s afraid of me too. She can’t understand a person who doesn’t want to belong to anything.
Descending into the city, driving at its heart. He takes me into Paharganj, that ink blot on the consciousness of Delhi, the spot on the map obscuring it black. One of those places good Delhiites don’t go, a ghetto of backpacker foreigners and dirty liars, con men, beggars, cheats, a place of drugs, a place of adventure, a Disneyland of white skin, vacancy taped across the eyes, foreigners like film-set refugees waiting to be airlifted, and those who make a living of them, of their need and their fear, waiting for the new arrivals, picking out the weak from the strong.
This place in April, the touts and crooks, the toilet paper on sale. Israelis, Japanese, Germans, English, not many Americans, one or two with tousled, floppy hair and chinos, clutching guidebooks. And the Japanese boy whose face is on the wall of every guest house and café—missing eight months, last seen in Manali, presumed dead.
He knew this place well; he guided me through the alleys with ease. He took me to see a friend of his who is frozen in my mind even now. Franklin John.
Perhaps it’s because of the photograph. We had a camera with us that day, he carried his Pentax and took a picture of Franklin and it came out all blurred on black-and-white film, but somehow that suited him, it matched his face. Taken in the smeared room in the backstreets, junked to his eyeballs, full of grace. The patron saint of Paharganj.
We are walking away from the main bazaar, he knows where he’s going, he cuts in and out of the alleyways until he reaches a guest house full of travellers, climbs the stairs inside and raps on a door.
In the photograph of Franklin his face is obscured, his body too, though its outline says enough. It holds the spectre of his muscles, their graphitic blur. Though wasted away, they are still enough to kill a man.
He was in motion the moment the photo was shot, talking at us until the needle hit the vein. He moved around the room in anticipation of it the way a boxer moves around the ring, his mouth the jab, the needle the knockout punch. In his fifties, a body of hardship and experience, an Irishman from
Galway, with a history of junk as long as his arm. His hair is cropped close to his head, a Caesar cut for a backstreet emperor. His eyes are blue. They fix on you, they don’t shy away. He could be dead now too, I’ll never know.
I see him frozen in this photo and then I see him in the flesh with the needle in his hand full of the heroin he’s bought from the Kashmiris downstairs. It’s shit, he says. He talks about the good stuff, the opium in Pushkar, the junk in Amritsar. He knows India in a way I never will, a country that doesn’t exist for me. There’s the malarial buzz in the corridor, the underwater echo of sounds, the drone of fans, the faint strumming of guitars in other rooms. Check the door is locked shut. I watch him hold the lighter to the spoon, his bare feet collecting dust. There is so much care to his preparation, it’s just like puja.
He finds the vein, presses the syringe into his skin, his eyes glaze over into glorious death. Then he’s crouched in the cold shower, naked aside from his underwear, I see him through the open door. Afterwards he crawls, pulls some trousers on, drags himself under the bed and bends into a ball, mumbling to himself for an hour like an old man. There are four other people in the room, two Israelis, a Dane and an Englishman, all stoned out of their minds, just back from a trip to the mountains. I’m introduced as a friend but they don’t care. They’ll forgive anything, they don’t know what’s going on. They pass the chillum around invoking Shiva. He takes it and inhales harder than everyone.
He asked about Aunty all the time, about my mother and father, even Uncle. He was fascinated by them all, he wanted to get to the heart of them. He listened, rapt at my reports of the dinner table, at my memories of childhood, he laughed at their ideas, nodded lovingly at my life. He said everyone was afraid, because they couldn’t see any more. But you don’t owe them anything. Why do you cling so hard?
Then one day, instead of driving, he asks if I’d like to see his apartment. He says the renovations are almost done, that it only needs painting and he can unpack and settle in. Would I like to see it? I say I would.
His apartment is like no place I’ve seen. Cut off from Delhi, cut off from the earth, turned into a kind of maze, then sealed. Terracotta and black granite floors. There are empty spaces cut into the inside walls, they look out into the central hallway so fragments of every room can be viewed, so nothing is private inside.
He says he designed it himself. As if it were a bunker at the end of the world.
He walks me around: bedroom, hallway, kitchen, living room, balcony, one looking into the next. It’s only in the bathroom at the rear where the original home remains untouched, old, charming, possessed by the clank of pipes, with the big pale light that streams through the frosted glass. In here you can feel the heat and light of Delhi.
We sit out on his balcony for an hour in the morning sun, among the boxes of his life that are waiting to be unpacked. The balcony is surrounded by a high bamboo fence with creeping plants all around, so you can only see the sky. Without friends, without family, without servants. He says you can walk around naked if you want, no one would ever know.
A few days later we’re driving from CP around India Gate. I am holding an empty Coke can between my legs. He looks at it and says, Can I get that for you? Can I throw it away? And I say, No, it’s OK. I like something between my legs.
Pointedly. A calculated phrase. He looks at me.
This is all it takes.
All the marriage meetings I ever had ended in the same rejection. What they never understood was that I had rejected them long before they saw my face.
The first boy was from a middle-class family much like my own. He had a steady job as an engineer. Aspirational, shining with belief, with the ambition to go to the States himself. He had learned his role by rote. We met in the Defence Colony Barista in the March of my first Delhi year. I had no car then. Aunty escorted me, waiting in the back seat like a pimp while her driver ate chaat in the market outside. She made me wear a kurta and jeans, to be both modern and traditional at once.
He was already waiting for me inside. He had his laptop open at the low table. I recognized him from the photo in the résumé that had been sent, that had just been thrust beneath my nose, and he looked up and recognized me in turn. Aunty had sent a photograph of me, taken at a studio set up at one of the wedding functions we’d attended. In a sari, a little tipsy, in the glare of the artificial light, with a posed, enforced smile, the photo stripped me of my life.
I remember very clearly the pen he kept in the top pocket of his shirt, also the new glasses he wore. They were designer, he proudly said. But his face I don’t recall, his was like the million others I saw. He was simply his glasses and his pen and the starched white shirt. He talked to me from the start about the importance of family, about his mother, what his mother thought about things. My mother says, he said many times, and he listed what they looked for in a girl. I sat across from him silent, sullen, angry with myself because I had agreed to be there at all. He said he wanted a girl who was simple, respectful, but educated of course, able to have her own opinions. But she must be respectful to his mother above all else. They must get on or there’d be no point. I felt quite sick at the mechanics of it. But Aunty had told me again and again, Marriage is not about love, when will you understand this? Love is a luxury that doesn’t exist in the real world.
I asked him drily if it wouldn’t be better for me to meet his mother alone. Without a flicker of understanding he said no.
When it came it was one of those polite rejections, where his mother tells Aunty that he’s found someone else absolutely perfect that very same day, what timing, what coincidence. What to do? Aunty smiles. What to do. But she’s kicking herself. What did you say? You don’t know how to talk to people, to show yourself in the best light, you don’t stand up straight, you don’t smile.
The next boy was from a south Delhi business family, the only son and heir, twenty-six years old. We met in another coffee shop, all around us you could spy these marriage meetings taking place. This boy was more arrogant, wealthy, dressed in a designer shirt, he wore his fat with pride, was well groomed, his pouting lips protruding from his face, his eyes heavy lidded, stirring his tea very slow. Well-manicured fingers perched on the table like exotic birds. There was something in his manner that spoke of cruelty to me. He talked at length, about his Hyundai, his plan to replace it with a Mercedes before the year was out. And all the while he eyed me with a measure of disdain. Why he ever agreed to meet me in the first place I’ll never know. But Aunty was punching above her weight, saying, Nothing succeeds like success.
We make love on the first of May, Labour Day. A day for the workers.
His apartment is being painted, it’s full of them but he sends them home, tries to explain the concept of it as he does, this day to honour the working people of the world, but it’s lost on them completely, everything about it is lost. They down tools and go anyway.
He says, Go home, get drunk, make love to your wives. They look at me as they go.
He’d waited until they arrived to tell them they were free, until they’d begun to work, to make it worthwhile, to see their reaction. Because theatre was important. But we’d planned this. I’d told him I wanted to know what it was like, I was ready, I wanted it to be him.
We’ve been drinking since the workers left. Drinking to remove the awkwardness in me.
Most of the other rooms have been finished, already painted in purple, black, red or ink blue. But in the bedroom the walls are still white.
Everything smells of paint in here. The smell catches in my nostrils, the back of my throat. The AC is on high. Outside it’s approaching forty degrees. Beating the earth.
In the kitchen the fridge is well stocked: water, juice, soft drinks, a crate of beer. Several bottles of good whisky in the cupboard. There are cold cuts in the fridge, from the charcuterie in Vasant Vihar, bresaola, serrano, chorizo. He teaches me how to say these words, how to say “charcuterie,” from the French, obsolete: char
for flesh, cuite for cooked, cooked flesh, flesh that is cooked, which we eat.
He pours a glass of whisky for me, Caol Ila. Teaches me to say that too, tapping the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, mixing it with some drops of clean water, saying, This is the way. In the dhabas the whisky’s dirty, you drink it with Coke, with soda, but not this. He rolls it around the glass. It coats the side and falls, like amber for fossils. Smell it, he says, close your eyes. And he raises the glass to my nose. It smells of earth and sea and salt, Bombay without the heat, in the glint of stars and mud and leaves, in woodsmoke sluiced through rain. Now taste it. I take the glass from his hands, bring it up to my lips. It burns as it touches them. He kisses it back from me and delicately, with his hands on my hips, presses himself against me. I feel the hardness of him. I bring the glass up, fill my mouth, kiss him back again. He looks up, almost surprised, like a boy.
Now wait. In the empty bedroom he smokes a cigarette, and I make up the bare mattress with a fresh white sheet. Wait. Now I’m standing before him taking off my clothes, covering myself with my arms.
Wait. He’s lowering me down, I’m breathing him in as he’s looming over me with his enormous eyes, like the statue of a dictator waiting to fall.
A Bad Character Page 6
