A Bad Character (10 page)

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.