A Bad Character (11 page)

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.

When it happens it hurts.

And then it doesn’t hurt. Pain slips away into the distance of a blizzard, and beyond all that, with eyes closed, chest cracked open, ribcage pulled apart, my heart fills up with the driving snow.

I didn’t know what to do afterwards. I lay there still as a corpse in the mortuary sheets, a vacancy of limbs, not daring to move in case it marked an end, but he was a part of me, his ugliness, his black skin. I held it all. Falling in and out of sleep with a pin drop of pain somewhere else.

He’s in the bathroom now. He’s come back with a cigarette. He’s lying next to me. He’s hard again. He puts the cigarette to my lips, holds my gaze, opens my legs, with his hand he guides himself in.

Seeming to wake from nowhere suddenly from the cold, I ask for a blanket. Instead he switches off the AC.

Little by little Delhi encroaches. You can hear it. You can see the thin sliver of sunlight on the frame of the window, fading to dusk. Slowly you make out the noise of children laughing and playing in the lane behind, pans being washed there and traffic beyond.

The bathroom has retained the day’s heat. The air is so thick in here you can swim in it. In the shower we stand and he washes me, his body behind mine, his hand on my belly where my heart beats, he brings it down, puts one hand around my neck, one inside. I move away, I sit at the side to watch him. There’s muscle around his bones,
not a shred of fat on him, and there are scars across his back that I see. We go back into the room to sleep.

When I wake again it is night, the room has been filled with it, the headlights of cars shift along the fabric of the curtain, rise up the wall and are gone. The whisky bottle is half-empty. He’s not here with me.

I find him in the dark of the balcony, crouching naked, one hand against the bamboo, his head tilted, listening. He turns towards me, puts his finger to his lips.

Shhh, he says. Listen.

In the dargah of Nizamuddin the qawwalis are playing. He says, Do you hear them? Let’s go before it’s too late.

His same sense of theatre demands we wear the right clothes. He unlocks a cupboard inside, tells me to look through it, pick out something to wear. It’s full of discarded
items, from family, cousins, his mother, old girlfriends maybe. His parents lived here before, left many things behind. I find a salwar-kameez, he takes out a long white kurta for himself from his own wardrobe, and in it he becomes dignified, sober, seeming older. And me, I watch myself in the mirror, covering my head with the dupatta, wrapping it around my forehead, behind my ears, around my neck, to frame my face, and I become Persian, dark-eyed, pious, transformed.

We laugh in the mirror and he holds me, touches my face, tucks my hair away.

He sits to crumble charas into a mixing bowl. I watch in fascination. Do you want to try? You’ll like it, he says. He says it comes from the mountains, a deep rich scent from Parvati Valley, he’ll take me there one day. Here, smell it. He holds it to my nose. Then I watch as he heats it, crumbles it in the bowl, burns the cigarette, adds the tobacco, mixes it reverently, rolls. Lights it, praises Shiva, takes a long drag and hands it over to me. He says to take it all the way in, down to the base of the lungs, hold it there as long as I can.