A Bad Character (13 page)

He says there should be two of me. One forever in that place and one for the world. He’d fuck one on the bed and watch the other up there.

Other times he just wants to lie inside. He comes up and enters, wraps his arms around me, holds me from behind, says he’d frame me if he could, pin me like a butterfly to the page. He holds my head in a certain light, positions me by the chin. My arms, my neck, my nose, my heart—so perfect a set of things they could break.

I find to my surprise that I don’t mind hearing these words, that I like him doing these things to me. I find I’m happy to make an object of myself for him, he who is setting me free.

It’s getting light at 5 a.m., the heat has never left. It’s so hot these days that the tarmac melts and no one really sleeps. I wake and I drive into the city. I arrive at his apartment and let myself in. I find him asleep, in bed or in the living room. I press myself into him. The apartment is unmoving. No one is ringing the doorbell, there’s no sound of soap operas on TV, no servants sweeping around our feet. There’s only this.

The vendors wheel their carts along the road. Above his balcony the black kites circle, looking like sharks seen from the ocean floor. His head is between my legs, his gleaming mouth gnawing at my flesh. Day ends and night falls again and again, and each night I have to go home. With my black hair shining I shower and get dressed and I go.

At home I talk about my course, I bore Aunty with it, I even speak some small phrases of French he has taught me. I tell her little anecdotes about the people there, the friends I’ve made, the ones I hate. I talk about the friends’ houses that I have begun to study in, talk about their parents who don’t exist. Lies on top of lies, as easy
as breathing. People and lives constructed out of nothingness. I keep her happy with gossip, make her intimate with it. It’s still necessary, even at twenty, to do these things.

But when I’m with him there is only the truth of his apartment, his car and the city in which we move. I see his eye on me above all things. In his living room, with the lights off, in the glow of the TV, watching movies:
Pickpocket, Hiroshima Mon Amour, La Jetée, Night of the Living Dead
. He fixes his eye, follows my face for every twitch, each smile, each moment of delight and surprise, sadness and pain, he says he’s never seen a face like mine, he could watch it all day. All those years of eyes on me, all that fear, and it has come to this, this desire that is in me alone.

Lying on my back. He comes into me. His eyes flutter behind their lids. I say, I knew you were watching me in the café. I knew it long before. I was sitting there for a long time. I could feel your eyes on me. I smile at the memory, say to myself, Your beautiful face. I pull him close, reach round to feel the scars on his back, ask
where they came from. He barely acknowledges the question, his breath is shortening in concentration, he’s losing the power of speech, slowly rising, slowly falling into me. With his eyes closed he finds the breath for it, tells me they’re very old, from his childhood, they grew up with him.

There are long moments when nothing exists. She lies on her back. Their heads are touching, their bodies drifting apart in a V. They look at one another. The AC fights against the oven outside. They catch their breath awhile.

Smiles fade and the thoughts remain. She says, Let me see them again. He rolls to his side and she examines his scars in the cathedral light. He’s not ashamed. She’s fascinated by their texture, by their memory of pain. She places her fingers upon them. This is inevitable. It’s inevitable too that she brings her mouth close, kisses them, touches them with her tongue, moves her tongue along their ridges. He opens his eyes to this, she can feel it happening, she can hear him holding his breath. She says, Does it hurt? and he turns to her, cups her face in his hands.

Out on the street nothing stirs. It’s too hot for anything now. The city is disappearing from view. We lie in bed and we barely move, we hide from the bleached white weight of the sun that throbs like a migraine on the land. In this darkened room I hold his cock in my hand, and for hours we are like this in half-sleep.

Then night is here. The wailing of the dargah begins. The tree-tangled temples glow with their flags and their bells inside. Sounds change in the dark, some imperceptible quality of the air alters them, a quality of thickness, permeability, as if the sun has been an infinite wall and the darkness an absence that amplifies. Voices clamour from the pavement. Trains come and go from Nizamuddin station. I hear the longing in their departure. I’ve started to smoke his joints with him, see their curls that are lit by the headlights of cars. I listen to the horns on Mathura Road.

Lodhi Road joining Mathura Road. The curious witchcraft of junctions. The ruins of Neeli Chhatri in the
middle of the traffic circle, connecting us. We walk around it. We talk through our story all the time. We talk through our story and make a myth of it, let it solidify, see it cool in the bed. Over and over I ask him, What did you see that day? What were you doing in the café? We celebrate ourselves this way. I like to hear it when it comes from his lips. He says, I saw a blank slate, a lump of wet clay.

With me, like this, he’s the happiest he’s been. I give it to him, I raise him up. He pulls me down, puts his lips to my hole. The balance of this goes on for hours. For hours I’m consumed, and when I leave he remains a mountain in his shadow room.

But very early on he gives me a sign of how it will end, if I’m wise. We’re sitting on the sofa in his living room, looking at the empty bookshelf against the wall. Looking at the boxes full of books by its side. New ones, old ones. He’s been to Fact and Fiction in Vasant Vihar, bought a hundred books; he’s hauled two hundred more from New York. The day is white-hot outside. We’re
naked, and I’ve told him that a bookshelf without books is a terrible thing. So he says, Fill it up, go ahead, the job is yours.

It takes the whole morning. A perilous operation. One false move and the spell is broken. Naked he sits on the sofa with an icebox of beer by his side, and naked I stalk the room. He watches me crouching and opening the boxes, placing the books on the floor, and he drinks as I run my fingers along their spines.

I stop at a book now and then, leaf through its pages. Sit down and read before deciding where to place it. I debate how to arrange them, whether they should be done alphabetically, by size, by style, or some clever combination of it all. I take pleasure in whispering these questions to myself. He says, You whisper to yourself all the time. I never noticed it before. He wants to know what I say, I say it’s nothing, just words. Reassurances for myself.

Every now and then I go to take a sip of his beer. Sometimes I take a book of photography and sit with him, and we look through the images together then, I
spend hours like this, with Araki, Prabuddha, Moriyama and Klein. With black-and-white photos of naked women he’s culled from magazines, Kate Moss and tribeswomen and Japanese girls bound in rope.

When I find a passage of text that I like I read it out to him. He never interrupts. He listens to me, tells me to speak and we get lost in it, in my own voice and in his listening to me. There are goosebumps on my arms and legs, the soft hairs stand on end. I come over to the sofa and climb into his lap, continue to read, watch his hands sliding over the tautness of my skin, dipping in. And all the time he continues to drink.

Then it happens that I forget him entirely. The performance stops and my work goes on. For an hour or more I lose myself so completely in the task and I’m the same girl I’ve ever been, the tongue poking out of the corner of my mouth, the same as I was when I was six years old, pensive, curious, not fit for the world.

When it’s over I stand back to admire my handiwork. And proud, calling out to him, turning around, I discover he’s passed out from the beer, twelve in total, one
after the other without pause. And unable to keep control or wake, he’s pissed himself; there’s a wide dark patch on the sofa dripping to the floor between his legs.

Like my grandfather he is a godman. Like him, he has things to say. He speaks of Shiva to me, and I have become his disciple on the dusty road. Convincing, persuading, cajoling me. He gives his sermon as he speaks, of another future, of revolution in the villages, in the towns and cities, the revolution of technology, the Internet, new connections and networks. Revolution in India, this is how it will be: no war, no guns, only technology, this he truly believes. He tells me how these connections will occur, how the poor will see and hear, how there will be empowerment for all, how Shiva guides him, and of this world he will be the king.

Like my grandfather, who spoke in tongues. Who had the light of God in him, barefoot from town to dusty town. Who roamed the lands that are the future now, the townships and malls and garbage dumps.

He worked in a bank when he lived in the world, a shy, nervous man. He worked quietly there for years behind the metal grille, behind the screens in the back room, counting money, making copies of copies of forms by the crumbling yellow walls. And then every so often he would get up and start to walk.

Straight out of the door, across the fields to the horizon. He’d walk for days sometimes and sometimes weeks, give all his possessions away. Lose his clothes, find new ones, wear rags, not shave, grow his hair and his beard, get that desert look in his eyes. They’d find him beneath a banyan tree in a far town, holding forth with a crowd, giving sermons, reciting the Gita and the Upanishads by heart. From where he learned them no one knew. They seemed to have been carved on his heart with a blade.

At the start they went out to find him, to bring him back like a wayward teen. But every time he walked right out again. Soon enough they grew to indulge him, to leave him alone, they stopped searching, they washed their hands of him, they cursed him and sighed and said, Let it be his fate. He’d always wander back in the end, walk
in through the door one day. Like everything, it was just allowed to go on. The bank kept his job for him. He’d go back there every time, turn up for work and no one would say anything, though it’s hard to believe. So there were two men in him, one hidden at home and one forever wandering the plains.

But it’s the history of women that’s the history of migration. Men hold the line and they remain. They go to war, they go for work, they travel the land, but they remain. Their name remains, their land remains. You can follow their line into the dark. How to trace the line of women, how to find from where we came? Every generation stripped away. Passed to another name. Gone the line and the name. They never belonged to us anyway. The earth doesn’t belong to us. We disappear, we do not remain.