A Bad Character (14 page)

When I left his apartment the day I learned of his death, Ali was alone a short distance away on the road, despondent, full of grief, his body hanging limp in the rain with
his long fingers around his thighs as if he were preparing to be sick. I was halfway to my car before he saw me there and it was only then that he came to life, running after me and calling out, shouting, Madam, madam, please stop.

Ali is standing outside my car door, I can see him. He’s on the street, knocking on the window, trying the handle, saying something that I cannot hear. The rain has become heavier, bouncing off the front of the car, and his face is covered in tears, his eyes are red with crying and drink. He is begging me to please open up, to speak to him, to wind down the glass and open the door so he can speak to me, Please, madam, please. He is drenched, rain has dishevelled his hair, rain is dripping from the beak of his nose. And he is snivelling in a way that I cannot bear. He begs, he starts to slap the glass, struggles with the handle, his face is twisting out of shape. People on their balconies are watching. Guards are stepping out into the street. They know what this is about. From the balcony the fiancée is shouting, ordering Ali away. I can’t take it. Can’t look at him. I start the engine and drive.

I drive for hours. Numb, my whole body shivering, teeth chattering, an ashen face looking at itself in the mirror when it dares. I try to think of a place I can go, somewhere or someone to whom I can turn, a street where I can park without memory, some quiet colony where I can clear my head. But there is nothing, nowhere. Every time I stop, accusing faces look in at me. Maids and servants walking by, housewives and aunties, guards telling me to move. Through the blur of rain I can barely see the road.

At some point a calm descends. It comes at the limit of exhaustion, from something being extinguished. I turn the car around and I begin to drive home. On the way I stop one last time by the Purana Qila. I pull to the side here, take out the SIM card from my phone, bend it in two and throw it in the road.

We wait for the monsoon to break. The black clouds are gathering over Humayun’s Tomb, the kites ride the thermals above its domes. We run our hands over the sandstone walls, walk the boundaries of Nizamuddin.
The morning is already swollen, in the middle of the day it dims, it might as well be dawn again the way the light drops out and the clouds roll in, cities themselves, blotting the sun.

Then the first big drops of rain descend. Plop, plop, plop. Bombs of rain one day, big as insects, splashing up the choking red dust, sending it into the atmosphere, trowelling nostrils in the thick cake of earth, and in the smell of wet tarmac rising up we rejoice. People have come out to stand in the streets, on to their balconies to soak themselves in it. We lie on his balcony as it turns to a deluge, as the drops grow together and the thunder cuts the air.

Rain pours down, the city floods. Thunder and lightning fill the sky. And the junctions, they’ve become waterlogged, silt has clogged the drains that are never cleaned. I still go on visits with Aunty here, in a car with water up to the axles in places, stuck in traffic, carrying gifts. I still sit with her at dinner, see Uncle trotting in and out of his room, still answer her questions, listen
to her prattle on about the NRI. All this life goes on. But I don’t remember a thing of it.

I remember him instead. He’s following me in the street. The rain-slicked pathways, potholes as puddles, the pools created in the roads, sunlight breaking through the cloud sculpting deep shadows, bringing colour and heat and bouncing light from the sheets. In the evening the headlights graze upon black umbrellas open at crossroads, disembodied toes avoiding the splash of cars and autos. Auto drivers queued up outside Khan. We play games like this: I message him, tell him which market or colony I’ll visit, where I plan to shop, South Extension, GK I, Sarojini Nagar. And he will be there, hidden among the crowds, searching to find me there. I’ll catch a glimpse of him from the corner of my eye. Sometimes I’ll never see him at all. I’ll walk from shop to shop, conscious of my straightened back, my breasts, the arch of my neck. I’ll go back home and undress as he tells me where I’ve been.

Then I arrive at his apartment one day and there are clothes laid out for me on the bed. Clothes he has bought,
which he wants me to wear. He says they’ll suit me, that it’s time to become someone new.

He watches as I examine them, measuring my response. They are cool clothes, clothes from the parties in Goa, clothes from the raves: tight T-shirts, cargo pants, a psychedelic T-shirt of Shiva, another with Ganesh. Fluorescent colours. He says, Try them, put them on, and the authority in his voice that is always so absolute is cut with something else. I do it for him without complaint. I undress, I take off my jeans and T-shirt, stand in front of him naked and put them on.

He watches while I dress, and as I do so he holds his breath, getting hard, and when it’s done he comes towards me, puts his hands on me.

In Delhi it was the time of the Cyber Mehfil. A small window of belief, an explosion of parties and raves at the turn of the century, voices celebrating the new millennium, the opportunities it held, the freedom, the new technology on offer, the hope with the music filtered in
from abroad, filtered through Goa via the dargahs and temples, the riverbeds and the mountains, becoming Delhi’s own. A small window of celebration and joy in the farmhouses and the disused spaces, before the police got wind of it and shut it down, before the moral panic set in. These parties broke the barriers and stormed the city for a while.

These were the places he went to in the night when I went home to Aunty and lay in bed wrapped up in our love. These are the places he went to dance, take acid, MDMA, where he thinks he is Shiva, Shiva in the flesh. Dancing this new reality, dancing the destruction and the chaos of the world. Everyone was delighted with him, he was well loved. He the one who never held back, who danced through the night like a shaman, a dervish, like a god. Who went on his hands and knees and howled, roared like a lion, tore off his clothes. He was famous for it.

I knew none of this. This part of his life he kept away from me, he didn’t let me into this world, he wanted me all for himself. But for a time these people held the
bloom of something new, something no one had seen here before. Like everyone who sees such things, they saw a new consciousness, the end of one world and the beginning of a more enlightened age.

He dresses her up in these clothes and it transforms him much more than her, he becomes hard, he’s hard just watching her slip them on, a storm has risen in his eyes, the air has changed. It’s not the girl that he desires, it’s this possession of her, what he’s made, the dressed-up thing. He puts her in front of the mirror, stands behind her, his hands around her waist, feeling across her, passing over every inch, rising to her ribs, beneath her breasts, under her arms, her shoulders, her neck, kisses her neck, slides his hands back down between her legs over the fabric. He watches her as he does this and she watches his hands. He says, Look at yourself. And she looks. Admire yourself, and she does.

Fall in love with yourself. This is you.

He talks about Shiva to me. He fully reveals this part of himself that had earlier only been hinted at, and which
in its distant orbit had been charming, little more than an affectation. But Shiva, he says, is all. Shiva in his aspect as destroyer.

After I see his family I tell no one of his death. I give no sign. I carry on with my daily routine. My exam results arrive and despite everything they are good. In the absence of marriage offers it is agreed I should look for a job. On the surface it is as if nothing has happened. If I maintain this I will be a bright young girl.

But slowly things come back to me. They come in dreams at first, nightmares of him that are hard to place. I tell myself not to remember as I wake, but in the corner of my eye they remain.

He has something for her now: a few drops of acid left in a bottle in the fridge, a gift, wrapped in foil, kept in the dark, still potent, waiting for an occasion to be used.

He drops it on the back of my hand and I bring it to my mouth. He has another drop for himself. Now it’s done there’s no going back.

I’ve made my excuses with Aunty: I’m staying over at a friend’s house. It’s quiet in the colony. In the darkness outside good people have retreated to their beds, but we won’t sleep. He says I’ll see things tonight, the world will open up to me. I’ll see it for the illusion it really is.

We leave the flat and go down to the car. He says we’ll drive into the night out in the desert towards Jaipur.

Driving through the city, nothing happens for a long time. I say, Maybe it’s not working, maybe we should take some more? And he laughs and says, Trust me, it’s coming, you just have to wait.

It begins on the Gurgaon road. Yawning, each one sucking in a lungful of air, but it’s not tiredness, it’s something else, as if bubbles are rising and the atoms of the body are breaking loose. The buildings at the side tingle and shudder. The tail-lights of cars leave tracers of red in their wake. And in the belly, there’s this feeling of butterflies, the compulsion to bring it all up, the impossibility of it, and the knowledge that if you could, it would be nothing less than the universe, a projectile stream of galaxies from the mouth.