A Bad Character (15 page)

But this is only a whisper, a small wave, it comes, it goes. Relax, he says. Relax, and his voice comes to me from far away. I close my eyes and focus on the dark throbbing music he plays, the low hum of the engine. We’re on the highway in the desert.

I open my eyes to a carnivalesque world. Unhinged, the trucks come roaring at us with their painted faces and vicious mouths, the cheap flashing statues of neon gods that adorn their dashboards leading the charge, dancing into the void. Real objects slide on the surface of things. Solid spaces bend. What I once knew to be true is only a
canvas to be painted on and torn apart. I turn to look at him and he’s a black beast with a grinning maw. I can’t help laughing out loud. I laugh at him for what seems like hours. There’s a panic somewhere there.

On the stereo the sheer terror of Vivaldi.

Haunting corridors and cloisters, bales of straw across fields, sweat cooling on the skin.

She loses speech, hearing.

Her sense of self, always so certain, so fearful, begins to fall away. Her personality, so fixed and inevitable, reveals itself to be entirely open to change.

Here it peaks.

And then it breaks.

Like passing from a raging torrent into a vast and eerie lake.

He pulls the car over at a dhaba. The engine dies, the music stops. She can hear it ticking as it cools. The silence
is unnerving. His face is watching hers; his eyes drift like coracles tied to the dock of his nose. He insists they go in.

She says she won’t go in. He goes in. It’s 3 a.m.

There’s nothing left but the tremor of the tyres, the horns going off like ships leaving port, horns like the charges of matadors. In the trees the tube lights hang at odd angles, the broken limbs of angels. The insects of India swarm, drawn to the brightness that is a gas fogging the eyes.

He returns without a word and we are driving again. We might never have stopped. We drive for ever and turn around and drive back again.

We end in the birthing fields of Gurgaon, among those infinite constructions that have become ruined cities to me, the emptiness of history reflected in the stars above. I don’t know how we got here, how much time has gone and what has been lost.

Ahead there is one building site framed by bamboo drenched in an artificial light with workers crawling across the concrete and steel.

They look like ants devouring an elephant’s corpse. Only the corpse will devour the ants in the end, devour them and grow up tall.

We fall down before it, are silent in awe of it. He makes love to me on the desert floor. I see other faces in him; he changes before my eyes into an old man, a demon, a little boy. The birds circle around to pick at our bones.

Light falls from the sky, the stars fade, the horizon grows grey and real. The drug wears off, sadness leaves a mist. The men in the distance carry on their work, oblivious to any of this. We get in the car and drive back into Delhi without words. As the morning stirs I see men and women who have slept all night rise from their beds, enter the streets again, sweep the earth, go about
their work. I thought I’d be free, released of my chains. Now I only see how it will end.

But oh! I’m meeting the NRI today. Oh sweetness and light and what joy! The day has finally arrived. He is here for me, my ticket to the Promised Land.

He’s waiting in the coffee shop of the Taj Mansingh, he sees me and puts up his hand, recognizes me from the photo Aunty sent. He’s buttoned up and bland, this American. Just like an American should be, in a lime-green polo shirt and chinos, side parting and perfect white teeth. A nice guy I’m sure, but at this point nice means nothing to me, I can barely tell if I’m awake or asleep, and I can only take so much of sweet.

Aunty laughs and trills like a bird of paradise when she’s getting me ready to go. She’s overseeing the game of dress-up we play. She’s certain about this one now; she knows that he is the one for me.

He greets me like an old friend at the table. He clumsily tries to kiss me on the cheek. Tells me I’m much prettier in person than he imagined on the phone. We sit down and order nimbu-pani, but when it comes it’s too sugary, so he sends it back and asks for a Diet Coke instead.

He complains about India awhile to me, about how slow and inefficient it is compared to the States, how customer service is zero here, how the taxi drivers don’t know where to go. But he’s almost signed the papers for a new apartment in Gurgaon. His parents are going to move there when they get old, back to the motherland, and there’ll be a room for us there as well.

He places his palms on the table in an emphatic show. It’s so good to finally meet you. He asks how college is going, and tells me he’s been looking into courses around New York for me, advertising or marketing, a way to make use of my degree. He believes in a joint-income family after all.

I see his eyes on me, decent and dull, and I know what he wants from me, that he wants to turn me into a good girl. That he thinks he knows who I am.

I tell him I’d like to study film maybe.

And he says, Have you seen
American Beauty
? It’s a masterpiece.

And even though he is dead I still call him on his phone. I sit in my room and I pick up my mobile to dial his number that I know by heart. Only his voicemail comes through, but his voice is beautiful on the line. He has a separate voice, one he puts on for this role. None of the madness is there. He’s reasonable, perfectly calm.

The message isn’t long. He says his name and the fact that he’s not here right now, but he’ll get back as soon as he can. In a deep and resonant voice. A voice full of easy confidence. A voice that doesn’t match his animal face.

In August college restarted, my final year coming so abruptly upon us that the dream of the summer was at an end.

He said he’d do my work for me, write my essays, he’d do whatever, it was easy for him, he’d make sure I passed with the highest grades. I wouldn’t have to do a thing.

In college, in the lectures, I look around at my classmates, at the girls who I’ve been out with before, whose fortunes had been read alongside mine, and I feel apart from them, superior, changed. I see the life they lead, the things they do, the direction they’re heading in, and I want none of it. My old sadness is worn as a kind of arrogance now.

In bed, in the living room, driving in the car, it’s much the same. He says, It’s just you and me now, and I say, Yes, just you and me. No one else in the world. Fuck them, he says. Fuck everyone. We’ll go crazy, we’ll show them all. And I say, Yes, yes, we’ll do it. Show them all.
He says it’s time to leave that world behind, leave Aunty behind, leave marriage behind, leave society behind, and I say, Yes, yes. When he’s inside me I say yes. He says, Move out of that house, move in here with me. And when he’s inside me I say yes. I will. I’ll go get my things, I’ll tell her, I’ll shock them all. He says, Do it, do it now, you don’t need their hypocrite world any more, their safety, their ignorance, their preservation. You have me now. And I say, Yes.

It’s a heady world of make-believe.

But I am a coward and I’ll never leave.

A month passes from the day I hear of his death; I call his voicemail all the time. Ten, twenty times a day, I call him just to hear what he has to say, but it’s always the same. Even as I’m going about my vacuumed life, I step aside and dial the number to hear the only part of him that remains.

Out of hiding, almost imperceptibly, I begin to drive the city again. Routes are muscle memory and Delhi an extension of him. So I drive to the places we have been, grief-stricken but free. I drive the streets at night looking for him. I drive through Lutyens’ Delhi. I go to the American Diner and drink a Bloody Mary alone.

We’re sitting in the American Diner, me and him, drinking Bloody Marys, eating chili dogs. We’ve commandeered the Tabasco sauce. We sit on the stools at the bar, watch what’s happening from here, keep an eye on the red-and-white Formica room, to the right of the cash register with the door behind. Good for conversation, good for getting little extras from the barman. Chili dogs, onion rings, Bloody Marys and later a glass of beer. Our glorious playground Delhi. He whispers in my ear.