A Bad Character (17 page)

She comes back and sits down opposite and asks me what I’m doing here in Delhi, besides coming to find old friends. I tell her I’m applying for my visa to the States, and also meeting a boy who I might be marrying,
who’s from the U.S. himself. He’s only here for a few days, but we’ve met six times before and I think he might be the one. The lies fall out my mouth very easily. But it’s hard being here. Beneath the layers of new furniture and everyday life I can see where I’ve been ripped apart.

She sees my wandering eye and asks, It must look different to you. I heard their son did a lot of work on it in the last few years. Did you know him very well?

I say I knew him a long time ago when we were small, he was older than me, he used to tease me a lot, but when we moved to Chandigarh we lost touch.

She nods and says, So you really haven’t heard? Well, I hate to be giving such bad news, but he died, not so long ago at all. He fell in front of a truck on the highway. He was drunk. It was in the papers, they said it was suicide and a girl was involved, but then there usually is in these cases, no? She drove him to it, that’s what they say. It almost stopped us buying the place, but since he didn’t actually die here we thought that there’s really no bad luck involved.

The pain is suddenly very sharp, like a clockwork razor turning in my chest; I feel it tightening and cutting me to shreds. I want to run away from here as fast as I can. I ask if I may use the bathroom instead.

As soon as I shut the door my strength begins to fail. I have to cover my mouth with my hands to stop myself from crying out. When I look around me, I see that nothing in this room has changed. There’s the same chipped tiles, the cracking paint on the pipes, the plaster falling from the walls, the same shower, the frosted glass with the sunlight seeping in. I see my face in the mirror and I know that one day I will die. Slowly, with great effort, I pull my breathing back, take deep inhalations and in the warmth and the whiteness I close my eyes. I am alive.

He says, Open your eyes. Open your fucking eyes. Don’t be blind your whole life. Don’t be blind to it. Open them up. I open them and he’s looking down at me, flaring in the sun.

In October it finally began to come apart. The Israelis moved down to Delhi from the mountains, on their way back to Sinai, to Tel Aviv, on their way to the new season in Goa. This great pack of Israelis coming into Paharganj. They called him up from there. They needed him to fix some things.

I didn’t know it then but he was going out most nights. Going out to smoke, drink, shoot up. In rooms with strangers and friends. Waiting for me to come back to him in the day. But getting bored of me. In rooms with men just like Franklin John.

I learned all this from K.

K the fat Buddha man, one of the greatest dealers Delhi’s ever known. Dark like my love, but unlike him possessed of a beatific face, a face that catches the light, without malice, a face to put your faith into. Self-taught, home-grown, raised right out of the dirt of Orissa, unable to read or write, but he could speak seven languages, he learned Hebrew in three months. He knew everyone.

K sat in all of his hotel rooms and the models came, the designers came, the actors and actresses came, the sons of politicians came. They all shook his hand, venerated him. They came to talk, hang out, pick up what they needed, and he sat there like a maharaja with his cigar, the centre of the world. When his customers arrived he’d have a long chat, he’d reach into the bag by his side, take out the drug, give a little more from his own supply, give it on credit if required, always with a good word and a smile.

K was an acquaintance of his, not quite a friend, both part of the scene. We were introduced in a five-star hotel suite at the very start of things, in those glorious first three weeks. We’d gone to pick up some money he was owed. Downstairs in the hotel a fashion show was going on. K was keeping everyone high above.

When we went into the hotel suite that day K looked him up and down, gave a wry smile and shook his hand. He said he hadn’t seen him in a long time, but that he was looking well.

I was introduced but we didn’t stay long. We picked up the money and left. But K shook my hand then and quietly handed me his card as I walked out the door.

Outside the flat in Nizamuddin, with the woman watching me from the balcony above, I searched the glove box for K’s card. It was there, buried under papers, off-white and expensively made. I had no one else to talk to then, nowhere else to go any more. No voice to hear on the phone. I drove awhile until I was away from there, parked in a small street in Lodhi Colony and then called.

K answered the phone almost right away. He said, Hello and nothing more. In the silence that followed I told him who I was and where we’d met before. He said he remembered me and he was sorry because he’d heard the news. Would I like to come over to see him some time? He said he was in the Meridien, he gave me the number of the suite, said he’d be around for a while.

I sat with him for a few hours that same day, nestled in a couch at the side of the room, listening to him talk. He said how much I’d changed. He remembered a fresh and nervous college girl.

Between customers, between answering the phone, he talked to me, talked about things absent-mindedly, talked about his business, kept me occupied. When the customers came I sat alone at the side and watched until they were gone. Finally he came round to the only thing I wanted to know. He said he was not at all surprised by what happened, that he always thought it would end this way, that he was a wild one, that no one could live like he did for so long and not come crashing down to the ground. He told me all about the parties, about the raves.

For a week or so I go back to K, day after day, and he tells me the things he knows. I listen to it all. I keep coming back. He doesn’t mind, he says I’m good luck for him. I sit in the room while he conducts his business. I
provoke curiosity in his customers. I sit there every day, numbed somehow and lost in thought. He asks me what I’m going to do with myself now. I say I don’t know. I’ve finished college, I was thinking of getting a job. Where I live, they’re getting impatient, but they’ve given up trying to marry me off.

At some point he looks over at me as if I’ve been noticed for the first time. He cuts a couple of lines of coke, holds out a rolled-up banknote and says I should help myself. He says it’ll make me feel better.

There’s nothing in the world like the first line of cocaine. The way it hits the brain, sharpens the lights of the room, removes all doubt, removes the pain. Removes guilt too.

I take two grams with me. He says there’s no rush to pay, just go, forget about him, enjoy yourself. That’s what he would have done. There’s a whole city out there waiting for you.

I do another line in the room and then I drive back home.

Throughout our love, until it was much too late, there was always the hope that he would change. That he would become rich, successful, respectable. Respectable above all else, because of his ideas and the wealth they would bring. That one day he would become rich on his own, not through inheritance but through talent, skill, that he would make money, make business, do something. That this would be enough for me to present him to my family and say, Look, I found someone. And if he were rich, if he were famous, if he were a recognized success, if they knew him from the papers, if he had been confirmed in some public way, then they would embrace him. They would overlook his flaws, his ugliness, his black skin, his well of madness. They would be happy to let me go to him. All the way through I held on to a hope like this, like the coward that I was. I could never quite let that go.