A Bad Character (21 page)

The hotel room is hushed and sealed. The AC is on. It’s 4 p.m. I undress. Stand naked above him.

Now the sun has risen outside and all the coke is gone, her mind is clogged, has reached the point of saturation, can go no higher. But she still tries, searches for every packet, looking for one that might have been missed, fingering the insides of the empty ones, turning them inside out, rubbing them on to her gums, something to make it all numb, to make the aching go away.

Searching through his clothes she puts her hand on his gun. She holds it, feels its weight, raises it up, points it
at his face, holds it to her own. Caresses the trigger, pretends to squeeze.

Later, in the bathroom, grinding her jaw, staring down the mirror, she takes a pair of scissors and starts to cut at her hair.

Late November in the world in which he’s still alive. Winter is coming, Diwali is here. The city is lit up at night, fireworks explode in the chill, wedding venues are crammed to bursting, bridegrooms on horses ride in the presence of drummers, elephants march along the highway in the mist, the markets are overflowing, their cash registers are ringing. Strings of red-and-gold tumble down the front of buildings, twinkling, gift-wrapping Delhi.

I called him from college and said I wanted to talk. I’d made a decision, I was tired. He told me to come over but I refused, I said I’d meet him in another place, so we
agreed on a Chinese restaurant we both knew, a family place in Green Park, frayed around the edges with Formica tables and frosted-glass booths. He sounded amused on the phone. He said he’d be there in an hour. When I got there he was already waiting for me, looking half wild, puffy in the bad light, plain ugly, at once familiar and unknown to me. I sat down opposite. He went to touch my hand. I pulled it away and this caused him to laugh. He lit a cigarette and he asked what this was all about. Had I left home, was I moving in with him now? The smile on his face said he knew that wasn’t the case, but I shook my head anyway and told him, No, nothing like that. I said I couldn’t see him any more, that was all, it was too painful for me, too much to take, I was worn down, I couldn’t trust him, I didn’t know who he was any more. I had college to think about, my exams, my future. He listened to me patiently and then he told me it wasn’t the case, because he was my future, and he wouldn’t let me go.

I shook my head. He asked me very casually what happened to the NRI. The smile that grew around his mouth suggested he knew more than he let on. I stared at him a long time and in a whispered voice I told him to
leave me alone. I got up to go to the bathroom. I left him sitting at the table, watching me.

But walking along the soiled tiled corridor at the back of the restaurant I suddenly heard someone behind following fast. It was him, he was bearing down on me with an excited look in his eyes. I hurried forward, pushed open the door and tried to make it into a cubicle to lock myself in, but he was too fast, he followed me even there, caught me before I made it through, pushed me into the cubicle with him and put one hand over my mouth to stop me crying out. Then he took his hand away, fell to his knees and removed my jeans.

I said no. But I couldn’t pull myself away from it. I’m there again and he’s going down on me. He’s moving his tongue between my legs and I’m bracing my arms against the walls, closing my eyes and biting my lip until it bleeds.

THREE

Delhi in the winter is colder than a person from the outside can possibly imagine. There was a time when the sun would shine, but that time has gone. In its place there is the grey of pollution and the dirty clouds of freezing fog that roll into the buildings, like cotton wool wiped along the back of a filthy neck, clinging to the city in a frozen, depthless sky.

To not feel the sun, to see it only as a faint disc, like a silver tablet dissolving into water. What a terrible thing.

The moment comes, sometime around the middle of the day, when you finally feel that the sun might come. And then it is gone again.

This would be fine if the houses were not built exclusively for the heat. If they were insulated you could retreat indoors and wait. But there’s no insulation, no radiators, no carpets, and the walls that stay mercifully cool in the summer are icy now, the windows and doors let the unchecked cold seep in through their gaps, their porous borders inept against this dread. It is impossible to get warm. The cold goes into your nerves, invades your bones. It feels as if animals are gnawing at them. You sleep in silence, in blankets, fully clothed.

Despite all this happening year upon year, no one seems to have learned; everyone is surprised. In the summer, when the heat can kill, an old man goes out in a vest, shirt and sweater and cycles to and fro in the midday sun without so much as breaking a sweat. In the winter he just freezes to death.

Even sitting in your car you just cannot get warm. The engine blows out artificial heat, only giving a headache, inducing you to fall asleep at the wheel. As if poison is being pumped in. The word “filament” repeats in your brain.

And the men crouch in blankets, unmoving, lining the streets.

December and January, suspended animation, when the fire of north Indian blood is dimmed. Rage crawls inside itself. I crawl inside myself too. As if I’ve been placed inside a matchbox, in a doll’s house.

The end, when it came, was unexpected. It was all tied up with the girl in the other tower. She never made it to Canada. She didn’t even make it out of Delhi. She died right there on the day of her escape. I’d lost sight of her for a long time, I didn’t think of her at all. Then I came home from college on a freezing afternoon and she was at the bottom of her tower, a crowd around her body and a pool of blood around her head.

Aunty is ablaze with the news. She shepherds me into my room. From my window we see the bedroom and a trail of sheets still coming out of it like spilt guts reaching halfway to the ground. She’d made a rope of them but had fallen almost as soon as she’d climbed out. She’d fallen, fallen all the way past the balconies with pot plants, frightening the pigeons—a short intake of air, a scream, and then silence, her brain open on the concrete.

Her father must have found out about the affair, about her boyfriend, about her plans to elope with him. Something must have happened, he must have stopped her from going, maybe he locked her up like Aunty used to say, and the window was her only escape. It made the papers, February
2001
. The boyfriend, who had been waiting at the bottom of the tower with tickets and passport in hand, and who had then seen her fall, was arrested on the influence of her father. He spent two months as an undertrial in Tihar Jail.

That same night I drove to him in a daze. I had no one else to turn to. I told him about the girl in the window, what had happened to her, how she’d fallen trying to escape and how she’d died. I was distraught, unreasonably upset. My distress seemed to animate him. A spark was triggered in his eyes. We got drunk and smoked and held one another, talking about the shortness of lives.

The next morning I woke early, hung-over and unsure of myself. I left quietly, and on a whim went shopping. I took an auto to South Extension. Shopping to forget. To be like any other girl.

But I saw her brains on every piece of pavement I stepped on and her blood in the strands of every stranger’s hair. Even so I bought a pair of jeans I liked from the Levi’s store.

She sits with the Businessman in the club. They’ve cordoned off an area in the dark. There are indulgent waiters
exclusively for them, segregation created through orbiting bodies of lesser wealth. The music is loud, people know who he is. She is known by association. And even those who don’t know understand they must be very important. People to be reckoned with. She is seen here as a still life, painted in the chiaroscuro of carefully concealed lights that bring out a feature here and there, plunging it back into the velvet dark. In the middle of all of them she looks imperious, and with the coke in her this is how she feels. Yes, to anyone watching this girl she must look cold as moonlight, marble hard. She barely moves, just sits beside him as he talks and drinks and plots, before she goes to the bathroom for another line.