A Bad Character (5 page)

Now it’s night in the car. Night falls so fast here. From dusk it’s only a heartbeat away, a curtain that falls into place. The songbirds give their final note, giant bats flit between the trees, perforating the sky. We are driving through the wide boulevards of Lutyens’ Delhi, the colonial sweep of classical bungalows housing memories of order and rule, of radial roads and white cupolas shaded by tunnels of trees. Jasmine blossoms blow along the wind, the gulmohar glow like cinders. In the darkness I follow his tail-lights. He drives fast and then he coasts along, waiting for me to catch up. It’s a game to him. He heads through Lodhi Estate, where the rich and powerful crouch in their mansions, their guards poking guns from their nests at the street. It’s still very hot, a dry heat that sees men out everywhere on the grass, lit by the street lamps on the circles, in the scattered parks—men who’ve been stunned into torpor now stirring to put away their cards, light beedis, make fires, their bicycles propped up against the trees, some walking again. Women glide along the road, apart, single file, carrying
babies, with baskets on their heads, impossibly erect, draped in frayed saris bright as Gauguin fruit. But none of this exists to me now, I can never be part of it, there’s only his tail-lights ahead of me. I follow them down into south Delhi, all the way to Vasant Vihar, no longer alone.

I’m always alone.

I’m thirteen years old.

My breasts are puffing up like crisp little puris, the blood flowing out of me so hard I think I’ll die. My stick of a body ripens, tightens, becoming newly curved. The flesh around my eyes takes on the purple of a bruise.

Such a spurt of growth that my clothes don’t fit me any more. And I can never again wear my tartan dress.

Around this time my extended family becomes secure, finds wealth. My father’s brothers, all moving forward in the world. Not spectacularly, not extraordinarily so, but more than enough to survive. The economy is opening up. Jobs are found. Land is bought and sold. Then come the cars, the washing machines, the televisions, the cousins sent off to America to study, to become doctors,
accountants, lawyers and bankers. All the bases are covered.

But we do nothing, go nowhere. Though my father still sends money, we are displaced, shoved aside. I keep my head down in school and get lost in my dreams, but my mother sits outside it all, the exile, watching the rest of them in silence in the frozen halls of our home, becoming suddenly old, her hair getting tangled in knots. She removes her bangles. She doesn’t sit with the other women, she only sits by herself and smokes. She has her suspicions, she laughs bitterly, as if someone has made a cruel joke about the world.

When I’m seventeen she dies. It’s a short illness, there’s no time. She’s blown away like dust on the veranda wind. My father returns for the cremation. But they don’t let me see her, and he doesn’t take me back to Singapore with him. I don’t know why it happens. I can’t explain why I’ve been abandoned this way.

I’m avoiding him, that’s the truth. Avoiding coming to him, knowing that as soon as I do he will reach his end. And my mother, my father, my family—perhaps there’s no link to them at all.

Now the Delhi streets are sulphur and dead, the streets are bridled by fear. We go into Vasant Vihar, to sit in the Chinese restaurant, to smoke and eat chicken and drink beer.

Inside, the restaurant is red and gold; outside in the colony nothing stirs. The market is deserted except for the liquor store from which men scurry like rats with their twenty-rupee bottles of Doctor’s Choice, before vanishing into the darkness of doors. Crumbling dead Delhi, gasoline ghost town in the dark.

In the restaurant the waiters know him. They welcome him with their watery eyes and obsequious grins. They wear grubby waistcoats and bow ties. They show us to a booth at the side of the room.

I say I shouldn’t be here. She’ll be waiting for me.

Who will? He offers a cigarette. I decline.

Aunty. Where I live.

Aunty …

Yes.

Where do you live?

Over the river.

And your parents?

My mother’s not here. She’s dead.

And your father?

In Singapore.

He nods to himself, smiles slightly, sympathetically. Lights his cigarette. Settles into the red booth.

What’s it like in Singapore?

I say I don’t know.

He flags down the waiter and orders two beers.

At home, Aunty would take me on her visits. For two years I’m dressed in my itchy salwar-kameez, sitting next to her juddering flesh, among the bags of clothes that are going somewhere, to be altered, to be gifted to someone
else on the way, given away second-hand, untouched. This is the currency we trade in here, a great merry-go-round of unwanted gifts. The driver is looking at me through the rear-view mirror. He can’t help himself. He positions it so he can see me instead of the road. But what to do? Aunty doesn’t believe me when I complain, and the two of them, they’re as thick as thieves. We’re going round to Karol Bagh today, but first to Paschim Vihar. So many people to see. So many visits to be made.

During Aunty’s visits I’m often asked what it is that I am studying, then asked what, with this, I can hope to achieve. An MBA would be the smart option, one uncle says, or accountancy. And though education is a good thing, it’s true, it has its limits, just like freedom. Freedom and education, neither are to be abused, both should know their place.

And what about your marriage? Have you found someone yet? Aunty sighs and shakes her head. Then perking up, she talks about the NRI.

But today they discuss the servants, how they’re all controlled by their maids. How they’re slaves at their mercy,
held ransom to their whims. I keep my head down and try not to think.

In college, in my lectures, it’s much the same. I write words but I’ve lost interest in what they mean. The lecturers don’t seem to care themselves; the students seem only to repeat what they’re told.

I have my own ideas about things and a couple of times, having coffee with the girls, I’ve ventured some thought close to my heart only to receive blank looks in return.

But I’m twenty and really there’s nothing wrong with my life. I have everything a girl could want or need, a modern girl like me.

In the restaurant I take one of his cigarettes. He lights it for me.

It’s starting to fill up inside. All around there’s the stench of cooking, the MSG, the smell of stale carpets, ashtrays, empty glasses, the stickiness of beer on plastic
floors, the warm aroma of chicken and noodles and red chilli, the soy and turmeric that comes all the way from the Chinese of Calcutta, the gobi Manchurian that crowns their hard work far from home. The noise is a womb, waiters are shouting to the kitchen, the kitchen is sizzling in white light behind the swing door. On the wall in the corner there’s a cricket match on TV. Every now and then the waiters stop in clusters to watch a replayed shot, a wicket, drunken men shout at a decision. Out on the open floor around the big round tables people are drinking, arguing, stuffing their faces, making deals. Lots of cheap white-shirted businessmen in here, lots of Punjabis, Taiwanese, Malays, Chinese.

He asks what I’m doing exactly. I tell him, literature. When he asks why, what’s the reason behind it, I hesitate and he sees this and says it’s just a question, not a trap, he only wants to know what I think. I tell him that I don’t know why. Because it’s the only thing I was ever good at. I tell him about my mother and her books. But I say I hate it now. It’s nothing like what I thought it would be.

What did you think it would be?

I shrug. I don’t know.

What are you going to do about it?

A pause. I don’t know.

He smiles. You don’t know much, do you?

I must look hurt. He corrects himself, says he’s joking. It’s just a joke. He understands how I feel. Then he asks what I’d really do, if I could do anything.

A simple question, but again I don’t know. There’s a moment of silence where I feel nervous, and to fill it I blurt out, like a confession, that I’m stuck, that they all want to get me married off, but I don’t want to get married at all.

He lets this sit between us and I think right away how I shouldn’t have given so much, because I can’t be sure of him, I have to remember this, though already I want to trust him, already I want to tell him things. He looks at me out of his large, dark eyes. I’ve been starved of this look for so long.

The waiter comes to take the order. He orders chilli chicken, Hakka noodles, veg Manchurian, fried rice, two more beers. You have an accent. I say this when the waiter is gone. He leans back in the booth and smiles. He must know that it’s part of the reason I came with him,
the security it brings. It marks him out as different too. Combined with his ugliness, his confidence, his dark skin, it’s intriguing. For someone who looks like him, it turns him into a mystery.

It’s from New York, he says. I picked it up there.

You lived in New York?

He nods. For seven years.

How old are you now?

Twenty-eight.

I put the cigarette out, push the ashtray away and sip some beer.

What’s it like in New York?

He says, Why, would you like to go? It’s too bad but it’s too late, I’m already here, otherwise I’d have taken you, shown you around, it would have been my pleasure.

From across the table I can smell his aftershave and suddenly I feel cold. We’re next to the AC. I see the hairs on his arms standing on end, and the thin, faded T-shirt he wears, washed so many times that now the threads show.