A Bad Character (6 page)

New York was the making of him. It was the place where his ideas took flight. First he studied film, later psychology. He pursued journalism on and off in between,
worked in a restaurant, in a record store. It’s all connected. It’s one and the same.

But he says it wasn’t the lecture halls that did it for him. Instead it was the streets. In the streets he could see it all quite clearly, walking around the Lower East Side, Chinatown, SoHo, Washington Square in the winter sun, freezing cold, up Fifth Avenue, the skyscraper canyons so vast they cut out the glow, the razor air splitting your lungs. Through the park, through Columbia, round into Harlem. He realized here he could be anyone.

He suddenly talks about the light there. He says the light in the winter in New York is beautiful, it’s so thin. It’s nothing like the Indian light, which is heavy and dull, full of dust, involved with the gods. Their light has no gods, only Weegee, Trocchi and King Kong.

He tells me about Chinatown too. Bubble tea, dumplings and pork buns, about the escalators to get into the restaurants, the revolving tables in the giant banquet halls. How easy life is there. About Washington Square and Harlem jazz beyond the park. Do I like jazz? Do I know Mingus and Coltrane? He’ll play them for me.

If it’s so good, why did you come home? He inhales the question, taps his cigarette slowly, exhales smoke, looks
at me as if deciding what to say. After a long time he tells me that it’s because both his parents died, they died together in a car crash on Mathura Road. On the way back from a wedding party late at night, a truck from Haryana came on to the wrong side, the driver was drunk or asleep, they never knew. But he veered across at a junction and ploughed straight into them. There was nothing anyone could have done. They were killed right away. Of course the driver and his boy left the scene, absconded back to their native village, never to be seen again.

I tell him I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. He shrugs and tells me it’s all right, I don’t have to be sorry, it’s life and it was a year ago now, there’s no more pain. Besides, I wasn’t driving the truck, was I? So why apologize?

He describes them to me. They were doctors in private hospitals—a heart specialist and a paediatrician. Serious people, cautious, they never touched a drop of alcohol in their lives, didn’t smoke, never went on holidays, never spent money on themselves. That’s why they could afford to send him to New York, why he could stay so long there, spend so much money. They paid for his education, they paid for everything.

But now they’re dead. He looks down and closes his
eyes for a second, tries to smile. He suddenly seems filled with regret.

I was the only child, he says. The prodigal son. I inherited it all, the money, the apartments, the ancestral land. I’ll never have to work again.

He leans back and says, But that’s not the real reason I’m home. In the end it’s very simple: this is where the world is going. India’s the future and America is done.

The food comes. The ashtray is full. The waiter takes it away. The waiters, they’re all hovering in the wings, casting glances. They know him, he eats here often, but he says he’s never been here with a girl before. Certainly never a girl like me. And now he’s a conquering hero in their eyes. He looks around, he knows it, he’s pleased. He says with satisfaction that he loves these places, the service, the food, the atmosphere, the sense of brotherhood one feels, the anonymity, the way they connect to the pulse of the city. He says he knows a thousand just like this, he knows them all, all over the city, he hunts them out, blends into them, he’s a connoisseur of low-down dirty joints, side-street shacks, roadside carts, the best paratha, the best chicken, the best bad whisky, the best dal. The best dal of them all, he says, is on the Jaipur
road, at one of the dhabas out there. Dal like you wouldn’t believe. He drives on these highways in the night, all night sometimes, he drives to Jaipur and back when he can’t sleep. He drives up and down the highways until the sun begins to rise.

We eat hungrily with the beer. Spill on to the tablecloth. I ask where he lives, he says in Nizamuddin West, close to the dargah, the tomb of the saint, at the point where the neighbourhood goes from rich to poor—he can sometimes hear the singing in the night, the qawwalis, the voices, the harmonium, the devotion filling the alleyways from the inside out. He says he’ll show it to me some time.

He lives there alone, it’s just him. No family, no flatmates, no maid, no cook, no servant. No prying eyes. No sentiments to offend.

I’ve never met anyone who lives alone, not once in my life. It’s such a strange, alien thing, inconceivable in my world, where lives are piled on top of one another in a mass grave.

His apartment is being renovated now, he’s fixing everything, but it’ll be complete soon and then he’d like to show it to me.

He leans forward, offers another cigarette. And what about you? Tell me. He’s very curious, he wants to know. What was I doing in the café? What was that look on my face? Where had I come from? Where was I about to go? He was watching me a long time before I saw him there. He couldn’t help himself. There was something about me, something different, he knew it immediately, knew he had to speak to me, to know me somehow. I had a rare sort of power in me.

Embarrassed, I say I don’t know about that. I came from college, that’s all, I had nowhere else to go but home, and I didn’t want to go home.

Do you go there a lot, to that café? I say I do, no one bothers me there. Not usually at least. He smiles apologetically. Did I bother you? I’m sorry. Do people bother you a lot? I bet they do.

We fall quiet, he’s thinking about something. I say, Do you miss them? He looks at the table. Do I miss them, you mean my parents? He pauses, sketches a pattern quickly on the cloth. You know, when I heard they were dead it was evening in Manhattan. I was
walking on Mulberry Street, north, through Little Italy, to Lafayette, up to Union Square, I had my set routes I liked to walk. There’s nothing like walking there, you never tire of it. I was just walking, it was very cold, damp, almost snowing, and all the Christmas decorations had started to be put up around the city. I could see my breath in the air, and the noise when someone opened the door of a bar or restaurant seemed to flood the street with light. I was walking up towards Union Square when someone called, a relative, my father’s cousin, I hadn’t spoken to him in years. I hadn’t spoken with my parents in a month. I kept walking as he spoke and then I stopped. He told me they were dead.

He stubs his cigarette out, lights another.

But listen, it wasn’t grief I felt when I heard they were dead. Nothing like that. It was the most incredible feeling of a weight being lifted. It was a feeling of being free. Of being beyond judgement. Of course I loved them, but I was afraid of them too. Love and fear equally. Fear more than love maybe.

What I knew right then was that I’d never be afraid of anything again, I’d never be embarrassed or ashamed, I’d never have to hide. I could live my life exactly as I wanted.

Our eyes meet, they hold awhile.

And now I’m here in this city that I love.

I look down. I say I hate this city. I hate it here. All I want to do is leave.

He’s surprised. He can’t understand it. It seems unreasonable to him, short-sighted. Go where? He says he wouldn’t trade it for anywhere else in the world. There’s only Delhi. It has everything you need.

I tell him, That’s easy for you to say. You went away, you came back, you saw the world first. You have money and you’re a man. You can do whatever you please.

He shrugs and sits back and watches me.

Silence again.

And suddenly serious, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, he says, Let me show you. Let me show you the city then. See how good it can be. I’ll be your guide. Make your mind up for yourself. Let’s make a deal. He holds his hand out.

It’s getting late. I say I have to go home, I’ll be in trouble. He pulls his hand back and watches me with a long, indulgent smile. He says OK, I understand. But just think about it, I don’t bite, and the offer still stands. He says he’s grateful for the evening regardless. I took a chance on him and that’s rare, he’s thankful for it, most girls would run away, boring, normal girls, but I’m different, he was right about me.

Calling for the cheque, crumpled banknotes fall from his pocket, with them a pack of tissues, a pen, his battered silver Zippo. He scoops the money into a pile on the table, starts to pick through it, gives up, doesn’t even count it properly, just sucks on his cigarette and throws money together into the mess in the middle. OK, he says, that should be more than enough. He stubs the cigarette out, drains his beer, puts the rest of his things away.

Outside it’s dead quiet. The liquor store is shut, the market is as pleasant as a ruin. The heat is finally bearable too. We stand for a moment facing one another in the yellowing light and only now do I realize how drunk I
am, but also how alert to him. I want to say something. I can’t think of what it is. Instead he asks if I’m OK to drive. I say I’ll be all right. He nods and tells me to follow his car as far as Jor Bagh.

Lodhi Road, opposite Safdarjung’s Tomb, at the entrance to Jor Bagh, he pulls into the service lane at the side.

Nothing stirs beyond, inside the colony the gates of the small entry roads have been locked, the rich houses inside are packed up for the night, guards are in their cabins. A pack of stray dogs cross silently beyond us into Lodhi Gardens. We speak out of our windows. He says he wants to see me again.

When?

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow …

Tomorrow at noon, right here.

OK.

OK. He smiles. I’ll be waiting. It was good to meet you. Think about what I said.

It’s only when I’m free of him that I’m spinning out into space, racing back home as if I’m being chased in the
fields, by the river with the barking dogs as the sun goes down, and my mother waiting for me inside.

I left Agra for Delhi in the middle of the monsoon, when the air was cool and sweet and teeming with life. Aunty sat with me in the train, outside we etched past the rubble bungalows of my childhood, past their fields of clothes lines with sheets already soaked by the sudden rain, falling in great drops, stinging when it hit, the noise it made on the blue tarp and tin of the slums drowning everything else. Rain on the grille, the cold air twisting through like a string of magician’s silk. A note of thunder rolling through the vault of cloud, the wind rattling water through the trees. And my mother, left behind in the river and on the wind.

Inside the train people shifted, chattered, gorged themselves on food. North towards Delhi we went, past the rotten towns of dhabas and trucks, towns of mud, brick and kilns, towns of dogs and cows shaped in half-light, dirt-road towns with names like Tundla, like the names of vegetables I didn’t want to eat. In each town
God’s music grew louder, the music of horns and voices, loudspeakers and temple bells, like all the rivers coming together to pour into a chasm in the centre of the earth.

Now crows cry and dogs bark, the canopy of the day grows dim. Aunty is talking at me, telling me about her splendid college days.

She doesn’t tell me about her own daughter though, the one who was born the same year as I, who died when she was four years old from childhood leukaemia caught late. Aunty sitting with her through the radiation, holding her hand, the doctors trying to keep her out of the room. They can’t, she won’t leave, she gives them no choice. But it doesn’t matter because the treatment fails, and her hand is soon left on its own.

We entered the city late in the day, the train dragging along so slowly it seemed we were on the verge of a complete stop, where all the other passengers would just jump off and walk away. But we never stopped, we only crawled on.

And in New Delhi station the red-jacketed coolies dance among the crowds, piling luggage in their private rhythm, their teak-hard bodies absurd beneath the colour of their uniforms.

We are standing on the concourse beneath the white of the station light and the old ticking clock, Aunty uncomfortable in the crowd. We’re sweating, waiting for Uncle to appear. He’s corralled some coolies, now he’s leading us over the footbridge, through a thousand bodies, until we’ve reached the end of it and climbed down to the earth, spat out at the rear of the station where whole villages sit with sacks and boxes, chain-linked together amid the rubble, waiting for something to come.