A Bad Character (8 page)

I met her another day and she recognized me then. We were in the car park and she offered me a lift. Where was I going? To college, I said. She said she’d take me some of the way.

We sat in a wary silence at first. Then without warning she began to speak, defiantly, almost scornfully, she said, I know you, you live in the other block across from me, I’ve seen you. I see you sometimes in the window. You always look so sad. Then she said, Guess what? Don’t you dare tell anyone. I’m going to run away. You’ll see soon enough. But don’t you dare tell anyone.

She tells me her story: her boyfriend loves her and she loves him, but he’s an Old Delhi Christian and the families will never agree, will not even meet. So they’re going to run away and start again, away from family, away from everything. They have a way out too. He’s a chef in one of the five-star hotels, nothing special yet, right at the bottom, but he has talent. He can chop faster than
anyone she’s ever seen. And a chef can get work anywhere, that’s what he says. She says it’s all arranged. He knows an agent who specializes in these things. They’ll fly to Montreal. But before Montreal they’ll go to Nigeria, to Lagos—it’s a simple matter of passports, money, visas and bending the rules.

When I say nothing in return she looks at me with that bold eye of hers. You don’t believe me? Well, what do I care. As long as you keep your mouth shut. You better promise. I promise, and we drive the rest of the way in silence until she drops me off beyond the bridge.

He was there at twelve the next day, waiting as he said he would be, the engine ticking over, exhaust fumes paddling out over the scorched asphalt earth. No breeze in the sky, only the motionless blue, and the roads were all quite empty, stricken by the burning sun.

I pulled my car up behind his, sat for a moment, got out, walked to the passenger side, knocked on the window.

Behind the blacked-out windows, in the AC cool, there’s smoke around his head, curling in blue, the stereo turned up so loud you can hear it outside, playing Mozart of all things. He says it blows the cobwebs away.

Here he is with such a strange look on his face, fierce, almost tribal, caught unawares. Then a great smile breaks out, he opens the door and he asks if I want to go for a drive.

Inside, through the plastic blast of the AC, his car smells of cigarettes and aftershave. Lived in, a private domain, the inside of a brain. There are piles of books, computer journals, old copies of
Crime & Detective
, CD cases, junk food wrappers and printouts on the seats and on the floor. Throw them to the back, he says. Stuff them in the glove box, wherever, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t apologize for the mess, doesn’t care. Doesn’t try to be proper. In the back of the car it looks like someone might have slept there. I ask half jokingly if he did and he says, No, not last night, but sometimes, when I’m too far gone. It’s good to wake up sometimes and not know where you are.

I still have my misgivings about going off like this, about being alone here with him. He could be anyone, he could take me somewhere, hurt me. But more than this I have misgivings about his face, and what this means, the implication of the step I’m about to take, beyond which at a certain point I cannot return. The question of what it will finally say about me.

We’re driving through Lodhi Colony, around Mehar Chand, on the way to Lajpat Nagar, skirting the top of Defence Colony. He knows all the shortcuts, the alleyways. He cuts through the middle lanes, through inside lanes hemmed in by houses with back walls that have no windows to see the garbage piles, through the veins and arteries, then out on to a familiar road to my delight. He takes pleasure in dissecting Delhi, carving it up like this for me. And suddenly, in this certainty of his, I don’t feel afraid. It is as if I’ve slipped into another world, driving through a city unfurling like a tapestry, listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 in D minor.

He asks how it was, getting home last night. I say I didn’t realize I was so drunk. He nods and smiles. And
how was this Aunty of yours? Did you get into trouble with her? I say I slipped in while she was watching her soaps, managed to get to my room and shower, change my clothes, brush my teeth, but came out to find her sitting on my bed sniffing the air.

I can just imagine it, he says. And what then? What did you do?

I’d told her I had gone for a movie with friends. She said I should have called her if I knew I was going to be out late, I know how she feels about me driving home in the dark.

Yes Aunty, I know, I’m sorry. You’ve told me a hundred times before, I must call, or don’t even stay out at all, come back before the sun goes down. But I have to be out for college, and it’s rush hour early on, I’d be stuck in traffic for hours if I drove back then, so it’s better that I wait until the traffic dies. You don’t drive yourself, so you don’t understand.

She sighs and shakes her head and says, Oh, you know how I hate that car.

It’s true that Aunty hates the car. At the breakfast table she says she doesn’t like to think of me alone, being alone is a sure sign of trouble, it attracts attention, it’s a provocation to some. And what if I were to break down? What if there was an accident? What would happen then?

There’s some truth in this, I know. But the real danger is of being out of control.

And though I stay in the library sometimes and do what I’m supposed to do, sometimes I also drive.

Sometimes I drive to the Grand Trunk Road and think about the mountains beyond. Sometimes I drive towards the airport to see the planes taking off. Sometimes I park near Kamla Nagar or go down among the old colonial bungalows of Civil Lines. But parking does attract attention. It has its own problems. What is she doing there? What does she want? Is she a whore? Is she waiting for a man? At traffic lights, in the middle of a jam. Stuck behind cages of chickens stacked in the backs of tempos, waiting to be killed. They do notice me, these eyes, discovering I’m all alone in this city of meat and men.

And filling gas at the station the attendant strokes my hand when I hold the money out to pay. But still I drive
around the city tempting fate, fingering the walls of the cell for the point at which it will break.

When we drive I ask him more about his life, about America and New York. He tells me about the cinema, the theatre, the galleries, the music he’s discovered, the indie shows, the club scene. He describes the parts of the city; he walks me through the streets, peers across Manhattan from the top of the World Trade Center, from the Empire State Building, rides the L train to Brooklyn. He comes back to Fifth Avenue and the canyon walls there, blotting out the sun.

He tells me about something else, on Fifth Avenue, right by the Empire State Building. It’s January and he’s walking north, the crowds are at the crossroads, all starting to cross mechanically before the red of the traffic light, not waiting for the green man because there’s no traffic to be seen on either side of the road. Both sides of the crowd are stepping forward, they’re about to meet like two sides in war, when all of a sudden there’s a terrible scream in
the air, as if someone has been stabbed, so terrible that everyone stops in their tracks, the entire crowd freezes still. It’s a bicycle courier riding right through the gap at full speed. His voice is the only thing that parted the crowd, his voice and nothing else, no pain, no knife, no gun. It was amazing, he says. It struck him right there, the certainty of the rider, the reaction of the crowd. How a crowd can be controlled. How the bike would have crashed if he’d failed.

Every day we meet like this. I skip college; I tell Aunty I’m in the library studying for my exams, but then we meet and we drive and we talk. We talk through everything that needs to be said. He asks a thousand questions of me, about my life, as if he’s reconstructing every scene, I tell him everything, my mother, my father, childhood, my suspended dreams. We meet in the same place every time. Like a good-luck charm: Jor Bagh, Safdarjang’s Tomb. I meet him here, park my car and we drive.

I never know where we’re going, never ask, never want to know. He drives fast through the traffic, drives as if
the other cars are not there, says this is the only way to do it, like you’re in a video game, as if there’s no one else in the world.

And in the car he watches me, has his eyes only half on the road.

One day I meet him at 8 a.m. and instead of driving we walk across to Lodhi Gardens in the pleasant morning heat. Feel the grass beneath our feet. Delhi has never been like this for me—I tell him so, I say I haven’t known moments like these, this city is a prison with nowhere to go, but now this, so strange, a morning’s walk, parakeets fluttering between the trees.
Ficus infectoria, Plumeria alba
, Latin names on signs. Along the rows of royal palm, on their bulbous bases, the carved graffiti of lovers’ names. We stroll with the joggers, the walkers, the well-to-do and well-heeled, the retired army men of Def. Col., the judges and politicians of Lodhi Estate and Jor Bagh, the movers and shakers, the same ones who shop at Khan, the ones who have guards with rifles at their gates.

And sometimes after the grass on our feet, after Lodhi’s regal ruins, below skies that are serene with cloud and touched by a tender breeze, we walk along to the Ambassador Hotel, inside to the Yellow Brick Road, for coffee and eggs at the breakfast buffet, for cornflakes and orange juice and toast, to sit in that bright sun-bleached room, poring over the menu and laughing at the words, pretending we’re on holiday, seeing the pale tourists and starched businessmen passing through. It’s a city transformed.

For three weeks it goes on like this. A quivering note sustained. He shows me this city, reveals it to me.

Back at home these days I can barely believe this is happening to me. When he drops me to my car at Jor Bagh and says good night I don’t dare look in the mirror.

In the fire of Delhi we drive down Janpath, past the Imperial Hotel, on the way to Palika Bazaar in Connaught Place. He says he wants to show me something here, something I’d never find alone.

We leave the blasted light of the day behind to walk
the slope to the market underground, past the metal detectors that don’t work, into the throng of subterranean bodies buying things. So I don’t get lost he takes me by the hand and pulls me along. We navigate the shops, the people, the plastic, the video games, the men selling belts and hats and bags, the mountains of cheap bright junk that Delhi consumes. By the hand we steal through the crowd; he knows exactly where he’s going: a faceless electronics store with an open front, small as a bathroom, identical to the rest.

In the shop he pushes through the crowd to reach a spiral metal staircase at the back and climbs straight up without pause.

The room above, this attic, has barely enough space for one to stand up straight, no windows, only bare bulbs, a fan blowing the stale hot air, and walls lined with cupboards containing thousands upon thousands of pirate DVDs. That’s what he wants me to see, any film you need, anything you want. All the foreign films, going back a hundred years. The man who follows us up proudly says that all the foreigners come here, the embassy people, the film-makers too, actors, everyone, everyone comes to me. A black-market list of foreign
films, Bergman, Kurosawa, Renais, Truffaut, Godard, the more obscure ones. They play a game with one another, he reels off a name and the man goes to a cupboard, picks out a stack, flips through it like a banker counting notes and hands over the correct plastic sleeve. He laughs, he can do this all day, he says.