A Bad Character (9 page)

They know each other well, he’s a good customer, he’s already devoured the list. Carnivorous in his tastes, he’s bought and seen everything. He says he wanted to show me. He says, Choose whatever you want, pick as many as you like, it’s my treat. The man slides open a cupboard and pulls out five piles. Shouts down the stairs for the boy to bring tea.

Out of the buried heat, at the stop lights on the edge of CP, pink-skinned tourists roam out of season on the pavements, on the short leash from the Imperial Hotel, ambushed by chess sets and peacock feathers and maps, swooped on by the hawkers and beggar girls. As we drive back south along Janpath, he motions over the wall to the Imperial, says, Do you know you can go into the hotel, leave your car with the valet, go in through
the lobby, along the corridor, past the bathrooms, take a right at the bar, go outside along a pathway to the pool. At the pool you can give a fake name and room and you’ll be handed a bottle of water, a towel and be left completely alone. A day by the pool, away from it all. It’s possible. You just have to walk in as if you own the place, that’s the trick; it’s all about how you behave, and how you look, you have to go in with a certain disdain. It also helps if you wear shades.

I ask him about the
PRESS
sticker, the one on the back of the car—he says it’s not real, he bought it in Karol Bagh, it’s there to scare the cops, give them second thoughts at least, and also to open doors. A sticker and also a card. Any trouble and you wave it in their face, you buy some time with the right kind of talk. Another thing, he says, handing me his wallet. Open it. There, take out the top card on the right, the thick white one.

It reads: Deputy Commissioner of Police.

Do you know him?

No, he says, But I interviewed him once for a fake magazine, one I invented just for fun, to see what he’d say, to get hold of his card.

For three weeks it goes on. Three weeks like this, a glorious three. Giving the lie to the claim that time’s a linear thing, a simple proposition from A to B. He says, You’ll remember these days for the rest of your life. And though I laugh at him here, it’s true. I will, I do. These three weeks that are amputated and cauterized, preserved in memory’s specimen jar, lasting longer than the years before or since.

I still take refuge in their peaks. I watch the sun rise from them sometimes, sitting above the clouds before the avalanche of the present takes the ground from my feet. I’m still a girl here. My heart has not yet been broken in two. Everything has yet to happen, though it has already begun. He is still ugly, I am still beautiful. I am turned on. But if I stay here too long I get lost.

He tells me his story, talks to me about his exacting family, his schooldays, how he was a rebel with perfect grades, how his parents had schooled him beforehand, made him learn so many things, made him learn piano too,
how the girls loved him for it, for his rebellion, his skill. How he could get away with murder if he wanted to.

He tells me about the girlfriends he had. About a girl he was with in school, how once she went away with her family on the train and he chased the train all night on a whim, drove after it in his car just to be at the station when she stepped off. Just to see the look on her face.

I ask him about the girls. Has he had many? With a casual smile he asks, Why do you want to know? And I say, Just because, that’s all. So he tells me, Yes, he’s had some. Enough to know. Would I like to know too?

We’re driving down past AIIMS towards Green Park, towards the Outer Ring Road; we’ve been driving around for an hour. He looks at me, considers my silence.

I tell him I want to know, I want to know about them all, each and every one. What they were like, what they thought about the world, what he did with them.

Every time we meet we talk like this, pick it up and carry on. Each time I ask him and he tells me more. He willingly
talks, describes their bodies to me, their lives, their pleasures and pains, the sex they had, how they fucked, the way their bodies combined. He watches my reaction to that word, and I stir, and every time we meet I ask for more.

We eat too, we measure life by our meals in the places he shows me, the canteen at the Andhra Bhavan, Basil & Thyme, Alkauser in Chanakyapuri. We eat in Connaught Place more than anywhere.

In the decaying chandelier ballroom of the United Coffee House, we have our own waiter here, we don’t like to be served by anyone else. I tell myself that he knows something of us, that he’s complicit somehow. This waiter of ours, his face is gaunt, high-cheekboned, with thick black hair, an Alexander nose, hard soul eyes. He’s very handsome in a mountain way, Kashmiri, Himachali or Afghani, a killer, a nomad brought to earth, serving coffee and chicken à la Kiev. We decide he must be an actor in the end, one who is resting, or essaying a role, never just a waiter. His arrogance is peerless,
matched only by his consummate professionalism, his excellence in the role, his simultaneous mastery and disdain for it. No one flicks a napkin like him, with such insouciant grace. He glides around the hall, never hurried or flustered. When it comes to your order he’s almost disappointed by your choice, or else bored by the indecision when you can’t pick your plate. A doubtful eye is placed somewhere else in the room, a hairline sneer appears. No matter how much you smile, he never smiles back, only nods. No matter how many times you thank him, however big a tip you leave, there’s no reply. When he walks away we laugh. And yet he claims us every time, when we walk in he sees us and seats us.

In the restaurant we pore over the menu and gossip about the other diners, spy on them and make up their stories in this colonial relic, this memory of the Raj. We guess what people do, what they mean to one another, who’s conducting an affair with whom, a century of secrets clinging to the stucco vaulted ceiling. Old genteel Delhi. A direct line to the British days, Ludlow Castle and Court Road. Before they bring in plasma TVs, before our waiter vanishes, never to be seen again.

We drive and we drive and he talks. He wants to show me every inch of the city, wants to exhaust me, fill my body with it, he wants me to know. To know the Ridge, the tail end of the Aravalli Hills stretching all the way from Gujarat, bursting up through the city like a dinosaur’s back, one hundred and fifty million years old, older than the Himalaya itself, cutting across Delhi to die after the Hindu Rao Hospital and the Mutiny Memorial. To die without ceremony by the Yamuna.

Across boulders there are ghosts that haunt the Delhi Ridge. Across boulders, bodies of women have been draped rag-dollish, cut up, mutilated, their heads caved in with rocks, rotting to the earth, feeding the wild dogs. Bodies of men too, tumbled down in ruins of red, red rock. Across boulders, looming large, above and beyond, where the demons hide out in the scrub. We drive and we drive as the sun goes down, and here within the half-dead trees monkeys gather and men roam; they appear without warning at the side of the road, running out sometimes to flag you down.

It’s the Southern Ridge he loves the best, he drives me there, around Tughlaqabad, the ruins of the ancient city, its desolate brawn of stone. He tells the legend of the Sufi saint, how he cursed the emperor who built these walls, condemned the fortress to be barren for evermore, populated only by animals and goatherds.

From the wild heart of Delhi this lonely city stands. Intruded and built upon, abandoned. There are forgotten monuments here, lost dreams. We’ve parked awhile by their side. Look, he says, watch the trees. Murders happen all the time, people vanish, men, women and children, in such a barren spot, the desolation of madmen, mystics, whores. A place as wild as anywhere in the world. Isn’t it wonderful? He says he walks inside himself sometimes, there’s nowhere else like it in the world.

Each day, as if our time is running out, we drive and talk. From Vasant Kunj to the farmhouses of Chhatarpur, through ancient Mehrauli.

Back again, overlooking Nehru Place. He stops to park at the side of the road, lights a cigarette. The scars of the twentieth century, the brutal Soviet blocks brushed in fine, choking dust, the crowds swarming in the gaps, charging the black market of computers, hardware,
software. I’m worn down by him. He says, Look at what we’ve built. How wonderful it is to be alive.

Crepuscular. Delhi creeps as we go, the sun sinks behind the earth once more, bathes in the rotten Yamuna, drowns there. The temples erupt, the mosques, the droning of men’s voices, the keening of every faith, the desperate plea for the sun to rise again, the bats and the birds, the great tambourine shake, a bedsheet shook over the balcony to the street. And the beasts of the Ridge are going wild, making a noise of pylons and wires, a cassette being rewound, unfurling tape against magnet, the madness of the dying sun, inducing ritual panic as old as the earth.

In a city such as this you still know the sun. You know the moment it appears, you hear the bells ringing madly in praise, hear the chanting and the call to prayer leaping into the sky, the wild dogs barking in the alleyways, rising from their beds of construction sand and dirt.

Driving to Vasant Vihar, where Baba Ganganath Road meets Nelson Mandela Marg, he stops the car at the high circle of rock that forms a roundabout there. Houses
are built up there the way teeth grow from gums, hewn rock cemented on to ancient stone to make squat rooms painted in blue, pink, green, painted with advertising for soft drinks and petrol and butter. A cluster of families are living as if they’ve been shipwrecked, marooned. He says he goes and talks to them sometimes, spends hours sitting with them, telling them about the world, asking questions about their lives, making them laugh with his strangeness, with his wisdom, wandering in and out of them like a holy fool.

Further and further, more tangled in these lines, into the inferno night we go, into the reeling streets with the windows down, south past the pharmacies that leech on to AIIMS, past the families of patients waiting outside, past the narrow shopfronts and signboards of Green Park to the Qutb Minar, beyond the tombs and scrub into the desert, free of bodies and cars and rupee notes. Into the foundation emptiness of Gurgaon, to the construction sites that stretch monolithic, as far as the eye can see. He wants to show me the future. He wants to share the new world with me. We drive down these long, straight desert roads, built with nothing at their
ends. They suddenly fall away around girders and steel poles. Construction appears, towering shells of concrete with sodium vapours illuminating the workers in the sky.