A Bad Character (12 page)

We left the apartment that night and walked along the streets, walking without touching. Through Nizamuddin in the heat to the dargah, from the smart, clipped neighbourhood into the Muslim streets, where bearded men gathered in white and goats were tethered to butchers’ shops. Left at the mosque, down the passageway, the night brighter than the day, eerie in its calligraphic pharmacy, in Urdu glowing green and gold, trimmed by the desert and the certainty of God. Men stood in their shops behind counters, beside TVs showing preachers delivering sermons, voices droning out of loudspeakers, the flutter of rose petals, a butcher’s knife.

The crowds were swirling in the narrowing alleyway, the walls closing in at the sides, canopied with cloth, drawing us down lower, almost underground, as if we were being sucked downriver to a grotto. So many bodies there that we were almost lost. He grabbed my hand to keep me close. The threshold of the dargah appeared, medieval. We crossed over.

It is said that the dargah is not only a place on earth, it is also a rupture in space and time, a portal through which the saint can enter this world.

We remove the chappals from our feet, add them to the rising pile. Bump against the mass of bodies, step on the black-and-white marble that like a riverbed has been worn down, smoothed by centuries of pilgrims’ feet, its corners like melted wax. Red petals fleck the ground, fluttering on to graves.

Inside, the river of people dissipates; it finds new currents, reaches up into the sky. Pilgrims slow down, scatter, form groups, they find corners for themselves, as if striking camp.

The eight players of the qawwali are sitting in the inner courtyard before the shrine, sitting in two banks of four, lining one side of a rectangle. Devotees and onlookers form the two long edges, thirty or forty of them now, their numbers increasing all the time. Everyone faces inwards to the centre they have made, a void and a well
in the middle of the bodies in which the song is amplified. It has been going for an hour now.

The tabla and dholak inducing a trance.

The harmonium guiding the leader’s voice.

Handclaps locking the rhythm inside.

The leader is gnomic, bold and erect, his beard hangs down his chest in a point, his eyes crinkle above it in a smile. And his voice, it undulates within the scaffold of his throat, rising to a pure note with his hand held high.

Hypnotized, forgetting ourselves, we take a place at the back of one side, enclosed in the heat, standing at the back of the crowd. We crane our necks to see. At the front they are seated, swaying, hijras among them, their painted eyes rolling around their heads.

In space, beyond the sun and moon, in the depthless universe where the stars can’t be seen, there is the saint.

The music grows faster, wilder, careening towards rupture, the crowd grows so that we are pressed against one
another by those around, but I can feel him, feel his body next to mine, his hand around my own. As the rhythm builds we are pushed forward until we emerge somehow at the front of the standing group. Here we remain poised on the edge.

We begin to forget ourselves, who we are, our daily lives, for half an hour we remain like this.

Then the miracle happens.

The leader in full song looks up at me, looks me in the eyes, and in the middle of his plaintive cry motions with his hand for us to sit at the front of the crowd.

The crowd parted, it did, the people smiled and moved aside, hands steadied our path, faces beamed at us, bodies rocked themselves possessed.

And now sat at the front on my heels, fists on knees in the desert heat with the hot wind of Delhi that scours our skin, with faces etched in the rhythm and bound in the love of the saint, my entire being a percussive beat, and even he who has given me this is gone.

I am disappeared. On a plateau of rock, burst into flames.

I fall into a trance. I lose myself. How long I remain like this I can’t say, but it feels like hours have passed when I open my eyes. People are looking and smiling. For as long as the music plays the world is mine.

But it wears down, it eases off, exhaustion follows, and the leader seems to avert his gaze.

Without the beat to hold us in place our hearts release themselves like birds up into the night sky. We begin to drift. Electric light falls on the land.

And walking home through the city, listening to its womb-sound, we are conquerors. We don’t say another word. Hungry, bereft, slipping through the alleyways, it’s only when we get back to his home that the desire returns. It comes with the force of everything we’ve heard. We do it again right there against the door, without
undressing. He lifts me up and holds me against the wall. With sanctity, grief and passion, I bite into his flesh and he puts himself inside me and he bursts.

Aunty thinks I’m sleeping at a classmate’s house. When I call her to say good night he takes the phone from me and he speaks as my friend’s imaginary father, in an assured voice that is casual, measured, having just the right tone. He’s such a convincing liar.

It goes on all night, until disintegration. He drinks his whisky and worships me, and I give my body to him, feed my skin, take his black lips and hold them to the childish fat around my waist, the heat between my legs. I let him come to me. With such abandon, such a lack of care. And such terror on seeing the daylight appear through the cracks, to find the room becoming visible again, to know dull shapes are real things once more. Lying down at the end of it, upheld in the empty thoughts of what we’ve done. I’d forgotten the night would ever end.

I woke around eleven. In those few moments of unremembering, of pure animal consciousness unattached to the world, I saw him beside me, felt the pain in my hips, the tearing in me, and the dull tobacco warmth of his breath.

He stirred and rolled closer, opened his eyes, and for the briefest moment his face was ungoverned, appearing monstrous. But his pupils dilated, turned cunning, and when he blinked he hid the animal away. Good morning, he said. He reached to light a cigarette and smiled.

We did it again, painfully this time, all too real. Every nerve tapped and twisted, with nothing to numb it, I cried out, lost in the fields, and I held him as he poured himself into me. Like the pressing of a bruise, the pleasure of pain, I love him for this.

He held me in his arms afterwards, held me round my waist, pressed his teeth to the back of my neck, whispered in my ear, and he asked me what it was I wanted from the world, what it was I feared. I said I feared everything, and I only wanted to be free.

Later I showered, brushed my teeth and got changed. While he made breakfast he coached me on what to say to Aunty. Already we have slipped into a pattern, there are things we don’t mention any more, movements that are unquestioned, the shorthand of lovers, things that are understood.

I drive home as if in slow motion, floating above the noise as the city parts for me. It’s such a sudden switch inside where Aunty is dressed in a fine sari, preparing to go for a kitty party, putting on earrings in the strip-light mirror, filling an envelope with money and chatting away, trying to make me get changed to go along with her, but there’s no time, she’s already running late. She leaves me alone.

In the silence left behind, inside my room, I close my eyes. In the bathroom I take a shower and revel in the water’s heat. I examine my body closely, look for marks and wondrous signs. Then, with the ghost of his cock between my legs and Aunty far away, I fall into a deep and turbulent sleep.

TWO

Now I’m remembering the day a year later when I heard that he’d died. He was dead three weeks already then, already cremated, his ashes scattered by his parents in the Ganga at Rishikesh. That’s right, his parents, alive and well and in the flesh.

I was sitting next to Aunty on the sofa when the call came in. His driver, Ali, was on the line. He had a driver by that point, he’d found him in a slum colony drinking one night and they’d hit it off, he’d given him the job on a whim. Ali loved him like they all loved him, all his men. Now sobbing, drunk, half out of his mind, he gathered himself enough to say, Madam, no one has told
you, but I have to tell you, it’s my duty … Sir is no more, he is dead.

I listened to his sobbing and I hung up without a word, and as we continued to watch the TV a white-hot surge shot from my temples through my skin.

Still I didn’t believe it was true, not at first. In the moment of shock I told myself it was a game, that after months of silence it was the beginning of his revenge. Throughout the night I went over all the things that had gone between us, how it had come to this, and I met the dawn staring at the vacant window in the tower block across the way. Then, with barely any sleep, I resolved to drive to his apartment to confront him and finish this once and for all.

July 3rd. It was raining that day. The monsoon hung over the city in a tepid kind of grey, not with the driving force that exhilarates but the squalid sort that seeps into your bones. I hadn’t been near Nizamuddin since I’d seen him the final time, and when I turned into the colony
all the memories came rushing back at me, banging on the windows like beggar girls. Still I rehearsed my lines, I prepared a defiant speech.

But when I pulled up across the road I knew there was no need. The bamboo wall of the balcony had been torn down, the front door and the windows were all wide open and an ugly white light shone on a handful of well-dressed people within.

As I entered they were standing in the living room, engaged in sober conversation. The room had been stripped clean and there were packing crates along one wall. I don’t know what I said at that moment, but I must have looked disturbed to them, exhausted, confused and soaked by the rain. The entire group seemed to back away, all except three: a couple in their sixties, elegant but severe, and a hard-edged girl several years older than I.

It was the girl who spoke first. In a tired voice she said, Who are you? and when I found I couldn’t answer she
nodded as if she knew the answer anyway. Then I asked the question back of them, Who are you? Who are they? To which she replied that they were his parents and she was his fiancée, and he was dead now, so it would be better for everyone if I just turned around and went away.

We don’t drive around Delhi any more, we stay in his apartment and we fuck. And also we make love. He is a god to me. I’ve never known with such certainty what my body is for.

I’ve told Aunty I’m enrolled in a summer language course. I say I’m learning French. That it will aid my studies, my future career, my marriage prospects. It will help to take me abroad one day. This is his idea of course, he tells me to say these words. He says she’ll accept them, that they’ll work. And it’s true—despite an initial protest, she’s pleased.

Inside the apartment the renovation is complete. His belongings are moved back into place, the paint is dry, the AC runs day and night.

Up the white marble stairs, we enter through the heavy wooden door, across the dark hallway, to the living room that’s partitioned by Japanese sliding screens.

There’s a vast TV in there, an expensive stereo, low sofas, cushions, Afghan rugs, piles of books and magazines on the coffee table, standing lamps with warm bulbs and art prints on the wall. There’s a writing desk, too, with his computer on it, a still-empty bookshelf, and the high bamboo-walled balcony beyond the black glass doors.

In his bedroom the walls are painted red, with one small window to let faint light in. It’s bare save for the bed that sprawls across the terracotta floor. A scaffold of interlocking tubes, he says there’s only one way of putting it together and taking it apart.

This bedroom, this red floor, that black bed, those white sheets. That long space like a fish tank cut into the inside wall, to look out on the corridor, for invisible faces to observe.

In a niche above the bed he has a shrine to Shiva. Nataraj, the dancing Lord, who stands in a dark hole with a small warm bulb giving fire from behind, summoning the chaos of the world.

There’s a recess in the bedroom too, big enough for a body to fit. He places me inside there, asks me to pose for him. He photographs me here. Like a statue he watches me, admires my body, my face, adores my youth. In the recess, in profile, my knees pulled up to my bare chest, arms clasped around them, spine curved, hair tied up on the top of my head, carved out in silhouette. I hold my breath. Sitting naked, cross-legged, he photographs me. On hands and knees, not moving, he tells me to stay and takes my image and watches me. Then he paces the room, cigarette in hand, like a critic, examining me from
all angles before he goes to get a beer, goes to the kitchen to make some food, to the living room to watch TV. Tells me not to move, until I think I’ve been forgotten. Then he comes back in, opens my legs.