A Bad Character (16 page)

A family comes in and sits at the far corner of the bar on the side that leads to the hotel exit. Father, mother, daughter. The girl is about fifteen. I see her right away and she sees me too. She’s watching us, curious. I tell him
this and he casts his eye over her. He leans into me and says, See, she’s another you. The only difference is that she knows it already. It’s true, you can see something in her, that curiosity, that restlessness, the disobedience. The arms so thin they might break, with that body and the long black hair, very straight, sitting erect and still as a coal in a fire. Her parents are nothing like her, their surfaces have dulled, and who’s to say she won’t dull too. But right now she’s aflame. And we’re staring at her.

We can’t stare for ever. I tell him to watch me instead. He looks at me. But she knows she’s been seen, that she’s the object of our attentions, our curiosity. So there’s the three of us now, watching, and no one else to know, and she’s looking at me, asking telepathically, What are you doing with this monster by your side? And I’m saying to her, I don’t know. But you should try it some time.

Delhi, yes.

Black bilgewater out of every orifice. Water flowing from the drainage channel. The cops have cordoned off the underpass from Lothian Road. Lothian Road to the
Red Fort, stray dogs are eating a corpse down there. They’re using rocks to chase them away but the dogs don’t scare, they keep coming back for more.

In September we take to walking after college, walking Old Delhi as the sun goes down. The monsoon has left its glory behind. This is the height of us. It will never be like this again.

We see another dead body here, before entering the old city at Mori Gate. He is leading me through the streets with him. I am letting myself be led. We’re heading across from the slumber of Civil Lines where we’ve parked, heading from the red-brick charm of Court Road up to Mori Gate, past the police parade ground, up to the edge of the walled city. Each broken brick arch in the distance houses a person, a family, a way to stay alive, the alleyways beyond holding a million lives. People living here the way weeds live in ruins and make flowers. Millions of them, people in the mazes of alleys beyond, where the sun barely shines, through the gaps, with the temples and the minarets and churches, along paths that are labyrinthine. Inside the old city, there’s the smell of
engine oil, mechanics with their spare parts, with their shops for screws, brackets, car stereos, flashing lights. A wall of tyres stacked ten metres high, stinking of rubber, towards the Old Delhi station, obscuring the golden dome of St. James’s Church. And kerosene, this is the smell of Delhi too. The gas burners for the bubbling oil, for the samosas and pakodas in their wide-bottomed pans. But in the crowds of open road before the old city this young man is dead. Dead, face up on the pavement, whose cobbles have shaken loose as if they’ve been through an earthquake.

You can see it from far off. There’s something unmistakable, entirely separate from sleep. From drunkenness or unconsciousness. This young man, this Raju, bus passenger, cheap groper, son to a mother, friend, thief, piece of meat. In his early twenties maybe, he’s clean-shaven and not long dead, wearing a black plastic jacket. Cheap and dead with no tale to tell. The mouth, as you get closer, it’s been ripped open on the left side, torn as if caught on a fishing line so it gives an awful grin of skeletal teeth behind the veil of cheek. And the eyes are wide open, staring up in disbelief. Soon the crows will have them, they’ll pluck them out. There are only socks on his feet.
His shoes are gone. Someone must have already stolen them.

Everyone is walking around him, acting as if he isn’t there. Thousands of feet, no one seems to notice. We keep walking too. He says, Look, don’t stop, there’s nothing else to do. A cop is directing traffic down on the Tis Hazari road. We all know not to approach him, he’ll happily take us in, question us, come up with an absurd theory, some trumped-up charge. Why are you so interested in a dead man? What does it have to do with you?

My memory always enters Old Delhi at Mori Gate. No matter where I am, it enters into this maze from here, which I have learned through him by heart. Into the medieval stone and commerce, and the din of daily voices in their treble shriek, words swamped by film songs on old radios, battered TV sets and the urgency of porters with heavy loads yelling for people to get out of their way.

Through this maze and out into descending night to the scene of Hamilton Road, past the queues of cycle rickshaws and the toilet blocks, and families with young girls in make-up and cheap clothes, over the railway bridge, just like a fairground, the colour and bustle, the ephemeral joy of the lit-up. A dentist is sitting cross-legged waiting for customers, kept company by pliers and a pile of orphaned teeth on the side of the road.

Into the bazaar north of Chandni Chowk we plunge, to the market inhabiting the centuries-old stone, plastic toys, calculators, computers and games, stationery, manuals. Everything you could hope to find has its place here, junk piled up high into rooms which tiptoe into blackness, passageways that fork and vanish into crypts, double back on themselves. Above ground or underground, inside or out, it’s unclear.

We emerge without warning into the pavement of Chandni Chowk. He pulls me across a gap in the road, past the cycle rickshaws. The Red Fort is glowering at one end. The sound of so many bodies swallowing us. And the fort is gone.

Then a measure of peace, a side alley where nothing stirs. Turning back you can see people marching past the crack of it. It happens like this sometimes, some lanes remain forever hidden away.

He walks me deeper into the walled city, twisting down narrow passageways and alleyways, knowing the way by heart. Suddenly we’re in the place where lives are spent behind walls, in courtyards where the walls are front doors. It’s where the Muslim girls roam, in twos and threes, heavenly girls of milk-white whose skin the sun does not see—they glide past us in silence with their painted cat eyes framed in black.

Turning into another alleyway, he slows our pace to follow a pair moving arm in arm ahead. Suddenly I see them with his eyes, feel his obscene desire, the sport he makes of them. My sisters and me. Because I love him we follow them like this, see their sashaying walk, seek the plaited hair peeking below the waist. Beneath the blackness of their outer world there are gaudy colours, there
are sequined and embroidered clothes of pink and blue, pierced ears and noses, rings and studs, necks clamped in jewels, arms in bangles, legs in anklets, feet in heels. I taste the hunger he has for them, for their enormous kohl eyes etched in black, for their lips made up with ruby-red and lashes rising to the moon.

Somewhere, behind closed doors, in cramped and barren rooms, in happy rooms of austere stone, they’ll lie down in their splendour and a man will make love to them, beat them for a look or a word, for no reason at all, will despise them, ignore them, be blind to them, somewhere someone will caress them, whisper secrets in their ears, buy gifts to appease them, make them smile, coax a laugh from their lips from which love trickles like a brook. Her eyelids open and close in the heat of the night, overlooking the masjid.

In his room we hold Old Delhi inside us, the things we’ve seen: the torn cheek, the teeth, the clicking heel on stone, the fleeting eye, the hair beneath the veil. He talks it to me, he fucks me slowly with his words, takes his pain out on me from the city he’s consumed, merging
limbs and lips, doing it to me again and again. I beg him. He wraps his hands around my throat and sinks inside. He wants to be with me everywhere, wants to follow me through the streets. I’d walk for him and he’d obliterate me, take everything but my eyes. I’d cover myself, in devotion, and know that I was owned.

But it’s the same old problem, the one we come back to every time. He says, Leave, move in with me, and I say I will … but I can’t. I ask him to wait awhile and he says, What for? He gets angry and stalks the apartment, calls me a liar, a coward, drinks some more, says I’m boring, just like everyone else. He wonders why he’s wasting his time. I’m a tease and a tourist. He becomes angry because I leave, because of the way I guard myself, the way I never let go, as if I’ve learned nothing from him. But it’s OK. He’ll show me if it kills him, he’ll carry me kicking and screaming through his world.

Driving home I feel everything that’s been lost, I feel the sudden fear of a life out of control, knowing it’s too late to go back and that I’ve already gone too far. Going
home I think how I can escape, how I can get away from what we’ve done. And then I get inside Aunty’s static world and I can’t wait to run back to him.

Under the pretext of looking for jobs I drive around the city all the time, spend hours driving around in my car alone. Then go to his apartment and sit outside and look, waiting for something to happen.

Finally something does happen: a family appears, a smart-looking corporate type with his wife and small child. I watch them on the balcony and through the living room window from the dark of my car. I keep coming back for more. I watch the husband leave for work in the morning. I watch the wife standing on the balcony as he goes.

A few days later his voicemail dies.

In Nizamuddin I ring the bell of the apartment door. The maid answers and I ask to speak to sir or madam, knowing that sir has already left for work.

Madam comes to the door holding her young child, a curious look on her face. I act surprised to see her, as if expecting someone else. I ask her right away where they are, if the family is in or away. She tells me they don’t live here any more, they sold the apartment, it only happened two weeks ago, it was a very quick sale. Oh, I say, but I’ve come all the way from Chandigarh. I’d lost their number but I knew the house, I used to live just round the corner and now … Do you have a number for them? Do you know where they’ve gone?

She says she’ll get it for me, would I like to come in?

The woman offers me a seat in the living room while she goes to leave her child with the maid. The Japanese screen doors have been removed—now family photos cover the walls. It’s hard to believe it’s the same home.