I run.
I run a lot in these college days, in the colony below the tower block, in the faded little park where the aunties go for their morning strolls, after the cleaners have swept the rooms and the cooks have been given their work. It’s the same park where the servants sit on the benches during their breaks, trading house gossip and complaints, and where the drivers lie wolf-eyed, waiting to be called in the shade. I run a lot in this park in the mornings, before all this happens, and in the evening before the sun goes down I run too, put on a CD and just run. Going in circles because the park is so small, listening to Moby in the beginning — simple, uplifting, driving my feet forward. And then later listening to the trance my love gives me, hard, dark and hypnotized.
But before all this I listen with bursts of hope, desperation, burning up the energy that has nowhere to go. I want to run in the night, to get up at 4 a.m. and go out into the deserted lanes, charge down the middle past the sleeping dogs, over the potholes. I wake up in the dead of it and listen to the AC and I want just to put my music on and go out there, make my lungs burst, and run. Only Delhi is no place for a woman in the dark unless she has a man and a car or a car and a gun.
But now we’re in this café, a place I visit often. I drive a little, then I come to sit, to read a book, to pretend to think. I chat with this waitress of mine, this Chinky, as Aunty calls her, this woman from the north-east. She’s very beautiful to me, but we only talk between orders, in the time she takes to collect my cup and plate, and even then she lingers with one foot ready to leave, an ear cocked to the rest of the room. In snatches she tells me about her troublesome brother in Manipur, her loving husband who is educated and too proud to take on lesser work. Around her eyes she wears a thick ring of kohl to make them seem larger — she says quite sadly that she has small eyes, that they’re ugly, but I like her eyes, as I like everything about her: alert, mournful, intelligent, but most of all different. And while the kohl around her eyes looks like rebellion, around mine it is a prison.
Once or twice in my green bathroom light have I put kohl around my eyes like hers, thickly, admiring them.
But she’s not here today.
And across the room he is staring at me.
I’ve been stared at a lot, of course; it’s what happens here, it’s what men do. Every day, from door to door, on the buses, stepping through rubble on the edge of the road, in the car stuck in traffic, at red lights. Stares of incomprehension, lust, rage, sad yearning, so vacant and blank sometimes it’s terrifying, sometimes pitiful. Eyes filling the potholes, bouncing down the street like marbles, no escaping their clank. Eyes in restaurants, in offices, in college, eyes at home. Women’s too, disapprovingly.
But in his eyes there’s the promise of something else.
So I’m in this café in Khan Market, twenty years old and I’m beautiful, though I only know it now looking back at the photos I have of myself, where it’s obvious, painfully so because it’s gone, this beauty, never to return, where the skin is so young and unmarked by life, still with the last traces of puppy fat, but how deep is the hunger in the eyes, the joy right there inside her at the moment she’s being shaped and devoured.
And nobody knows, nobody will. That’s the thrill of it. None of my classmates, no family. They’ll know something is up, that something has changed, but if they knew for certain what it was, if they could see him, they’d be horrified beyond belief, because he’s ugly.
Ugly with dark skin, with short wiry hair, with a large flat nose and eyes bursting out on either side like flares, with big ears and a fleshy mouth that holds many teeth.
There’s something of the animal in him. Something of the elephant and the monkey. Something of the jackal.
He’s not a typical “Delhi boy,” that’s for sure, not only because of his face and skin but also because of the clothes he wears: a faded yellow T-shirt that’s been washed too many times, a pair of too-large brown corduroy pants held up with an old belt. A vagabond who’s been scrubbed clean. But there are also brand-new red Converse sneakers on his feet, with their clownish white rims that tell me he’s not exactly from the street.
He’s nothing like the boys they want me to marry. There’s a new one of those on the horizon, a non-resident Indian, twenty years in the U.S., a full-blooded American now. Aunty is lining him up for a meeting. I sit with her at home on the sofa while she tells me all about him. She leafs through his biodata, his golden résumé, and in this apartment high up in the air I cannot breathe. I eat and sleep but I cannot breathe. She’s been arranging these meetings for a year now, without success, but she never tires, and this new one is very promising to her: he’s seen my photo and approved of my looks, and because he’s divorced he’s willing to overlook my own unfortunate situation, the mother dead, the father absent.
Aunty doesn’t imagine I’d ever say no, and after so many rejections, after so many families have turned me down, she’s giddy about this one.
Sitting on the sofa. Listening to her speak. The soap operas on the TV, the thick curtains drawn, the fan spinning dead air. Such heavy furniture in her world, stared at by that dark wood, by those statues of gods, by bronze and dried fruit, by nuts tied in packages with bows, left over from this wedding or that, from Diwali.
Uncle is in his bedroom looking through the accounts, or pretending to at least, drinking his peg of whisky. His world is his own, he doesn’t share it with me — only good morning, how are you, fine, off to college, very good. Never any emotion, no affection for his wife, not in public at least. Only the motions of putting food on the table, only off to the factory or the club and then to sleep.
In front of the TV Aunty looks at me sadly. She sees my stubbornness, my lack of enthusiasm, and suddenly she’s afraid for me.
But I’m actually considering the American, that’s the truth. I’m seriously thinking of saying yes to him. I’ve been toying with the idea for a while now. The neighbour says, But he’s divorced, and Aunty says, So what if he’s divorced, he’s learned his lesson, he makes good money, he’s a good family boy, what more is there? And unlike this one in the café, the American is not ugly at all.
It’s the years of conditioning that make me think his dark skin is ugly, poor, wrong. That make me think he looks like a servant.
But in the café I’m looking up at him.
I am pretty and he is ugly.
And the secret is this turns me on.
I tried many times to write this down, and all have failed. Ten years gone by. Words deleted from hard drives, set on fire in ditches, in metal bins on balconies, pages torn up in frustration, scrunched into balls and tossed away. I tried to write this down but went about it the wrong way. How to write while being pursued? When one is not the pen but the page?
So, Varanasi, aged eight. Still in pigtails, wearing my tartan dress. Still a little mute and pensive, my lips pursed, looking in the mirror but not quite recognizing myself, not yet comfortable in my own skin. I want to be grown-up more than anything, but for now I’m only aware enough to be embarrassed of myself. I don’t know any other way; I certainly don’t know how to change it. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s within my power to change anything, to make decisions of my own. So I’m stuck in this body and the clothes I’m given to wear. But it’s also true that I like my tartan dress.