The message isn’t long. He says his name and the fact that he’s not here right now, but he’ll get back as soon as he can. In a deep and resonant voice. A voice full of easy confidence. A voice that doesn’t match his animal face.
In August college restarted, my final year coming so abruptly upon us that the dream of the summer was at an end.
He said he’d do my work for me, write my essays, he’d do whatever, it was easy for him, he’d make sure I passed with the highest grades. I wouldn’t have to do a thing.
In college, in the lectures, I look around at my classmates, at the girls who I’ve been out with before, whose fortunes had been read alongside mine, and I feel apart from them, superior, changed. I see the life they lead, the things they do, the direction they’re heading in, and I want none of it. My old sadness is worn as a kind of arrogance now.
In bed, in the living room, driving in the car, it’s much the same. He says, It’s just you and me now, and I say, Yes, just you and me. No one else in the world. Fuck them, he says. Fuck everyone. We’ll go crazy, we’ll show them all. And I say, Yes, yes, we’ll do it. Show them all. He says it’s time to leave that world behind, leave Aunty behind, leave marriage behind, leave society behind, and I say, Yes, yes. When he’s inside me I say yes. He says, Move out of that house, move in here with me. And when he’s inside me I say yes. I will. I’ll go get my things, I’ll tell her, I’ll shock them all. He says, Do it, do it now, you don’t need their hypocrite world any more, their safety, their ignorance, their preservation. You have me now. And I say, Yes.
It’s a heady world of make-believe.
But I am a coward and I’ll never leave.
A month passes from the day I hear of his death; I call his voicemail all the time. Ten, twenty times a day, I call him just to hear what he has to say, but it’s always the same. Even as I’m going about my vacuumed life, I step aside and dial the number to hear the only part of him that remains.
Out of hiding, almost imperceptibly, I begin to drive the city again. Routes are muscle memory and Delhi an extension of him. So I drive to the places we have been, grief-stricken but free. I drive the streets at night looking for him. I drive through Lutyens’ Delhi. I go to the American Diner and drink a Bloody Mary alone.
We’re sitting in the American Diner, me and him, drinking Bloody Marys, eating chili dogs. We’ve commandeered the Tabasco sauce. We sit on the stools at the bar, watch what’s happening from here, keep an eye on the red-and-white Formica room, to the right of the cash register with the door behind. Good for conversation, good for getting little extras from the barman. Chili dogs, onion rings, Bloody Marys and later a glass of beer. Our glorious playground Delhi. He whispers in my ear.
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.