I shook my head. He asked me very casually what happened to the NRI. The smile that grew around his mouth suggested he knew more than he let on. I stared at him a long time and in a whispered voice I told him to leave me alone. I got up to go to the bathroom. I left him sitting at the table, watching me.
But walking along the soiled tiled corridor at the back of the restaurant I suddenly heard someone behind following fast. It was him, he was bearing down on me with an excited look in his eyes. I hurried forward, pushed open the door and tried to make it into a cubicle to lock myself in, but he was too fast, he followed me even there, caught me before I made it through, pushed me into the cubicle with him and put one hand over my mouth to stop me crying out. Then he took his hand away, fell to his knees and removed my jeans.
I said no. But I couldn’t pull myself away from it. I’m there again and he’s going down on me. He’s moving his tongue between my legs and I’m bracing my arms against the walls, closing my eyes and biting my lip until it bleeds.
THREE
Delhi in the winter is colder than a person from the outside can possibly imagine. There was a time when the sun would shine, but that time has gone. In its place there is the grey of pollution and the dirty clouds of freezing fog that roll into the buildings, like cotton wool wiped along the back of a filthy neck, clinging to the city in a frozen, depthless sky.
To not feel the sun, to see it only as a faint disc, like a silver tablet dissolving into water. What a terrible thing.
The moment comes, sometime around the middle of the day, when you finally feel that the sun might come. And then it is gone again.
This would be fine if the houses were not built exclusively for the heat. If they were insulated you could retreat indoors and wait. But there’s no insulation, no radiators, no carpets, and the walls that stay mercifully cool in the summer are icy now, the windows and doors let the unchecked cold seep in through their gaps, their porous borders inept against this dread. It is impossible to get warm. The cold goes into your nerves, invades your bones. It feels as if animals are gnawing at them. You sleep in silence, in blankets, fully clothed.
Despite all this happening year upon year, no one seems to have learned; everyone is surprised. In the summer, when the heat can kill, an old man goes out in a vest, shirt and sweater and cycles to and fro in the midday sun without so much as breaking a sweat. In the winter he just freezes to death.
Even sitting in your car you just cannot get warm. The engine blows out artificial heat, only giving a headache, inducing you to fall asleep at the wheel. As if poison is being pumped in. The word “filament” repeats in your brain.
And the men crouch in blankets, unmoving, lining the streets.
December and January, suspended animation, when the fire of north Indian blood is dimmed. Rage crawls inside itself. I crawl inside myself too. As if I’ve been placed inside a matchbox, in a doll’s house.
The end, when it came, was unexpected. It was all tied up with the girl in the other tower. She never made it to Canada. She didn’t even make it out of Delhi. She died right there on the day of her escape. I’d lost sight of her for a long time, I didn’t think of her at all. Then I came home from college on a freezing afternoon and she was at the bottom of her tower, a crowd around her body and a pool of blood around her head.
Aunty is ablaze with the news. She shepherds me into my room. From my window we see the bedroom and a trail of sheets still coming out of it like spilt guts reaching halfway to the ground. She’d made a rope of them but had fallen almost as soon as she’d climbed out. She’d fallen, fallen all the way past the balconies with pot plants, frightening the pigeons — a short intake of air, a scream, and then silence, her brain open on the concrete.
Her father must have found out about the affair, about her boyfriend, about her plans to elope with him. Something must have happened, he must have stopped her from going, maybe he locked her up like Aunty used to say, and the window was her only escape. It made the papers, February 2001. The boyfriend, who had been waiting at the bottom of the tower with tickets and passport in hand, and who had then seen her fall, was arrested on the influence of her father. He spent two months as an undertrial in Tihar Jail.
That same night I drove to him in a daze. I had no one else to turn to. I told him about the girl in the window, what had happened to her, how she’d fallen trying to escape and how she’d died. I was distraught, unreasonably upset. My distress seemed to animate him. A spark was triggered in his eyes. We got drunk and smoked and held one another, talking about the shortness of lives.
The next morning I woke early, hung-over and unsure of myself. I left quietly, and on a whim went shopping. I took an auto to South Extension. Shopping to forget. To be like any other girl.
But I saw her brains on every piece of pavement I stepped on and her blood in the strands of every stranger’s hair. Even so I bought a pair of jeans I liked from the Levi’s store.
She sits with the Businessman in the club. They’ve cordoned off an area in the dark. There are indulgent waiters exclusively for them, segregation created through orbiting bodies of lesser wealth. The music is loud, people know who he is. She is known by association. And even those who don’t know understand they must be very important. People to be reckoned with. She is seen here as a still life, painted in the chiaroscuro of carefully concealed lights that bring out a feature here and there, plunging it back into the velvet dark. In the middle of all of them she looks imperious, and with the coke in her this is how she feels. Yes, to anyone watching this girl she must look cold as moonlight, marble hard. She barely moves, just sits beside him as he talks and drinks and plots, before she goes to the bathroom for another line.
Waking with no memory. Fear from the belly up. Then remembering. Driving the car through red lights, speeding at dark through the fog, a brain overloaded with coke. These mornings alone are the worst. Wrapped up in a ball, trying not to remember myself.
But if there was anything left over in the packet I’d do it right away. And you can’t live without your shades. You can’t live without your blacked-out car. You can’t live without your driver and gun. You can’t live without the five-star rooms, without the guarded compounds. The houses of the rich are sealed compartments, and the houses of the poor are open to the world. Everything you want, anything at all. Delhi is the sound of construction, of vegetable vendors and car horns. Of crows bursting up out of the blackness and diving back down.