He nodded. Then, changing his mind, he shook his head to indicate he wasn’t well, or that he didn’t know how he was, or that he didn’t care. A girl came in with tea.
‘I often think of those days, when your khana was the best in the city. Some people said in the country.’
‘Useless. It was my mistake, that stupid business.’
‘Not such a big mistake. At least you’re still here.’
‘I’m not here.’
‘Dimple?’ I asked.
‘Dead.’
‘Bengali?’
‘Dead.’
‘Rumi?’
‘Dead.’
‘And yourself?’ I said. ‘Alive?’
He was already drained by the conversation. He blinked at me, meeting my eyes for a moment. Then he shook his thin white-bearded cheeks.
‘Worse each day. And alive.’
The girl came back with a plate of grapes, washed and peeled and set on a white plate. Too much, he said to her. But he reached out his fingers and took some and pushed the plate to me. I took some too. There was silence in the room.
I said, ‘What happened to Dimple?’
The girl offered more grapes.
‘No, no, no,’ he said.
*
He locked up the office. He picked up his phone and keys and went up. His father was sitting in his room with the fan off and the window open, doing, as far as he could see, absolutely nothing. The old man sat all day in the same position, staring out the window. Sometimes Jamal heard him talking to himself, very softly, as if he didn’t want to be overheard. His father left the room only occasionally, sometimes for a walk, sometimes to the apartment on the half landing where the kaamvali used to live. What he did in the apartment Jamal couldn’t imagine. The place was full of junk and mould and things that needed to be thrown away. Jamal went into his own room and washed his face and neck at the sink. He picked up a towel and thought of Farheen, of her tummy fat, which never failed to excite him. She wore burkhas that she designed herself, patterned burkhas cut like a lab coat, tight around the hips and belly. She reminded him of his father’s kaamvali. Once, in a guest house in Lonavla, he came so many times that he wanted to keep count. Number seven, he said, what do you think of that? I wish you also thought of pleasuring me a little, Farheen replied. Sometimes I wish you were older, or that you acted older. To this he said nothing, because he was the age he was, younger than her by two years, and there was nothing he could do to change it. When he thought about it, about her calm appraisal of him as they fucked, the way she kissed him, the way nothing he did surprised her, as if she’d been fucked many times by many men, and the fact that she never talked about marriage though she was a spinster of twenty-five, already older than his sisters when they’d been married, and when he brought it up all she would say was that he wasn’t ready — it maddened him, it made him want to own her. He ran his fingers through his hair and checked his shave and then he turned off the lights and went out.
*
Rashid was in his room, thinking about indifference. He and his son rarely spoke because conversation was Jamal’s weapon, a way to antagonize his father. He said whatever came into his head, or, more likely, things that had never entered his head before, strange turns of phrase with no relation to reality. The last time they spoke, Rashid had complained about household finances. He’d said that Jamal was not putting enough aside for unforeseen future occurrences. Jamal’s reply: Who gives a shit about all that? Tell the future to go fuck itself. At that point, the conversation had come to an end and Rashid had returned to his apartment, where he’d picked up his prayer beads and gone to his armchair and wondered if some types of communication were better achieved without words. Communication between animals, for example, was wordless and highly effective. Perhaps communication between father and son should be the same, mostly silent. He thought of the strange one-word text messages Jamal and his friends sent each other: ‘gr8’ and ‘rotflmfao’ and ‘ftds’. It was as if they didn’t care whether they were understood, or they took pleasure in being misunderstood, or they’d decided that the rewards of obscurity outweighed the rewards of clarity. They had distilled communication down to its essence: guttural exclamation, partial understanding, indifference. They did not worry about words and what words meant. They were unmoved by tradition. He thought of the burkha-clad teenage girls he saw on the street, openly smoking on their way to or from school. The sight always gave him a small shock. Now it was time to learn something from the young, in this case the usefulness of indifference. Or it was time to relearn it, for it was a lesson he had once known. He went back to his prayers, his thumb and index finger beginning the count. From the courtyard below he heard the sound of children. It was the sound he heard most days, the shouts and cries of small children, a vast army of them, and it seemed to him at those moments that the city was a pen for unchaperoned children, wild boys and girls who were bringing themselves up on their own, begging, stealing, selling, stoning, and that his son was among them, and there was nothing he could do about it because after all this was Bombay and how else could it be?
*
It was a Saturday night and there was a crowd at the door. The club was couples only, so he’d picked up Farheen and they’d ridden to Juhu, an hour in the traffic and more time waiting at the entrance. After twenty minutes he called a number he’d been given and told the woman who answered that he was there, waiting outside, and he didn’t mind leaving if they were full, but he wasn’t going to wait any longer. She came down personally, introduced herself as Natasha and escorted them upstairs. They rode up in a glass elevator fixed to the side of the building. She had an accent he’d never heard before, South American, maybe, and all the way up she was talking on a cellphone, a second phone gripped in her free hand. I’ll try, she said. I promise you, I’ll try. All the way, for three floors, she repeated the promise. Once they were inside, Natasha vanished. Jamal and Farheen wandered around looking for a table but there was no space anywhere, not in the lounge and not at the bar, and the crowd was thicker than Grant Road Station at rush hour.
‘Is it hell?’ Farheen whispered, buffeted against him by the crowd.
‘No,’ Jamal said, ‘it’s cocaine.’
Which it surely was, a cocaine fantasy directed by a maker of Bollywood extravaganzas, because every surface, wherever he looked, was shiny, the bar tops, the low tables, the armchairs and stools. People brandished new cellphones and laptops, and these devices too were shiny: aluminium or steel or white plastic. The ceiling was hundreds of cylindrical light fixtures that changed colour with the beat. Even the toilet tanks had ridges on the side, to keep your drugs safe. He could see it on the faces and smell it in the air, cocaine and MDMA and Ecstasy, new drugs for the new Bombay.
The Russian he was supposed to meet was sitting alone in a lounge area near the rest rooms, an area designed for men or women who were waiting for their partners. And what were their partners doing? The skinny women and buff men he saw around him looked like they wasted no time on ordinary activities such as pissing and shitting. They took their time in the toilets and returned with sniffles and frozen smiles. The smile on his own face was genuine enough. He knew what he was looking at, a vast opportunity made up of many separate smaller opportunities. He tried not to let his excitement show as he negotiated with the Russian, a big man in a coat who never smiled. They did the deal right there at the table, Jamal handing the Russian the coke and the Russian giving him cash. Then the man said he was going to try a little taste. Did Jamal want some too? Jamal replied that he didn’t do coke because it wired him and if he wanted to be wired he preferred coffee, which was cheaper and more reliable. The Russian looked at him in surprise and said Jamal was probably right but it was a good idea to keep such opinions to himself, since he wouldn’t want the word to get out among his customers.