Deepti Kapoor - A Bad Character

In his bedroom the walls are painted red, with one small window to let faint light in. It’s bare save for the bed that sprawls across the terracotta floor. A scaffold of interlocking tubes, he says there’s only one way of putting it together and taking it apart.

This bedroom, this red floor, that black bed, those white sheets. That long space like a fish tank cut into the inside wall, to look out on the corridor, for invisible faces to observe.

In a niche above the bed he has a shrine to Shiva. Nataraj, the dancing Lord, who stands in a dark hole with a small warm bulb giving fire from behind, summoning the chaos of the world.

There’s a recess in the bedroom too, big enough for a body to fit. He places me inside there, asks me to pose for him. He photographs me here. Like a statue he watches me, admires my body, my face, adores my youth. In the recess, in profile, my knees pulled up to my bare chest, arms clasped around them, spine curved, hair tied up on the top of my head, carved out in silhouette. I hold my breath. Sitting naked, cross-legged, he photographs me. On hands and knees, not moving, he tells me to stay and takes my image and watches me. Then he paces the room, cigarette in hand, like a critic, examining me from all angles before he goes to get a beer, goes to the kitchen to make some food, to the living room to watch TV. Tells me not to move, until I think I’ve been forgotten. Then he comes back in, opens my legs.

He says there should be two of me. One forever in that place and one for the world. He’d fuck one on the bed and watch the other up there.

Other times he just wants to lie inside. He comes up and enters, wraps his arms around me, holds me from behind, says he’d frame me if he could, pin me like a butterfly to the page. He holds my head in a certain light, positions me by the chin. My arms, my neck, my nose, my heart — so perfect a set of things they could break.

I find to my surprise that I don’t mind hearing these words, that I like him doing these things to me. I find I’m happy to make an object of myself for him, he who is setting me free.

It’s getting light at 5 a.m., the heat has never left. It’s so hot these days that the tarmac melts and no one really sleeps. I wake and I drive into the city. I arrive at his apartment and let myself in. I find him asleep, in bed or in the living room. I press myself into him. The apartment is unmoving. No one is ringing the doorbell, there’s no sound of soap operas on TV, no servants sweeping around our feet. There’s only this.

The vendors wheel their carts along the road. Above his balcony the black kites circle, looking like sharks seen from the ocean floor. His head is between my legs, his gleaming mouth gnawing at my flesh. Day ends and night falls again and again, and each night I have to go home. With my black hair shining I shower and get dressed and I go.

At home I talk about my course, I bore Aunty with it, I even speak some small phrases of French he has taught me. I tell her little anecdotes about the people there, the friends I’ve made, the ones I hate. I talk about the friends’ houses that I have begun to study in, talk about their parents who don’t exist. Lies on top of lies, as easy as breathing. People and lives constructed out of nothingness. I keep her happy with gossip, make her intimate with it. It’s still necessary, even at twenty, to do these things.

But when I’m with him there is only the truth of his apartment, his car and the city in which we move. I see his eye on me above all things. In his living room, with the lights off, in the glow of the TV, watching movies: Pickpocket, Hiroshima Mon Amour, La Jetée, Night of the Living Dead . He fixes his eye, follows my face for every twitch, each smile, each moment of delight and surprise, sadness and pain, he says he’s never seen a face like mine, he could watch it all day. All those years of eyes on me, all that fear, and it has come to this, this desire that is in me alone.

Lying on my back. He comes into me. His eyes flutter behind their lids. I say, I knew you were watching me in the café. I knew it long before. I was sitting there for a long time. I could feel your eyes on me. I smile at the memory, say to myself, Your beautiful face. I pull him close, reach round to feel the scars on his back, ask where they came from. He barely acknowledges the question, his breath is shortening in concentration, he’s losing the power of speech, slowly rising, slowly falling into me. With his eyes closed he finds the breath for it, tells me they’re very old, from his childhood, they grew up with him.

There are long moments when nothing exists. She lies on her back. Their heads are touching, their bodies drifting apart in a V. They look at one another. The AC fights against the oven outside. They catch their breath awhile.

Smiles fade and the thoughts remain. She says, Let me see them again. He rolls to his side and she examines his scars in the cathedral light. He’s not ashamed. She’s fascinated by their texture, by their memory of pain. She places her fingers upon them. This is inevitable. It’s inevitable too that she brings her mouth close, kisses them, touches them with her tongue, moves her tongue along their ridges. He opens his eyes to this, she can feel it happening, she can hear him holding his breath. She says, Does it hurt? and he turns to her, cups her face in his hands.

Out on the street nothing stirs. It’s too hot for anything now. The city is disappearing from view. We lie in bed and we barely move, we hide from the bleached white weight of the sun that throbs like a migraine on the land. In this darkened room I hold his cock in my hand, and for hours we are like this in half-sleep.

Then night is here. The wailing of the dargah begins. The tree-tangled temples glow with their flags and their bells inside. Sounds change in the dark, some imperceptible quality of the air alters them, a quality of thickness, permeability, as if the sun has been an infinite wall and the darkness an absence that amplifies. Voices clamour from the pavement. Trains come and go from Nizamuddin station. I hear the longing in their departure. I’ve started to smoke his joints with him, see their curls that are lit by the headlights of cars. I listen to the horns on Mathura Road.

Lodhi Road joining Mathura Road. The curious witchcraft of junctions. The ruins of Neeli Chhatri in the middle of the traffic circle, connecting us. We walk around it. We talk through our story all the time. We talk through our story and make a myth of it, let it solidify, see it cool in the bed. Over and over I ask him, What did you see that day? What were you doing in the café? We celebrate ourselves this way. I like to hear it when it comes from his lips. He says, I saw a blank slate, a lump of wet clay.

With me, like this, he’s the happiest he’s been. I give it to him, I raise him up. He pulls me down, puts his lips to my hole. The balance of this goes on for hours. For hours I’m consumed, and when I leave he remains a mountain in his shadow room.

But very early on he gives me a sign of how it will end, if I’m wise. We’re sitting on the sofa in his living room, looking at the empty bookshelf against the wall. Looking at the boxes full of books by its side. New ones, old ones. He’s been to Fact and Fiction in Vasant Vihar, bought a hundred books; he’s hauled two hundred more from New York. The day is white-hot outside. We’re naked, and I’ve told him that a bookshelf without books is a terrible thing. So he says, Fill it up, go ahead, the job is yours.

It takes the whole morning. A perilous operation. One false move and the spell is broken. Naked he sits on the sofa with an icebox of beer by his side, and naked I stalk the room. He watches me crouching and opening the boxes, placing the books on the floor, and he drinks as I run my fingers along their spines.