Deepti Kapoor - A Bad Character

It was Ali who also called his parents. It was his parents who used their money and influence to make the police disappear. His parents, living only a few miles away in south Delhi.

They committed him to a psychiatric ward the next day. He was inside that place for three months, February to April. Locked up and tied down.

I drove home to Aunty that afternoon and cried into her arms. I cried without restraint and she cleaned the wounds, put ice on my face, washed the blood off me, took the bloodied clothes away. The guards downstairs and some neighbours had seen me and come to the door, but Aunty curtly shooed them off. Later, when Uncle came home, she told him someone had tried to rob me near college, had tried to steal my car and I’d fought back stupidly but had escaped. Only the face had been touched, nothing more. She was at pains to point this out. A silly girl, that’s what she is. A foolish girl. She told me this would happen one day. She always hated that car. But never once did she ask what really went on.

Terrified, I waited the rest of that day for him to call, for him to turn up at the door. But nothing came that day. And the next day nothing came.

I sat in my room. My body stopped hurting, my bruises healed. Then I went with Aunty on visits, watching the street outside, smiling politely to the other women when we arrived, answering all their questions with a nervous smile. But bracing myself every time the phone rang at night, imagining Aunty’s face reacting to his voice, his words. I checked my own phone, held it in my hand as I slept. Waiting for the call. But there was no call, no knock on the door. Nothing came.

We live in luxury now. Unable to hold the pain of Delhi inside, it is better to orbit it from space. I sit in the back of the Businessman’s car, climate controlled, inoculated, floating beyond the city in a blacked-out throne. We glide through traffic, accelerate round corners, move past red lights as if they’re not there, through the charred streets of the tombs of my ancestors, the flaming oil drums and the ragged men, and all the places we have known. At night it’s as if we’re underwater, lights quivering in the haze of coke, glowering buses pulling across the lanes. Ghosts drift by in rickshaws, women dangle babies from the edges of motorcycles. Drowning in light and fog and noise, men stream into the road. They look into the window when the traffic stops, but no one sees me at all.

Inside the hospital they fed him their drugs. They tied him to a bed and injected him with many things. For days he was raging, incandescent. Saying Shiva was with him in the room.

Then he was calmed, put under their control. They began to counsel him. They challenged his beliefs. They talked to him about what he knew and what he saw. They wore him down this way, and he grew compliant. He believed what they said to him and recognized that what he believed was not the truth. Later, when they agreed to release him, it was on the condition that he renounce what he’d always thought. They made him sign a piece of paper that said Shiva did not exist.

When he came out of that place his parents took him back to his apartment. They flew his fiancée over from the States and they all stayed together for several weeks, until the end of May, and then, convinced he would be all right again, they left him in Ali’s care. Ali, who promised to be with him day and night.

I retreated into my studies in those months. I blocked him from my mind as best I could, devoted myself to college instead. In May I sat my final exams, half expecting him to be there when I left the hall.

At the end of May, late at night, someone called me on my cellphone, five or six rings, enough to bring me out of sleep. But before I could think to answer, the ringing stopped. I spent the rest of the night clutching the phone tight, my eyes open in the dark.

The Businessman had other girlfriends. In London, in Bombay, in Delhi. But she didn’t care. She had no illusions about him. And he still looked after her. He found her a small apartment in Defence Colony, a barsati near the market in B Block, a small one-bedroom flat on the roof of one of the large houses there. She moved out of Aunty’s the next day. The goodbyes were brief. The coke she did in her room right then made it manageable, completely without consequence.

The barsati was bare, unfurnished. Only a bed, a table and a chair, a few rugs, naked bulbs, a couple of cups and glasses in the kitchen area. Nothing on the walls, empty shelves. The city came in from everywhere. She stood on the roof and looked out over the colony, the city. There was no one here to claim her, no one telling her what to do. She went back inside, switched off the fan and cut another line.

In this room, in silence, staring at the ceiling fan, lying completely alone, no longer waiting, she felt the bliss she’d been searching for from the start.

He and Ali were back in his apartment and everything went well at first. He kept regular hours, took the pills he’d been given dutifully, exercised and slept like never before. He didn’t touch a drop of alcohol. His eyes took on a steady shine.

But after a few weeks things started to slip. He was restless, didn’t sleep so well, and soon enough he was awake throughout the night. Ali sat with him in the living room or by the bed, exhausted, talking with him, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, but he had no luck. So they began to go out and drive again, but with Ali now in the passenger seat. They’d drive around the city, then they’d go out to the dhabas on the highway to eat.

It was here that he began to open up to Ali, to talk about the hospital and what they made him do there, what they did to him, but Ali confessed he didn’t understand a word of it, it made no sense to him, he thought it was black magic and the doctors were all crazy themselves for saying Shiva didn’t exist. Shiva, Allah, God, they were around us all the time, it was plain to see.

I know all this because I met Ali again, quite by chance. He’d found work as a driver for an associate of the Businessman, he’d clawed his way up and was sober and smartly dressed. He had a daughter now too, she was three months old. His knowledge of the city was unparalleled.

We met as I came out of a club in GK with the Businessman very late one night. There were many drivers standing waiting for us in the desolate colony street, empty besides the stray dogs and the humming lights and the expensive cars under the drivers’ watchful eyes. Ali was among them — I was climbing into the back of the car when I heard his voice calling out to me. His voice brought back everything and I stopped and began to tremble, so when he came towards me the other drivers held him back as if he were mad. But I regained myself and said it was OK. We stood facing each other for a moment before I nodded at him and climbed into my car.

I got Ali’s number from one of the other drivers and I called him the next day, asking him to come and see me when he had finished work. He arrived at my building late at night in an autorickshaw. I’d been waiting for him, unable to think of anything else, unable to go out. When I heard him I went down, handed over my car keys and told him to drive.