Deepti Kapoor - A Bad Character

He asks what I’m doing exactly. I tell him, literature. When he asks why, what’s the reason behind it, I hesitate and he sees this and says it’s just a question, not a trap, he only wants to know what I think. I tell him that I don’t know why. Because it’s the only thing I was ever good at. I tell him about my mother and her books. But I say I hate it now. It’s nothing like what I thought it would be.

What did you think it would be?

I shrug. I don’t know.

What are you going to do about it?

A pause. I don’t know.

He smiles. You don’t know much, do you?

I must look hurt. He corrects himself, says he’s joking. It’s just a joke. He understands how I feel. Then he asks what I’d really do, if I could do anything.

A simple question, but again I don’t know. There’s a moment of silence where I feel nervous, and to fill it I blurt out, like a confession, that I’m stuck, that they all want to get me married off, but I don’t want to get married at all.

He lets this sit between us and I think right away how I shouldn’t have given so much, because I can’t be sure of him, I have to remember this, though already I want to trust him, already I want to tell him things. He looks at me out of his large, dark eyes. I’ve been starved of this look for so long.

The waiter comes to take the order. He orders chilli chicken, Hakka noodles, veg Manchurian, fried rice, two more beers. You have an accent. I say this when the waiter is gone. He leans back in the booth and smiles. He must know that it’s part of the reason I came with him, the security it brings. It marks him out as different too. Combined with his ugliness, his confidence, his dark skin, it’s intriguing. For someone who looks like him, it turns him into a mystery.

It’s from New York, he says. I picked it up there.

You lived in New York?

He nods. For seven years.

How old are you now?

Twenty-eight.

I put the cigarette out, push the ashtray away and sip some beer.

What’s it like in New York?

He says, Why, would you like to go? It’s too bad but it’s too late, I’m already here, otherwise I’d have taken you, shown you around, it would have been my pleasure.

From across the table I can smell his aftershave and suddenly I feel cold. We’re next to the AC. I see the hairs on his arms standing on end, and the thin, faded T-shirt he wears, washed so many times that now the threads show.

New York was the making of him. It was the place where his ideas took flight. First he studied film, later psychology. He pursued journalism on and off in between, worked in a restaurant, in a record store. It’s all connected. It’s one and the same.

But he says it wasn’t the lecture halls that did it for him. Instead it was the streets. In the streets he could see it all quite clearly, walking around the Lower East Side, Chinatown, SoHo, Washington Square in the winter sun, freezing cold, up Fifth Avenue, the skyscraper canyons so vast they cut out the glow, the razor air splitting your lungs. Through the park, through Columbia, round into Harlem. He realized here he could be anyone.

He suddenly talks about the light there. He says the light in the winter in New York is beautiful, it’s so thin. It’s nothing like the Indian light, which is heavy and dull, full of dust, involved with the gods. Their light has no gods, only Weegee, Trocchi and King Kong.

He tells me about Chinatown too. Bubble tea, dumplings and pork buns, about the escalators to get into the restaurants, the revolving tables in the giant banquet halls. How easy life is there. About Washington Square and Harlem jazz beyond the park. Do I like jazz? Do I know Mingus and Coltrane? He’ll play them for me.

If it’s so good, why did you come home? He inhales the question, taps his cigarette slowly, exhales smoke, looks at me as if deciding what to say. After a long time he tells me that it’s because both his parents died, they died together in a car crash on Mathura Road. On the way back from a wedding party late at night, a truck from Haryana came on to the wrong side, the driver was drunk or asleep, they never knew. But he veered across at a junction and ploughed straight into them. There was nothing anyone could have done. They were killed right away. Of course the driver and his boy left the scene, absconded back to their native village, never to be seen again.

I tell him I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. He shrugs and tells me it’s all right, I don’t have to be sorry, it’s life and it was a year ago now, there’s no more pain. Besides, I wasn’t driving the truck, was I? So why apologize?

He describes them to me. They were doctors in private hospitals — a heart specialist and a paediatrician. Serious people, cautious, they never touched a drop of alcohol in their lives, didn’t smoke, never went on holidays, never spent money on themselves. That’s why they could afford to send him to New York, why he could stay so long there, spend so much money. They paid for his education, they paid for everything.

But now they’re dead. He looks down and closes his eyes for a second, tries to smile. He suddenly seems filled with regret.

I was the only child, he says. The prodigal son. I inherited it all, the money, the apartments, the ancestral land. I’ll never have to work again.

He leans back and says, But that’s not the real reason I’m home. In the end it’s very simple: this is where the world is going. India’s the future and America is done.

The food comes. The ashtray is full. The waiter takes it away. The waiters, they’re all hovering in the wings, casting glances. They know him, he eats here often, but he says he’s never been here with a girl before. Certainly never a girl like me. And now he’s a conquering hero in their eyes. He looks around, he knows it, he’s pleased. He says with satisfaction that he loves these places, the service, the food, the atmosphere, the sense of brotherhood one feels, the anonymity, the way they connect to the pulse of the city. He says he knows a thousand just like this, he knows them all, all over the city, he hunts them out, blends into them, he’s a connoisseur of low-down dirty joints, side-street shacks, roadside carts, the best paratha, the best chicken, the best bad whisky, the best dal. The best dal of them all, he says, is on the Jaipur road, at one of the dhabas out there. Dal like you wouldn’t believe. He drives on these highways in the night, all night sometimes, he drives to Jaipur and back when he can’t sleep. He drives up and down the highways until the sun begins to rise.

We eat hungrily with the beer. Spill on to the tablecloth. I ask where he lives, he says in Nizamuddin West, close to the dargah, the tomb of the saint, at the point where the neighbourhood goes from rich to poor — he can sometimes hear the singing in the night, the qawwalis, the voices, the harmonium, the devotion filling the alleyways from the inside out. He says he’ll show it to me some time.

He lives there alone, it’s just him. No family, no flatmates, no maid, no cook, no servant. No prying eyes. No sentiments to offend.

I’ve never met anyone who lives alone, not once in my life. It’s such a strange, alien thing, inconceivable in my world, where lives are piled on top of one another in a mass grave.

His apartment is being renovated now, he’s fixing everything, but it’ll be complete soon and then he’d like to show it to me.

He leans forward, offers another cigarette. And what about you? Tell me. He’s very curious, he wants to know. What was I doing in the café? What was that look on my face? Where had I come from? Where was I about to go? He was watching me a long time before I saw him there. He couldn’t help himself. There was something about me, something different, he knew it immediately, knew he had to speak to me, to know me somehow. I had a rare sort of power in me.