Deepti Kapoor: A Bad Character

My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken on the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night.

Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he’d never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character.

It’s a phrase they use sometimes, what some people still say. It’s what they’ll say about me too, when they know what I’ve done.

Him and me

(long dead).

Sitting in the café in Khan Market the day we met, in April, when the indestructible heat was rising in the year, sinking in the day, the sun setting very red, sacrificing itself to the squat teeth of buildings stretching back round the stinking Yamuna into Uttar Pradesh.

The city is a furnace on days like these, the aching heart of a cremation ground.

But inside the café you wouldn’t know it; inside it’s cool, the AC is on, the windows are politely shuttered, it could be any time of day in here; in here you could forget the city, its ceaseless noise, its endless quarry of people. You could feel safe.

Only he’s staring at me.

Twenty and untouched. It’s a sin. For twenty years I’ve been waiting for this one thing.

Idha.

In the mirror.

I give myself a name, I wear it out. Lunar, serpentine, desirous. A charm that protects me.

By the time I met him he was already gone. I didn’t know it then, but he was gone. Because he never once paced himself, because he was racing forward from the moment of birth and every bridge he crossed he turned round to destroy. Chaos mixed with joy, the joy of Shiva, biting his mother’s breast, madness in the blood.

And I couldn’t have saved him; he wasn’t there to be saved. Instead he picked me up in the café and tried to make me in his image. He said, You’re my lump of wet clay. And it’s true in a way, I was.

So now we’re sitting in this café in Khan Market the day we met, in April, in the year 2000. In Khan where it’s civilized, where there are bookstores and florists, and the music shop still selling cassettes, all joined together in a horseshoe and no big chain stores yet. Where the grocery shops for the embassy crowd are long and thin, with shelves packed high, full of imported goods, of Nutella and Laughing Cow cheese, Belgian chocolate and Spanish olives. Where the great and the good of Delhi walk upon the cracked pavements, or send their servants at least.

And in this café on the first floor, the waitresses are from the north-east, from Manipur and Assam. The tables and chairs are wooden, painted dark green, distressed like Parisian antiques. There are nooks and crannies in here to hide from the day, old posters on the walls, terracotta floors for the feet. They play Brubeck and Dylan on the stereo, brew filter coffee, bake carrot cake and serve toasted brown-bread sandwiches on large white plates.

People are returning to India these days. Money is pouring in from every hole. It’s also rising up out of the ground, conjured from nowhere, a miracle of farmland and ruins, an economic sleight of hand. There’s construction everywhere, in Defence Colony and GK they are building, and out in the satellite wastelands of Gurgaon and Noida they are building cities too.

Laxmi is doing her job, for those who know how to pray.

It’s every man for himself.

India is Shining.

But me, I’ve gone nowhere, done nothing.

I’m in the second year of college, in the care of Aunty. Not in dorms, not in hostels, not with other girls, no, there’s no paying-guest house for me. No mother either any more, and my father, he’s off living in Singapore, abandoned me a long time ago for a new life there, though no one will say it out loud, though everyone still pretends it’s not the case.

No, I’m alone, in college, living in east Delhi over the filthy Yamuna, in the care of Aunty. My mother grew up with this woman, who I can never call by name. She went to school with her too, and then was left behind. Aunty is a proper woman, she will be until the day she dies.

So I go to college and I come back home, I sit with Aunty in front of the soaps or else study and daydream in my room. But sooner or later I’m always called outside to be presented to whichever visitor has dropped by, or else I’m dragged with Aunty on one of her endless visits, to sit in other apartments and living rooms with the other aunties of this world, their daughters too sometimes, listening to the incessant talk about other lives, their weddings, sons and daughters gone astray, the ones who have failed, the servants who will not do what they’re told, the property disputes, scandals, jewellery, the price of gold. I keep my head down here and my thoughts to myself.

I have my classmates in college of course. Not quite friends but they’re still nice girls. With them I go to the movies sometimes, and sometimes we sneak out to TGIF to get a Long Island iced tea or a beer and sit around the table talking about the films we’ve seen, the clothes we’ve bought, the boys at college we’re supposed to like, the ones we dream of marrying, besides the film stars.

Once or twice I’ve even had dates with these boys, been to coffee shops nearby and listened to them talk. They’re such good bright boys that I should be in awe, but on these dates I’m always left cold. I sit as they talk and feel nothing for them, and the world keeps turning, but no one knows what turns in me.

Then, driving home to Aunty in my car, round the monumental grandeur of India Gate, across the black water of the creeping Yamuna, a pain grips my heart. My father bought me this car at the start of college’s second year, out of guilt perhaps, or as a consequence of his new wealth. But driving home a pain grips my heart and I put my foot down to speed in the sulphurous dark.

There’s another girl in the flat across from me. In the window of the tower block along the void of empty air I see her sometimes looking out. She’s my shadow self, I decide. I keep a watch for her and then write foolish words about hope and love in my diary before I sleep.

And before waking each morning I dream. As the light breathes into the city I am leaving again: instead of the library I make my way north, along the river’s edge towards the iron railway bridge, joining the Ring Road and driving up the Grand Trunk Road, leaving the city, going all the way to Chandigarh. Beyond Chandigarh there are the wheat fields of Punjab and the foothills and mountains that rise above. I drive through them to places I’ve never seen, that only live on these maps of mine: Mandi, Kullu, the Rohtang Pass, the east Ladakhi plateau, into the void above where nothing more exists.

But even in dreams I don’t make it. In my dreams I am stuck on the edge of town, with the sun coming up around the Yamuna pipelines, the shredded prayer flags of the Tibetan refugees, the swampland near Model Town, where everyone is shitting and brushing their teeth on the side of the road, running for the buses in the shimmer of exhaust fumes bouncing off the heat of baking stone.

I climb out of bed into the cold of the AC to look at myself in the mirror, my black eyes and my pale cheeks, and I wait for this one thing to happen to me.

I run.

I run a lot in these college days, in the colony below the tower block, in the faded little park where the aunties go for their morning strolls, after the cleaners have swept the rooms and the cooks have been given their work. It’s the same park where the servants sit on the benches during their breaks, trading house gossip and complaints, and where the drivers lie wolf-eyed, waiting to be called in the shade. I run a lot in this park in the mornings, before all this happens, and in the evening before the sun goes down I run too, put on a CD and just run. Going in circles because the park is so small, listening to Moby in the beginning — simple, uplifting, driving my feet forward. And then later listening to the trance my love gives me, hard, dark and hypnotized.