Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

I switched off the light, and we lay next to each other. I knew she wouldn't sleep for a while, for an hour or two at least, but she deferred to my schedule and was courteously pliable. She ate and slept and woke when I wanted. And I wanted to sleep now. But her body kept me awake.

It was not only appetite that tickled and teased my mind into movement. I was sated, for the moment. What I was thinking about was the form of her body, its lines and arrangements and proportions. We had remade that form. Jamila's bottom had been realigned. That is, the cheeks – which are naturally asymmetrical on all human beings – had been lined up. The fat inside the small rolls on her hips had been sucked out and inserted into her gaand, to make it properly plump and perky. The lower end of her thighs, the sides and the upper rear portions, just under her bottom, had all been liposuctioned. Her waist had been liposuctioned. As had her upper arms and the area behind her chin. She had new saline implants in her breasts, natural-shaped ones we had examined and handled and discussed at length. We had done all this at Dr Langston Lee's house of wonders on Orchard Boulevard. He had a peerless reputation, a clean and very modern clinic and extravagant rates. But he was a master, that small-eyed and funny-speaking man, he was a maha-magician of flesh, he could move it and transform it and make it vanish and have it reappear. Jamila had found him through her extensive world-ranging research, and he had not disappointed. Even I, who had been a thoughtless consumer of bodies, a mostly undiscriminating chodu who knew what he liked but not why, even I had learnt from listening to their discussions. I understood now this language of beauty, its grammar and its sublime syntax. Listening to these two poets, I understood how a well-made song of curves and textures and spaces could effortlessly enchant the stoniest heart. It was magic that they had created together, this doctor and his subject. There was no defence against the cunning spell they had made out of her.

This process had cost a lot of money already, and unimaginable pain. I hadn't ever visited Jamila in the clinic, but I had spent time with her after the surgery, in our flat. She had never let out a groan, or complained, but I knew what effort it cost to make one journey from the bed to the bathroom when the tissues under her thighs had been ripped and assaulted by a probing nozzle. I saw the grinding strain in the sweat on her forehead. I felt it in her bruises, in the yellow-green welts across her breasts, in her clutch on the bed-cover. So much pain, so many days of it. And it was not over. We were going to do her face next. Dr Lee was going to carve hollows in her cheeks. He was going to put fat in her lips. He was going to work on her nose, sharpen it with an implant. He was going to raise her hairline. And the chin was to get an implant too, to lengthen it, to make it strong, shapely, exactly the right counterpoint to her brow. He was going to make her harmonious, flawlessly balanced, perfect. She was then going to be – according to her calculations – complete.

'How did you begin?' I said.

'Saab?' she said. Her reply was instant, and she was not sleepy, not fuzzy. But my question, it must be admitted, had been vaguely phrased.

'When did you first think you wanted to be a star? When did you make a plan to come to Bombay? How did you manage it?' There was no change in her breathing, or movement in her body, but she came into full alertness now. I could feel it on my forearms, at the back of my neck.

'That is a boring small-town story, saab.'

'Tell me.'

'Yes, saab,' she said. She was a good girl. She always called me 'saab', and was quiet and obedient. Now she spoke, in even tones. 'The first time I saw models was when I was six years old.'

'Yes,' I said. And as she spoke, every other minute I made a sound, a 'yes' to let her know that I was listening. And she went on.

'I mean, I had seen them before in magazines and newspapers, and actresses in the films, but that time I saw models in real life, in our Lucknow itself. My mother had taken me to my chacha's house, and on the way back we walked through Hazratganj. The models were walking out of a department store, they had come to Hazratganj for the grand opening. They walked out of the store, across the pavement, through a crowd held back by policemen, and climbed into an air-conditioned bus. That was it, thirty seconds, maybe a minute. With me standing squeezed between my mother and some man, looking up at them. They passed so close that I could have reached out and touched a skirt, a hand. But I didn't. I held on to my mother's burqa and looked up at the models. They were there, right there. In Hazratganj. But they looked like they were from another world. Like they were fairies. They were tall. Taller than me, taller than my mother. Thin and tall. Two of them spoke as they went past, in English, and I understood none of it. But even their voices had that feeling, that mood which was there on their red cheeks, their dark eyes. They were fairies. After that when anyone told me a story about princes and djinns and magic, I always saw the models. I never forgot them. That evening, I asked my mother who they were. She didn't know. She was a pious woman who always wore a burqa, what did she know of models? I tried to tell my father when we got home, and he laughed and asked my mother what I was talking about, and she shrugged. Some shameless cut-haired foreign girls, she said.

'They weren't foreign, they were Indian enough, a troupe of top models from Bombay. But that was foreign enough for my mother. We found out the next day who they were. My father was a small man, he owned a small restaurant in the Chowk Bazaar, and he was pious. He thanked Allah every day for the success of the restaurant, which was famous even beyond Lucknow for its kakori kababs. But he was also progressive. In the restaurant he took not only two Urdu papers but also the Times of India . He couldn't read English himself, but he hoped that his children would learn, move up in the world. Actually, his hope was mainly for his sons, my elder brothers. But I – who was the youngest and his pet then – also used to flip through the papers and magazines that he bought for them, and listened to his discussions with them. That morning my eldest brother, Azim, who was most fluent in English in the family and was preparing for the UP State Services exam, he laughed and said, here are Jamila's foreign women. And there they were, in a photograph on the third page of the paper, floating down a long raised walk. I recognized the one right in front, she had been part of the conversation I had heard. Azim explained to my father that they were models who had come from Bombay for a fashion show at a five-star hotel, which had been attended by all the rich people of Lucknow, and also the DIG and the collector. That was the first time I think I had heard the words "fashion show". I hardly knew what they meant. I imagined a crowd, like that on the pavement in Hazratganj, and the beautiful models walking above them all. Nothing else, just drifting by. And all the people looking at them.

'This was all I knew then. And this was all I clung to for a long time, for many years in my world, which was my street, my home and my school, and my father and mother and brothers and aunts and cousins. Every night I had that walk, every night I slept at last seeing only the beautiful models of Bombay, walking by me on a footpath where the crowd was gone, which had somehow been lifted up out from Lucknow. I wanted to know more, but by instinct I did not ask, I didn't let anyone know. I knew women shouldn't hanker after such things, that good girls memorized surahs and hadiths and were modest and quiet, not just while awake, but even when sleeping. Just sitting next to my mother, when I ate after the boys had finished, I knew this. So I kept quiet, and learned by listening, whatever bits and pieces I could. I tried to read the Times of India , with Azim, until it became something of a joke in the family. Come, Azim said every morning, as he opened the paper. So I knew a bit more. I knew that models lived in Bombay, that most of them were English-speaking girls who grew up there, that they made wonderful amounts of money and moved with high-high people. But it was only after we got a colour television at home, and cable, that I really understood anything.