A Bad Character Page 2

  And just his presence. Just his hand on my belly as we sleep, when he loves me. It lives forever.

  Close your eyes, go to sleep.

  It lives forever, the hand on my shoulder in the train on the way, in the compartment, hanging down from the top bunk. I look at them, my mother and my father, and he is stroking her hair. He is holding her in his lap like a little bird.

  In the black and yellow of the taxi to the city we sit with our luggage stacked around us on the torn leather seats. Then, in the lanes that are too narrow for taxis, a cycle rickshaw, groaning under our weight. They’re carrying the luggage on their heads the last bit of the way—my bag is on my head, I’m mimicking them. Lots of legs, and those sudden processions of the dead coming round each bend.

  At the house where we’re staying, the courtyard has water flowing in narrow channels around its edge and creepers in bowls that climb up the walls to the lattice-screen balconies on the first floor. The gates of the courtyard open to the alleyway. When they are closed, the city remains as noise coming through a blue square of sky, where toy kites fall and rise. There’s a hospital nearby. You hear the cries of the patients in the morning, the hacking of phlegm in the throat that is the song of India.

  Then one evening the wind changes and a thin layer of grey falls on the courtyard floor. It’s the ash, someone tells me, coming from the burning ghat, the ghat of the dead.

  In the café I get up to go to the bathroom, and in the cramped bathroom away from the AC, I feel the city crawling over me—as soon as I’m through the door it crawls through the window in squashed and malodorous heat. In thousands of horns and voices, in red dust. Night is falling, so the people are moving back out to the streets, bulbs are being switched on in the stalls, in the doorways. The retreating sun releases fragrance, incense, sewer smells, frying food, exhaust fumes. The minarets give their call to prayer, the rising swarm of their devotion telling us that God is great.

  Early next morning I left to see the dead. Alone, no one knew I’d gone, snuck out through the alleyways, I was drawn to the river, somehow I knew where it would be. Coming round a corner on the cobbles to a slope running north-east, long like the slopes that boats are pushed down, but at the bottom before the water it’s the inferno of Dashashwamedh.

  There are two pyres in my head, maybe three. The third might be lower down, out of focus, but these two are raised up, clear in my mind, on abutments of concrete. Behind there is a wooden tower and around this many piles of wood, many different kinds, each more expensive than the last, each more fragrant, to mask the smell of burning flesh.

  There’s already a body roasting there, almost done, its family quietly accepting now.

  This girl would have looked wide-eyed to anyone watching her. Transfixed, standing without words. The smoke changing direction without warning, billowing across her, pieces of ash running into her dress, sticking in her hair.

  Bluest of blue skies, not a cloud within it, and already hot at 7 a.m., even without the raging fires whose ripples in the daylight are a thing to behold.

  After a lull, a new procession begins, the body wrapped in bandages as in the alleyways, the pyre cleared, the ash and logs swept away, the last bone set to sail as the soul drifts up past the crows on the rooftops and the new pyre is laid. They are sobbing, the women, a group of women holding on to one another. One in the middle cannot be contained. At any moment she might break away, fall forward to embrace the dead man’s face.

  It has a moustache, a balding head. It is laid on the crisscrossed wood, the fire is lowered on a stick, pressed in underneath. It takes hold and quickly begins to spread. The hysteria of the widow stops and it seems as if the whole universe has held its breath.

  I feel the heat of the flames against my skin, I cannot take my eyes away, I think that he’ll jump out at any moment and run. But nothing happens like this. Instead the moustache zips out of existence like a magic trick, the eyes melt, the yellow layer of fat beneath his skin becomes exposed, it starts to sizzle and pop. Soon the bright white bone shows through. He is burning away; he’s dead and he is disappearing again. The widow: I watch her watching this, not removing her eyes, and there’s no mistaking that nothing exists in time.

  Afterwards, alone, far downriver, in silence beyond all roar, a naked Aghori smears himself in cremation ash. He pulls a corpse from the water to pick at the bones, to eat the sodden and putrid flesh raw. Many years later I’ll see him again in the final face of the man I love.

  It’s only when he dies that I’ll become the person he wants me to be. Only when he dies that I’ll let go, sleep with other men, let them sleep with me. But right now he’s alive, I’m twenty, untouched, and he’s staring at me.

  When I come out of the bathroom he’s sitting at my table. He says some women had moved to take it, thinking it empty, but he’d stopped them, he’d given up his own instead. I don’t know if it’s true, but the appearance of the women there backs up his words. And here he is at the table, standing up, holding out his hand, looking into my eyes, saying, Pleased to meet you.

  His voice is educated, frank, completely unexpected. There’s a foreign lilt to it, as with those who’ve been to the American School. Very slight—he wears it like a set of summer clothes. As if it could go up in smoke.

  But his body, his eyes, his entire way of being, makes me think of someone who’s been lost at sea, lost for a long time, or else wandered out of the forest, as if he’s been in the forest and learned something there.

  There’s not a shred of fat on him, it’s all muscle and sinew, coiled eye and glacier bone, as if he’s covered every inch of land, burnt off every strip of fat through breathing.

  So now there’s this wild animal dressed in human clothes, with a set of keys picked up from the table and a wallet stuffed full of rupee notes.

  When I went back to the house from the ghat that day there was ash all over my body, all in my hair and in my clothes. I reeked of smoke. They’d been looking for me, my mother was panicking. She beat me, stripped me and scrubbed me clean, and I cried for an hour in her arms.

  Varanasi looks like the scene of a plane crash in my sleep. Small fires are scattered about, seen from above, scattered on the banks where the debris still burns, where homes have been wiped out without warning, where bodies are strewn. Night falls in Varanasi and pockets of fire still rage from the blackness, their flames reach up to diminish the stars, spewing sparks into deep space, souls orbiting the terror of this world.

  There are lingams everywhere in the Varanasi of my dreams. On top of every step, at every ancient corner turned. It’s a virile city, teetering on the brink. And on the other bank it is barren like the afterlife.

  The Ganga is a river that flows backwards in time.

  In Agra, in our crumbling ancestral home, six years old. I’m the same person I was when I was six years old. The same fear, the same watchfulness, the same cowardice too, the same sense of doom. The same desire to jump over the edge.

  I sleep next to my mother when Father isn’t here. We sleep in that same big bed in the silent house, silent as soon as the fans are off, eerie beyond belief. She pulls me towards her, murmurs in her sleep, twitches like a cat dreaming, whiskers in the hunt on some imaginary breeze, stalking the grass over the hill when the sun goes down. She bares her teeth at the squirrels in the eaves, and then she cries, so sadly that I lie with my breath held, listening to her moan.

  Sleep, the only time she’s really awake, the only time she truly cries. I love her. She never cries like this in the day. Never pities herself or bemoans her fate, never knows what has become of her.

  She liked to bathe me in the old days, took great care with it, and one day she sat me down on the cold metal stool, opened my legs, and pointed between them, then said, If a man ever tries to touch you there, an uncle or a servant or a cousin, anyone at all, you fight him off and you scream. You run. You don’t let anybody touch you down there. That is the worst place in the world.

 
I’m still in pigtails.

  I’m running through the fields in my tartan dress, the one brought back from Singapore, which he said was Scottish.

  And the thunder breaks inside the sky, like the crack of an old record player. Skips across the surface, clicks. Follows a pause by the peal, rumbles between clouds the way the belly sky rumbles, mourns and quakes. Belly sky of tectonic plate. Rupture and rent.

  Rent the blackness, billow the sail, on a ship of ocean ink.

  The rain pours down on to the fields.

  From thunderous chest of sky, on to the page.

  On to childhood, my love.

  A cadaver.

  A labourer dead in the long grass. The sack of a cat from the side of a well, a rat killed by dogs in the short grass.

  And in the house down the street they had a son.

  So they lit fireworks.

  They lit rockets and crackers and bombs.

  Smoke on the ground blowing into our yard, because they had a son.

  In the bedroom he puts his fingers between my legs. But in the café he tells me he’s been living in New York, that he’s only just come home, back to Delhi for good.

  And do I like Chinese food? Yes, I do.

  And do I have a car?

  I have that too. Yes, I have a car.

  Perfect, he smiles, drumming his fingers on the table, Then let’s go, you and me right now. I’ll buy you dinner, I know the place.

  He looks me in the eye. This is how it starts.

  In school we practise kissing one another. Take turns, giggle, watch in the bathroom mirrors, in the mirrors we make ourselves cry, cry and hold one another like our sons have died.

  We walk home in our uniforms at the end of the day, and I dread walking home, I dread walking to school. I’m never good enough anywhere. I’m awkward. I carry it along with me into adulthood.

  When I get my marks in class, I’m asked by the family where the other marks have gone—I’m compared unfavourably to the cousins with higher ones, the ones pegged for success, for government jobs, set to become doctors, lawyers and accountants. Only my English teacher believes in me. She tells me I have it in me to go all the way: to college, abroad, to be anything I want. To be a modern woman. That’s what she says. Our headmistress says it too; in assembly she tells us we’re what the country needs. You’re the future of India, she says.

  I look back on this childhood as if standing on the far bank of a fast-flowing river, impossible to bridge. And he is cutting through it, a drowning man in the dark waters of the monsoon.

  The sun has gone down completely now. The noise of the city rises as it falls, she can’t separate it from the heartbeat in her throat, the chattering of her teeth, because something is finally happening to her.

  The guard at the door salutes him and they share a word. They’re friends already it seems. He has a habit of this, she’ll discover—of making poor people love him; he could raise an army of them if he wanted to, they think he’s one of them in disguise. He offers her a cigarette and she declines, so he lights it for himself and asks her if she knows how beautiful she is, asks as if he’s wondering what to do with it, as if it’s a quality he might apply to a task. Then he laughs to himself and moves on, changes the subject, tells her that his car is over there and that they can meet across the lights towards Lodhi. He’ll be waiting on the side of the road, he’s got a red Maruti Zen with a sticker saying PRESS on the rear window in big letters. You can’t miss it.

  It’s in the car away from his eyes that she thinks this might be madness, that it could be a trap. That this could lead to something untoward. The coward in her rises up and says that she should drive out the other way and go home, away from this strange man, never to come back, never to see him again, to keep living the life that Aunty preserves. But then she remembers home, Aunty and all of that, and she thinks how long she’s been waiting for something to happen to her, how long she’s been motionless inside herself. And now here it is, here’s her chance. It might never come again.

  Like my mother, I’m a loner. I’m sitting by the river near the banyan tree in Agra, she is calling out to me from the house at dusk, my father’s ancestral home on the edge of town. He’s still out working in Singapore but he’ll return, he hasn’t abandoned us quite yet. I hear my mother calling but I don’t reply. She’s fearful, imagining all the terrible things that can happen in the dark.

  When he comes back he holds me in his arms. He smells of cigarettes. Of Old Spice aftershave and whisky. When he comes home he acts like nothing’s changed.

  My mother, she’s suddenly awake, she’s been nervous for days, cleaning the house, getting everything into shape for his arrival. She fixes her hair and puts on her best sari and thinks everything will be OK. When he turns up he brings gifts, all the latest electronic goods, kitchen things. They put on a big party for him—the family lays out all kinds of food on a long folding table, they put out the drinks in plastic cups, they blow up balloons, and everyone comes to meet him. He likes the crowds, my father, he likes the parties, he’s a natural showman—handsome, a charmer. He shows off some magic tricks. I stand in the room watching him, watching my mother waiting. Now and then he passes by and runs his fingers through my hair, and when he puts me on his shoulders I hold him tightly, smell the Brylcreem with my eyes closed.

  When the food is finished, the music played, when everyone has drifted back home, he takes my mother into the bedroom, he pulls her by the arm. I recognize that look on her face. He doesn’t go to sleep when they’re done, he watches TV in the living room and I slip out my door to crawl beside his chair. He never sends me back to bed. Instead we watch TV together for hours, until I’ve fallen asleep. In the day when there’s no one there I go and lie on their bed, dwarfed by it as my mother is, watching the folds in the sheets turn into vast mountain ranges, tracing the caravan through the passages, laden with Arabian gold.

  He’s gone as quickly as he came, the thief.

  Later I learned of his own father, my grandfather, the godman. He ran away too when he was young. Barefoot from village to village performing miracles, reciting the ancient texts by heart, sometimes speaking in tongues. From where he learned these no one knows. I met him several times when he was already old, but I understood nothing of him then, and by that time God had already left him in the corner of the room, like a lamp without a bulb, gathering dust.

  It’s the first year of college and the pleasant shadows of dreams have been banished by the spotlight of Aunty’s world, where everything is good and right and clean. In this world there are no moments to yourself, for what’s the need? Why do you need to keep your door closed? What are you hiding in there? It makes no sense at all to Aunty, this simple demand from the girl to please be left alone.

  No, she’s expected to be the same as them, to smile the right way, to say the right things, to be grateful at all times, to be seen and not heard. She sees this very clearly, in cars, in apartments, in homes, in pujas, in the same words and ritual learned by rote.

  It’s in this desperate life of preservation that death is held. Holding on to life only to die unblemished, to make it to the end, untouched by sin. And for what? What then? The girl sees this, and yet there’s nothing to be done, nowhere to go. Nothing for her to do but grit her teeth, calm the voices inside.

  Aunty knows the resistance in her, her reluctance. She chides her for it, calls her a snob sometimes. Says she only wants the best for her, that’s why she says these things, because she cares. But she can’t understand the behaviour of this girl.

  On Diwali night she talks to me, after a rare drink, on the balcony watching the fireworks. The freezing shawl of smog envelops the city, makes the explosions flash like the synapses of a dying brain.

  She says wistfully, In college your mother was a shy girl, a person I would describe as too shy, too quiet, a good girl, too sweet, everyone was very fond of her, everyone wanted her to do well. But every so often she would shock us with some strange wo
rds, she would say something completely unexpected, which took us all by surprise. She really lived with her head in the clouds.

  She smiles apologetically, clears her throat, tugs her dupatta over her heavy breasts. From the balcony we watch the sky on fire and the city bombarded with light. She gets nostalgic; she says, Life has been good to me. I’ve had all the advantages in this world. I’ve married well. I planned ahead. I have security now, though I’ve had my setbacks like anyone else. But you cannot just run and play in this life, you can’t live on air alone.

  She’s only thinking of me, she says. I’m too young to understand, too much like my mother still. But my situation is precarious. Marriage is important. It needs to be handled well. One stray step and well, let’s not talk about that.

  It wasn’t for love that my parents married. They were placed together in their awkwardness, in their deficiencies, through the taint of their blood, though it was known he was very handsome and she was oddly beautiful in her own nervous way.

  My mother, who makes me read books. Who forces them on me, even as she drowns in loneliness, superstition, gossip and boredom, like so many good housewives before her. And not just any books, but the classics: works of great literature. There is a whole series in the library. We go through them together, one by one. She doesn’t even know what’s inside them, never reads them herself, just forces them on me the way another mother forces diamonds down her daughter’s throat before the soldiers knock at the door.