powder, which he patted lovingly on to the cheeks of people he knew. In Sanyogita it produced a kind of arousal. It was as if the sudden thrill of bhang and anonymity worked on her. She was normally fearful of Delhi’s reputation for malicious gossip. But now, as if playing with the excitement of masks, she pressed her open palm against my leg and groin and said, ‘Baby looks so good blue.’
Ra saw and laughed garishly. It made what was a frank but affectionate advance seem somehow humiliating. I gently moved her hand away. But perhaps not gently enough; she seemed wounded.
The afternoon wore on. The sun blazed, making the colour feel like a second skin. I was hot under it. And this heat was like anxiety. The grass on the lawn was stained. Coloured water dried in the mud. Clay cups lay about in broken pieces and the sun’s pale reflection slid into a puddle of muddy purple water.
Just as the sun was leaving the lawn, a flood of newcomers poured in. Among them was a fashion designer in a white suit. He was Kashmiri with red hair and blue eyes. He had slightly pointed, gapped teeth, which he displayed like fangs when he laughed. He was followed by three men of great beauty.
The first was tall with sharp features, high cheekbones and a prominent nose. He seemed vain and distant. The one next to him was shorter, darker and bare-chested. He had an open, friendly face and a horsiness that suited his solid figure. The third, the most beautiful of them all, was tall, with longish hair and a softness around the mouth and eyes. His features, like his physique, were strong and well defined, but covering the prominence of their lines, as if the work of their creator’s thumb, was a gentle effacement. It carried over into the clothes he wore: low, loose jeans and a close-fitting, faded T-shirt, threadbare in places. His beauty seemed to embarrass him, and as if nervous of its effect on any one person, he kept moving about, distributing his attentions. The only person he looked frankly at, with his dark, doting eyes, was the designer. He seemed to need the little red-haired man like a circus animal its trainer. And the designer, though he passed like a ball between the men, laughing and bowing, at once an object of fun and their leader, exhibited something of the showman’s coldness towards their beauty.
‘Mateen Butt’s models,’ Ra, emerging from nowhere, whispered in my ear.
‘The one with the long hair is pretty amazing-looking,’ I said, finding it difficult to be open about male beauty.
‘And guess where he was found?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘In a village in Punjab. Not a poor boy, but straight from a village. Mateen literally drives through Punjab, pulling boys like this out of their homes.’
‘And they come readily?’
‘With their legs open,’ Ra laughed, and seeing me recoil added, ‘No, seriously, why wouldn’t they? It’s a golden opportunity. That one, for instance, was a full Sikh, bearded and turbaned. Mateen had him transformed overnight.’
The models now danced in a circle around Mateen. The sprinklers rained down on them. They taunted Mateen with their dancing, moving clockwise for a few steps and then, in time with the sprinklers, anticlockwise. The handsome model danced with his arms in the air, moving just his shoulders. It was a folk dance from Punjab. His faded T-shirt rose, the holes in it stretched and the pale inner portion of his arms showed. With every shoulder movement, he flicked his straight black hair off his face. Mateen laughed fearlessly as the model closed in on him and drew back. In his hand he carried a packet of light blue powder. He now took some out, and like a genie, blew it in the model’s direction. The model closed his eyes and let the powder cover his face. When he opened his dark eyes, their sockets free of colour, he looked like a clown. He seemed to take a special pleasure in the desecration of his beauty. He smiled, then laughed at tasting the colour on his lips. But Mateen, as if he’d hurt him without intending to, pulled his neck under the sprinkler and the blue powder ran from his wheatish complexion.
It was difficult for any observer to look away or feel indifferent to their taunting. There was something equalizing in their physical beauty. It seemed to cut through the barriers of money and language. In Delhi, where these aspects of status had been encoded in people’s looks, in their bad teeth and skin, their shabby clothes, their scrawny bodies, this flowering of physical beauty, people rehabilitated, and the licence that came with it, felt like avenues had been driven through the city’s closed quarters.
A final arc of sunlight slipped away. The designer, his suit still mostly white, left the dance floor with a female model. She was in velvety tracksuit bottoms, and he drunkenly clutched her long, slim body. They staggered towards us, the designer speaking rapidly and the model responding with languid, filmy replies. I watched them vanish past the wall of our cane pavilion, their voices still audible.
‘How do you do it, Mattu? Tell us your secret, no?’ the model said.
‘Nothing to it, Oozma,’ the designer replied. ‘I just keep my eyes open and when I see a hot little country boy, like this one here, I say, “Oh gawd, you have such a hard life. Why are you slogging! Come on, tell me, where is aunty? We’re going to go and take her blessings. You are going to be the face of my new collection, Sher-e-Punjab.” ’
‘And then,’ Oozma asked, ‘what do they say?’
‘They come panting.’ And I heard an imitation of a dog panting, followed by raucous laughter. ‘Now, take this fellow,’ the designer continued, ‘short, pretty dark, hairy. But sexy eyes, great features and hot body. We give him a little stubble, mess up his hair, have it coming over the forehead, do up the eyes and wa-lah those black pink lips will…’
‘No, Mattu, stop. He can hear everything.’
‘Oozma, if he could understand, what use would he be to me?’
At this point I heard a third voice. ‘Ey-ey,’ it said in dialect, ‘we’ll see what aunty does when you bring this langur into my house.’
The voice made me sit up.
‘Oh no,’ the model moaned, ‘I told you! He understood everything. Now he’s going to bash you up.’ Then laughing, she added, ‘Dishoom, dishoom.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ the third voice answered, now in English. ‘Whaddyou think? I am an
‘Oh gawd,’ the designer said, ‘and I thought you were a villager. Sorry. Ta-ta.’
I swung my head round. The designer was staggering away when a small, calloused hand pulled him back.
Through the cane lattice, I saw Aakash in a black T-shirt bedaubed pink and green. His lips were dry and his pointed tongue scraped over them as he spoke. He was standing close to the designer, his mud-coloured eyes burning with contempt.
They were in a grove of trees that had been wrapped in white satin. Where the Holi colour had stained the satin red, they looked like bandages. The shrill voice of a female playback singer broke through the afternoon.
The men in their pre-splashed T-shirts had stood out for their facelessness. It was what had struck me about them. Seeing Aakash reduced to this factory line jolted me. I hadn’t thought of his world beyond Junglee. I hadn’t thought it could include moonlighting at a security agency. The designer’s assumption about the security had hardly been different from mine, but seeing it now misfire, I felt some shame at my blindness. The designer had been wrong, and though he could see his mistake, he wasn’t willing to hear too much about it.
His little blue eyes flamed. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he screamed. ‘How dare you, you two-bit little man?’
‘Leave it, Mattu, no big deal,’ the model said in her languid way.
A few people turned around and looked. A man carrying a tray of Bloody Marys stopped and watched. Aakash saw them, and though his face didn’t show fear, a passivity crept into it. The designer yelled for the head of security; people were gathering round him, nodding obediently; and even as the head of security walked over, Aakash seemed to know he would be forsaken.
Outside Junglee he was bigger and his skin somehow darker. He seemed to be fighting to remain the person I knew. He had a hunted look in his heavy eyes. It was as if he needed to be reminded of who he was. And this was all that I did for him. I left the pavilion and appeared in the grove of bandaged trees.
In a few short moments, the situation had deteriorated. The fashion designer’s anger had grown into a performance; the head of security listened sympathetically; Aakash, every line in his face inflamed, couldn’t say a word. My appearance, but more importantly Sanyogita’s behind me, shifted the balance and rescued him from the worst of all Delhi fates: being a man with no connections.
I slipped my hand through the tangle of people and prodded Aakash’s pectoral. He fell back slightly and smiled with relief and fatigue. ‘This, Sanyogita, is my trainer at Junglee. The man I wanted you to meet.’
