‘No. Not yet.’
Aakash was offended. ‘Our first beer and you won’t join me?’
‘It’s a little early.’
He said, ‘I’m the kind of person who can wake up in the morning and brush my teeth with beer.’
A level of comfort entered his manner, as though, after surveying the flat, he had found it suitable and now wanted to settle down for a session. When Shakti returned with a cold Cobra and two glasses, I felt as if I were being drawn into an unfamiliar drinking culture: of hotel rooms, curtains drawn, a bottle on a plywood table with some nuts, an ashtray filling up quickly. Seeming to read my thoughts, Aakash asked if I had any cigarettes. I didn’t but knew that there were some in the house. Chamunda insisted a packet of Dunhills be kept for her in the bar. I brought these out. Aakash looked at them admiringly, then pulled one out and lit it with cupped hands. He inhaled, inflating one cheek, then with the cigarette at arm’s length, blew on to it, watching the end brighten through the smoke.
The Cobra was amber-coloured. Its pretty colour in the glass, catching the light in the room filling with smoke, made me want to have some. Aakash poured me one with great aplomb, exaggerating the tilt of the glass. I asked him how he’d come.
‘Motorbike,’ he said, letting out smoke from the corner of his mouth.
‘What kind?’
‘Hero Honda,’ he replied, now inhaling strenuously, making a pained face as if it were difficult to talk.
‘Nice.’
He smiled ironically, ‘What to do, saab? I’m not a rich man. But this I can say, the bike was bought with my own hard-earned money.’
I feared some conversation about privilege when he surprised me. In English, he said, ‘I’ve never sucking dick,’ and laughed.
‘What?’
‘Yes, man. You know Sunil, he’s the other trainer at the gym…’
‘The big beefy guy?’
‘No, no. Someone else; I think he comes after you leave. Anyway,
‘What did he do?’ I said, now more horrified at the recounting of this wild story in the middle of the afternoon than at its bizarre, filmy details.
‘He’s sucking, man,’ Aakash said matter of factly. ‘He’s sucking, sucking, for one hour, sucking…’ He screwed up his dark lips so that their pink interior was more visible than ever.
‘Aakash, come on, this is not true.’
‘It’s true, man,’ Aakash insisted. ‘It’s true.’
‘Did he take the money?’
‘Why not, after he’s sucking…’
‘Yeah, yeah, please.’
Aakash laughed. ‘He bought a Hero Honda.’
I was sure the story was a lie, but I couldn’t gauge his motive in telling it. Was he trying to suss me out, see how appalled I would be? I was surprised at his own indifference; the story seemed hardly to make a dent in his notions of morality, as if all vice, no matter what its nature, was a luxury item.
He drank the beer quickly and yelled for Shakti, who appeared with another one. Aakash was enjoying this mid-afternoon revelry in the little-used flat. He poured me another glass without my asking for it. I had been under the impression that Aakash worked from five a.m. till late at night. I wondered how he’d found this block of free time in the middle of the day; I also didn’t expect a trainer to have these habits. Most of all, I was surprised at how his earlier urgency had given way to such complete repose. I asked if drinking beer damaged his physique. After taking a large gulp, he put down his glass, stood up and walked to the middle of the room. Then he removed his grey and black striped T-shirt, and standing in a grey vest, flexed his chest and triceps. His skin now seemed lighter and his physique more proportionate. Where the muscles had been expanded near the chest and the arms, there were stretch marks, pale and hairless, like knife wounds. A fine layer of hair ran over his shoulders and back, culminating in a thick chasm between the pectorals. Red and black religious threads, entwined with a single silver chain, disappeared into the chest hair.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘that if you were a businessman, you would take no interest in me.’ He glazed his eyes and made a snooty face. ‘You’d think this guy lives in Sectorpur, he drives a Hero Honda, he’s not someone I can sit down with. But because you’re a writer, you look at me and you want to dig inside, to discover what there is in this guy. Aren’t I right?’
‘Perhaps,’ I replied, embarrassed.
‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to tell me, I know. And in my lifetime itself, I’ve seen a lot of change. I’ve upgraded myself. When I was seventeen, eighteen, we were a group of three best friends. Our shoes were torn, soles coming off, we walked in the street in the heat, we took buses, we sometimes ate nothing more than a few toffees in a whole day. I remember you got two for fifty paise. The vest I worked out in had holes in it.’
He put his index finger to his thumb, indicating holes the size of one-rupee coins.
‘I wanted to be a mechanical engineer,’ he continued, ‘I got the marks for it, but my father couldn’t pay the bribe for the admission. You know, it was some seventy, eighty thousand. He said, “I’ll borrow it from somewhere. You go, just go and get your degree.” But I told him no; I’m going into fitness. I started working in one gym in Panchsheel Park, earning fifteen thousand. And slowly by slowly,’ he said, ‘I started picking up personal trainings, people liked my work, they liked that I got results, and so when Junglee opened I was hired there. I started on thirty thousand and in a year I doubled my income with personal trainings. I bought a bike, started buying good clothes. I upgraded myself. Man, and I know now for sure that if I get this one golden opportunity, I’ll never look back. There’s something in me, I know it. When I was born, our astrologer looked at my eyes and said to my mother, there’s something in his eyes. He’ll either soar or he’ll destroy himself.’
It was strange to think of the eyes, which I had thought of only in terms of beauty, as signs of providence. His ambition had also blurred into an idea of religious duty and what I thought of as vanity seemed almost like a homage to the work of fate.
‘But, you know,’ he said, ‘you might look at me and think, this guy, he’s a trainer, his father’s an auditor and that’s all: they’re low-grade people. But that’s not all we are.’
He spoke in a mixture of Hindi and English. The speed with which he recounted his personal history was startling. It was ready on his lips. He carried it around like one of the dented and blackened silver amulets he wore round his neck. He changed lenses effortlessly. One moment he was himself, striving, feeling the heat of the day and the fear of failure, the next he imagined himself as me, considering his achievement, wondering if it was something I could write about. It was as if he wanted to show me his making, show me a measure of worth different from the one that had humiliated him at the Holi party a few days before.
When he said, ‘That’s not all we are,’ I had thought he was referring to some intrinsic human worth, but he meant something entirely different.
‘My great-grandfather was a famous priest in a village in Haryana,’ he began. ‘When he was very old, he was faced with a scandal. It led to him renouncing his life and drifting down a river. He disappeared and wasn’t heard of till years later, when someone saw him in Kanyakumari.’
Kanyakumari, once Cape Comorin, was on the southernmost tip of India. It was some three thousand kilometres away.
Hoping to ground the story, I asked, ‘What form did the scandal take?’
Aakash’s eyes shone. ‘There was an army officer’s wife. She used to regard my great-grandfather very highly. She would work for him in the temple, help him with the prayers, clean the idols. Even before serving her husband, she would serve my great-grandfather. And so people in the village began talking.
‘Then one day, her husband died. But despite this she went that morning to the temple. So you can imagine, the village went wild with talk. A crowd gathered outside the temple, chanting, “Abolish these corrupt priests.” My great-grandfather heard their cries and appeared outside. Though he was heartbroken, he didn’t say anything. He
