Aakash chuckled at her good nature. ‘Now she’s set. Should we get down to it?’
‘Down to what?’
He pressed what I thought was a packet of pan masala into my palm. When I felt its evasive hoop slide between my fingers I said, ‘You’re not serious? She’s quite old and not very pretty.’
‘She was my first.’
‘Maybe, but…’
‘It’s for us, man. It’s one of those things you have to do with your best friend.’
Before I could answer, he opened a bedroom door on our right and pushed me in. I was surprised at how domestic the room was, really like someone’s home. It had glass, almond-shaped wall lights, a single plywood bed with a white lace bedcover and bedside tables. A stand in one corner contained what looked like broken ostrich eggs but were in fact the begum’s foamy bras.
Aakash came in with her a few moments later. Her waxy hair was tied up with a pink scrunchy and instead of her kaftan she wore a satiny tiger-print slip. Aakash, seeing my alarm, began gently massaging the back of my neck. The begum walked towards the plywood bed, the dimples on her thighs forming new patterns with every step. There was something inoffensive to the point of attraction about her soft, hairless body. It seemed as though, once some original hesitation had been overcome, it would be possible to fuck her five times a night, in a way that would be less possible with more beautiful girls.
Aakash led me over to her by the neck, undoing his black pinstripe shirt as he walked. The begum had pulled out two pillows from under the lace bedcover. She rested her palms on one and her knees on the other. Her vagina was black, the hair around shaved clean, the thighs faintly powdered. As Aakash approached, she began to massage herself with her tiger-painted nails, and I noticed that on their yellowish-brown surface, interspersed between the black stripes, were also strands of red. I felt these details make too strong an impression. I knew that they would kill any possibility of sexual arousal.
Aakash at that moment had not only undone his own slate-grey jeans but was about to undo mine when I stopped him. I wasn’t erect and the sight of his small, pencil-thin penis pushing sharply against his underwear intimidated me. His ease, his hedonistic ease, even as I had thought myself out of my body, intimidated me. I knew all along that this would be a problem. Seeming to read my mind, he pressed my crotch casually, and finding it soft, looked urgently at me, as if to say, ‘Come on, man. Thirdeen, fordeen, we’ll do it slowly…’
The begum sensed a disturbance behind her and looked back, perhaps thinking we were making fun of her again. Aakash was forced to act quickly. He pulled down his underwear, slipped his penis into the white latex he held in his fingers, and rising to the balls of his feet, pushed himself into the begum. Once he was inside her, he turned his attention back to me, draping one arm lightly over my shoulders for balance. He was no different from a man giving blood or urinating, and I stood next to him as though there for moral support. We made light conversation. I noticed a picture on the begum’s bedside of a young man in a silver frame. He was dark-skinned and fine-featured, with amber Nepalese eyes and a cruel smile.
‘Who’s that?’ I whispered to Aakash.
Aakash looked over, readjusting his balance.
‘Her son,’ he whispered, adding, ‘my double,’ with a smile.
But for the colour of his eyes, he looked nothing like Aakash. The begum must have heard us, must have felt Aakash move in her.
‘What’s all this khoospoos you’re doing?’ she snapped.
‘Nothing, Begum,’ Aakash yelled back. ‘Just pointing out the photo of your son.’
‘Oh,’ the begum said, and lowered her head. ‘Poor boy, working as a chowkidar.’
Aakash put both his thumbs to his temples and wiggled his fingers in a child’s gesture of defiance.
When he was near climax, he rested his arm on my shoulder and began again to massage the back of my neck. His rough wrinkly fingers pressed painfully as he came nearer an orgasm. When at last he pulled out, in one movement tearing off the condom and thumbing out long strands of semen over the begum’s back, I could hardly stand the pain. I pushed his hand away and he fell forward, dropping his body over the begum’s for a moment and laughing euphorically.
‘Slowly, slowly,’ the begum cooed, as if glad to finally have some physical contact.
‘Begum,’ Aakash said in a broken voice, ‘can I ask you something? You won’t take it badly?’
‘Tell me, baba.’
‘I’m starving. Is there anything to eat? Brad, butter, a desi omelette?’
‘Baba!’ the begum said indulgently. ‘Is this even something to ask for! Of course your begum will make you an omelette. You’ll take green chillis in it, no?’
‘Yes, Begum. You’re the best.’
The begum rolled Aakash off her back, rose agilely and picked her way past me.
I sat down on the bed next to Aakash. He pulled his jeans back on and sat up. I thought that he spoke indirectly to me when he said, ‘Don’t mind what happened earlier. I have this problem routinely in my life. When I get involved with someone, I burrow into their mind. They can’t get me out and they start behaving irrationally.’
‘What was this deep, dark secret she kept going on about?’
‘Nothing, man, nothing. She’s mad. But let’s leave all these serious things. We had fun, right?’
A few minutes later the begum appeared in the doorway with a plastic plate. As she handed it to him, Aakash looked up at her with adoring eyes. ‘Food cooked by Begum’s own hands,’ he muttered, using Bollywood lines as he tore up the omelette with his fingers. She rested her palm on his shoulder. He sat crouched over the omelette, rolling up the long shreds he’d made before putting them into his mouth. Then lips glistening, chewing noisily, he looked up at us with the glazed contentment of cattle drinking. His self-absorption was that of a man who would have been truly amazed to learn that either of us had any plans other than to watch him wolf down a post-coital omelette.
My phone beeped. Sanyogita. ‘Baby, off to bed. Will you be home soon?’ I put it away, feeling an urgent longing for her bed and her warm, sleepy presence near me, washing clean the night’s exposure. Aakash, licking his chops, looked resentfully over at the challenge to his centrality. The begum’s nails drooped off his shoulder. The Alsatian had also now nosed its way in, and with its head edgewise, sniffed, and began licking clean Aakash’s empty plate.
11
Delhi in that last week of May, despite the great heat, was filled with flowers. There were burnt orange blossoms on the gulmohar’s fern-like leaves, mauve tendrils fountaining from the jarul’s thatched canopy, and the blaze itself seeming to reside in the laburnum’s yellow flowers.
On my last afternoon I sat with Zafar, reading the Urdu newspaper. The affection that had grown between us had softened his insistence on teaching me to write. I’d mastered the script’s meaningful single and double dots and mysterious elisions, and had started reading well. But if I ever confused an ‘n’ with a ‘b’, he would croak irritably. If only I’d followed his advice and learned to write first, none of this would be a problem.
The newspaper was a thin, oily rag with splashes of bright colour and ink that blackened your fingers. The sessions with Zafar had reinforced my vocabulary in definite ways. I drank in ordinary words like ‘often’, ‘perhaps’, ‘unintentionally’ and ‘complete’. Simple words; easy to take for granted till lost and regained in another language. The newspaper offered them up daily, and reading it also became a way for Zafar and me to discuss the week’s events.
For months now the country had been seeing waves of new motiveless crime. In Bombay, there were the beer-can murders. A bearded jihadi wandered the city’s streets, hunting down homosexuals. His calling card was a can of Kingfisher left by the bodies of his victims. Ra was hysterical about copycat murders in Delhi, now seeing its own incidents of brand-new crime in its satellite towns. In Sectorpur there was a flesh-eating serial killer in whose oven the skeletal remains of women and children had been found. And in Phasenagar there was a double homicide. A fourteen-year-old girl had been found with her throat slashed while her parents slept in the next room. When the police arrived, ready to arrest the servant, they found him face down in a pool of his own blood. The death of their
