significance. I started to believe that the world around me, the minutiae of life in a big city, contained signs of whether I was to be a writer or not. If this feeling had come from a genuine wish to be a writer, it might have had a foundation in hard work and reading that would have given me solace. But it was an empty wish; it was like my novel, a wish for a lifeline.
One hot afternoon, when Sanyogita had gone to see an aunt in Long Island, leaving me to take care of Kuku, I stepped out to have an iced coffee. I felt in my pocket for the keys and let the door slam behind me. But even before its metal teeth had closed around the powerful cylindrical bolt, I knew that what I had thought were my keys was in fact loose change. I stood in an airless corridor, permanently lit by a yellowing fluorescent light, staring with aimless intensity at a floor of many tiny hexagons. I didn’t have a phone; I had only enough money for an iced coffee. I didn’t want to leave the building, as that would lock me out of the building as well as the flat. I could hear Kuku mewing, no doubt rubbing his scrawny body along the door, reminding me that I had to feed him. I felt an irrational hatred towards the cat for not being able to help me.
It was then that I had what I can only describe as a swarming of nerves. Already close to some kind of lip, they cascaded over. My body turned cold with sweat, I felt some kind of essential life-giving liquid drain from me and I had the desire to curl up on the floor by the door, with the strange belief that if I kept my face close to the centimetre gap of cold air between the door and the floor, I would be able to restart the flow of oxygen into my body. The city beyond terrified me. When I thought of it, I could think only of the crowds and commotion around Times Square. And it was like this, hardly able to walk, that I made my way down three flights of stairs, banging on every door in the hope that someone would be able to help me cope with the blackness rising around me.
On the ground floor, a girl in a summery dress opened the door. She had a garden flat, with an open window and a large white fan. I broke into the tranquillity of her room and collapsed on a purple futon, trying slowly to explain my situation. She listened, nodded, emitting a few comforting ‘uh-huhs’, then picked up a red telephone and called a locksmith. After a rapid conversation, she said he would be there in eight minutes.
The man who arrived was a Romanian, slim, blond, in a vest. He had been at a nearby cafe drinking an iced coffee, he said. He looked at the lock with dismay. He said that this was not the kind of lock his tools could open; he would have to drill it. Two hundred dollars. I had no choice. It was Friday and Sanyogita was not back until Monday. He took his drill to the brass lock and bore into a single point just above the keyhole. It was as violent a thing as I had ever seen; I could hear, as brass flakes flew, the lock’s interlocking components break one by one. Then he took a wrench to the lock, and after many failed attempts pulled its little brass face from its place in the door, leaving an empty hole. But the door didn’t open.
‘It has a double-lock,’ he said, ‘but you didn’t tell me.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘We’ll have to drill that one too. It’ll be expensive. It’s a good lock. Yeah, yeah. Another two hundred at least.’
He bore into the second lock now. The brass flakes flew and the lock’s components broke one by one; it was wrenched from its place in the door; a second empty hole appeared. The door fell open, the room reappeared, Kuku rubbed up against a sofa. But the door couldn’t be left like that; the locks had to be replaced. Two hundred dollars each. I gave him the money in two-hundred-dollar instalments withdrawn from an electric-blue ATM outside a deli. It felt like cutting away parts of my body. He gave me two sets of brass keys in return.
I went back upstairs and wrote to the agent.
The following week, once Sanyogita had returned, the blue orb in my inbox brought this letter, a letter within a letter, of which painful snatches remained with me:
Aatish – Since I had to go off on a long weekend after your delivery of
Best wishes, Marie
AN INTERNMENT – BY AATISH TASEER
Although Tasser can write with fluency and intelligence at times,
The line-by-line style needs serious attention. There are so many awkward and over-elaborate sentences. I’d encourage Tasser to be as ruthless as possible with his own writing – to stop trying too hard – and to work on developing clarity and simplicity in his style…
All in all – I wouldn’t recommend taking Tasser on as a client now – but it might be worth asking to see a substantially rewritten version of this novel.
As I finished the email, with its cruel misspellings of my name, I felt as though I had been set free. I realized that it was not so much the fraudulence of the literary effort but waiting for that fraudulence to bear fruit that had been the hardest part. I hadn’t found a way to write about my situation. I had the disarray of my situation to show me why.
Stronger now for being stripped of my pretences, I boldly approached Sanyogita about wanting to go back to India. She was not angry. She only said, ‘Baby, I hope you don’t mind if I follow in a few days?’
Part Two
13
The season had changed. The moisture was gone from the air and the evenings were now a little smoky. The occasional cluster of yellow petals, the odd burnt-orange tendril, stubbornly hung on in the laburnum’s branches and the gulmohar’s stepped canopy. Their brilliance was unsuited to the new season and there was something of the gloom of streamers and confetti from a past celebration in their now rare occurrence. New pigments and scents flooded the leaves and branches of Delhi’s trees and winter flowers began appearing on roundabouts. One tree particularly, the
At Junglee, too, there had been changes. Pradeep, Aakash’s pale, meatier rival, had moved back to Bombay, leaving the field open to him. The ponytailed owners, afraid to give him too much power, had promoted Montu, the pork- and beef-eating chooda, to the position of trainer, in the hope of putting up a counterbalance. This only inflamed the situation, and Aakash, with Mojij the Christian at his side, now spent a good part of the morning leaning against the cable crossover machine, ridiculing Montu. He would organize his clients’ workouts based on what Montu was doing with his (most of whom were inherited from Pradeep, though even from these Aakash had pinched a few). Then, within earshot of Montu’s client, he would point out his failings. ‘See, wrists not straight. Weight is coming down behind shoulders so effect is falling on back, balance is off. Like that, anyone can do. Now, follow this, wrist’s straight, weight coming down here, yes, balance perfect, thirdeen, fordeen, we’ll do it slowly…’
There were also changes in Aakash’s physical appearance. His hair, once neat, short and bristly, was now long and uneven and fell jaggedly over his forehead. ‘Messy look,’ he answered briefly when I asked him about it. He had also, to go with the look, grown a short black dacoit’s stubble with a vicious nap. If it grew too long, he would shave it off, leaving either the faint outline of a French beard or a triangle of stubble below his lower lip. He wore a diamond stud in one ear. His manner was also different, not colder, but harder somehow. It manifested itself in the
