‘I know there isn’t,’ he replied, his words bristling. ‘That’s why I just touched on it and quickly dismissed it.’
I said, ‘TV should only be called in if there’s a threat to your or Megha’s life.’
‘Yes, but if I go to meet Megha’s family, there will be a threat to my life.’
‘Were you planning to? This is the first I’ve heard of it. If you go alone, you really are mad.’
Megha nodded sadly in agreement.
‘Take it from me now in writing,’ Aakash said. ‘The way it’s going to happen is this: in a month, there’ll be another suitor for Megha; her mother will try taking her to meet him; and then I will pressurize Megha to tell them and she will.’
Megha bit her lip nervously and looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. Aakash looked viciously at us both.
‘Is your stomach full?’ Megha asked.
‘Isn’t it clear I’m full?’ Aakash answered without a trace of humour. ‘That’s why I’m talking like this now. My energy has returned.’
‘And aggression,’ I said.
He smiled and became gentler.
‘What can I do, man?’ he confessed. ‘Taking a lot of tension. This thing is constantly on my mind. I used to sleep till eleven on Sundays but now I wake up at five from worry. Thinking, thinking. I have many problems. It’s not just this thing. I have to think of my career. How I’m going to upgrade myself. I have to think of how I’ll take care of Megha. Fine, I can rent a flat in Sectorpur; she will stay there in the days when I’m working or she could be with my mother so that she won’t get bored on her own.’
Listening to this description, tender that it was, I felt sure that it would never become a reality. Something about Megha, her boisterousness, or perhaps her sheer size, defied any notion of her sitting alone at home in Sectorpur, or milling about Aakash’s tiny flat with her mother-in-law. And this mention of boredom, linked somehow to the solitude of the modern apartment, seemed to bring alive Megha’s resistance to any quiet sequestering in Sectorpur. As if also sensing the impossibility of living with Aakash’s family, she said snidely of his brother Amit, ‘And we know all about your brother and his wife.’
A tense moment passed between them.
‘Everyone has faults,’ Aakash snapped. ‘You do, sir probably does too, and so does he.’
Turning to me, Aakash said in English, ‘My sis-in-law is very sharp.’
‘And very money-minded,’ Megha added.
Aakash relaxed and said in English, ‘My brother sometimes says me, “Why are you worried? You have Megha.” Can you believe, man?’ Aakash exploded, and switching to Hindi, said, ‘ “And we count every little paisa, thinking, can we afford this, can we not? Let’s not buy it now; we’ll buy it next time.” ’
It was becoming afternoon when we left Mantra. The sun now shone on a different segment of Connaught Place. It showed me what I had not seen earlier: a single block, renovated, whitewashed, looking for the first time since independence how it was built to look. It was as hopeful a thing as I had ever seen, almost impossible to imagine, impossible to think of in the surrounding decay as the work of a brush and fresh paint. If it was so easy, why had it not been done before? Aakash explained that it was the first block to have been released from rent control. As soon as it had been, fresh life had poured into it.
We put Megha into a taxi headed for Sectorpur. Before waving her off, Aakash told her to be careful when driving into Sectorpur.
‘Why for?’ she asked.
‘There’s been an encounter,’ Aakash said, ‘with Muhammadans.’
‘Not Muhammadans, Aakash, terrorists. Not all Muhammadans are terrorists,’ I added prissily.
‘Fine,’ he replied, ‘but all the terrorists are Muhammadans.’
‘Same difference,’ Megha said from within the taxi. ‘Tell what happened, no?’
‘The policeman killed was a Sectorpur man. All I’m saying is just be careful in case there’s trouble.’
‘Tch, that’s nothing,’ Megha said jauntily. ‘Do I look like a Muhammadan to you?’
‘No, appu! Now hurry up, you’re causing a traffic jam.’
She was still laughing when the taxi drove away.
When she’d gone, Aakash asked me to drop him at Junglee. Driving back through the avenues, the canopies flaring and fading overhead, we passed the Human Rights Commission, the silver letters on its facade blazing in the light. Aakash pointed at it and smiled ironically. Then looking back into the boot of the car, he said with pride, ‘We got things from all the brands. Puma, Nike, Reebok.’
As I was dropping him off, he asked for eleven hundred rupees.
‘Why?’
‘It’s for a jagran we’re organizing in my colony. I want you to come.’
‘A jagran?’
‘Tch, you really don’t know anything,’ Aakash said. Then looking at Uttam, he added, ‘Tell him what a jagran is. I don’t have the time right now.’
I took out eleven hundred rupees, including a red thousand-rupee note, and gave them to Aakash. He put them in his back pocket and vanished behind Junglee’s brushed-steel door.
On the way home, Uttam explained that a jagran was an all-night wake of sorts, with devotional singing, pageants and prayers.
‘It’s all rubbish,’ Uttam said bitterly, having seen Aakash extract a third of his monthly salary from me. ‘Just a way for the Brahmins to make money.’
17
When that evening she was disappeared, the news came as a matter of course. Aakash especially, expecting it for so long, was the least surprised. He felt also that this was not the disappearance we had been waiting for: that she would return, and that then there would be some attempt at a forced marriage or a period of captivity designed to make her give up Aakash, for which we had to be prepared. He seemed almost irritated with me when I stressed that Shabby Singh was coming to dinner that night, and if there was a time to act, it was now. The drama with which he had opened the conversation, saying only, ‘They’ve taken her,’ drained from his voice. ‘Tch! Take it easy. The ball is now in play,’ he said. ‘We have to think before we act. This is not the time when they’ll find a boy for her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They’ll have to have the lipo done first, no? The recovery period from that itself takes a few weeks. Now, obviously they won’t show her to a boy in that period when she has scars and bandages all over her.’
‘They’re going to forcibly lipo -’ I grasped for the verb – ‘lipo-suck her?’
‘Yes, man.’
‘Surely you can’t do that.’
‘Whaddyou saying, man? With money, in this country, you can do anything you like. The Aggarwals even have their own clinics. Who’s going to stop them?’ Then his cynicism vanished and some mixture of regret and self- absorption took its place. ‘Man, I feel so bad. She kept saying, “Don’t make me thin. Don’t make me thin, otherwise they’ll marry me off.” If I had wanted, I could have shown results in a few weeks. I’m a professional person, you know? But I listened to her, and now look, because of me she is going to get lipo.’
‘Get lipo’: ah! I thought, that’s the verb.
‘So you want me to say anything tonight?’
‘Nothing. Not a single word.’
Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had – restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels – or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And
