rhythmic flashes. Chamunda wiped her hands and lit a Dunhill cigarette. She offered me one, but I declined. We sat in silence for some minutes. The rising smoke moved sideways over a ruled page of fine, slatted light coming in past the green bamboo fence.
‘So listen, baba,’ Chamunda said, ‘it looks like no one will have to stay here after tomorrow. I mean, you can stay on, of course, if you want to, this is your house. But what I mean to say is that you don’t have to stay here. You don’t know how grateful I am that you came, though. These have been trying times, really. But you watch, we’ll win the election and then we’ll have some fun. We’ll get your mother here as well. You know, I love her like a sister. Much more than a sister.’ Chamunda laughed wickedly, thinking perhaps of Sanyogita’s mother, with whom she had strained relations. Then as an extension of that thought, she added, beetling her eyebrows, ‘Try and make Sanyogita understand that her aunt is not such an evil person. You don’t know how she wounds me. I have no children, so she’s like my own, but she’s always edgy around me. I want her to get in touch with India. We’ll need someone from the family at some point. Already there’s no one to contest the parliamentary seat from Ayatlochanapur. Get her to sort herself out. Creative writing! Emigres at Home! What is this nonsense!’
At the time, it didn’t occur to me to ask how Chamunda would have known the name of Sanyogita’s creative writing group. Nor did I think she was purging her guilt as she spoke. I thought she was acting with her niece’s best interests at heart.
Raunak Singh appeared a moment later with a cordless telephone.
‘Right, baba. I must go. I’ll see you in Delhi.’
I sat in the courtyard a while longer, looking at the flashing tree, and got up only when I saw Chamunda, now in a turquoise sari adorned with reflective, gold-rimmed flowers, go out of the house for the last time, followed by a small entourage.
Aakash had not emerged from the gym. When I went in a few minutes later, he was working out himself, barefooted, bare-chested, in just his jeans.
‘Hi, man. How’s you doing, man?’ he said, swinging his arms up in bicep curls.
‘Fine,’ I said, and sat down on a workout bench.
‘It feels so good. I can’t tell you. It feels like I haven’t worked out in weeks. Everything’s gone. Look, look,’ he said, flexing a tricep, which emerged obediently like a great vein in his arm.
‘Aakash, it’s fine, really.’
‘And chest,’ he said, shrinking his face and pushing out his pectorals.
‘Also fine.’
‘But abs are really gone, no?’ He pulled down the skin from his stomach and the faint outline of a six-pack emerged, the beauty spot on it, reminding me that I had seen it before.
Then he looked hard at my reflection, and seeing perhaps some fatigue, some sorrow in my face, he stopped and turned round. ‘You’re all right? No?’ he asked with concern. ‘Not angry with me, I hope. Chamunda Devi told you what happened between us?’
‘No.’
His face cleared.
‘You’re upset this is our last night.’ He laughed. ‘You were getting comfortable. Come on, I’m going to cheer you up. We’re going to do something I used to do with my brother when we were children.’
‘Aakash, I’m fine.’
‘No, no, no. I can see there’s a problem. Come on.’
With this, he pulled me out of the gym. The house was in half-light. It was caught in that special Indian hour when the day has gone and the servants are still to turn on the lights. Under the cover of this dusk hour, Aakash stole into the dimly lit pantry, past a few Nepalese maids, and hunted round for something. Not finding what he wanted, he stuck his head out and said, ‘Sister, where is the wine kept?’ She pointed him to another area of the kitchen, and not wishing to break momentum, he rushed over there. The sight of many bottles of wine of varying quality confused him.
‘Aatish, help me out,’ he whispered.
‘Choose something from the top.’
He stood on his tiptoes and pulled out a bottle of wine. It looked Californian and expensive. It had a single red drop falling against an off-white label. Around the drop, as if it had broken the surface of the label, were faint ripples, also in off-white.
‘Mod… mod…’
‘Modicum.’
‘Good?’ Aakash asked.
‘Probably.’
‘Great. Let’s go,’ he said, taking two glasses from a shelf.
We made our way up the internal staircase to the first floor. When we reached the landing, Aakash whispered, ‘Now, really quiet.’
We tiptoed past an open doorway, in which Sanyogita, now in darkness, could be seen still in front of the computer. Two or three doors down, Aakash gently slid back the bolt of a room I hadn’t seen so far. The light outside had become so dim that I could barely make it out. A kind of purple gloom spread through the room and only the silver of a mirror at the far end was visible.
‘Fuck,’ Aakash said, a moment after we entered, ‘I forgot the screw thing. I’ll go back. You wait here.’
Before I could protest, he had slipped out, leaving me in the empty room. As my eyes slowly adjusted, I could make out a crystal dressing table in one corner, a dark wooden cupboard from the fifties and an old four-poster Calcutta bed with a white bedspread. I wandered ahead absent-mindedly, opened a wide, heavy door with a long brass handle, and found myself in a dressing room. Past a further door, there was a high-ceilinged bathroom, with an art-deco floor of black, white and beige stone arranged in a large rhombus shape. Great panels of mirror, screwed into the wall, whose silver had rusted and fallen away, stood over a black bathtub, and steel capsule- shaped lights threw low-voltage shadows over the room.
I was still taking in the bathroom when I heard Aakash enter behind me.
‘So you’ve found it,’ he said. ‘Good boy.’
He pushed me into the room and locked the door. The bottle of wine was open. He poured me a glass and sat me down on a cane chair against the wall. Then, still only in his jeans, he leaned across the vast bathtub and opened the taps. There were some bath salts on the edge, which he smelt suspiciously before scattering them in large handfuls into the bath, turning the few inches of water cloudy.
As the bath began to fill, he sat down on the edge of it and took a large sip of wine.
‘It’s good, man!’ he said.
It was very good – heavy and smooth.
The moment overcame him, and as if wondering how it was that life had brought him into such varied situations, had shown him both poverty and luxury, he said, always with that special ability to explain complicated problems in simple material terms, ‘Now Chamunda Devi, she smokes Dunhills, right?’
‘Right.’
He nodded. ‘On Marlboro packets the price is shown, on Benson the price is shown, but on Dunhill there is no price.’ He took out a packet from his pocket, and twirling it in his hand, showed me it had no price. ‘What does that mean?’
I thought it was a rhetorical question and didn’t answer, but he pressed me for a response.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That it’s imported! Now people might say,’ he said, taking on the voice of an impressed observer, ‘ “Right, so she smokes Dunhills, she must be very rich.” They don’t stop to think, why does this person smoke Dunhills?’
Again, I thought I was not meant to give an answer, but Aakash waited for one.
‘Because of the length, the quality of the tobacco?’ I offered.
‘Right,’ he replied, a little disappointed. ‘But those people will say, “Such and such person smokes Marlboro, that’s all right, not bad.” My brother smokes Benson, but Benson you can buy loose. Dunhill, you have to buy a whole packet at a time. “So, good, this person must be pretty rich.” What they don’t see,’ Aakash said, seeing perhaps some confusion in my face, ‘is that the person who smokes Dunhills might also smoke Gold Flake should the need arise.’
At this point the bath was more than half-full and the clouded water was steaming up the mirror.
