‘Let’s get in,’ Aakash said abruptly. ‘I’ll explain in a minute.’
I didn’t question him, but undressed to my underwear. Aakash watched me the entire time. When I took a step towards the bath, he said, ‘Come on, man. You insulting me? I’m not a fucking gay. Take your underwear off. This is like something I would do with my brother.’
I took my underwear off and put one foot into the bath. It was still very hot and I could keep only one foot in at a time, even as they began to tingle from the heat. I was able slowly to manage both, then to lower myself in. Aakash watched, smiled with satisfaction, then seeing I had left my wine by the chair, went over and brought it to me. When I was up to my neck, he took off his jeans and stood for a minute on the edge of the bath, looking at himself in the browning mirror. He watched himself take a sip of wine, rubbed his body with his other hand, pulled at his foreskin, which had become small and shrunken, then let himself sink into the bath.
‘So I was saying,’ he said, once we were both in the cloudy water, our knees sometimes touching, our bodies mostly submerged but occasionally floating to the top like refuse, ‘that everyone is in their correct place and working accordingly.’
In the suspense of the filling bath, I had missed the importance of his words. I hadn’t seen that behind the rambling about tobacco and brands was a philosophical, almost Hindu, way of dealing with the problem of inequality. The world to Aakash was not illusion; it was real and material, and he was hungry for it. But it was impossible to live in India, especially the new and shaken-up India, without having a way of coping with its inequalities. Zafar had his idea of the poet, and though Aakash had a corresponding idea, a new idea, of himself as a trainer, to which he was willing to ascribe Hindu notions of duty, he also had something else. He had his high idea of himself as a Brahmin. With it came an innate acceptance of fate and the inequality of men. And even though, in the new scheme, Aakash’s caste was not on top, he saw this more as a practical problem than a philosophical one. He said, ‘So now what am I to do, if I don’t have money? Perhaps the day won’t be far off when I’ll have more money than the people who were to be my in-laws, perhaps even more than you. And what will they say then? “Fine, you can marry my daughter”?’
Interrupting him, I said, ‘You loved her a lot, didn’t you, Ash-man?’
‘Yes, man,’ he said warmly. ‘She would have been a great wife. You know, when you’re upgrading yourself, many people try to make you feel small, make you feel you’re nothing. But with her by my side, I would have felt strong.’
I was won over. His calm, the preternatural strength of his nerve didn’t seem out of place. It was as if it flowed from his unshakeable belief in the preordained. And his own gritty modern story, with its amorality and sudden reversals, didn’t seem so far away from the stories I had heard around him, like those of his ancestor and of Tara and Rukmani. In fact those stories were like a fount for his own. And when things were at their worst, I felt sure they gave him his power to switch off, taking consolation on the one hand in the disinterested work of fate and on the other in the always auspicious light of his star.
We had made our way through half the red wine; we were both drained from the heat, lying back in the vast bath, our penises bobbing limply to the surface.
That was where I should have left things. But in that deep moment of relaxation it suddenly occurred to me to ask, ‘So then what was the solution you gave Chamunda?’
Aakash half raised his head, his dark face flushed, and said, ‘It was simple, really. I told Chamunda about the threat Megha’s brother made a few nights before. Yes, she told me about it in the end,’ he added seeing the surprise form in my face. ‘Oh, and also I drew her attention to a certain short story – what was it called? – “The Ass -”… “The Ass -”… you know the one?’ he said, and laughed.
Seconds later, there was a great banging on the door outside.
Epilogue
The sea changed from green to brown; oily, rainbow patterns ran over its surface. Red-bottomed, rusting freighters, some with Russian and Arab names, came into view. Then tall white buildings and the pale red domes of the Taj Hotel. A terrorist attack had left its facade blackened, its windows boarded up. There was now heavy security outside. Bombay’s mud-coloured water sloshed around us, bringing up plastic bottles and rose petals. A businessman’s yacht prevented us from docking. The passengers on the ferry stared in wonder at its white body, darkened windows and European crew. We rocked in the brown water for a few minutes more, then gingerly disembarked. I was on the three p.m. flight to Delhi.
Uttam was there to pick me up at the other end. There was new weather in Delhi. The winter had dried out, and though the silk cotton’s fleshy flowers were yet to fill with their coral colour, the months of flowering trees yet to come, there was an unruly wind blowing, carrying in its wilfulness, rather than in its temperature, hints of summer. Delhi was my city. I knew its every mood, its every colour; it could only surprise me now on hidden levels when, like a spy agency, it would unseal from some shade-filled crescent, dark as a forest, a new memory.
But I couldn’t think of that Delhi. It was another casualty of the ending romance. And Sanyogita, as if claiming it as part of her settlement, chose to meet in Lodhi Gardens. We came to it now from different directions: I, from the Lutyens’s Delhi end; she, from the Jorbagh end. I had walked there every day when I lived in Delhi. Her suggesting we meet there felt like an appropriation. Trying to gauge the fine meanings in these messages – her new assertiveness, her calm – I became aware before entering the park that our relationship was over.
In the days that followed the night at the safe house, I took my mother up on a long-standing offer to visit her in Alibaug, at my stepfather’s and her house by the sea. I wanted both to be in India but to hold it at bay. I found myself wishing for the oblivion of my childhood, for the inevitability of my surroundings.
I might have stayed indefinitely at that house by the sea, with its dim view of Bombay and its blackened beach, on to which the carcasses of turtles and dolphins occasionally washed up, had Sanyogita, some eight weeks after my arrival, not called. All that had happened over the past year must have clarified for her too. And released from a cycle with me, she decided to be released for good.
She always wore a fig-scented perfume. But not that day. And other small things were different too. She dressed warmly, and for comfort, though it was not cold. Normally she would have worn her light, pretty clothes as soon as it was warm. Her longish black hair was twisted into a single plait and pulled over her left shoulder. Her smile with its tinge of sadness seemed now in sadness to be cheerful. It also had a humorous or ironic colour, as if projecting some fairy-tale notion that this inversion was the greatest sadness of all. It was as if she had dismantled the person she had been before. And it felt both like a defence and a renewal. I thought I saw in her face relief that it was over.
It prevented me from making any kind of case. It felt too much to overturn the serenity of the evening. We met as we’d met many times before; the only difference was that we wouldn’t meet again. It was a small park, but intricate, and we walked many times around it. We walked past the bare tombs with their line of glazed turquoise tiles hanging on over the centuries. There was bougainvillea, the avenue of white-trunked palms and an old bridge of high pointed arches. We stood there over a mossy pond.
Thinking only of her words from the night before, obsessed with them now, I said at last, ‘Is it because of what you said last night, about not being able to compete with the other intimacies in my life?’
‘Not only,’ she replied, ‘not only,’ making me feel that the passion from the night before had gone out of her. ‘My feelings have changed,’ she said again.
‘Overnight?’
‘No, not overnight. Over many months.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I didn’t want to believe that they had.’
It was so beguiling an answer. I felt our emotional equivalency evaporate.
‘Have you heard from Aakash?’ she asked with no rancour.
‘Come on. I hope this is not about -’
‘No, no, really, no. I’m just curious.’
I could see she was not lying.
After Aakash revealed the secret of Kris’s homosexuality to Chamunda, and Chamunda, with his short story in
