A Bad Character (2 page)

But in his eyes there’s the promise of something else.

So I’m in this café in Khan Market, twenty years old and I’m beautiful, though I only know it now looking back at the photos I have of myself, where it’s obvious, painfully so because it’s gone, this beauty, never to return, where the skin is so young and unmarked by life, still with the last traces of puppy fat, but how deep is the hunger in the eyes, the joy right there inside her at the moment she’s being shaped and devoured.

And nobody knows, nobody will. That’s the thrill of it. None of my classmates, no family. They’ll know something is up, that something has changed, but if they knew for certain what it was, if they could see him, they’d be horrified beyond belief, because he’s ugly.

Ugly with dark skin, with short wiry hair, with a large flat nose and eyes bursting out on either side like flares, with big ears and a fleshy mouth that holds many teeth.

There’s something of the animal in him. Something of the elephant and the monkey. Something of the jackal.

He’s not a typical “Delhi boy,” that’s for sure, not only because of his face and skin but also because of the clothes he wears: a faded yellow T-shirt that’s been washed too many times, a pair of too-large brown corduroy pants held up with an old belt. A vagabond who’s been scrubbed clean. But there are also brand-new red Converse sneakers on his feet, with their clownish white rims that tell me he’s not exactly from the street.

He’s nothing like the boys they want me to marry. There’s a new one of those on the horizon, a non-resident
Indian, twenty years in the U.S., a full-blooded American now. Aunty is lining him up for a meeting. I sit with her at home on the sofa while she tells me all about him. She leafs through his biodata, his golden résumé, and in this apartment high up in the air I cannot breathe. I eat and sleep but I cannot breathe. She’s been arranging these meetings for a year now, without success, but she never tires, and this new one is very promising to her: he’s seen my photo and approved of my looks, and because he’s divorced he’s willing to overlook my own unfortunate situation, the mother dead, the father absent.

Aunty doesn’t imagine I’d ever say no, and after so many rejections, after so many families have turned me down, she’s giddy about this one.

Sitting on the sofa. Listening to her speak. The soap operas on the TV, the thick curtains drawn, the fan spinning dead air. Such heavy furniture in her world, stared at by that dark wood, by those statues of gods, by bronze and dried fruit, by nuts tied in packages with bows, left over from this wedding or that, from Diwali.

Uncle is in his bedroom looking through the accounts,
or pretending to at least, drinking his peg of whisky. His world is his own, he doesn’t share it with me—only good morning, how are you, fine, off to college, very good. Never any emotion, no affection for his wife, not in public at least. Only the motions of putting food on the table, only off to the factory or the club and then to sleep.

In front of the TV Aunty looks at me sadly. She sees my stubbornness, my lack of enthusiasm, and suddenly she’s afraid for me.

But I’m actually considering the American, that’s the truth. I’m seriously thinking of saying yes to him. I’ve been toying with the idea for a while now. The neighbour says, But he’s divorced, and Aunty says, So what if he’s divorced, he’s learned his lesson, he makes good money, he’s a good family boy, what more is there? And unlike this one in the café, the American is not ugly at all.

It’s the years of conditioning that make me think his dark skin is ugly, poor, wrong. That make me think he looks like a servant.

But in the café I’m looking up at him.

I am pretty and he is ugly.

And the secret is this turns me on.

I tried many times to write this down, and all have failed. Ten years gone by. Words deleted from hard drives, set on fire in ditches, in metal bins on balconies, pages torn up in frustration, scrunched into balls and tossed away. I tried to write this down but went about it the wrong way. How to write while being pursued? When one is not the pen but the page?

So, Varanasi, aged eight. Still in pigtails, wearing my tartan dress. Still a little mute and pensive, my lips pursed, looking in the mirror but not quite recognizing myself, not yet comfortable in my own skin. I want to be grown-up more than anything, but for now I’m only aware enough to be embarrassed of myself. I don’t know any other way; I certainly don’t know how to change it. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s within my power to change anything, to make decisions of my own. So I’m
stuck in this body and the clothes I’m given to wear. But it’s also true that I like my tartan dress.

Varanasi, my father: the last time I remember you whole. As if you were a thing that could be broken apart, like a chocolate bar.

We went together, the three of us, mother, you and me, a final holiday. You were back from Singapore, the last time before you left for good. We took the train from Agra and stayed with relatives in the old city, near the Ganga, in a house in a tangle of lanes with a courtyard inside that one would never know was there.

This lane is so narrow we have to press ourselves against its sides as the bodies come by. They come as torpedoes wrapped in cloth on the hands of sadness towards the Ganga to burn.

He once told me, he said, Even after burning, the breastbones of men and the pelvises of women remain. That
instead of crumbling to ash they are sent down the river to sail, to sink in its bed. One day when the Ganga dries up they’ll find them there. Thirty billion pelvic bones, thirty billion sternums. The history of the world in a watery grave.

And just his presence. Just his hand on my belly as we sleep, when he loves me. It lives forever.

Close your eyes, go to sleep.

It lives forever, the hand on my shoulder in the train on the way, in the compartment, hanging down from the top bunk. I look at them, my mother and my father, and he is stroking her hair. He is holding her in his lap like a little bird.

In the black and yellow of the taxi to the city we sit with our luggage stacked around us on the torn leather seats. Then, in the lanes that are too narrow for taxis, a cycle rickshaw, groaning under our weight. They’re carrying the luggage on their heads the last bit of the way—my bag is on my head, I’m mimicking them. Lots of legs,
and those sudden processions of the dead coming round each bend.

At the house where we’re staying, the courtyard has water flowing in narrow channels around its edge and creepers in bowls that climb up the walls to the lattice-screen balconies on the first floor. The gates of the courtyard open to the alleyway. When they are closed, the city remains as noise coming through a blue square of sky, where toy kites fall and rise. There’s a hospital nearby. You hear the cries of the patients in the morning, the hacking of phlegm in the throat that is the song of India.

Then one evening the wind changes and a thin layer of grey falls on the courtyard floor. It’s the ash, someone tells me, coming from the burning ghat, the ghat of the dead.

In the café I get up to go to the bathroom, and in the cramped bathroom away from the AC, I feel the city
crawling over me—as soon as I’m through the door it crawls through the window in squashed and malodorous heat. In thousands of horns and voices, in red dust. Night is falling, so the people are moving back out to the streets, bulbs are being switched on in the stalls, in the doorways. The retreating sun releases fragrance, incense, sewer smells, frying food, exhaust fumes. The minarets give their call to prayer, the rising swarm of their devotion telling us that God is great.

Early next morning I left to see the dead. Alone, no one knew I’d gone, snuck out through the alleyways, I was drawn to the river, somehow I knew where it would be. Coming round a corner on the cobbles to a slope running north-east, long like the slopes that boats are pushed down, but at the bottom before the water it’s the inferno of Dashashwamedh.

There are two pyres in my head, maybe three. The third might be lower down, out of focus, but these two are raised up, clear in my mind, on abutments of concrete. Behind there is a wooden tower and around this many
piles of wood, many different kinds, each more expensive than the last, each more fragrant, to mask the smell of burning flesh.

There’s already a body roasting there, almost done, its family quietly accepting now.

This girl would have looked wide-eyed to anyone watching her. Transfixed, standing without words. The smoke changing direction without warning, billowing across her, pieces of ash running into her dress, sticking in her hair.

Bluest of blue skies, not a cloud within it, and already hot at 7 a.m., even without the raging fires whose ripples in the daylight are a thing to behold.

After a lull, a new procession begins, the body wrapped in bandages as in the alleyways, the pyre cleared, the ash and logs swept away, the last bone set to sail as the soul drifts up past the crows on the rooftops and the new pyre is laid. They are sobbing, the women, a group of women holding on to one another. One in the middle cannot be
contained. At any moment she might break away, fall forward to embrace the dead man’s face.