“Whatever happened to that boy?” her mother asked late one night. Neda was eating cold chicken at the dining table.
“What boy?”
“You know very well,” her mother said. “The one who came over that night. The one you went out with, without your clothes.”
“Without my clothes?”
“Yes, that boy.”
“He’s not a boy.”
“Don’t be smart.”
“He’s not around anymore.”
“I didn’t catch his name.”
“It doesn’t matter, he’s gone.”
“I see.”
Neda just shrugged and kept eating.
“I thought he was charming,” her mother said.
“Your radar is off.”
Neda ate in silence awhile.
Her mother sat down opposite her.
“What’s going on at work?”
“I’m not sure I want to keep working there. I want to study some more.”
Her mother processed the words.
Neda said. “I’m tired of the job.”
“Tired.”
Neda fell silent.
Her father walked in.
“She wants to leave her job,” her mother yelled.
“Love of my life,” her father grumbled, “let me get both feet inside the house.”
Neda got up from the table. “I didn’t say that.”
“Are you walking away?”
“Yes.”
“She wants to quit.”
* * *
—
She drove by Sunny’s mansion that night. Turned and parked some distance down the road and watched the entrance. She’d done it before. She parked and sat with a cigarette, smoking, watching the comings and goings of servants, service providers, men and women, the comings and goings of blacked-out cars. She made a rule for herself. When three cigarettes had burned down, she would drive away.
* * *
—
She was sent out by Dean to visit the resettlement colonies, to get some quotes and a flavor of the scene and to try to find the parents of the dead kids. She drove at sunrise, fifty kilometers out, where Delhi became desolate, dusty, lined with derelict industrial complexes and dairies with emaciated cattle. A series of stinking canals bifurcated the land. On the patch of land that had been designated for the slum dwellers’ resettlement, the recently evicted looked at one another in confusion. What were they supposed to do here? She began recording.
“They tell us this land will be worth something in fifteen years. That there will be everything we need. We had everything we needed there. We built it ourselves. Who can wait fifteen years?”
“What use is land if there’s no work nearby?”
“It’ll take four hours to commute to my job in the city. It used to take twenty minutes in all. How can we live like this?”
One of the men told her he was selling his deed to a property broker.
“We need money, we can’t live here and starve, you can’t eat a plot of land.” Many others were doing the same. They told her several brokers were visiting the land daily, buying up their deeds for ready cash, enough money for them to start again somewhere else, or return to Delhi and take up in another slum. They pointed across the settlement plot a couple of hundred meters, where a broker stood with his men. She thanked them, walked over to this group. A fat, bald man in a white shirt and black pants stood in the middle of a group of toughs. She waved as she approached them. Could she ask them a few questions? The bald man turned away and began walking slowly. Not with fear but with contempt. She pursued him. She wanted to ask him some questions. Who did he work for? An arm stuck out to bar her from getting any closer. It belonged to a young man with a lazy eye. His face was froggish, fleshy, his hair thick with curls. He reminded her of a venereal boy in a Caravaggio painting. She recoiled.
“Don’t touch me.”
The broker was walking away, and the Caravaggio goon was facing her down.
She tried to step around him and he stepped with her.
Several poor men among the evicted came to her aid. They asked her to go back with them to her car. The goon’s face was set in a snarl. She retreated. She asked her saviors about the parents of the children who had died. She needed to distract herself. Someone knew them. They were migrant laborers, they’d only been in the city three years. Did they come here? No, they weren’t eligible for resettlement. What about the compensation money, the money announced in the paper? No, no one knew anything about that. She took some names anyway. She took the number of a man among them who had a mobile phone. She promised to return. “Why bother,” the man said, “anyone with half a brain will be gone.”