He stopped talking a second and thought about those words. When he started again his voice became quiet, she had to strain to catch the words. “I lived beside a sugar mill we owned. I stayed in a cottage on the grounds. Cooked for myself, washed my own clothes, grew this shitty little beard. I went running every morning. Every morning. I became lean and strong and fast. I led this . . . pure life. I went running through the fields every morning, past the workers, I could smell their food on the wood fires, I could see their girls. Watching me. Handsome. I had this desire . . . I hadn’t been with anyone before.”
He smiled. “I did all this. It went on and on. For months I was there, living with the mill workers like I was one of them, happy, humble. I wrote all this in my journal. My hopes and dreams, my desires. All that time I was waiting for Vicky, but he never came. He never came. No one even spoke his name. Then, one night, he came. He arrived with this entourage. Their jeeps came down the long road, pulled up outside the mill.”
He flicked his cigarette into the sand. “He stepped out. He was huge. All the workers were terrified. He rounded them up, intimidated them. I just stood at the back of the group, waiting. Waiting for him to look at me. He didn’t even acknowledge me. He went off with his men to inspect the workers’ camp, and I went back into my cottage. I still waited. It got late. It must have been eleven when he walked in. He was a mountain. His men were there too. They were . . . wild. They filled my room. He scared me. He took my seat. Handed me a bottle and told me to drink. He told his men stories about my childhood. My mother. Then he started reading my journal, started reading passages out, private things, things that hurt me. But there was nothing I could do. There was”—the memory was becoming very painful—“a knock at the door. Several of his men entered with three girls. They were young, fifteen maybe, I don’t know, but I recognized them from the laborers’ camp. They were as scared as I was. Well, two of them were. The third was . . . defiant. She looked defiant . . . she looked us all in the eye in turn. She looked at Vicky. He stood and walked toward her. He turned to me. He said I could stay if I wanted to or . . .”
“Sunny . . .” She put her hand on his arm.
“I ran.” He pushed his hand through his hair. “I just ran. I ran to the fields and I hid in them for hours. I didn’t recognize this man. I watched their jeeps leaving in the early hours and crept back. The cottage was a wreck, empty. It smelled of liquor and sweat and worse. I made a space on the floor, curled up, and went to sleep. When I woke up it was chaos outside. The workers were screaming, shouting, they wanted to tear the place apart.”
“Jesus.”
“The police were there. They took me to safety . . . They sent me back to my father.”
He fell silent, stared at the ocean.
“What happened?”
“Two of the girls were found hanging from a tree. The third was never found.”
She felt herself shivering, speechless.
“I was sent to London after that. My father said I’d ‘earned it.’ I was given a first-class ticket. Credit cards. I was sent to a man who gave me cash. I was told to do whatever I wanted. No one spoke about what happened. So I tried to forget it. I tried to change myself there. I partied. A lot. Did a lot of drugs. Acid. MDMA. I went to galleries, museums. I tried to construct a new self. The one with the sculptures and the paintings. The one with the big ideas. And I was good at it. I carried him back to Delhi with me and I pulled the trick off for a while. I thought I could be that man forever. But look at me. I can’t be that man. I can’t keep it up. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. It was all a lie . . . I love beauty. I want to create beautiful things. But that’s the last thing they understand. They want me to have a beautiful surface and be rotten to the core, like they are.”
* * *
—
The crows flew round the pines, the wind whipped along the tide, the sun dipped into the Arabian Sea. After a long silence he described the bioluminescence of the ocean, as if nothing else had been said. It was growing cold. Her skin was stippled with goose bumps. He remained in the sand with his arms wrapped around his knees as the sky grew dimmer by the second. She stood and slouched to the water and the water was warmer than the air. She waded in and soon enough she let the tide push and pull her body. When she climbed out again, he was still there, like a petrified nobleman in the ashes of a volcano. She pulled him by the hand and said, “Let’s build a fire.”
* * *