“You know he’s from this royal family in Madhya Pradesh. They have a lot of land. Like, half the state. There’s talk of iron ore deposits in some of their land near the Chhattisgarh border. My father wants a piece of it. Gautam’s the heir. The only son. My father thought I could influence him. Bring him in line with our way of thinking. That was my punishment. My test. Gautam had checked out completely from that life. He was never going back home. I was supposed to get him on the side. Get him to clean up. I was supposed to lure him with . . . I don’t know, power? So he could go back into his family as a proxy for my father. He wants a piece of that mining. He wants to expand out of UP, but Gautam doesn’t want to go home. He doesn’t want to do any of this. So we’ve been talking.”
“You and Gautam?”
“Yeah. We’ve been saying ‘fuck you’ to our fathers.”
She felt nauseated.
“So?”
“We’ll leave together. We’ll go into business together.”
“With what?”
“Our brains. Our savings. Our contacts.”
“And?”
“He used to run a hotel. We’ll build a new one, up in the mountains. Something special. Remember the sketch I showed you once, my retirement plan? Cantilevered off the hillside, a stream running through the heart of it, through a courtyard, great bukharis heating every room in the winter, a grand view of the Himalayas, a solarium on an upper deck with a pool, heated by solar panels, tunnels through the mountainside connecting underground saunas and steam rooms, trees growing up inside the structure itself.”
She could feel him waiting for her to say something.
“That sounds like a dream.”
“It’s going to come true. And we’ll be free.”
* * *
—
There was a long silence before he spoke again.
“I took this girl once,” he said, “you know her, Kriti.”
Neda smiled gently. “She’s a type.”
“I took her with me up to Himachal once, on a road trip. It was a disaster. She was too precious.”
“She thought she had to behave that way.”
“She could see she was pissing me off.”
“She was trying to please you.”
He shrugged. “We drove up past Shimla, there was this village I wanted to get to. Sarahan. Not the big Sarahan, this other one, small, high up, hard to get to. There’s a waterfall and an old wooden temple. We were driving there in the afternoon, there was a herd of goats on the road below Hatu Peak. I called out to the shepherd to buy a goat, take it up to the village and offer it for a feast. It was the right thing to do.”
“Was it?”
“Sure. You know what happens when you turn up with nothing?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She laughed. “But when you turn up with a goat, everything changes?”
“Exactly.”
“So, what happened?”
“I bought one. Threw it in the back seat. It shit everywhere and she bitched about it nonstop, then she gave me the silent treatment. I almost stopped and threw it off the side of the mountain just to make a point. We reached the village miserable. I stayed in a shed attached to one of the houses, slept on straw, drank whisky, gave the goat to slaughter.” He laughed to himself. “I told everyone it was called Kriti. Kriti ended up sleeping in the car. She got a ride down to Kullu the next morning. Didn’t call for two months.”
“Is there a point,” she said, bemused, “to this story?”
“The point is, I wish you’d been there.”
She smiled and nodded to herself. “I would have loved it.”
“I know.” Then he said, “Come live with me. Don’t go abroad.”
* * *
—
Sushma brought food by lamplight. She was a wisp of a woman in a purple sari, strong and weathered from a life of work. She placed the tray on the table a little way off from the fire, retreated and returned with a metal bucket under her arm, which she placed in the sand. Neda was stoned and motionless and she was thinking about a life in the mountains, a life both like and unlike hers. It was always intruded on by Gautam Rathore. By the foot in Sunny’s chest. By the rubble of slums and empires. By her own heart. The flames of the fire were low. Sushma slipped away without a word. When Neda got up to bring the food she saw there was a bottle of champagne in the bucket, packed in ice. Sunny sat up and placed another log on the fire. “What’s this?” she said, carrying the bottle. He smiled. “I had Santosh pick it up from the Marriott down the road.”