* * *
—
They drank the champagne solemnly in cracked china cups, along with plates of grilled mackerel and mounds of red rice. There was more: rava-fried prawns, a huge spicy bowl of crab curry, the pieces of crab taken up in their hands, broken open, the meat sucked out noisily. She threw the fish heads to the dog, who ate them out of the sand. They drank more champagne, rinsed their hands with water and settled by the fire.
* * *
—
When she woke the fire was low and Sunny sat staring into the flames. She feared the night was already dissolving, the world no longer at bay. She pulled her blanket tighter.
“What time is it?”
“Past three.”
“I passed out.”
“It’s OK.”
“It’s cold.”
“There’s more wood to burn.” He reached out and built up the fire, then shifted back and lay down. “Come here.”
She crawled in the space between his body and the flames. He wrapped his arms around her, and she shivered and pressed herself into him. He slid his warm fingers under the blanket, under her clothes, rested their tips around her belly button, toyed with the cold flesh. She closed her eyes again and her breathing shallowed, and he slipped his hand inside her.
“It can’t stay like this,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “It can get better.”
She turned to him. “You promise?”
He lifted his fingers and touched them to his tongue.
“You taste like the sea.”
“An oyster,” she said.
He settled his hand on her hip.
He couldn’t promise her anything.
But she could feel his hardness.
“I love,” he said, “that you never asked if I loved you.”
“I love,” she replied, “that you never needed me to say it.”
* * *
—
It was five a.m. He’d come inside her, and holding her, he’d fallen asleep. Now the crows were calling from the pines.
“They’re coming back in.”
Sunny opened his eyes.
Santosh and his brothers were hauling their boats up the beach.
He still had her in his arms.
She rolled free and turned to him.
“The chains of existence,” she said, “have to be weak enough to break.” She kissed him. “But strong enough to carry you through in the first place.” She turned to face the stars. “By the way . . . Happy birthday.”
LONDON, 2006
FROM: [email protected]
DATE: 2/25/2006
SUBJECT:
Dean,
Do you know how many times I’ve composed this mail? This fucking mail to you a thousand times, in my head, in so many ways, when I’m walking, walking is the only time my thoughts flow, so long as I’m walking I can justify it all, but to compose I have to stop, and the page robs me. It’s even worse when I begin to write. Every pretty phrase that rolled off my tongue becomes a trap. I can’t tell the truth. I don’t know how to anymore. I used to be so good at telling the truth. I was so good at telling the truth that I discovered it was easy to tell a lie. Do you understand me? I told enough lies to you. I couldn’t tell one from the other in the end.
What I’m trying now is to tell you about Sunny Wadia.
I hate the name. I avoid it if I can. Those syllables. But I can’t avoid them today. Right now, the early morning of the 25th. Two years since that night where everything was destroyed. The ghosts come out tonight. I’m drinking vodka. Remembering. When I remember I’m a mess. But forgetting is even worse, forgetting is memory’s lining. I thought I could escape, I’ve been rubbing pages out, but it doesn’t work.
What I’m trying to tell you . . . I’m trying to tell you what you already know. India is so far away. So far away but I’m there every day.
You wanted to know what happened to me, you wanted to know why I disappeared, where I was. You’ve already guessed. What I’m trying to tell you, I was there, there at the end, in the crash. I was there on the road. I was there with Sunny. Gautam. Ajay. I was there with the girl. I held her when she died. I didn’t know her name. I read her name later in the news. One of your pieces, one of someone else’s I don’t know. You were always there to record the names, weren’t you. All their names. I saw the broken bodies. Dean, I don’t remember everything . . . I’m back in Delhi suddenly, a teenage girl in my room. The monkeys have come down from the ridge and they’re jumping in the trees in the park. My father used to carry a stick every morning on his walks. I want to go back there. Go back there more than anything, that time, that Delhi, and take another path. But I can’t. It’s impossible. To dream it is intolerable. I can’t bear it anymore. I know I don’t deserve your sympathy. I imagine your stoneface . . . Dean, let’s set this straight . . . you want to understand. First it was Sunny, Bunty, the Wadias, what you learned, what they did to you, and I was there on the side, then it was something new. You want to know everything, you want to know how I was involved. It still confuses you. You still can’t find a thing. Here it is now. The first thing I can give you: I shouldn’t have been in that job. You know my mother flexed her muscles and found that position for me. Good, old-fashioned nepotism. Or something about idle hands. My father had been sick so I couldn’t go abroad. You’ve heard this story before. And on paper at least I was some kind of match. I studied the liberal arts. My English was beyond reproach. I’m upper caste and fair. What’s not to love? So I started work and of course I didn’t have any ethics. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ethics in journalism. I knew injustice when I saw it, in a novel, on the news, but I never understood the process of its creation. I never considered complicity, or the obligation to guard against it in yourself. I was interested in a good story above all else. And yet you pursued me. Or you let me pursue you. I often think you missed your calling. You should have been working with the lepers in East Delhi, you should have been giving sermons at Tis Hazari Church. Did you see something in me worth saving? I don’t know how you lasted so long. See, your problem was decency and mine was being afflicted by the toxic compound of curiosity and passivity. Passivity is normal—most people suffer from it. They watch the woman being beaten in the street. They watch the accident from the car window. They’re frozen, expecting someone else to intervene. I’m the same. Only I’ll go and stand right next to the beating and take notes. Remember this. Remember this. Write it down. Remember the light. Yeah, I just want to see where the story goes, it’s my privilege to observe the futility of life. But life isn’t futile if you live it right. I want to live it right, I want to but I can’t! Let me just confess something else: I was interested in Sunny from the start. He was the smoke that told me there was fire. I was bored of Delhi, of the job. Of you. I was restless. I wanted more. I was twenty-one and he was promising to make Delhi the center of the world and I believed him. Why not? I remember you called him a joker that first time, you dismissed him as another rich kid, and that stung, it stung like you’d insulted me. You were coming from the States. You hadn’t lived through the nineties in Delhi. You hadn’t seen how dusty and dull and sleepy it was. You couldn’t understand how someone like Sunny made me feel. I was coming out of the years of dealing with my father’s cancer too, of the disappointment of not being able to escape, when everyone around me had left and gone. Then he came along with his ideas, his words, his wealth and glamour, and it just seemed like the most incredible trick in the world. Do you think any of us asked where his wealth came from? Seriously? We grew up watching Beverly Hills 90210. We treated our servants with kindness, but they were still our servants. That was the way it was. We wanted above all else to live like the West. We never thought about the consequences of that, the misery our desires were built on in the Indian context. What did you expect me to do? Put on a hair shirt? Renounce it all and go live in a slum? No. He looks at you and says, “let’s go.” What would you do? So I started with him. And I saw no conflict of interest. I had nothing to declare. Even when you mocked him, wondered about his background. I just thought, there goes Dean again, American Dean. Like when foreigners came and discovered poverty and wept, started giving out money in the street, gave away their shoes. They could afford it. But I’m Indian. I could live with our work by day and be in Sunny’s world by night and it was fine, it was fine until it wasn’t fine. I have had so many lives, and I’ve lived them all apart from the other, it’s what you do, a woman, a woman in Delhi of means. It was fine until it wasn’t. So yeah, I started seeing Sunny, and there was this small window of joy. Do you know what it feels like to have power? Real power. To sit all of a sudden inside the wheels of power and speed through the city with your eyes wide, watching everything, making eye contact with everything—it was intoxicating. To roar through the city at speed and have no fear, and to see, to be able to see, the way a man sees, to stare, be able to do it without blinking, my God. I don’t know, maybe as a man it’s something you can’t understand. Your fear arises from the things you do, not the things that are denied to you. But Sunny gave the city to me. And here’s the thing you didn’t understand about him, here it is. He wasn’t his father. Sunny wanted to leave his father behind. He hated his father. He wanted out. He wanted to go his own way. I wanted to help him. Why would I have come to you with any of this? Why would I have abandoned him? I wasn’t living like a journalist. I was living like someone in love.