“You shoot yourself.”
“What if you try to see it?”
“Eli. I’m not fucking around.”
“OK, OK.” Eli’s spooked. “But what if your father tries to see it?”
“Then I shoot you.”
“OK, boss.”
The Bolero creeps into the narrow underpass.
Eli turns the headlights on.
Pitch darkness and deep holes where the concrete has worn away.
Sunny begins to speak in the dark.
“Dinesh Singh wants to bring his father down. And if my father goes down with him . . .”
When they emerge into the light, rising onto freshly paved tarmac, Sunny is staring at Eli with plagued eyes.
Eli is staring back at him.
It’s 5:49 p.m.
Friday, June 8.
Eli doesn’t see the masked man stepping out from behind the parked truck, wielding an antique shotgun.
Sunny does.
But by the time he cries out, it’s too late.
THE GODOWN
There’s this dream he keeps having.
Culled from life.
Back home in Meerut, aged five,
sleeping next to his mother,
the whir of the ceiling fan,
the cotton of her nightdress bunched in his fist.
It’s the dream he keeps having.
Only it’s real.
* * *
—
He’s five and awake, and his mother is no longer there.
Empty hand clenches empty fist.
The sheet still carrying her outline and her scent.
He calls out to her, but his voice is swallowed by the ceiling blades.
He must jump to reach the floor.
* * *
—
Tinu is sleeping in the kitchen.
In the study, a light is on. His father’s frame in the frosted glass.
He moves away, calls through rooms.
In the violence of the blades, his voice goes unheard.
But when he enters the sitting room,
the fan does not spin in there.
* * *
—
She hangs from it by her own dupatta,
tongue out,
eyes bulging,
void.
He comes up like he’s coming up for air.
From the turbulence of the ocean floor.
Rag-dolled.
Rasping.
Howling.
And the dream he was having is receding,
sucking up boulders, hurling them toward the shore.
Leaving only enough oxygen
for the scream.
“Namaste ji,” the Incubus says.
“You pissed yourself.”
And Sunny thrashes like a caged animal in this dank and humid room, with the monstrous presence in front of him and the ropes that bind him to the chair.
The Incubus watches his rage.
An ink blot in black jeans and blue-checked shirt.
“For a while I thought you were dead,” it says. “Then you started to scream. And you pissed yourself.”
* * *
—
Gnashing, gasping. The whites of his eyes. Teeth bared.
Sunny comes out of this twilight.
Breathing, panting, spent.
The Incubus holds his head and pours water over his cracked lips.
He chokes, then begins to groan.
Sunset leaking through the walls.
The stench of manure, buffalo, blood.
The pain across his nerves, inside his bones.
Taking him outside himself.
“I asked,” the Incubus says, “what’s he dreaming of that could make him so scared? I’ve had dreams like that myself.”
Sunny tries to gather the fractured parts.
“Where am I?”
His body won’t respond.
“You’re here.”
“Where’s here?”
“You don’t know?”
He doesn’t know.
“What’s happening?”
“You’re lucky to be alive,” the Incubus says. “You weren’t supposed to be in the front.”
Front of what? He doesn’t remember. He tries to stand.
“If you died, Sunny Wadia, so would I.”
Sunny’s eyes flicker at his name. “I don’t know you,” he says.
“But I know you,” the Incubus replies. He places a hand on Sunny’s cheeks. “I know this face.”
He takes a pill from his pocket and slips it into Sunny’s mouth.
“Take your medicine.”
He pours more water in, covers Sunny’s mouth, and pinches his nose with his spidery hand.
“Papa’s going to kill you,” Sunny says.
The Incubus runs his hand through Sunny’s hair. Drenched in sweat and blood. Presses his thumb down on the deep gash at his hairline.
“He can try.”
He’s in a hotel suite.
No place or time.
It could be Europe.