When the café closes, it’s assumed that, as usual, he’ll travel to Goa with the boys.
But the afternoon before the day they’re due to leave, just after he receives his salary and tips, he packs his sports bag and walks away. Just packs his money and clothes and his few possessions and walks down the mountainside to where the bus waits. He catches the six p.m. bus to Delhi, sits staring out the window willing the engine to start.
He thinks he won’t be able to sleep the whole way, but as soon as the bus starts moving, he’s out like a light. It has a disorienting effect. He wakes in the dark hours later, hurtling down the many folds of mountain hundreds of kilometers to the plains. I can come back, he thinks. I will just see what it’s like. But a part of him knows he’ll never return. And there’s something liberating about leaving, it’s true, about throwing so many years over his shoulder and marching forward to a majestic life.
* * *
—
When he reaches the city, deposited at the Interstate Bus Terminal, he approaches a group of loitering men who are touting for business, trying to sell rooms, to ask if they can show him where he’s going. He recites the address from memory, and they look at one another, one of them saying he’s heading that way and can take him right there. Ajay climbs in an auto with him, and three others suddenly join. They take him a short distance, then stop in a quiet alley to beat him and rob him of all his things.
He roams the streets for the next few hours in a state of shock, bleeding from the nose and several cuts to his face, grieving the loss of everything he owns. Without the Nepali boys to guide him, everything is alien and threatening, everyone a potential assailant. He walks without a compass, hoping to stumble on an answer, but he cannot solve the puzzle of the city and is afraid to ask.
He wanders into a wealthier part of town, with wide boulevards and tree-shrouded bungalows guarded by cops. He passes a pair and they hustle him on as if he were a vagrant.
After an hour he takes the chance to sit outside a chai shop beside a busy junction. A perky auto driver takes an interest in him, asking him what happened to his face. When he summons up the courage to tell him about the theft, and why he’s in the city in the first place, the driver buys him chai and bun-makhan and tells him he’ll take him where he needs to go. In this moment of hope, Ajay remembers the card. He searches his shirt—yes, it’s there! In his top pocket. He feels a burst of hope and pride and holds the card out, showing the address scrawled in slanting handwriting on the back. But the auto driver is only interested in the name on the front.
“You know who this is?” he says, whistling to himself.
“Yes,” Ajay replies. “He’s a good man.”
“And you’re gonna work there? Lucky kid. Who cares if anyone robbed you.” He hands the card back. “Let’s get going.” He puts his arm round Ajay. “Just don’t forget your friends.”
It’s turning to dusk when they pull into the narrow road full of shiny cars and piles of construction sand and blocks of inscrutable residential buildings hidden behind huge gates. Ajay is hungry and nervous, with bruises and cuts on his face, but his adrenaline soars when he sees these gates, the grandeur of the buildings they shield.
“This is it,” the auto driver says, pointing toward the gate directly in front, where two armed guards stand outside. The building is a solid, dark, impregnable block, five floors high, its smooth, muscular walls obscured by creepers and vines and mirrored glass holding secrets inside.
As he climbs out, the men eye him distastefully, their hands tightening round their rifles.
“What do you want?” one says. “If you’re begging food you can go to the temple.”
“He’s here for a job,” the auto driver shouts. “Someone needs to pay me too.”
“Get lost,” one of the guards says to the auto driver.
“What do you want?” the other says to Ajay.
“I want to see . . .” Ajay’s voice is so quiet they can barely hear.
“What? Speak up.”
“I’m here to see Tinu,” Ajay says in a clearer voice.
The guards laugh. “Tinu-ji? What do you want with Tinu? What does Tinu want with a dog like you?”
Ajay hesitates. Then he reaches into his top pocket. His fingers caress the card. He withdraws it and steps forward and holds it out nervously, as if it might disintegrate. “See,” he says, praying it will work. “Sunny Wadia sent for me.”
* * *