* * *
—
Often they’ll vacate abruptly. Cut the music or the movie midway and pile out the door. He might be in the middle of serving food. He might be fixing someone’s drink. But they go and Ajay is left alone, standing motionless in the silence, savoring the debris, savoring his life, before setting to work cleaning things so it will be spotless when Sunny returns. They could be back within the hour, or they won’t be back at all. He’ll go to bed with his phone and beeper next to his ear, waiting for Sunny to call. It’s not always like this. There are low, slow days when Sunny doesn’t get out of bed until the afternoon. Where it’s just the two of them, Ajay serving tea and Sunny melancholy or rude. Days when Ajay knows to stay out of his way. There are days of women too. Ones he recognizes from the raucous nights. Turning up to see Sunny alone.
10.
A year passes in this rhythm, wanting for nothing, no time to think. He attends one of the gyms in the neighboring basti, a crumbling and swaggering box of testosterone and camaraderie, with a tin roof and old jury-rigged machines, a hub for migrant domestic servants and local braves. As a Wadia man, he’s afforded extraordinary respect. No one forces him from the treadmill. No one teases his bench press and bar pull. No one asks questions. He takes his hour each day, building himself up with the weights. He goes running in the Deer Park in the morning, when he can, like the rich people do. In the mirror of the gym he repeats a name.
Ajay Wadia.
He is becoming aware of Sunny’s fame. He knows his master is known in the city, it makes him proud. For the first time in his life he looks at himself as an object to be improved, he spends money on his grooming, gets a manicure once a month, a pedicure every other, takes a head massage from Dilip in Green Park. He shops. He consumes. He visits the new malls. He takes with him a handwritten list of the things he wants to buy. Searching out the alien words he has written down from Sunny’s bathroom—Davidoff Cool Water, Proraso, Acqua di Parma, Santa Maria Novella, Botot, Marvis— sacred as an ancient text. He spends his free time and his salary in the malls working out the alternatives of these. Axe. Old Spice.
Those malls.
They’re easier now.
But he remembers the first time he tried to enter one, on his first day off, his first month of service. There he is, waking before dawn. He can’t sleep in. He has an idea to buy new clothes. But the bruises are still on his face; he looks like a nobody, worse than a nobody—in his old clothes from the mountains he looks like a poor migrant. Suddenly he is aware of his poverty. He turns up at the metal detector and he must reek of it, his poverty must betray him. The security guard, a man he now recognizes as someone who makes less money than he, bars his entry. It’s humiliating, watching well-to-do families and smart young men in nice clothes walking past, watching young modern girls in skirts, linked arm in arm, eating ice cream, watching the occasional foreigner too, dirty and travel-stained and half naked, being given the royal treatment, saluted sometimes even, to their delight and amusement, while this gatekeeper pushes Ajay Wadia away. He takes half lessons from it. And he can only peer inside at the marble corridors, air-conditioned, with all the shops glowing, feeling slighted, ashamed like a beggar.
How am I supposed to buy nice clothes if I can’t enter the place that sells them? The conundrum rattles around in his head. He devotes more attention to Sunny’s wardrobe, learns the phrases, the terms—Rubinacci, con rollino, Cifonelli, pocket square, cap-toe Oxfords. He riffles through the magazines in the living room when he’s alone, memorizes the fashions, the lines that differentiate weak from strong, he takes some pages he’s torn out of the old ones to a tailor in the neighborhood and sits with him trying to explain what it is he wants to wear. Over some days they fix on an idea. The elegant blue suit that comes out of it, along with two shirts, a tie, and a pair of shoes, costs almost two months’ wages, but it’s worth it. When he tries this suit on, he is a man transformed, he’s a someone in this city, someone beyond his job, beyond Sunny even, if he can dream of such a thing. He dresses up as this free man on his next day off and steps out, noting the whistles and murmurs of the guards, the giggles of the maids, then he hails an auto and goes to the mall.
And yes, he passes.
He passes for someone who has leisure time.
Despite his apprehensions, he’s ignored by the guardians of the mall, not so much as glanced at as he sails through the arches of the metal detector and into the promised land.
Now he can do whatever he likes.