He doesn’t know what’s happening, but he knows Neda can’t be here. So he does his duty.
When the coast is clear, when the men are inside talking, he smuggles her out and home.
* * *
—
After this night, Neda disappears from Sunny’s life. And Sunny’s life takes a drastic turn. In the coming days there’s an awareness across the household that something terrible has happened, some dreadful confrontation has taken place between Sunny and his father—news spills out from his father’s floor, it is heard by dozens of domestics and passed around in whispers. Tinu calls Ajay soon enough, orders him to his office. Once there he demands Ajay’s SIM cards, his phones, his batteries, everything that Sunny has given him, he must hand them over. He is given a new phone, a new number. When he returns to the apartment Sunny is sitting in the living room in silence, staring at the wall, his back to the door, his fists clenched. As if he’d been waiting for some blow. There’s a knock on the door. “Get it,” he says.
Bunty Wadia enters the apartment, this sacred space, followed by seven men Ajay has never seen before, rough men stinking of tobacco and liquor, men from the street. They proceed to tear the apartment to pieces, smashing things with bats and rods, Sunny motionless while it happens, resigned, and Ajay paralyzed with shock. When the goons finish the job there’s nothing left. Amid the rubble, the apartment is shockingly bare.
* * *
—
The next morning Sunny appears early, ashen, stern, dressed in a dark and somber suit. Ajay drives him out to one of the Wadia offices in Greater Noida—the headquarters of their real estate operation—and Sunny remains there all day. All day and every day thereafter.
* * *
—
The parties have ended. Neda has vanished. Sunny goes to the office every day and comes home in the evenings and glowers in his apartment alone. All of the dazzling, sparkling nightlife is gone. Sunny grows taciturn and secretive.
Weeks pass and this becomes the new routine. Sunny’s mood cools and hardens. He shows no emotion, but he begins to entrust Ajay with new tasks, and Ajay must trust no one else. He must take the car out, make sure he’s not being followed, then he must scope out various cheap, grubby, two-star hotels in the city, the names of which Ajay is given on sheets of paper. He must check their security, their privacy, their anonymity, and report back. Each hotel is given a code name, A, B, C, D, E, F. When they talk of them, they are not to use their real names.
Sunny begins to spend odd hours in these different cheap hotels, Ajay dropping him off, waiting several streets away in the car for the call to pick him up. At first he assumes Sunny must be meeting Neda, then he believes it’s something else. There is talk among the staff of a crisis in the family, some kind of awful feud. Sunny has done something terrible. Some of the domestics in the house lean on Ajay for information about Sunny’s activities. But Ajay plays dumb, says he knows nothing. Tinu calls him in when Sunny is busy and tells him to relay information about Sunny’s state of mind, about what he’s been doing, about the girl Sunny has been meeting. He reminds Ajay that Sunny is not his master. Bunty Wadia is the one he serves. Reluctantly, Ajay gives Neda’s name. He tells them where she lives and where she works. But he does not say anything about the hotels Sunny has found.
* * *
—
Ajay feels like he’s become trapped in a grotesque civil war, and somehow Neda is the cause. He imagines all kinds of vague and terrible things about her. That she has come expressly to ruin Sunny’s life, to disrupt the gentle, luxurious harmony that had been put in place. Perhaps she was a spy all along.
Every day is loaded with a tension he can barely take, barely decipher. As if they were on a war footing. In private Sunny remains angry and withdrawn. In public, with his father, with Tinu, in the office, he maintains an aura of detached professionalism, robotic indifference.
One Sunday Sunny receives a phone call that causes him alarm. He pulls Ajay aside and tells him to drive out to the Greater Noida office immediately. Be discreet. Make it seem like you’re going somewhere else. But go right now and keep watch on the office from the road. Watch out for Neda.
“Keep her safe,” Sunny says. “I mean it. Keep her safe. Don’t let anything happen to her.”
Something does happen. He waits on the service road a short way from the office building. It’s just off the main expressway, in a desolate part of the satellite city outside Delhi, all farmland and construction. He sits hours, watching for her, then he spots her car, driving back toward Delhi in the dark. He keeps his distance, driving at a steady pace a few hundred meters behind. Neda’s car crosses into Delhi at the Kalindi Kunj Bridge, heading into Okhla.