The distance he has kept means he doesn’t see the accident. He only sees the two cars smashed and at rest on different sides of a wide, deserted junction in an industrial area. He only sees two men surrounding Neda’s car, banging on the bonnet and the windows, shouting inside, and another man pulling a cricket bat from the other car. He doesn’t stop to think it through. He accelerates until he’s almost on them, his headlights blinding the two men. Then he runs out and he attacks. Attacks with all the violence that’s been coiled inside him. It’s over in a few seconds. He doesn’t even remember what he’s done. He just knows there are men on the ground broken and bleeding and his gun is drawn and he’s looking back into the car where Neda clutches the wheel, staring at him with her eyes wide.
Ajay calls Sunny and Sunny directs him to deliver Neda to Hotel D. She is angry, suffering from shock. When Sunny opens the door, she hits him. He drags her inside and sends Ajay away. She spends several hours in there, while Ajay returns to the crash site to take Neda’s car for repairs. After he has dropped the car at a mechanic, he returns to Hotel D and waits. When he’s finally called to take her back home, she is drunk and subdued and terribly sad, but her anger is gone. He keeps watching her in the rearview mirror.
After this incident, Ajay begins to have painful, unsettling dreams. Dreams of violence. Sometimes he dreams of broken limbs. Sometimes of burning bodies. Sometimes he dreams of Neda.
12.
Months go by without Neda. Sunny doesn’t mention her name. Doesn’t call her. Doesn’t see other women. He begins spending time with a new friend, a man named Gautam Rathore, a cruel and frightening man who sneers at Ajay with a sick smile. Sunny is always dining with him, drinking with him. Sunny rarely sees anyone else. He’s sinking into a morose state, a depression.
He asks Ajay, “What’s the most important thing in life?”
“Work, sir,” Ajay says, without looking up.
“Family,” Sunny corrects him, without conviction.
Sunny is drinking more these days. Drinking alone.
Drinking with Gautam Rathore.
Doing coke with Gautam in the penthouse.
Ajay seeing nothing.
And soon Ajay is sent out to meet someone in a lay-by at night, to sit and wait an hour for this man. A young and friendly Nigerian man. He buys coke from him for Gautam Rathore. Sunny makes a point of this, makes sure Ajay knows it.
“It’s not for me.”
* * *
—
Without warning, in November, Ajay and Sunny fly out to Gorakhpur the next week. Sunny in first class, Ajay in economy. Ajay, who used to gaze at the sky in awe of planes, now sleeps before takeoff. When they land, the hostess touches him on the shoulder, he comes to with a frown, he can smell the tang of sweat in the stale air as the passengers stand up and grab their luggage while the plane taxis on the runway. The sky is dull and full of haze. Winter is sweeping down from the mountains to the north.
It is only now that Sunny tells Ajay they are here to meet his uncle, Vikram “Vicky” Wadia, a man about whom Ajay has heard a great deal, but only in whispers. “Vicky-ji is causing problems again.” “Vicky-ji is handling things in UP.” “Vicky-ji and Bunty-ji are having tension these days.”
Ajay retrieves Sunny’s bags from the carousel. They are greeted in the arrivals hall by a pack of goondas and an armed police escort. Ajay can see the apprehension in his master. He tries not to reflect it. He stands tall, drawing strength from his gun concealed in its holster. But Vicky’s men are the real deal: rough-hewn, menacing, weighed down with gold. They smirk at Ajay, with his safari suit, his slick hair. They cut him off from Sunny, lead him to a separate car. What would Eli say? All his training leaves him. He mutely obeys.
They drive for three hours through this land of sugarcane and dusty, ramshackle towns, Ajay staring out the window with an unerring sense of déjà vu, a memory he cannot or dare not place.
Finally, in the middle of nowhere, they turn left off the road, through a set of iron gates below a crumbling concrete arch in the middle of precisely nowhere, drive along a wide track of dirt, past parked trucks and workers’ tents, the sugarcane tall on either side, until they come upon a rusty, muscular island of industry, a sugar mill, in whose shadow they park.
The guards stream out of the cars, wordless, their weapons clicking and clanking. Throats are hawked, paan is spit red into the dirt where it thickens and dies. Ajay is held loosely by the bicep, as if he might bolt. He feels unnaturally oppressed, sickened. The sun dips behind the clouds, making a halo. One of Vicky’s men casually urinates to the side.