She lights her cigarette with it.
“Charming.”
* * *
—
Sometimes she thinks they’ve hidden a camera in the apartment. She searched for it but found nothing. Now she treats it with the same shrugging formulation she once applied to gods and masturbation. Even if they can see it, what difference does it make?
But when it comes to her laptop, she keeps masking tape over her webcam. Always turns on the VPN. Stares at the screen. Lights another cigarette. Another careful line. Opens her Gmail, clicks COMPOSE.
Fine, Dean. You win.
Then she stops.
She can’t help herself.
She opens a new browser tab.
Closes her eyes.
Takes a deep breath.
Opens them.
And Googles his name.
NEW DELHI, 2003
NEDA
1.
Sunny Wadia.
She’d been hearing the name for some time. Sunny this, Sunny that. Tall tales circulating through the veins and arteries of the city, until it felt like he was the city himself.
He was an art dealer, a party planner, a restaurateur, a provocateur. He was the son of a multimillionaire from the States. Or a dot-com millionaire himself. No one seemed to know for sure. But he was the vanguard, the architect, the patron saint, on the fringes of anything new or exciting or strange. And she was a junior reporter on the City Desk of the Delhi Post—even as she shirked her official duties, she took it upon herself to track him down.
But that wasn’t why she was here, sitting in a circle with her old school friend Hari at a crumbling South-Extension rooftop terrace on a shimmering April night.
She’d called Hari up after a year of not speaking—a real “long-time-no-see” kind of deal. She’d seen a piece about him in another paper’s culture magazine, hadn’t even recognized him at first: in the badly printed photo in the top right there was this grinning facsimile of a guy she once knew by heart. Only now he was wearing an acid-wash T-shirt, elbows askew, a set of Technics decks beneath his blurry hands. And a DJ name to hide behind.
WhoDini.
She peered a little closer into the ink. She was sitting in her old Maruti, pulling hard on a cigarette. “You’re fucking kidding.”
Shy, nerdish Hari was transformed the way everyone in the city seemed to be transforming these days. Everyone but her. She texted him on his old number thinking that would be gone too, but he replied right away, the same guy he ever was, excited and courteous, more than willing to meet, he’d even buy her dinner tonight (which was new), but only after they’d gone to pick up smoke. “It’ll only take five minutes,” he promised her as she climbed into the passenger seat of his Esteem outside her work. “This dude owes me big-time.”
That was almost two hours ago.
Now here they were on the roof. She, Hari, a bunch of random stoner dudes.
As the bone-dry heat of the First Delhi Summer receded to a deep astral blue.
She was so blasted now, she closed her eyes and their voices all merged into one.
And there he was again.
Sunny.
The name.
“Yo, did you hear about Sunny’s party? He flew in five thousand dollars’ worth of caviar from Iran.”
“No, man. It was Wagyu beef from Japan. On a private jet. Twenty thousand dollars’ worth. It’s insane.”
“Were you there?”
“How much do you get for twenty thousand dollars? Is that one whole cow?”
“Were you there?”
“They airlifted a cow?”
“Ha-ha, shut up, man.”
“Strapped beneath the jet, roasted on the way.”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha.”
“Picture it, a cow in a jetpack.”
“Man, were you there?”
“Don’t say that cow shit too loud, bro. Mr. Gupta will hear.”
She contemplated their faces.
Who were these guys?
“I heard they flew up to Leh once on a private chopper, landed at a monastery, and put on a rave. The monks were still inside. They had all these oxygen masks and everything.”
“Bullshit. You don’t need oxygen masks.”
“It was probably nitrous oxide!”
“You know he was brought up in Dubai.”
“He was not.”
“His mother’s a famous actress.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Guess which one?”
“Your mom.”
“No, shut up. Look at his eyes, you know her.”
“I know your mom.”
“Ooooh.”
“He keeps a tiger in his bathroom.”
“You don’t even know what he looks like.”