“So, when am I going to meet this man?”
“Where do you think we’re heading now?”
“Seriously?” She began to check herself in the mirror. “I look like shit.”
He said, “You know that’s not true.”
* * *
—
She grew up in her world of cultural elites, both parents from scholarly backgrounds, “impoverished,” “proud.” Highly educated families risen to subtle prominence in colonial days. Post-Independence, advantageously placed. Quote marks always needed to describe them. Words like “cash poor.” Now they lived in a “modest” five-bedroom home in Malcha Marg, leafy and gated and close to Parliament, an address that reeked of proximity to power.
They made their money from handloom exports in the 1980s during the License Raj. Their success was a by-product of intellect, refinement, work ethic, and a wholesale bypass of the labyrinth of permits to gain tax-free contracts through their well-connected friends.
Still, they had been genuinely radical in their politics—marching, manning the barricades, organizing fundraisers. Justice was their concern. They viewed money—never wealth—as a mild shame they were eager to off-load.
True wealth was knowledge. When Neda had school friends over as a girl, the daughters and sons of new money, her mother made it a point to ask the question: “So, what are you reading?”
True wealth was the accretion of experience. As evidenced by the grace of their home, with the fig trees and the palms and the parakeets in the park, the faded Persian carpets lining the marble, the signed artworks that were gifts from friends who just happened to be famous now. Shelves of books lined almost every wall, their tattered innards releasing noble yellow perfumes. That home, a store of memory. A store of knowledge.
A cage to her.
“We want you to be the best you can be,” her mother told her. “We want you to be happy.” She should have been grateful for the qualifying clause—it was rare enough. But happiness had its interpretations. Her mother would have approved of her bringing a poor (secular) Muslim boy from JNU. But a guy like Sunny Wadia at her dining table? No way.
* * *
—
Hari pulled into the parking lot of a deserted shopping arcade.
“Where are we?”
“Moti Bagh.”
She recognized it suddenly, she’d driven past a hundred times. One of those markets between colonies. In the daytime, shops selling plastic goods and household junk. In the night, everything shuttered and nothing stirred. Hari’s stereo was replaced by a soundtrack of barking dogs, distant horns of trucks on the airport road, planes putting down their landing gear.
He led her over the gravel toward the arcade, a low, one-story brutalist concrete square of shops with an empty field of concrete in the middle. Weeds grew out of the cracks. A set of stairs led to the lower basement level, the underground run of shops. A solitary light bulb hung over the descent.
Hari lit a cigarette. Smoke puffed above the thick bush of his hair. She was still very stoned. His body loped ahead like a ranger in a forest. The comfort that had come from being inside his car leaked out into the sky. She was nervous. There were voices ahead. Hari skipped down the concrete stairs and turned a corner, disappeared from view. This was his world, and she was a stranger in it. She followed, saw desolate store after store, each with a number painted above its close-shuttered entrance, then Hari with his arms wide, crying out a greeting. One shop front was unshuttered and music and light were spilling out. As she drew near, she looked into the uncanny recreation of a Soviet living room, like a bombed-out cross section of an apartment block. A long table with floral plastic cloth. Flowered wallpaper. East European TV playing high on the wall. The table was full of men and women engaged in the act of drinking. Many plastic trays, vodka bottles, and shot glasses. Great plates of stewed meat, potato salad, bowls of borscht. And there, standing at the head of the table, leaning forward, arms gripping the edge, his eyes blazing with all the possibilities of life, the mysterious, the immaculate Sunny Wadia.
“. . . and listen, listen . . . I was there in England, I saw it, this ‘Cool Britannia.’ Oasis. Tony Blair. God Save the Bloody Queen. But you scratch the surface, it’s crumbling, it’s dying, there’s no future on that miserable island. The same in America. You think India is poor? Go and travel around America. I couldn’t believe it. Meanwhile some backpacker in Paharganj wanders around crying about our poverty, shaking his head, taking pity on us, taking photos for the people back home. Take a look at your own backyard. Study your history, man. You people looted us, took everything, stole our treasures. Now you look at us and say, ‘You’re so spiritual, you have so much wisdom, you’re so wise, you’re so . . . simple.’ Yeah, we’re simple, fucker. We’re simply going to destroy you. They don’t want us to, they don’t want us to be strong, to have heart, wit, resilience, ingenuity, wealth, power, but we are, but we do. We took their shit for so long, now the tables are turning. It’s our time now!”