“I don’t know. Everyone has their own struggle.”
“But not like us.” He put his cigarette out. “It’s a struggle to get to the top. To get there you have to learn to be ruthless. But once you’re there, then you can start to do good. My father is clean.”
“And what about Vicky?”
There was a thrill in the dropping of the name.
His face was unreadable.
“I haven’t seen him in years.”
“He’s part of your family,” she said.
“But he has nothing to do with our future.” He leaned forward and clicked the Dictaphone off. “We freed ourselves from him a long time ago.”
“What do you want me to do with this?” she asked.
She waited for him to remove the tape, to put it in his pocket or set fire to it in the ashtray, but he just slid it over to her.
“That’s up to you.”
He stood from the chair, smoothed down his shirt and pants.
“If you’ll excuse me, I’m late for a meeting. It was nice talking to you, Ms. Kapur. Ajay will see you out.”
* * *
—
At home in her room, lying on the bed with her earphones on, she listened to the tape. She rewound it to Khan Market. First the voxpops, street noise in the background, then a click and the loud silence of his apartment. She closed her eyes and returned to the sofa, listened to Vijay, 23, Call Center Worker, listened to that voice and could not match it to the face, to the clothes, to the apartment. Then she mentally stripped him of the props, as it were, put him in cheap shirt and pants, placed him on the roadside, sitting on a motorcycle by a chai stall, and she was almost there, she could almost see him. But no, it fell away. Wasn’t he faking it, after all? Wasn’t his voice a caricature of all those men whose daily struggles he had as little insight into as she? He had merely been playing the role of one of his potential customers, putting words he wanted to hear into his doppelg?nger’s mouth. She paused the tape. She wondered how far he’d really come. And how fast. All that talk of Italy and Japan. How much was real? Stripped to essentials, relieved of his props, who was he?
She listened on as he talked about the river, opera houses and business districts and promenades. In the apartment all she’d heard was his pitch, but now she heard his hope, his enthusiasm, his energy. In hindsight, free of the temptation to intervene, to mock, to correct or challenge or adjust, free to listen and empathize, she found it all fascinating. He really believed it, she thought. This was the flip side of the misery, destruction, poverty, the world Dean waded through. And didn’t she want Delhi to be like this? Wouldn’t it be so much easier than the struggle? Dean’s cold voice rose to meet her conscience. “Struggle?” it said. “You’re not even in the struggle.” She heard her own voice saying, “And then I asked a colleague about you.” She winced. The words reached her ears. “Sunny Wadia? That joker?” She clicked off the tape a moment, braced herself, and pressed PLAY. “Do you know who his father is?”
She studied his responses, his speech about his father’s struggles, and realized he’d deflected things, hadn’t really answered anything. She’d let him, by being chicken. There’d been an opening for her, when he’d asked what Dean had said. “One of Ram Singh’s cronies,” came her voice. But if she’d been smart, she wouldn’t have mentioned Ram Singh at all—the name was both too direct and too vague; instead she should have pushed him. A criminal. A gangster. Watched his response. She cursed herself for being too impulsive, not critical and objective enough. Still, she’d managed to get that question in about his uncle. She listened to herself.
“And what about Vicky?”
She’d said the name so casually, with such familiarity, as if they were talking about a family friend. It felt transgressive. She rewound the tape and listened to herself, tried to parse the second’s silence after the question. But he’d given nothing away.
He had, however, thrown her out.
She tried to figure out what the hell had gone on in there. Flirting, definitely; they had chemistry. Had he bitten off more than he could chew? Despite his professing to liking her back talk. Certainly he couldn’t have expected her to bring up his father, his uncle. Maybe he didn’t think of himself as “known” in that way. Maybe he was too busy trying to be known himself, for his own deeds. So many questions. She was left with the image of an egoistic young man, swaddled in wealth and luxury, craving importance but cursed by a fatal insecurity. Just the kind of man she fell for.