—
It had been more than ten years since I had seen Tilo and shared that joint with her on her terrace. She was thinner than I remembered. Her collarbones winged out from the base of her neck. Her gossamer sari was the color of sunset. Her head was covered, but through the sheer fabric I could see the smooth shape of her skull. She was bald, or almost. Her hair just a velvet stubble. My first thought was that she had been unwell, and was recovering from chemotherapy or some other dreadful affliction that caused hair loss. But her dense, almost-bushy eyebrows and thick eyelashes put that particular theory to rest. She certainly didn’t look ill or unwell. She was barefaced and wore no make-up, no kajal, no bindi, no henna on her hands and feet. She looked like an understudy for the bride, temporarily standing in while the real one got dressed. Desolate I think is the word I’d use to describe her. She gave the impression of being utterly, unreachably alone, even at her own wedding. The insouciance was gone.
When I walked up to her, she looked straight at me, but I felt as though someone else was looking out through her eyes. I was expecting anger, but what I encountered was emptiness. It could have been my imagination, but as she held my gaze a tremor went through her. For the nine-thousandth time I noticed what a beautiful mouth she had. I was transfixed by the way it moved. I could almost see the effort it took for it to form words and a voice to attach to them:
“It’s just a haircut.”
The haircut—the shave—must have been ACP Pinky Sodhi’s idea. A policewoman’s therapy for what she saw as treason—sleeping with the enemy, her brother’s killers. Pinky Sodhi liked to keep things simple.
I had never seen Naga look so disconcerted, so anxious. He held Tilo’s hand right through the evening. Musa’s ghost was wedged between them. I could almost see him—short, compact, with that chipped-tooth smile and that quiet air of his. It was as though the three of them were getting married.
That’s probably how it turned out in the end.
—
Naga’s mother was at the center of a clot of elegant ladies whose perfume I could smell from across the lawn. Auntie Meera was from a royal family, one of the minor principalities in Madhya Pradesh. She was a teenage widow, whose royal husband had developed an aggressive lung tumor and died three months after she married him. Unsure of what to do with her, her parents sent her to a finishing school in England, where she met Naga’s father at a party in London. There could not have been a better position for a queen without a queendom than being the wife of a suave Foreign Service officer. She modeled herself into a perfect hostess—a modern Indian Maharani with a plummy British accent, acquired from a childhood governess and perfected at finishing school. She wore chiffon saris and pearls and always kept her head covered with her pallu, as Rajput royalty should. She was trying to put a brave face on the trauma that her new daughter-in-law’s shocking complexion had visited upon her. She herself was the color of alabaster. Her husband, though Tamilian, was Brahmin and only a shade darker than her. As I walked past I heard her little granddaughter, her daughter’s daughter, ask:
“Nani, is she a nigger?”
“Of course not, darling, don’t be silly. And, darling, we don’t use words like nigger any more. It’s a bad word. We say negro.”
“Negro.”
“Good girl.”
Auntie Meera, mortified, turned to her friends with a brave smile and said of the new member of her family, “But she has a beautiful neck, don’t you think?” The friends all agreed enthusiastically.
“But, Nani, she looks like a servants.”
The little girl was admonished and sent off on a pretend errand.
—
The other guests, Naga’s old college friends—acolytes more than friends—none of whom had ever met Tilo, were bunched together on the lawn, already gossiping, trained by now in Naga’s distinctive brand of cruel humor. One of them raised a toast.
“To Garibaldi.” (That was Abhishek, who worked for his father’s company, which sourced and sold sewage pipes.)
They laughed loudly, like men trying to be boys.
“Tried talking to her? She doesn’t talk.”
“Tried smiling? She doesn’t smile.”
“Where the hell did he find her?”
—
I’d had my last drink and was moving towards the gate when Naga’s father, Ambassador Shivashankar Hariharan, called out to me. “Baba!”
He belonged to another era. He pronounced Baba the way an Englishman would—barber. (His own name he pronounced Shiver.) He never lost an opportunity to let people know that he was a Balliol man.
“Uncle Shiva, sir.”
Retirement is rarely kind to powerful men. I could see he had aged suddenly. He looked gaunt and a little too small for his suit. He had a cigar clenched between his perfect, pearly dentures. Fat veins pushed through the pale skin on his temples. His neck was too thin for his collar. Pale rings of cataract had laid siege to his dark irises. He shook my hand with more affection than he had ever shown me in the past. He had a thin, reedy voice.
“Running away, are you? Leaving us to our own devices on this happy occasion?”
That was the only reference he made to his son’s latest escapade.
“Where’s your beautiful wife? Where’re you posted these days?”
When I told him his face suddenly hardened. The change that came over him was almost frightening.
“Get them by the balls, Barber. Hearts and minds will follow.”
Kashmir did this to us.
—
After that I dropped out of their lives. Between then and now, I met her only once, and quite by chance. I was with R.C.—R. C. Sharma—and another colleague. We were taking a walk in Lodhi Gardens, discussing some vexing office politics. I saw her from a distance. She was in a tracksuit, running full pelt, with a dog by her side. I couldn’t tell if it was hers or just a Lodhi Garden stray that had decided to run with her. I think she saw us too, because she slowed her run to a walk. When we came face-to-face, she was soaked in sweat and still out of breath. I don’t know what got into me. Maybe it was embarrassment at being seen with R.C. Or the usual confusion that came over me when I was with her. Whatever it was, it made me say something stupid—something I’d say to the wife of a colleague I happened to bump into somewhere—chummy, cocktail-party banter.
“Hello! Where’s the hubby?”
I could have killed myself just after those words came out.
She held up the leash she was carrying in her hand (the dog was hers) and said, “The hubby? Oh sometimes he allows me to take myself for a walk.”
It sounds terrible, but it wasn’t. She said it with a smile. Her smile.
—
Four years ago, out of the clear blue sky, she rang to ask whether I was the Biplab Dasgupta (there are plenty of us, the absurdly named, in this world) who had advertised in the papers for a tenant for a second-floor apartment. I said indeed I was. She said she was working as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer and needed an office and could pay whatever the going rent was. I said I’d be more than delighted. A couple of days later, my doorbell rang and there she was. Much older of course, but in some essential way unchanged—as peculiar as ever. She wore a purple sari and a black-and-white-checked blouse, a shirt actually, with a collar and long sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms. Her hair was dead white and cropped close to her head, short enough for it to look spiky. She looked either much younger or much older than her years. I couldn’t decide which.