One morning, Naga, who, whatever his other faults, was physically the gentlest of men, hit his wife. Not very convincingly, they both realized. But he did hit her. Then he held her and wept. “Don’t go. Please don’t go.”
That day Tilo stood at the gate and watched him being driven away in his office car, by his office driver. She couldn’t see that he cried in the back seat all the way to work. Naga was not a crying man. (When he appeared as a guest on a prime-time TV debate about national security later that night, he showed no signs of personal distress. He was sharp with his repartee and made quick work of the Human Rights woman who said that New India was sliding towards fascism. Naga’s laconic response raised a titter from the carefully picked studio audience of nattily dressed students and ambitious young professionals. Another guest, a retired, geriatric army general, all mustache and medals, who was trundled out regularly by TV studios to supply venom and stupidity to all discussions on national security, laughed and applauded.)
Tilo took a bus to the edge of the city. She walked through miles of city waste, a bright landfill of compacted plastic bags with an army of ragged children picking through it. The sky was a dark swirl of ravens and kites competing with the children, pigs and packs of dogs for the spoils. In the distance, garbage trucks wound their way slowly up the garbage mountain. Partly collapsed cliffs of refuse revealed the depth of what had accumulated.
She took another bus to the riverfront. She stopped on a bridge and watched a man row a circular raft built with old mineral-water bottles and plastic jerry cans across the thick, slow, filthy river. Buffaloes sank blissfully into the black water. On the pavement vendors sold lush melons and sleek green cucumbers grown in pure factory effluent.
She spent an hour on a third bus and got off at the zoo. For a long time she watched the little gibbon from Borneo in his vast, empty enclosure, a furry dot hugging a tall tree as though his life depended on it. The ground underneath the tree was littered with things visitors had thrown at him to attract his attention. There was a gibbon-shaped cement trashcan outside the gibbon’s cage and a hippo-shaped trashcan outside the hippo’s cage. The cement hippo’s mouth was open and crammed with trash. The real hippo was wallowing in a scummy pond, her slick, wide, ballooning bottom the color of a wet tire, her tiny eyes set inside their pink, puffy eyelids, watchful, above the water. Plastic bottles and empty cigarette packets floated around her. A man bent down to his little daughter dressed in a bright frock, her eyes smudged with kohl. He pointed to the hippo and said, “Crocodile.” “Cockodie,” his little girl said, cranking up the cuteness. A knot of noisy young men flicked razor blades across the barred enclosure and down the cement banks of the hippo pond. When they ran out of blades they asked Tilo if she would take a photograph of them. One of them, with rings on every finger and faded red threads around his wrists, composed the picture for her, handed her his phone and ran back into the frame. He put his arms around his companions’ shoulders and made the victory sign. When Tilo returned the phone she congratulated them for the courage it must require to feed a caged hippo razor blades. It took a while for the insult to register. When it did, they followed her around the zoo with that leering Delhi yodel “Oye! Hapshie madam!” Hey! Nigger madam! They taunted her not because the color of her skin was unusual in India, but because they saw in her bearing and demeanor a “hapshie”—Hindi for Abyssinian—who had risen above her station. A “hapshie” who was clearly not a maidservant or a laborer.
—
There was an Indian rock python in every cage in the snake house. Snake scam. There were cows in the sambar stag’s enclosure. Deer scam. And there were women construction workers carrying bags of cement in the Siberian tiger enclosure. Siberian tiger scam. Most of the birds in the aviary were ones you could see on the trees anyway. Bird scam. At the cage of the sulphur-crested cockatoo one of the young men insinuated himself next to Tilo and sang to the cockatoo, setting his own lyrics to the tune of a popular Bollywood song:
Duniya khatam ho jayegi
Chudai khatam nahi hogi
The world will end,
But fucking never will.
It was intended to be doubly insulting because Tilo was at least double his age.
—
Outside the enclosure of the rosy pelicans she received a text message on her phone:
Organic Homes on NH24 Ghaziabad
1 BHK 15L*
2 BHK 18L*
3 BHK 31L*
Booking starting at Rs 35000
For Discount call 91-103-957-9-8
The dusty old Nicaraguan jaguar had his chin on the dusty ledge of his cage. He stayed like that, supremely indifferent, for hours. Maybe years.
Tilo felt like him. Dusty, old and supremely indifferent.
Maybe she was him.
Maybe some day she would have an expensive city car named after her.
WHEN SHE MOVED OUT, she didn’t take much with her. At first it wasn’t clear to Naga or, for that matter, even to her that she had moved out. She told him she had rented an office space, she didn’t say where. (Garson Hobart didn’t tell him either.) For a few months she came and went. Over time she went more than she came, and then gradually she stopped returning home.
Naga began his life as a newly unmarried man by plunging into work and into a string of gloomy affairs. Being on TV as often as he was had made him what magazines and newspapers called a “celebrity,” which people seemed to think was a profession in and of itself. At restaurants and airports strangers often approached him for an autograph. Many of them weren’t even sure who he was, or what exactly he did or why he looked familiar. Naga was too bored to even bother to refuse. Unlike most men of his age, he was still slim, and had a full head of hair. Being seen as “successful” gave him the pick of a range of women, some single and far younger than him, and some his age or older, married and looking for variety, or divorced and looking for a second chance. The front runner among them was a slender, stylish widow in her mid-thirties with milk-white skin and glossy hair—minor royalty from a small principality—in whom Naga’s mother saw her younger self, and coveted more than her son did. She invited the lady and Prince Charles, her Chihuahua, to stay with her downstairs as a house guest, from where they could jointly plan the capture of the summit.