That was the last thing I remembered. I woke up four days later, lying beside a canal among the beggars in a market town I didn’t know, dressed in tattered clothing, covered in my own filth, an empty liquor bottle in my hand. My feet were raw, my body bruised. It was the middle of the day, the sun beat down. The market was lively and I was ignored, taken for a drunk, a madman. A crone without legs howled at me. I staggered up and on in agony. As I hobbled, trying to remember what had brought me to this place, I stopped to examine my face in the mirror of a bike. I almost jumped out of my skin. My cheeks had been clawed, my lips had burned and blistered. I had aged, it seemed, many years. What I saw was the man you see now. I knew in that instant; something had been taken away from me. Something here, in my head. Here, in my heart. Even down here, in my balls. I tried so hard to recall how I ended up this way. All I could remember was my name. Sunil Rastogi. But I was not myself. I was not the man I used to be. I was penniless and haunted. Without luck. I tried to beg, and I was spat on. I tried so hard to beg, and I was beaten by the cops. Left to bleed. I crawled through ditches. I was bitten by stray dogs. Me! Me? No . . . there was no me. I had been hollowed out. I escaped at night and walked through fields. I slept in temples and old buildings. But I couldn’t bear to be around men. I took to sleeping in the wild. I hated sleeping at all. Sleep was full of monsters. Even when I was awake, I felt something watching me behind the lids of my eyes. But when I tried to understand what had happened, my brain fell into darkness. I could only see life out of the corner of my eye. I knew I had to flee.
18.
But flee where? The only place I could think was west, all the way back home, back where everything started. You have to understand, Sunny Wadia, I was desperate in that moment, desperate and afraid. The amnesia that haunted me was the worst of all. But what’s that you’re thinking? Wasn’t home just as unsafe? Weren’t they waiting to arrest me there? It was possible. But at the same time, I doubted it. The only one who knew me as a criminal was Madam-Sir. But to protect herself, she would never have uttered my name. Besides, it seemed to me that years had passed, that old sins had been forgotten. No, I would go back home, show humility, take my family land. Live a life of solitude and simple work. This thought sustained me as I begged and stole my way west. Several weeks later I arrived. Imagine my surprise, Sunny Wadia, when I reached Greater Noida and came to find all the farmland gone, whole villages erased, huge apartment complexes rising, and mansions for former farmers springing up from the soil. With some difficulty I located the place where I had been born, found the village house had been replaced by a compound with tall metal gates and video cameras on top. I called my uncle’s name; there was no reply. I pressed the buzzer on the gatepost and a voice buzzed back. Who was I? What did I want? If I didn’t leave they’d come out with the dogs. Even though I was no longer wearing rags, I looked a sorry state in that grand light. One part of me wanted to turn and leave. Another said no, this is your land. In my indecision, a door within the gate burst open, and one of my young cousins stepped out, dressed in a shiny suit, sunglasses, big watch, wielding a huge American gun. Ah, I said, so it runs in the family! What are you talking about, crazy man? I asked him if he didn’t recognize me. Especially since he was standing on the place of my birth. He told me to get lost or he’d shoot me. I managed to smile at that. I am your cousin, I said. “Sunil?” I heard a woman’s voice behind him. It was my brother’s widow. Plump and covered in jewelry and dressed in jeans! She had a queenlike manner, she was in charge of the home now . . . my loins burned on seeing her, my heart raged . . .
19.
She told my cousins to let me in. Within the compound walls, next to brand-new marble palaces, our old brick houses remained. Buffalo still snoozed alongside the SUVs. And in the courtyard, our old toothless dadi slept on a charpoy. My uncle emerged at the commotion. He’d grown so fat and grand. He wore so much gold I don’t know how he didn’t fall down. All my cousins lined up, they glared at me, they were spoiling for a fight. “Sunil,” my uncle said, “you worthless fellow, you chor of a man. What is it you want?” I told him I didn’t want trouble, I had traveled very far, and now at the end of my wanderings, I wanted to return home. He replied, “There’s nothing here for a thief!” I became hot in the head, I forgot myself. I said, “It is you who is the thief, uncle, because this land is mine and mine alone, you have taken it from me.” He laughed and dismissed me. “No land is owed to a beast like you.” I stood there humiliated, seeing they wouldn’t budge. I realized how much things had changed, how weak and worthless and unlucky I had become. They all began to laugh at me. They could see it dawning on my face, how my future lay out there on the road, a vagabond. What could I do? I lowered my head, stepped toward the door out to the road. But before I crossed the threshold, I heard my brother’s widow call my name. I turned yet again, and there she was, removing her heavy gold chain. “Take this,” she said, “for the things you have done in the past.” I took it humbly. She remembered the person I had been. When she was in my brother’s bed, I had barely been able to look her in the eye from shame. Even now, it was hard to look her in the face. But with that gold chain in my hand I would begin a new life. My reverie was short-lived. Ten minutes later, as I trod the dirt road, a police Gypsy arrived to cut off my path. A man matching my description had snatched a woman’s chain.
20.