Ajay Wadia.
He is becoming aware of Sunny’s fame. He knows his master is known in the city, it makes him proud. For the first time in his life he looks at himself as an object to be improved, he spends money on his grooming, gets a manicure once a month, a pedicure every other, takes a head massage from Dilip in Green Park. He shops. He consumes. He visits the new malls. He takes with him a handwritten list of the things he wants to buy. Searching out the alien words he has written down from Sunny’s bathroom—Davidoff Cool Water, Proraso, Acqua di Parma, Santa Maria Novella, Botot, Marvis— sacred as an ancient text. He spends his free time and his salary in the malls working out the alternatives of these. Axe. Old Spice.
Those malls.
They’re easier now.
But he remembers the first time he tried to enter one, on his first day off, his first month of service. There he is, waking before dawn. He can’t sleep in. He has an idea to buy new clothes. But the bruises are still on his face; he looks like a nobody, worse than a nobody—in his old clothes from the mountains he looks like a poor migrant. Suddenly he is aware of his poverty. He turns up at the metal detector and he must reek of it, his poverty must betray him. The security guard, a man he now recognizes as someone who makes less money than he, bars his entry. It’s humiliating, watching well-to-do families and smart young men in nice clothes walking past, watching young modern girls in skirts, linked arm in arm, eating ice cream, watching the occasional foreigner too, dirty and travel-stained and half naked, being given the royal treatment, saluted sometimes even, to their delight and amusement, while this gatekeeper pushes Ajay Wadia away. He takes half lessons from it. And he can only peer inside at the marble corridors, air-conditioned, with all the shops glowing, feeling slighted, ashamed like a beggar.
How am I supposed to buy nice clothes if I can’t enter the place that sells them? The conundrum rattles around in his head. He devotes more attention to Sunny’s wardrobe, learns the phrases, the terms—Rubinacci, con rollino, Cifonelli, pocket square, cap-toe Oxfords. He riffles through the magazines in the living room when he’s alone, memorizes the fashions, the lines that differentiate weak from strong, he takes some pages he’s torn out of the old ones to a tailor in the neighborhood and sits with him trying to explain what it is he wants to wear. Over some days they fix on an idea. The elegant blue suit that comes out of it, along with two shirts, a tie, and a pair of shoes, costs almost two months’ wages, but it’s worth it. When he tries this suit on, he is a man transformed, he’s a someone in this city, someone beyond his job, beyond Sunny even, if he can dream of such a thing. He dresses up as this free man on his next day off and steps out, noting the whistles and murmurs of the guards, the giggles of the maids, then he hails an auto and goes to the mall.
And yes, he passes.
He passes for someone who has leisure time.
Despite his apprehensions, he’s ignored by the guardians of the mall, not so much as glanced at as he sails through the arches of the metal detector and into the promised land.
Now he can do whatever he likes.
It’s only when he walks around inside that his mood changes. With nothing left in his pocket, he feels an ominous burden, an oppressive sense of waste and fear. The landscape is of judgment; he begins to suspect everyone knows. He’s a fraud. It’s not only clothes, but bearing. He’s never had this feeling before, never cared what anyone says of him. Now he clams up. He feels the shop assistants watching him, singling him out. They know he’s merely trying to pass for the other side. So he doesn’t dare go inside certain shops, even to browse. To open his mouth would be to give the game away. Finally he retreats to one of the bathrooms and sits sweating in one of the stalls. He looks down at his ridiculous clothes that feel so tight. What was he thinking? He looks like a clown. When he comes out of the stall he stares at his dumb clown’s face in the mirror and wants to erase it. He resolves to flee as fast as he can. He breathes the air of the street, sucks in the fumes with gratitude, takes the bus back home, not wanting to waste money on an auto, not wanting to waste time on a walk. Once home he tears this suit off, showers, and puts his uniform back on, the blue shirt and worn-in black trousers, so comforting, so in tune with his soul, and locks that expensive suit away. He goes back to the mall several weeks later wearing his service clothes. He is taken for what he is, the servant of a rich man shopping for his master. If anyone asks, not that they will, he can say with confidence that he’s on an errand for his boss, he can flash his money clip if need be. He can flash his shopping list. Davidoff Cool Water, Proraso, Acqua di Parma, Santa Maria Novella, Botot, Marvis. He can go through the shops slowly, pretending he’s buying for his master as he gathers the replicas of Sunny’s personal things.
* * *
—
One day, over a year in, when Sunny has gone away for three days, and Ajay has nothing much to do but wait around in his quarters and sweep the apartment occasionally and feed the carp or learn new recipes from the cookbooks on Sunny’s shelf, he’s called into Mr. Dutta’s office and told he’s been promoted to Sunny’s personal valet; it’s a role he all but inhabits anyway. Mr. Dutta tells him Sunny will one day soon be taking a great position within his father’s empire, and as such he needs additional support. Alongside his existing responsibilities he will accompany Sunny whenever he attends the various family offices, he will carry his briefcase in the passenger seat beside the driver, he will run errands for him throughout the day when errands are required, carry his luggage when he travels, be his shield against the world, be at his beck and call around the clock, tie his shoelaces if he so needs; if he has to blow his nose, you will offer your handkerchief or your sleeve.