—
He holds him for hours. And in the dark he speaks. “I’m from a village,” Ajay says. “In Eastern UP. I am Dalit. My family were abused. My father was killed by a big man. I was taken to the mountains and sold. I worked on a farm. I was told to say I am Kshatriya.”
He sees himself.
He’s lying with his matchboxes and his wind-up duck toy.
Trying to remember his mother’s face.
Daddy is upstairs, stoking the fire.
He has to make people happy to survive.
* * *
—
“I ran away when I was fourteen,” Prem says as if in a dream. He picks out the words so slowly. “I grew up outside Kanpur. I had a sister and a mother, I loved my mother so much, but she died. My father married again. I cried all the time. His new wife hated me. She caught me sleeping with my mother’s old clothes. I’d kept some hidden when that woman threw everything away. She beat me so hard. I ran to Delhi. I worked in a sweet shop. I made jalebi. I had good hands. But the owner forced me to do things for him. He said if I refused he’d tell the police I was a thief and they’d lock me away. I ran away. I slept on the street, at the train station. I found other jobs. There was always somewhere to work. But there was always someone trying to take something from me.”
* * *
—
“The day I came to Delhi,” Ajay says, “I was beaten by a gang of men. They stole everything from me.”
He falls silent.
“They didn’t steal everything,” Prem says.
Silence.
“I had one place to go. A place I’d been promised work.”
“And?”
“I went.”
“And then?”
“I served.”
* * *
—
To obey. To serve. To be rewarded with protection, purpose, even love in the end. “I’ll take care of you,” Sunny said. It could have been so simple. There could have been a world in which these words rang true, provided succor, gave him sustenance, something to believe. A world where there was only duty, where he hadn’t scratched that itch to find home. How simple it would have been. Loyalty, unquestioned. A desire to please. Sunny would have said, “You’ll take the blame. I’ll take care of you.” And Ajay would have said, “yes, yes, yes.”
* * *
—
But he had to scratch that itch that was always there. What had it been? Watching Neda and Sunny in love? He remembers wading alone into the ocean in Goa, before he was sent away. How many times had he been ready to break? How could he have gone on so long?
* * *
—
Who are you?
The words chase round his head.
Who are you?
Ajay Wadia. Sunny’s boy.
Loyal.
Ready to serve.
In circles.
He’d rather not think about it at all.
He’d rather be here.
A killer VIP.
That thought surprises him.
Can it really be true?
* * *
—
Where did he leave himself behind?
Unraveling.
He keeps coming back to rooms. In the Palace Grande. Right after he’d killed Vipin Tyagi and his men. Waiting for the knock on his door. Waiting for the door to be broken down. Gun in hand. Waiting for death to come. And when it didn’t, he went searching for it instead. Certain this was the end. He wanted to die. Yes. He’s living in death.
* * *
—
He’s still holding Prem long after Prem has fallen into a nullifying sleep.
Touching his delicate, broken face with his own once beautiful hands. The bloom of his split lip, his grotesquely swollen jaw. He runs his hands through the blood-dark hair, matted to the skull. He can’t remember being so close to another human before, except when trying to kill or stop himself from being killed. His teeth begin to chatter. He doesn’t want to let go.
He lets go of him.
Gets up and checks that Sikandar is still alive.
Then he begins to sweep.
* * *
—
He has cleaned the cell, placed the shattered TV neatly in the corner.
He is making chai, cooking roti on the gas burner.
Sikandar comes to with a jolt, the air caught in his throat, sitting up like a storybook monster and looking at the whisky in his hand.
He sees Prem, bruised and battered and shriveled in drugged sleep.
And Ajay at the stove.
Ajay glances at him, looks back to his work.
Waits.
Waits for it.
“What a night . . .” Sikandar moans.
He rubs the bump on his head.
Looks at the remnants of the TV.
Starts to remember things.
Stands over Prem.
Looks at Ajay.
“Women,” he says sadly. “They’re all the same.”
* * *
—
Prem is sent to the infirmary.
Sikandar sits morose in the cell.
A new TV is brought. He watches it all day.
He can’t remember all of it, but he remembers the name.
* * *
—
Prem is in the infirmary for a week.
Sikandar gets reports—Karan has been to visit him there.
Many times Karan has paid the guards.
Visiting Prem.
Holding his hand by the bedside.
Karan.
Sikandar knows he’s been betrayed.
He wants to cut ties with the Sissodia gang.
But Satya says he can’t.
* * *
—
Prem returns after the week.
Quietly to his mattress, with his broken nose, without makeup, wearing male clothes.
Sikandar ignores him, keeps watching TV.
Prem applies lipstick to his mouth, kajal to his eyes, crouches at Sikandar’s feet.
Sikandar pushes him away. “No. You’re not Khushboo,” he says, as if he’s only just learned the truth.
The next day he announces that he’s divorced. He has no wife.
And Prem is for sale.
3.
An MLA from UP, Charanjit Kumar, comes visiting. He’s conducting an inspection of the jail. Kumar is from Ram Singh’s ruling party. Time to look busy. Ajay is assigned to an art class he’s never attended, there to fill up the numbers, to look productive. The warden has told them: this is an art class, draw something nice, show it to our guest, everything will be well. The prisoners follow the teacher’s instruction. They draw still-life pieces, flowers, plastic fruit. Then they draw from memory, as they are told, something that makes them happy. They make pictures of their mothers, brothers, families. Trees and fields and rivers. Ajay sits with his pad of paper and his pencil, his hand poised, and draws nothing.
4.
MLA Kumar is impressed. The prison is exemplary. Run to a standard even prisons in the West cannot reach. He’s saying it for the cameras. He’s brought a photographer with him, a journalist. At the end of the visit, the MLA asks to speak with some of the prisoners alone, to get their honest feedback. Prisoners are chosen at random. The interviews are held in one of the administration offices. Ajay is among the chosen. During Ajay’s turn, Kumar asks him several banal questions, which Ajay answers monosyllabically. He dismisses Ajay and calls for the next prisoner. But on the way out he says, “Vicky sends his wishes.”
5.