Ajay’s legs almost go.
Outside the office, Kumar’s aide takes Ajay aside. “Our mutual friend would like you to take care of something.” He slips Ajay a scrap of paper. Tells him to read it.
It says: KARAN—SISSODIA.
The aide takes it back. “You know why you’re here.”
* * *
—
There is no stable ground.
He returns to his cell.
He thought he was safe.
He was never safe.
“Had fun?” Sikandar asks.
Is he in on it?
Is Prem?
Are they all?
Can it really be a coincidence? He gets the feeling things are being controlled, they can read his mind, they watch him all the time. That Vicky Wadia is playing some elaborate game.
* * *
—
Loyalty was not the reason he had agreed to go to jail. It was fear too. Fear of what Vicky might do. What he might make him do. Spy on Sunny . . . and what else? Harm his family. He thought in prison he would escape. How stupid could he have been?
Must he really do this?
It seems impossible.
Is there another way? If I could speak to someone, he thinks. Then he stops. Speak to whom? Speak to Sunny? And say what? Sunny is as remote as the sun, the moon. Sunny, whose life he once knew, is gone.
6.
Karan makes an offer for Prem. Twenty thousand rupees.
Tell him, Sikandar says to Ajay, that’s not enough.
Go tell him. Go on your rounds, stop at his cell, and tell him.
* * *
—
It’s the first time he’s face-to-face with Karan. He has a calming presence, peace in his eyes, a gentle smile. He sends his cellmates away. He tells Ajay twenty thousand is a good price.
“The price is good for anyone else,” Ajay says. “But not for you.”
He has a razor in his pocket. He sees the blood pumping through Karan’s neck.
He looks him in the eyes.
He could do it right now, he could overpower him.
But then Ajay would have started a war.
Most likely, Ajay would be dead.
“Fifty thousand,” Karan says. “That’s more than fair, considering the damage that’s been done.”
Ajay nods. He’ll take the message back.
He hesitates.
Wonders what makes Karan so calm.
Wonders what secrets he holds.
“What?” Karan says.
“Why,” Ajay asks at the cell door, “do you want Prem so much?”
“Because I love him,” Karan says.
* * *
—
He takes the offer back. Sikandar laughs. “Do you hear that, Prem? He loves you! He’ll soon learn the truth.”
Sikandar tells Ajay to make Karan sweat on it. Don’t give him an answer yet.
* * *
—
No answer yet. Karan still lives. A letter arrives for Ajay. It’s delivered directly to his cell. It doesn’t even have a name on it, just a blank envelope. He’s beckoned to the bars by a guard. There’s no note. Only a photo inside. A woman in her midtwenties lying on a bed in a small cubicle of a room, neat and tidy despite the squalor, with a small shrine on a table next to the bed and a painting of a waterfall nailed to the wall. It’s a brothel. The woman wears a floral sari, but her breasts are exposed. There is a man in the corner of the frame, at the foot of her small bed, drunkenly embracing her legs. Even through the years, Ajay recognizes the girl.
* * *
—
Hema.
“Arrey, chutiya, what’s this?”
Hema, his sister.
Sikandar snatches the photo from him.
The sight of it is enough to get his mojo back. He whistles through his ugly teeth and laughs. “Look at this bitch. Is she waiting for you outside? So you’re not a eunuch after all. But look, I don’t think she’s waiting for you anymore. She’s got enough cock to pass the time!”
Ajay rushes to snatch it back, but Sikandar shoves him away. He laughs his ugly laugh. “Let me get a good look at her.”
Sikandar turns the photo around. “And what’s this?”
He reads out the words: “DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD.”
It’s too much for Ajay to take. He launches himself at Sikandar, leaps up and grabs his arm, twists Sikandar’s wrist, tries to prize the photo from his fingers. Fires his knee into Sikandar’s chest. Sikandar is having none of it. With his free hand and his enormous strength, he grabs Ajay by the throat. Throws him through the air. He stands over him. Glowers. “You’re protected, so I can’t kill you. But no one touches me like that. And you still have to do what you’re told.”
TWO
LONDON, 2006
She’d always dreamed of living abroad.
She never wanted to do what she was told.
“Neda,” her professor said.
She’d zoned out again.
“Are we boring you today?”
He’s American, still young, likes to go for a drink with his students, likes to be their friend.
But Neda is a wall.
“No, sir.”
It’s the second term of her second year.
BA Social Anthropology at the LSE.
She’s a straight-A student, mostly.
He plays to the room.
“So it’s just me?”
A ripple of amusement, but from Neda, no.
He returns to the board.
“Maybe a full night’s rest is in order? A little less partying with the boys?”
He reminds her of Dean.
“I don’t party with boys.”
Now the laughter is on her: of the students in her course, she’s the least likely to party with anyone at all.
* * *
—
Yeah, she’d always dreamed of living abroad, of having an apartment of her own, a rich and stimulating inner life, tangled love affairs, true friends to whom she could confess. Something to write home about. A home to write home to in the end.
Not this.
* * *
—
She slips out of the hall, head down, hair over her face, books barricading her chest.
She doesn’t even know why she’s still there.
She imagines, when the time comes, she’ll abandon it.
Just walk out the door the day before her exams and never return.
It’s not like it matters.
It’s not like the money matters.
* * *
—
Each day, at HSBC, she checks her account to see if it’s still there.
It’s always still there. One hundred thousand pounds.
Whatever she does: ?99,878 becomes ?100,000; ?96,300 becomes ?100,000.
Whatever she does, however much she spends, there it is, topped up with remorseless precision.
As if he were taunting her.
She taunted him back once by making a twenty-thousand-pound donation to a homeless charity.
Her balance returned to one hundred thousand pounds the next day.
Now she taunts him by barely spending at all.
* * *
—
She leaves the campus and walks up Southampton Row to the Polish vodka bar behind Holborn. It’s slow at lunch; the suits like to come and get wasted in the evening after work. She takes her usual seat, back against the wall, watching the door. Orders ?led?, a half pint of ?ywiec, a shot of Chopin. Her one indulgence. The same thing every day. She eats in mechanical silence, sips her beer, saves the vodka for the end. She never orders more. To the outsider looking in, it’s an eccentric’s discipline.
* * *