She puts a cigarette between her lips.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“Of course.”
“What do you know about Maypole dancing?”
“Pardon me?”
“Maypole dancing.”
He takes a moment, frowns, and shakes his head. “Nothing.”
She lights the cigarette. “Then what the fuck do I know about Krishnamurti?”
* * *
—
For a brief moment, out in the street, exhaling smoke in the cold and the rain, she revels in her spite.
At least it is a feeling.
An old one. Like her old self.
She used to have a smart mouth.
She used to be, for want of a better word, “sassy.”
It’s dangerous, remembering that. That exuberance. Glib. She could be so glib. It would be easy enough to be glib again. What she fears most is joy.
* * *
—
She tries not to think about him and the time they had, and whether any of that ever qualified as joy.
She wants to say: I hope you die.
Die miserably of cancer. Catch Ebola and bleed out of your eyes. Get blown to pieces in a terrorist attack. Or just die alone.
She wrote him several emails she never sent.
She screamed and howled in those first four months.
She checked her email every day, waiting, dreading. She demanded something. A letter, a phone call. Something. She rehearsed what she’d say to him, she rehearsed the back-and-forth. But who was she to make demands, or expect them to be met? Who was she? He never wrote. He never called. There was only silence and that money in her bank account, the one his father’s representative, the man who called himself Chandra, set up for her.
* * *
—
The bar at Dukes Hotel. The place Chandra took her the night they both landed from Delhi, when she was still numb and in shock and the pain hadn’t set in, when she naively believed she could start again. Cheerful, avuncular Chandra. Hadn’t she demanded this? Hadn’t it been her idea? No, no, no!
She cries in the taxi. It’s so foggy in her mind. She can’t fix those days straight anymore, she had stopped trying, she’d buried them, and now when she digs, the carcass has been ransacked. “You all right there, love?” the cabbie asks. She nods, wipes the tears to the side. Puts on her dead face. Composes herself. They pull up outside Dukes Hotel. I’ll be fine. She didn’t wear any kohl yet today. She wore a nice shirt and black pants and black boots and a long black coat, because she knew she would be here tonight. She steps into reception and without emotion says she’d like a room, the best available, and a table for one, at the bar, in an hour’s time. She slides over her Amex card.
* * *
—
Vomits in the room. Cries and screams on her knees, smacks her palm with a balled fist, curls up on the floor, then climbs into the shower and scours herself. Dresses again slowly. Takes the kohl from her bag and puts it on. Rings her eyes darkly. Then she takes the coke she’s been saving for months, goes into the bedroom, and cuts herself a line. If they could see her now, her classmates. If they knew the half of it.
* * *
—
In the bar she takes her table, orders the Dukes Martini.
Lights a cigarette.
Looks at the two middle-aged businessmen looking at her.
The martini is poured ice cold.
It changes nothing.
* * *
—
She checks out at one a.m. She tells them she has changed her plans. Why do you do this? she asks herself on the cab ride home.
* * *
—
Her apartment is in Angel. A modern, luxury complex. Newly built. It wasn’t her choice. She lives on the sixth floor. An open-plan one bedroom, all glass and metal and the smell of fresh upholstery. Surrounded by junior lawyers, investment bankers, anonymous young professionals. She meets them in the elevator sometimes. They smell of showers after the gym. When she gets inside, she throws her keys on the kitchen counter, takes a bottle of vodka from the freezer, cuts herself another line. The room glows blue and lonely in the night.
* * *
—
She hears a car door open on the street below. She can almost hear the light pouring out of it, smell the laughter. It’s 2:20 a.m. Drizzling. Some birds are singing in streetlights. The pavement smells of rain. These voices cut through the dark, ricochet off buildings. She stands on the balcony looking down. The door slams and the car drives away; she’s left with the click of heels and her own breath once again. She returns to the table in the living room. From the drawer she pulls out his Vietnam Zippo. Reads the engraving. “35 Kills. If You’re Recovering My Body, Fuck You.”
She lights her cigarette with it.
“Charming.”
* * *
—
Sometimes she thinks they’ve hidden a camera in the apartment. She searched for it but found nothing. Now she treats it with the same shrugging formulation she once applied to gods and masturbation. Even if they can see it, what difference does it make?
But when it comes to her laptop, she keeps masking tape over her webcam. Always turns on the VPN. Stares at the screen. Lights another cigarette. Another careful line. Opens her Gmail, clicks COMPOSE.
Fine, Dean. You win.
Then she stops.
She can’t help herself.
She opens a new browser tab.
Closes her eyes.
Takes a deep breath.
Opens them.
And Googles his name.
NEW DELHI, 2003
NEDA
1.
Sunny Wadia.
She’d been hearing the name for some time. Sunny this, Sunny that. Tall tales circulating through the veins and arteries of the city, until it felt like he was the city himself.
He was an art dealer, a party planner, a restaurateur, a provocateur. He was the son of a multimillionaire from the States. Or a dot-com millionaire himself. No one seemed to know for sure. But he was the vanguard, the architect, the patron saint, on the fringes of anything new or exciting or strange. And she was a junior reporter on the City Desk of the Delhi Post—even as she shirked her official duties, she took it upon herself to track him down.
But that wasn’t why she was here, sitting in a circle with her old school friend Hari at a crumbling South-Extension rooftop terrace on a shimmering April night.
She’d called Hari up after a year of not speaking—a real “long-time-no-see” kind of deal. She’d seen a piece about him in another paper’s culture magazine, hadn’t even recognized him at first: in the badly printed photo in the top right there was this grinning facsimile of a guy she once knew by heart. Only now he was wearing an acid-wash T-shirt, elbows askew, a set of Technics decks beneath his blurry hands. And a DJ name to hide behind.
WhoDini.