—
More people arrived. A handsome minor film actor always in the gossip pages came with a TV star who played good girls in the soaps. It was a veritable who’s who of bubblegum, not a camera in sight. All of them paying fealty to Sunny, who soaked up their attention and radiated it back out at them. More chairs were found. More vodka brought, some bottles of red wine were opened. More food. She felt she was backstage at a performance of Delhi, watching its players remove the paint, their masks. She was on the inside, the other side. The guy next to her said, “How do you know Sunny? He’s the man of the hour.” He extended his hand. “I’m Jagdish. Full of ideas.” “You or him?” More voices were cutting in. “What this city needs.” Neda smiled. They were all drunk. He curled his Dalí mustache. “A firm hand.” “What?” “What do you do?” “I write.” “I paint on walls.” “What happened to your nose?” “I fell off a wall.” Everything was spinning. Hari was smiling at her with fraternal pride. “Murals of a Future Delhi.” “What?” “That’s what I paint.” “He has a grant from my foundation,” Sunny shouted. He’d been listening in. “I got a grant from Sunny’s foundation,” Jagdish shouted. “?ūnyatā. Do you like the name?” Sunny said. “It means nothing. Literally ‘Nothing.’ Do you understand? Everything is connected.” “That’s what I tell myself,” Jagdish said, “when I spend all his money.” The room was red velvet and fairy lights of psychedelic wire. She watched the talk show on TV with great seriousness, men smoking cigarettes in armchairs, and below it all she saw Sunny raising a glass. “Neda here is going to write about me . . .” A bottle was knocked over. She grabbed another glass of vodka, and the room was falling out of orbit and she was spinning on her axis. She looked up and Sunny was looking at her . . . She saw the red lampshade sideways on the horizon . . .
* * *
—
She was in her own bed. There was birdsong and it was morning. Her leg was hanging out, touching the floor. She reached out and shut off the alarm, knocked it off the bedside table. Her clothes were strewn on the floor. Her mouth was an ash heap, her throat gravel, her stomach drying concrete . . . “Oh fuck.” She couldn’t remember how she got there. Or what she’d done. Then the restaurant came back to her. Standing on a table. She went to her bathroom and threw up.
* * *
—
“Cinderella,” her father boomed. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
She dropped into one of the chairs at the dining table, picked up a piece of buttered toast, threw it down again.
“I think I made a fool of myself.”
He watched her with patience and no small wonder. “Not for the first time, daughter of mine. I trust you had a good night?”
“How did I get here?”
“Home? Hari delivered you to the door. He was in good spirits. He’s all grown up.”
“Did we wake you up?”
He shook his head. “I was watching TV.”
“What did Mom say?”
“Nothing. She was sleeping.”
“That’s good.” She sighed. “I’m never drinking again.”
“Here.” He lifted his newspaper to reveal Sunny’s pack of Treasurers and his Zippo. “I believe these are now yours.”
“Oh shit, I think I stole them.”
“Maybe from the one driving the fancy car.”
“Which car?”
“Hari was not alone.” He nodded wistfully at the cigarettes. “I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to have one.”
“Dad?” she sat down.
“Yes?”
“Please stop talking.”
He saluted her. “Message understood.”
She took the lighter and cigarettes, looked at her phone. “I’m so late for work.”
“Your powers of recovery are at their peak. Revel in them, child. Meanwhile, I already called you a taxi. Sardar-ji is waiting out front.”
She kissed him on the forehead. “Thank you, Papa.”
* * *
—
She felt anxious and skittish all morning at work, worrying about what she might have said and done, the regular hangover traumas, amplifying all those underlying fears. She was terrified of being irrelevant, of being found out, of being left behind. All those people there last night, they’d seen her. She’d thought she was being cool, but what if she’d been plain ridiculous? And now in the morning they were thinking how pathetic she was. And what if Sunny was laughing about her too, laughing with one of them right now? She reassured herself with the usual formulations: Everyone was as drunk as you. But they’re not like you, she countered herself. They’re rich or powerful or cool. What are you doing, Neda? She thought to text Hari, but she was too ashamed. But why? She’d done nothing wrong. She’d flirted with Sunny, but Sunny, he wasn’t a big deal.
Was he?
She remembered his big words, his grand ideas, his promises and proclamations, which sounded so right at the table. But no, no, it was all hollow and dumb and he was just a guy. A guy like anyone else. Maybe he wasn’t even real. Everything about the night was hazy, appearing to her memory as if in a funhouse mirror. She took out the lighter and examined it. It struck her as childish. What moron carried a lighter from a far-off, foreign, long-finished war? She put it away. She decided to just keep working. A weird night consigned to the dustbin of her life.
The hangover only got worse. Gone was the giddy stardust of waking. The sense of atoms twinkling. She was left with a viselike emptiness. A shrink-wrapped brain.
* * *
—
She went through the motions at work. It was only tolerable if she rolled downhill in neutral. She shifted a few sentences around a fraud story she’d been working on, filed it, made a round of phone calls of which she didn’t hear a word, scanned the police bulletins, arranged an interview with the head of a trader’s association for the afternoon.
At 3:38 p.m. her phone beeped.
A message from Hari.
Her stomach churned as she opened it. But it wasn’t a horror at all.
—hey watt a nite!
—:)
—just woke up. we kept going til 10
—nice.
—u made an impression!!
As she was figuring out what to say, she looked up to see Dean standing over her. She put the phone facedown.
“Dean.”
“Neda. You good?”
“Surviving.”
“I wondered if you got a chance to go through the bulletins?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did.” She looked over her notes. “Kidnapping, kidnapping, kidnapping, spurious ghee, another kidnapping, an altercation at a paan shop, yet another kidnapping, some ransom demands but mostly they’re missing with no trace.” She flicked through her notes. “This one was interesting. An ‘interstate car-stereo gang.’ They were targeting Marutis, mostly. Remind me not to leave my stereo in my car.”
“Don’t leave your stereo in your car.”
“Thanks.”
“You want to get a smoke?”
“Sure.”
* * *