—
At home in her room, lying on the bed with her earphones on, she listened to the tape. She rewound it to Khan Market. First the voxpops, street noise in the background, then a click and the loud silence of his apartment. She closed her eyes and returned to the sofa, listened to Vijay, 23, Call Center Worker, listened to that voice and could not match it to the face, to the clothes, to the apartment. Then she mentally stripped him of the props, as it were, put him in cheap shirt and pants, placed him on the roadside, sitting on a motorcycle by a chai stall, and she was almost there, she could almost see him. But no, it fell away. Wasn’t he faking it, after all? Wasn’t his voice a caricature of all those men whose daily struggles he had as little insight into as she? He had merely been playing the role of one of his potential customers, putting words he wanted to hear into his doppelg?nger’s mouth. She paused the tape. She wondered how far he’d really come. And how fast. All that talk of Italy and Japan. How much was real? Stripped to essentials, relieved of his props, who was he?
She listened on as he talked about the river, opera houses and business districts and promenades. In the apartment all she’d heard was his pitch, but now she heard his hope, his enthusiasm, his energy. In hindsight, free of the temptation to intervene, to mock, to correct or challenge or adjust, free to listen and empathize, she found it all fascinating. He really believed it, she thought. This was the flip side of the misery, destruction, poverty, the world Dean waded through. And didn’t she want Delhi to be like this? Wouldn’t it be so much easier than the struggle? Dean’s cold voice rose to meet her conscience. “Struggle?” it said. “You’re not even in the struggle.” She heard her own voice saying, “And then I asked a colleague about you.” She winced. The words reached her ears. “Sunny Wadia? That joker?” She clicked off the tape a moment, braced herself, and pressed PLAY. “Do you know who his father is?”
She studied his responses, his speech about his father’s struggles, and realized he’d deflected things, hadn’t really answered anything. She’d let him, by being chicken. There’d been an opening for her, when he’d asked what Dean had said. “One of Ram Singh’s cronies,” came her voice. But if she’d been smart, she wouldn’t have mentioned Ram Singh at all—the name was both too direct and too vague; instead she should have pushed him. A criminal. A gangster. Watched his response. She cursed herself for being too impulsive, not critical and objective enough. Still, she’d managed to get that question in about his uncle. She listened to herself.
“And what about Vicky?”
She’d said the name so casually, with such familiarity, as if they were talking about a family friend. It felt transgressive. She rewound the tape and listened to herself, tried to parse the second’s silence after the question. But he’d given nothing away.
He had, however, thrown her out.
She tried to figure out what the hell had gone on in there. Flirting, definitely; they had chemistry. Had he bitten off more than he could chew? Despite his professing to liking her back talk. Certainly he couldn’t have expected her to bring up his father, his uncle. Maybe he didn’t think of himself as “known” in that way. Maybe he was too busy trying to be known himself, for his own deeds. So many questions. She was left with the image of an egoistic young man, swaddled in wealth and luxury, craving importance but cursed by a fatal insecurity. Just the kind of man she fell for.
She reached for her bedside drawer, pulled out his Zippo. Lit a cigarette.
* * *
—
She spent the rest of that evening writing up the real voxpop interviews she’d conducted and the fake ones she hadn’t. Fake names, fake quotes.
She wrote up Sunny’s last.
Vijay, 23. She added a later line, when Sunny spoke in his own voice.
“Adapt or die?” her editor called out from his desk the next day. “This fellow really said that?”
“He did,” Neda replied.
“My God,” he said. “This city gets harder by the day.”
2.
She waited for some message from Sunny all week, some sign. She wondered if she should reach out herself, apologize. For what? Sorry I insulted your family. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed like a bad date. But still she was drawn to him. She thought about him all the time. On the other hand, she was always on the cusp of starting a dialogue with Dean. Saying: Listen, this thing happened, I think you should know. In her head she handed over the tape and he listened in his office, she sitting beside him, watching his face. Would he be proud of her?
“Good work,” Dean said, in the bad version in her head. “Get close to him. Discover his plans.”
In truth Dean might say, “That joker? Don’t waste your time.”
One day she asked Dean about the demolitions. (Another thing she’d been thinking of. Why hadn’t she mentioned the demolitions to Sunny? Why hadn’t she articulated a vision of the city where land isn’t just waiting to be commodified?)
“They’re awful, I know.”
“But?”
“Playing devil’s advocate . . .”
“Go on.”
“The Yamuna Pushta. Isn’t that land better used for, I don’t know, the city?”
“It is being used for the city. People are living there.”
“But I mean, the city as a whole. Like London or Paris. Everyone’s drawn to the rivers there. They’re the heart of the city. Here we turn our backs to them.”
She realized she was parroting Sunny’s words.
He gave her a long, piteous look.
“India is not Europe,” he said. “The Yamuna is not the Thames.”
* * *
—
About two weeks had passed when her editor tapped her on the shoulder.
“Neda, what are your evening plans?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Here.” He handed her a press release. “Sridhar can’t make it. You go.”
She looked at the sheet of glossy paper: “Dinesh Singh Kumar, President, RDP Youth Wing, invites you to attend the inauguration of the Uttar Pradesh Tourism Initiative: Toward the World Class.”
“Toward the World Class,” she repeated.
“The usual nonsense. So don’t waste your time. In and out, write a few hundred words, file it, get your free drinks if you’re lucky.”
* * *
—