“She’s like I imagined.”
“Did she ask who you were?”
“I said I was a friend.”
She spoke in a quiet voice. “You’re not a friend.” She closed her eyes. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be with Dinesh?”
“He can wait.”
She shook her head. “I feel so stupid.”
“Why?”
“I need a drink.” She fetched a bottle of Teacher’s and two brandy snifters from the sideboard. “What did you tell her?” She poured large measures into the glasses.
“Nothing.”
She drank one of the glasses down. Looked at the other. Drank that too.
“What did she ask you?”
“Nothing.”
She poured for herself again. “Slow down,” he said.
“Don’t lecture me.”
“I’m not.”
She poured him a glass too.
“It’s not the good stuff, I know.”
“Can I smoke?”
She waved her hand. “Sure.”
He took out his cigarettes and lighter. Offered her one. “You grew up in this house?”
She took it, he lit it. “You know I did.”
“You’re lucky.”
“So I’m told.”
He spotted pencil markings on the white paint of one of the pillars. Lines with dates written next to them, marking growth. “Is that you?”
She nodded.
He stood and went over to examine them. The last one was marked 26.7.97. He ran his finger over it. “What happened after this?”
“I grew up.”
He came back to the table.
“I don’t want to fight with you.”
She poured another whisky into her glass.
“It’ll hit you.”
“I’ll hit you.”
She drank the measure down.
“I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking,” she said after a long silence. “And I’ve woken to another bad dream.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to get out of here. Out of this city. Out of my life.”
“So let’s go.”
“It’s so easy for you, isn’t it? There’s nowhere to go.”
“Let me take you somewhere.”
“I don’t want to go to a hotel room with you.”
“I’m not talking about that.”
“Not some private dining room, not some VIP fucking bar.”
“No.” He stood, walked to the door. “Where I’m taking you, you don’t even have to change clothes. Are you coming?”
* * *
—
She lay across the back seat of his Audi as he sped her through the night, feet pressed against one of the doors. She wanted this cocoon. The AC was turned up very high, the upholstery fresh, the car an island. She felt the engine in her bones. Her teeth chattered with the cold and the adrenaline. He was on the phone, one hand on the wheel, speaking quietly. She watched the night city unspool like reams of ink ribbon while he managed the road. As they drove she felt she had been drugged. They were heading south toward the Qutb Minar. The car pulled along the straights at speed, the stretches between traffic lights devoured by the engine.
* * *
—
They traveled over the edges of South Delhi into Mehrauli. An inchoate world of farmland without farmers, their land hijacked and consumed by the secretive, the lucky, the adventurous, the strange, a labyrinth of dirt lanes and small holdings, shadowy, high-walled estates necklaced with barbed wired or crumbling villas grazed with goats. She’d been to a wedding reception here once, a school friend’s elder sister. What surprised her was the space. Land. So much hidden land. Now it was being colonized by the wealthy, the super-rich. She should have guessed what was coming.
They came to a gleaming gate guarded by two old Rajasthanis with their mustaches and shotguns. They recognized the car, snapped to attention, ran to open the gate, and saluted as the car passed through. Beyond, the smooth dark tarmac of a private road. It was Delhi and it was not Delhi—lush verges, peacocks crying in the night, silent men tending to flower beds, no garbage, nothing broken. The engine hummed as the car moved at a stately pace, turning left and right as if on rails, as if this were a theme-park ride. The disorientation was intoxicating. She cracked open the window and even the air smelled different, moist and sweet, full of night-blooming jasmine. She watched the gates and high domes and gothic spires, guardhouses illuminated in white light, guards reading newspapers, listening to the radio, sipping chai, looking up to glance at the passing car. On the right there were no houses, no gates, nothing but a dark unbroken wall, almost as high as the trees that crowded the other side. They drove along this impregnable length until they reached a solid metal gate, built just wide enough for a car to pass, unremarkable after the other grand entrances. The car idled outside and a few seconds later a bolt was released from inside. The gate swung open inward. By the headlights she could make out woodland, a murky track that disappeared into a mass of trees. As the car drove in she saw Ajay holding the gate and they were swallowed inside.
* * *
—
They crept along the track inside the compound, through the woodland, Ajay trotting alongside. They traveled for a good few minutes this way. Then the track opened up, the trees vanished, and they emerged into a grassy clearing with another track leading out the opposite side. He stopped the car in the middle. Killed the engine and the lights. Climbed out and opened the rear door. She climbed out too, felt the grass underfoot, the soft purity of it. The moon came out and the clearing was illuminated. It was clean and empty. He took her by the hand.
“What is this place?”
“Wait,” he said.
He led her through more woodland to a vast open space in which there stood a construction site of monolithic proportions. They were looking on the foundations of an extraordinary building, like an alien spaceship crash-landed. Around it were mountains of sand and gravel, piles of brick, and slabs of marble sheltered beneath tarp. There were several JCBs, a bulldozer, a huge cement truck, a dormant workers’ camp of tents and firepits. But the site was empty.
* * *
—
He guided her with a flashlight across a manicured field, toward a squat building a hundred meters from the main site; when they got closer she could make out a single-story villa, sliding-glass doors, and horizontal slabs of rough-hewn stone, slightly run down, an older marker on the land.
“Ouch.” She flinched and pulled her foot back.
She’d stepped on something sharp.
“What is it?”
He shone the torch down and saw that her foot was bleeding. She’d stepped on broken glass. A piece was still inside her skin.
He pulled it out. “Can you walk?”