—
She entered using the key beneath the aloe plant, holding the bottle of vodka behind her back, listening to the Audi pull away. Her father was awake, sitting in lamplight in the living room in his favorite armchair, patched up many times over the years, watching a DVD. He looked over the top of his reading glasses. “Cinderella . . .”
He said nothing about her clothing, her bare feet.
“What are you watching, Papa?”
“Apur Sansar.”
She drew closer to him, kissed him on the forehead. His nose twitched.
“You smell like the Moscow Olympics.” He reached behind her back, examined the vodka. “What’s this? Gold medal?”
“The consolation prize.”
“Well, let’s be having some, daughter of mine. Just a small glass before we retire. We can have one of your mother’s cigarettes too, and you can lie to me about your adventures in the night.”
She fetched two glasses from the cabinet while he opened the bottle and sniffed. “Do you want ice?”
“No, no. You’ll wake her. Just pour it neat.”
She poured two stiff measures until the bottle was over, passed one to him, and fetched her mother’s Classic Mild, then she pulled up a stool by his chair.
On-screen, a grieving Apu wandered the coalfields of central India, scattering his novel to the winds.
“So?” he said, enjoying the vodka sting on his lips.
“So . . . Did Mom tell you?”
She lit the cigarette.
“That a boy came to get you?”
“No, not that.”
“Ah, yes, that other thing. She did, she did. I’m sorry, my child. I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“If I could just disappear, I would.”
He studied her. “Are you in trouble?”
She shook her head. “No.” Then changed her mind. “Maybe.”
She passed the cigarette to him. He inhaled once, very deeply, held the smoke in his lungs, tilted his head back, and, eyes closed, exhaled rings.
She laughed in childish pleasure. “You’ve still got it.”
“I do.”
“You used to do that for me all the time.”
“It shut you up when you were crying.” He ran his fingers through her hair. “I can’t protect you anymore.”
He knocked the rest of the vodka back.
There was nothing more to say.
He returned to the film, and she took the glasses to the kitchen, put out the cigarette, and slipped upstairs. She showered in very hot water. She was asleep the moment she crawled into bed.
* * *
—
She awoke from violent dreams with her head raging and went to the bathroom to be sick. It took awhile to remember what was real and where she was, and when she remembered she was more afraid than ever and there was no one she could talk to about what had happened last night. His father. God, his father. That foot in Sunny’s chest, pushing him back into the water. Soon Dean was texting her, asking her when she’d be in the office. There was a lot of work to be done.
* * *
—
She and Dean went back out to the demolition site that next morning. It was chaotic, half demolished, full of government workers, NGO workers, journalists. Because of the deaths and the media outcry, the full demolition had been halted. But almost all the former residents were now gone. Some, eligible for relocation, had been bused out of the city, others had just drifted or run away. A few remained, picking through the rubble. She felt twice removed from herself. She kept forgetting things. Eventually Dean put her in an auto, sent her back to the office.
* * *
—
Dean wrote a piece about the demolitions, the children’s deaths. “Tragedy and the Neoliberal Reimagining of Public Space.” Late in the office that night, before heading home, she began looking through the first edition of the next day’s paper. There, on page 8, only a few pages from Dean’s piece, was a full-page, color advert: The Wadia Charitable Foundation wishes to announce a 10 lakh rupee compensation (per child) to the parents of the children tragically killed in the Laxmi Camp eviction disturbance. We deeply regret their loss.
The intense, thoughtful face of Sunny looked out of the page. He was standing at the shoulder of his father, who was seated at a desk, pen in hand, looking up with a genial gaze as if caught unawares in the middle of signing a decree.
Dean slapped a copy of the same paper down on her desk.
“Can you believe this crap?”
She was paralyzed.
“It’s in every damn paper,” he went on. “The cost of the adverts combined is more than the compensation offered.”
“It’s a lot of money,” she said.
“It’s a lot of bullshit. Look at them,” Dean said, opening his crumpled copy to the same page. He jabbed his finger into Bunty’s face. “Who does this guy think he is?”
She thought: It was Sunny. Sunny did this.
“If they think they look good, they’re wrong. It stinks. It stinks of a guilty conscience. You know what?” he snatched up the crumpled copy, leaving Neda’s own looking up at them. “I’m going to find out what they’re really about.”
* * *
—
She texted Sunny from the bathroom.
—I saw the paper.
She stared at the phone a few minutes, waiting.
Nothing.
She wrote again.
—I know it was you.
She stared and stared at the phone. But there was nothing.
Nothing.
—I didn’t ask you to.
Nothing.
—You still don’t get it, do you?
Nothing came.
NEDA II
1.
Nothing came. Her phone remained quiet as a tomb. Days went by. She watched Dean’s fury against the Wadias metastasize, and she carried her own confusion in her heart. She felt at any moment she would be caught. She worked on Dean’s follow-up pieces, focusing on police indifference and judicial failures in light of the evictions. But Dean’s was a lone voice at their paper. Op-eds appeared soon enough from interested parties, defending or excusing the demolitions. Dean charged her with tracking down the parents of the dead kids. All the while she waited for Sunny’s call. She expected him the next day, the next, she expected to hear from him, for him to talk to her. But nothing came. She called him in the end, but his number didn’t exist. She called Ajay and it was the same. She waited a week with no word or sign, and because there was no one she could confide in, it began to feel like all of it was a dream.
* * *
—
She replayed the night in the farmhouse, that terrible vision of his father looming poolside. His implacable foot into Sunny’s chest, sending him under the water. The ride home with Ajay, fluid and inky, as if she were underwater herself.
* * *
—