You wanted to know what happened to me, you wanted to know why I disappeared, where I was. You’ve already guessed. What I’m trying to tell you, I was there, there at the end, in the crash. I was there on the road. I was there with Sunny. Gautam. Ajay. I was there with the girl. I held her when she died. I didn’t know her name. I read her name later in the news. One of your pieces, one of someone else’s I don’t know. You were always there to record the names, weren’t you. All their names. I saw the broken bodies. Dean, I don’t remember everything . . . I’m back in Delhi suddenly, a teenage girl in my room. The monkeys have come down from the ridge and they’re jumping in the trees in the park. My father used to carry a stick every morning on his walks. I want to go back there. Go back there more than anything, that time, that Delhi, and take another path. But I can’t. It’s impossible. To dream it is intolerable. I can’t bear it anymore. I know I don’t deserve your sympathy. I imagine your stoneface . . . Dean, let’s set this straight . . . you want to understand. First it was Sunny, Bunty, the Wadias, what you learned, what they did to you, and I was there on the side, then it was something new. You want to know everything, you want to know how I was involved. It still confuses you. You still can’t find a thing. Here it is now. The first thing I can give you: I shouldn’t have been in that job. You know my mother flexed her muscles and found that position for me. Good, old-fashioned nepotism. Or something about idle hands. My father had been sick so I couldn’t go abroad. You’ve heard this story before. And on paper at least I was some kind of match. I studied the liberal arts. My English was beyond reproach. I’m upper caste and fair. What’s not to love? So I started work and of course I didn’t have any ethics. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as ethics in journalism. I knew injustice when I saw it, in a novel, on the news, but I never understood the process of its creation. I never considered complicity, or the obligation to guard against it in yourself. I was interested in a good story above all else. And yet you pursued me. Or you let me pursue you. I often think you missed your calling. You should have been working with the lepers in East Delhi, you should have been giving sermons at Tis Hazari Church. Did you see something in me worth saving? I don’t know how you lasted so long. See, your problem was decency and mine was being afflicted by the toxic compound of curiosity and passivity. Passivity is normal—most people suffer from it. They watch the woman being beaten in the street. They watch the accident from the car window. They’re frozen, expecting someone else to intervene. I’m the same. Only I’ll go and stand right next to the beating and take notes. Remember this. Remember this. Write it down. Remember the light. Yeah, I just want to see where the story goes, it’s my privilege to observe the futility of life. But life isn’t futile if you live it right. I want to live it right, I want to but I can’t! Let me just confess something else: I was interested in Sunny from the start. He was the smoke that told me there was fire. I was bored of Delhi, of the job. Of you. I was restless. I wanted more. I was twenty-one and he was promising to make Delhi the center of the world and I believed him. Why not? I remember you called him a joker that first time, you dismissed him as another rich kid, and that stung, it stung like you’d insulted me. You were coming from the States. You hadn’t lived through the nineties in Delhi. You hadn’t seen how dusty and dull and sleepy it was. You couldn’t understand how someone like Sunny made me feel. I was coming out of the years of dealing with my father’s cancer too, of the disappointment of not being able to escape, when everyone around me had left and gone. Then he came along with his ideas, his words, his wealth and glamour, and it just seemed like the most incredible trick in the world. Do you think any of us asked where his wealth came from? Seriously? We grew up watching Beverly Hills 90210. We treated our servants with kindness, but they were still our servants. That was the way it was. We wanted above all else to live like the West. We never thought about the consequences of that, the misery our desires were built on in the Indian context. What did you expect me to do? Put on a hair shirt? Renounce it all and go live in a slum? No. He looks at you and says, “let’s go.” What would you do? So I started with him. And I saw no conflict of interest. I had nothing to declare. Even when you mocked him, wondered about his background. I just thought, there goes Dean again, American Dean. Like when foreigners came and discovered poverty and wept, started giving out money in the street, gave away their shoes. They could afford it. But I’m Indian. I could live with our work by day and be in Sunny’s world by night and it was fine, it was fine until it wasn’t fine. I have had so many lives, and I’ve lived them all apart from the other, it’s what you do, a woman, a woman in Delhi of means. It was fine until it wasn’t. So yeah, I started seeing Sunny, and there was this small window of joy. Do you know what it feels like to have power? Real power. To sit all of a sudden inside the wheels of power and speed through the city with your eyes wide, watching everything, making eye contact with everything—it was intoxicating. To roar through the city at speed and have no fear, and to see, to be able to see, the way a man sees, to stare, be able to do it without blinking, my God. I don’t know, maybe as a man it’s something you can’t understand. Your fear arises from the things you do, not the things that are denied to you. But Sunny gave the city to me. And here’s the thing you didn’t understand about him, here it is. He wasn’t his father. Sunny wanted to leave his father behind. He hated his father. He wanted out. He wanted to go his own way. I wanted to help him. Why would I have come to you with any of this? Why would I have abandoned him? I wasn’t living like a journalist. I was living like someone in love.
Where did it go wrong? Was it the deaths at the demolition site? The adverts he put out as a consequence? It locked us all in a death spiral. You were offended by what you thought was hypocrisy. You thought it was his father, but you weren’t looking at it right. It was all Sunny. He was trying to placate me. Trying to impress me, to spite his father. I was distraught, as you saw. I had some rage by then, a little of you had already seeped into me. I repeated your lines. But I used them quite cynically, to wound him. I started to question his world without really believing in the question. Just to taunt him. Only my grief was real. I’d been immune for so long to the city and suddenly there I was, confronted by it in the shape of dead children. Not on TV, in front of my eyes. Their ashen bodies. I was a mess, and he wanted to protect me. In his wisdom he took me away, smuggled me to his farmhouse, where I could escape the city, inoculate and isolate myself for a while, recline in luxury. It didn’t work. It only upset me more. I should have walked away, I should have come to you. I might have, if something hadn’t happened that night, if I hadn’t seen his father and understood so much . . .
. . . I won’t go into that night. You can’t have it . . .
But I barely saw him again after. I saw him on three occasions in seven or eight months after that night, and after the last night, never again, though he has haunted me all this time . . .
What am I supposed to apologize to you about? What is mine to confess? I’ve made excuses for myself, I’ve tried to make you understand why I was with him, why I didn’t betray him, how I got to that point. But all you want to know from me is what really happened that night.
Tomorrow I might tell this story differently. I’ll have changed again. Only the words will remain, and what truth they hold I can’t tell. I can’t remember. I don’t know what else to say. So let me tell you.
Sunny had made a decision in the weeks before—he was finally going to leave his father. He was going his own way. Taking what he could and making a fresh start. He had convinced me that Gautam was his friend. Oh, it’s so ridiculous . . . but this is what I understand: his father, punishing him, controlling every aspect of his life, charged him with taming Gautam, making him loyal to them for some future use, something about their land back in Madhya Pradesh. It was one of a thousand schemes his father had, he just happened to use his son for this one. But Gautam only dragged Sunny down. It’s clear to me now he’d got him hooked on the blow. Oh, these men, these fucking men . . . two heirs who hated their fathers, using the other for escape. The way Sunny painted it, they would survive. He called me that night. He called me and Gautam to the club and he was giddy. I went there with some kind of hope, but as soon as I walked inside, I knew all the things Sunny had been trying to convince me about Gautam were wrong. I could read it in his eyes. I looked at Sunny, he seemed so pathetic. I could see what was coming, it was so plain and clear. Sunny called for another bottle of champagne. When it arrived, he put one arm around Gautam’s shoulders, another around mine, pulled us close together and said . . . “Well, it’s time . . .”
“Well, it’s time,” he says.
“Sunny . . .”
“We’re getting out.”
“Sunny . . .”
She tries to stop him, but stopping him is as good as killing him right now.
Still, she tries.
“Sunny, don’t.”
Bloated, exhausted. On edge.
“You don’t know what’s on my mind. But we’ve talked it to death. Tomorrow morning, I’m doing it. I’m telling him I’m leaving him behind. I’ve tried to prove myself, I’ve tried to do what’s asked of me, and nothing works, nothing makes him happy. There’s nothing left for me. I don’t have to live like this.”
He’s staring at the bottle in his hand; the bottle in his hand is shaking.
“We can start from scratch,” he says. “We can build our own world.”
He’s never looked so naked and scared, never looked so vulnerable, and she’s never loved him so much as she does right now.
He pops the cork and charges her glass, Gautam’s glass, his.
She looks to Gautam.
Gautam looks to her.
And she knows.
Just knows.
Sunny sees the nausea in her face.
“What’s wrong?”
She keeps her gaze on Gautam.
Gautam on her.
“Go on, tell him,” she says.
Sunny frowns. “What?”
She’s not even sure.
But Gautam takes the bait.
“Here’s to Neda.” He makes a toast, swallows his champagne, and refills his own glass. “The smartest bitch in the room.”
The look of confusion on Sunny’s face breaks her heart.
“Tell me what?”
Gautam begins to laugh.
“That you’re a fool.”
Sunny laughs too. For a second, it’s a joke. Then he has the sensation of being exposed.
“Why,” he asks, “am I a fool?”
* * *
—
Gautam tells him. “It’s as plain as your nose. You actually think I want to go off and make a hotel with you? A hotel?! Pull myself up by my bootstraps? With you?! Sunny, my boy, you’re nothing on your own. You think you could survive a minute in this world without your father? You would be a losing proposition. You’re too gullible. You lack what’s called a cutting edge. The only reason I’m sitting with you right now is because of Daddy Dear. Take away Daddy, and you’re just a . . .”
“But we . . .”
“But we,” Gautam cuts back. “But, but, but . . .” He stands. “But you said you were my friend.” He raises his glass, saunters across the room, turns at the door. “It was good while it lasted, Sunny boy, you got me on my feet, that’s true enough, but it’s time for the next adventure.”
He might have left it at that. But he goes on.
“You know what? Maybe I’ll go right now and wake Daddy Dearest. Tell him what a fool his son has been. Do you think he’ll adopt me? Do you think he’ll greet me with open arms?”
* * *
—
Sunny has been sitting dumbstruck listening to him speak. Now it’s dawning on him: it’s over. All avenues are shut. A new thought: maybe he will. Maybe he’ll greet you with open arms. She says his name. She reaches for his hand, but he pulls it away. “What did you do?” He might be talking to himself. He reaches for the bottle, grips its neck.
* * *
—
She’s shouting his name. He pushes past her. Shouting his name over and over as he holds the bottle like a club and pushes past the curtain and enters the main room. She thinks: He’s going to kill him. Or get himself killed. She puts her head in her hands. Then she hears the screams. Not one, but many. The sound of broken glass. Of a brawl. A man falls through the curtain into the VIP room, his face streaming blood. She runs.
* * *