“About last night.”
Bunty smiles. “Does it matter? Do you think I don’t know everything anyway? Your plans with him. Your plans with the girl. Do you think I didn’t know?” So there it is. His father knew it all. He watched quietly, waiting for Sunny to ruin himself. Waiting, waiting, until . . . “But you’ve wiped the slate clean.” Bunty stands. Shifts his body close to Sunny and Sunny looks up as Bunty speaks. “I always worried for you. Worried that you didn’t have it in you to be my son. But you destroyed everything you held close in a heartbeat.” He reaches for Sunny’s face, holds his cheek in his great hand. “You did good, son.” Tears well and fall. Then just as suddenly Bunty is gone, walking across the villa floor. “You didn’t ask about the girl,” he calls back brightly. “She didn’t ask about you either.” He pauses at the sliding doors. “You’ll stay here in the farmhouse for four nights. As far as the world is concerned, you’re in Singapore.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Eli will keep an eye on you here.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“When you return home we’ll get to work.”
4.
He returned to the city mansion on the fifth day, Eli driving him home. To his penthouse, still almost empty since it had been torn apart. He walked into it, and he was glad all the memories were gone. He was with his father now. He ate with his father, he sat with his father, he listened to his father’s calls in the evening in his father’s great mahogany-paneled dining room, the two of them alone.
* * *
—
He told himself a story. He had been playing different roles all his life, testing personas, like all young people test themselves. Seeing who it was possible to be. Seeing which one fit. For a while he had enjoyed building a scene, projecting himself in a certain way, as an avant-garde philanthropist, a patron of the arts, as a good man with a moral code. There had been that flourishing cult of personality around him, and this he had greatly enjoyed. He had enjoyed the attention, the importance he was afforded by a small band, which he craved as a proxy for what he really needed. He had lavished them with generosity.
* * *
—
And the more he exercised his incredible generosity, the more he felt the desire to corrupt grow in him. He had seen it again and again inside himself. He lavished his friends with wine, whisky, champagne, five-star meals. He let them know everything was free, everything was on him, they needn’t worry about this ridiculous little thing called money because it would keep pouring from his body, his wallet, his card, his father. He watched their pleasure, especially those who were not conditioned to wealth, who otherwise had to count their rupees. He forced luxury and pleasure upon them so readily. It was only inevitable their tolerance, their threshold would increase. That they would slowly stop expressing delight and guilt and joy at what came from him. That they would slowly come to expect everything. And then he would pull the plug on them.
* * *
—
Now when these old friends came back to him, in the weeks and months that followed, as Gautam got clean in the Alps, as Neda vanished into London, as Ajay was just a name gathering dust, as the crash was forgotten, never spoken of, never raised, never even known, as all the tension of the last year washed away, he watched with numb pleasure as these parasites devoured everything around them without a second thought, and those he’d rejected so cruelly and arbitrarily turned up once more as if it had never happened, and partied without question, consumed without question, took everything from him. But now he succumbed to that desire within him to see them suffer, to see them fall prey to their vices. He surveyed them, his false friends, and despised them all, and was secretly glad in his heart because he was corrupting them. He was giving and giving and giving in the knowledge that when they needed him most he could take it all away.
* * *
—
In a globalized world given over to solitary consumption, his desires found expression in the anonymity of expressways and the suites of luxury hotels, pleasure in their streamlined ease, liberation in their frictionless navigation. He only need withdraw his card, only need direct his driver, sit back and close his eyes, let the blue glow of the future wash over him. The car would do the rest, the card would do the rest, the driver would do the rest. He despised public contact, dust, noise, failure, sorrow. He’d dream of waking in a city of the future, depopulated, full of elevated walkways, paths to nowhere on which no one walked.
* * *
—
When he was called in to his father, he was told he would get his reward. Now he would build. But not in Delhi. Delhi was dead to him. He would build across the border in UP. There was land, land given to them, land that Ram Singh had acquired, which Dinesh Singh would oversee, as was the deal. It was a blank canvas of nothingness upon which he could finally construct his dreams.
AJAY IV
Tihar Jail
1.
It was a lesson to him, the photo of his sister. You’re never comfortable. You’re never happy. Thinking you have power, you’re in control, this is a mistake. Never make that mistake again. He keeps hold of the photo in the brothel, it’s in his hand all day, in his hand at night, a double-edged sword, a double-sided coin that’s the price of life. Obedience and slavery. He can’t bring himself to look at her face. He can’t stomach the words on the back of it. But he holds it. All day long he torments himself. He just holds it, keeps his eyes averted. An act of torture, an austerity. His sister. He wants to see her again. He wouldn’t judge her. He would save her. At night before he sleeps he allows his eyes to fall on her.
* * *
—
Is it possible to withdraw? Disappear? Be erased? Can one do it by doing nothing? Or must one make the choice? Must one take the drastic step? There it is, the thought that’s been dogging him, at his heel his whole life. He, Ajay, can die. He can just die. It would be quick. It would only take a moment and all the pain would end.
* * *