The only thing he has left.
He pulls the razor from Karan’s throat and digs it into his left wrist. Gouges it open. Does the same to the right.
Lies down next to Karan.
Looks Ajay in the eyes.
Ajay looks down, turns his back.
Walks away.
FOUR
LUCKNOW, 2006
DINESH AND SUNNY
“So?” he says.
“So what?” Sunny replies.
“So you got what you wanted . . .”
They sit in the private room of the five-star hotel restaurant, Sunny and Dinesh Singh, hushed in the AC, looking out through one-way glass at the elite of Lucknow living their best lives.
“. . . but are you happy?”
Sunny winces like he swallowed something bad.
“What?”
“It’s a simple enough question,” Dinesh says. “Are you happy?”
“Right now?” Sunny puts his lips to his whisky. “The conversation is a little lacking.”
Dinesh smiles. “You know what I mean.”
“What are you?” Sunny says after a long pause. “My shrink?”
“Do you have one?” Dinesh replies. “Do you want one?”
“Jesus.”
“Either way, the question stands.”
Sunny stares straight ahead, crunches the ice, signals to the attendant for one more.
Dinesh echoes the wave as Sunny lights a cigarette.
Endorsing Sunny’s order.
Being a good host.
This is Lucknow after all. His turf.
Also, there have been problems. Sunny, intoxicated in the past, has caused a scene, sometimes merrily, sometimes angrily, before blacking out.
At some point Dinesh may have to make a call: no more drinks for Sunny Wadia.
But he’ll cross that bridge when he gets to it.
As for the question: Is Sunny Wadia happy?
File that away under Who the Fuck Knows?
If Sunny’s not on the way up, he’s coming down. Lurching from one position to the next, avoiding the horror of an equilibrium that can only reveal his face in the mirror.
In his midtwenties, already starting to look old. Fat and old. Held together by shoestrings of misery, dark energy, expensive suits. It’s incredible, the extent to which he’s letting himself go.
Sunny turns his head.
He can still arrange his face just so.
Do I really have to sit through this? Listen to this from you?
And Dinesh’s face is saying:
Yeah, you do.
They have a little bit of telepathy by now.
Sunny gets up, and Dinesh gently pushes him back down.
“Chill,” he says. “I’m just fucking with you.”
Sunny had come to Lucknow to finalize the land acquisition. Today the deal was done. The land in Greater Noida was going to be all theirs. The farmers were to be bought off. This so-called Megacity would take root.
The details had already been thrashed out by their fathers. All Sunny had to do today was dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Dinesh had to be there to facilitate. Dinesh had nothing exceptional to do.
But Dinesh also has plans of his own. In the past couple of years he has grown in myriad ways. Developed into a striking young man. An ambitious, effective leader in waiting.
Before, he was simply playing the part.
He was, in many ways, aping Sunny Wadia. The truth is, Dinesh used to be a little gauche. A little bit “village.” Sunny had always been the more stylish, the more worldly. But then Sunny stood still, and Dinesh worked on himself. He traveled extensively. To seminars and museums, galleries, auctions, fashion shows, opera houses. He befriended writers and thinkers and grilled them extensively about matters unknown to him. His English became nuanced. He learned to express himself colloquially, modulating his delivery to include a sense of play, irony, delight. People once laughed behind his back, thought he was a striver. They don’t laugh anymore. To reflect all this, he has developed his style as well. He still wears kurtas, but he accentuates them with elegant scarves, jeweled brooches, with pocket pins and pocket squares. He wears designer spectacles modeled, it has been noted, to both approbation and approval, on Dr. Ambedkar.
Yes, he is well groomed.
He is well put together.
It shows.
Next to Sunny now, it definitely shows.
* * *
—
“I’m not going to let it go,” Dinesh says. “I want to know what’s going on in that head of yours.”
It’s the next morning.
Monsoon clouds fill the air.
They’re in Dinesh’s Pajero 4×4.
Sunny is smoking a cigarette, staring forward at the road, clammy in his fine white shirt, knees up, feet on the dash, one hand across his gut. In intense negotiations with his own hangover.
Last night, he sat obstinate in the booth. Dinesh’s entourage joined, talked rumor, policy, social justice, election tactics, hip-hop, eventually “the bitches,” and he was a coiled serpent of misery. The hotel bar became increasingly busy beyond the isolation of their room, and Sunny became increasingly withdrawn.
Out in the main section, another drunk man began playing the piano badly, bashing at the keys in what could only be called an act of provocation. Free jazz, Dinesh joked.
But when a tipsy young woman objected in her own brash manner, the man pulled a revolver on her, waved it around the crowd. Then Dinesh was up and out before you knew it, defusing the situation.
Dinesh the Peacemaker.
He disarmed the rowdy in full view of the room, put an arm round his shoulder and led him to the exit, listening to his woes, handing the gun to security, all witnessed by the pack of city journalists, formerly huddled in one corner, drinking hard.
Sunny made the revolver incident his excuse to escape. He slunk upstairs to his suite without a good-bye, opened the bottle of whisky he’d had Eli buy. Drank a good two thirds of it before he passed out cold.
He’d woken to his own screaming at four thirty a.m.
A nightmare. Someone had been pulling him somewhere he didn’t want to go.
Turned out he’d been clasping his own hands, holding them tight above his head, lying on his belly, trying to prize them apart in his sleep. He sat at the side of the bed trying to remember himself, shaking off his fear. He poured a large glass of whisky, slung it back, lit a cigarette, smoked half of it, poured more whisky, knocked that back too, went back to bed and focused on the humming of the AC.
“Nothing’s going on with me,” he says. “Nothing.”
The morning becomes bright with the sun between the clouds scorching the earth, making Sunny’s skin itch, turning the puddles in the road into obnoxious mirrors.
Dinesh looks him up and down dubiously.
“Yeah, right. I mean, you look like shit.”
“That’s because you dragged me out of bed.”
They’re an hour out of Lucknow.
Out in the countryside. The green fields, the bicycles, the buffalo. The life-giving monsoon air streaming through the windows like a fresh current in the ocean over this lush and bountiful land.
Dinesh is dressed casually, in navy APC chinos and a red Loro Piana wool polo shirt with Loro Piana suede moccasins.
He’s saying something.
“What?”