Dinesh shakes his head. “Do you even know who you are?”
They’d called Sunny’s room at seven a.m.
Ringing on and on until he was roused from his sleep.
Reception on the line. Then the phone passed to Dinesh.
He’d been smart enough not to call Sunny on his mobile.
“Hey, listen, bro. I need you to get down here. I want to show you something.”
* * *
—
“How long is this going to take?”
Sunny did not expect to be driving into the countryside. Driving out alone, without guards, without security, without a driver? In UP?
His father would not approve.
There is, as has been impressed upon him, a real and ongoing kidnap threat.
Sunny tosses his cigarette. Lights another cigarette almost immediately.
“Oh why?” Dinesh says. “Is there somewhere you need to be?”
Sunny slips farther down in his seat, closes his eyes entirely, and concentrates on the cigarette between his fingers and on his lips. The very real tangible cigarette and the smoke that goes in and out of his lungs. Is he asleep?
“I like to slip out,” Dinesh says. “Go into the villages and towns. Take the pulse of the common man. You should try it sometime. You might learn something.”
The engine has stopped. The air is moody, pregnant with the monsoon.
They’re in a lane in a scrappy little market town. An oppression of horns, bodies streaming past. The stench of everything. How did they . . . ?
“You were out cold,” Dinesh says. “But you looked so angelic. I thought: just let him sleep.”
Sunny sits up. Still vulnerable. Senile, momentarily.
“What happened to my . . . ?” He looks at his fingers.
“I took it right out of your hand, bro. You were ready to burn yourself. Come on.”
Dinesh climbs out, breezy, ready for the world.
They take a table at a simple dhaba overlooking the main road, quietly bustling, red plastic chairs, stained tablecloth, surly no-nonsense waiters. One arrives and Dinesh orders a plate of parathas, two nimbu panis.
They look like a couple of big city folk on the way to somewhere else.
“It’s funny, I’m out of uniform, so no one recognizes me. I realized, they all know me by my kurta. If I turned up wearing a beautiful white kurta, maybe they’d recognize me. If I turned up next to my father, well! Then they’d know who I was. Everybody knows what my father looks like. My father, and his famous mustache. The second most famous man in this state. You could draw that mustache on a cartoon face without eyes, ears, nose, and I swear, voters would know who it was. I used to say, you should put that mustache in the ballot box. You know, I saw him once, when I was a child, without his mustache. I don’t remember why. He turned up at home one day with it shaved off. I cried and cried like crazy. I didn’t recognize him at all!”
Sunny says nothing.
“But you know what really interests me?”
Still nothing.
Dinesh taps the table. “The most famous man.”
Sunny lowers his shades, looks at him warily.
“I bet my shirt,” Dinesh says, “no one here has the slightest clue what he looks like. And yet”—he presses the tip of his finger down until it turns white—“and yet if I stood up and shouted his name, what do you think would happen? Shall I try? Do you want to see what happens when I call out your father’s name?”
Sunny stares at him with a face like murder.
The waiter arrives with the parathas and drinks.
“The sooner you tell me what you want . . . ,” Sunny says.
Dinesh comes back in, leans both elbows on the table. Gently, he tears a small triangle of paratha apart, places it in his mouth. He eats with tiny, controlled gestures.
“What I really, really want,” he says, “is to know what the fuck is going on with you.”
Sunny rubs his face, growing in agitation.
“And I keep telling you.”
“So tell me again.”
“There’s nothing. Nothing is going on.” A long pause. A small concession. “What do you think is going on?”
Dinesh nods once, firmly. “I think you’re depressed, man. Frankly speaking.”
“Fuck off.”
“And, you know,” Dinesh goes on, “that shit really affects me. Not just in our business relationship. I mean it affects me here”—he slaps his hand to his heart—“right here, it hurts to see you like this.” He cracks his knuckles gently. “You may not know it, but I used to look up to you. I used to hang on your every word, brother. You knew shit. I’m talking about those good old Delhi days. I was stuck here, dreaming, learning my trade, and you were in Delhi like a . . . like, like a fireball, blazing through the sky.”
“Spare me.”
“No. To talk to you was to travel the globe. Look at you now. You’re . . . you’re like . . . frankly, I don’t know what you’re like. But look at you. You look like shit, Sunny. Yes, it’s true, don’t look at me like that, look at that belly instead. Do something about it. Because, bro, you look like shit. And some people, they just get fat because they love life. You know. They eat, drink, and be merry. But you? No.” He wags his finger, crosses his legs. “You’re not loving anything anymore. You’re miserable. That’s what it is. You’re depressed. And it can’t go on like this. Look,” he says, lowering his voice to a whisper against the morning thrum, holding what he knows is Sunny’s eye through the black glass of his shades. “Look, I know what it is. I know what happened. That night, that business with Rathore. It’s no great secret.”
He watches Sunny clench his jaw.
“These things eat at you.”
Sunny shakes his head, stares into the middle distance across the road.
“You don’t know shit.”
But Dinesh has the scent.
“It’s the girl, isn’t it?”
“What girl?”
“What girl!” Dinesh laughs in mock surprise, claps his hands together. “You were in love with her, no?”
Sunny snorts a laugh. “You’re fucking retarded.”
“What was her name?”
Nothing from Sunny.
“Neda,” Dinesh says. “That was her name.”
He watches Sunny for a reaction.
“Oh, yeah, that bitch,” Sunny says, as if recalling a long-forgotten acquaintance. “She was a bad fuck. Nothing more. I threw her out.”
“Right.” Dinesh brushes crumbs onto the floor. Pinches off another piece of paratha. “I’m glad you cleared that up. That makes a lot more sense than the story I heard.”
Dinesh is waiting for him to take the bait.
It takes awhile to come.
But it comes.
“What did you hear?”
“Oh no, forget it, it’s nothing.”
“Fuck off, what did you hear?”
“You really want to know?”
“Fucking tell me or shut up.”
“Your father sent her away. That’s what I heard. With, pardon the expression, an offer she couldn’t refuse. A very generous one, monetarily speaking.”
Sunny is a picture of nothingness.
Dinesh pushes the plate his way.
“Why don’t you have some paratha?”
“Why don’t you shove your paratha up your ass.”