Shockie said, “These small chocolates will achieve nothing.”
Meraj shook his head absently.
“You’re listening?” Shockie said. “Fuck it. It’s useless talking to you.”
This was not the best attitude to have, since they were soon on a five-hour bus to Gorakhpur, in India. A diesel-perfumed monster, its seats appeared ready to come loose from their moorings on the metal floor. Shockie looked out angrily at the landscape as Meraj drenched his shoulder with drool. How had this arid, dusty, ruthless part of the world become his life? Fighting for Kashmiri independence, he hadn’t seen Kashmir in two years; he was an exile, and in those two years, he feared (with the unreasonable worry of all exiles) that Kashmir would have changed. What if it had become like this after all the warfare? What if the green had been exhausted and the placid mirror of Dal Lake had been smashed, revealing layers of dead bodies and desert that lay on the lake bed?
When he’d been growing up in the late eighties and early nineties, he was convinced that the bottom of the lake was choked with bodies, that each taut stem of lotus or water hyacinth tugged at the neck of a drowned person like a noose. Sometimes his friends and he boarded a shikara and went trawling, running their hands through the water, jumping back if they touched something or if they saw a small drop of red floating by.
When Shockie looked out of the window again, it was evening. It occurred to him through his sleep that maybe even Uttar Pradesh had once been as pretty as Kashmir—only to be despoiled by wars and invasions.
Gorakhpur is one of the armpits of the universe. The best thing that can be said about it is that it is better than Azamgarh, which, along with Moradabad, competes in an imaginary inverse beauty pageant for the title of the world’s ugliest town.
Shockie and Meraj disembarked and checked in to their usual hotel—a half-finished concrete building that had once been a godown and was crowned with rooms in a gallery on the first floor and now called Das Palace. (Though they called it Udaas Palace—Sad Palace.)
The room was even more awful than the ones they were assigned in Kathmandu. Mosquitoes swarmed through the gaps in the doorframe—the door did not fit properly. Meraj, alert after his nap on the bus, smeared his body with Odomos. “There’s Japanese encephalitis here,” he said, offering the tube to Shockie and savoring the name of the disease: he had once been a compounder.
Shockie accepted moodily. Alexander the Great had died from a mosquito bite, from malaria, he knew.
In the morning, when they had drunk tea served by the hunchback, the only apparent employee of the hotel, they went to visit the Jain.
The Jain sat on a cushion in an impeccable house, impeccable only on the inside, of course: outside was a heap of roiling, shifting garbage, a heap that seemed a living thing with rats burrowing through it—swimming, really, floating in an unreal paradise of gnawables with pigs pushing aside layers of plastic and rotten trembling fruit with their snouts.
But the Jain’s house, built like a Gujarati kothi, was oblivious to all this. The Jain was a boulder of a man with smooth coal-colored skin and a bald head offset by two equal tufts of hair. His nose was a beautiful chorus of tiny pores. He had large dark hands, whitish on the inside. He sat on his knees on a cushion in a white kurta, the rock of his paunch balanced before him. “I had orchiopexy, you see—you know what that is?” he started. “When one of your testes doesn’t descend.” He must have been twenty-nine, thirty. No one in this world was very old. “For years I had lots of pain, and though I was strong, I couldn’t run without losing my breath and getting a sharp pain in my torso. I used to always wonder why.” The servant set down three earthen cups of tea; the Jain accepted his cup daintily in his large hands. “Now that I’ve had surgery I have all this energy. I can run five kilometers without stopping.”
Where does the poor fellow run in this dump? Shockie wondered. But ideas of health, Western ideas, were spreading everywhere. Shockie himself was obsessed with exercise, with hanging from a rod in his doorway.
“Anyway,” the Jain said, putting his large hands on his thighs, thighs the size of cricket bats, “I overdid it, so I have been advised to rest. Hence this cushion under me.”
A fan turned overhead, raising a delicious current from the layers of sleeping air. It was dark in the drawing room, a welcome respite from the May heat of Gorakhpur.
The servant brought a VIP suitcase with a numbered lock and the Jain twisted it open on his lap. “Count it,” he said.
Meraj and Shockie each took a bundle in their hands and petaled the notes. Shockie was sleepy and slightly delirious; the room had a fan but not much air, and the smell of fresh money made him high. He kept losing count only to realize he’d been thinking of nothing, or rather, thinking of himself thinking.