Vikas had a fever. Since the day of the blasts, he’d been consumed by such what-ifs (the initial embargo on them, imposed for the sake of his wife, out of a temporary maturity that comes to a man when he feels he is in a historic phase of his life, having been lifted). Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present. For every decision there were a million others he could have made. For every India, a Pakistan of possibilities.
When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided. He blamed himself for all sorts of decisions: for turning down money (he’d been offered a commercial project on the strength of his documentaries but had rejected it on cranky artistic grounds), for not taking another job (his brother had offered him a position at his travel agency when he was particularly low, living off loans from the family), for cowardice (why had he been so afraid of trying his hand in Bombay, of fleeing his festering ancestral womb?). He blamed himself for selfishness (why had he persisted with this career that so clearly made his children ashamed? All the fathers of their friends were industrialists who took their kids on holidays to Jungfrau and bought them Parker pens for their schoolwork). But mostly, he felt trapped with his consequences in the flat, in this flat with its terrazzo floors and yellow post-partition walls and views across the street of the home of a technology czar, a sleek set of buildings muscled through with old, hard, thick Rajasthani-looking wood—a fashionable touch recommended by an architect, no doubt, the same one who had recommended that the pool be shielded from view of the prying neighbors. Are there any women in this house? Vikas wondered, coming to the window. He had vaguely known that the IT czar’s daughter was a classmate of Nakul’s, but he had never seen her or her mother—not even at the funeral rites for the boys, which the czar attended alone, looking freshly barbered and shaved in his white safari suit and designer slippers, slippers he carried in his hands out of fear of the shoe-keeper at the temple misplacing them.
They must drive up in their tinted Mercedes and be docked directly into the air lock of the portico of the Spanish-Rajasthani villa, Vikas thought.
What am I supposed to do? he wondered. How am I supposed to respond to this thing that has happened to me? A few weeks ago I was standing here, looking through this garbled, pearly whorled window for my kids on the street, seeing instead the servants skulking under the ashokas. Now they’re gone, forever, no matter how long I stay here like faithful Hachiko, from their English reader. And yet I have an urge to stay here forever. An urge to punish myself by looking, by scouring every inch of tarred road and glittering gutter and veined dust-sprinkled leaf, in every season, at all times, for my boys—to look till I go blind or mad, till my brain revolts, staging a headache in the space where I am trying to insert the entire city by looking.
His heart moved like a rudder through the icy seas of his chest. Vikas was a tall man with a patrician forehead and a rude thatch of hair; he took it in his hand in wild bunches. He did not move from the window. His eyes—wide-set, mobile, vulnerable—blinked more than normal. His thighs, muscular yet thin, like pipes, burned with tension. Outside, on the street, the wind unfurled a serpent’s tongue of dust through the colony, pushing the organic detritus a few feet, little bits of shattered leaf getting stuck in blisters of tar. Horns. No cars turning the corner. Leaping sunlight. No boys.