What a bitter man I am! he thought with some satisfaction. Can’t feel anything for my parents and soon I won’t feel anything for my dead children either. I care only about myself and there’s the rub—I’m not even worth caring about. Self-pity welled in his chest. It was a familiar, even comforting sickness, like the pleasure that a bulimic must feel when the food first starts rising in the elevator of her gullet. He thought again of his failures, thought of his wasted promise, thought of the way in which even God—yes, God!—had confirmed his suspicions about himself by murdering his children. I’m not fit to live! Everything I touch turns to shit! Now look at this poor woman—this lovely woman who’s thrown in her lot with mine (he looked at her as these thoughts swirled through his head, gathering together the threads of his life: only a second or two had passed in the drawing room, where they were having the conversation. She was icing a cake again, as on the day of the blast). What has she got? Nothing but years and years of heartbreak, of being pushed physically, I am sure, into the country of her mother’s cancer. When she married me, with my encouraging smile and my famous family, she probably thought she was gaining security—exactly the thing she craved after that tiny lifeboat of a family in Bangalore. Instead she got the opposite. Or not the opposite—just a continuation of her childhood. Secretly we are all looking for ways to continue our childhoods—the hurt, the pain, the love, the fear, the shame. So just as I recognized in her someone who would let me carry on with my bitterness, she must have recognized in me someone who would let her down repeatedly. Lead her straight into the waltzing, frizzing arms of cancer.
He put his arms around her in the drawing room. Her small, perishable bones—light like aluminum. “We should get you to rest. I don’t want you to fall sick,” he said. It was this fear of sickness—which ticked inside her like a genetic bomb—that kept him from pushing things to their extremes, kept him back from the edge of terrible behavior. There was only so much you could hurt this lovely woman before she imploded.
Back in the jail, a door opened and they were led into a clean bureaucratic office. They had passed through a number of doors already—gates, really—unlocked by the guards and then padlocked behind them before they could pass through the next set of gates. It dizzied the mind. He tried to form an image of the prison in his head, and could come up with only an indeterminate squiggle and a respect for centuries of panoptical construction.
A woman was seated behind the desk. Thin, with healthy oiled hair emerging in a braid, her shirt spruced with epaulets, she got up to greet Jagdish Chacha. The man hadn’t been a cabinet secretary for fifteen years now, but the trappings of power did not go away. While she spoke, he rocked back proudly on his heels and touched his spectacles to signal that he was listening.
Somehow Vikas and Deepa were holding hands again.
It was in this state—making physical contact—that they were best. He had never lost his fascination, never once in fifteen years (they had been married as long as his chacha had not been a cabinet secretary, he realized, with some satisfaction), for how light her bones were; his hands clawed through hers as if trying to break a spider’s web. She opened up her hand and then clung to his tightly. If I had known it would come to this, he thought, I would never have married her. I would have let her go the very first minute we became acquainted at Arthur Andersen; I would have dived behind a desk as she passed.
The lady was the deputy head of the jail system. Now looking tougher to Vikas in her stiff uniform and military posture, she was telling them about protocol, the various things they could and could not do. He nodded, taking in nothing. Then, suddenly, there were too many bodies in the room—not just Mukesh and Jagdish and his wife and the escort but three or four assistants, men dressed like backup waiters at a restaurant or snack servers at a wedding—and the whole group was now led into what appeared to be a barbershop, a vast, sparse space with polished mirrors on one side and chairs that reclined.
“This is run by our inmates,” she said. “They charge twenty rupees for a haircut. The idea is to give them vocational training so when they go out they can adjust to the world.”
“I made a documentary about jails,” Vikas said. “I saw this in the Arthur Road Jail addition in Bombay.”
“Yes, yes, they have it there also,” she said. “But it started here.” She considered Vikas coldly now, with the suspicious look of someone quite unused to having her authority defied. “So you make films, is it?”
“Documentaries, mostly.”
“He’s won two National Film Awards,” Jagdish said. “You must watch them. About social issues,” he muttered. (Vikas had won two Film Society awards, a lesser honor, but he did not interrupt).
But the woman’s attention, in the vast modern-looking white barbershop, had been snared. “A woman came here a while ago, a Mrs. Sujata Menon—you know her?”
“Ah, of course; she’s a friend of mine,” Vikas said, trying to ingratiate himself and also to be a little curt—he did not think this was a pertinent conversation to have seconds before a major meeting; it reminded him of the way surgeons bantered with excessive, rehearsed politeness before they plunged scalpels into you in the ICU. “She took a lot of footage and talked to a lot of my boys here,” the woman said—this is how she referred to her inmates: as boys. “After that I never heard from her. Can you please tell her Mrs. Thapar was asking about her?”
“Of course.”
“A very nice lady; I liked her,” she said. “She really understood the type of reform I’m trying to introduce here.”
Vikas smiled politely. He knew Sujata Menon well. She was a sharp and dangerous journalist—she was always gaining access to places with her upper-middle-class, convent-educated charm and then backstabbing her subjects. He was sure the documentary was about the horrors of these people who proposed “reforms.” Not that he was opposed to such a documentary—that’s what he’d been abortively working toward at Arthur Road Jail in Bombay—it was just that he didn’t approve of misleading people.