He began to rail against his friends. What a judgmental, bigoted bunch I’ve been blessed with. Not one intellectual or broad-minded fellow in the whole lot of them. They all watch movies and read pondy mags and fantasize about all sorts of women but when it comes to marriage they’ll be marrying the usual fat Punjabi kuddis. . . . He suddenly felt very brave, like he was an activist hired by the government to promote national integration in a stubbornly segregationist Indian subcontinent.
Then a week passed. She made no effort to talk to him and was busy walking around the office twirling her hair with a finger, her crisp skirts making a sound like grains being raked, and Vikas began to feel nervous. What if she was about to quit? What if one of these British-looking fellows had designs on her? In the office Vikas had calculated that about fifteen men were better-looking and more articulate than he, while the other seventy were not; of course, he believed himself to be the most brilliant, with the best taste. Your taste won’t matter if you do nothing with it. If you just sit. He thought of his playboy friend Prabhat, who was just finishing his specialization in pediatrics, and from whom he had stolen so many gestures. Prabhat flirts with everyone: girls, aunties, babies, men, children. He has no shame at all. Prabhat’s lack of shame was amusing and endearing. He was in a sense an ecumenical playboy. In college in Delhi he had dated a couple of fantastically ugly coconut–hair oil types from Haryana—fellow medical students who, Vikas had said unkindly, should consider specializing in the medicine of self–plastic surgery. But then Prabhat had also snagged an air hostess and a TV newscaster, and in fact was now engaged to the latter. Bloody lucky fellow, with his good looks, his height, his hair which stands up on end . . .
Vikas went one day to Deepa’s desk doing a full medley of Prabhat gestures: tousling his hair into thick black twisting flames; stooping a little, as if he were a tall man; and looking off to the side as he spoke, as if deeply distracted by the galloping machinery of his intellect. “Deepa, hi. Oh—I saw Mean Streets, by the way. It’s bloody brilliant, man.”
She looked up from her desk. “Isn’t it? I love that scene in the billiards place.”
“Yeah, yeah, what amazing camerawork,” he said, fumbling—he hadn’t seen it. “Only thing was—I had a bad print. I saw it on my cousin’s VCR and there was that normal PAL/NTSC problem.” He continued, “Someone should bring new wave to India also.”
“Indian men aren’t handsome enough to pull off new wave stuff,” she laughed.
“Insult, yaar. Insult.”
“I’m joking, yaar,” she said. She picked up a piece of paper and began signing it. “One minute,” she said, and signed something else.
Vikas waited with his hands on his hips, wondering if the crowd of CAs was surveying him. To distract himself, he dished out more of his hair from his scalp and looked up at the ceiling. It occurred to him that there was something brilliant about Prabhat’s gestures: he’d taken a host of normal nervous tics and transformed them into something sexy and unpredictable and moody.
“You love touching your hair,” Deepa said, interrupting.
“No, no,” Vikas said. “It just distracts me.”
“What happened to your thumbs?” she said.
“Oh this?” he said, feeling suddenly embarrassed. There were two gashes, like mini eyes, on the sides of both his thumbs. “I scratch my thumbs when I’m bored and sometimes they peel off.” He had been doing it a lot recently, thinking of Deepa.
“It’s quite deep,” she said, taking his hands in hers and turning them over, like he was a child being examined for dirt by his mother.
Vikas felt a wild electric charge shoot through him. I wonder what the other CAs are thinking, he thought. But he let her look at the thumbs. These Christian girls, he thought. So fast. No wonder Mahinder the sardar was always going on about them.
She let his hands go and seemed to nod in a deep, knowing way. “I have many nervous tics also,” she said. “I bite my nails. I also pick at my face.” She grinned crookedly. For the first time Vikas noticed how properly filed her nails were, though they were bloodless and devoid of nail polish. The fingers were fragile-looking and wiry and veined with bluish-green vessels, and when Vikas looked at her face again he could suddenly see the vessels crisscrossing her large forehead, throbbing things like the pressings of stems in a scrapbook, the skin of the forehead already crinkled. She was just a mesh of blood, he thought, with pity. A fragile biological creature.
Vikas said, “Have you seen any films by Bergman, by the way?”
“Bergman? Let’s see. Scenes from a Marriage. Persona. Virgin Spring. Through a Glass Darkly. So yes. Four.”
Vikas was truly amazed. “That’s more than I’ve seen, man! I’ve just seen Scenes from a Marriage and Persona.” He said, “He’s a total genius, no?”
“I agree.”
He went on, “Sorry—I don’t know why I brought him up. I just thought, given that you liked Scorsese, you might like Bergman.” This was nonsense and he knew it. He had brought up Bergman because Fanny and Alexander was playing at a festival at Kamani, and he wanted to see if she was going, but he had lost his courage. “Anyway, I’m glad you like Bergman; it makes me happy someone else watches him also.”
“I think he’s quite famous, no?”