She sat down on the bed, her buttocks on the sheet, and began to read a gray dusty book titled The Magic Mountain, which she lifted from the side table.
Mukesh sat down on the sofa in the room, clutching and mopping his brow. Now that he had what he’d wanted—now that he was so close to it—he had a mind to turn back.
After a while, he got up as if to leave, but then turned around and, still fully clothed—this is how he liked to do it—climbed onto the bed.
It was not love—what happened. Though she had opened herself to him in that bed, on that morning, she was not aroused when he speedily covered her body with his.
It was as if she would only let him have her by pretending to be dead.
Their passion took on the flat quality of those mornings with their archipelagoes of white light thrown on the floor, the bones of the windows visible and gaunt, Mukesh coming over and rummaging around in her life, her bed—she never thought of it as sex, but as rummaging.
She had long since evacuated the sphere of full feeling. In some ways Vikas had been right about her after she’d come back from visiting Malik—she was gone. What remained was a bright shadow, a disturbance of light intent on going on a little longer.
The trouble started when she began to fall in love with Mukesh, as she looked forward to these illicit visits, imagining the imprint of his hands on the old wooden railing that ran alongside the staircase—the hands with their blisters from breaking and peeling branches with Swiss knives on trips to Dalhousie; hands that dragged the sliding door at the entrance to the drawing room so it hung, like a man taken by the throat, a few inches above its rail on the ground.
That’s when she asked him for money.
That had been the implicit agreement from the start—that he would give her money for Anusha; he had offered it after the first visit as he buttoned up his shirt and put on his brutal black shoes: the patriarch getting dressed before his family, entertaining petitions. And they never once talked about his wife and two grown-up daughters. “I should go pick up Anusha,” she had said after that first time, still half-smiling, half-radiant, abashed, touching her hair, confused, scared. She too knew she had crossed a threshold and, having done it, could not say why. It was not out of attraction—she had no physical feelings for Mukesh, disliked his breath, disliked even the tender, consoling way he had held her, as if putting her in a hypnotic lock before committing his act—no, she felt only a warping stasis, the desire to be rid of a station of life, no matter the method or means. And Mukesh, with his kara-cuffed arms, his triple-ringed fingers with their superstitious ruby insets, his almost synthetic mustache, his filigreed eyes, was such a means—had become complicit with her mission even before she’d set out on it. So she’d let him play his part.
And putting on his clothes, offering to help with future school tuition, boasting about how the sale of the lands had swelled his bank account so much his kids couldn’t even squander it on TVs and cars, he was not so bad. She accepted.
He kept giving her money, but it was to slap the relationship back into the realm of transaction that she began asking for it directly, her eyes hard. The more she liked him the more she hardened herself against him.
They lived in a crowded complex—how long before everyone was talking about it? The servants, with their practiced clairvoyance, probably already knew.
“This is the advantage of being a do-gooder type,” Mukesh said. “They think I’m interfering with everyone’s business and so won’t think it’s unusual I’m sometimes at your house.” It was a shocking touch of self-awareness and Deepa saw now how being generally shameless could permit and cloak even more dire shamelessness. “I’ve told them I’m bringing homeopathic medicines for Anusha,” he said. It was true: he did bring medicines, for Anusha’s persistent colds, but Deepa didn’t let him give her any. “I want Anusha to grow up free of all pollutants,” she said, thinking suddenly of Tushar’s pleading, brimming reactions to the tetanus injection brandished by the bespectacled lady pediatrician, or Nakul’s habit of squirreling away homeopathic pellets for all kinds of maladies in a single bottle, so he could nibble on them every night till they were inevitably found and confiscated.
Vikas, cut off from family, knew nothing about this. He came home and saw his wife in the same pose with Anusha—scolding her for running around too much, for falling and injuring herself when she had been diagnosed with keloids.
“Why not restart your baking business?” Vikas asked, waking from the dead dream of his endless documentary about terror.