“So he followed me in, took my hand and pulled me into the dining room. He said, ‘We have to sort this out right now.’ I said, ‘I know I’m younger than you, but I understand one thing: when you’re angry, we should not talk. It’s just going to blow out of proportion, and then you’re going to say things you don’t mean and you’ll feel sorry about it later. And I’ll reciprocate and it will be a who-hurts-who-most game.’ ‘No, we are going to sort this out now.’ So I was like, ‘Fine’. And we were talking — we were just talking — and he whacks me right across my face.
“He was really tall, 6’2”, decently built. He whacked me and I fainted. I collapsed.
“Afterwards I was totally numb. I called my two girlfriends and I went to see them. And I howled and I howled and I howled, and I was like, ‘Is this normal, is this normal? Does this normally happen in joint families?’ — because my friends were from joint families while I was brought up in a nuclear family. And they were like, ‘It’s okay, he was just really angry.’ They were just trying to calm me down because I was really out of my senses, but they were furious, you know — I could see the look on their faces. I didn’t tell anyone else, not even my parents, because I couldn’t decipher at that time whether it was a big thing. I was just totally lost.
“I thought I would just try to forget all about it. Start a new chapter. But each time there was a fight, I used to be really scared because I thought he might do it again. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t. But over time, the frequency of whacking just kept increasing and it was extremely disconcerting, and I was falling into a depression and all of that. Then one day, after about four years of our marriage, I left and I never went back.
“Obviously I hadn’t told my parents about the whacking and all that — so it took me about three months to convince them. No one apart from Dhruv and I and Dhruv’s aunt, in whom I used to confide, knew what had happened. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to tell my parents what went on in their family. So I said, ‘There are things you don’t know about, and I can assure you I’m not making a rash decision.’ But eventually, after months of trying in vain to convince them, I told them about the frequent whacking. They were furious. They went to discuss everything with Dhruv’s family. But I wasn’t ever going to go back.
“For some time I was very angry. I really wanted to put him and his mother behind bars. But eventually I calmed down. For a long time I wished I could slap both of them really hard, just once. But now I don’t even feel like doing that. It’s his life. I believe in God and justice. I know I didn’t do anything so drastically horrible in my marriage that things had to turn out the way they did. It’s okay. I’m fine with it.
“I did give it my best. More than I ever thought I had inside me. But I lost respect for him. I didn’t trust him, and after that it was over. Before the love could develop it turned into bitterness. So there was absolutely nothing.
“You know the moment at which I really lost respect for him? When I knew it was over? It was not when he was hitting me, strangely enough. It was something else.
“I always liked to have all the windows open but his family would keep them completely shut. I used to suffocate in there. And I have asthma, so sometimes it got really bad. One night I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe and I was panicking. I shook Dhruv awake and asked him to pass me my inhaler, which was on his side of the bed. But he refused to get it, and I passed out. After that there was no going back.”
She has been talking for a long time, and it is dark. People have come and gone. At the table next to us, an enormously rotund man with a ponytail has sat down with a beautiful woman a head taller than he. She has a chihuahua in her lap.
We pay the bill and head back inside the mall. I say farewell to Sukhvinder. I shake the hand of her companion, whose identity I still do not know.
I am thinking about all her stories. I get into the elevator to go down to the parking lot. Another man gets in with me: he is holding a Gucci shopping bag, whose enormous size brings a slight strut to his demeanour. It is a strange spectacle, these men from Delhi business families who demonstrate their masculinity by buying handbags.
The elevator doors slide open and I emerge into the brown light of the basement. The air is fetid and hot. The air conditioning cools the mall’s interior to a mild non-place; it is down here that the heat of the north Indian plains seems to be stored. Immediately, I begin to sweat.
I get into the car and drive to the exit, where there is a payment booth. I hand my ticket to the man inside and wonder how many hours he has to spend in this sub-terranean oven. “Fifty rupees,” he says to me, and I start fumbling in my pocket for change.
As I am doing so, the man reaches out of the window and picks something off my windscreen. It is a huge red flower, fallen from the silk cotton tree that grows outside my house. Lodged in the windscreen wiper, it has travelled with me all the way from the leafy city to this wasteland out of town.
The man inspects it as if it has just descended from outer space.
“Can I keep it?” he asks.
“Of course.”
And he sets it on his ledge inside the booth, and gazes at it, enchanted, as if trees were long extinct, and known only through children’s books.
Seven
Dressed in a kurta and a turban, the politician stands smilingly on the stage. “Is there anyone here who can tell me the name of Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter?” Everyone in the auditorium puts up their hand. “Indira Gandhi!” they cry. “That’s right!” beams the politician.
“And now who can name the sons of Mahatma Gandhi?” he says.
There is a shame-faced silence. No hands rise.
The politician feigns amazement. “How interesting this is!” he says. “Everyone can remember the name of a daughter. But no one can remember the name of a son!”
He walks across the stage, surveying the audience.
“So why do we kill our unborn girls, my friends? Why do our young men grow up with no women to marry?”
When advertisements wanted to show you something freshly contemporary, they showed you a woman in a suit.
Young, professional women were the icons of the new India. Towards the bottom of the economic scale women had always worked, as they often had, also, at the very top; but many of those middle-class women who took up jobs in India’s post-liberalisation economy were doing something novel. Many of them had to fight battles within their families to achieve it; and yet, in aggregate, the revolution was swiftly won — partly because even those who disliked it could see that everything was changing against them.
The years after liberalisation greatly increased the extent to which middle-class self-esteem in general derived from work and income, and it diminished, correspondingly, the force of those unpaid roles of homemaker and mother that had appeared so lofty in twentieth-century mythology. Young women enthusiastically followed the flux of the times, for they had much to gain and little to lose from the move outside the home. They were therefore in many ways the most unequivocal adherents of the new India, which was why their minds were so unencumbered — and why they were so successful in the workplace. The corporate world was more egalitarian than might be assumed — Indian gender inequality never had the same structure as in the West, and the dynamics of the corporate office were not those of the home — and women rose quickly to the highest ranks of corporate India. They were in many ways the model corporate employees, for they had no stake in old, entrenched systems, they analysed situations calmly and objectively, and they felt no fear of change.