About thirty-five years old, Anil is quite extraordinarily rotund, and carries himself with that altered gait of people who must support an enormous stomach. His speech sticks in his mouth in a way that resembles a lisp but seems to affect all his consonants.
“I was working in Atlanta at the time my mom decided it was time I got married. I was running my business so I couldn’t come to Delhi, and I got married through the newspaper. My mom wanted to make sure there was someone to take care of me. As soon as they put the ad out there were loads of applicants because of my name. So we chose a girl, I came back to Delhi to get married, and then we went to Mauritius on our honeymoon.
“The honeymoon was perfect. I didn’t have all this fat in those days. In fact, I was a taekwondo black belt. She and I were both excellent dancers and when we used to dance together, everyone else used to stop dancing and watch. My wife was a great singer, so she sang at all the karaoke sessions and everyone loved it. She wasn’t beautiful, but I didn’t mind. She was perfect for that time we were on honeymoon — she used to massage my head at the end of the day, wash my clothes and polish my shoes, massage my feet.”
We are sitting in the bar of Delhi’s golf club.
Driving along the dusty, congested roads of central Delhi gives no sense of the verdant landscape behind the high walls that line them: it is only when you ascend, for instance, to the top of the Taj Hotel, that you can look down and see that these roads are but arid strips through an enormous expanse of green. The several-acre lawns of the politicians’ bungalows add up to a great garden tract of their own. The Mughal tombs at either end of Lodhi Road have expansive grounds of lawns and fountains; between them is the pleasant botanical sprawl of Lodhi Gardens, home to diplomatic joggers and unmarried lovers, who go — the lovers, that is — to hold hands and kiss under its bushes.
But most verdant and extensive of all is the golf club, set up by the British in 1931, and extending over 220 acres in the middle of the city. Unknown to all but Delhi’s elite, the club is so pampered and insulated that it has an ecosystem all of its own. Walking in past the Mercedes promotional diorama of glinting limousines, the roar of the street fades behind the cushion of forest. Flirting pairs of yellow butterflies, a species I have never seen elsewhere, flutter on every side. Three hundred species of birds fill the air with song. Peacocks wander lazily across the lawns as, in quieter moments, do sambar deer. The hedges are perfect, the Mughal tombs — their red sandstone heart-rending against the golfing green — the most lovingly maintained in the city.
Here, in the bar, sit Delhi’s landowners, lawyers and businessmen, laughing, chatting and exchanging fraternal handshakes.
“When we got back from our honeymoon, she thought she was going to have a lifestyle like my uncle. She thought she was going to have twenty-four servants and a mansion in London. But we don’t live like that. We’re not from that side of the family. I bought her a Toyota SUV and she was very disappointed. She thought she would get a Mercedes.
“We were only together for another twelve days. During that time she managed to persuade my mom to take her to the bank deposit box where she kept her jewellery. She said, ‘Mom, could I borrow that necklace you wore to the wedding? It was so beautiful!’ So my mom took her to the lock-up and she borrowed three necklaces, each one worth a crore [$200,000]. My mom said to her, ‘Look: you have to be careful with these because they’re worth a lot of money.’ ‘Of course I will.’
“After that she said she was going to her home town to spend a few days with her mother. I said, Fine — I thought maybe after the first sex, a woman wants to chat to her mother about it. But then she didn’t come back. She kept making excuses and then her mother said to me on the phone, ‘You don’t seem to love her.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about? We’ve only been together twenty-eight days!’
“She said to my parents, ‘Your son doesn’t love our daughter. He only wants to work. He was checking email when he was in Mauritius on honeymoon.’ I mean, what am I supposed to do? Can’t a guy check email? As it was, she wanted to have sex five or six times a day, which is not normal, and I was having trouble keeping up.
“Eventually we got a divorce settlement where we paid her 10 lakhs [$20,000] and she gave the necklaces back. She had to give them back because we had all the receipts and photos and everything.
“I was really shaken up by this because divorce is really bad for Marwaris. You can do anything you like behind closed doors — you can beat your wife and everything — but you should not get divorced.
“When she left, I lost it. I started drinking heavily. I started eating meat, which I had never done. I put on a lot of weight. That’s when I started doing this thing with prostitutes. I wanted to humiliate girls. And because my wife liked sex, I took it out on girls who liked sex.
“I did not sleep with these girls, I just humiliated them. If any of my friends wanted a prostitute, I would arrange it for them. I would do the deal with the guy and I would tell him that we had to be able to do anything to the girl, with any number of people, or the deal was off. I would go and pick up the girl and I would tell her to suck me in the car for free. It was all about humiliation: I came in her mouth not for pleasure but to humiliate her. When I delivered her to my friends we would sit around drinking whisky and I would ask her to strip in front of everyone and to do all kinds of humiliating things. To put money in her cunt.
“Because I did everything for my wife. I gave her everything she wanted. I gave up my business in the US to be with her. I gave her a Toyota SUV just because I wanted her to have it. I gave her the respect of society, being the wife of such a rich family of India. I gave her all that and she screwed me. What was I supposed to do?”
I ask Anil if he had girlfriends before his wife.
“I wouldn’t say I was a virgin when I got married. But I only had girlfriends outside India, never in India. I never touched an Indian girl before I got married.”
“The prostitutes. Were they Indian?”
“Yes.”
Anil is preoccupied by boundaries, and by the purity of what lies within. It was acceptable for him to have pre-marital sex outside India, but not to corrupt the Indian woman. It was possible to do business with both American corporations and ultra-conservative Islamists — for he had made some of his money from deals with the Taliban in Afghanistan — but he had to keep his body pure of meat and alcohol. In getting married, however, Anil had relaxed his boundaries. He had opened up his intimate world to an outsider, and in return he had been utterly undone. He had found that the pure Indian woman of his imagination not only had a sexual appetite in excess of his own, but that she was capable of perfidy. In the resulting emotional chaos he began both to defile his own body and to extend a ceremonial kind of sadism towards Indian women.
He tells all of this quite naturally, and without any kind of apology. He does not seem to feel that he is morally compromised. In fact he lectures lengthily, even tediously, about morals.
“You should not have desires,” he says. “You should make yourself enjoy what life has given you. I do meditation every day to control my desires. For instance, I could spend my time complaining that I was in Delhi and wishing I was somewhere else, but that would just make me unhappy. I hate the fact that Delhi has no respect for women. But you have to be content where you are. People are too full of desires. Women, especially. Women don’t know how to control their desires.
“True happiness is about sacrifice. Love is about sacrifice. When you’re in love with a person, you just want to sacrifice for that person. Like Radha did for Lord Krishna. Like Sita did for Rama. If someone asks for your life, give your life. If blood, give blood. Like Mahatma Gandhi said, if someone slaps you on one cheek, offer them the other cheek. But the problem is today, people don’t have that much patience.