‘It’s not what’s she’s done, it’s what she’s not done,’ Deependra hisses. ‘There’s a big difference between someone not being available and someone deliberately not taking your calls. Oh yes. You’ll learn this, mark my words. You’re at the first stage, when it’s all new and fresh and exciting and you are blinded by the amazing fact that someone, someone at last, at long last! thinks you are a catch. It is all rose petals and sweets and cho chweet and you think nothing can possibly go wrong. But you pass through that stage, oh yes. All too soon the scales fall from your eyes. You see… and you hear.’
‘Deependra.’ Jasbir moves to the battery of driers. ‘You’ve been on five dates.’ But every word Deependra has spoken has chimed true. He is a cauldron of clashing emotions. He feels light and elastic, as if he bestrode the world like a god, yet at the same time the world is pale and insubstantial as muslin around him. He feels light-headed with hunger though he cannot eat a thing. He pushes away Sujay’s lovingly prepared dhals and roti. Garlic might taint his breath, saag might stick to his teeth, onions might give him wind, bread might inelegantly bloat him. He chews a few cleansing cardamoms, in the hope of spiced kisses to come. Jasbir Dayal is blissfully, gloriously love-sick.
Date one. The Qutb Minar. Jasbir had immediately protested.
‘Tourists go there. And families on Saturdays.’
‘It’s history.’
‘Shulka isn’t interested in history.’
‘Oh, you know her so well after three phone conversations and two evenings chatting on shaadinet – which I scripted for you? It is roots, it is who you are and where you come from. It’s family and dynasty. Your Shulka is interested in that, I assure you, sir. Now, here’s what you will wear.’
There were tour buses great and small. There were hawkers and souvenir peddlers. There were parties of frowning Chinese. There were schoolchildren with backpacks so huge they looked like upright tortoises. But wandering beneath the domes and along the colonnades of the Quwwat Mosque in his Casual Urban Explorer clothes, they seemed as remote and ephemeral as clouds. There was only Shulka and him. And Ram Tarun Das strolling at his side, hands clasped behind his back.
To cue, Jasbir paused to trace out the time-muted contours of a disembodied tirthankar’s head, a ghost in the stone.
‘Qutb-ud-din Aibak, the first Sultan of Delhi, destroyed twenty Jain temples and reused the stone to build his mosque. You can still find the old carvings if you know where to look.’
‘I like that,’ Shulka said. ‘The old gods are still here.’ Every word that fell from her lips was pearl-perfect. Jasbir tried to read her eyes but her BlueBoo! cat-eye shades betrayed nothing. ‘Not enough people care about their history any more. It’s all modern this modern that, if it’s not up-to-the-minute it’s irrelevant. I think that to know where you’re going you need to know where you’ve come from.’
Very good, Ram Tarun Das whispered. Now, the iron pillar.
They waited for a tour group of Germans to move away from the railed-off enclosure. Jasbir and Shulka stood in the moment of silence gazing at the black pillar.
‘Sixteen hundred years old, but never a speck of rust on it,’ Jasbir said.
Ninety-eight per cent pure iron, Ram Tarun Das prompted. There are things Mittal Steel can learn from the Gupta kings.
‘“He who, having the name of Chandra, carried a beauty of countenance like the full moon, having in faith fixed his mind upon Vishnu, had this lofty standard of the divine Vishnu set up on the hill Vishnupada”.’ Shulka’s frown of concentration as she focused on the inscription around the pillar’s waist was as beautiful to Jasbir as that of any god or Gupta king.
‘You speak Sanskrit?’
‘It’s a sort of personal spiritual development path I’m following.’
You have about thirty seconds before the next tour group arrives, Ram Tarun Das cuts in. Now sir; that line I gave you.
‘They say that if you stand with your back to the pillar and close your arms around it, your wish will be granted.’
The Chinese were coming the Chinese were coming.
‘And if you could do that, what would you wish for?’
Perfect. She was perfect.
‘Dinner?’
She smiled that small and secret smile that set a garden of thorns in Jasbir’s heart and walked away. At the centre of the gatehouse arch she turned and called back,
‘Dinner would be good.’
Then the Chinese with their shopping bags and sun visors and plastic leisure shoes came bustling around the stainless iron pillar of Chandra Gupta.
Jasbir smiles at the sunny memory of Date One. Deependra waggles his fingers under the stream of hot air.
‘I’ve heard about this. It was on a documentary, oh yes. White widows, they call them. They dress up and go to the shaadis and have their r’sum’s all twinkling and perfect but they have no intention of marrying, oh no no no, not a chance. Why should they, when there is a never-ending stream of men to wine them and dine them and take them out to lovely places and buy them lovely presents and shoes and jewels, and even cars? So it said on the documentary. They are just in it for what can get; they are playing games with our hearts. And when they get tired or bored or if the man is making too many demands or his presents aren’t as expensive as they were or they can do better somewhere else, then whoosh! Dumped flat and on to the next one. It’s a game to them.’
‘Deependra,’ says Jasbir. ‘Let it go. Documentaries on the Shaadi Channel are not the kind of model you want for married life. Really.’ Ram Tarun Das would be proud of that one. ‘Now, I have to get back to work.’ Faucets that warn about water crime can also report excessive toilet breaks to line managers. But the doubt-seeds are sown, and Jasbir now remembers the restaurant.
Date Two. Jasbir had practised with the chopsticks for every meal for a week. He swore at rice, he cursed dhal. Sujay effortlessly scooped rice, dhal, everything from bowl to lips in a flurry of stickwork.
‘It’s easy for you, you’ve got that code-wallah Asian culture thing.’
‘Um, we are Asian.’
‘You know what I mean. And I don’t even like Chinese food, it’s so bland.’
The restaurant was expensive, half a week’s wage. He’d make it up on overtime; there were fresh worries in Dams and Watercourses about a drought.
‘Oh,’ Shulka said, the nightglow of Delhi a vast, diffuse halo behind her. She is a goddess, Jasbir thought, a devi of the night city with ten million lights descending from her hair. ‘Chopsticks.’ She picked up the antique porcelain chopsticks, one in each hand like drum sticks. ‘I never know what to do with chopsticks. I’m always afraid of snapping them.’
‘Oh, they’re quite easy once you get the hang of them.’ Jasbir rose from his seat and came round behind Shulka. Leaning over her shoulder he laid one stick along the fold of her thumb, the other between ball of thumb and tip of index finger. Still wearing her lighthoek. It’s the city girl look. Jasbir shivered in anticipation as he slipped the tip of her middle finger between the two chopsticks. ‘Your finger acts like a pivot, see? Keep relaxed, that’s the key. And hold your bowl close to your lips.’ Her fingers were warm, soft, electric with possibility as he moved them. Did he imagine her skin scented with musk?
Now, said Ram Tarun Das from over Shulka’s other shoulder. Now do you see? And by the way, you must tell her that they make the food taste better.
They did make the food taste better. Jasbir found subtleties and piquancies he had not known before. Words flowed easily across the table. Everything Jasbir said seemed to earn her star-light laughter. Though Ram Tarun Das was as ubiquitous and unobtrusive as the waiting staff, they were all his own words and witticisms. See, you can do this, Jasbir said to himself. What women want, it’s no mystery; stop talking about yourself, listen to them, make them laugh.