His barsaati was in want of some modern amenities that I’d come to take for granted over the past two decades: a Western toilet, for example. But it wasn’t lacking what bohemians would call “character,” things like old-fashioned split-paneled doors with a sliding rod and hasp, the kind that have become a faux pas in the capital’s southern parts.
Gautam went to use the bathroom, and I remained in his living quarters, a sparsely furnished room whose sole decoration was a framed poster of depressed Guru Dutt playing a depressed poet in a depressing film. I stroked the orphaned puppy he’d recently rescued from Deer Park until it got overexcited and pissed on the floor.
A dozen books, both in Hindi and English, were piled atop a rickety aluminum card table. Next to these was a photograph that Gautam had clearly been pondering. It was of his dead friend, who was wearing a khadi kurta on top of some green military trousers. A defender of the tribals but not a tribal himself, this activist looked like your average small-scale landowner from the Hindi-speaking heartland: mustached, paunchy, and balding.
“He’s Khem, a dear friend of mine who passed away,” said Gautam. He’d returned from the bathroom and was fiddling with his Enbee. The old stereo was his most prized possession.
“Actually,” Gautam said with the exaggerated earnestness that was typical of him, “I called you over here to talk about Khem.” As an old Hindi record crackled, Gautam told his story.
“It all started six years ago,” he explained. He’d just written an article about Orissa, where the state government, then controlled by the B Party, had decided to hand over some bauxite-rich land to the Canadian Aluminum Corporation. But a tribal community resided on the land, and its members formed a movement to protest the B Party’s actions. Paramilitary forces, heeding B Party orders, opened fire on movement members during a demonstration.
“Five tribals were killed, two of whom were children,” he said morosely.
Lauri Zeller, a new arrival to the subcontinent, read Gautam’s article and thought the situation was ripe for a documentary. She persuaded him to return to Orissa with her, and the two spent the next year living with the tribals. “We became very, very close,” he explained. He didn’t say so, but alone in the tribal community, they became lovers.
Both forged a close relationship with Khem Thakur, one of the movement’s main organizers. Gautam believed that Lauri’s film should focus on Khem’s struggles against corruption and capitalism. Lauri had different ideas though.
She’d started teaching a group of tribal youths how to paint with watercolors. “She decided to make the film about her ‘attempt to help these children reflect on poverty and globalization through art,’” he told me, mocking the way foreign newspapers had lauded her work.
By the time Lauri had won her BAFTA for The Color of Water, she and Gautam were barely speaking. “I should’ve seen it sooner,” he lamented. “She was an egomaniac — she wanted to exploit India like every other foreigner.” He didn’t tell me Lauri’s side of the story, but I know one of the reasons she broke things off with him: he’d gotten back into pharmaceuticals.
Soon after, Khem died in a mysterious car accident. Gautam tried contacting Lauri for help, but she refused to take his calls. “Actually,” he said, his eyes moist now, “she never came back to India after becoming famous.” There was more to it than that, I knew, but Gautam wouldn’t talk about such things with me or anybody else.
As he recounted his story, I put a hand on his arm. But he turned away from me and began to stroke the puppy, which was chewing on an old chappal by our feet. “It must have been so difficult,” I said, mustering up my most sympathetic voice.
He proceeded to tell me about G.S. Lakshman and the Satya article, and I listened patiently even though I knew more about the situation than he did. “I have an opportunity to do something for the memory of my friend, to do some good for this corrupt country,” he explained. “But I’m not one hundred percent sure I want to.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“It’s fear, you’re right,” he said. A breathy laugh of self-loathing escaped through his teeth. “You’re very wise. I knew you were the best person to speak with about this.” I gave his arm a squeeze. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’ve decided to go through with it.”
“Well, you’re a very brave man.”
He smiled sheepishly. “You smell that?” he asked.
“What?”
“It’s smoke from a chowkidar’s fire.”
“So?”
“Winter has begun.”
He turned to look at me with a smile I knew well, one that doesn’t care about borders of class or religion. Gautam was hungry for sex.
During the month that followed I continued volunteering at the school. In the afternoon we’d spend hours wrapped in shawls on the terrace, the puppy curled up by our feet. A pair of golden-backed woodpeckers was building a home in the amla tree across the street, and Gautam threw stones at the menacing parrots that were trying to chase them away. At night Suraj would bring up sabzi and rotis for us, and I’d tell stories about my invented childhood in Bihar, so many of them that they began to seem real.
Before sleep there was no actual intercourse but lots of touching. In this department, no matter how hard he tried, Gautam could never be the Indian man he wanted to be. He didn’t just stab me with his fingers like some child with a new toy. He used the palm of his hand to rub me between my legs, and I felt things I’d never felt before, not even by myself.
Lakshman told Gautam that he was now representing an important multinational media organization and had to look the part, so Gautam spent a morning in one of Green Park’s many salons. He came out looking like a cross between Hritik and George Harrison.
The depression that burdened his eyes began to fade as he flittered around the city investigating Ashok Kumar’s connection to Khem’s death. He did thorough work and met every type of person imaginable: bureaucrats, ladies who lunched, drivers, and businessmen. Lakshman provided him with a generous allowance to convince people to go on the record.
Within a week Gautam was an expert on Ashok’s life story, a story I already knew by heart. Using his father the poet-politician’s connections, Ashok became the official supplier of white goods — air conditioners, refrigerators, televisions — to the central government. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia turned to India for these products. India put the Reds in touch with Ashok, who supplied them with all the TVs and washing machines they needed for free, bargaining not for cash but influence. Eventually, he became the exclusive broker of oil between Russia and India.
The brat-turned-billionaire soon had more money than he knew what to do with. He had no use for Indian whores anymore. He could fly blondes in and out of Delhi for weekend sessions. He even formed his own security force and intelligence agency. Before long he became a broker not just of oil, but of nuclear submarine deals and the votes of senior MPs. He became a fixer of memorandums of understanding for bauxite mines in Orissa.
“I’m almost done with the research,” Gautam told Lakshman on the phone one day. We were sitting on the terrace, and I hummed along to a silly Geeta Dutt song playing on the Enbee. I hadn’t heard it in years.
“There are now two witnesses who can connect Ashok directly to Khem’s death,” he said. He was no longer the disaffected poet I’d met a month earlier. “And there’s this accountant who’s willing to testify that Kumar received three million USD — cash — from the Canadians. I just need a few more days, and the money trail will lead straight to the B Party. I’m thinking about a short trip to Orissa to round off the article, give it some authentic flavor.”