‘You’re the fourth person who said that.’
‘The fourth person today?’ He was smiling.
She said, ‘No, not today. But I’m prettier.’
He said, ‘Much, much.’
It wasn’t true, not at all, but she could pretend.
*
Dimple, sitting in the movie theatre with Rashid, looked up at Zeenie’s moon-like face, her round milk-white face that had absorbed every injustice in the world, and Dimple wished for a sister, an older sister she could talk to. The theatre was very cold: cold air was blowing in from the sides, and she wished she’d brought a shawl. It was the AC, Rashid said. What is AC? she asked. He said something in reply, something she forgot instantly, because she was watching the screen so carefully. Zeenie was playing a woman who runs away from a broken home and renames herself Janice. When she and her brother meet as adults she cannot remember him.
janice’s brother (trying to jog her memory): Look at this flower. You used to like flowers.
(Janice accepts the flower and smiles a smile of such sweetness you know, if you’re at all knowledgeable about such things, that she will die very soon.)
janice: Beauty is in the mind, in the eyes.
(They are among a crowd of flower children. Someone passes Janice a chillum and she takes an impossible, elegant puff and hands it to her brother, though she doesn’t know him yet.)
janice’s brother: No, I have a cough.
janice (scolding): If you want to sit with us, be like us. Joy, intoxication, peace, these are the things we believe in. Do you believe in joy?
janice’s brother: Is it only by smoking that you can believe in joy?
(Rashid knew the line and didn’t think much of it. He shouted it out anyway, only slightly out of sync with Dev Anand, laughing thickly as he mimicked the actor. A man sitting ahead of them turned to say something, took a look at Rashid and changed his mind.)
janice’s brother: Are you happy? Janice, are you happy?
(Janice is quiet for a time, a light in her eyes, an ancient light like the light from a long dead moon, and when she speaks it is in a whisper, and everybody in the theatre leans forward to hear.)
janice: Yes, I’ve never been so happy. It’s good to run away from home when nobody needs you and you have so much love to share with the world.
*
Dimple imagined Janice was talking only to her, ignoring the others in the theatre and tilting her moon face so her beautiful dying eyes were looking into Dimple’s. She wished Rashid had named her Janice instead of Zeenat, Janice, who didn’t remember her mother or father, who was strumming a guitar, saying: Oh I know this song, it’s on the tip of my tongue, make me another chillum and I’ll remember. What is this song? So high she was like an alien from a glorious superior species. And later, lying on the grass, lost, mountains around her, this lovely girl looks at the audience and says: Parents, why do they have us? A moment of pleasure and they’re saddled for life. They don’t really want us.
Dimple understood the exact nature of Janice’s suffering. To know you were unloved by your parents, it was a wound that would never heal. Nothing Dimple did to forget her early life could change this fundamental fact. She was always under the sway of it. It never went away. She’d think she was okay, but she wasn’t. If she wasn’t sleeping enough or if she was anxious, it would catch up with her, as fresh and wet and red as it had ever been. In the scene when brother and sister are finally reunited in a village in Kathmandu, Dimple made no effort to hide her tears. Others were crying too, men and women, entire families weeping together as they munched their popcorn and sucked noisily at bottles of Thums Up and Fanta.
*
The movie had a tremendous effect on Rashid, though he’d seen it many times. He didn’t speak until they were in a cab heading back to Shuklaji Street. Number eight, he told her, holding up seven fingers. And I’ll see it again. This is the movie that got me into drugs. This is why I opened my first adda and became a hippie. The only thing I can’t stand is that Dev Anand. He wouldn’t last three minutes on Shuklaji Street. Then he sang the song so forcefully that the melody lost its haunting quality and became an anthem. He lingered on the chorus, on its famous first couplet,
Dum maro dum,
Mit jaaye hum.
Bolo subah sham.
But there he stopped. He would not sing the final line, ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Ram’. It was too Hindu for him. Instead, thinking about dinner, he sang the verse again, changing the words.
Dum aloo dum,
Mit jaaye hum.
Bolo subah sham,
Dum aloo dum.
Chapter Six Stinking Asafoetida
When he started the car again he was feeling better, a miracle actually, the way his mood lifted, Rumi told Dimple. He drove towards Khar with ‘Machine Gun’ turned up loud, the smack kicking in like Buddy Miles’s big bass drum, never mind the shitty car’s shitty speakers; and the feedback and weird radio interference, some kind of helicopter noise, GIs in Vietnam maybe, then Jimi again, doing his voodoo shit, the spaces between notes liquefied into scratchy slow-mo sound grabs, the guitar loud, beyond loud, like a car crash in slow motion, metal and flesh fused: gave him the shivers every time, made him want to crash the car, or drink till he died, or tattoo a motto on his chest with a rusty nail and industrial dye, Kill You Quick. And that, said Rumi, was when he saw the woman. She was standing at the turn from Khar Dhanda to the main Juhu Road. She turned into the headlights when she heard the car slow. Her dark skin was scarred with old smallpox and her hair was held in place with pins and she carried one of those striped shopping bags, like a housewife. She was looking right at him. He stopped the car and she put her head at the window. He saw a bunch of keys on an ornate silver ring hooked to the waist of her sari. Maybe she really was a housewife, doing some quick freelance on the side to supplement the family income. Should I get in? she said. He fixed the price and drove until he found a street that was dark enough and then he parked between two cars, backed into the space and turned the engine off. He told her to move to the back seat and climbed in beside her, already conscious of her stink, what was it, garlic? Asafoetida? She’d been cooking recently and she had a powerful body odour, which excited him. She smelled of food and sweat and faintly of cologne and she was rubbing two fingers against her thumb. He dug into his jeans and gave her a hundred-rupee note, telling her to use her mouth on him. She gave him a look, like she didn’t do that, like she was out on the street selling sex but only on her terms. No water in my mouth, okay? she said, and her voice was pure business: she could have been a hooker on Shuklaji Street. And when she’d been at it for a while, head bouncing like a toy, a spray of bobby pins holding the hair in place above her ears, and he maybe nodded off a little, a tiny teeny little bit, she goes, You slept off or what? Then she muttered something in Bambayya Hindi that he didn’t catch and she started to gather her things. Finish, he told her, his voice loud in the small car. She put her shopping bag down and shot him a look and went back to work. He was half erect, when all of a sudden she stopped. Her jaws hurt, she said. She asked him to fuck her, which he did, reluctantly, because this was not part of the deaclass="underline" fucking was work. He slapped her lightly and she moaned. She liked it; she fucked him back. Then he hit her again. She grabbed his hand and he punched her on the head, fucking her hard, and when he came, for the first time in weeks, he did what he always did, he screamed words he didn’t know and by now she was screaming too, in fear, and so, to shut her up, he hit her in the mouth, drawing blood, and the sight of it pushed him over and he came again. He pulled out, still dripping, and opened the door. She was moaning but unconscious. He put her on the ground by an abandoned handcart, small piles of shit nearby, human, by the smell of it, and as an afterthought, he put his hand into her blouse, realizing that he hadn’t touched her breasts until then, a pity, because they were swollen and wet at the nipples. He fondled her briefly and took the wad of notes folded into the whore’s bra and drove away as slowly as he could.