Tal tried to hide that morning, behind work, behind huge wrap-round tilt-jet pilot shades, behind the Lord of the Hangovers, but everyone had to come and get the goss on the faaa bulous people at the faaa bulous party. Neeta was celebstruck. Even the cool guys circulated past Tal’s workstation, not of course asking direcrly, but accessing hints and suspicions. The goss-nets were full of it, the news channels, too, even the headline services were beaming pictures from the night to palmers all over Bharat. One of which was two nutes going at it on the floor and A-listers cheering and clapping.
Then a neural Kunda Khadar burst behind Tal’s eyes and it all came gushing back. Every. Little. Detail. The taxicab fumblings, the airport hotel mumblings and profanities. The morning light flat and grey with the promise of another merciless day of ultra-heat, and the card on the pillow. Non-scene.
“Oh,” Tal whispered. “No.” Yt crept home as early as the impending wedding of Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala would permit, a shaking, paranoid wreck. Huddled up in the phatphat yt could feel the card in yt’s bag, heavy and untrustworthy as uranium. Get rid of it now. Let it flutter out the window. Let it slip down the seat lining. Lose and forget. But yt could not. Tal was terribly, terribly afraid yt had fallen in love and yt didn’t have a soundtrack for this one.
The women were on the stairs again, winding their way up and down with their plastic water carriers, their conversation dying as Tal squeezed past, mumbling apologies, then resuming in titters and low whispers. Every rattle, every snatch of radio seemed a weapon thrown at yt. Don’t think about it. In three months you will be out of here. Tal plunged into yts room, tore off yts stiff, smoke-reeking party clothes and dived naked into yts beautiful bed. Yt programmed two hours of non-REM sleep but yts agitation and heart-hurt and wonderful, mad bafflement defeated the subdermal pumps and yt lay watching the nibs of light cast by the window blind bindings move across the ceiling like slow worms and listening to the voiceless, choral roar of the city moving. Tal unfolded that last insane night again, smoothed out its creases. Yt hadn’t gone out to get involved. Yt hadn’t even gone out to get fucked. Yt had gone out for a simple mad time with famous people and a bit of glam. Yt didn’t want a lovely person. Yt didn’t want an entanglement. Yt didn’t want involvement, a relationship. And the last thing yt wanted was love at first sight. Love, and all those other dreadful things yt thought yt had left in Mumbai.
Mama Bharat was slow answering Tal’s knock. She seemed in pain, her hands uncertain on the door locks. Tal had washed in a cup of water, removing surface layers of sleep and grime but the smoke, drink, and sex were engrained. Yt could smell them off ytself as yt sat on the low sofa watching the turned-down cable news while the old woman made chai. She was slow about her making, visibly frail. Her aging scared Tal.
“Well,” Tal said. “I think I’m in love.”
Mama Bharat rocked back on her seat, swaying her head in understanding. “Then you must tell me everything about it.”
So Tal began yts tale, from stepping out of Mama Bharai’s front door to the card on the pillow in the numb morning.
“Show me this card,” Mama Bharat said. She turned it over in her leathery, monkey hand. She pursed her lips.
“I am not convinced about a man who leaves a card with a club address rather than a home address.”
“Yt’s not a man.”
Mama Bharat closed her eyes.
“Of course. Forgive me. But he is acting like a man.” Dust motes rose in the hot light slanting through the slatted wooden blind. “What is it you feel about him?”
“I feel I’m in love.”
“That is not what I asked. What do you feel about him? Yt.”
“I feel. I think I feel. I want to be with yt, I want to go where yt goes and see what yt sees and do what yt does, just to be able to know all those little, little things. Does that make any kind of sense?”
“Every kind of sense,” Mama Bharat said. “What do you think I should do?”
“What else can you do?” Tal stood up abruptly, hands clutched. “I will, then, I will.”
Mama Bharat rescued Tal’s discarded tea-glass from the rug before yt could flood it with hot, sweet chai in yts excited determination. Siva Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, watched from his place on the tallboy, annihilating foot eternally raised.
Tal spent the remains of the afternoon in the ritual of going out. It was a formal and elaborate process that began with laying down a mix. STRANGE CLUB was yts mental title for yts venture to Tranh. DJ aeai sourced an assortment of late-chill grooves and Vier/Burmese/Assamesse sounds. Tal stripped off yts street clothes and stood in front of the mirror, raising yts arms over yts head, relishing yts round shoulders, child-slim torso, full, parted thighs free of any sexual organ. Yt held yts wrists up, studied in reflection the goose flesh of the subdermal control studs. Yt contemplated yts beautiful scars.
“Okay, play it.”
The music kicked in at floor-shaking volume. Almost immediately Paswan next door began banging on the wall and shouting about the noise and his shifts and his poor wife and children driven demented by freaks perverts deviates. Tal namasted ytself in the mirror, then danced to the wardrobe cubby and swept back the curtain in a balletic twirl. Swaying to the rhythm, Tal surveyed yts costumes, weaving permutations, implications, signs and signals. Mr. Paswan was beating on the door now, vowing he would burn yt out, see if he did not. Tal laid out yts combo on the bed, danced to the mirror, opened yts makeup boxes in strict right to left order and prepared to compose.
By the time the sun set in glorious polluted carmines and blood, Tal was dressed, made up and geared-in. The Paswans had given up hammering an hour ago and were now treating Tal to half-heard sobbing. Tal ejected the chip from yts player, slipped it into yts bag and was out into the wild wild night.
“Take me, here.”
The phatphat driver looked at the card and nodded. Tal hooked up yts mix and slumped back on to the seat in ecstasy.
The club was off an unprepossessing alley. In Tal’s experience, the best clubs usually were. The door was carved wood, grey and fibrous from years of heat and pollution. Tal guessed it had been there even before the British. A discreet camera bindi blinked. The door swung open to the touch. Tal unhooked yts mix to listen. Traditional dhol and bansuri.
Tal took a breath and walked in.
A great haveli had once lived here. Balconies in the same weathered grey wood rose five floors around the central courtyard garden now glassed over. Vines and climbing pharm bananas had been let run and ramble up the carved wooden pillars to spread across the ribs of the glass dome. Clusters of biolume lamps hung from the centre of the roof like strange fetid fruit; terracotta oil lanterns were arranged across the tiled floor. All was flicker and folded shadow. From the recesses of the wooden cloisters came low conversation and the musical burble of nute laughter. The musicians sat facing each other on a mat by the central pool, a shallow rectangle dappled with lilies, intent on their rhythms.
“Welcome to my home.”
The small, birdlike woman had appeared like a god in a film. She wore a crimson sari and a brahmin’s bindi and carried her head cocked to one side. Tal guessed her at sixty-five, seventy. The woman’s gaze darted over yts face.
“Please, make yourself at home. I have guests from every walk of society, from Varanasi and beyond.” She pulled a thumb-sized banana from its broad-leafed vine, peeled it open, and offered it to Tal, “Go, eat eat. They grow wild.”