“You said you wanted to listen,” Tal said and gathered yts shawl around yt.
“My father was a choreographer in Bollywood, one of the top. Did you ever see Rishta ? The number where they’re dancing across the roofs of the cars in the traffic jam? That was him.”
“I’m afraid I don’t much care for films,” the man says.
“It got too camp in the end. Too self-referential, too knowing. It always gets like that, things become superexaggerated, then they die. He met my mother on the set of Lawyers in Love. She’s Italian, she was a hovercam trainee—at the time, Mumbai was the best, even the Americans were sending people out here to learn technique. They met, they married, six months later, me. And before you ask, no. An only. They were the toast of Chowpatty Beach, my parents. I got to all the parties; I was a real accessory. I was a gorgeous kid, baba. We were never out of the filmi mags and the gossip rags; Sunny and Costanza Vadher, with their beautiful child, shopping on Linking Road, on the set of Aap Mujhe Acche Lagne Lage, at the Chelliah’s barbecue. They were the most incredibly selfish people I think I have ever met—but they were totally unselfconscious about it. That’s what Costanza accused me of when I Stepped Away; how incredibly selfish I was. Can you believe it? Where did she think I learned it?
“They weren’t stupid. They might have been selfish, but they weren’t stupid, they must have known what was going to happen when they started to bring in the aeais. It was the actors first—one day Chati and Bollywood Masala and Namaste! are full of Vishal Das and Shruti Rai at an opening at Club 28, next Filmfare’s running centre page triple pullouts without a single cubic centimetre of living flesh. It really was that quick.”
The man murmurs polite amazement.
“Sunny could have a hundred people dancing on a giant laptop, but now it was one touch and you’d have them dancing from here to the horizon, all in perfect synch. They could get a million people dancing on clouds, just with one click. It hit him hardest first. He got bad, he get ratty, he would take it out on people around him. He was mean when it turned against him. I think that’s maybe why I wanted to get into soapi; to show him there was something he could have done, if he’d tried, if he hadn’t been so strung up by his own image and status. Then again, maybe I just don’t care enough. But it hit Costanza soon after, too; you don’t need actors or dancers, you don’t need cameras, either. It’s all in the box. They would fight: I must have been ten, eleven, I could hear them screaming so loud the neighbours would come banging on the door. Two of them in that apartment all day, both of them needing work, but jealous as hell in case the other actually got something. In the evenings they’d go to the same old parties and durbars to schmooze. Please, a job. Costanza coped better. She adjusted, she got a different job in the industry in script development. Sunny, he couldn’t. Walked right out. Fuck him. Fuck him. He was a waste anyway.”
Tal snatched up the arak, took a bitter draft.
“It all ended. I’d say it was like a film, the credits roll, the lights came up, and we were back in the real again, but it wasn’t. It didn’t have a third act. It didn’t have an against-all-the-odds-happy-ever-after. It just got worse and worse and then it just ended. It stopped, like the film snapped and I wasn’t living in a Manori Beach apartment and I wasn’t at the John Connon School and I wasn’t going round the parties with all the stars saying, oh look, isn’t it sweet and look how big it’s getting? I was in a two-room apartment in Thane with Costanza, going to the Bom Jesus Catholic School, and I hated it. I hated it. I wanted it all back again, all the magic and the dancing and the fun and the parties and this time I wanted it to go on after the credits rolled. I just wanted everyone to look at me and say, wow. Just that. Wow.”
Tal sat back, inviting admiration but the man looked afraid, and something more Tal could not identify. He said, “You are an extraordinary creature. Do you ever feel that you’re living in two worlds, and that neither of them is real?”
“Two worlds? Honey, there are thousands of worlds. And they’re as real as you want them to be. I should know; I’ve lived all my life between them. None of them are real, but when you get into them, they’re all the same.”
The man nodded, not in agreement with anything Tal had said, but at some inner dialogue.
He summoned the bill, left a pile of notes on the little silver tray. “It’s getting late, and I do have affairs to attend to in the morning.”
“What sort of affairs?” The man smiled to himself.
“You are the second person to ask me that tonight. I work in information management. Thank you for coming with me here and the pleasure of your company; you really are an extraordinary human, Tal.”
“You didn’t give me your name.”
“No, I don’t believe I did.”
“That’s so male,” Tal said, sweeping along behind the man on to the street where he was already waving down a taxi.
“You could call me Khan.”
Something has changed, Tal thought as yt slid in to the back seat of the Maruti. The man Khan had been nervous, shy, guilty at the Banana Club. Even in the restaurant he had not been at ease. Something in yts story had worked on his mind and mood.
“I don’t go to White Fort after midnight,” the driver said.
“I will pay you treble,” Khan said.
“I’ll get as close as I can”
Khan leaned his head against the greasy rest.
“You know, it really is an excellent little restaurant. The owner came here about ten years ago in the last wave of the Kurdish diaspora. I. helped him. He set the place up, he’s doing well. I suppose he’s a man trapped between two worlds as well.”
Tal was only half listening, curling up in the arak glow. Yt leaned against Khan, for warmth, for solidity. Yt let yts inner arm roll into the space between them. The row of buds were puckered like bitch-nipples in the street glow. Tal saw the man start at the sight. Then a hand was stabbing down the front of yts lounging pants, a face loomed over yt, a mouth clamped over yts. A tongue pressed entrance to yts body. Tal gave a muffled scream, Khan recoiled in shock, which gave Tal space to push and shout. The phatphat bounced to a halt in the middle of the highway. Tal had the door open and was out, shawl flapping behind yt, before yt was fully conscious of what yt was doing.
Tal ran.
Tal stops running. Yt stands, hands on thighs; panting. Khan is still there, peering through the headlight blur, calling out futilely into the traffic roar. Tal stifles a sob. Yt can still smell the aftershave on yts skin, taste tongue in yts mouth. Shaking, yt waits a safe few minutes before flagging in a cruising phatphat. DJ Aeai plays MIX FOR A NIGHT TURNED SCARY.
15: VISHRAM
New day, new array. Everyone from cleaners to Centre Director turned out under the canopy of the Ranjit Ray Research Centre. They look nervous. Not nearly as nervous as your unexpected and unprepared CEO, Vishram Ray thinks as the car crunches sensuously up the raked gravel drive. Vishram checks cuffs, tugs collar.
“You should have worn a tie,” says Marianna Fusco. She is cool, immaculate, creases all geometrical.
“I’ve done my tie-wearing for this lifetime,” Vishram says, lick-slicking down hair in the vanity mirror in the chauffeur’s headrest. “Anyway, as any historian of costume will tell you, the sole purpose of the tie is to point to your dick. That’s not very Hindu business, that.”
“Vishram, everything points to your dick.”