And then there is his sister.
Leela is a reminder that a son and brother should not leave it from Diwali to Guru Poornima to see his family. What had been a nice-looking, quiet, shy but solid-minded seventeen-year-old—could have married up—has turned Bible Christian. She went out one night with a friend to a religious thing run by a cable television station and came back born again. But it is not enough that she has found the Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone else must find him, too. Especially her baaaadest of baaaadmash brothers. So round she comes with her Bible with the whisper-thin paper that Shiv knows makes the very best spliffs and her little tracts and her cumbersome zeal.
“Sister, this is my time of rest and recreation. You disrupt it. If your Christianity means as much as you say, you would respect your brother. I think it says that somewhere, respect and honour your brother.”
“My brothers are my brothers and sisters in Christ. Jesus said that because of me, you will hate your mother and father, and your brother, too.”
“Then that is a very foolish religion. Which one of your brothers and sisters in Christ got you drugs when you were dying of tuberculosis? Which one of them rammed that rich man’s pharmacy? You are making yourself no one, nothing. No one will marry you if you are not properly Indian. Your womb will dry up. You will cry out for those children. I don’t like to say this, but no one else will tell you this truth but me. Mata won’t, your Christian friends won’t. You are making a terrible mistake, put it right now.”
“The terrible mistake is to choose to go to hell,” Leela says defiantly.
“And what do you think this is?” Shiv says. Yogendra bares his ratty teeth.
That afternoon Shiv has a meeting: Priya from Musst. Good times there are not forgotten.
Shiv watches the chai stall for fifteen minutes to be sure it is her and her alone. She is pain to his heart in her pants that cling to the curve of her ass and her wispy silk top and her amber shades and her pale pale skin and red red sucking lips that pout as she looks around impatiently for him, trying to pick his hair, his face, his walk out of the thronging, staring bodies. She is all the things he has lost. He must get out of here. He must raise himself up again. Be a raja again.
She bounces on her boot heels and gives little squeaks of delight to see him. He gets her tea, they sit on a bench at the metal counter. She offers to get the bill but he pays with some of his dwindling wad. Chandni Basti will not see a woman buy Shiv Faraji tea. Her legs are long and lean and urban. The men of Chandni Basri measure them with their eyes, then catch the hem of the leather coat on the man beside her. They go on their way then. Yogendra sits on an upturned plastic fertiliser barrel and picks at his teeth.
“So, are my women and bartender missing me?” He offers her a bidi, takes a light from the gas burner under the rattling water boiler.
“You are in such trouble.” She lights hers off his, a Bollywood kiss. “You know who Ahimsa Debt Collection Agency is?”
“Some gang of hoods.”
“The Dawood Gang. It’s a new line of work for them, buying debts. Shiv, you have the Dawoods after you. These are the men skinned Gurnit Azni alive in the back of his limo.”
“It’s all bargaining; they go in high, I go in low, we meet in the middle. That is the way men do business.”
“No. They want what you owe them. Not a rupee less.”
Shiv laughs, the free, mad laugh breaking up inside. He can see the blue around the edge of his field of vision again, the pure, Krishna blue.
“No one has that kind of money.”
“Then you are dead and I am very sorry.” Shiv lays his hand flat on Priya’s thigh. She freezes.
“You came here to tell me that? I was expecting something from you.”
“Shiv, there are a hundred big dadas like you on every street corner, all expecting.” Her sentence snaps off as Shiv seizes her jaw, pressing his fingers hard into the soft meat, rubbing his thumb over the bone. Bruises. He will leave bruises like blue roses. Priya yelps. Yogendra bares his incisors. Pain arouses that boy, Shiv thinks. Pain makes him smile. The people of Chandni Basti stare. He feels eyes all around him. Stare well.
“Raja,” he whispers. “I am a raja.”
He lets her go. Priya rubs her jaw.
“That hurt, madar chowd.”
“There’s something, isn’t there?”
“You don’t deserve it. You deserve the Dawoods to cut you up with a robot, behen chowd.” She flinches as Shiv reaches for her face again. “It’s a little thing but it could lead to more. A lot more. Just a drop off. But if you do it right, they say.”
“Who says?”
“Nitish and Chunni Nath.”
“I don’t work for Brahmins.”
“Shiv.”
“It is a point of principle. I am a man of principle.”
“It’s principle to get chopped up into kabob by the Dawoods?”
“I do not take orders from children.”
“They aren’t children.”
“They are here.” Shiv cups his hand over his groin, jerks. “No, I will not work for the Naths.”
“Then you won’t need to go here.” She snaps open her little bag and slides a piece of paper across the greasy counter. There is an address, out in the industrial belt. “And you won’t need this car.” She parks a rental chitty beside the address slip. It’s for a Merc, a big Kali-black four-litre SUV Merc, like a raja would drive. “If you don’t need any of that, I guess I’ll go now and pray for your moksha.”
She scoops up her bag and slides off the high bench and pushes past Yogendra and strides off over the cardboard in those high heel boots that make her ass go wip-wop side-a-side.
Yogendra is looking at him. It’s that wise-kid look that makes Shiv want to smash his head against the tin counter until he hears things crack and go soft.
“You finished that?” He snatches the kid’s can of tea, splashes its contents over the ground. “You have now. We have better business.”
The kid is right in his fuck-you silence. He is as old as any Brahmin, inside there in the skull. Not for the first time Shiv wonders if he is a rich boy, a son and heir to some pirate lord, tumbled out of the limo under the neons of Kashi to learn how the world really works. Survive. Thrive. No other rules apply.
“You coming or what?” he shouts at Yogendra. Somewhere the kid has found himself a chew of paan.
Leela comes around again that night to help her mother make cauliflower puris. They are a treat for Shiv but the smell of hot ghee in the confined, dark house makes his skin crawl, his scalp itch. Shiv’s mother and sister squat around the little gas cooker. Yogendra sits with them draining the cooked puris, on crumpled newspaper. Shiv watches the boy, squatting with the women, scooping the smoking hot breads into their paper nests. This must have meant something to him once. A hearth, a fire, bread, paper. He looks at Leela clapping out the puris into little ovals and throwing them into the deep fat.
She says into the peace of the house, “I’m thinking of changing my name to Martha. It is from the Bible. Leela is from Leelavati who is a pagan goddess but is really a demon of Satan in hell. Do you know what hell is like?” She casually ladles cauliflower puris out on the chicken-wire scoop. “Hell is a fire that never goes out, a great dark hall, like a temple, only greater than any temple you have ever seen because it has to hold all the people who never knew the Lord Jesus. The walls and the pillars are tens of kilometres high and they glow yellow hot and the air is like a flame. I say walls, but there is no outside to hell, only solid rock going on forever in every direction, and hell is carved inside it, so that even if you could escape, which you can’t, because you’re chained up like a package, there would be nowhere else to go. And the space is filled with billions and billions of people all chained up into little bundles, piled on top of each other, a thousand deep and a thousand wide and a thousand high, a billion people in a pile, and a thousand of those piles. The ones in the centre cannot see anything at all but they can hear each other, all roaring. That is the only sound you hear in hell, this great roaring that never stops, from all the billions of people, chained and burning but never being burned up. That is the thing, burning in flame, but never eaten up.”