Sacred Games (53 page)

Comilla Marwah was talking now, as Mary worked on her hair with a Yasaka cutting scissor and a comb. ‘You don't know, Mary,' she whispered, ‘how that woman went after Rajeev. Such drama about how miserable she was in her marriage to that horrible husband, and all of this delivered to Rajeev in little black dresses at Indigo. So of course something started. She used to go to the Oberoi, tell her driver that she was shopping: “Driver-ji, you go and have lunch, I'll take two-three hours.” Then she would go in, through the hotel and to the other entrance, catch a taxi from there straight to Rajeev's building, enter through the side gate and up to his apartment. So, nice afternoon bonk, then back in another taxi to the Oberoi, and ten minutes of shopping so she had some bags, and off to home looking like some Sati-Savitri. And telling Rajeev that she had made a terrible mistake, that she should have never left him in London, all this shit. Meanwhile she meets Kamal, who's rich, rich as in the industrialist type of rich…'

Comilla had to stop then, for a stylist to squeeze by with her client. Space was so expensive in Bombay that even the best salons always had too many chairs squeezed in, too much business. And every day the salons were full. There was a lot of money in the city, and Comilla had a fair bit of it, and she knew exactly who had how much. She went on, ‘But then she meets Kamal. This is at the same time she's doing Rajeev on the side, on the side of the horrible husband I mean. Kamal is loaded, and socially he's completely connected, he's right in the centre. And let's face it, she's an attractive woman. So then she starts angling for Kamal. Right under her husband's nose, you understand. They move in the same circles, all of them. But again the same story, unhappiness, haay-haay, I'm so sad, all that. Men can't resist that. So stupid. So then she's doing Kamal and Rajeev at the same time. Can you believe that?'

Mary could believe it easily. She had believed reports about Comilla Marwah's own affairs, which affairs were – one had to admit – not simultaneous but serial. Mary made a properly shocked face, and whispered with exactly the right touch of titillation, ‘And then?'

‘Then what? That Kamal falls completely for her. She's got that chweetchweet innocent face, you know. And, according to Rajeev, she gives a mean blow-job. So Kamal leaves his wife and three kids and ends up getting engaged to the bitch. Of course her poor husband is totally stunned, but imagine what poor Rajeev goes through. One minute he's her hero and lover who is going to take her away from her horrible marriage, the next he's one discard.'

‘When is the wedding?'

‘Next week.'

‘Sounds like Rajeev is going to need some comforting.'

‘Yes,' Comilla said. She was peering at herself moodily, in the moisture-clouded mirror. ‘True.'

Mary patted her shoulder. ‘You have lost weight. Going to the gym?'

‘Five mornings every week,' Comilla said, but even the compliment didn't pull her out of her self-examination. ‘And all for what? Men. And men are stupid. Want to know what the moral of this whole story is, with her and Rajeev and Kamal and all?'

‘Tell me.'

‘If you give a whore's blow-job with a saint's face, men will leave their wives for you.' And she burst into such grandly boisterous laughter that Mary laughed along with her. Comilla lay back in her chair and roared, and Mary had to put her scissors down and lean on the table. After a while the entire salon was laughing along with them, laughing at Comilla's guffaws. Comilla's mood was greatly improved, and she left Mary a hundred-and-fifty-rupee tip. Mary had given her a good cut, tight to the delicate bones of her head, revealing the long stalk of her neck. She looked wonderful, but not in a hundred years and a thousand haircuts would she look like a saint. She looked like a sleek woman in her late thirties, funny and experienced and brightly curious and wearing well, with that buffed gloss only money could buy. Mary knew too much about her, as she knew too much about many of her clients. Mary knew, for instance, that long ago, when Comilla had been in her early twenties, she herself had been made into the other woman, that her moneyed Marwari boyfriend had left her to marry a nice Marwari girl chosen by his parents. That this boyfriend had continued to meet Comilla in Goa for weekends through two children and many avowals of undying love and declarations that he cared nothing for his fat, boring wife. That he had always promised to leave the wife the next summer, and then the next. And that of course he never had. Comilla had finally managed to tear herself away from that disastrous love, but had found herself alone at thirty, an attractive professional woman with a good pay cheque, but quite disastrously single. There were many in Bombay like her, too many. She had flailed around for a couple of years, and had been lucky to land her husband, a widower nineteen years older than her. He was quite comfortable, had his fingers in real estate and travel and had been charmed by her style. He had married her, and they had had two children, and Comilla had found
her stable, safe home and also, inevitably, certain discontents. After the children were born, she had taken two lovers. All this Mary knew.

Twilight was Mary's favourite time, and as she often did after work, she walked down Carter Road to the sea wall. She strolled slowly down the walkway, amidst joggers, crowds of teenagers and brisk, ked-wearing grandparents doing their evening constitutionals. There was a greenish tint in the sky this evening, shading from a foggy turquoise up high to a startling underwater jade at the horizon. This was what Mary loved about the dimming of the day, this mingling of colours and people. In this amiable mixing, to be alone in the city was to find companionship with a thousand strangers. Of course she had friends, and sometimes they walked the sea wall together. But often, to be solitary, and free, was the gift she wanted from Bombay. She had learned how to be alone, through dragging nights of terror and nostalgia, and now she prized her liberty. There was a certain temperate calm in being one's own person.

And yet there were women like Comilla, who, despite all their advantages, made their bargains for another kind of safety, full of lies and drama and half-understood and half-spoken compromises. Did Comilla's husband know of her affairs? Certainly half the world did, or at least the world that came in and out of the salon. Certainly there were enough women talking to each other about Comilla's adventures, and to Mary. Maybe he knew. Maybe he knew and looked away, maybe he understood. Mary thought she understood a little herself, but she never mistook this understanding for friendship. Comilla told her all kinds of things, but Mary knew she talked only because leaning back in a chair and offering her head to Mary's scissors drew them both into a momentary intimacy, a limited closeness that didn't need the darkness of the confessional box. But the thirty-five or forty thousand rupees that Mary brought home every month didn't make her a member of Comilla's social circle, not at all, even if it was more money than some white-collar briefcase-wallahs made. Comilla would sooner call in her driver to sit at her table than invite Mary to one of her dinner parties. Mary was a very good hairdresser, that was all. Mary had no illusions, no fantastic dreams about who she was and what she could become. She had found her place, and made her peace with it.

A trio of ragged girls passed Mary, their bare feet slapping the pavement, and they surrounded a tall, blond foreigner walking some ten feet ahead. Mary went past him, smiling at the patter of the girls as they held up their open palms to his face. ‘How are you? Uncle, Uncle. Please,
Uncle. How are you? Please. Uncle, hungry, hungry. Uncle, food.' They were jumping up, towards his beaky nose. He looked stricken. All this way he had come, to India, and now he was confronting its fabled poverty, and it had acquired English. The foreigner was shaking his head, no, no, but he had stopped, and Mary was sure that he would reach into his pocket in a moment. A band of little beggar boys streamed past Mary, heading for the foreigner. He'd have them all on his tail now, until he got into a taxi and fled. The privilege of his white skin and money cost him this minor trial, this swirling comet's tail of the needy. The kids on the sea wall were energetic and persistent, but they had long ago learnt to ignore Mary. She talked to them, but she gave no money, and they were professionals. This was work, and they had no time for idle chatter at this prime hour of evening.

Twenty minutes of walking had taken her to the far end of the walkway, almost to the Otter's Club bus stop. Under the deepening black, the low tide had pulled the waves far from shore, leaving a bare scrabble of rock and rubbish. Above it, facing the water, sat Sartaj Singh. Mary averted her face and angled to the left, away. She risked a single glance, quick, and he hadn't seen her. He was fixed on the stain of last light on the horizon. On she went, to the bus stop, where a bus was just drawing in. She ran the last few yards, and looked again only when she was safely on the bus, looked through the rear window. She could still make him out, alone on the edge of the walkway, his feet dangling over the rocks. She found a seat, and held her small grey purse tightly in her lap. Her pulse was racing, and she knew it wasn't just from the running. Why had she wanted so much to avoid a conversation with him? She hadn't done anything wrong. She was guilty of no crime. But he was a policeman, and policemen carried grief with them, like an infection. Better to stay away from them.

She held on to this relief all the way home, this sense of having escaped an encounter with something turbulent and dark. Even in the brief glimpse she had had of him, she had sensed a coiling sadness. He had been watching the sea and the sky with a questioning, pained tension in his shoulders and neck, as if he expected an answer. Better to run from such a man.

Mary shut the door to her room behind her, locked and bolted it. She switched on only one lamp, close and low to the wall, so that the shadows held her with a candle-lit cosiness. There was some fish curry left from last night's dinner, and she made a small bowl of rice with swift
efficiency. She ate sitting on the bed, sipping from a large steel tumbler of water that she kept on the bedside table. She liked the animal shows on Discovery channel, the eternal round of birth and migration and breeding. Against the high dome of African sky, even the gory killings of deer and zebras by lions seemed only proper, a necessary link in an enormous cycle of harmony. Mary's friend Jana, who was addicted to the night-time serials about three-tier families and straying husbands, called her morbid and strange and made her change the channel when she came over. But the ceaseless longings and betrayals of the serials were offensive to Mary, she grew restless and upset and angry. Sharks at least were honest in their appetites, and beautiful besides.

She washed her plate, and the pots, and then reached to the back of the fridge for her chocolate. She had half a box of rum balls from Rustam's in Colaba, glorious in their individual gold-foil wrappings. She allowed herself one after dinner, and only she knew what a supreme act of self-control it was not to eat the whole box at once. She took the leftmost ball back to the bed, and turned up the sound on a leopard sliding through brush. The foil came off slowly under the very tips of her fingers, crinkling deliciously, so delicate. Then there was the golden waft of the cocoa, and she inhaled it deeply, and then tilted her head away so that she could come back to it anew. The first bite was always a small one, just a little nip so that her palate pinged from the clarity of the warm taste, and an ache started at the back of her jaws. Only after she had lost that first exhilaration did she allow herself a substantial chunk. And it was heaven. The dark taste of the rum swirled around her tongue, and she let out a little hiss of satisfaction at the leopard.

Then she was ready for sleep. She wore no make-up, ever, so her night-time ritual was short: a fast wash with a neem soap, and a good brush with Meswak toothpaste. She put on a faded pink caftan, softened by years of washes, and lay on her back, with her hands by her sides. When they were children, Jojo used to tease her about this pose of the dead, this corpse's motionless pause, but then Jojo even in sleep was a spiralling wind, and awoke often with her feet pointing at the pillow. She kicked and thrashed but wanted to sleep close, and Mary used to grumble about her lost sleep at breakfast.

Mary sat up, went to the bathroom, came back and lay down again. She tried breathing evenly, deeply. But her mind still turned and moved. Sleep, she whispered. Tomorrow is a long day. And, and. And Jojo had loved rum balls from Rustam's, but they hadn't been able to afford them
more than once a month. And today there was that Sartaj Singh, plonked like a squatting toad on her sea-wall. The last time she had spoken to him had been in his car, when she had told him about John and Jojo. She had slept very badly after he had come to her with the news of Jojo's death, for a month she had walked around with a reeling heart, feeling dizzy through the day. Then finally the knowledge had settled in, become part of the structure of the new world: your sister is dead. That's how it was, when you confronted something impossible – your husband is sleeping with your sister – at first there was a nausea, a loss of all landmarks. Your own home became a hostile borderland. And then one day you knew that this raw wasteland, this garish alien light, was your home. You just had to have patience and will enough to survive the first terrors.

Mary sat up, propped a pillow against the wall and switched on the television. She found a documentary about space stations, and turned down the sound, and watched spidery white contraptions spin against stars. They were man-made, but soothing. It was always Jojo who had been the religious one, who at eleven had slept with a cross under her pillow, who had gazed up at the church altar with bright, sunlit eyes. Later, she had the same soaring love for celebrity, she had pursued its grail with the same marvellous faith. The closest Mary had ever come to this big-
big
feeling that Jojo told her about was when she watched wildebeest rumbling across a valley, or when she saw some unmanned spacecraft's pictures of the rings of Jupiter. She had been saving, for three years and five months now, for a safari holiday to Africa.