The Scatter Here Is Too Great (13 page)

He thought that I'd feel angry and insulted and quit the job, but I was hungry and tired of thinking about Sehr and why she did what she did and who the fuck was she going to marry and why. I did not say anything to Chief. I turned around and apologized instead. He was surprised, so surprised that for three seconds he said nothing and looked at my face to see if I was being funny. Then he said, Fine. I don't hold grudges and don't want you to have any either. If you need work you can work for commission—like other boys. Just that you are no partner remember. And you can be fired like other boys.

I knew other boys can be fired for No Reason.

That's how. That's how he insulted me. But I knew I was tired and hungry and so I kept quiet and asked him if he had five thousand rupees I could borrow for a couple of days. He gave me the money and shook my hand.

That day on, he kept things uneasy between us: kept me out of important cases, delayed my payments, and once even offered that I could take a little bonus for all my previous work—as a token of his love—and go find work somewhere else. It was tempting—all that free, extra money—but I told him no, I am happy to work for commission just like the other boys. It gives me a job.

I gave him no reason to be suspicious. My car recovery ratio was a shocking 100 percent. And so one day, I was told I was being put on the Team for Special Cases.

Thing was Chief was in trouble. He had lost real money betting on the Pakistan cricket team in the Cup final. The guy he owed money to was a political party worker that was known for guns and steel. Two days back, the guy visited the shop and yelled at Chief that he was going to rip his ass up if he didn't pay up in three days. So now Chief had ideas.

Instead of returning the car to the bank, we had to bring it to the workshop, where after the necessary rebranding (change the number plate, new papers, all that), Chief was going to sell it for cash. It was not legal but it was smart: instead of turning the defaulted cars to the bank, you sell them at half the price. The police would treat the car as stolen, the bank could claim its money from the insurance, and nobody was ever going to go looking for the car.

This was not recovery anymore. It was stealing. But the commission for this work was five times. I agreed to it immediately. But not for the money—not really—but to make up for my missing 40 percent. And everything else.

The car smells sweet and blurry. Pannoo takes a drag while studying the backside of the Honda Civic in front of us. His face is pretty fucked. He's Chief's right-hand man. He gets to oversee the Special Cases.

On my right, a driver's half-drowsy half-nasty eyes are looking at me. He's got a brick brown face, a thick mustache creeping up his unshaven cheeks. I know what he's seeing-thinking, seeing-thinking with all the smoke inside our car—ah, all the sweetly wafting smoke—I
know
he sees-thinks us to be a bunch of smoked-up bastards. Bastards he's telling us, look. BASTARD he's calling me. BASTARD!

I stop my thoughts and look deep into his right eye and load my face like I want to spit into his eyes and say “FUCK YOUR MOTHER YOU MOTHERFUCKINGING-INGG—” but that's when I see a large cooking pot wobbling down the footpath behind him, spraying hot steaming chickpeas from its lidless mouth. A boy, young, tenish, runs after the pot. He slaps it on the head and it falls on its mouth with a loud metallic gulp. The chickpeas spill out on the road. The boy squats and starts to sweep them all wet and muddy into his palms. His face is sticky and dusty with sweat. He looks like he'll break into tears.

I have SEEN this bugger—
fucker
—before! Ha-ha, he does these tears pretty well. Cars slow down, people pause to look. Once enough people are around, he lifts up his kurta, and lets the blood-seeping, whip-stripes on his back show. He tells you that he works for a contractor, who is his father or his uncle, who whips him for fucking up. You'd think his father/uncle/contractor beats his skin white with a hot ladle for spilling the stuff on the road. Yes, you'd think of a hot-ladled father-contractor-uncle yelling at the kid—
You fucker! You motherfucker! Oyeyooooooou!
Tha. Tha. Ha-ha.

If I could get out now—right NOW—if I
could
—I'd knock his face off his shoulders and bang it into the tarmac. Blood'd pool around his head and roll into the road cracks, leave a dark patch when dry and turn into tar. Everything you leave on the road turns like that, first dark then tar—that's how a fresh yellow banana gets killed on the road: it vomits its pulp, then turns black, then dry black and then nothing. NOTH—

“Look carefully now. We must find the car today, this is the most probable route.”

“Keep in the center lane, keep looking, this is the route,” Chuchu tells Pannoo, me, anybody.

The smoke rolls upward, unscrewing the tight spaces at its center and blurring the off-white matt-leather seat in front of me. I feel the hit in my head. I start missing her and the dark. My hands miss her. I miss her wet and vicious in that dark landing, doors of empty apartments on both sides. She smelled of sweat and sadness and patches of muffled strawberry perfume. She kissed me with immense sadness. I miss her with all the memory in my muscles.

I close my eyes and recline my head against the seat. With my dick so hard, I just got to go to sleep I think.

I got my revenge with Sehr. I stalked her for weeks, showed up outside her college, phoned incessantly at her home number, called and yelled at her close friends for being the reason of our breakup and sprayed the walls with her address and phone numbers so that all the dicks hanging out of pants everywhere could go and bang at her door and make her feel like without me she was just a slut in hell. I just stamped and stamped her with my boot. Her parents had to get their home phone number changed and change the college she went to.

Ha-ha. She was hot.

There is another girl now. Asma. My bedroom window opens into her grandmother's bedroom. That's how we first said Hello. That first look and I knew she was warm and salty and just right. So later when I found her going down the stairs, I tried to make eye contact, but she ignored her way past me. Then another time I just stopped her and told my name and said I wanted to be friends. She smiled, said, thank you, and disappeared. Came one day in the afternoon when I ran into her. She was sitting alone on the apartment stairs, humming some old Bollywood song. I started talking to her and that was it. From that day, we met every day in the afternoons on the stairs. I am here to live with my grandmother for a few months, she said. Till her parents returned. They were away trying out another city for a few months to see how it suits them to move for good. That was her story, she said.

She was different from Sehr. She didn't have any anger inside her. She was happy. Happier than happy. Her dark brown curly hair smelled of fresh shampoo and she had stories—of her little kid brother, of her mother's trunk whose inside nobody has seen, of her grandmother's belief that you should not cut your nails at night, or drop them on bare floors, because that affects your health and wealth. I laughed when she told me this about her grandmother. I asked her if she believed such things. She looked at me with a quizzical face—she said, Aren't stories always true? I said, I don't understand. So she told me this story of a sorceress who turns her husband, the mighty emperor, into stone, and visits him every evening so that she could feed him with her hands and talk to him and hear him recite poetry to her. “She did that out of love. Because when he was the emperor he was High and Mighty and did not care much about how she loved him. When he turned into an invalid she could take care of him. You see? She did that out of love. Love makes you want to possess people. It makes you destroy the other person.” I didn't understand what the hell she meant in that story, but for half a second I felt whipped at the back of my neck with the steel part of a belt. (I once got that in a fight.) It got me thinking about Sehr, about what I did to her. Did I hurt her so that she could know how much I loved her?

Afternoons, Asma and I sat on the stairs and laughed in low voices, and hummed Bollywood songs. In the fuzzy darkness of the apartment landings, her skin glowed and her eyes were always thinking something up. Up close, she was warmer than I had thought from the distance, but strangely, I could never bring myself to touch her. I never understood why.

She touched me. But it was different. “Why is your eye so red?” she'd ask, placing her fingers below the eye; or, “Do you have fever?” the back of her hand on my forehead, on the side of my neck. When she touched, it left me muddled with feelings that I had never felt. I kept welling up with feeling when she touched. I did not dare touch her back because I knew if I touched her, my touch would be different. It would break something—something was going to happen to her, but more importantly, to myself first.

It scared me that I could not touch her without damaging her.

But yesterday, we met on the landing. Her grandmother was in the neighbor's house. She told me it was her last day. Her parents are going to return and she will go away to another city. That we should do something. She looked at me intensely but I did not know what she meant. Then suddenly she pressed my face in her hands and then before I had finished drawing breath, her mouth was on mine. Her skin, her hair and warm smell and sadness. I exploded. I put my hand around her waist and then gathered my fingers in the small of her back. All I could think of was Sehr, how hard I was to her—HARD. And how gently this girl touches me. I held her to the wall and was kissing her neck when her little brother shouted,
“Oye! Kia karta hai!”
After that I only remember her grandmother's large melting eyes.

We're at a traffic signal. From Chuchu's face it looks like he's crushing something behind his eyes. He's handsome in a black shirt, collar stiff and alert, soaking up the sweat coursing down his temples. I turn around to find the chickpea boy. Too late. But somewhere behind us he's still filling up his palms with chickpeas, wet and muddy, that he'll reheat and resell hot and steaming. I bet he will. And you will eat. Ha-ha.

The girl in the car next door is wearing a sea green sleeveless
kameez
. She's looking ahead with her elbow out of the car. Her glowing neck is bare and white. I stare into it. Taut white glowing neck, I'd like to eat. She glances at me and pauses half-smile. I know how we look to her, I
know
: our heads like fish floating in an aquarium. She must be thinking of something to herself. Something about the boy who could touch her, who was allowed to touch her up in all the places. The soft cusp in her arms, white and warm. And her neck, the most eatable curve you'll dig your teeth into. . . .

That
chutiya
Pannoo still has the joint. “Give it to me.” I rap the seat near his shoulder. “And turn up the window. You are fucking up.” The window's already up, I know. I just want to be a bastard to him. I want him to say something to me, something that angers me enough to crack his head open.