A Bad Character Read Free Page B

the ground blowing into our yard, because they had a son.
    In the bedroom he puts his fingers between my legs. But in the café he tells me he’s been living in New York, that he’s only just come home, back to Delhi for good.
    And do I like Chinese food? Yes, I do.
    And do I have a car?
    I have that too. Yes, I have a car.
    Perfect, he smiles, drumming his fingers on the table, Then let’s go, you and me right now. I’ll buy you dinner, I know the place.
    He looks me in the eye. This is how it starts.

    In school we practise kissing one another. Take turns, giggle, watch in the bathroom mirrors, in the mirrors we make ourselves cry, cry and hold one another like our sons have died.
    We walk home in our uniforms at the end of the day, and I dread walking home, I dread walking to school. I’m never good enough anywhere. I’m awkward. I carry it along with me into adulthood.
    When I get my marks in class, I’m asked by the family where the other marks have gone—I’m compared unfavourably to the cousins with higher ones, the ones pegged for success, for government jobs, set to become doctors, lawyers and accountants. Only my English teacher believes in me. She tells me I have it in me to go all the way: to college, abroad, to be anything I want. To be a modern woman. That’s what she says. Our headmistress says it too; in assembly she tells us we’re what the country needs. You’re the future of India, she says.
    I look back on this childhood as if standing on the far bank of a fast-flowing river, impossible to bridge. And he is cutting through it, a drowning man in the dark waters of the monsoon.

    The sun has gone down completely now. The noise of the city rises as it falls, she can’t separate it from the heartbeat in her throat, the chattering of her teeth, because something is finally happening to her.
    The guard at the door salutes him and they share a word. They’re friends already it seems. He has a habit of this, she’ll discover—of making poor people love him; he could raise an army of them if he wanted to, they think he’s one of them in disguise. He offers her a cigarette and she declines, so he lights it for himself and asks her if she knows how beautiful she is, asks as if he’s wondering what to do with it, as if it’s a quality he might apply to a task. Then he laughs to himself and moves on, changes the subject, tells her that his car is over there and that they can meet across the lights towards Lodhi. He’ll be waiting on the side of the road, he’s got a red Maruti Zen with a sticker saying PRESS on the rear window in big letters. You can’t miss it.
    It’s in the car away from his eyes that she thinks this might be madness, that it could be a trap. That this could lead to something untoward. The coward in her rises up and says that she should drive out the other way and go home, away from this strange man, never to come back, never to see him again, to keep living the life that Aunty preserves. But then she remembers home, Aunty and all of that, and she thinks how long she’s been waiting for something to happen to her, how long she’s been motionless inside herself. And now here it is, here’s her chance. It might never come again.

    Like my mother, I’m a loner. I’m sitting by the river near the banyan tree in Agra, she is calling out to me from the house at dusk, my father’s ancestral home on the edge of town. He’s still out working in Singapore but he’ll return, he hasn’t abandoned us quite yet. I hear my mother calling but I don’t reply. She’s fearful, imagining all the terrible things that can happen in the dark.
    When he comes back he holds me in his arms. He smells of cigarettes. Of Old Spice aftershave and whisky. When he comes home he acts like nothing’s changed.
    My mother, she’s suddenly awake, she’s been nervous for days, cleaning the house, getting everything into shape for his arrival. She fixes her hair and puts on her best sari and thinks