Free A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor Page A

how to talk to people, to show yourself in the best light, you don’t stand up straight, you don’t smile.
    The next boy was from a south Delhi business family, the only son and heir, twenty-six years old. We met in another coffee shop, all around us you could spy these marriage meetings taking place. This boy was more arrogant, wealthy, dressed in a designer shirt, he worehis fat with pride, was well groomed, his pouting lips protruding from his face, his eyes heavy lidded, stirring his tea very slow. Well-manicured fingers perched on the table like exotic birds. There was something in his manner that spoke of cruelty to me. He talked at length, about his Hyundai, his plan to replace it with a Mercedes before the year was out. And all the while he eyed me with a measure of disdain. Why he ever agreed to meet me in the first place I’ll never know. But Aunty was punching above her weight, saying, Nothing succeeds like success.

    We make love on the first of May, Labour Day. A day for the workers.
    His apartment is being painted, it’s full of them but he sends them home, tries to explain the concept of it as he does, this day to honour the working people of the world, but it’s lost on them completely, everything about it is lost. They down tools and go anyway.
    He says, Go home, get drunk, make love to your wives. They look at me as they go.
    He’d waited until they arrived to tell them they were free, until they’d begun to work, to make it worthwhile, to see their reaction. Because theatre was important. But we’d planned this. I’d told him I wanted to know what it was like, I was ready, I wanted it to be him.

    We’ve been drinking since the workers left. Drinking to remove the awkwardness in me.
    Most of the other rooms have been finished, already painted in purple, black, red or ink blue. But in the bedroom the walls are still white.
    Everything smells of paint in here. The smell catches in my nostrils, the back of my throat. The AC is on high. Outside it’s approaching forty degrees. Beating the earth.
    In the kitchen the fridge is well stocked: water, juice, soft drinks, a crate of beer. Several bottles of good whisky in the cupboard. There are cold cuts in the fridge, from thecharcuterie in Vasant Vihar, bresaola, serrano, chorizo. He teaches me how to say these words, how to say “charcuterie,” from the French, obsolete: char for flesh, cuite for cooked, cooked flesh, flesh that is cooked, which we eat.
    He pours a glass of whisky for me, Caol Ila. Teaches me to say that too, tapping the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, mixing it with some drops of clean water, saying, This is the way. In the dhabas the whisky’s dirty, you drink it with Coke, with soda, but not this. He rolls it around the glass. It coats the side and falls, like amber for fossils. Smell it, he says, close your eyes. And he raises the glass to my nose. It smells of earth and sea and salt, Bombay without the heat, in the glint of stars and mud and leaves, in woodsmoke sluiced through rain. Now taste it. I take the glass from his hands, bring it up to my lips. It burns as it touches them. He kisses it back from me and delicately, with his hands on my hips, presses himself against me. I feel the hardness of him. I bring the glass up, fill my mouth, kiss him back again. He looks up, almost surprised, like a boy.
    Now wait. In the empty bedroom he smokes a cigarette, and I make up the bare mattress with a fresh white sheet. Wait. Now I’m standing before him taking off my clothes, covering myself with my arms.
    Wait. He’s lowering me down, I’m breathing him in as he’s looming over me with his enormous eyes, like the statue of a dictator waiting to fall.
    When it happens it hurts.
    And then it doesn’t hurt. Pain slips away into the distance of a blizzard, and beyond all that, with eyes closed, chest cracked open, ribcage pulled apart, my heart fills up with the driving snow.
    I didn’t know what to do afterwards. I lay