Free A Bad Character by Deepti Kapoor Page B

there still as a corpse in the mortuary sheets, a vacancy of limbs, not daring to move in case it marked an end, but he was a part of me, his ugliness, his black skin. I held it all. Falling in and out of sleep with a pin drop of pain somewhere else.
    He’s in the bathroom now. He’s come back with a cigarette. He’s lying next to me. He’s hard again. He puts the cigarette to my lips, holds my gaze, opens my legs, with his hand he guides himself in.

    Seeming to wake from nowhere suddenly from the cold, I ask for a blanket. Instead he switches off the AC.
    Little by little Delhi encroaches. You can hear it. You can see the thin sliver of sunlight on the frame of the window, fading to dusk. Slowly you make out the noise of children laughing and playing in the lane behind, pans being washed there and traffic beyond.
    The bathroom has retained the day’s heat. The air is so thick in here you can swim in it. In the shower we stand and he washes me, his body behind mine, his hand on my belly where my heart beats, he brings it down, puts one hand around my neck, one inside. I move away, I sit at the side to watch him. There’s muscle around his bones,not a shred of fat on him, and there are scars across his back that I see. We go back into the room to sleep.
    When I wake again it is night, the room has been filled with it, the headlights of cars shift along the fabric of the curtain, rise up the wall and are gone. The whisky bottle is half-empty. He’s not here with me.
    I find him in the dark of the balcony, crouching naked, one hand against the bamboo, his head tilted, listening. He turns towards me, puts his finger to his lips.
    Shhh, he says. Listen.
    In the dargah of Nizamuddin the qawwalis are playing. He says, Do you hear them? Let’s go before it’s too late.

    His same sense of theatre demands we wear the right clothes. He unlocks a cupboard inside, tells me to look through it, pick out something to wear. It’s full of discardeditems, from family, cousins, his mother, old girlfriends maybe. His parents lived here before, left many things behind. I find a salwar-kameez, he takes out a long white kurta for himself from his own wardrobe, and in it he becomes dignified, sober, seeming older. And me, I watch myself in the mirror, covering my head with the dupatta, wrapping it around my forehead, behind my ears, around my neck, to frame my face, and I become Persian, dark-eyed, pious, transformed.
    We laugh in the mirror and he holds me, touches my face, tucks my hair away.
    He sits to crumble charas into a mixing bowl. I watch in fascination. Do you want to try? You’ll like it, he says. He says it comes from the mountains, a deep rich scent from Parvati Valley, he’ll take me there one day. Here, smell it. He holds it to my nose. Then I watch as he heats it, crumbles it in the bowl, burns the cigarette, adds the tobacco, mixes it reverently, rolls. Lights it, praises Shiva, takes a long drag and hands it over to me. He says to take it all the way in, down to the base of the lungs, hold it there as long as I can.

    We left the apartment that night and walked along the streets, walking without touching. Through Nizamuddin in the heat to the dargah, from the smart, clipped neighbourhood into the Muslim streets, where bearded men gathered in white and goats were tethered to butchers’ shops. Left at the mosque, down the passageway, the night brighter than the day, eerie in its calligraphic pharmacy, in Urdu glowing green and gold, trimmed by the desert and the certainty of God. Men stood in their shops behind counters, beside TVs showing preachers delivering sermons, voices droning out of loudspeakers, the flutter of rose petals, a butcher’s knife.
    The crowds were swirling in the narrowing alleyway, the walls closing in at the sides, canopied with cloth, drawing us down lower, almost underground, as if we were being sucked downriver to a grotto. So many bodies there that we were almost lost. He grabbed my hand to