My boyfriend died when I was twenty-one. His body was left lying broken on the highway out of Delhi while the sun rose in the desert to the east. I wasn’t there, I never saw it. But plenty of others saw, in the trucks that passed by without stopping and from the roadside dhaba where he’d been drinking all night.
Then they wrote about him in the paper. Twelve lines buried in the middle pages, one line standing out, the last one, in which a cop he’d never met said to the reporter, He was known to us, he was a bad character.
It’s a phrase they use sometimes, what some people still say. It’s what they’ll say about me too, when they know what I’ve done.
Him and me,
(long dead).
Sitting in the café in Khan Market the day we met, in April, when the indestructible heat was rising in the year, sinking in the day, the sun setting very red, sacrificing itself to the squat teeth of buildings stretching back round the stinking Yamuna into Uttar Pradesh.
The city is a furnace on days like these, the aching heart of a cremation ground.
· · ·
But inside the café you wouldn’t know it; inside it’s cool, the AC is on, the windows are politely shuttered, it could be any time of day in here; in here you could forget the city, its ceaseless noise, its endless quarry of people. You could feel safe.
Only he’s staring at me.
Twenty and untouched. It’s a sin. For twenty years I’ve been waiting for this one thing.
Idha.
In the mirror.
I give myself a name, I wear it out. Lunar, serpentine, desirous. A charm that protects me.
Copyright © 2015 by Deepti Kapoor. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
