The Death of Mr Love, page 1
Praise for Indra Sinha’s The Cybergypsies
‘Not only is it an exhilarating read but it is a demonstration of why we need to read’
The Times
‘A vivid exposé of a social evil, accompanied by an equally vivid evocation of the pleasures of addiction’
Observer
‘An engrossing tale of modern morality’
Face
‘Truly extraordinary’
Independent
Dedicated with affection and respect to
Mulk Raj Anand
who told me when I was a child to write,
and when I was grown up to write about my childhood.
‘Bhalu, call this story fiction if you want, but you must write it for three reasons. First because it is true, and at its heart is that murder of forty years ago which people in India still remember. Second, because its threats1 are still alive, running unbroken into the future. Third, you must reveal that the uproar and sensation of the Nanavati trial hid another monstrous crime, which remains undiscovered, its perpetrator unpunished, except by these words that you will write.’
* * *
1 A slip. I was trying to type ‘threads’. Phoebe claimed this was a message from Maya, received at a second seance in Brighton, after I had left for Bombay in July 1999.
PROLOGUE
RETRIBUTION (BOMBAY, APRIL 1959)
Last night on Juhu beach I startled a prostitute, hard at work beneath a client in the cigarette-butt salted sand. She saw me over his shoulder and let out an ululation of pure terror. How elating that shriek was. Mostly, my fellow citizens are impervious. If they notice me at all, they don’t know what they are seeing. All kinds of tricks I have tried to gather an audience. I staggered among the traffic at Kemp’s Corner, but instead of the expected chorus of horns and abuse, drew a solitary beep from one rattled motorist. I climbed onto the statue of the black horse at Kalaghoda and perched behind King Edward VII, waving to the people below, but only a few looked up. I have roamed Bombay city from end to end and everywhere I meet eyes that stare through me as if I weren’t there. Those who can see don’t want to. They look hastily away. Well, I am not a decent sight in my blood-soaked attire, my hair curded with dried gore. A disgrace, the averted faces proclaim, father of his own misfortune. They can tell from the bottle I am carrying, whose miserable translucence proclaims it to be empty, that I am no good-hearted village drunk, driven by a harsh life and an unjust world to drown his sorrows in honest country mash. My stuff is Scotch at four hundred chips a bottle. Across its label strides the top-hatted, monocled, red-coated figure which our Indian cinema has translated into hero man ‘Jahnny Walkar’, screen maestro, last slurred word in comedic drunkenness. If this story ever becomes a movie, I fear it’s he who will play me.
To be hated is one thing, to be ridiculed is worse. I am accused of unpleasant crimes, to some of which I may even plead guilty, but I was never a figure of fun. Those who know me well could tell you that I am a quiet man, a gentle soul – if only my friends would speak up – but many of them now deny having known me. I want the chance to tell my own story, to put my side of things. Look, I am described (I am thirty-six) as ‘an ageing Lothario, who maintained his sleek and deceiving looks with the help of Vasmol, “the hair darkener that keeps its promises”, although this heartless seducer did not . . . He drinks foreign liquor, obtained on the black market from a bootlegger, and buys Macropolo’s brown perfumed cigarettes in tins of fifty. More than forty of his gold-tipped butts were found at the scene of the crime.’
I am, it seems, a louche villain, a cynical genie of the whisky bottle, given entirely to vice, ‘a symbol of those wealthy, corrupt, immoral and basically un-socialist forces which are holding the nation and its integrity to ransom’. This last is a quotation from Blitz, our city’s beloved scandal sheet, which would like its readers to believe me capable of murder.
‘Some,’ writes Blitz, ‘may attribute this sickening event to the intolerable heat of the season, but this is a mistake. Persons such as he do not share the lot of the common man. They live and move in a world of privilege. For their sins, their outrages, their crimes, they and they alone are to blame.’ Please, do me a favour. The thing that happened was inexplicable, mad, and only an imbecile would blame the weather – but it was not my fault.
The heat in Bombay, in those last few weeks before the rains, is famous for driving people crazy. Such clamminess, such moisture that turns armpits into oozing swamps and crawls like insects under the clothes, such oily clinging dirt, collars and cuffs made black by an hour’s wearing, such a swelter of bodies, and nights when sleep is impossible because the heat hangs like a contagion in airless rooms. In the poorest parts of the city, in chawls and shanties, there are more murders at this time of year than any other. But these are, of course, socialist areas. Blitz reports, ‘A labourer has cut his wife’s throat because she refused to make him a cup of tea. His advocate in the Sessions Court jokes that at this season the only defence is “heat of the moment”.’
Even where modest incomes permit each family to have its own living space, things are no better. Across the city, people in thinly-partitioned rooms switch on their fans and open their shutters to catch the faintest breeze; but the sea has the foetid breath of a beast and its faint exhalations are soon lost in the maze of alleys. The prurient eye of Blitz notes, ‘The young men lie on their backs and hear people going to their mating beds, and the dark snake crawls in their veins.’
The wealthy, no doubt, escape. On Malabar Hill, where the mansions and fancy apartments look out over the Arabian Sea, with servants camped outside the big front doors, chowkidars to guard each entrance and conclaves of drivers playing cards in the car parks, we siesta-ing rich seal ourselves into our air-conditioned rooms and lock out the glare, the heat and the suffering world.
On such a day, in such a room, I was lying naked on my bed, thinking of the women I had had in it. Fish-kites wheeled outside my window, and forty feet below, the sea was shouting. There were quite a few women, I will admit, but a seducer I am not. I never set out to make a woman fall in love with me. It happens naturally. I know how to be charming. Many lovers have told me, though it’s hard to see while my face still carries marks of a violent struggle, that I have the looks of a film star, a firm jaw, a straight nose, thick eyebrows that frame eyes capable of great tenderness. My mouth is wide and broadens readily into a smile. In the back-streets off Mohammed Ali Road one can buy all sorts of potions which are supposed to make one irresistible to the opposite sex. A man I know used to mix a tincture of gold costing hundreds of rupees with his own semen and dab the mixture behind his ears, but such things are for the ignorant and desperate. A sincere smile costs nothing and is more effective.
Particularly galling is the suggestion (Blitz again) that I used drugs to get women into bed. An Anglo-Indian who calls herself ‘Angela’ has come forward with a pitiful story about how, ignoring her tears and wretched protestations about the trusting husband and small child at home, I cajoled her out of her underwear. These sessions – there were several – took place each time against her will and better judgement, while her moral faculty was paralysed. How could this be? She offers no explanation, other than that once, when she was ‘nauseous with self-loathing’, I produced a paper with a yellow powder in it and told her to take it because it would make her feel ‘sparkling and alive’. Months later, on a train in South India, she overheard a sinister-looking man mention a certain yellow love philtre which, he said, when administered to a victim, would produce in her ‘a feeling of lively exuberance’. It is a pity that I am in no position to mount a libel action because I know exactly who ‘Angela’ is and can certainly vouch for the happy gusto of her adulteries, but the only powder I recall was the stuff caked on her upper lip.
No, I never make the first move, and if I do have a reputation for walking up to beautiful women at parties and saying, ‘You look lonely, would you like to dance?’ simple acts of human kindness don’t make me a seducer. Nor, wallah, am I a deceiver. I admit that I have often carried on more than one affair at a time, I have never pretended otherwise. Always at the outset I made it clear, ‘We will be friends. We will have fun, but don’t expect me to give up other friendships.’ Is it my fault if some chose not to hear? I am not ready to be a husband. This is why I made it a rule only to see married women. So much the better if they had children, it made their marriages harder to leave. ‘At thirty-six years old he is still a bachelor,’ say my detractors, ‘because no decent woman wanted to marry him.’ Ah, if only it were true.
But I must not allow present troubles to get in the way of my story. Let us go back to that intolerable, steamy afternoon before the rains. The evil event had yet to happen and other thoughts occupied me as I lay on my bed, listening to the thin screaming of kites. It was four. Outside, on city streets, people were leaving footprints in the tarmac. My habit was to come home from my office at this time for a nap. Usually the sea, crying of birds and dyspeptic gurgles of the air-conditioner send me to sleep at once, but that day I was lying awake, a thin pillar of cigarette smoke rising from the vicinity of my pillow, the ashtray near my head accumulating gold cigarette-ends. I had a problem. I needed to get rid of my girlfriend . . .
Two was a mistake. I’d known it from the outset. Most of the women who come to my bed are pragmatists, they know exactly what they are doing and have their own reasons for deceiving their husbands, but Two was dangerous. She was a romantic, a thing I’ve noticed bef
‘I put myself in your hands,’ Two said to me not very long after we met. ‘I want to belong to you completely.’ Normally I despise that kind of sentimentality. I should never have encouraged her.
I met Two because I was carrying on an affair with one of her best friends, to whom she bore such an uncanny and complete resemblance that they might have been twins. Both were English. They were almost exactly the same age and favoured the same look – Ava Gardner from The Barefoot Contessa – dark waving hair and highly arched brows above eyes that seemed to challenge men to meet them. To make confusion worse, even their names sounded alike. People constantly got them mixed up. Once, when they were still friends – before they fell out over me – they spent a whole evening at the Willingdon Club impersonating each other, flirting extravagantly in one another’s names. ‘My husband is away next week, do give me a ring,’ breathed One, dancing with an iguana-jowled Lebanese banker, and whispered Two’s number. Two smiled her sweetest smile at the High Court judge who was stroking her arm and offering to teach her Hindi, and gave him One’s calling card. Little did his wrinkled and famously lecherous Lordship know, but my affair with One had already begun.
Later One came laughing up to me, bringing Two with her, and introduced us.
‘I’ve heard all about you,’ said Two, when her friend had gone off again, leaving us together. ‘You’ve got quite a reputation.’ She was still in a flirtatious mood. ‘Is it safe to be seen talking to you?’ Her likeness to One was startling. She had the same grey, slightly-hooded eyes, and a practised through-the-lashes stare which she probably thought of as languorous.
‘Reputation is one thing, truth is another.’
‘They say you can’t see a woman without making a pass at her.’
‘Well, what do you think? Have I made a pass at you?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘so I expect you don’t find me attractive.’
As a matter of fact I did, but not for the reasons she might have imagined. It isn’t usually beauty that attracts me, but some small peculiarity. If, for example, I see a pair of thin lips, which their owner has tried to disguise by painting a voluptuous shape around them, it makes me want to find out how a woman so aware of the ugliness of her mouth will use it for kissing. The elusive thing that catches my interest needn’t be physical. If I see amusement, alarm, or even contempt – it has been known – in a woman’s eyes when she is talking to me, I can’t help wondering what message they will convey when they are inches from mine during the love act.
Two’s peculiarity was her likeness to One.
Well, of course it was irresistible. Imagine. How deep would it run? Two’s kisses, would they taste like One’s? One was noisy in bed, she grunted and gave little squeals. And Two? One liked the missionary position. How about Two? Well, after sex, when One re-did her face in my mirror, she would sit very upright, suck in her cheeks, raise her eyebrows and stare at herself like a haughty duchess. Two leaned forward, peered, scowling and pulling her mouth into strange quadrilaterals. But there were times when the face looking back out of the mirror could have belonged to either of them. During one of our early sessions I called Two by the name of her double. It was an easy mistake. I only realised what I’d done when I noticed the doppelganger face in the glass glowering at me. More errors followed.
Two liked to plunge her nails into my back – God knows where she had learned this unpleasant habit – and once, in bed with One, I surprised her by asking to examine her fingernails. They were chewed to the quick. She apologised and told me that for special occasions she wore false nails glued on top of the real ones. The glue wasn’t very good and they were apt to lift away on sticky strings. At a smart party where plates of food were being passed round, she was appalled to see a scarlet claw circulating among the guests, stuck in a cucumber sandwich. Two would never have told such a story against herself. In fact, as I soon discovered, the chief difference between them was One’s sense of humour.
When, inevitably, it became clear that I was seeing both of them, they reacted quite differently. One tried to laugh it off – most admirable, because I could tell she was hurt – but Two flew into a rage and damaged my cheek with her finger-daggers.
‘What did you expect?’ I demanded. It was essential to nip this in the bud. ‘You knew when we met that I was seeing your friend. What made you think I’d give her up? If you’re going to behave like this, I can’t go on seeing you.’
She began weeping and said she was in love with me. Then she made that remark about putting herself in my hands. I should have kicked her out. Instead – why, I don’t know – I softened my tone and said, ‘She has fallen for me. She wants me to marry her, but you know my feelings . . .’ Some minutes passed. Back in bed, the gouges on my cheek still bright with blood, Two said, ‘I want to marry you too. You do realise that, don’t you?’
So began a period – it did not last long, perhaps four months – during which, if I am honest, I behaved very badly. I played them off against one another. Rivalry made them all the more ardent. Each wrote me letters which I read aloud to her rival. To each of them I insisted that the other meant nothing, that I no longer slept with her. I stopped protesting when they talked about marriage, I let each believe she was winning. I even spoke of it myself. Neither of them, of course, liked the situation. One, putting on her best brave face, said she felt sorry for Two.
‘I saw Two yesterday,’ One wrote to me. ‘She must hate me. Her face was so hard set, her lips so tight, her hands shook when she lit a cigarette. She was coldly polite . . . You said you had to beware of her, but couldn’t remember the expression you wanted so I thought of all the sayings beginning with “Beware” for you. Beware of the Dog? Beware of Pity? Beware the Ides of March? Beware of Greeks bearing gifts (bootleg whisky)? Or Christ, was it, saying “Beware of soothsayers”?’
Two wrote to me, ‘Sweetheart, in these last few days something has happened and I find myself so much in love with you and so much wanting to be with you that everything else seems quite unimportant. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly selfish person, but now, I want to be wholly selfish and think only of myself . . . For the first time I know what it is going to mean if we lose each other and perhaps for the first time I realise that much unhappiness has to lie ahead for someone anyway . . .’
These letters arrived within days of one another. I put them away in the cardboard box I kept under my bed for such things.
One of them had to go, but which? I had decided to drop Two, with her talent for temper and sulks, when One, without warning, upped the stakes. She came to the flat and let herself in – she had a key, Two did not – and the first I knew of her presence was when she was in my bedroom, laughing, already pulling off her clothes. Later, lying in my arms, she said she had good news.
‘Tell me,’ I said. I was leaning over her, affectionately tracing her lips with my finger, expecting to hear, I suppose, that her husband was going away again. He often made long trips, during which we could be free. In my mind arose the possibility of whole nights together, perhaps a run down to Goa. Instead she announced that she was pregnant.
I was horrified. I had not believed her capable of such deceit. Why had she stopped taking precautions? I hid my anger as well as I could and explained that marriage at present was impossible. She would have to be patient. Meanwhile I’d take care of things. There would be time in the future for other children.
Two was overjoyed by the news. ‘She’s scared of losing you,’ she said. ‘Hey presto, she’s with child. Anyway, it couldn’t be yours, could it, because you’ve stopped . . . you know?’ There was something very vile about her triumph.
‘At least you’ve nothing to worry about,’ I told her. ‘She won’t be speaking to me again. Not after what happened.’
‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me. What happened?’
