THE MAN WHO LOST INDIA is a novel that has been ten years in the making.
About the novel
The year is 2032. China declares war on India. Pillage and plunder ensues. The war comes to an abrupt halt when a supernatural event saves the obscure town of Lalbag from annihilation. Even as China renews its efforts to invade Lalbag, a greater calamity awaits this sleepy town. A Chinese cop stumbles upon a dangerous secret that threatens to end the town’s immunity. A fierce and forbidden love between a servant and his mistress destroys two families. Meanwhile, the town’s richest man becomes afflicted with a terrible disease, the town beauty goes mad when her love betrays, and a psychic turns water into blood, sending the town and its people deeper into tragedy.
A dystopian never-been-done-before tale set in – and between – China and India, THE MAN WHO LOST INDIA is a powerful portrayal of love, strife and family in the wake of 21st century’s biggest war. Incantatory and atmospheric, this is Meghna Pant’s most ambitious novel yet, full of beauty.
EXCERPT ONE (950 WORDS):
LIFE AS WE KNOW IT
2032
Across the landscape, a slit of light disappears, as if a giant hand is drawing a veil over the face of this earth. The afternoon shine becomes dimmer.
“Aeroplane bye bye!” he hears Ida shout. Seth looks up into the darkening sky, thankful for the distraction, and sees something black flying above the kites.
“It’s not an airplane, stupid,” Vakil tells Ida. “It looks like some kind of—”
They hear a loud explosion from the neighbouring town ofKharbag. The children drop theirkites and run to Seth.
“What’s happening?” they ask,terrified.
Peace does not fall from the sky, but war certainly does. Sethknows this. He also knows thattongues are keepers, not of thetruth, but versions of the truth. Hepauses with the effort of a poetcarefully selecting his words, andsays, “Don’t worry. Nothing is happening.”
“Papa, look!” Vakil says. He holds up his mobile phone that is live streaming Times How. A hysterical anchor screams: Thelast bastion has fallen. China hasattacked Punjab!
Seth sees his children tremble like electric wires in a storm. Before he can calm them, they hear the roar of a jeep. They run to the parapet and look out at the road. An army jeep screeches to a halt in front of Mehra’s bungalow. Five Chinese soldiers in olive drabs jump out of the jeep and storm into the house. Seth hearsthe sound of glass shattering, utensils clanging and cupboards falling. They’re ransacking Mehra’s home.
“What’s happening, Papa?” Idaasks her father.
Seth says nothing. He pulls hischildren to the ground. His heartis thumping against his body like it’s possessed by a powerfuldemon. He looks up to the skyand sees a large yellow moon hanging there like a decayed tooth. Where has the clear blue day gone?
He turns to Urmila. Her eyesare brimming with tears. “Theclothes!” he whispers urgentlyto her. “Get rid of
the clothes!”
Urmila runs to the clothesline and pulls down the clothes. Through the balustrade, Sethlooks at his neighbour’s terrace.Nandini is gone. He sees thesoldiers pull Pramod, Nandini andtheir two housekeepers out of thehouse. They make them line up ina row and kneel down on theirknees.
Nandini and her father huddle together. Pramod’s eyes are filled with the sorrow of a man who has lost everything.
Ida starts crying. Shhh, Seth tells her. We can’t let them hear us.
A soldier, a boy, a few yearsyounger than Nandini, stands above her. There is no playfulness in him. He rams the butt of his rifle into Nandini’s face. Nandini clutches her face and crunches to the ground in pain. Her father gets up and leaps at the boy. The other soldiers grab him and bring him to his knees.
Seth sees a Benelli shotgun. Hesees a soldier feed a bullet intothe chamber. He hears a loudclick, a sound as cold as death,the metallic snap of the shotgun’s safety being released. He sees themuzzle of the shotgun pointed atPramod’s head. He sees thesoldier pull the trigger. He seesthe bullet fire. Pramod’s headdroops, as if he’s asleep. His body crumples to the ground. Dustfrom the ground rises on impactand covers Nandini’s horrified face. The soldier resets the shotgun’s safety and slips the shotgun back into its holster.
Seth shuts his eyes in shock. He hears Nandini scream, almost at the same time as Ida. He puts his hand over Ida’s mouth. “Quiet! Everyone stay down,” he whispers urgently. Ram, Urmila and Manu sit down beside him, no one moves a muscle.
There’s a rustle of leaves from their compound’s mango tree. Seth cannot believe that the front gate of his bungalow is open.What if the soldiers enter? Whatwill he do then?
They hear gunshots. Seth peers over a baluster and sees that the two housekeepers have been shot dead. Only Nandini remains. She holds her burst cheek, sobbing. She’s only sixteen, three yearsyounger than his daughter. Sethwatches the boy soldier kick heragain. The front of his army boot hits Nandini on her nose. Seth sees blood roll down her face. The soldier’s foot rises again,high in the air, and Nandini folds her hands in front of her face. “Daya,” she seems to be saying.Her front teeth are broken. Thesoldier laughs. He picks her upand carries her to the jeep, asthough she’s as light as a feather.
Seth freezes.
Geeta Mehra comes running outof their house. At the front gate she stops. She looks at the dead bodies. Her eyes become as empty as a gutted animal. She sees her daughter and hurls herself at the jeep. Seth turns his children away.
He hears a shot. He watches Geeta as she falls to the ground.
The jeep pulls away.
It’s been less than twenty minutessince it arrived.
No one moves. Sweat streams down Seth’s arms and he watches it dry. A jacaranda flower falls quivering to his lap. After a minute or ten, he lets Ida go. She screams.
“Where have they taken her?”Ida clutches him and asks. “Where has she gone?”
Nightmares havepooled around hereyes. “I don’t know,”Seth replies.
He holds his daughter andwalks her slowly down the stairway. The others follow, crying and trembling. Will his family meet the fate of the Mehrafamily?
Seth breaks into tears.
Life as we know it, he thinks, will never be the same again.
EXCERPT TWO (1000 WORDS):
STARDUST AND FIREBRAND
God is not listening, because not a single prayer is bringing what’sexpected of it. But if there’s atime for prayer, Seth knows, this is it. Over the last three months, without any warning, withoutheed, China has captured most ofIndia. Millions of people have been killed. Lalbag is one of the last standing frontiers and, at any given moment, a bomb is expected to fall on it.
It’s almost midnight and the ceasefire is minutes away. So, thetownspeople are praying. They’repraying to their beloved Lord Shiva, for it is Maha Shivratri, the holiest day of the new moon month of Maagha. Seth watches their eyes shut tight in devotion. War does not change you, it reveals you, Seth thinks. He admires their piety, the surrender that it brings. But has a single man prayed himself out of the life meant for him?
Seth hears the ring of a large brass bell and watches Swamijirotate a lamp, throwing fire twofeet into the air.
The sandalwood scent of the incense, the rhythmic chant of Om Namah Shivay, and the gentlebreeze flowing in from the North ensconce the temple into a calm that can lull the fear in every heart. Standing atop Mount Akaho, the temple casts a golden glow on the town of Lalbag. No wonder man created God.
Seth is here, to show hissupport to the townspeople, but he cannot bring himself to pray. Hepossesses neither the fear nor thedevoutness of a devotee. He looksat Ram, Urmila and Manu, standing next to him, deep in prayer. Seth’s own family haschosen to stay at home, stillshaken, still distraught.
Faith is like the sea, it throws back double of what’s thrown into it. So is fear.
Suddenly something blackdarkens the night sky. A shadowfalls on the half moon of Seth’sface. On the Shiva Linga,glistening with milk andvermilion paste, Seth sees thereflection of a dazzling blaze oflight. Light: the colour of blood and ice.
Seth looks up to see that the dark night has revealed somethinginsidious. His mind becomes redhot. He peers into the vastemptiness where the earth joinsthe sky and sees a light churning the air behind it. What is it? A star with a tail? A comet? No, thelight is slashing the air with angrywelts. Its fury is as bright as the skin of Lord Shiva. It is …
“A bomb!” Seth screams, his tongue like scorched water. “Run! Everyone get out of here.”
The devotees open their eyes inalarm. They look at each other in confusion. Does anyone believe the rich? No. They turn to Swamiji, where their faith truly rests.
“Save yourselves,” Swamijisays slowly, as if God iswhispering in his ears. “Run.”
The earth begins to quake. The temple bells tremble and crash to the floor. The devotees look up to see that the hot summer moon has swallowed its own light. The vaults of hell have been let open. They drop their bilva leaves and rudraksha malas, their bananas and marigolds. They get up in commotion, ready to flee. But their feet! They find that their feet have frozen. The heavens are lost. What is happening?
They look at each other inpanic. Many begin to sob. A man faints.
Seth too finds himself glued to the temple floor. Ram leans over and puts his arms around him.
“I will not let anything happen toyou, Mai Baap,” he says. Urmilaand Manu look at Ram with thefull force of hurt,
till he pulls his arms away.
“Save us, Shiva!” says Urmila, clasping her hands in prayer, tears streaming down her face. “I vow to spend the rest of my life filledwith your thoughts and to neverspeak a human word again.”
Seth thinks of Ida, within whomhis happiness always finds heart. He hopes the bomb does not make its way to her gentle life.
From behind the Shiva Linga, where the cannonball tree grows—bearing sweet-scented bloomsin winter and shading the devotees in summer—there comes a strange noise. Seth seesthe buds of the cannonballflowers, twelve in all, quiver, as ifgathering their strength. And then—Seth gasps, as do
all the devotees—the flowers begin to open their petals, like the hood of Shiva’s serpent. They throw columns of shining golden light into the sky. What supernatural thing is this?
Then the Shiva Linga, black and crowned with the Naga, startsto grow. It grows and grows.Longer and longer, wider andwider, crashing through the roofof the temple. This time the shockis too great. Seth can’t even gasp.He just stares, mouth open, as theLinga begins to take the shape ofShiva. It is a shape that he knowsbut does not expect. And then,right before his disbelieving eyes, Shiva turns into a fiery column of light. The Lord has come alive!
Like leaves falling at the foot ofa tree, everyone drops to their knees.
“The Neelkanth has arisen,” they gasp. The fear in their hearts is gone.
The bomb shows no such reverence. It hurtles towards them, impatient, as if it’s a blessing the devotees have long prayed for. And it falls, wreck and fury, in all its destruction, and it falls upon the light of The Lord.
“No!” cry the devotees.
There is a single dazzlingexplosion. Mount Akaho rattles as if its core has exploded into the sky. A tempestuous wind sweeps through the land, whirling dust in an eddy, shaking trees by their roots, forcing homes to crumble, sending the good earth into that heaven where Gods convene.
Seth shields his face from theflying embers and shrapnel heexpects. His ears ring. He feels apowerful force lift him up and drop him to the floor. He hears his body crunch.
Hai Ram!
Then there’s silence.
EXCERPT THREE (400 WORDS):
STARDUST AND FIREBRAND
God is not listening, because not a single prayer is bringing what’s expected of it. But if there’s a time for prayer, Seth knows, this is it. Over the last three months, without any warning, without heed, China has captured most of India. Millions of people have been killed. Lalbag is one of the last standing frontiers and, at any given moment, a bomb is expected to fall on it.
It’s almost midnight and the ceasefire is minutes away. So, the townspeople are praying. They’re praying to their beloved Lord Shiva, for it is Maha Shivratri, the holiest day of the new moon month of Maagha. Seth watches their eyes shut tight in devotion. War does not change you, it reveals you, Seth thinks. He admires their piety, the surrender that it brings. But has a single man prayed himself out of the life meant for him?
Seth hears the ring of a large brass bell and watches Swamiji rotate a lamp, throwing fire two feet into the air.
The sandalwood scent of the incense, the rhythmic chant of Om Namah Shivay, and the gentle breeze flowing in from the North ensconce the temple into a calm that can lull the fear in every heart. Standing atop Mount Akaho, the temple casts a golden glow on the town of Lalbag. No wonder man created God.
Seth is here, to show his support to the townspeople, but he cannot bring himself to pray. Hepossesses neither the fear nor the devoutness of a devotee. He looks at Ram, Urmila and Manu, standing next to him, deep in prayer. Seth’s own family has chosen to stay at home, still shaken, still distraught.
Faith is like the sea, it throws back double of what’s thrown into it. So is fear.
Suddenly something black darkens the night sky. A shadow falls on the half moon of Seth’s face. On the Shiva Linga, glistening with milk and vermilion paste, Seth sees the reflection of a dazzling blaze of light. Light: the colour of blood and ice.
Seth looks up to see that the dark night has revealed something insidious. His mind becomes redhot. He peers into the vast emptiness where the earth join sthe sky and sees a light churning the air behind it. What is it? A star with a tail? A comet? No, thelight is slashing the air with angry welts. Its fury is as bright as the skin of Lord Shiva. It is …
“A bomb!” Seth screams, his tongue like scorched water. “Run! Everyone get out of here.”
EXCERPT FOUR (750 WORDS):
THE GREAT GALL OF CHINA
As China awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, it found itself transformed into a gigantic arid nation. This was not entirely unexpected, of course. The Chinese, so many of them, had long been tapping into scarce resources and drinking up all of China’s water. The government tried to get new sources of water. It launched a one-litre-a-day drinking water campaign. It built dam after dam after dam on rivers Yellow and Yangtze and Sungari and Pearl. It tried to save the melting Himalayan glaciers, two-thirds of which were expected to disappear by 2056. It tried to get the Mekong River breadbasket to bake—speaking metaphorically—fresh buns. Nothing worked. Beijing experienced heat waves. Shanghai saw storms and floods. The citizens were left parched. There was simply no water.
China was left with two options: to become a barren wasteland or to source water from the outside.
That’s when the bright Chinese strategists remembered.
The Doctrine of Absolute Territorial Sovereignty. This doctrine said that upstream states, like China, were allowed unlimited use of trans-boundary waters regardless of what occurred downstream. Now Tibet, whose ass China owned, happened to be—luckily for them—the world’s largest water tank.Many rivers originated from Tibet and flowed downstream to other nations. All China had to do was gain absolute control over these trans-boundary waters. After all, why should China let Tsangpopour its precious water into the Brahmaputra, when it could keep all the water to itself?
Thus, on all rivers flowing out of the Tibetan plateau, China build dams and canals and pipelines! It wrung out all the lower riparian nations and soon had control of most waterways in Asia. China then diverted most of Tibet’s water to its parched North (enforcing the one-litre-a-day drinking water policy on the innocent Tibetans) and rejoiced when liquid fire flowed into the bone-dry throats of their yellowing necks.
The other Asian nations protested.
Make a bilateral treaty on water utilisation, China!
Err … no, sorry, we talk no English.
Share hydrological data, China!
Err … no, sorry, we see no English.
Engage in dialogue, China!
Err … no, sorry, we hear no English.
Then the still-thirsty Chinese throats gurgled: why are we nibbling on the shore when we can swallow the whole ocean? So, in typical covert style, China build a dam on Nepal’s Karnali River and then watched—it worked, this plan worked!—the great Ganga River gasped for breath.
The other Asian countries, pushed to the brink, threatened to attack China.
Well, shrugged China. Perhaps for water to flow, blood must flow. Instead of building dams, we will build graves. And so, China began a war for regional dominance. It wasn’t a new idea, or fairly difficult. All of China’s greatest leaders— Mao Zedong, Sun Yat-sen, Deng Xiaoping—wanted only one thing for China: for it to become the world’s most powerful country. China knew that it could become a superpower only when it had an indestructible military power capable of huge devastation across the globe. And it had that: the world’s largest army, with a military budget of three hundred billion dollars, one hundred thousand million troops, and a long-roosting ambition to rule Asia. Despite having suffered a century of invasions and humiliations, the Chinese had not developed a notion of not doing unto others what they didn’t want others to do unto them. Like a dog squirting on fire hydrants, China began to mark everything in Asia as its territory.
Taiwan: unification. Vietnam: intimidation. Philippines: incapacitation. Spratly Islands in the South China Sea: reconquestation. Outer Mongolia: reclamation. Japan: old revenge, easy conquest, as it lay crippled by Mother Nature. Diaoyu and Ryukyu Islands: now Chinese. Soon, the winds from the Pacific Ocean to the South China Sea to the East China Sea whispered: China is King.
The autocratic regime showed no remorse in displacing and killing thousands of people.
With Tibet, China owned almost fifty per cent of the world’s water supply, and now—with recent invasions— it owned more than sixty-to-seventy percent. It controlled more than half the world. But, the dragon was still thirsty. It greedily eyed another H2O nation: India, with its mammoth blue lines of boundless gurgling water. How lovely would it be, thought China, to sip from the Ganga, Krishna, Godavari, Yamuna, Kaveri and Meghna, to slurp from the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea, to take a gulp from that great Indian Ocean. India was both a mere downstream pawn and also the mightiest enemy on China’s border. It was the only nation that could oppose China in the region. It had to go.
EXCERPT FIVE (500 WORDS):
She rolls over and thinks about her to-be husband, Harsh Shah. Ida doesn’t mind that he sniffles his nose a lot, and that, though taller than most men and better built, he slouches at his shoulders. His idea of life is to receive everything that he gets with the simple acceptance of a child, andshe hopes this will include her. She’s met him only once and can only hope that the premeditated arranged marriage will translate into love. But is love all that a woman needs? Doesn’t a woman long to be weighed down by a man’s body and be consumed byhis agony? Doesn’t a woman need a man who stands below her window every night as she slowly undresses for him; a man who is as dark as Harsh is fair, as hot-blooded as Harsh is calm, a manwho enjoys smelling her smutty panties? Is love all that a woman needs? No, of course not. Ida, she knows this.
Ida feels feverish, as if she’s made of water, and the water is boiling. Her feelings continue to knead and plod her body withsuch disregard for what they’re doing to her that Ida wonders if they’re being intentionally cruel. Still, it is only when her mother leaves the room that she gets out of bed.
She picks up her panty from the floor and takes an old red lipstick from her dressing table. At least she can use it for something. She turns to the inside of her panty and writes: Midnight. Black Taj. She folds it neatly into a wicker basket of her soiled clothes, pick sup the basket, leaves her room and walks down the marble steps.
Behind The White Taj is a large empty laterite field that shimmers like a lake of blood. From this rises hot red dust that engulfs three adjoining decrepit black walls, an unfulfilled mausoleum of Seth’s ambition: The Black Taj. Before the Chinawallah War her father had wanted to build The Black Taj as a traditional courtyard home, with a four-sided yard and blood red lacquered doors, flanked by guardian lions with ferocious roars meant to scare away bad spirits from the mortal and immortal world. After the war, he wanted to make it as lavish as The Taj Mahal, which New China now controlled. They reasoned with him. Some thirty thousand labourers built the actual Taj. It took them twenty-five years. Its marble came from Rajasthan, jasper from Punjab, and jade from China. From Tibet came turquoise, lapis lazuli was sourced from Afghanistan, sapphire from Sri Lanka, and carnelian from Arabia. How could they build something like that with the Chinamen watching? Seth persisted. He wanted the fourth wall to be made of red sandstone inlaid with semi- precious stones, like the actual Taj Mahal. It was only when he hired an architect who was later found in a ditch with his fingers chopped off, that Seth dropped the idea. Now The Black Taj is a frail shadow of The White Taj, a dilapidated howling structure with the reputation of an angry ghost.
Dreams sometimes have all the soot of a fireplace with none of its warmth, thinks Ida.
EXCERPT SIX (500 WORDS):
She walks up to him and puts the basket in front of him. “For you.”
He tosses the basket. She sees a hot flash consume his entire body. She smiles.
In the house Manu is an amorphous entity, dangerous of Ida’s full attention, but now she can scrutinize his smoldering dark looks like hot coals she wants to walk over. His sleeves are rolled up to his biceps and his trousers show half his lower leg (he’s wearing Vakil’s clothes that can’t keep up with his height). His body is a place where youth has come to reside. It is strong, with the kind of muscles that her rich friends acquire with steroids. His sooty black eyes focalise his exquisiteness, as if they’re the earth around which celestial bodies revolve. His hair is likewaves washing ashore, and it makes Ida want to run her hands through them. Who would’ve thought that poverty was a raw savage beast that would walk beside him like a trophy? Her brain becomes fatuous mush, but her body, it wants to be held by him, by those lips and those arms, and be torn apart by them.
Ida ignores her impulse to leave everything behind for their love, for this world is full of responsibilities greater than happiness. For now, she can only leave her lover’s house.
Once Ida is gone, Manu sits down on the floor. All he hears is his heart banging loudly against his chest, as if it wants to sear his body. He looks around. This is where he lives with his mother and father, in this structure that was originally intended to be some sort of gardener’s shed(which accounts for the flimsiness of its walls). This roomless house is divided by curtains into three parts—his parents’ room, his room and a kitchen. The house has two doors: a front door that leads out to the garage and main gate, and a back door that leads onto a small verandah—Manu’s favourite part of the house—overlooking the orchard. Attached to the house is an outhouse, a narrow and cold space built as an afterthought to a bathroom. It contains a toilet where iron has stained the bowl a toxic brown, and a black rubber hose for bathing, through which a trickle of water flows in icy coldness. Despite his mother’s constant swabbing and dusting, everything in the house remains smutty with grime. This house is the reason he can’t be with Ida. It’s a symbol of his poverty, the deadly thing that tears lovers apart.
He collects all her clothes and puts them back in the basket, folding each one gently, caressing each one as if it’s a baby that has to be coddled back to sleep. He is searching for a message Ida must’ve sent him. Stop, he says to himself. He cannot fall under love’s trap again. But his hand keeps rummaging the basket. You have to stop, he thinks, gathering his strength into determination. Quickly, before his mind changes, he carries the basket outside. Next to the outhouse is a washing area for clothes and utensils, where he dumps the clothes on the hard cement floor and begins to wash them. The soapsuds flow into nothingness, like his feelings.
Suddenly he stops. For beyond the water, beyond the hard floor, beyond the splay of the many coloured clothes, he sees his favourite panty: pink with a red rose in the front. And on it is scrawled that message again: Midnight. Black Taj.
This time, he decides, he will not go.
EXCERPT SEVEN (800 WORDS):
Manu enters The Black Taj. Blinded by its absolute darkness, he gropes the brick walls till his eyes find light in the flicker of a lamp. His shadow is thrown against the corner of a wall from where another shadow emerges and merges with his.
“I am leaving,” he shouts at the shadow. “I came here to tell you… I want to tell you that it is over between us.”
The shadow becomes a bright red cloth, shimmering with a million mirrors. Each mirror reflects his unmet desire. Stay strong, he tells himself. Turnaround and leave. Then her face emerges, a face for which the light burns, for which mirrors are built; a face cast in the soft glow of beauty. Ida: Goddess of theEarth, born of dewdrops and stardust, her opaline skin of milk and honey, gleaming golden: for morning had slipped into her mother’s womb at the moment ofher birth.
He manages to ask, “How was dinner? Is your to-be- husband madly in love with you?”
How does it matter, she say simply.
“Do what you want. I am leaving,” Manu shouts. “Even if I say I love you?” she whispers.
Manu startles for a second. Can it be true? Has she not given up on their love? But she’s marrying another man.
“How can you love two men at the same time?” he asks. “The heart is not a box that gets filled up with love. It
expands and it expands, and it keeps loving more.”
Her face is contorted with the innocence of a child and the lust of a temptress. It is the only thing about her that reveals the truth.
“What nonsense!” he says.
“If you grow up in darkness, you only love darkness because that’s all you can see. So, one day, when you see the light you’re drawn to it. It’s magnificent! But seeing the light doesn’t mean that you’ll never turn back to look at the darkness. You love both light and darkness … and you can’t love one without loving the other. You’re helpless.”
“Are you drunk?” he snaps.
I don’t love him, she says simply, and smiles at him like he’s an impish child.
He doesn’t listen. “How much did you drink?”
“I had to. I had to drink to survive that horrendous dinner,” she says.
A tear rolls down her cheek. Manu walks towards her.
“No,” she says. “This is my own doing.”
“Talk to me about how you’re feeling,” he tells her. “Right now, I don’t want to talk.”
She moves towards him, like liquid flowing between silk sheets. She runs her hand along her face, over her breasts and her navel. She reaches that mound which Manu so often visits: rub sit and pokes it. Then she moans.
Manu’s thoughts slow down and stop, like a train pulling into a station.
Her fingers, wet and shining, rise up again and dip into her blouse. They unbutton the blouse, revealing two full moons of breasts. They tug at her cherry nipples.
The twisted coils in Manu’s stomach unfurl and an ember burns; the fire within him reignited.
She steps out of her sari and stands before him, naked like a goddess.
Lust gathers in his throat like a lake.
He remembers the taste of her skin, like molten honey, her vagina like crushed grapes, and her lips like a glass of red wine being poured in the sun.
The dam bursts. He falls upon her.
***
Today she is doing what she’s never done before. Today it’s all teeth and nails and deep angry growls, as if they are two clashing swords. Her fingers coil around him like a noose and her tongue forks in his mouth, sending his moans into silence. He pines for her soft eyelashes, those moist lips, their entwined limbs and a gentle caress. He pines for all this but today he lets her be. Pleasure is not the only thing that leaves memory.
***
For even as she prods and explores Manu, Ida sees lights torch the corner of her mind. Her dark spaces are invaded by such ecstasy that she can’t reach out to them anymore. The parts of her body that he touches come alive, moist and glistening as if made of dewdrops. Everything within her that is shattered, the niggling bits and wobbles of her life that she can never piece together, become whole when she is beside him. All her stupidity, her mistakes gather in one place, and blanketed by his embrace, they are forgotten.
This stupid stupid love. She sees it; it’s still there, standing quietly in the corner, whispering to her. She turns the other way and prays for it to go away.
EXCERPT EIGHT (500 WORDS):
“Do you know why the earth revolves only around the sun? Why things grow only in sunlight? Because the sun is the first to come to the earth’s life. By the time the moon is out, the earth has no more love left to give. That’s why it becomes dark. That’s why most rapes and murders and sins take place in the night,” Manu tells no one in particular. “Why can’t people show that kind of loyalty to the ones who come into their life first?”
Manu sees the plate of prasad that he was supposed to put in the mandap: sugarcane, coconut chips, cut fruit and groundnuts, and shoves a handful into his mouth. He picks out a sugarcane rind stuck between his teeth and takes another sip.
Someone shouts, “The dulhahas arrived. Where’s the milk?”
Manu sees the milk in a brasssamovar next to his feet and spits in it. He points out the samovar to the waiters and giggles. He hears the headwaiter call two men and instruct them to “throw out that drunkard”. Two men pick him up and lead him out of the cooking tent. Manu stumbles past many people and finds himself at the wedding tent. He stands alongside the swarming guests—he can’t believe he’s able to do this—and watches the groom’s feet washed in the samovar. He snickers. Harsh looks like a beached whale finding its way into a pond.
Then Harsh stands up, in all his splendour, and walks towards Ida, goes towards God. Manu wonders: the things that Harsh has, the things that Ida’s parents have given him, the heavy gold chain, the three-strand pearl necklace, the drape of jasmine threads, the heavy sherwani studded with Swarovski diamond sand rubies; where will they go when he is alone in the room with Ida? Will he place them carefully, softly, beside their bed, like a gentle lover? Or will passion take hold of him as he tears off the chain and necklace and threads? And Ida; his Ida with Harsh on top of her? Will she be weighed down with the chain and necklace and threads, or will he make her delirious with happiness?
What will Manu do with himself then? What will he do in that hour as it pours into another hour? No, he cannot bear this pain. He will kill Harsh and he will kill himself. He will burn the world. This pain, it is too much.
He starts weeping, softly.
Ida turns at that moment to look at him. Dressed in whorls of gold—her wedding trousseau stitched with thirty gold needles and spools of golden thread—she is brighter than the golden sun.
Their eyes meet, lock. Everything stops.
He cannot do anything to her: he cannot harm her, he cannot hurt her, he cannot hate her. All he can do is love her.
I’ll find a way to you, he tells her without words. Then he breaks, like linesof poetry.
EXCERPT NINE (450 WORDS):
CHIN CHIN CHU
They’re supposed to meet at the Chindia restaurant in Comi Area, a posh sequestered part of town that Manu has never been to before. As Bingbing had said, the guards at the big gate don’t stop Manu; like a mother they know when to expect him.
Bingbing is late so Manu strolls around the area and checks out the well-heeled folk. If this iswhat life in New China is like, he realises, it may not all be bad. He walks into the restaurant, so he can pretend that he’s been here before. His mouth opens for he’s never seen anything like it. It’s the biggest room he’s stepped into. He likes big, he realises, and he likes lamination and things that glitter: bleached wood and pendant lights and brass trimmings and mirrors shaped like portholes. Well-dressed people are on almost every table but they make no sound, as if they are mime artists mimicking the act of dining. All he can hear is the faint clanking of glasses and the slight grating of silver forks rubbing against
porcelain plates. The restaurant smells of lemongrass. Where are the usual smells of thick spices and tepid fish, the noise of humanity? Manu pats the key tucked inside the safety pocket of his pants and steps out, back into the natural warmth of the sunlight, underneath which he has spent most of his life. It is soothing and he relaxes.
Bing bing is still nowhere to be seen, so he enters the adjacent naturopathy shop which has a sign claiming to treat a range of illnesses using a combination of Chinese herbs and Indian Ayurveda. The stocker, in a whitecoat and severe black glasses, stands next to a row of white tables. He is gluing paper signs on brown bottles: Hernia, Increase of Hips, Masturbation, Ulcer, Woman Frigidity, Tightening of Woman Part, Asthma, Painful Menstruation, Tummy Flat, Urination in Bed.
“What you want?” a Chinese pharmacist asks Manu. He looks at him as if he’s a poor Indian who cannot pay for anything here. Manu randomly points to a bottle.
The pharmacist smiles. The bottle says “Enlargement of Man Power” in Mandarin. Manu smiles back at the man to show him that he can read the Chinese script.
At that moment Manu sees a woman in a low-cut red dress, her hair tied up in colourful cotton threads, the sun shining on her. She turns in his direction and he sees a mole shaped like a cloud. It is Mi Bingbing. She looks nothing like her usual self!
The pharmacist catches Manu’s gaze and says, “You not needing this bottle.” He replaces “Enlargement of Man Power” with “Early Ejaculation”.
EXCERPT TEN (1000 WORDS):
There’s his wife Kamala, lounging on the chaise lounge in the living room, one hand inside a bag of Hao Pengyou kimchi chips and another hand scratching the welt of torso skin turned red against the tight band of her satin salwar. When Seth thinks of his wife he sees a showy vacuous thing, like a Lamborghini with the gas needle on empty. The kind of woman who allows her person to dissolve so completely into itself that there is nothing of her own left in her: no ambition, no capacity, no curiosity. An integument of sloth, she has packed in so many empty, layers of flesh underneath that skin, that to touch her personality, to even find evidence of its existence is highly improbable.
But when Seth’s eyes had rested on her for the first time—back when her pet name was Kamar and not Kamra as Seth secretly calls her—it was this empty space—wrapped in a blue kanjeevaram sari, with a polki nose ring and a thin gold kamar-bund—that had appealed to him. He’d mistaken the cosmetic binds around her body for docility and her emptiness for mysteriousness, as all young men are foolish enough to do.
“In front of a good hunter always comes a good hunt,” Videsh had whispered to Seth. Seth knew that this marriage was his father’s last-ditch effort to salvage the dregs of his privately dwindling wealth by bringing home, for his only son, the daughter of Lalbag’s wealthiest cotton farmer.
So, when Seth saw Kamala, he imagined her coconut- shaped head resting against his shoulders, pried open with the machete of his company and spilling its sweet juices into
the crevice of his bachelor life.He saw her boil adrak chai for him in the morning, press his legs at the end of a long day, light uphis dark empty room, hold his hand as they watched Sunil Dutt on screen. It was the only time in his life that he’d let logic leave that carefully guarded cage inside his heart, and for its maiden blunder Seth has a new curse everyday.
It’s true that she hadn’t been much to look at, with her thin long hair that coiled towards the end like a snake, and her pencil-line lips that became narrower under the onslaught of flesh. Due to her lack of beauty it was assumed that she’d possess the comeliness of a wife. These illusions were destroyed within the first few weeks of marriage, when it was discovered that she dispersed human effort only under the narrow definition of eating-sleeping-breathing-farting. Her father had claimed that Kamala was religious, but what he’d failed to reveal was that Kamala was interested in the worship of one thing: her jewelry. Every morning she would bathe, wear clean clothes, and sit in front of the temple like any other devotee. But instead of worshipping the many god statues, she would open the iron-door safety locker adjoining the shrine and pull out the handful of jewelry sets—in gold and diamond and rubies and pearls—bequeathed to her as the daughter-in-law of the house. For the next one hour, Kamala would remove each piece out of its box, gently open its swathing of soft cotton, hold it up against the flame of the diya, caress it, scrutinise it for scratches, missing prongs, fasteners and links, and then put it back in the box. Her love was so sparse that she had enough only to dispense to herself.
She knew so little of trying to please another that even with her favourite thing in the world (after jewelry, of course)— food—effort was made short: her rice clumpy, her dal watery, her vegetables singed. She suffered from sleepapnea and had to be shifted to a separate room of her own where she slept till noon everyday, unperturbed, content without her husband.
When her dowry ran short of the promised fifty gold bars, two cows and a colour television set, it was discovered that her father too was at the last leg of his wealth, as the Pata factory’s iron-ore production destroyed the delicate cotton buds in his fields. Therefore, after Kamala’s marriage, her parents moved up north to Kashmir and sold blankets to soldiers and, later (said the rumour mills), to militants.
“I want to send her back,” Seth told his father. By selecting such a bride for him, Videsh had given Seth one more reason to quietly resent him.
Videsh looked at him, with his eyes the colour of conjunctivitis, and said, “A wife is like a child, son. You cannot send her back to where she came from. She is tied to you for eternity.”
So the lies, the disappointments continued to reveal themselves, wedged between any love that Seth attempted to rouse for her. It was clear to him that Kamala was a woman in possession of such little expectation from life that she wasted absolutely no time on it. Her vocabulary mirrored a similar sentimentality, comprising a sprinkling of words, which when they came out of her mouth were ignorant and commonplace. These qualities became more abhorrent with time as Seth’s wealth acquired a sheen that his wife did not.
Then Kamala produced Ida, of milk and honey. Seth saw that his mother Rani’s beauty, which had skipped a generation, found itself in Ida. For producing a family member whom he could finally not just tolerate but love whole-heartedly, Seth was grateful, sometimes even at peace with Kamala. He even forgave her for her motherliness that was as vacant as her wifeliness.
That’s why he’s paid a million dollars to save her.