Khanna started calling me at odd hours, which was how I knew he had moved from indulgence into ownership.
A man who loved you called when he felt like it. A man who paid for you called when he wanted to remind you that he still could. Khanna was doing something uglier than either. He called when the city was loud, when the power had gone, when the fan in my room had slowed to a sulk and the walls were sweating through their damp skin. He called when I was half-asleep and angry and therefore less likely to sound elegant. He called when I was in a cab and could not immediately throw the phone into a gutter. He called when I was with people so I would have to smile like a woman under glass.
He had always liked to know where I was. Earlier he had disguised it as concern, which is how rich men dressed up surveillance when they still believed themselves romantic. Now he stopped bothering. If I did not answer, there would be ten missed calls in a row and then a message that was not really a message, just a sentence with no punctuation and the stink of command in it.
Where are you.
Who is with you.
Call me now.
It was never phrased like an order. That would have been vulgar. Khanna liked his cruelty polished. He liked it in a silk tie. He liked to make a woman feel she had chosen the cage because he had put flowers in it.
I told myself I was managing him. I told myself that because I had to keep my self-respect somewhere, and if it could not live in the facts then it had to live in the story. I had learned that early in Delhi. Story was architecture. Story was the only thing that made a room look larger.
But the truth, which I only admitted in pieces, was that he had begun to tighten around me like a fist closing very slowly. Not dramatic. Not immediate. A little more control over the driver. A little less notice before he appeared. A little irritation when I said I was busy. A little silence after I said I would not come. Men did not usually become monstrous at once. They became repetitive.
The city, meanwhile, went on being itself, which was one of the more offensive things about it. Uttam Nagar still smelled of frying oil and wet concrete and the cheap incense Bua Devi burned in front of the little brass god on her shelf, as if smoke could bribe the monsoon into better manners. The lane outside the PG still flooded in the first hard rain, turning into a brown ribbon of slush and plastic wrappers and one dead slipper no one ever claimed. The metro still coughed people in and out in the mornings with the tired authority of a machine that knew it was carrying the entire middle class on its back. The auto drivers still shouted from the corner. The boys at the chai stall still argued about cricket, prices, women, and the government, in that order, as if history had been reduced to a betting game.
Inside the PG, nothing changed except the gossip.
Bua Devi had a talent for making gossip sound like public service. She sat on her plastic chair in the corridor, a steel tumbler of tea in one hand and her phone in the other, supervising the girls the way a prison warden might supervise flowerpots. She knew who had come home late, who had lied about work, who had worn lipstick to a grocery run, who had been picked up in a car with tinted windows. She missed very little and forgave less.
When I came down one evening in a black dress and oversized sunglasses, she looked me over in a single sweep and said, “You look tired.”
I did not like being told that by a woman whose entire face seemed made of verdicts.
“I am busy,” I said.
She snorted. “Busy girls in Delhi are always tired. Busy with what, only they know.”
I would have laughed if I had been in the mood to be generous. Instead I said, “You should write a book.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “And who will read it? Girls like you do not read truth. They only read invoices.”
That was the problem with Bua Devi. She was often right in a way that irritated the vanity out of you. I hated that in people. It made them hard to dismiss.
My old contacts were no help. Rohit had stopped replying to my texts with the old eagerness and had replaced it with a professional politeness so cold it might have been carved from ice. He still wanted me in front of his camera sometimes, but now it was in the way a man wanted a familiar object he could rearrange for his pleasure without paying full price for it. The last time I went to his studio, he had looked at me with the distracted consideration of someone deciding whether his ex-girlfriend could still be used in a campaign.
“You’ve changed,” he said, as if that were my crime.
“Have I?” I had asked, smiling.
He had shrugged. “You know. There is a… look. People notice.”
That was Delhi code for used. Not beautiful. Not unavailable. Not expensive enough to be worth the trouble. A woman could be a lot of things in this city and still be forgiven if she looked like an asset. Once she looked like a story people already knew, her market value dropped faster than monsoon water through a broken drain.
Vikram was no better. He had started including me in dinners again, but only if there were others present, and only if there was a possibility that his friends would see me and think he had excellent taste. He liked to place a hand on my back in public, the gesture of a man who wanted to be seen owning a painting. In private, he had become lazy. Men were always lazier once they believed they had already won.
Arjun, the choreographer, was the worst kind of coward because he was a cheerful one. He still smiled when he saw me. He still spoke to me as if we were on perfectly normal terms. But the last time I asked him for a slot in a show, he had given me a helpless little shrug and said the roster was full.
“Full of what?” I had asked.
He had laughed, not meeting my eyes. “Don’t do that. You know how it is.”
I did know how it was. He had found a younger model with a cleaner reputation and a better family name and had decided that I belonged to the category of temporary pleasure, no longer useful for public ambition. Men were like that. They wanted a woman to be available and respectable at the same time, which was a contradiction they never had to solve themselves.