Narcopolis

He taught her some Chinese. Ho leng ah, and ha tho, so she could haggle with the vendors at the Chinese shop where she went to buy vegetables and fish. She told him that the Hindi for how much, kitna, sounded a little like the Cantonese, kay dow cheen ah, especially if you said it fast. It made him angry. There was no similarity between the two languages, he said, none at all. She was being stupid.

He taught her how to curse, comprehensive terms of abuse that wished disaster on descendants and forefathers alike, phrases as thorough and devastating as Chinese martial arts. ‘Repeat after me,’ he said, enunciating the words very slowly and much too loud. ‘Dew lay low mow chow hai siu fun hum ka chaan.’ He taught her the intonation, the staccato monosyllables, the plosives that detonated in the mouth. He taught her the proper pronunciation of dew, the Cantonese for fuck, telling her to stretch the vowel. He encouraged her to employ variations.

‘Enjoy sound of word. Is only way to say correctly.’

And he repeated the phrase, chanted it, because he was having such a good time with this.

‘One question,’ Dimple said.

Mr Lee took a cigarette out of a pack and considered it. He was rationing himself, taking his time instead of lighting up right away. They heard muffled explosions, four in a row, and he froze, then half a dozen louder bangs went off.

He lit up and said, ‘Nothing, only firecracker for their festival. Indian are crazy.’

They were in the courtyard, sitting in the sunshine, Dimple wearing Mr Lee’s straw gardening hat. She was protecting her complexion, a phrase she’d learned from Stardust magazine. Mr Lee put his cigarette out to cough. He spoke around his hack: ‘Wha-a-at question?’

‘Why am I learning to swear in Cantonese? Who will I swear at in Bombay? Nobody will understand.’

‘Best. If they don’t understand, you can curse as much you want, like I use to.’

He’s taking his leave, she thought. He’s absenting himself.

Book Two The Story of the Pipe

Chapter One In Spain with Mr Lee

He’s absenting himself in stages. He’s making it easier for me, she thought. He’s teaching me how to be alone. His cough had become constant. The smoke made it better, but only for a time. He spent entire days in his bunk, dreaming and coughing. She heard the scrape in his throat, a private, deeply intimate sound, and it embarrassed her. She heard the bray of it and it reminded her of the people she knew, all of whom carried the sound deep in their chests, from where it would someday emerge. She shook her head to dislodge it but the cough or its echo stayed with her all day.

His fifty-fifth birthday came at the end of December when the city moved into its brief winter. She took a taxi to a Parsi bakery at Kemps Corner and bought a cake in the shape of a heart. On the way back she rolled the window down and felt the breeze against her face. It smelled of camphor. There was a traffic jam on Grand Road Bridge. For ten or fifteen minutes the cab stood in one spot, trapped in a tight squeeze of vehicles. Then a procession passed, a small group of mourners in single file, behind them four men carrying a bier. The body, covered in a single sheet, bounced with every jolting step the bearers took, bounced so much she wondered if it would fall to the bridge. The sight filled her with such unease that the pleasure she’d felt a moment earlier vanished and she remembered something a customer had read out from an English newspaper. It was a quote from the Mahabharata that the newspaper had placed on its editorial page as a thought for the day: Only eunuchs worship Fate. The girak had made a joke of it, asking her if it was true, but the words had stayed with her. For she did believe in Fate and ghosts and bad luck, and if this made her doubly a eunuch there was nothing she could do to change it. It was Fate.