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“Once you’ve been to India,” he shouts, “you’re not the same. It gets under your skin.” No shit.
Take a look at your own backyard. Study your history, man. You people looted us, took everything, stole our treasures. Now you look at us and say, ‘You’re so spiritual, you have so much wisdom, you’re so wise, you’re so . . . simple.’ Yeah, we’re simple, fucker. We’re simply going to destroy you. They don’t want us to, they don’t want us to be strong, to have heart, wit, resilience, ingenuity, wealth, power, but we are, but we do. We took their shit for so long, now the tables are turning. It’s our time now!”
Then you’re rich. It annihilates everything. Everyone is nice to you. Everyone wants you there. You’re the most popular person in the room. It’s so easy to be charming when you’re rich. Everyone laughs at your jokes, hangs on your word. You forget and think it’s about you. Then sometimes you go somewhere and you don’t spend, and it’s so miserable, it’s so horrible to go back to the drawing board, and you’ve forgotten how to earn someone’s trust or love, and you know it’s easier with a shortcut or two, so you bring out the cash in the end, the wad, the clip, the card, and the thrill of it is
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Do you know what it feels like to have power? Real power. To sit all of a sudden inside the wheels of power and speed through the city with your eyes wide, watching everything, making eye contact with everything—it was intoxicating. To roar through the city at speed and have no fear, and to see, to be able to see, the way a man sees, to stare, be able to do it without blinking, my God. I don’t know, maybe as a man it’s something you can’t understand. Your fear arises from the things you do, not the things that are denied to you. But Sunny gave the city to me.
If you use any of this, just remember, nothing will change, this is Kali Yuga, the losing age, the age of vice. The people on the road will remain dead. The baby will still be unborn. The Gautams of this world will thrive. The Ajays of this world will always take the fall. And Sunny? I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. The wheel will keep turning toward the dissolution that will swallow us all.
What could he do? What was he supposed to do? What more? What could anyone expect of him? Take charge, call an ambulance, call the police, try to help the dead and dying while he waits for the authorities to arrive? Really? Laughable. Absurd. Maybe in Sweden. But this is India.
No one ever gets it back. Life just runs away from you. It never comes back, however hard you try, however much you want it to. This is the lesson you should know. You have to adapt or die.
Me! Me? No . . . there was no me. I had been hollowed out.
He’s a dog digging a phantom hole. A needle gouging the skin to find a vein.
She has her phone on the table in front of her. The cigarette burning down in her hand. When it rings—unknown number—she answers right away. Clairvoyance. Despair. Puts it to her ear. Hears the silence of a sealed room, a sealed mind. And all these fucking years.
