This time was different. Lila had brought Raj. I tried to think if I had ever had an actual conversation with him. Raj’s family was from Delhi, but he had grown up in Dubai and studied in the US. He and Lila had met in business school. It was a measure of where I’d stood with Lila that when they married I was only invited to the reception, not the wedding or the mehendi or the sangeet.
I remember going for fifteen minutes tops, partly out of politeness – not that my absence would have been noted – but mostly out of curiosity as to the chap who Lila had chosen, of all chaps, to hitch to herself for life. Lila would not divorce. There was no divorce that could escape a self-indicted charge of failure. If the husband were cruel, or drunk, or professionally feckless, it would connote a failure of original judgment; if he were unhappy, or unfaithful, or simply bored, her failure would be of effort or competence. She would not fail at such a thing, or anything.
At the reception Raj had looked more suited to throwing an American football around than to any Indian idea of marriage. He had changed out of the wedding sherwani and into a navy suit from which his shoulders kept threatening to pop. A suit of Italian rather than American cut. I had never seen a man so broad in a suit so slim.
But the broadness was American rather than Punjabi. He had no belly to speak of, and his square neck was firm enough for use as a percussive instrument. Wojciech might say: Too chunky for my taste, a Hummer not a McLaren, but at least the chunks are of muscle. The Punjabiyat was announced a little higher up, in the nose and chin. He’d have been thought good-looking in any Punjabi family from Vancouver to Singapore, at any point in history. I remember thinking, What does Lila want with this block of tandoori beefcake?
Today’s Raj didn’t look fit for the football fi eld, but his unfitness didn’t fit the usual pattern of male ageing: he had none of the gunny-sack heaviness of the athlete who has let himself go. Everything but the hair had receded. The shoulders and calves had narrowed; the neck looked as if it had been bullied into weakness by some brace or girdle. There was still no belly to speak of, but there is more than one genre of flatness. He had been married eight years and he seemed to have spent very little of that time eating. How much of this was down to Lila? Honey, I shrunk my husband.
We sat on an accustomed bench while shrunken-Raj chased Kabir around, his polyester T-shirt darkening with each step. The weather had turned. Maybe a more accurate way of putting it is that it had stepped down: to a deeper, even more gruelling level. If Delhi’s human-fucked seasons were a set of tests of the viability of life in conditions of escalating horror, then July was the point at which you had to ask at what cost life itself was worth preserving.
Kabir didn’t seem to mind being pressure-cooked. Lila looked at my face and neck and said, “I’m sorry for doing this to you. I may be taking this too far.”
Raj was dangling Kabir by the legs with an enthusiasm that was painfully effortful.
“We’re just sitting here. Raj is the heroic one.”
“Heroic?” She gave me a different smile, one I hadn’t seen before. “I won’t tell him you said that. He’ll think you were being serious.”
I only just stopped myself from saying, quite truthfully, I am. Father and son jogged over to the other side of the park. Kabir looked back at us a couple of times on the way. Not for the first time, I regretted the difficulty of asking a friend, How often do you fuck your husband? How often do you still want to? Deepti was the only friend whom I could ask, and in her case there was no need.
“You were going to tell me what you thought of Woj. I didn’t know you knew him.”
“Everyone knew him. He made it his business to be known, didn’t he?”
“He was doing his job. Him being known was an achievement. Whoever went to an event at the Polish embassy before Woj?” And then, before she could answer: “You think I’m defending him, defending my dating him. I’m just stating a fact.”
“I never understood what you saw in him. He was just so thoroughly … average. Which is fine. Most people are. But he didn’t wear average particularly well. Average that thinks itself special, yuck.”
“What are you basing this on? You met him, what, a couple of times? Did you actually speak?” If we had to have this conversation, why couldn’t it be in the air-conditioned indoors?
“Twice was enough. One of those times I was stuck next to him at a dinner. Two hours of him trying to impress and charm me with one side of his mouth, and shame me for working in PE with the other. Oh, and the usual clichés about the cultural superiority of Europe to the US. At the end of it, I told him, ‘I hope you know more about French poetry than you do about economics, because you speak about them with equal omniscience,’ and I tapped my bump and said, ‘This foetus of mine knows more about economics than you do. It knows nothing, but you have negative knowledge, anti-knowledge.’”
Woj’s reply she did not quote. “You never heard about this dinner? I’d have thought he came home and crowed all night about how he rattled the hell out of some banker chick.”
Maybe he had crowed, who knows. There had been a lot of dinners. At least three nights a week I’d be eating Maggi noodles in the office while he was at a dinner and, afterwards, when I was too tired to listen to his account he’d do his best to cloak annoyance with sympathy.
“So when I heard he was with you, I wondered. It can’t have been the white thing, Tara—?”
“What do you think?”
“You couldn’t call him good-looking. Not ugly. Just average, like the rest of him.”
I didn’t say: facially, Woj was about as good-looking as I am. Facially we’re both in the happy middle of the distribution. No one would fall for us on the basis of looks – no question of love at first sight – but if they liked us in other ways, we were good-looking enough. I’d always thought this much the best place to be. No need to ask, Does he only want me for my looks, and no need to worry over much about ageing. No walking into a bar or party and thinking, Is that girl prettier than me? No walking into a bar or party and thinking, Do I still have it? When you tot them up, the privileges and burdens of conventional prettiness don’t really appeal. Woj’s case was more complicated – he had his body.
“You’ve never seen Woj naked, clearly.”
“You of all people, falling for a set of abs.”
Her face softened into a kind of contrition. “I’m being unfair, I know. It’s just – it’s you. I’d always want the best for you, the very best. In the end, I rationalised your choice by saying, Delhi men are such a useless lot, she wants someone she can talk to, someone who reads.”
Later she would tell me that I was made vulnerable by my lack of a Western education – that Woj’s Cambridge degree had conferred false glamour. Had I studied abroad I’d have seen through him.
“Tell me,” said Lila, “did you ever hear him saying anything funny? Actually funny, not just snide.”
Had I? We had laughed a lot – but always, I now realised, at someone or something that Woj thought stupid.
“You’ve got me there. No.”
“That’s what made me think of him. Ashwin.”
“The guy you want me to meet.”
“He’s everything Delhi men aren’t – he’s from the south – and he’s what you might have mistaken Woj for. He’s actually smart, seriously well-read. And he is. So. Hilarious. We get a drink every few months and people are looking at me wondering what the hell is so funny while Ashwin sits there poker-faced. And he’s single. And really keen to meet you.”
I didn’t ask, Is Raj friends with Ashwin too? Raj, who stood before us panting and clutching his side. On his T-shirt the work of his sweat was complete. He invited me home for a drink; I said no, and went back to the office.
I was late to see Ashwin, although not by Delhi standards. Based on Lila’s description I expected to find him reading a book while he waited. But there was no book, only AirPods. He smiled and indicated the vacant chair, but he didn’t get up. “Desert Island Discs,” he said. “With Billie Jean King. She’s about to choose her luxury.”
Ashwin too was in the Wojciech-Tara happy facial middle. As I sat down, I revised this judgment: he had better raw materials than either of us. He had a straight nose, lips as red and swollen as some overripe fruit, and a shockingly perfect pair of eyebrows. His eyes shone with a mischief that could, I was to discover, flow all the way down to his teeth.
But – of course, there was a but – Ashwin was soft and round. I don’t mean big or fat. Not the type you usually see in Delhi – let’s say, Kunal if he didn’t work out for three months – the accumulated buttery dal and chhole bhature parading themselves on back and thighs and belly, the whole thing an assertion of the God-given male right to be unattractive, thrown into proper relief by the carefully dressed and painted skinny wife across the table. None of that here. Ashwin was unintimidating. His roundness was gentle. He had a face like a fresh idli, and cheeks that demanded to be squeezed, like a toddler’s. When he rose to go to the bathroom he showed the hips of a 1960s Indian film star. I’m not even sure Ashwin was technically overweight. He just looked lazy.
Later, Lila would tell me that I ought to touch his hands. “The softest palms on earth. It’s like shaking hands with a shahtoosh shawl.” The inherited softness of sedentary generations.
I admired the laziness. In a way I envied it. But the idea of tumbling around with this man was ridiculous. But the idea of him and me tumbling hadn’t seemed ridiculous, to Lila. Attempts at matchmaking tend to reveal one of two things about the matchmaker – their own taste, or where they think their friend sits in the sexual food chain. Was this really where Lila thought my place was?
Excerpted with permission from The Tiger’s Share, Hachette India.
