WiP 1

Alka is dying of uterine cancer in an obscure nursing home in the moribund city of her birth. The news article stares out of my computer screen, surrounded by the wood panelling and bookish disarray of my study. I haven’t seen Alka in twenty years. In the next three days I have to complete the final draft of the new novel, the previews for which have already started appearing. I cannot imagine how Alka may have grown old—my mind rebels at the thought of silver streaks darting through those serpentine locks or that gaunt, whip-like figure weighed down by time. My next week’s schedule is crammed with appointments for interviews, talk shows, honorary appearances and every other trapping of the life of a successful author on the verge of delivering his next bestseller. Besides, we aren’t even friends. She would find little of value or entertainment in my books; be utterly dismissive of my fame; would probably deign to give a callous little smirk if I told her of the very first novel I had started to write, the novel I’ve been writing for the last twenty years—the only novel I never managed to draw to a close. 

But Alka is dying, and I have to go.

1

Emmanuel was ushered into New Delhi by a heat wave that scorched him right from the tips of his hair to the soles of his sneakers the minute he got off the bus. By the time he found his way to Mrs Dowson’s lodgings in Civil Lines, Emmanuel was parched and struggling to breathe, and a host of angry rashes had sprouted on his forehead. Burning with fever and confined to bed over the next few days, he alternately cursed this weather, this city, this country, this raucous and hardy people and his wretched fate that had dropped him in the midst of them.

This was not where Emmanuel had wanted to belong. He did not want to live in Delhi or study at the college where he had found a seat. At school, he had been a diligent student. Had his father been alive he would have made sure Emmanuel went to Oxford or Cambridge, living among his own people, studying literature or the Classics and writing in his free time, mingling with the crème de la crème of the world’s literati, as he was destined to do. But his father had succumbed to a freak road accident nearly six years ago. His mother’s meagre pension and acquaintance within the dwindling Anglo-Indian population of Shimla could only afford him this much—a college admission and a roof over his head in the city nearest to home—an opportunity to make the rest of it on his own.

It all felt too much for eighteen-year-old Emmanuel. Life was unfair.  His first day at college was miserable. He shied away from his classmates, and no one came up to talk to him. But everywhere he went, Emmanuel could feel furtive eyes taking in his pasty white skin—reddening under the ruthless summer sun—his chestnut hair and blue eyes. The stares made him feel awkward and alien. He began to avoid the college canteen and other spots where the students came together. Time and again, he escaped to the refuge of the library. By the third day Emmanuel had almost resigned himself to a bitter college life, when Jasmeet Singh Saigal stepped in and changed everything.

***