The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar Read Free Book Online Page B

her well in life, Meher giggled prettily through her own speech, and then she was gone, and my loneliness deepened, grew immense.
    I took to leaving the office exactly at closing time and boarding buses to various parts of the city—Bandra, Khar, Malabar Hill, Chowpatty, Juhu—where I would spend an hour or two aimlessly wandering among the crowds, nursing my unhappiness, eating fried foods from the hawkers’ stalls, eyeing women more beautiful than I’d ever seen, with the sole exception of Meher, as they made their way self-consciously and skilfully through great swells of male attention. But unrequited love is usually not a fatal affliction, and gradually I began to grow more positive in my outlook. I immersed myself in my work, and reasoned to myself that somewhere in this city of endless possibility there would be a woman for me.
     
    ~
     
    Towards the end of the monsoon Deepak came to my room and discovered I had no plans for the evening. He suggested we go out. As he possessed neither the sophistication nor the connections that enabled my room-mate Rao to wander among the beds of the princesses of Cuffe Parade, Deepak made do with the whores of Shuklajee Street. When he discovered I was still a virgin, he swept my protestations aside and, after a few shots of Old Monk in his room, we found ourselves in a leaky taxi crawling through the flooded roads towards Shuklajee Street, where the madam of one of the brothels was expecting a consignment of fair-skinned, moon-faced, ‘almost virginal’ whores from Nepal.
    The taxi dropped us off in one of the poorest areas of the city. Deepak, who could barely contain his excitement at the prospect of the women who awaited him, tipped the driver a hundred rupees and we floundered through dirty water to a building that seemed in imminent danger of collapse. The bouncer at the door looked astonished to see us, it had obviously been a day without customers, but his demeanour changed in an instant when he recognized Deepak. With a cry of ‘Palang-tod Master’ he hauled us in out of the rain and up a narrow staircase to a parlour where five girls lounged on two sofas. The attempts to make the place alluring were depressing. The sofas were covered in green Rexine, nylon saris had been strung up as curtains, garish posters of corpulent actresses torn from film magazines were stuck to the walls, and the glare from a cheap multicoloured chandelier from Chor Bazaar only served to accentuate the hopelessness of the place. But Deepak seemed to notice none of this, and the madam, a gargantuan woman casually draped in a sari, more than made up for the deficiencies of her brothel by enthusiastically crushing him to her shapeless bosom.
    ‘Ah, Palang-tod Master, not even the weather could keep you away, could it? Today you get two girls for the price of one.’
    ‘You said there would be new Nepali cheez,’ he said in his Tamil-accented Hindi.
    ‘The rains have stopped everything, alas, but there’s Shalini and you haven’t tried Neeta yet, have you? Her nipples are the size of rupee coins.’
    Two of the girls got up obediently at a signal from the madam, and it was then that Deepak asked the mistress of the house to look after me.
    ‘He’ll be taken care of, Palang-tod Master, he’ll be taken care of,’ she bellowed jovially as he was led away by the two girls. I had been feeling more and more uncomfortable as Deepak and the brothel keeper bantered on, but now that he had vanished I wanted nothing more than to leave the place. To make matters worse, a blurry vision of Meher in the restaurant, the glow from her earring misting her face in blue, came to me, and it was all I could do to keep from bolting down the staircase and out into the rain. The madam must have sensed my discomfort because something approaching pity entered her voice.
    ‘You’re new to this, aren’t you? Think nothing of it; I have seen many young men like you. There will always be a first time, and it is my