Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Six

A man is telling me about the decline of his marriage. Part of the story is an affair his wife was having at work. From the way he tells it, I do not quite believe in this affair. I make the statement deliberately bald to see if he will stand by it.

“So she was having an affair,” I say. “That must have been—”

“At least I thought she was having an affair—”

“You thought she was having an affair?”

“She thought I was having an affair. So I thought she was having an affair.”

I realise that he knows perfectly well she was not having an affair. But he thought it all the same, as a form of revenge.

Discontent was a persistent irritant in Delhi during this period, like a bad spice lodged in the city’s proverbial belly.

Often this discontent was of a very material and obvious sort. The group of people who felt that the serene, propertied lifestyle depicted in advertising campaigns was intended for them — a minority of the population, certainly, but a substantial one — came to realise that life in the new India did not automatically turn out like that. The carefree adults, the sprawling kitchens, the moneyed youth — none of this seemed to come as easily as one was led to believe. In fact, it grew to seem more and more remote, for property prices rose more quickly even than good middle-class salaries.

This particular kind of discontent was sharp. The middle classes had a strong sense in those years that wealth was their due: it had been promised to them. And it had been promised now: this was India’s moment, and it might not come again. This explains those newspaper articles during that period which documented ‘unconventional’ middle-class money-making: the students who supplemented their income by theft or prostitution and, much more widespread, those entrepreneurial corporate employees who found ingenious ways to redirect company money to themselves.

But there were many other forms of discontent too, and if these were more inscrutable, they probably had a more profound and distressing effect on people’s lives. It was clear for instance that the family — that symbolic mainstay of Indian society, in whose name so many people embarked on this fury of accumulation in the first place — was under enormous stress. It was as if the torque of the new system was exerted asymmetrically on parents and children and, in particular, on men and women: the various units of the family were wrenched in different directions, and bonds deformed and broke. Nowhere was this more visible than in middle-class marriages, which were exploding in those years like so many nuptial firecrackers.

• • •

“I think it would have been better if my husband and I had lived separately from his mother,” says Sukhvinder. “At least there wouldn’t have been so much constant bickering. And I think my husband would have been a little bit more open to new ideas. He was very stuck living under that roof. He did what he had always done and in the way he had always done it. The word ‘change’ did not exist.”

We are sitting under Mediterranean-style parasols on the roof of one of Delhi’s upscale shopping malls. There are other tables around us where people speak on mobile phones and sip brightly coloured drinks.

Down below, the mall encloses a cosy courtyard of cafés and restaurants. There is a billboard showing a larger-than-life photo of the new Mercedes S-Class on one side and, on the other, a video wall showing fashion ads. The architecture mimics those Italian Renaissance drawings of perfectly geometrical cities: there are classical columns and porticoes, and a square piazza where docile people are pleasingly arranged. In the middle are fountains, which periodically start up a synchronised display accompanied by loud Johann Strauss waltzes; people stop their conversations during these episodes — they don’t have much choice — to watch the plumes of water prettily conversing, copying each other, chasing each other like chorus girls. The waltz ends with crashing chords and all the fountains ejaculate simultaneously. It feels like everyone should get married at this point, or kiss, or something. But conversations just resume, and the piazza reverts to how it was before.

Delhi’s malls began small and late, but as the 2000s wore on, they sucked up more and more of the city’s resources and attention. Great amounts of public land were released to private developers, who built frenziedly — quickly covering up, for instance, the ancient ruins they came upon as they went — and by the end of the century’s first decade, several great air-conditioned consumer strongholds had been added to the thousand-year catalogue of palaces built on this plain.

The new mall we are in has been erected just next to the airport — which is why low planes roar so frequently over our heads — and in many ways it has absorbed the spirit of its location. The marshalls who wave cars around the underground lot seem to have been borrowed from the runways next door: their arm signals make you feel you are perched in a cockpit. Like an airport, the mall is entirely cut off from the space around: if we take the trouble to look through the screen of trees along the wall on the other side of this terrace, we can see that the landscape around the succulent mall, with all its lawns and fountains, is like a CNN cliché of ravaged earth. Right now, a truck has come to deliver water to the large slum below us: women and children are rushing out of their houses with as many plastic containers as they can carry.

Inside the mall, the number of men and women wearing aviator sunglasses continues the feeling — as if buying French fashion or American technology were an activity only a shade less intrepid than flying a fighter jet. There is something aeronautic about everything — as if membership of the small minority of people who can shop here brings with it a desire to lift off from the chaotic sprawl of the contemporary Indian city into a kind of well-enclosed Duty Free in the sky. Through its refracted memories of European metropolitan achievement — the Italian piazza, the Viennese ballroom — the mall seems to present itself as part of a long history of ideal cities, but this ideal city, of course, is not a city at all. It is not even really ‘in’ the city, since it can only be accessed by highway, and then only by a very small proportion of the population. It is a place where all transactions seem to serve the same purpose, a place with bag scans and body checks at the entrance. Just as the ideal home for so many of Delhi’s rich seems to be a five-star hotel, the ideal city seems to be an airport.

“My parents started looking for a husband for me as soon as I finished my MA,” says Sukhvinder, who is tall, quick-witted and hilarious. “I’m Sikh, so we generally don’t wait too long.”

One should not imagine that arranged marriages are the burden of ‘tradition’ imposed by regressive parents on ‘modern’ and unwilling children, for the situation is often more complex than that. In many cases, the parents of those having arranged marriages today did not themselves have arranged marriages, nor have they forced their children into them. Many arranged marriages emerge therefore, not from tradition, but from the rush of contemporary circumstance. In these days of uncertainty and change, choosing to go it alone is for many people too isolated, and too risky, a prospect. Children who have moved very far from the ambit of their parents feel that something should tie them down. And arranged marriages provide many reassurances in an era so short of them: in such alliances, responsibility for the couple’s prosperity and happiness belongs, not to the couple alone, but to the combined ranks of their families.

But for Sukhvinder there was added pressure because she had a cleft palate, which her parents felt would make it more difficult to find a husband for her. So she joined those thousands of family groups who at any one time are sitting across from another family group in Delhi’s restaurants and hotels, trying to strike up a conversation.

“Every weekend I’d meet guys. Each time I would sit totally disinterested because you know you have this thing in your mind about a guy that you want to marry and all the guys I met were jerks. I don’t know why everyone pretends to be extremely modern and out there and inside they’re complete idiots if I may say so. They’re in the party circle and very well dressed up and all of that, very expensive shades. And when they open their mouths you’re like, ‘Oh my God.’”

Parents use many methods to find prospective spouses for their offspring. Professional matchmakers cover a particular caste group or social class: they circulate albums containing single men and women’s résumés accompanied by photographs which, especially in the case of women, are minor masterpieces all of their own, the make-up professionally done beforehand, the carefully styled hair borne aloft on studio fans. But such matchmakers can serve only a small and well-delineated universe of partners. For a long time now, the ‘matrimonial’ pages of the newspapers have been the primary way to reach out into the city at large — and for traditionalists they are still the sole trusted route. In the last few years, however, online marriage agencies have stormed the market — in part because they also offer additional features such as detective and astrology services. Detectives check up on a person’s marital and sexual past, and verify the information they provide — that they really are HIV-negative, for instance, or vegetarian, or perfectly sighted. Astrologers ensure that there are not terrible clashes between the birth stars of the two prospective partners.

“I wanted to get married to someone I could have a conversation with. After ‘Hi’, most of these guys had nothing to say. ‘Don’t show the real you,’ is what my parents kept telling me, ‘don’t open your mouth too wide,’ so I’m trying to keep my mouth shut and I’m sitting listening to these guys and they’re like, ‘So do you know how to cook?’ and I’m like ‘Cook? No. I’ve always worked.’ ‘Oh.’”

It is difficult to convey in text the lobotomised tone in which Sukhvinder imitates her male interlocutors. Her renditions have me weeping with mirth.

“Then they would say, ‘Do you intend to quit your job?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh. Because we don’t have any women working in our family.’ So I would say, ‘I think this isn’t happening then.’ ‘Oh. You have very strong views.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Oh.’ So the conversation used to end right there.”

Sukhvinder and her sister are directors of their father’s business, which manufactures equipment for the printing industry. She is in charge of operations, which means that her working day often ends late. Quick-thinking and sure of her judgements, it is easy to see why she would be good at what she does.

“So I finally met Dhruv, the guy I married. I couldn’t point out any real flaws when we met the first time, and his family was not open to us meeting many more times. Because I’m a blabbermouth, I didn’t realise he didn’t talk. He just answered whatever I asked and that was about it, but he really had nothing to say. Mom and Dad wanted me to get married quickly because my sister was going through a rough patch in her marriage, and if something were to happen, I would be less eligible. So things moved quickly. My parents went to see their house and said it was nice. My father visited their factories, which seemed fine, though as we found out later they were not doing well at all.

“Things went badly from the very beginning. We were very different people. I told my husband before we got married, ‘I drink and I smoke and I don’t plan to quit. I understand the family you come from. If you think you have a problem with this, tell me now and we won’t do this. We haven’t got engaged yet, I’m not in love with you and I dare say you’re not in love with me. So we can say what we think.’ ‘No, I’m absolutely cool with that,’ he said. I said, ‘Fine.’

“When we went on our honeymoon, I carried five boxes of smokes. On the way we had a stopover in Singapore. I really wanted to smoke, but he was more into shopping, so I didn’t. So we got to Bali, we checked into the hotel, and the first thing I did was to light a cigarette, go out on the balcony and sit there looking at the view and thinking about this beautiful holiday. And he looked at me and he was quite taken aback; he hadn’t seen me smoking before. He was like, ‘Can’t you put that thing down? Don’t you want to rest a little bit? Don’t you want to lie down and watch TV?’

“I said, ‘I understand that a honeymoon is about lots of sex, but it’s not only about sex. We have to plan out what we’re going to do here because we may never come here again.’ And I’d brought all these pamphlets from the airport, and I wanted him to look through them with me so we could decide what we wanted to do.

“He was very boring. I had to drag him along to scuba diving. The guy didn’t know how to swim and he was nervous about it. So when I realised he was going to take a long time, I jumped in the water and spent a nice twenty minutes, and I came up and he was still sitting on the boat. He said, ‘I’m just about to go.’ Then I went down again and when I came back, he wasn’t there, so I realised he must be under the water. I was tired and I got on the boat, and there was this guy smoking a rolled cigarette and I asked him if he had another one.

“So by the time my husband pops up, I was sitting and smoking, and he saw me and said, ‘Where did you get that cigarette from? You didn’t bring yours with you.’ So I said, ‘No they’re his.’ He was really shocked. He said, ‘But you don’t know him!’ I said, ‘Okay, sorry.’ So I put out my cigarette.

“Actually it was finished anyway. I don’t waste my smokes. Not for anyone in the world.

“I said, ‘Let’s not make an issue of this.’

“Then we went shopping. You know, usually when you go away for the first time as a married couple, you bring back presents for everyone, so I made a list of everyone in his family and mine. He wanted to buy a carved wooden statue for himself. He looked at statues for forty-five minutes. I was going crazy. He said, ‘Don’t get impatient.’ Impatient? I wanted to pull his hair! I said, ‘You choose your statue, I’m going to buy the presents.’ I went and bought gifts for twenty-five people, came back, and he was still looking for his statue.

“He said, ‘I don’t just spend like you do. I’m careful about money.’ I said, ‘Being careful with money is one thing. I’m careful with money. But wasting your God-given time is something else.’

“That day I realised that I would never go shopping with him. So after we got back to Delhi, I took all his measurements and I used to go and get him everything he needed. Because I can’t stand wasting time shopping.

“But later I realised that actually he wasn’t doing so well for money, which is why he was uncomfortable about spending. His business was not doing well. After I realised that, I used to deliberately leave his wallet at home when we went out, so that if he liked something we could just get it and he wouldn’t have to think too hard. And then I stopped shopping in front of him. Which made me feel a little guilty because more often than not, I had to sneak things inside the house and lie about when I’d bought them. But he developed a real inferiority complex about money and it became an issue between us.

“There was this time when I walked in on his uncle saying to him, ‘You can go and take over their business and it will all be yours. They have so much property and it will all come to you eventually and you can really make a life out of your wife.’ I did not like that conversation at all because in our family we’ve always given more priority to relationships than to money. Even when Papa was starting up the business and we were hard-up, money was never an issue. We went through a patch when my parents only ate one meal a day to save money. But it never affected us.

“Cash was never really an issue for us. If we had it, we had it; if we didn’t, we didn’t. In his family, money was a really big thing. Much bigger than relationships. Which was really weird for me. Why would someone give priority to something that might not be there tomorrow rather than to people who might help you in your old age or whatever? But that’s how he was. So his inferiority complex came up. And because of that a lot of fights started happening and abusive language.”

The sun is going down and the feel of evening descends on the terrace. The heat of the day evaporates, leaving the roar of the highway somehow more exposed. Great numbers of crows caw overhead. Waiters put candles out on the tables. Groups of twenty-somethings turn up for after-work drinks; like everyone else in this mall — except the ones who clean and guard it — they are high-caste and pale-skinned.

A woman is taking photographs of her colleagues on her phone, which flashes each time with improbable brilliance. She has her back to us; through her beige business suit I can see the precise outline of her black thong.

“Soon after I moved into my husband’s house,” Sukhvinder continues, “I realised that the dependency between him and his mother was intense, and it made me extremely uncomfortable. Especially because his father had died many years before, and he acted as a husband as well as a son towards his mother. I have absolutely no issues about a son having a good relationship with his mother, but his mother intervened in every aspect of our relationship. There are certain things that should remain between a husband and a wife. After every conversation I had with Dhruv, his mother used to taunt me for it the next day. And I used to be quite taken aback. ‘You know about that too! What else do you know about?’ So I spoke to him about it, but he was absolutely closed to the idea of me saying anything whatsoever about his mother.

“I used to sit down with her — I am an open person and I believe a lot in talking about stuff — so I used to sit with her and talk to her, thinking that I could be a friend to her, since she didn’t have a companion. But it totally blew up in my face. Each time I used to talk with her, she used to go to my husband and say, ‘She was trying to say some shit against you.’

“She thought I was trying to take her son away from her. She thought, since my family had more money, I would one day buy her son off, move to a different house and make him totally forget about her. Which is really weird. I was the one who always said we should never move out because otherwise his mother would be lonely. Her other son never talked to her. He treated her like shit. So I said to my husband, ‘She’s our responsibility and we’ll take care of her.’

“But she would tell Dhruv, ‘You don’t know what she is plotting, I heard her talking on the phone, she is evil.’ Which was ridiculous. I never made phone calls when I was in the house because I knew what it would lead to afterwards.

“I used to tell Dhruv: ‘She doesn’t believe in herself or the values that she’s given you. Or the man she’s made you into. Otherwise why would she be so insecure? You take care of her. She knows you care about her. What is she scared about? One mere girl walking into your house? I’m not here to break up your family.’

“I was supposed to get up in the morning, cook, pack everyone’s lunch, drive an hour to work, run the factory and get out of there in time to buy vegetables for the evening meal and be home by 7 p.m. to cook the dinner. Initially I didn’t know how to cook and she taught me, which I still thank her for. But if I got back at 7.01 she’d have taken her place in the kitchen and she wouldn’t let me enter, and then there would be a huge scene. I had to be in the kitchen by 7 p.m. so that Dhruv would not face some almighty scene when he came home. Nobody wants to walk into a house after work where there’s already bickering happening, and I realised the only way I could help Dhruv was if I turned up on time. There were days when I left the office at 4.30 p.m. I mean, when it’s your own business, you can take certain liberties. But it became a big problem: you can’t go too far.

“Then there came a time when he told me that his mother had a problem with me working. I said to him, ‘I told you before I’m not going to give up working.’ But then it was ruining everything that I’d worked on so much that for a month I didn’t go to work at all.

“I was not allowed to have any social life. The only time I socialised was when I sometimes spent two days at my parents’ house or in the car on the way home from work, when I used to call my friends. At home they hated any calls on my number. Sometimes a machine was being dispatched somewhere and got held up, and since I was in charge I couldn’t just say, ‘I’m not allowed to take calls at home.’ So I would take the call, deal with the issue, and my mother-in-law would say, ‘She’s just trying to show that she works more than my sons. Just because she has so many people under her supervision doesn’t mean my sons are no good.’ Things like that caused glitches in Dhruv’s mind. I don’t think he had really thought about it like that until she said it.

“I couldn’t hug boys even if they were my brothers. I just couldn’t hug anybody. In my family we’re very physically expressive. If my father was going out of town, we’d hug and kiss you, know? There was this time when Dhruv was leaving for work, so I hugged him. And he was like, ‘Don’t do that, Mummy’s standing right there!’ I was like, ‘Goddammit, I’m married to you, okay?’ Then he was like, ‘No she’ll talk to me later and say you shouldn’t do those things standing outside.’

“It was a totally different school of thought. Like there was this time when I came back from work, and I parked my car outside the house and there were kids playing badminton in the street. So I picked up a racquet and joined in. She opened the door and started shouting at me right there. ‘Get inside the house!’ I came in and there was a huge argument. ‘The daughter-in-law of the house doesn’t do such things! I don’t know what your parents have taught you.’

“Sex was another issue. Actually he was pretty comfortable about sex. More than I was. Not that I was a virgin when I got married, though that was the picture I had to portray, knowing the kind of family I was getting into. But in the beginning his mother wouldn’t ever let us close the door of our bedroom. From day one she wanted us to have a kid — that’s what Punjabi families are all about — and I used to tell her, ‘You won’t even allow us to close the door: how am I gonna give you a kid?’ If we did shut the door, she would start banging on it. ‘Knock’ is too polite for what she used to do.

“She would say, ‘What has happened that you have to close the door? If nothing bad is happening you shouldn’t have to close the door.’ We would just be sleeping or chatting inside — on those rare occasions when we actually chatted — and she would come and shout ‘Please put the light on in there. I don’t like you being in there with the light off.’

“Dhruv was totally casual about it. ‘What’s the problem?’ he would say. ‘We’ll just open the door.’ Several times I used to tell him, ‘You tell your mother everything; why don’t you tell her the sexual positions you’ve tried with me?’ I used to make fun of him about it.”

During her speech a man has come to our table and, without a word, sat down next to her. She has taken no notice of this man, so I assume she was expecting him, but I am slightly taken aback at the lack of reaction on anyone’s part. Sukhvinder has not touched her phone since we made the decision to come to this café, so she cannot have informed him where she was. And yet he has found her and sat down beside her without any remark. I enjoy the aloofness they both display to locational issues. I have no idea who the man might be. He must be someone she knows well, since she continues to talk about intimate things in front of him.

“Dhruv’s family were not Sikhs. They were Hindu Brahmins from West Punjab, and they surrounded themselves with priests and astrologers. After about four months of our marriage my mother-in-law started to tell Dhruv that her priest thought I was an evil force and things were going to go wrong. I was the reason his business was failing and all of that.

“She began to tell him I was doing black magic. I just laughed because I don’t even believe in all that. But they started all these rituals to protect their home. There would constantly be weird things in the doorway when I arrived to stop the evil coming in, and since I came from a Sikh family, I had no idea what they were, so I would pick them up and throw them away, which only made them believe it more. My mother-in-law was terrified about bad stuff coming in from outside. She never ever left the house except to buy vegetables from a street vendor, and when she went out she had three pairs of shoes and she would change from one into the next and then into the next, to make sure there was no contact between the inside and the outside.

“One day she went through my things and she found this amulet that I’d been given by a Muslim friend. It was some Islamic symbol and I liked it, I found it interesting, you know? She took it away and showed it to her priest and he said, ‘This is where all your problems are coming from.’ And they did rituals to purify the amulet. And she told everyone in the house and they all started avoiding me. The entire family would look down on me. They were a Partition family and this was like Partition. And I was Pakistan. What hurt me was not that everyone else believed these crazy things but that Dhruv did. He couldn’t question anything his mother said.

“I really did not want to fail at my marriage and I tried everything I could. I thought I could change everything and make everyone happy. My mother-in-law had been mourning ever since her husband died fifteen years before. You won’t believe it: when I moved into that house I realised that in the entire house there was not one photograph of Dhruv’s father. Which made me feel they had not yet accepted that he was no longer in their lives, and I thought that was why they were so insane. So one day we were out shopping and I bought a beautiful frame, and I got a photograph blown up and I put it in the drawing room. When she saw it, she was hysterical. ‘Get rid of that!’ she screamed. I said, ‘Look it’s a beautiful frame and it’s a beautiful picture of him. I thought it would make you happy.’ And she screamed at Dhruv, ‘This girl just wants to make sure I am crying all the time.’

“She used to sleep with her property papers under her ass because she thought I wanted to steal them. I don’t like to say such things but secretly I was like, ‘Have you seen the property my family has? I already have houses of my own. This house will be divided between five grandchildren. Do you think I care about stealing one-fifth of your shitty house from you?’ But I thought that since she cared so much about money, I could maybe make her happy with money. So I opened a savings account and every month I used to deposit 5–10,000 rupees [$100–200] depending on what I had. I gave her the ATM card and said, ‘You don’t need to go to Dhruv whenever you need money. This is yours. I’m a part of the family too.’ But I guess I was never part of the family. The entire month she’d be sulking, being completely bitchy — and just when the day came that I had to transfer the money, she was suddenly extremely sweet to me. It was visible you know, that sweet thing, sickening sweet. But I had no issues with it. I thought, ‘If this is what buys peace in the house, you can keep my entire salary.’

“As things got worse, I used to say to my mother-in-law and my husband quite frequently: ‘What exactly do you want me to do, how do you want me to behave? Give me a list, A-Z, and I’ll stick to it? Because whatever I do makes you unhappy, but when I stop doing it, you’re still unhappy.’ I told her after a year, ‘Every week I sat down with you and asked you what you wanted me to do, and every week there was a definite thing. And I actually made a note of each and every thing you wanted me to do. But each week it completely clashed with what you’d said the week before. It was as if you just wanted me to fail.’

“Dhruv had a younger brother who was a loudmouth. He was very rude to his mother, and he would hit her when they had arguments. All that really shook me because after the first time I saw him do that I thought, if he doesn’t respect his own mother, he’ll kill me tomorrow. It totally shook me. He kept on kicking her and boxing her, and I wrapped myself around her so she didn’t get hurt because she had acute arthritis. But in her head her sons were perfect, and the following morning she called up one of her relatives and said, ‘Sukhvinder was trying to hit me.’ So I was like, You bitch! She could never ever see that her sons were doing something wrong, and if they did bad things, she forgot about them straight away.

“I couldn’t understand this, and I always made the mistake of being brutally honest. If my husband and his mother were having an argument about something, Dhruv would bring me in and ask me, ‘Which one of us is right, which one of us is wrong?’ Now, if you ask me that sort of a question, I expect you’re prepared for the answer. So I would say, ‘I think she was wrong here and you were wrong here and—’, and it would make both of them furious. They would both forget about the fact that they were fighting, and they would eat me alive. He would be like, ‘How can you say that about my mother?’ And she would say, ‘How can you say that about my son?’

“Anyway, there came a time when I got home really late from work. There’s one time in the year when we show our products at a trade exhibition, and I have to work all hours. So I came back from the exhibition really late and I really wanted to go to the toilet. So I came back and I completely forgot about the slipper changing thing, I just ran to the toilet. She made a huge fuss and said all sorts of weird things to me. I said, ‘I’m sorry. I genuinely forgot. I only wanted to go to the toilet.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you are up to something.’ So I said, ‘Forget it. You’re not making any sense.’ And I went to take a shower.

“While I was in the shower I heard all this shouting between the mother and the son. When I came out Dhruv said, ‘You should not argue with Mummy.’ I explained the situation to him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you slapped her.’ I was like, ‘I slapped your mother?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ Then he said, ‘Well you didn’t slap her. You were about to slap her.’ And I was like, ‘If you think after a year and a half of marriage that I am capable of that, then God bless you.’ And I went into the kitchen to start cooking.

“So he followed me in, took my hand and pulled me into the dining room. He said, ‘We have to sort this out right now.’ I said, ‘I know I’m younger than you, but I understand one thing: when you’re angry, we should not talk. It’s just going to blow out of proportion, and then you’re going to say things you don’t mean and you’ll feel sorry about it later. And I’ll reciprocate and it will be a who-hurts-who-most game.’ ‘No, we are going to sort this out now.’ So I was like, ‘Fine’. And we were talking — we were just talking — and he whacks me right across my face.

“He was really tall, 6’2”, decently built. He whacked me and I fainted. I collapsed.

“Afterwards I was totally numb. I called my two girlfriends and I went to see them. And I howled and I howled and I howled, and I was like, ‘Is this normal, is this normal? Does this normally happen in joint families?’ — because my friends were from joint families while I was brought up in a nuclear family. And they were like, ‘It’s okay, he was just really angry.’ They were just trying to calm me down because I was really out of my senses, but they were furious, you know — I could see the look on their faces. I didn’t tell anyone else, not even my parents, because I couldn’t decipher at that time whether it was a big thing. I was just totally lost.

“I thought I would just try to forget all about it. Start a new chapter. But each time there was a fight, I used to be really scared because I thought he might do it again. Sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t. But over time, the frequency of whacking just kept increasing and it was extremely disconcerting, and I was falling into a depression and all of that. Then one day, after about four years of our marriage, I left and I never went back.

“Obviously I hadn’t told my parents about the whacking and all that — so it took me about three months to convince them. No one apart from Dhruv and I and Dhruv’s aunt, in whom I used to confide, knew what had happened. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to tell my parents what went on in their family. So I said, ‘There are things you don’t know about, and I can assure you I’m not making a rash decision.’ But eventually, after months of trying in vain to convince them, I told them about the frequent whacking. They were furious. They went to discuss everything with Dhruv’s family. But I wasn’t ever going to go back.

“For some time I was very angry. I really wanted to put him and his mother behind bars. But eventually I calmed down. For a long time I wished I could slap both of them really hard, just once. But now I don’t even feel like doing that. It’s his life. I believe in God and justice. I know I didn’t do anything so drastically horrible in my marriage that things had to turn out the way they did. It’s okay. I’m fine with it.

“I did give it my best. More than I ever thought I had inside me. But I lost respect for him. I didn’t trust him, and after that it was over. Before the love could develop it turned into bitterness. So there was absolutely nothing.

“You know the moment at which I really lost respect for him? When I knew it was over? It was not when he was hitting me, strangely enough. It was something else.

“I always liked to have all the windows open but his family would keep them completely shut. I used to suffocate in there. And I have asthma, so sometimes it got really bad. One night I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe and I was panicking. I shook Dhruv awake and asked him to pass me my inhaler, which was on his side of the bed. But he refused to get it, and I passed out. After that there was no going back.”

She has been talking for a long time, and it is dark. People have come and gone. At the table next to us, an enormously rotund man with a ponytail has sat down with a beautiful woman a head taller than he. She has a chihuahua in her lap.

We pay the bill and head back inside the mall. I say farewell to Sukhvinder. I shake the hand of her companion, whose identity I still do not know.

I am thinking about all her stories. I get into the elevator to go down to the parking lot. Another man gets in with me: he is holding a Gucci shopping bag, whose enormous size brings a slight strut to his demeanour. It is a strange spectacle, these men from Delhi business families who demonstrate their masculinity by buying handbags.

The elevator doors slide open and I emerge into the brown light of the basement. The air is fetid and hot. The air conditioning cools the mall’s interior to a mild non-place; it is down here that the heat of the north Indian plains seems to be stored. Immediately, I begin to sweat.

I get into the car and drive to the exit, where there is a payment booth. I hand my ticket to the man inside and wonder how many hours he has to spend in this sub-terranean oven. “Fifty rupees,” he says to me, and I start fumbling in my pocket for change.

As I am doing so, the man reaches out of the window and picks something off my windscreen. It is a huge red flower, fallen from the silk cotton tree that grows outside my house. Lodged in the windscreen wiper, it has travelled with me all the way from the leafy city to this wasteland out of town.

The man inspects it as if it has just descended from outer space.

“Can I keep it?” he asks.

“Of course.”

And he sets it on his ledge inside the booth, and gazes at it, enchanted, as if trees were long extinct, and known only through children’s books.