One of my problems with stories is that they have to have a start and an end. Of course, nothing does. We make up these divisions so that our stories don’t become Charlie Kaufman movies, in which the realm of what is inside the story is constantly expanding.

All endings may be artificial, but this night ended with a savage beating, so at least we have a clear point at which to break. But although we begin here with drinks after Parvati’s play, this is really the middle. A better beginning would be the night I met Parvati, or even the night I met Romit, and it would definitely include all of the revelations about Parvati that Romit made to me. But we need a beginning that holds everything together; a container for the events of this night. And so we start with drinks.

The play was bad. There’s no way around this. It wasn’t painfully bad. Rather, it was an Indian version of Friends placed on stage and set in a call center. It was timed like a sitcom; paced as if the writer was pausing for commercial breaks that never came. Priya and I laughed hysterically at a golden shower joke. The rest of the auditorium was silent.

After the play, Parvati pretends to want our opinion. I limit my comments to facts; “It was the best play I’ve seen in Bombay,” and “the physical comedy was really committed.” Parvati is actively inviting fawning, but the play made that difficult, so I leave it to Romit and the rest of the group.

Not being with the kind of people who think much about money, we’ve ended up on a rooftop bar of a five star hotel, overlooking the sea. The kind of place where everything is made of white leather, the music is bad pop-house, and they try far too hard.

We are nine. My girlfriend Priya and I. Romit is there. A Swiss Indian, I suspect he’s living off of his parents’ largesse after the music/film/television production company that he worked for went out of business, still owing him several months of back pay.  Although he will eventually go on to join the entertainment wing of a large consulting firm, at this point he’s mostly trying and failing to produce films and music on his own. There’s Vijay, a 36 year old, massive pothead, indie film producer. He makes the kind of English language films watched by rich metropolitan Indians that are often only half as clever as what they strive for. Sundance bait. I knew him for almost a year before I found out that he has a wife and two children in another city. He’s rather baby-faced and doesn’t try to advertise his entanglement, but despite the whispers of wild group sex I’ve heard, I doubt whether his efforts at infidelity lead to much. From what I can tell, his job mostly involves begging various investors for money, and he’s just taken on his first mainstream commercial Hindi movie to pay the bills. Parvati is his new star. She’s here, of course. A stunning Australian Indian, fresh out of law school, who has moved to India so that her acting career can take off.

Our group has picked up two Caucasian members. An Australian with a social climbing Indian-Canadian friend and a French guy with the Indian fashion magazine editor. They don’t talk too much, or perhaps I just don’t listen too much, and their presence is only notable for the fact that you couldn’t have chosen two more stereotypical representatives of their respective nations. The Aussie is loud and brash, sporting an unkempt mullet, healthy stubble, and a loud white t-shirt with garish flower printing. The French guy works for some French government trade group, has bad teeth, wears an untucked button-down shirt and chain smokes over his daintily crossed legs.

An Indian film director joins us. He’s short, looks a bit like Danny Devito as The Penguin, and he seems incredibly gay. He’s also blatantly hitting on my girlfriend in front of me, telling her how beautiful she is, and loudly scheming on how to get her drunk and me deported. I know she’s not interested, and it’s hard to imagine how anyone could be, but I’m a bit put off by her failure to be more obvious in her disinterest.

The crowd is, to put it gently, privileged. As Kunal, the trollish director becomes ever more sloppily drunk, he flings a glass off of the table. He lambasts the waiter for failing to keep the champagne bucket stocked with tallboys of Kingfisher, as per his demand. Eventually, Romit throws Kunal’s wallet to him, and knocks over a second glass. The bar manager comes over to scold us for breaking two glasses. Instead of apologizing, Kunal begins a tirade about how it’s only a glass, and he’ll call so-and-so to go golfing the next day, and he’ll explain everything. I got the impression that maybe he was talking about the owner of the hotel, but I really couldn’t say. What’s certain is that the point is he can do whatever he wants there. The manager doesn’t bother us much after that.

The other revelers express outrage as soon as the manager leaves, and I’m about to join them until I realize that their outrage isn’t at Kunal for his boorishness, but at the manager for his scolding.  The general consensus is more or less that at the prices we’re paying, the rules ought not to apply to us.

I, of course, am not paying anything, and have been greedily throwing back beer from the moment I confirmed that it was on Kunal’s tab. I don’t have to like someone to accept free beer. I’m a student. The crowd is generally on the tipsier side of things, and Vijay passes me a lump of hash and asks me to roll a joint at the table. I don’t have any influential family members to bail me out in the event of legal difficulties, so I balk at the suggestion and go to the bathroom to take care of the job.

I emerge from the sweltering bathroom with two neatly rolled joints and place them on the table. I had forgotten that I was with the jeunesse doree of Bombay who can do no wrong, so the bright young things proceed immediately start smoking them at the table. Nobody says anything, and hash joints smell much less than weed. Perhaps nobody noticed.

Of course, thanks to Kunal’s insistence that “the champagne bucket at our table must never have less than two cans of beer until I’m too drunk notice,” he quickly meets that goal.

I said these people were high class. That doesn’t mean they have class.

Kunal stands up, slips on a floor that’s lost all traction having been liberally doused with his beer throughout the night, and goes frantically sprawling, tossing chairs as he falls. We attract the attention of both the entire staff and those people who just had chairs thrown at their tables, and decide that this is our cue to depart, navigating a teetering Kunal to the elevator.

Upon reaching the outside of the hotel, there’s some dissent about whether we should stop at a late night street-side kebab joint. I’m hungry, but mostly I’m tired, and I successfully advocate for a return to the suburb of Bandra, where most of these people, Priya included, live. Kunal, sadly, has a very large car and driver, and manages to fit all of us in, so I’m not yet free of him. The gambit to convince Kunal to head back north is based on suggesting that we all go to Zenzi. Of course, I – and most of the others, I imagine – realize that Zenzi will be closed this late on a Sunday night. Kunal is far too drunk for such vagaries. A few minutes into the drive, Vijay turns to me and mutters “Wait, what time is it? Zenzi’s going to be…” – I quickly elbow him. He gets the point and plays along. And so the car alternates between silence and drunken ridiculousness, mostly emanating from Kunal. We, or at least I, make fun of his idiocy by prompting him along to ever more foolish heights by encouraging him in a manner that I assume to be subtle and clever. I doubt very much that it was. In any case, the subtlety bar was set very low in that car on that night.

***

Halfway through the ride home, it happens. We’re on the Western Express Highway. We’re approaching an overpass, locally referred to as a flyover. There are small slums on either side of the road. Traffic slows. It’s the middle of the night. This isn’t normal. Trying to figure out what’s going on, we notice that two lanes of traffic are being diverted into one ahead of us. I don’t know exactly what the laws are, but police traffic-stops in Bombay don’t seem to need any PC and there’s no fourth amendment around here. As I look ahead, I expect to see the familiar road blocks that usually serve as a sign of an interminable wait. Instead, I see a boy, perhaps 17, being thrown to the ground and punched and kicked violently by three others of about the same age.

It takes some time for this to sink in. There is a brutal beating going on in the middle of the street, and nobody is stopping. They are slowly waiting in line, merging into one lane, passing the violence, and speeding back up. I have never before seen Indian traffic this organized. But mostly, I just can’t believe that this many people could pretend that what’s happening right in front of them isn’t happening right in front of them.

Inside the car, it is somewhat chaotic. Kunal can barely figure out what’s going on. Parvati decides that the best action is to open the window and start yelling at them. Romit’s trying to restrain Parvati. Priya is in utter shock. I start muttering, mostly to myself, that we need to stop them. At this moment we merge into the other lane, and the boy gets off of the ground and staggers towards the narrow lane of the slum with the others in fast pursuit. I realize that talking to myself isn’t enough.

“Gari bund karo,” I shout at the driver; “Stop the car.” I hope my Hindi’s right. The driver accelerates.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shout again in Hindi. I know I’m saying this right. Vijay joins in and yells at the driver some more to stop. His Hindi is flawless. But the driver keeps speeding up. Kunal doesn’t want to stop. Romit is skeptical, but I don’t think he’s made up his mind. The driver doesn’t stop. As we get further from the fight, we all stare at each other in a shocked silence. Except it wasn’t a fight, that’s the wrong word. A fight has two sides.

I know that I should be yelling to turn the car around, to stop, to do something, to fight. Something has happened. There’s a heaviness in the car. A guilt, I hope. I can only speak for myself. The more distance that comes between us and the beating, the more impossible it seems to start yelling that we have to turn back. I’m frozen. And I’m ashamed.

But Priya finally emerges from her shock and starts talking. Or maybe she’s still in shock, but at least she’s saying something, unlike the rest of us.

“We have to stop them. We have to stop them. They’re going to kill that boy. We have to stop them.”

***

We have to stop them. They’re going to kill that boy. When I reread the words, they sound dry and antiseptic on the page. They sound like bad writing. But when I go to delete them, to modify, to paraphrase, I can’t do it.  It was that stark.  It was that simple. We had to stop them or they might kill that boy.

Priya was barely coherent. She continued saying that we had to stop, and maybe more. I don’t remember the rest of her words. I think I offered some platitudes about how there was nothing more we could do. I think I hated myself as I said them. I know I do now.

And then she acted. And I can hardly remember respecting someone more. It would have been so easy to keep driving.

“Stop the car,” she said, “I’m going to throw up.”

This time, there were no arguments. The car stopped, she got out, I got out, and she started running across the street. She didn’t have to throw up, but she knew how to make them listen. I chased after her and asked her where she was going.

“We have to stop them.”
“They won’t even be in the street any more.”
“What if they kill that boy?”

We got in a cab. We started back. Romit called to ask what was happening. I answered, and he told me to be very careful, and to call him after to confirm we were okay. I wanted to tell him he was a coward. There were three of them. I’m not a big guy. My girlfriend barely weighs 100 pounds. And there Romit was in a car a quarter mile away with five people. The two of us are driving into the slums to stop a boy from getting beaten to death, and all he can do is tell me to be careful. But I didn’t feel like I was in a position to accuse anyone of cowardice that night. Not after what I didn’t do. We reached the flyover and made the u-turn. We drove back underneath, between the slums. The street was quiet. The alley was quiet. There was nothing.

What if they killed that boy?

***

We rode the taxi back home silently at first. The weight felt too heavy. Priya was crying. I felt like doing the same. Every now and then she would repeat the phrase that was in both of our heads even when unspoken. And then she started to apologize.

For making trouble.
For making us stop.

And as proud as I was of her, I was ashamed of myself. How could she apologize? How could she, the only person in the car who did the right thing, think she had to excuse herself for the inconvenience? How could the rest of us be so worthless, say so little, that she thought that she had done the wrong thing?

“You did the right thing. You’re the only person who did the right thing.” I repeated and repeated and repeated.

And the alternative visions wouldn’t leave my head. What I should have done. What a better me would have done. I saw myself yelling more loudly, more forcibly. I saw myself getting out of my seat and making the driver stop. I saw myself doing anything other than sitting numbly silent as the horror faded behind us in the distance.

But that’s not what I did.

Words by Kerry