Another Country (22 page)

Again, the fine kohl-lined eyes considered her. ‘Touch of Joy,' said Shalini gently, ‘at BEST Marg, it's really very good. If you're in a hurry, they have two girls waxing at the same time.'

Leela was baffled.

‘You know, so you save time.'

She nodded.

‘And of course, you must come here for a meal any time. Consider it your home,' Shalini added much more warmly, and Leela was confused. She must be misjudging this; she both admired and disliked this woman and couldn't understand why. The conversation had moved away from the form she had anticipated, but it had now again become recognisable; perhaps she had simply, through stupidity, failed to give the proper responses and that was why it had departed from its theme before returning, like a song, to the melody.

Vikram was in the room, he bent and kissed his mother. Then Leela. ‘Hi,' he said. He smelled fresh, had evidently just bathed.

‘Hi,' she said, understanding now.

She didn't get a chance to discuss it with Vikram, for she didn't see him for two days. Chitra was out of town. She wondered, she rehearsed conversations in her head. I like her, she began, but she makes me feel unsure. There's something; I can't tell what she really feels about anything. People are weird about their sons. Mothers.

‘It went really well, didn't it?' Vikram said with joy on Tuesday.

‘Yes, of course,' Leela said. She wondered that he couldn't tell.

‘Mummy said you seem like a lovely person.'

‘She did?'

‘Of course. What did you think she'd say?'

Smart woman, thought Leela glumly.

‘I like your mother,' she said later. ‘I just think she has more interest in whether or not I get a pedicure than whether I speak French or have a degree.' When she named these accomplishments, they sounded equally irrelevant to her.

‘She knows you care about me, and that's what matters,' Vikram said. He looked surprised, and when it dawned on him, hurt. ‘Do you think you're giving her credit? It can't be easy to feel relaxed when you meet your son's girlfriend. It's not a concept she's had a lot of experience of in real life.'

‘What did she say?' Leela asked. Her vanity was curious, but more than that she burned to understand the unnamed, not-quite-personal hostility under the flawless manners.

‘She asked me if we're going to get married,' he said.

‘Oh. What did you say?'

‘I said I hope so.' His hug was quick.

‘Oh!' There was nowhere for her affront, so ready to appear, to go.

‘I feel,' said Chitra, folding a pile of clean but unironed clothes, ‘that you talk more about Vikram's mother than about Vikram.'

Leela was annoyed, and laughed. ‘Maybe she's a worthier adversary.'

They both laughed.

‘No, it's not that,' she said, ashamed of herself. ‘I can't tell what she's thinking. I nearly said, I can't tell what she's up to.'

On the balcony outside, pigeons made soft, iterative noises: Oooo-oo, ooo-oo.

I will leave here at some point, if Vikram and I do marry, this phase of my life will have ended, Leela thought, looking at the white formica-topped desk and the steel cupboard. I will not be stuck here, or like those girls you see at dinner who talk about looking for a place to live because their term is nearly over: paying-guest accommodation in Colaba or Warden Road, or a shared flat in Bandra or further out: Andheri, Borivali, Navi Mumbai.

She caught Chitra looking at her.

‘I feel like there's an unspoken thing going on between me and her that she thinks I understand. But I don't. I can tell there's some sort of battle taking place though.'

‘What d'you expect? She's a widow, only son, obviously she's paranoid. You could marry him and then treat her really badly.'

‘Like an aunt of my father's,' Leela remembered. ‘Her daughter-in-law even kept the sugar locked up and didn't give her a key. When my father went to see her she couldn't make him a cup of tea. I'd never do anything like that.'

Chitra wrapped her unironed clothes in an old sheet and tied the ends in a knot.

‘Let's go down,' she said. ‘I'm hungry and I want to catch the dhobi.'

‘Why does everyone call him the dhobi when most people just give him their clothes for istri?' enquired Leela as they got into the lift.

Chitra laughed, as people tended to when Leela asked linguistic questions. ‘Because he will also wash clothes, I suppose. I don't know.'

I am right only about useless things, Leela thought.

‘I thought of bringing a friend to lunch on Saturday,' she told her father on the telephone, knowing he wouldn't say no.

‘A friend?'

‘My friend Vikram, er, actually my boyfriend.'

There was a pause. ‘Lovely, yes. What does he eat or not eat?' Mr Ghosh enquired. Leela cringed, imagining his expression at the other end of the line, the look of warning or having something to elaborate on that he might have given her mother.

‘Everything, he eats everything. Don't worry too much about the food,' she said.

So it happened that Vikram was sitting in her parents' drawing room, on the sofa, where a jittery Leela also sat. He reached for her hand; she tried hard not to see her parents not rolling their eyes at each other. Every time Vikram spoke she was aware of unbelievably convoluted pathways and tables of rules in the air which only she – and perhaps Neeti, had she cared – could perceive. She found it impossible not to notice them.

‘So what do you do, Vikram?' her mother was asking. Vikram had a cold beer next to him.

‘Well, I'm still looking around, auntie,' he said. ‘But I have a master's in international relations, so I'm interested in working in policy development.'

‘What does that mean, concretely?'

Without wanting to, Leela found herself, while the interrogation was taking place, seeing it all through her parents' eyes, and detaching herself inwardly from Vikram. Or was it that her own thoughts, which she'd suppressed in her pleasure at being loved, were now arising again?

‘Working for a policy shaping organisation, for example. Attending meetings, local government.'

Leela's father chuckled. ‘You'd find that pretty tedious, I think.'

‘Baba,' said Leela.

‘No, you're right. But some of us have to get involved. Otherwise all the resources of this country seep away into low-level corruption, and we wonder at dinner parties why nothing works and so many people are still poor.'

Leela was afresh impressed by, and mildly irritated with, Vikram.

When her father was driving her to the station on Sunday he said, ‘Nice fellow. Seems very nice. Seems quite young.'

‘He's a year older than me.'

‘Ah? Maybe he just needs to find out what he wants to do in life. Business family, you said?'

‘He knows what he wants to do.'

They had rounded the station road, and were waiting to turn into the chaotic parking lot.

‘You're pretty serious?' Her father sounded mildly regretful, but that was a habit.

‘Yes,' Leela said firmly.

She spent the journey staring, melancholic, out of the yellow-tinted windows of the chair car. When Bombay and its filth approached – miles of slums and rubbish on the tracks, people harvesting greens grown near them, and industrial chimneys pumping clouds of smoke into a pearly, polluted sky – her heart didn't flip, as usual, with happiness. She sighed, ready to re-enter her world, and at VT hurried into the dark station, where shadows moved like former people along the night-time platform.

Chapter 29

‘Hold on. Mummy wants to talk to you. I think about lunch.'

Leela was left mouthing ‘What?' to herself in the mirror after the fashion of a cartoon character. She looked at her reflection: were Tintinesque drops of perspiration flying from her face in alarm?

‘Hello?'

A pause. Vikram's mother was the kind of woman who managed to be ineffably feminine even on the telephone. ‘Hello?' she said softly.

Oh come on, thought Leela. ‘Hi, Mrs Sahni.'

‘Shalini, Leela.'

‘Hello Shalini.'

Pause.

‘Leela, I was wondering if you might have the time to have lunch with me one day?'

‘Oh. That's very kind.'

‘Will it be possible for you? This week?'

‘Well …'

‘Which day?'

‘Thursday?' It was far enough off, she could tell Joan a couple of days before.

‘Lovely. One o'clock?'

‘One o'clock.'

‘See you then, my dear.'

Leela remained looking at the phone. Shalini had hung up.

On Tuesday she forgot to chase the istriwala for her ironing; on Wednesday she was late home and missed him. She couldn't wear her smarter clothes, therefore. She took out various things from the closet, examined them, wondered where she and Shalini might go for lunch, tried to imagine what her motives were – perhaps just a simple thought of eating lunch together, or feeding the hostelite Leela. Had it been one of those lunches, the sort her mother would take her to when she was in Bombay for work, clothes would have been tertiary. The main focus would have been large quantities of good food. Swati Snacks, for example, or Vithal Bhelwala, or Samovar. Back to the lunch at hand, she couldn't work out what Vikram's mother wanted, if anything. Anyway, she couldn't go suspiciously dressed up, even had this been possible, to the office. Questions would be asked. Sathya – who seemed to be looking more and more haggard, and was out of the office as much as once a week – would notice, ask what was up. Joan would enjoy keeping Leela on a random pretext.

She put on an embroidered sleeveless top that her mother said was nice, and a pair of jeans and forgot about it except for the need to keep an eye on the time all morning lest she be late to meet Shalini outside Regal. As the last half-hour in the office approached she began to feel strange. Sathya wasn't there. Joan raised an eyebrow but said nothing as Leela went to the loo three times in thirty minutes to check her hair.

‘I'll go now, for my lunch.'

Joan nodded.

Leela bolted. She couldn't get a cab to go the short distance but had left herself just enough time to walk. Her heart raced, she wondered if she would be late, or smell sweaty and look dishevelled. Car and truck exhausts seemed to want to breathe on her; the April heat was intense; she nearly had her foot run over twice by an amorous motorcyclist. She got to Regal and tried not to look panicked. Her face must be shiny. Breathe. She squinted into the glare.

A thin young man came up.

‘Hello madam, how are you?' he asked in polite Bombay Hindi.

He looked young and was neatly dressed in shirt-pant. Leela smiled at him and looked away.

‘Madam, do you want a map? World map hai, India map hai.' He opened the A2 posters and began to unfurl them.

‘No, thanks.'

The sun glinted off the lamination. She felt a childish attraction to them, perhaps because they resembled the comic books she'd loved in childhood, or perhaps because of the large expanses of turquoise sea. Her knowledge of the different states and some of the smaller cities was poor; she began to peer at Andhra Pradesh.

‘Le lo Madam, le lo. Main aaj hi aaya hun Bambai,' he began to whine. Buy one, I only came to Bombay today, ‘yeh mera pehla din hai, le lo', this is my first day, please buy one. ‘Bahut achcha hoga aap ke liye', it'll bring you luck.

‘You're saying it won't be lucky for you? How much are they?'

‘Two hundred rupees.'

‘No way.'

‘Please madam, it's my first day, no one's bought one, please, it'll be very good for you, take one, take two, I'll give you a good price.'

What if it really was his first day in the city? She remembered sitting in the café here on a Saturday morning, reading the newspaper, ignoring the white tourists, watching the street kids eye them through the glass.

‘I'll give you a hundred rupees.'

‘No madam, very good quality, special price for you, one-fifty.'

‘Okay.' She chose a map of India, political, with many place names in each state, and the seas clearly marked: Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea. There was Kanyakumari at the tip. She felt the same strong but obscure patriotism that she recalled from childhood, watching the Republic Day parade on a neighbour's television. Those memories were concrete but seemed fictional; not more fictional, though, than London, or Richard, or school and its unending misery.

She gave him the money and he rolled the map up for her and produced a rubber band to hold it in place. Leela stood looking at it. A minute later, he came up behind her again. ‘Madam?'

She wheeled around, snapping, ‘I just bought one, didn't I?'

It was Shalini's driver.

‘Madam is waiting,' he said.

‘Coming.'

The car was parked in a side road, and Leela, holding the map, got in.

‘Hi,' she said.

‘Hello dear. I was worried you were lost.'

‘No, I was there, I just – I got caught up. This boy was selling these.'

The car had started moving again, the air conditioning was on.

Leela tried to wedge the rolled-up map into a less inconvenient place near her leg. Vikram's mother wore white slacks, perfectly pressed, and a sort of kurta blouse. She carried a tan handbag.

‘He said it was his first day in Bombay,' Leela said.

‘Oh yes, they always say things like that.'

‘No, I really think it might have been.'

‘I don't think so, dear.'

Leela opened her mouth to argue and shut it again. They rolled up at the Taj.

‘I thought we might go to Souk, they have a nice lunch buffet,' Shalini said.

‘Great.' Leela wasn't sure whether to leave the poster in the car. A large turbaned man was holding open the door. She got out, still holding the map.

‘Perhaps we can have a look at the shops later,' Shalini said, as they crossed the lobby.

‘Yes, sure.' Leela was both rebellious and embarrassed in the perennial scruffy kolhapuris and jeans, amid the brocade furniture and smiling staff. ‘I like the Taj best of all the hotels in Bombay,' she told Shalini. ‘I like the pretty girls who open the door for you and smile and say hello. Sometimes it's nice just to come here for the air conditioning and the loo and the smile.'

She was confiding, but Vikram's mother raised an eyebrow and remained silent.

Leela tried to continue talking while they were led to a table near the enormous windows.

‘The view is lovely,' she said, as a waiter served hot starters and tripped over the rolled-up map under her chair.

The view was lovely: Bombay, grey, hazy, slightly diminished through tinted glass; the sea, and a small island which the navy used.

Shalini smiled.

Leela worked her way through humous, tahini, and aubergine dip, and wondered why she wasn't enjoying the food more. It was the Taj, after all. When she had to come here for a meeting she fell on the biscuits and tea with delight. Now, she wasn't having a particularly good time. The food was also boring. You could eat dirtier, tastier versions of the same thing off the Edgware Road.

‘Are you enjoying the food?'

‘Yes, delicious,' she said, obliged to eat more pitta bread.

‘My dear, I notice you don't – you don't wear very much jewellery. You dress very simply, which is nice. But I wondered if you've seen some of the newer designers at boutiques like the Courtyard? You might really like them.'

Leela nodded.

‘You girls today have so much to do, and that's wonderful. So many opportunities. But it's also important to be presentable, take care of that side of things.'

Leela smiled.

‘Maybe it would be nice if you got a manicure once a month or so. And you might not know, you haven't lived in Bombay long, I can point out the best dry-cleaner. There is a place in Colaba, but the best thing is to save a few pieces and send them to Beauty Art at Churchgate.'

‘Right.'

‘I have a good fellow who makes sari blouses, too, for when you need to go to a formal occasion. You have some saris?'

‘I generally wear my mother's. She has some old temple saris and Bengali silks. But I don't really know how to tie a sari.'

Vikram's mother seemed exhilarated. ‘It's just a case of working with what you have,' she whispered. ‘Do you see?'

Leela didn't, and nodded. She wondered if she should claim to be going to the loo and leave. What would happen? She couldn't do that. She thought of Vikram's delighted face. ‘Mummy wants to spend some time with you.'

You can't suppose, Leela said silently, that I will do what you want. I don't even do what my parents want, as a point of principle, and I care about them.

‘You know, there is an adjustment, when you're with someone, and with their family and friends. It's a new start, in many ways. But it can be fun.'

‘Mm.'

‘When I got married, I was much younger than you. Those were different times. I'd just finished college. Vikram was born a year later. I had to learn in a hurry. There are some mistakes it isn't worth making for yourself.'

Leela nodded. She was unsure what was being talked about. Birth control?

‘Any dessert for you, dear?'

‘No thanks, I'm really full,' Leela said, then felt despondent, remembering the expression was inelegant. What were you supposed to say? ‘I'm satisfied', or something of the sort. ‘I couldn't possibly', but that might be as vulgar as sticking your little finger out when drinking tea. She grinned. Vikram's mother gave her an odd look.

In the arcade downstairs they stopped outside a jeweller's. ‘Do you see those earrings? Very lovely. And quite simple, really.' Shalini pointed at a pair of enamelled chandelier earrings, set with uncut diamonds.

‘Yes, beautiful.'

‘We should come back here. First maybe shoes.'

In the shoe shop, Shalini pointed out with approval various styles. ‘Those look smart, don't you think?' Elegant tan shoes.

‘Yes.'

‘Or those.' Jewelled wedges. Those look Sindhi, thought Leela, reprising her sister's summary of some cousins' sequinned clothing and footwear.

‘Maybe a bit bling for me.'

‘They also make kolhapuris. Would you like to see? Very elegant.'

‘I'm wearing kolhapuris.' Leela smiled.

Shalini asked the salesmen, who brought out silver and coloured kolhapuris with and without heels, their soles stamped with the shop's logo.

‘They're nice. But a lot more expensive than the ones I get in Pune, and those are from Kolhapur,' Leela said.

Shalini's face became blank. ‘Maybe we can look in the jeweller's again.'

Over trays of velvet and across from the wily face of a polite man with a moustache, Leela allowed herself to be bought a pendant and chain. The pendant was silver, meenakari work with glass rather than diamonds in the back. The enamelling was delicate; it was crescent shaped, larger than things she normally wore.

‘It's very pretty, thank you so much,' she said.

‘It's only silver, but I think it's a good idea to start wearing some jewellery.'

‘I normally avoid buying or being given things that I might be sorry if I lost when I move,' Leela said.

A hand fell lightly on her shoulder. ‘Well, you're settled now. So you can stop doing that.'

Leela was startled, as though some deeper part of her consciousness had been disturbed; as though someone had interfered with her back. ‘Yes.'