The Red Carpet (5 page)

Out shopping for baby clothes, said Rohini. She should be back soon.

And Mr. D’Costa was angry with himself for not noticing her departure either. He felt that his visit was most ill-timed. He couldn’t help notice that the volume level in the drawing room had increased since he left it. There was really no question about it: his presence was a damper on that youthful crowd. They were getting boisterous again, and loud snatches of their conversation came into the guest room where the little bundled baby slept undisturbed. Mr. D’Costa couldn’t help listening. It was simply his habit to do so.

He heard a male voice say, somewhat pedantically: “. . . so after much discussion, we concluded that labor pain was like getting kicked in the balls.”

“Fuck!” said a second man. “Come on, Farhan.
Nothing
can be that bad!”

“And why not?” said a woman, speaking indignantly. “It probably is a lot worse!”

“It
is
a lot worse” came Farhan’s voice, dryly. “By inference, being in labor for a whole day and night, like Rohini, must be like getting kicked in the balls, without a break,
for twenty-four hours
straight.
”

There was a visceral sucking-in of breath by all the men present, and Mr. D’Costa too could feel a responsive quiver run through him at the thought. He was appalled and fascinated by the frankness of the conversation (no ladies and gentlemen these, for all that they were apparently well brought up), and forced his attention back to the baby, helpless cause of her mother’s carnage.

He made all the appropriate noises while his mind pondered: stay for a drink of a lifetime and impose some more, or leave while they were still pleased to see him?

The decision was taken out of his hands entirely.

He exited the baby’s room with Rohini, his mind still undecided between temptation and dignity, when the front door opened and Rohini’s mother swept in, followed by the houseboy struggling under an armful of packages.

She nodded amiably to the greetings of her daughter’s friends, and then spied Mr. D’Costa. The immediate joy on her face made it clear: if there was one person who believed that, without him, Rohini would have faced the direst of times, this was she.

“Mr. Dacosta! . . . So nice! . . . So kind! . . . I wanted to drop in and thank you personally, but so busy with the newborn baby!”

He was involuntarily swept back into the baby’s room to admire again the newborn infant while she pointed out with pride the reproduction of her son-in-law’s nose and her daughter’s fingers. “Maya,” she said. “We are going to call her Maya.”

Mr. D’Costa was back in his familiar milieu. There were no mysteries here.

“Come, Mr. Dacosta.” She led him back to the drawing room, and asked, “Now please have something . . .”

“I’m just fixing him a drink,” Aman put in.

“Tchi! Aman! A drink at four o’clock in the afternoon! Nah, nah. What will Mr. Dacosta think! He is not a drunken one like all you people!” She shook her head affectionately at the chorus of halfhearted denials. “Mr. Dacosta will prefer some hot tea and some nice
garam-garam
snacks.”

Temptation was swept away on a tide of goodwill; he saw his drink vanish into someone else’s hands and drunk thereafter as though it was the merest home-brew, and Mr. D’Costa found himself meekly agreeing to tea and hot samosas.

He ate three samosas with chutney, which were indeed delicious, and drank two cups of well-sugared tea. Rohini’s mother sat by his side, and kept his plate filled, and his mouth engaged in exchanging all manner of information crucial to their understanding of each other. He found himself telling her about his son in Australia, and his long-ago job of forty years with British Tobacco. Just so would he have liked to sit across from Elizabeth’s mother, chatting pleasantly about their grandchild and the commingling of their families.

The back of his mind, however, couldn’t help questioning, over and over: how much money did these youngsters make?

Surely, surely, it was enough for a plane ticket?

And today, several months later, closed curtains.

“You know them so well,” said Mr. Kurien, without intentional malice, “why don’t you go and check?”

Mr. D’Costa ignored both Mr. Kurien and his own impulses and waited. But when the curtains remained defiantly closed the following morning as well, he decided to act.

He told himself that he had to go vegetable shopping anyway; it was just a question of stopping en route, a small meaningless diversion, nothing more. He imagined: perhaps Rohini would turn to him, to cry and confide her problems. Perhaps, once again, he was to be her support in distress, what with his son out of town, her parents living in Australia, and all.

As once before, he dressed carefully, shaving and bathing and then drying his hair before combing it through with Brylcreem. He ironed the blue-and-pink checked polyester shirt and light blue poplin pants that constituted one of his best attires. He dressed slowly, then removed the pure leather brown belt from the plastic bag at the back of his cupboard. He looped it around his waist and slipped his feet into black crisscrossed Bata sandals. He was ready.

He looked in on his wife and told her he was heading out to the market. He half hoped that she would comment on his dress, but as usual, she barely paid attention. Her gaze was fixed on the television screen, where a pert-looking cartoon girl dressed in an animal skin stood with arms akimbo.
“But, Fred . . . !”
went the nasal twang.
“Oh, brother!”
His wife smiled in response and raised the volume. Mr. D’Costa closed the door behind him as he left.

It could be nothing. Perhaps Rohini was just sleeping late after a party. Perhaps she had left for a trip while Mr. D’Costa had been away to the market. Perhaps she had changed her housekeeping style. What, after all, were closed curtains? It could be nothing.

He had to ring the bell three times before it was answered. And then, immediately, he knew his impulses had been correct.

The door swung open to reveal a darkened, unkempt house. Rohini looked devastated. In fact, she
was
devastated. Something dreadful had happened in her life, causing her eyes to redden and swell, her skin to blotch, her T-shirt to crumple and stain, and leaving her hair greasy, uncombed, and in tangled disarray.

Mr. D’Costa’s mind darted about in horror. What could have caused this? An erring husband? An upset with her mother-in-law? A problem with her baby? His grandchildren? Why had his son’s letters made no mention of this?

A thousand questions bubbled up inside him, but they all died before they found speech, quelled by the unexpected, implacable impatience in her eyes. The eyes of his daughter-in-law, repulsing him. He felt himself falter. What did he really know of the alien being who stood before him?

“Mrs. Kapur,” Mr. D’Costa finally found refuge in formality. “Please excuse, but. . . . Your house . . . everything, is it okay?”

What happened? Where are your servants? Your baby?
What
happened to you?

The ghost of a smile on Rohini’s face was not echoed in her voice, as she answered the questions he could not voice. “The baby is at my mother’s house in Delhi, and the servants are on leave.”

And your husband?

But there was no further explanation.

It appeared she was waiting for him to leave.

Mr. D’Costa wandered back into the street, tightly clutching his plastic shopping bag. The gleaming white apartment building reared up behind him, and he kept his back to it, resolutely facing the pastel pink house from which he came. His gaze rested on the dark trails that edged the top of the walls. Every monsoon lengthened these trails, the rain dragging the dirt of the roof down with it, in filthy fat tears that coated the house in relentless, ever-narrowing stains until it looked like blackened fungal icing on pink cake. A long time ago, Mr. D’Costa had asked his son for a few extra dollars to repaint the house. If the money arrived soon, perhaps he would paint the house white this time. Or perhaps he wouldn’t repaint at all, for, pink or white, the rain would surely strike again and again.

Mr. D’Costa felt a dismay creep through his body, but before he could dwell on it, he sighted a familiar neighborhood figure turning the corner.

“Oh, Mrs. Gnanakan,” he called, and walked briskly over to inquire about her husband’s state of health.

TWO FOUR
SIX EIGHT

Mary and Mrs. Rafter died within a week of each other. I learned about Mrs. Rafter’s demise from the
Old Girls’ Newsletter.
“May she rest in pece,” it said beneath her photograph, quaintly and hurriedly, or perhaps simply in wry acknowledgment that she would never rest in peace. The blurb went on to mention her forty years of devoted service; the scar tissue resulting thereby still evident, no doubt, in two generations of old school girls.

Mary had no such obituary. The news of her death was brought to us by her daughter, Rosamma, a few days after it happened, along with an unstated hope that her former employers might wish to do something for Mary’s family.

“Give this woman something,” said my brother Ramu, “and get rid of her.”

“Poor thing,” said my mother. “She was not so old to die. Not well, is it? You are a naughty sweetie baby.”

Rosamma dutifully crooned to the child on my mother’s lap. “Baby-amma,” she said. “Baby-ammu-kutty. Yes, Ma,” she said. “She was very sick. So we took her to the government hospital, they gave some injection, she died, Ma.”

“Terrible . . . See, what plump legs she has.”

Rosamma plucked at the baby’s thigh with her fingers and kissed them. She held her hands out, but I got there before she could take the child from my mother.

Rosamma was the spitting image of Mary. Short, sturdy, as dark as the bark on the shemaram tree, the strength of ten elephants quiescent in her arms.

Rosamma, dressed in a white saree bordered with blue, long dark hair oiled and twisted into a tight bun at the back of her neck, funereal, rice-christianized, radiating competence and the warm smell of sun-baked skin that cannot afford to bathe more than three times a week, squatted at my mother’s feet and smiled up at me as I carefully gathered my child into my arms.

I could not bring myself to smile back.

Too much like her mother, Rosamma was.

Mary first came to us when I was three. The previous ayah had been dismissed by my mother in a fit of temper. For four days afterwards, my mother muttered and scolded. “That lying good-for-nothing!” she would say, as she dragged a comb painfully through my hair. “That thieving mongrel, taking advantage of my goodness, just like everybody else. Who else will let her get away with so much, tell me? Hurry up, do you think I have time for nothing else?” And her palm would smack me hard across the arm in her impatience to get me ready. On the fifth day, she relaxed. “Such a problem, finding a good servant,” she told my father. “But I think this one will do. She looks clean and polite.”

I missed my old ayah and stared resentfully at this replacement, refusing to go to her when she sat on the floor and smiled and tried to tempt me into her arms. I hid behind my mother, and heard her say:

“She doesn’t like you. I thought you said you were good with children.”

She’ll come to me, Ma, Mary said. She’ll come.

“We’ll see,” said my mother. “If she doesn’t settle with you quickly, I can’t pay you so much.”

Mary was engaged at a hundred rupees a month, as much, in those days, as my mother spent on a cotton saree. Far more, as my mother unfailingly pointed out, than she would get anywhere else. I ended up clasped in her arms before the day was through, sucking on the sweet that had tempted me there, and she stayed with us for years, turning quickly into an extension of my body, her smell as familiar to me as my own.

By the time I was ten, however, I didn’t need her for much. I dressed, bathed, and fed myself. She no longer slept on the floor beside my bed at night, wrapped in an old sheet like a soon-to-be-burned corpse. I wouldn’t be shushed, I didn’t listen when she scolded. Instead, I learnt to scold her back, carelessly, imitating my mother’s voice and querulous intonation.

Mary, to me, was nothing. I had other, more important things to think about—like school. That was all I talked about at home, school, chattering to my mother, ignoring everything else. In the afternoons, when my mother rested on her bed under the slow-soughing fan that gently stirred the stewy summer heat, Mary squatted on the floor by her side, massaging her feet. I didn’t notice that, every afternoon, Mary’s strong dark hands eased the pain out of my mother’s ankles and, at the same time, massaged her opinions about me deep into my mother’s skin.

It is a shame, she said, that missy does not like the tasty food you are putting on the table. So much effort you put, one bite in this house is worth ten in others, but when you are not at home, missy complains of it to me.

And: It is a shame that missy does not learn your good manners. See how she speaks to the cook. I don’t mind, what else do I live for but to serve this family, but the cook is threatening to quit if she shouts at him again.

Lately, I could not even ask Mary to bring me a glass of water without my mother saying: “Go bring it yourself. You have legs. Use your legs as much as you do your mouth.”

I would sulk, but briefly, my attention wandering immediately back to the most important place on earth, school, where even parents, when they visited, had to be attentive, mind their manners, and pay attention to what was said.

School was where we went to get a “convent education,” which meant, as far as I could tell, learning mathematics, English, geography, history, science, Hindi, a choice of Sanskrit OR French OR Kannada, singing, painting, How to Be English, and How to Be Good. The last two items were not officially on the syllabus, but there was no mistaking their importance. School was founded a hundred years previously, by the English church, for little English girls residing in the army cantonment of Bangalore. The English had left, but their ghosts remained.

Fee-fi-fo-fum

Kiss the arse of the Englishman

It was a curious puzzle, one that I never resolved. Be proud of your country, they said. Democratic. Republic. Independent. And be proud of the English traditions of your school. Remember the greatness of Indians dead, they said: Mahatma Gandhi, Akbar-Ashoka-Chandragupta, and use your fork, not your fingers. No, my girl,
we
don’t call it the Sepoy Mutiny; for us, it was the First War of Independence, and if the Queen of England were to see you slouching like that, would she be pleased? Even the slightest infraction of rules meant scoldings, and a loss of house points.

In retrospect I suppose at least some of the trouble could have been avoided if I hadn’t been late that particular day. I could have stood in my proper place during chapel services, right between Tara and Freny, and Tara would have handed me the note directly. Instead of which, I remained at the back along with the other latecomers, next to Mrs. Rafter, whose malignant eyes magnified the slightest infraction. Tara’s note was passed in my direction through the softly moving hands of several girls, one of whom opened it, read it, and kept it in shocked delight.

To turn it in, the very next day, to the last place on earth that notes passed in chapel should go, directly to Mrs. Rafter.

Of course, being late to school that morning was not my fault. If Mary hadn’t spoiled my uniform, I would have been on time. She didn’t spoil my uniform by accident, either. The scorch marks left on my shirt by the iron were painstakingly achieved.

The previous evening my mother had returned from the stores and dropped her handbag on her bed before going to the hall to make a telephone call.

I waited patiently for her to slide deep into conversation with her friend. This was usually good for at least twenty minutes. I had plenty of time. I walked softly to the bedroom and slipped inside.

Mary had beaten me to it. There she was, her hand deep inside my mother’s purse.

This purse was a magnet for all the dependants in the house. My mother would go shopping, and then carelessly leave it lying around her bedroom while she had a cup of tea out on the verandah, or discussed menus with the cook. She never remembered to check the contents or to keep it locked.

The servants presumably used that money to feed their children. My brother and I used it for play. Once a week, my mother pressed a ten-paisa coin into my hand. In the school tuck shop, this would buy me two boiled sweets. Once a week, I would further supplement this allowance from her handbag, and treat myself to an iced lolly stick for twenty-five paise. Or, if I was really lucky, a one-rupee coin would buy me a bottle of Double Seven Cola, or a slim bar of Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate, wrapped in gold, and again in purple paper, and smelling of heaven. My brother Ramu, four years older, made purchases of a larger magnitude, and was considered by his friends to be a very lucky fellow.

This time my need was urgent. Sports Day was just two days away, which meant an enticing array of snack stalls, just waiting for me to supply myself with spending money from my mother’s purse. With my mother on the phone and her bag unattended, this was the chance I’d been waiting for.

Mary hid her surprise calmly. Her eyes held mine as her hand continued to explore the contents of the handbag. As I watched, she slowly pulled out two five-rupee notes from the bag. She glanced at them, and walked towards the door. Two days’ salary, gained in twenty seconds.

I called her name.

What, she said. What missy, as though I have not seen you in here a hundred times, just like this.

I tried to block her path. “Put that money back,” I said.

Move, she said.

“I’ll tell my mother,” I said.

Do that, she said, and you see what I will do. She pushed one of the notes into my hand. Here, keep this, she said. Keep quiet. If you tell your mother, Terrible Things will happen to you.

Mary tucked the other note into her saree blouse and walked away, leaving me staring at the five rupees she had put in my hand, more money than I had ever handled at one time.

My mother turned the corner just as Mary left the room. My hand slipped the five-rupee note into my pocket. My mother didn’t see Mary. She walked into the bedroom and noticed the bag lying on the bed, the clasp undone. She stared at the bag, and then stared at me.

It took me five seconds to tell my mother that I had seen Mary stealing.

It took Mary half an hour. Crying, wailing, loosening her hair, beating her chest, telling my mother that she was innocent, but if my mother had any doubts to please search her, and if after that, there were still any doubts, to please take the money from her salary, for though she was innocent, she would gladly cut her entire salary to please my mother. Why, if my mother wished, she could cut Mary’s hands off, and Mary would not mind. She was only there to serve. And all the while, her eyes never leaving me.

Half an hour to convince my mother of her innocence.

My mother was never a conscientious accountant, and couldn’t tell exactly how much was missing. And the next morning, my school shirt was stained brown by the iron, my regulation white underwear was inexplicably torn, and my school shoes were left unpolished.

I wanted to complain to my mother, but her face that morning still carried traces of the upset of the evening before. So I said nothing. I looked hurriedly for a new shirt, changed into colored underwear, and desperately rubbed a piece of chalk over my white Keds to disguise the dirt. I was late to breakfast.

I was late to school.

I believed in Jesus.

It was difficult not to, given what the teachers said. Damnation and all. And I wasn’t the only one, either. By the time I was in middle school, almost everyone I knew abandoned, for eight hours, the ganeshas and allahs and mahaveers and zoroasters that peopled our homes, to clad ourselves in a uniform designed for a much colder, straitlaced climate, and cheerfully (emblazered, en-tied) congregate in the school chapel first thing in the morning to watch a Senior Prefect step behind the lectern to chant ThisMorning’sLesson is from Proverbs, chapter thirty-one, verses ten to thirty-one, and then read out, heathen voice bell-like in the wood-paneled chapel, Who can find a virtuous woman For her price is far above rubies.

And as we learned to cross ourselves, thus, with the tips of our fingers: forehead to clavicle, left to right (no, idiot, not right to left), we were worried not by our rampant infidelness, but rather by the doubt: were we, in spite of all our efforts, really English enough?

We straightened our blazers tightened our ties and took comfort in the notion that so too did all our favorite characters—in the Gospel according to Enid Blyton.

For hers was the Power and the Glory, and all of us knew it. St. Enid, the true Messiah, who wrote of the frozen-in-time nineteen forties English childhood that we aspired to and were perpetually excluded from. We ate her alive. Swallowed her down. And the teachers in class may have droned on about the greatness of Indian culture (This Morning’s Lesson: the history of India, volume two, chapter eight), but we always knew that, given a choice, we would: study in Malory Towers and St. Clare’s, spend our holidays as part of the Famous Five, the Five Find-Outers, and the Secret Seven, and have romantic, outlandish names like Jane.

With scorched shirt tucked carefully inside my pinafore, I kept my eyes on the chapel lectern and tried to look like I was paying attention. Every now and then, like a searchlight in a prison camp, I felt Mrs. Rafter’s gaze sweep over me. After chapel, I was among those who had to stay behind to be scolded by the house captains (two points lost for coming late, one for unpolished shoes. And later, five more for wearing the wrong underwear) while the rest of the school filed out quietly. Tara tried to catch my eye meaningfully, and I smiled inquiringly back.

I didn’t know she had sent me a note.

She didn’t know I hadn’t received it.

Mrs. Rafter was Anglo-Indian, like half the teachers in the school, but she pretended to be English. By our conservative estimate, she was at least as old as the school. She dyed what was left of her gray hair brown, hid the liver spots on her face with a dusty powder several shades paler than her skin, and stained her lips with pink lipstick. She wore shapeless dresses in floral patterns and plastic Bata slippers. She ate spicy fish sandwiches for lunch and perfumed her classes with her breath. She talked of her English grandfather, forbearing to recognize that he had slept with a village woman in the hills of Kemmanagundi to produce her mother. She was supposed to teach us Home Science, or how to be good wives and mothers, but actually it was her mission in life to mold the girls under her charge into little ladies. She taught us Deportment, and labored to correct the myriad regional accents in her classes: Sn-acks, children, not snakes. Raylways, not rilevays. She made her point with a long wooden ruler. Rilevays received one stroke on the palm. A chatty vaat yaar? in casual conversation, two.