The Way Things Were (43 page)

She arrived in the middle of an ugly fight. Kitten Singh was bearing down on her husband, who she had sat down in a chair in the middle of the room, around which she circled kiteishly. ‘I’ll tell you what they’re saying. They’re saying Tunnu, the Turd . . . Yes! That is what they call you. All over town. Not the serd, not the sardar: the turd! The one that hangs about in the toilet bowl, when the potties are done, waiting for a strong hand to flush him down. You know why they call you that?’

Something like curiosity gleamed in Tunnu’s haggard face, in which the grey of the beard merged with the sallowness of the skin. It enraged Kitten, the sight of those two searching eyes, in that gnomish face.

‘Because you’re a coward. You sit there like a question mark, in that chair, even as the whole damn town laughs at you. Tunnu, the turd, got flushed out of CM1. But not to worry: he’ll show up somewhere else. Turds always do. That’s in their nature: they lurk. And sometimes, you know, darling,’ she added, with unexpected tenderness, ‘when I see you out and about, standing at the edge of the party, with your little drink, while the real men are talking and laughing – with me! – I see their point. Even though I’m your wife, I have to agree with them. You do seem a little like a turd. A mild nuisance. Ever-present, but no threat to anyone . . .’

At this point she caught sight of Parmeshwari, who stood in the doorway, in keds and a cotton salwar kurta, as yellow as the laburnum. She had pulled the thick rope of her plait over her shoulder, so that it lay like a sleeping animal on the great expanse of her breast. And – casting her eyes with feigned innocence about the room – she inspected the end of her plait for split ends.

‘Chalo!’ Kitten said, with a mixture of dread and relief. ‘It’s you, at least, for all small mercies.’

Parmeshwari possessed certain essential traits of a consummate gossip, such as feigned boredom and pretend innocence, but the quality that gave her a distinct advantage over others in her tribe was her compassion. She had a way, no matter how wretched a scene she had witnessed, nor how damning the talk she had overheard, of making you feel that whatever it was that people were saying about you, it was no worse than what they were saying about each other. In this, she seemed really to be of a piece with the spirit of gossip in Delhi: it was a blood sport, but it was nothing personal.

In the dark, with her face pressed against a bed sheet, in which she could detect the stale jasmine of previous massages, Kitten heard her say, ‘So, it’s nothing. You should see what I do to my husband. You have to do it. It’s for their own benefit, no? Am I saying anything wrong, Kitty Madam? You tell me.’

Kitten, hardly consoled that her domestic life resembled Parmeshwari’s, mumbled something incomprehensible. Parmeshwari, driving her thumb up her calf, knew she had struck the wrong note.

‘I was at Chamunda madam’s the other day,’ she ventured, ‘and – my God! – you should have seen the kerfuffle there. That Ismail – Mohammadan, what else? – he has a mouth like a sewer. Bhenchodh, machodh, bhonsadi ka, every other word out of his mouth, such a fat insult, I tell you! And he’s taken against the little boy, you know: Rani saab’s little son, Bhaiya. Constantly humiliating him. “Oye, little Raja,” – he does with his hands like this, like this,’ she made a Venus flytrap of a flower with her fingers, and Kitten craned her neck to look, “where are the crown jewels?” And, phataak, he’ll grab the little boy’s balls in front of all the servants and guests. Can you imagine – old family servants, seeing their future raja humiliated in this way? And by a Mohammadan, at that? I can’t bear to look. I say: build the temple in Ayodhya, and send them all to Pakistan! The lot of them . . .’

‘Who?’ Kitten said, raising her head.

‘Mohammadans. Who else?’

‘Oh,’ Kitten said, and put her head down, a little disappointed that Parmeshwari had given the gossip this edge. Then, with that weariness with which society people respond to the mention of politics and art in their midst, never finding in themselves the courage to say,
We’d rather just talk about ourselves
, Kitten said, ‘None of that talk here, Parmeshwari. This is a secular household. And we, ourselves, you know, are minorities.’

‘Me too, I’m
sacular
,’ Parmeshwari flared up. ‘We’ve faced discrimination too. Injustice. What they call zulm. Why do you think I felt so much sympathy with Uma memsaab,’ she said, ‘when she threw her man out the other day – you know, that businessman fellow from Bombay, who everyone’s running after – for saying wrong things about Sikhs? I remember 1984! Tssss! With my own eyes, I saw one man set alight. The smell of rubber! Hey Ram! A burning tyre . . .’

Kitten Singh rose up like a yogic cobra, her back glistening in the dark, her red nails lightly puncturing the cotton of the bed sheet. She had had just enough of people that day burying important bits of information in trivialities. ‘
Uma memsaab
, for your kind information, Parmeshwari, does not have a man. Her man is gone. You must have made a mistake. Or maybe you mean someone else, her sister perhaps?’

A look passed between them. There was, for a moment, something hard and defiant in Parmeshwari’s eyes. Then – as if glimpsing weakness in her adversary’s face and deeming the fight not worth the fighting – the masseuse unexpectedly withdrew the challenge from her eyes. And, more than when she had been adamant, it was in the softer light of this shrinking gaze, of mercy thrown her way like a one-rupee coin, that Kitten wilted, and knew the terrible information the maalishwali had let slip to be the incontestable truth. She had lost much more than a cottage to the Fatehkotia sisters.

For a while the massage continued as before, Kitten silent, Parmeshwari, magnanimous in victory. They spoke of other things. ‘Ms Gayatri, one woman, who no like talking during massage.’

‘Well, for some people,’ Kitten said waspishly, ‘the massage is enough. And besides she must think of her books.’

‘Yes. Smart woman. Always thinking. “Back very bad from writing,” she say me,’ Parmeshwari said, driving her fingers into a hard and humpish area on Kitten’s back. They alternated between Hindi and English. The air in the darkened room was heavy. An inch of blaze pressing against the margin of the curtains. It made Parmeshwari uneasy; she was, at the end of the day, a service provider; the gossip was for entertainment, it was not meant to spoil the air of a massage.

She tried some old tricks. ‘Uma madam, she say Chamunda madam, she no do exercise. She have too much cellulite.’

‘So?’ came the response.

‘Her boobs sag.’

Silence.

She tried a bolder line. ‘But poor Isha madam. Feeling very bad for her . . .’

‘I know, I know, Parmeshwari, her husband beats her. The whole town knows. So? At least she has a husband man enough to beat her.’

A sad stung silence prevailed. Parmeshwari, as if wishing to begin on a clean slate, asked Kitten to turn over, and set to work on the front of her legs. From that place of servility, she muttered, with the false modesty of an antiques dealer saving his best pieces for last, ‘But she should not have thought of suiciding. That was too bad.’

In the quiet tension the darkness now acquired, Parmeshwari sensed that all perhaps was not lost. In between running her thumbs painfully along the tendon that girded Kitten’s tibia, she glanced up at her from time to time, and saw her face twitch with interest. She seemed to be processing this new bit of information. But save for the silence and the twitching, she made no other response. Then, just as Parmeshwari, now kneading her kneecaps, had begun to fear that she had supplied yet another bit of stale gossip, Kitten’s face shot up in the dark. Her eyes were wide open; there was tension about the mouth.

‘She tried to kill herself? I didn’t know that.’

Parmeshwari breathed relief. Things were beginning to turn around.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘her servants showed me the empty packets of the pills. Sobrium. Two dozen she must have taken.’

‘They didn’t work presumably,’ Kitten said with something like sadness in her voice. ‘I mean, we would have heard.’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean she survived.’

‘Oh, yes! I mean: yes,’ Parmeshwari said, apologetically. ‘The servants said there was no effect at all. She just slept a little later than usual, and was very hungry the next day.’

‘Those Fatehkotia sisters are indestructible,’ Kitten said with distaste.

And now, consoled by this new bit of information, and no longer feeling Parmeshwari rub her defeat in her face, Kitten found herself listening, without discomfort, to the story of the new man in Uma’s life, and how one evening, just a few days before, she had thrown him out of her house.

*

The episode in question had occurred some weeks after Uma’s conversation with Priti. It was an unseasonably hot April. The laburnum on Amrita Shergil Marg was already in flower. Convoys of cars laden with food and supplies had begun to leave for Kashmir. A beautiful haunting heat prevailed over the city, driving people into their houses in the day, stirring up sombre dust storms of green and purple light in the evening, which, once they had passed, would bring the temperature down enough for it to be possible to eat outside. Some days before, an exterminating wind had begun to blow and the mosquitoes, which earlier would have made dinner in the garden impossible, were all dead.

Her children were not with her that night. Skanda was at her sister’s; Rudrani, on the farm, with her parents.

The pleasure of being alone still felt new. Of driving home after aerobics at the Taj Palace; of a bath in a darkened bathroom, in whose mirror, she saw, as she dried herself, her bedroom framed in a slim column of lamplight. On an easy chair in the looming shadows of a large potted plant, there lay the bound proof of the new Rushdie – come to her via Gayatri via Zubin Mann. A blue book, with a red devil on the cover; the same devil that had, only a few months before, due in part to the foolishness of the Rajiv Gandhi government, driven the writer into hiding. The book was banned in India and this made the thrill of the proof all the greater. The book, the music, the exercise, the house to herself – they were all like little symbols of her autonomy, of a freedom that had come accidentally to her, and awakened in her an interior life whose secret pleasures were akin – if not greater, for they flowed directly from her – to those we feel at the outset of a love affair. In fact, truth be told, she felt this private thrill far more intensely for her newfound interiority, for the joy of being her own woman, than for the man who was coming to dinner that night.

Even as she went around helping Narindar lay a white lace tablecloth made by the nuns of the Presentation Convent over a wrought iron table, and lighting fanooses, it was with that feeling of self-possession that comes over us when, under the guise of doing things for other people, we, in fact, do things for ourselves.

Maniraja – his influence always at its greatest in hotels – had made a special request of the delicatessen at the Raj.

‘I’m not happy till I see blood, darling,’ he said, enjoying the effect of this remark on the young woman across the counter.

‘Of course, Mr Maniraja,’ she said, blushing at the over-familiarity. ‘Rare? Medium-rare? Well-done?’

‘Pink as your cheeks, sweetheart. But hurry, please. I’m late for a dinner.’

The girl laughed, reddening further. Then just as she was about to disappear into the kitchen, a sharp snap of fingers summoned her back. It was an old trick of Maniraja’s: to hold his fingers up like a pistol in the air, and snap them loud enough for someone halfway across a large room to hear. The girl turned around with a look of puzzlement on her face. Maniraja laughed.

‘Like this,’ he said, repeating the gesture.

The girl tittered. ‘So loud,’ she said.

‘What’s your name, darling?’

‘Pooja.’

‘Pooja what?’

‘Paranjpe.’

‘Oh, very good!’ Maniraja said, adding with pride. ‘My mother was herself a Brahmin. A Thanjavur Brahmin.’

The girl gave a smile of embarrassment; the mild embarrassment of someone obliged to refuse entry to another on the basis of a technicality, for she knew – no less than Maniraja – that this was a club far more concerned with punishing transgressors and preserving purity than offering concessions to those with minor quantities of Brahmin blood, Thanjavur or not.

A few minutes later the girl returned with a small foil container.

‘Open it,’ Maniraja said. The girl scrunched her face, and shook her head violently, handing the container over to Maniraja, as if it were a bomb. Maniraja laughed uproariously. Then, he carefully unfolded the foil of the box, removed the lid, and inspected the morsels of steaming beef swimming about in their blood and juices. He took one in his manicured fingers, and making direct eye contact with the girl, put it in his mouth. She gasped with shock and covered her mouth with her hand, which made Maniraja laugh so much that a thin stream of glistening liquid ran out of the corner of his lips.

‘I like my tenderloin,’ he said, his mouth full of meat and juice and laughter. ‘Like all good Hindus, I, too, love the holy cow.’ The girl instinctively handed him a napkin. Maniraja showed her his cheek; and she, now bursting with nerves, flashed a look left and right, before quickly wiping the liquid from his face. Then, as he put the lid back on the box, and folded in the silver edges, he fastened his gaze on her. And, with eyes steady and meaning, he told her to write her extension number on the napkin she had used to wipe his face.

‘What time does your shift run till?’ he said.

‘Till 1 a.m., sir,’ she said.

‘Good. I should be back before then.’

‘Will you have some of your . . . ?’ Uma said. In the candlelight, it was hard to see what it was. ‘Beef, is it?’

‘No, no. No, thank you. I didn’t know . . .’

‘ . . . if there’d be any dinner?’ she said and laughed.

Maniraja was about to reply seriously, then saw she was joking. A strange joke, strange in its tone. He looked with dismay about the garden.

She had not noticed the significance of the beef. She had simply accepted it, as one might a bottle of wine or some flowers, and served it along with the rest of the food. It sat there now, in its little foil box, among the larger bowls of dal and vegetables and meat. And in that form, lost among the rest of the food, the effect was lost too. It looked absurd. Maniraja, thinking back to his success with Pooja less than an hour ago, eyed it with displeasure.