Don't Let Him Know (31 page)

‘Believe me, honey, it was anything but exotic,’ replied BLD, laughing uproariously.

Soon they were swapping stories as if they were high-school girlfriends. Once Romola looked nervously at her watch. ‘Oh don’t you worry,’ said BLD. ‘I’ll take you home. I have a car. And your son must be asleep anyway. What will you do at Best Western? Buy non-stick cookware from late-night cable television?’

BLD wanted to move to New York or San Francisco but didn’t know how she could afford it. ‘Have you been to those Indian stores in Fremont?’ she asked eagerly. ‘I went there once with my mother. Oh my. They smelled divine.’

‘Yes,’ said Romola eagerly. ‘You must come. We’ll go shopping. And then we can go rent a Bollywood film.’

‘I want to practise a dance number. You must teach me.’

‘Oh,’ laughed Romola. ‘I don’t know all those jhin-chak cabaret dances. What kind of a woman do you think I am?’

‘I don’t know,’ BLD raised an eyebrow. ‘What kind of a woman are you, Romola?’

Romola blushed again and laughed nervously. She thought that maybe they could rent that old seventies film,
Jewel Thief
. She’d always liked the vamp in it, the way she flashed thigh and cleavage, the shiny golden dress that made her breasts point out like twin propellers. She imagined them rewinding and playing the songs over and over again, matching hip-shake for hip-shake. She could just see BLD sashaying in between the convertible sofa-cum-bed and the matching loveseat wearing white kid gloves and fluttering Amit’s
Economist
magazine in front of her like a fan.

BLD asked her if she wanted a cigarette.

‘Oh, I don’t smoke,’ said Romola. ‘Well I used to sometimes at a party but that was years ago,’ she lied.

‘It’s a terrible habit, but have a puff – all the Hindi film vamps do. Anyway, they won’t allow smoking in here soon. So it’s our last chance to be real vamps.’

As BLD lit up her cigarette using her Betty Boop lighter, Romola said, ‘Do you know, this is the best time I’ve ever had in Carbondale?’

‘Really?’ said BLD. ‘What is your story? I’ve just been prattling on about myself. Tell me about you, your husband and everything else.’

So Romola told her about landing in America, the apartment on Holly Street, about the shock of finding out that Avinash had had a male lover.

‘You don’t say. And then what happened?’ BLD’s eyes were wide.

‘Nothing. I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t know what to do, where to go. I just wanted to go home.’

‘Did you ever tell him you knew?’

‘I couldn’t,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t know what to say. I hoped it was just something in the past. I just said I didn’t want to raise a child here. He was a very decent man, you know. I never told anyone. Especially not my son. You are the first person I have ever talked to about it. It must be the gin.’

‘But what about the sex?’ BLD leaned forward. ‘What was that like? Could he do it properly?’

Romola burst out laughing. ‘What did I know about properly? We were not reading
Cosmopolitan
-sholitan then.’

‘Men,’ BLD shook her head and blew out a smoke ring. ‘Men are bastards. Why do you think I got tired of being one?’ She threw her head back and cackled. Romola stared at her for a second and then joined in.

‘Wait here,’ said BLD suddenly. ‘I have an idea.’ She slid down from the stool and disappeared behind the bar with her handbag. Romola looked at her watch. It was almost one. She shrugged. It was too late now anyway. She just hoped they didn’t lock the front door at the motel.

She noticed the music around her had died down. A voice announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, a special impromptu treat for us tonight. The one and only Lady Bang la Dish.’ A spotlight hovered uncertainly on the bare wooden stage. A hand pushed aside the tatty red velvet curtains, a sinuous leg arched itself around the drapes and then Lady Bang la Dish herself was onstage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone in between, you are here on a very special night,’ she crooned into the mike, her voice extra-sultry. ‘We are going to make history at Wonderland. Our first-ever Bollywood number. For my new friend Romola, all the way from Calcutta.’ She winked.

Romola’s mouth fell open.

‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo’ blasted through the club suddenly sweeping aside the Top 20 pop music from minutes ago. Everyone around her seemed startled for a moment but as BLD thrust her bosom out and shook her hips, they started hooting and hollering. Romola started laughing like she had not laughed in years. She had the sensation of thousands of coloured feathers cascading down from the ceiling, an endlessly exploding piñata. She could see herself running through the feather storm, her face raised up, drowning in the softness of the falling feathers. When BLD stepped down from the stage and came towards her, hand outstretched, Romola laughed and protested, but only mildly. ‘Oh no, no, I don’t know how to do all this.’ By now everyone was cheering and clapping along and Romola let BLD pull her off the barstool and drag her on to the stage.

They bumped hips and danced around the stage, Romola holding her sari out in front of her, trying to match her steps to a song she had once listened to on a little cassette recorder –
The Golden Hits of Asha Bhosle – Vol. 1
.

‘
Mera naam chin chin choo, chin chin choo
,’ trilled the sexy Asha Bhosle over the sound system. ‘Chin chin choo’ repeated BLD, laughing seductively. Romola giggled too, trying to do the hip flourishes she remembered from the old film. BLD fished out her sunglasses from somewhere and stuck them on Romola. Feeling impossibly glamorous, though she could see almost nothing, Romola sang along ‘
Chin chin choo, baba chin chin choo
’. She was dimly aware that the whole bar had joined in, a chorus of men going ‘
Chin chin choo
’, the wings of a vampy song from 1958 lifting them all up.

When the number ended, the place erupted in thundering applause. Romola, her heart pounding like a steam engine, clung on to BLD for support. BLD reached over and kissed her on the cheek leaving a perfect wine-red imprint of her lips. ‘Thank goodness I was carrying my Bollywood mix with me. You are the best, Romola,’ she laughed. ‘We could become partners. An act. What do you say?’

‘And we’ll get some new music,’ said Romola breathlessly. ‘I’ll find the latest hits for you. Maybe we can make you a new outfit. I could cut up my wedding sari.’ June had once asked if she would mind if she took one of Romola’s heavy silk saris and made a skirt. Romola had said she would most certainly mind. But she quickly put that thought out of her head.

‘Last call!’ shouted the bartender sending another gin and tonic over their way.

‘Oh, too much,’ laughed Romola taking a big gulp.

‘Chin chin,’ said BLD touching her glass to Romola’s and collapsing into laughter at her own joke.

When they eventually staggered out, they were still giggling as they made their way towards BLD’s battered burgundy Oldsmobile. ‘Good night darling,’ said a man in a leather jacket to BLD. ‘You were just fabulous. Namaste,’ he told Romola. She smiled and waved her hands airily as if she danced to cabaret numbers in gay bars all the time.

‘Let’s get you home before they send out a search party,’ said BLD unlocking the car door for her. The car felt like a ship. BLD swept aside a jumble of CDs and tissues and Romola slid into the front seat. BLD lit a cigarette, stuck in her Hindi film CD and cranked up the volume. They drove through the quiet streets lined with the names of American trees while Lata Mangeshkar’s nightingale voice, achingly perfect, filled the night around them.

A little Bengali poem she’d learned as a child buzzed in Romola’s head. She would sing it for Amit when he was a baby, strapping him on to her knees and bouncing him up and down.

‘
Ghugu shoi, khoka koi, ghughu shoi, khoka koi.
’

But she could not remember the next line. That, suddenly, became very important to her. She wondered if BLD’s mother had ever sung that to her. She glanced over at BLD who winked at her and squeezed her hand.

When they finally pulled up to the motel, its sign still resolutely on as if it was a lighthouse guiding her to shore, BLD hugged Romola and slipped a piece of paper into her hand.

‘It has my email and phone. I always keep one handy. You never know if you’ll meet Mr Right at the bar, though all I get are Mr Right Nows,’ she chuckled. ‘But don’t disappear on me, darling. You are the bomb, Romola. Come back anytime and we’ll have a proper Bollywood girls’ night on the town.’

Romola hugged her back. She smelled of stale perfume and gin. Romola wondered what it would be like if BLD lived in California. She imagined waking up in the morning and calling her after Amit and June left for work and Neel had gone to school. She would pull up in that burgundy car, and they would go to thrift stores and the mall and for picnics in the park all the while listening to old film songs.

‘You take care,’ she told BLD as she had heard the Americans say and then sashayed to the door. When she turned around to wave goodbye BLD blew her a kiss.

As soon as Romola walked into the motel she realized she was in trouble. The receptionist who had seemed half asleep when she had left was now wide awake.

Amit was sitting in the lobby talking agitatedly to a police officer. For a moment as she looked at him, his anxious profile, she thought it was Avinash – the same hairline, the furrowed brow, the glasses.

‘Ma,’ Amit cried springing up from the sofa where he had been sitting. ‘What’s going on? Where have you been?’

‘Oh, I’ll explain later,’ Romola said wearily. ‘I got a little lost but this kind person helped me get back. I didn’t want you to worry. I am so sorry.’

Amit was still wearing the sweatpants he had gone to sleep in. His face was taut with stress. ‘Ma, are you crazy? I’ve been beside myself,’ Amit said. ‘Neel woke up as well. June is upstairs trying to get him to sleep again. He keeps asking for you. How could you disappear just like that in the middle of the night? Didn’t you even think?’

Amit, it turned out, had woken up, found his mother missing, panicked and called the police. The Carbondale police were on the lookout for an elderly Indian woman in a sari. Romola had the hardest time explaining that she had not been kidnapped.

‘But where did you go?’ Amit asked, agitated, over and over again as if it was a piece of a jigsaw that just would not fit. Romola tried to describe her evening but the story got hopelessly tangled in its telling. She led them outside as if to retrace her path home but the Oldsmobile and BLD were long gone.

‘No, no officer,’ she said loudly as if explaining something to a particularly dull child. ‘Miss la Dish is a good friend. She brought me home just fine so no one needs to worry.’

‘Miss Ladish, huh?’ said the officer. ‘Like a radish, huh? Do you even know this person’s name?’

She could tell that the officer, a young man in his twenties, was not buying any of her story.

Romola began to laugh.

‘Excuse me, ma’am?’ said the officer while June, who had come downstairs by then, tried to shush her.

‘Oh, I just realized why she calls herself Bang la Dish,’ Romola snorted. ‘Bangladesh. I get it!’

Amit stared at her.

‘She’s half-Bengali,’ said Romola as if that explained everything. Amit said nothing but looked at her as if she was some stranger who had wandered in from the road and into their family.

‘I’m very sorry, officer,’ June said politely. ‘Thank you so much for all your help. I guess everything is okay now. We really do apologize for the trouble. My mother-in-law got a little confused. After all it’s a strange town, you know. She moved to the US recently from India.’

‘But I lived here before any of you were born,’ Romola said indignantly but no one paid her any attention.

It was past 2.30 in the morning when everything was finally sorted out and the policeman left.

‘You smell of cigarettes,’ scolded Amit. ‘Have you been drinking? Oh God, Ma, if you want a drink, just tell me. You don’t have to sneak off to strange bars.’

‘Do you remember that rhyme “Ghugu shoi” I would sing to you?’ Romola asked.

Amit stood there looking stunned.

‘Let’s just get your mother to bed,’ said June hurriedly.

Romola nodded meekly, knowing there was nothing more to say. She glanced outside. For a moment she thought BLD was still standing there, her satiny dress glimmering in the light of a street lamp. Then she realized she was only imagining it. As Romola walked upstairs she wondered whether she’d have a hangover the next day.

‘God knows what kind of people you could meet there. You could have been robbed,’ Amit muttered. ‘What were you thinking? Are you crazy? I don’t even know what to tell Neel.’

Nothing, thought Romola. Tell him nothing. It will be our secret. In a family of secrets, what was one more? But she said nothing. Her mind was far away.
There was so much she needed to learn. She was already composing a letter to BLD in her head. Not a real letter, of course, she would have to send an email. She would have to finally sit down and learn how to do that. At least Amit would be pleased about that, she thought.