Mumbai Noir (24 page)

Back in the bathroom, she sat on the toilet seat smoking her second cigarette, and absentmindedly called his number.

The first line of the Gayatri Mantra screeched into her ear before she heard his voice.

“Hello?”

“So, what are you doing, Mr. Mitesh?” she asked. Playfully.

Hopefully.

Mitesh reminded her that it was budget day and a busy time for Paypal, his subbroking office. It was a brief conversation. She put the phone down, popped a minty Kushal Kanthil into her mouth, and went outside into the dining room. She stood at the window. The sounds of an angry street swam up through the dazzling summer heat. Car horns jolted with the chants that emanated from the Jain temple on the street corner. A reverse horn plaintively belted out the
Titanic
theme song. Two people were fighting, perhaps over a parking space, or the price of onions, or maybe it was just the way they spoke.

Anita sat on her dining table sipping tea out of a melamine mug. She scratched at a dried-up patch of yellow daal on the clear plastic table cover and contemplated the day that loomed in front of her. She had to go to Dr. Jain, who kept changing her dosage, taking her on a merry-go-round of emotions which she didn’t mind. It had become her new reality. She’d long forgotten what it was like to feel normal. She also had to pick up two new muslin dhotis for Mitesh. He wore them every morning to the temple and they grew thin quickly, probably because the cursed maid spent all her time washing them too hard. Taru needed a new box of HB Natraj pencils. Anita also had to interview the new maharaj. She felt overwhelmed and weakened by her task list.

A few minutes later, she picked up the telephone handset and dialed her husband’s number again.

“Actually …” She paused, clutching the phone tightly. “Actually, I just wanted to tell you to bring home some money.” She waited, desperate, wanting him to continue the conversation. But obviously that was not to be. The stocks must have been flickering like little green aliens in front of him.
Soma Cement. Alpine Industries.
He was in another world. So she put the phone down after a weak, “Don’t forget.”

Those were the conversations she now thrived on— money and food and which social event they had to attend that weekend. They were distant dialogues, but they gave her immense comfort because they took her away from the diabolical dramas that banged around all day in her head during the times between the pills. She thrived on the quotidian. Her daughter’s schedule of school and classes, her husband’s routine of work and home. The food that had to be ordered, bargaining with the vegetable vendor, visiting the family jeweler to break and remake the same necklaces, bangles, rings. Once a week, they ate out. She was grateful that he no longer nudged her in the middle of the night, because she would slip into a deep sleep after her last pill. It had been three years since they had touched each other.

Some time back, she had popped into his office in Bhuleshwar, after stopping by Pannalal Jewelers on the next street, where she’d dropped off a kundan necklace to get its clasp repaired. When she pushed open the tinted glass door that had
Paypal Finance
painted in red letters, she was surprised to see that the old man who sat at the front desk had been replaced by a young girl. The girl had curly hair with blond highlights and a big pink mouth. The girl looked at her strangely, as if she were an imposter, not the proprietor’s wife. Mitesh had come out of his cabin and seemed surprised to see Anita. He turned to the girl and asked her to bring madam a cup of tea, just a little tenderly, she thought.

That voice stayed on in her head and kept coming back, in startling ways, while she bathed, when she sifted through apples, looking for the nonbruised ones, when she walked on the treadmill. Sometimes she woke up to it. She kept nursing that moment, allowing it to enter her, letting it change volume levels. Sometimes that simple sentence—
bring madam a cup of tea
—was the only voice she heard for hours. Like now, as she sat at the dining table, her elbows sticking to the clear plastic sheet.

She called Mitesh. This time, she just heard his voice and hung up. He called back.

“No, no, nothing. I pressed redial by mistake,” she said, gathering and regathering the little dried-up flakes of yellow daal in hurried finger movements.

A pungent lemony antiseptic smell pervaded the room. Rajkiran was swabbing the floor on the other side. When he reached the dining table, she lifted her legs onto the chair, folding her gown over them, so that he could get on with his cleaning. She watched him, moving in rhythmic movements next to her, and felt fearful again.
Bring madam a cup of tea.
She shut her eyes and the feeling went away. Maybe the three of them could go and have veg sushi at Cream Centre; it had been awhile since they had taken Tarini out. They could leave at seven after she returned from her abacus class. Anita was about to pick up the phone again, then decided against it.

The bell rang. When Suman opened the door, a light automatically went on and illuminated a photograph in the hallway. It was laminated, frameless, and enormous, covering almost half the wall. In the picture, they looked like any other happy family—a man, a woman, and a little girl, smiling on a beach, frothy ocean at their feet, with a balloon seller walking away from them. There were no dead bloated fish; no maimed characters smelling of urine. There was no other woman, no scent of a stranger in the medley of sweat and perfume and aftershave and stale cigarettes. The print ensured that the memory museum meant for public viewing would be filled with happy Kodak moments. Maybe loss showed up in the negative, or in dreams, or in an act of violence that would be passed on like a family heirloom.

That was the time the three of them had gone to Kovalam, to a timeshare beach resort. Mitesh had complained that there were not enough vegetarian dishes on the menu and he’d hated the smell of fish that lingered like a bad conversation and followed them everywhere, even into their room. They had not fought, but he had been on the phone most of the time. The market never sleeps.

It was the dhobi at the door. Suman walked in, hunched, with a pile of freshly ironed clothes. Anita then remembered that she had to interview the new maharaj that afternoon. Her sister-in-law had promised to send a candidate who was known for his exquisite undhiyo. Perhaps she could do a trial meal with him, but only if he was willing. She knew the breed; they could be quite difficult.

A week back, when Anita was out shopping, her household had turned upside down. She heard the story later from Suman, dramatized in her high-pitched voice. The maharaj was in the middle of cutting long yellow ribbons of khandvi and he couldn’t find the coriander. He accused Suman of hiding it and started rummaging around in the refrigerator. That was when he made the discovery.

Deep inside the vegetable drawer, hidden under a sheaf of spinach, there lay a candy-striped paper box that said,
Pom Pom Wafers.
The Maharaj wondered what it was doing there, so he opened it. Inside, there sat a solitary, oval, faintly cracked egg. He held it for a split second, with a look of horror on his face, and then dropped it as if it were a ticking bomb. He stared at the yolk spreading slowly across the white Granamite tiled floor, then gathered up his dhoti and ran out of the kitchen, cursing the bhabhi loudly in his native language, cursing her parents—Suman repeated this detail twice over—and left the house.

Later that evening, Anita’s mother-in-law came upstairs and confronted her about the egg, her green-brown eyes blazing, her two-carat solitaires sparkling furiously.

“Do you know we could be thrown out of the building? The only reason no one has said anything is because Papa is so close to the builders and they have their accounts with Mitesh.”

“Mummy …” Anita was in tears, shaking. She could hear them. The mean voices started moving and knocking about in her head. She contained herself and told her mother-inlaw what Dr. Jain had said. Little Tarini was not meeting the growth charts and she had to supplement her diet with something more substantial. He was the one who suggested eggs, she pleaded, only one a week.

Her mother-in-law’s voice softened: “At least ask my permission next time you want to do something like this. We could have thought of something that would not go against anyone’s feelings, na?”

Anita did not look up. She heard the word
feelings
and drew in. When she did look up, she saw Suman lurking behind the kitchen door, watching the scene.

She took an extra pill that day. She did not dare bring up the incident with Mitesh. All she told him was that the maharaj had left and her husband smiled and said, “Well, you didn’t like him much anyway, no? But he was a good cook. Ask Parul-behn to help you find a new one.”

It was true. Anita was not entirely unhappy that the maharaj was gone. She had never liked this man who tyrannized her kitchen with his overbearing disgruntled manner. She abhorred his rasping voice and the little gold studs in his ears. She hated the way she could see his striped shorts under his white kurta and dhoti. She used to find him muttering to himself while kneading dough, a strange smile on his sunburned face. He terrorized her. Once, he dared to sneak up to the bedroom door and saw her holding an unlit cigarette. He stared at her as if he had caught her naked and she spent the rest of the day hiding in her bedroom. She was convinced he would tell her mother-in-law or discuss it with the other cooks when they gathered in the evening at the street corner. She had meant to talk to Mitesh about the evil maharaj, but by the time he came home, she would slowly be entering her pink cave. She would only remember again in the morning when the maharaj asked her to order the food for the day, staring at her breasts while she gave her instructions: chana daal, doodhi, thepla, and your chopped-up penis, you son of a bitch. After a while, she let him decide what to make so that they didn’t have to interact.

The phone rang. Anita’s sister-in-law Parul said that the new maharaj could only come the next day. Anita felt despondent and desperately wanted to call her mother. But her mother was dead. Anita put on her black tights and a new white kurti with silver crochet at the end of the sleeves. She slipped on a diamond bangle. She then picked a pair of wedge heels and walked down the stairs. She hated the lift; its doors shut with a metallic clang, leaving her in a digital conundrum as it heaved up and down. She was always afraid that she would get trapped inside and the oxygen would run out.

In the building foyer, she ran into her neighbor Arti, and they hugged each other. They occasionally met for tea. Arti was always busy, going here and there with her Amway products, peddling enormous jars of vitamins, detergent, and protein supplements. She hardly ever had the time to sit and listen to Anita’s nonstories.

“So I heard about your maharaj,” Arti said with a smile. “And my maharaj told me that after he left your home, he was caught urinating on the road next to the governor’s bungalow. He got into a fight with the police constable who caught him and spent a night in the Malabar Hill station lock-up. He has told everyone that it was all because of the egg that you brought into the house. He said you were cursed. What to say! These people will never change.”

“I always knew he was trouble. I’m happy he has gone,” said Anita. “The only problem is that we have to go downstairs and eat dinner with the monster these days.”

They both laughed and walked out of the building together.

“See you at Gold’s Gym tomorrow,” Anita said.

“If I’m back in time, I’ll come in the evening for tea. I want to see that new crystal Swarovski Ganesh you bought at the exhibition,” Arti said. “And I’ll bring you a fresh stock of hand sanitizer.” She waved and walked off with her big bag slung on her shoulder.

Anita got into a taxi and directed it to Dr. Jain’s clinic on the other side of Napean Sea Road, in a building called Doctor Center. It had been three years since she started going to him, after someone in their Lion’s Club recommended him for migraines. He had diagnosed her with something that she didn’t understand. And she had blindly started taking the pills he prescribed, never paying attention to what they were, never discussing them with anyone else. All she knew was that they made her feel better. Sometimes they slowed her down. Or they hyperaccentuated what was happening around her, making her feel like she was a part of one of the reality television shows she loved to watch, filled with drama and intrigue and dangerous people. They took her away from herself. They worked.

Dr. Jain’s clinic was on the first floor, a small room with fake wood paneling that ran all around. She stared at the wood; a faint brown powder had begun to trickle down from it. It was exactly like the powder that had been forming a regular trail under the wood panel that ran the length of her living room, swept off every day by Rajkiran, only to return again and again. She was overwhelmed by the thought of termites taking over her entire flat, leaving only a sea of fine powder. She had spoken to the Tirupati Towers manager about it, but the society did not permit pest control treatment because it went against the community’s religious beliefs.
We do not kill living things,
she was told. She tried to argue with the manager, saying that the entire building could eventually collapse, but he called her a blasphemer and suggested that she stay out of men’s business. What would he do if he found out that she had been secretly bringing eggs into their pristine society with its big marble statue-cum-fountain of Krishna in the foyer?

She was back home with a new vial of pills, staring at the wood powder for a long time, she didn’t even know how long.

She had already forgotten about the dhotis and the pencils.

The bell rang and the photograph in the hallway lit up.

“Mummy has sent the food, bhabhi,” said Suman, bringing three hot plastic cases and a tiffin to the dining table.

Ever since the cook had left, her mother-in-law had been sending food upstairs. One daal, two vegetables, and a dozen thin rotis slathered with ghee to keep them soft and smooth. Suman boiled rice, which was easy enough. At dinnertime, they went down to the floor below and ate with Mitesh’s parents. The two men would sit on one side of the room and analyze the market’s movements. Mitesh’s mother would come out of her evening meditation and then try and coax her granddaughter to start attending Saturday-morning pathshala lessons at the temple. Anita would try and focus on Tarini’s homework: Contour maps. English spelling. Marathi.