The Red Carpet (13 page)

Her father checked his bank account, left the five hundred rupees in it untouched, and took his wife and daughter to see the new skyscraper on Mahatma Gandhi Road.

When she received the office memo about the Tuesday dinner program, Sita panicked at first, and toyed with the idea of telephoning Christine in America and asking her what she should do. But she didn’t. She already knew what her friend’s advice would be.

“Just say no,” Christine would say, pulling an appropriate Americanism out of the air. “Tell them to take a walk. Put your foot down. Stand up for yourself.”

But these things were beyond Sita.

She knew, too, that it wasn’t something she could discuss with her mother, before or after the event. “How could you?” her mother would ask, shocked, sorrowed; and Sita would have to admit: with great difficulty. Her mother would say no more about it, at least not during the day. Instead it would manifest itself in the middle of the night, which was when Sita’s mother usually battled with the ghosts of her mind, waking up, ghoul-like, tormented, weeping into her pillow, a low keening sound that, through the years, had pulled Sita from her own bed to sit by her mother’s side, to hold her hand and pat her back until the sobs died down. Her mother’s cheerful daytime energy never reflected the anguish of the preceding night, but she told Sita, frequently and tenderly: Oh, you are a good daughter. What would my life be without you?

Christine would have said that Sita’s mother had never learned to let go.

Christine, who was the very opposite of Sita’s mother, and clung to her work with a fierce determination, while sliding easily in and out of human relationships.

Their first contact had been through e-mail. Forwarded to her by her boss, it was from an American company looking for investment opportunities in India. It was brisk and businesslike, and signed, at the bottom, Best regards, Christine Miller, Associate Vice President. “Look into it,” her boss said, and so Sita dutifully wrote back, enclosing a list of deals that her firm had concluded in recent times, signing her letter, Yours sincerely, Sita Ranganathan, Manager. In the second e-mail, Christine addressed her breezily: Dear Sita, she said, immediately on first-name terms. And, surprised by her own insouciance, Sita wrote back: Dear Christine.

They met, finally, two months and many e-mails later. Christine arrived for a visit to Bangalore, to see for herself if any of the investment ideas identified by Sita’s firm were satisfactory. Sita dressed herself carefully that day, in a silk saree, her wavy hair carefully oiled and braided and lying thick and heavy along her spine. She waited eagerly in the office lobby for the car to arrive, and almost quailed when she saw the woman in the dark blue suit emerge. Christine stood eight inches taller than Sita, teutonic, pale, with short blond hair, blue eyes, and a loud, accented voice that made people turn around and stare. “Hi!” she said. “Sita? Great to finally meet you!” Sita smiled tentatively, and was delighted, so relieved, to see Christine smile eagerly back.

In the office, Ramu sized Christine up from a distance and said: “
Arrey,
bedding a woman that size would be like sleeping with a gorilla.” During the meeting that followed, however, she noticed that he was very courteous, chatting easily with Christine about places in America he’d visited on holiday and, later, the merits of her company’s proposed investments.

It was a fact, Sita knew, that this project was never meant to develop into anything quite so big. It was why, Sita knew, she was given the task in the first place. It was supposed to be small, leading nowhere, and when it grew, no one, least of all her boss, knew how to get Sita off the project. But then, as days went by, as Christine freely praised Sita’s work in e-mails that were forwarded through the office, her boss began to look at her differently. He leaned forward now when she opened her mouth. Finally, as a vote of confidence, he suggested: So, Sita, why don’t you go to America and meet the team there? Go see their factories. Give me a report.

Everyone else in the office stared, and Ramu lounged across her desk later that day, chatting lightly of this and that, as though she were somebody else.

The following weekend, Sita went out and bought her new car, the biggest extravagance of her whole life.

In the Palace Towers restaurant on Tuesday night, her boss ordered mozzarella sticks and onion rings as snacks. Sita remembered the onion rings from her trip to America, but the mozzarella sticks were new to her. She watched the others help themselves to the fried cheese and accompanying sauce, and copied them.

The restaurant became crowded, with fashionably dressed people filling the other tables. Her boss, and Ramu, and a couple of others at her table, seemed to know some of the other guests, but Sita recognized no one.

“Hi, Ramu,” a woman waved from across the room. He looked around and grinned; the two women with her waved and smiled also.

“I say, Ramu,” their boss said appreciatively, “ladies’ man, is it?”

“Isn’t that Ashwini?” someone asked at their table. Sita said nothing in reply.

She always knew, instinctively, what he thought of her. She was what men like Ramu called “
pavam
.” Literally, poor thing. Metaphorically, something worse than the pity those words automatically evoked. Something un-chic, old-fashioned, timid. No fun at all. To be avoided at all costs, except in the line of duty.

The socialite in Delhi didn’t look pavam. She looked very chic indeed. The newspaper carried before and after pictures of her, alive before and dead after, as though covering the effects of some weight loss or beauty treatment. In the before, the socialite looked beautiful. She was dressed casually, in tight jeans and a tank top that rested lightly on her slim shoulders, a cigarette held carelessly in her fingers. She was laughing into the camera, her fashionably layered and straightened hair falling slightly across her face, her mouth outlined in some subtle, lip-plumping shade of lipstick and parted to reveal her seed-pearl teeth. Her eyes were her strongest feature, large, a lustrous deep brown, under the arches of her delicately plucked black eyebrows, winging their way upward to her temples. After seeing that photograph, Sita went to the beauty parlor to have her own eyebrows shaped. When it was done, she looked at herself in the mirror and knew that it was a mistake. She didn’t look chic, she looked cheap. Cheap in the manner of the Tamil movie actresses that her mother despised, with their faces artificially brightened and colored, and the plumpness of their bodies barely concealed by the too-tight blouses and transparent sarees that revealed cleavage and belly button trembling to the sound of the music and the lust in the hero’s eyes.

In America, she and Christine had driven through miles of country, on a road trip that took them through almost ten factories and offices. During the day, they lunched on the road, quickly and efficiently; in the evenings, they dined lavishly at company expense. Christine would order whisky and wine, while Sita sipped soft drinks and, for the first time in her life, didn’t feel the least bit pavam. For Christine, Sita knew, this friendship was special, but then Christine had many special friends. For Sita, Christine was fast becoming the first real friend she had ever had. She wanted to tell her this, but never could bring herself to actually say the words. Instead, their dinnertime conversation revolved easily and lightly around deals they had done, and in Christine’s case, her family and friends and men she had slept with. She laughed loudly, and Sita laughed with her.

Occasionally Christine would interrupt the meal to deal with some personal matter, casually and briskly. “Sure,” she would say into the cell phone. “I’ll swing by. I’m busy now, but maybe next weekend? My mother,” she’d explain to Sita, “she’s broken her ankle. She’s in this retirement facility—they take really good care of her, but I bet she drives them crazy.” And in response to Sita’s wondering question: “Sure, we get along fine. Though she can be a real bitch sometimes.” And the bubbles from the soft drink would slide up Sita’s nose in shock.

Or she would jettison a lover, Christine would, with the same smile that had probably tempted them there in the first place, and that perhaps kept them from feeling any rancor when she said good-bye. “Take care of yourself. You’re worth it,” she would say, blowing kisses into the telephone. “You’re wonderful. Good-bye.” And then she would order another drink and start talking about someone else.

Sita knew herself to be a good daughter; this is so
wrong,
she would think as she listened to Christine, only to find herself smiling back across the table. She tried to imagine herself saying similar things, about Ramu perhaps, carelessly: Oh yeah, I slept with him because he was a good kisser; but jeez, he was a lot better up
here
than he was down
there
.

But one night she did talk about a man: Sita talked about her father and the road accident that had killed him. Halfway through, tempted by the sympathy in Christine’s eyes, she stopped and cleared her throat and started the story afresh. This time the truth, his suicide. Christine had listened, her eyes filling with tears. Christ, Sita, she’d said. Christ.

Sita returned from America with a clarity about Christine’s firm and their requirements that her previous, long-distance analysis had never been able to achieve. Their interest lay in software development; they wanted to acquire an established player; and Sita soon located a company that might be a good match. She had met one of the owners of this company, SigmaSoft, at a conference; she knew they would be willing to sell. Sita pored through their dossier and spent the entire weekend quietly by herself on the computer. She entered the figures into her spreadsheet, her fingers moving swiftly across the number pad, her mind processing the information in front of her, moving through ideas for restructuring the business in a way that would make the acquisition viable. By Tuesday afternoon she knew the deed could be done. She felt like picking up the phone and calling Christine immediately. She knew how the conversation would go: she would state her information, Christine would cheer and say something like, fucking hell, Sita, that’s great. Awesome.

Before she could do that, however, she first needed to run it by her boss. They were all supposed to go out to the Palace Towers restaurant that night, and, for the first time since her boss had brought it up, Sita thought that she might actually be able to go through with it. Dinner tonight at the restaurant, a meeting with her boss tomorrow morning. This time, she promised herself, she would do it properly. Take a leaf out of Christine’s book, Ramu’s book, speak with confidence and strength.

He wandered by her desk later that day.

“Hey,” Ramu said casually. “What’s up?” “Nothing,” she said, as usual. And then she found herself saying, “Actually.” An inner excitement was urging her to preen, for the first time. Ramu caught the animation on her face and raised his eyebrows, smiling. She pulled out the hard copies of the spreadsheets she had so carefully worked on and handed them to him. “That’s
fantastic,
” Ramu said, and she saw admiration warm his eyes, and heat her skin.

The bread-coated cheese served in the Palace Towers restaurant that night tasted rubbery and salty in Sita’s mouth, even after she coated it in sauce and took a second nibble.

“Try the onion rings,” Ramu said from across the table.

She found herself smiling back at him without averting her eyes.

“So, Sita,” her boss said, contravening his own rules about not discussing work at the restaurant. “How are things going on that account? That America trip of yours was useful?”

Sita could feel the heat rise within her as everyone turned to look at her. This was not the forum in which she had anticipated discussing her ideas. Her teeth had closed around an onion ring, grabbing and dragging the slippery vegetable out of its casing. She tried to stuff it into her mouth. Her eyes swiveled helplessly to Ramu.

He leaned forward and addressed the table. “I personally think,” he said, “that SigmaSoft would be a good match.”

Sita felt her throat clench, gagging over the onion ring, blocking the words that rose hastily within her. By the time she swallowed her mouthful, Ramu had explained all her ideas, the business restructuring, the possible acquisition value, everything.

She heard her boss say: “That’s fantastic, Ramu.”

Then he said: “Isn’t it?” And everyone else agreed.

The women from the neighboring table finished their meal and stopped to say good-bye on their way out. The one called Ashwini put her hands on Ramu’s shoulders. “Call me,” she said.

The next morning, the newspapers were full of the socialite’s suicide the night before in Delhi.

Sita rushed to the office, but Ramu had got there first.

“Sita,” her boss said when she walked in. “I know you will agree with me on this. I think it might be best if we put Ramu in charge of this account. What do you say?”

And once again, Ramu stole her words from her. “I have to say,” he said, holding her gaze, “that Sita really contributed. I mean, really, the whole thing was her idea.”

Her boss smiled, pleased at this demonstration of Ramu’s modesty and teamwork. Good, good, he said. She, too, shall work with you on this. But you take the lead.

The next day, towards evening, Sita received a phone call from Christine, who’d been shocked to hear about the change of guard. “That’s terrible,” Christine said. “You were doing such a great job.” Something professional seemed to slide through her voice. “Look after yourself, okay?” Christine said. “You deserve it. You’re wonderful.”

A few months earlier, Sita had visited one of those new department stores in the city that market Western lifestyles to Indian homes that were previously starved of wineglasses and aromatherapy candles and Provençal-inspired dishes. She was with Christine, who, with American efficiency, was trying to squeeze in a Saturday morning’s worth of shopping on an otherwise whistle-stop business trip through Bangalore. Christine wanted to shop for mementos, but not, she was explaining, for something Provençal; where was the brass and incense-sticks, she wanted to know. Next stop, Sita said, and returned to contemplating the items on display.