The Red Carpet (16 page)

Yes, Tara was her only child, and so Mrs. Srinivasan had sat with her through all her exams, providing endless cups of midnight coffee and moral support while Tara applied to American universities. Her mother had passed away before Mrs. Srinivasan could share with her the sense of achievement she felt when Tara eventually decided to pursue her PhD. Her husband may have a master’s degree, but her daughter, Mrs. Srinivasan would have liked to have boasted, will have a Doctorate.

But now there is no doubt about it. Tara is twenty-seven, and no matter how many PhDs she earns, it is time now for her to learn to be a good wife and mother, just as her mother and grandmother have done in their turn.

Mrs. Srinivasan turns on the garden lights and crosses over to Tara’s room. She hesitates; then, with old habits, opens the door without knocking. Her daughter is seated in front of her computer, entering data from a little book whose yellowed, stained pages bespeak its origins in a government office. Tara’s hair is knotted messily on top of her head, her glasses are slightly askew, and Mrs. Srinivasan is assailed, once again, by worry.

“We should be ready by seven-fifteen,” she says. “The guests have been invited for seven-thirty, and some of the older people, like Mr. Rao and the general, will be exactly on time. You
will
be ready, won’t you?”

Tara puts down the book and turns to face her mother.

For twenty-four hours she has rehearsed the excuse that will free her from this party.

Around them, the house darkens with the night.

The bathroom mirror captures a Tara of rare elegance.

She is wearing a well-tailored jacket and pant ensemble, with a silk blouse that echoes the cappuccino color of her skin. She looks remarkably chic. She looks uneasy and awkward.

She looks furious with herself for failing, at the end, to say no to her mother.

Her long curly hair has been combed away from her face, which is newly revealed by the absence of glasses. Her contact lenses make her blink. Perhaps it is time to get them replaced.

“Birdie
num
-num,” she says to her reflection, trying to catch Peter Sellers’ movie imitation of an absurd little Indian gentleman at a Hollywood party. Bir Die—she feels her lips meet and part, her tongue curve backwards and slap against the back of her teeth, the final horizontal stretch of her lips. Num Num. “Birdie num-num.”

The party outside is in full force, the chatter penetrating her little hideaway.

Birdie num-num.

The social fossils who have infested the house can look at her with only one thought in their smelly old minds.

The men, balding, paunchy, and old-spiced, leer at her and ask: So, when’s a pretty girl like you going to get married?

The women, besilked and hair-sprayed, shake their heads at her: Aren’t you getting a little too old to not be settled?

I
am
“settled,” thinks Tara. Unsettling to you, perhaps, but perfectly settled, thank-you-very-much.

She suggested to her father that she hang around for a while, meet everybody, then quietly exit to join her friends at the Blue Cigar Pub. Good idea, is what he should have said, sympathetically winking at her and shaking his head towards her mother.

Nonsense, Tara, was what he said. These are your guests as well. They have come to see you. You must stay and look after them. Go and help your mother.

Birdie num-num.

Back into the fray.

Her mother is everywhere, comporting herself with her usual elegance in an earth-toned saree that is as quiet as it is delicate, with solitaire diamonds twinkling discreetly from ears and finger. She is in terrifyingly full-blown form, laughing, hostessing, charming, feeding. Tara tries to keep away from her, but her mother’s voice follows her around. She is talking with a resplendent blue saree that is draped around a blouse a tad too small for the body it contains.

“Yes,” she says. “We have received so many offers for Tara. But you know what girls are like nowadays. So independent. Must make up their own minds about everything.” A small laugh. “Have a samosa?”

“Thank you,” and stuffing another samosa into that too-tight blouse. “No, thankfully, I have not faced that problem. My daughter, who is now expecting her second child, by the way, is only too happy to listen to me. She always says that my choice is best. She is not like Tara.”

“No, indeed. She is not like Tara. Few youngsters, I think, could do as well as Tara has in her PhD. Her professors in America are
very
impressed with her, you know.”

Touché.

And later, elsewhere in the room:

“Tara is
so
skilled, you know . . .”

And:

“. . . so many gifts for us from America . . . those Rosenthal plates . . . Even if we say no, she brings us things. . . . Yes, so lucky . . .”

And:

“. . . so keen to learn the traditional recipes . . .”

Oh, mother. Must you?

Tara’s fury propels her to the bar. A shot of Laphroaig in a glass and it’s back to the bathroom. Her reflection stares placidly back at her, unmoved by her temper. Num-num. She sips her drink, her tongue traveling through the flavors in her glass. Ultimately, she thinks, the great argument between single malt and blended is a mood thing. A good blended whisky is a comfort drink, crooning softly to you as it nurses you in its arms. A fine single malt is a seducer: muscle-bound, sexy, and fiery-eyed, urging you to up and at ’em.

The whisky is pushing her to misbehave. I think I will go outside and ask them
why
I need to get married, since I already have a
perfectly
active sex life. Now, that would give them something to talk about for the next ten parties.

Now, now. Behave, birdie. Num-num to you.

Tara once again exits the bathroom.

First, a word with her mother.

“Amma, will you please stop
marketing
me? And please don’t discuss my nonexistent wedding plans with everybody. It really is no one else’s business.”

“Don’t be silly, Tara. These are our good friends. Of course I will tell them how proud I am of my child.”

“I tell you, I have no intention of marrying one of their idiotic sons!”

“What nonsense you talk. You’re arguing about nothing.” Mother and daughter stare each other down. “Go see if your father wants any help.”

Dismissed like a bloody fourteen-year-old, thinks Tara. But she goes.

And spends the rest of the party trying to convince Lily not to sample the snacks that she is serving, and ensuring that the office boy doesn’t get
too
drunk behind the bar.

At the end of the party, the old general pats her cheek and says that she is a fine hostess, just like her mother.

Her parents beam with pleasure.

The next day Tara oversleeps and emerges with a mild whisky hangover and a strong sense of ill-usage. Her father is settled on the living room sofa, surrounded by newspapers and the televised blare of PGA golf, happily snacking on party leftovers. Her mother has the happy, tired air of someone who has been organizing, putting away, getting things back to normal after a very successful party.

“So many people called,” she says. “Such a lovely evening, they said . . . wonderful snacks . . .”

Tara refuses to participate in this happy postmortem. She is sulking and aloof.

Her mother prattles on. Her father is mellowed, relaxed, with the happy unwariness of a man who, having locked away the last whisky bottle the previous night and toted up, in awed tones, the amount of alcohol consumed at the party, knows that nothing further is expected of him.

Tara is brooding, formal, stiff in her responses. She waits for her mother to slowly approach the topic at hand, to push the conversation into discussions of the people who attended, their families, and the wondrous eligibility of their sons. She waits patiently, for a lifetime of dealing with her mother has given her the patience to rival geological time. She waits to deliver the scathing rebuff that will forever stop her mother from interfering in her life.

But Mrs. Srinivasan veers away from the subject completely.

She has vanished into her bedroom, and now reappears.

“Tara,” she says. “I need assistance in getting some boxes down. Could you help me, please?”

All of Tara’s latent irritation swells up, but before she can speak, her eyes fall on her mother’s face, which is lined with fatigue and suddenly seems pulled down by the weight of her years.

“Okay,” she says, and walks into her mother’s bedroom.

Mrs. Srinivasan directs her daughter as she climbs a stool and pulls down the boxes and old bags that are needed for storage. Then, and only then, does she artfully revert to her real reason for calling Tara into her bedroom.

“You know, I was sorting through these old sarees of mine the other day . . .” She carelessly indicates the pile lying on the bed.

Tara’s attention is caught by the pretty colors of the silks. “Oh, I remember these. They’re lovely, Amma. Why don’t you wear them anymore?”

Mrs. Srinivasan wants to say: I was saving them for you. Do you like them? Would you like to wear them? I hope you do. How lovely it would be to see you enjoying something that belonged to me.

Instead she says: “One has to be young to wear colors and designs like that. They don’t look good on someone who’s crossed fifty.”

Tara opens the sarees; her hands play across the fine old silk. Her mother watches her growing absorption with a deep, eager pleasure and then pulls out a package from the recesses of her cupboard.

“Oh, what’s this?”

The sun shines through the window and highlights the deep red of the saree, that
arakku,
the glorious color not quite blood, not quite claret, and gleams off the heavy, intricately patterned gold-work of the
zari.

“This is my wedding saree.” Mrs. Srinivasan inexplicably feels a strange diffidence in front of her daughter. She sits down next to her and strokes the old saree with tentative, gentle hands. “Paati had to go to Kanjeevaram to get it specially made for me.”

Tara’s grandmother had led a mysterious, antediluvian life in Madras, her wrinkled softness forever clad in a traditional nine-yard saree, her forehead smeared with piousness and holy
vibhooti
ash.

Her mother’s wedding saree is also nine yards long, three yards longer than a modern saree, and Tara touches it curiously.

Would you like to try it on? her mother says.

Tara pulls off her jeans, and her mother drapes the saree around her and between her legs, finally arranging the
thalaippu,
the decorative end-piece, in a tuck around her waist. Her long hair is smoothed back and twisted quickly into a knot at the nape of her neck. She walks slowly across to the full-length mirror, reluctance warring with curiosity.

Seventy years have fallen away, and Tara stares mesmerized.

She has been transformed into her grandmother.

Her Paati, young, ripe, and full of life, laughs at her from the mirror.

And behind her, her mother, her daughter, smiles back.

APPLE PIE,
ONE BY TWO

There is nothing very offensive about Murthy, even when he is high. He is usually rather quiet, but after two joints he becomes a little more effusive, and rather predictable. There are two things he likes to do, but even those he does more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. The first is to appropriate the music system and play Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” twice over. As it plays, he likes to nod his head and spell out the rhythm: FOUR FIVE, One Two Three FOUR FIVE. His gaze is locked inwards in musical bliss, and everyone else lets him be.

The second thing he likes to do is to paraphrase a minor character in the Billy Bunter books he loved so much as a child.

This is, very occasionally, on a night like this. Otherwise, during the day, he displays his skills as a software engineer, joins his friends for a drink and a little conversation after work, and lives quietly with his parents. His mother refers to him affectionately as a good boy. Friends like Swamy, though equally affectionate, refer to him in terms somewhat less complimentary, and Murthy reciprocates in turn.

The cheap glass that Swamy holds in his hand is almost empty, and Murthy’s face is refracted through it, stretching and wobbling in peculiar ways. It is a face that, like the sky, has accompanied Swamy everywhere, through school, engineering college, work, and life in two countries; usually mirroring his own aspirations and desires. But that, of course, is about to change; and Swamy studies Murthy’s face with a faint puzzlement that refuses to go away.

They are not alone, Murthy and Swamy. Other faces shift around them, shadowed and illumined by the night and the bonfire around which they sit. The glow of the fire is offset by a lone electrical bulb that swings from the rafters of the
dhaba
that lies to one side of the clearing: a meager shed insulated from the night chill by the heat of the wood-burning stove, and by the evanescent, spicy odors that rise from the food bubbling on top—succulent roasting chicken coated with chili and lime, glistening in the heat; hot wheat rotis on the
tava
pan; spicy vegetable
subzis;
lentils. The proprietor-and-cook stands over the stove, bare-chested, a dirty dhoti wrapped sarong-style around his waist, his forehead marked with a frown of concentration and beaded with perspiration. It is his customers who wait outside by the bonfire, stretched out on the charpoys that are scattered around the clearing, self-consciously absorbing themselves in the cool beauty of the night. The charpoys themselves, beds of rope woven around a light wooden frame, seem as old as the earth they rest on, and creak and rock with every movement.

This was supposed to be a much smaller group of people, but it hadn’t quite worked out that way. The party they had attended earlier in the evening had been a mistake. Swamy had felt restless; this was not how he wanted to spend his last evening in Bangalore. It was Murthy who suggested an alternative: to leave the party, drive out of the city, find a dhaba on the highway and dine alfresco. A meal, in short, that would take them back to their undergraduate days, when dhabas had been steady sources of cheap nourishment; dhaba proprietors usually, with great financial empathy, allowed them to share food and conserve money by dividing the item ordered into separate servings as per the request: one-by-two (single dish, between two people) or two-by-three or, on really impecunious days, one-by-three. Coffee one-by-two, and Murthy and Swamy could sit there for the rest of the day, clinging to their half-filled cups.

Swamy was delighted with the idea; but just as they were about to leave the party with a couple of close friends, someone else got wind of where they were going, and next thing you know, it had turned into a circus. Three cars, full of people, roaring down the highway, and here they all were.

“You big-mouthed bastard,” Swamy accused Murthy, a little unfairly. Murthy is still one of the quietest individuals he knows.

This particular dhaba is a lucky find; relatively clean, relatively free of the truckers who are the main clientele of such places. The dhaba owner seems used to feeding wandering tribes of urbanites who happen by with their fancy cars and unreal economics; without comment, he has lighted the coal
sigri
that holds the fire, pulled up charpoys, and offered them bottles of cold Kingfisher beer to drink. And this is enough, for the moment, to keep Swamy content; to allow him to stretch out, empty his mind of all the decisions that have dogged him for months, and ponder the residual surprise that still rises within him when he looks at Murthy.

At least, so it would be, if it weren’t for the conversation people keep forcing on him—he is under cheerful verbal attack from two individuals he met at the party earlier in the evening, and who do not seem to recognize that they are not wanted. They both appear to want to convince him that he is doing the right thing.

“I think it’s damn good,
yaar,
damn good,” says Rahul.

“Oh, yeah,” says Karl. “I wish I were in your shoes.”

“The last time,” says Rahul, “in Las Vegas, I tell you, I couldn’t decide whether to keep my eyes on the tables or on those chicks. Leaning over to serve drinks, their tits almost falling out. Great country!”

“Tell me about it!”

Swamy grunts and leans back.

“And then New York. What nightclubs, just too cool. And the shopping is something else. Everything so cheap. Half the price of London.” Rahul, Swamy is learning, suffers from a surfeit of inherited money and a depressing lack of imagination. He asks Swamy, “Where do you do your shopping?”

“I don’t shop.”

“Ah, good joke!” says Rahul, but he is looking discouraged. Swamy is one of the new fairy tales, someone who has founded and sold a software company that everyone talks about and venture capitalists see in their favorite visions. Swamy should be shopping.

“Ask Murthy,” says Swamy, relenting. “When we first shared an apartment, in America, he kept shopping. It was an obsession with him.”

Across the fire, he can see Murthy laughing in response.

The first of two apartments that Murthy and Swamy shared was a tiny place; just off-campus and furnished very simply, with a mattress on the floor of each bedroom in lieu of a bed, and another mattress in the tiny living room in lieu of a sofa. That was when they were graduate students, newly arrived from India, at the University of Pennsylvania. In the kitchen, they diligently acquired a pot for the rice, a pot for the dal lentils, a pan for the vegetables, a fridge that didn’t work, and a book full of handwritten recipes contributed to by their worried mothers in every letter from home. When Swamy announced casually that he had bought a television, he spent a moment savoring the distress on Murthy’s face at such unwarranted profligacy, before adding, “Black-and-white for twenty-eight dollars.” They had celebrated this acquisition with cheap beer and an evening spent injudiciously coaxing the antenna to capture a new show called
Seinfeld
.

It had come as a shock, at first, to discover exactly how poor they were.

Their college scholarships covered their tuition, and little else. Like their American colleagues, they worked at other jobs for their living expenses. Unlike the Americans, however, their student visas prevented them from working at reasonable rates off-campus, so they provided cheap intellectual grunt labor for anyone who asked. They taught undergraduates, did research for professors, worked in computer labs. And, again unlike the Americans, they could not rely on student loans, credit cards, or easy access to their parents’ homes and the acquisitions of a lifetime for material comfort. No cold-weather clothes, no car, no microwave, no popcorn maker. No Christmas presents of a golf set, or a tennis racquet, or a nice winter coat that happened to be on sale at Neiman Marcus.

They didn’t think of asking their parents in India for financial support; neither of them was so irresponsible. Murthy’s father was an accountant; Swamy’s a lawyer. Their respective incomes allowed them to maintain their families in decent homes, provide a good education for their children, a maid to help their wives with the housework, and annual holidays in the hill stations of Ooty or Kodaikanal. In India, the money stretched that far. Converted into dollars, it simply vanished, reduced to a sum insufficient to buy a decent car even. The economy-class plane ticket to America had cost their parents two months’ income, and that was all anyone could expect. In return for that gift, their sons were expected to take no risks, work twice as hard as the Americans, and eventually land good jobs, get married, and produce, lickety-split, so many grandchildren and raise them with good old-fashioned Indian values.

Luckily, Swamy and Murthy were not alone. Most of the Indians who came to study in America acted as they did, teetering between poverty on the one hand and grand future prospects on the other. There was a comfort in this, in meeting in each other’s rooms to eat dal and rice and feel a little less homesick, to figure out what jobs were being offered by what companies and how best to tackle the interviews.

Occasionally they would run into that other breed of Indian abroad. “Usually,” said Murthy, paraphrasing another favorite author, “the kind of thing one sees in bad dreams, or when one is out without one’s gun.” A breed that, like Rahul, was the product of inherited money; that meticulously failed all the exams and bought a Mercedes-Benz as a reward; and that subsequently vanished back to the homeland to don suit, glasses, and foreign credentials, before giving interviews that nobody believed on the need to introduce professional managers into family-run businesses.

It was Murthy, even then, who kept a strict control over their finances. He would plan and budget, wandering around the supermarkets with coupons in one hand and a calculator in the other, saying no to the handmade pasta, and yes to the big cheap tub of rice. “There’s a sale on,” he’d say, meaning not Bloomingdale’s or even Kmart, but the secondhand sale by some other graduate student who’d gotten a job somewhere and was selling everything before moving uptown, upscale. A sale, and Murthy and Swamy would rush across to buy (on a predetermined budget) perhaps a cooking pot, or a winter jacket that with a little effort could have the stains removed.

All of which is presumably not the kind of shopping Rahul has in mind.

“Is there anything to smoke?” asks Ashwini. Swamy hunts for his cigarettes, while Rahul pulls out his cigars.

“Ah, the dog turds,” says Swamy.

“Cohiba Esplendidos,” says Rahul. “Try them. They’re very good.”

Ashwini eagerly reaches for one. She is technically Murthy’s girlfriend, and patently hopes to be something more. She has read about fashionable women who smoke cigars, and she is keen to emulate them. Rahul courteously trims the end of a cigar for her, and then shows her how to light it by holding it not in, but over, the flame, and the importance of puffing without inhaling. Ashwini is pleased, and punctuates everything she says with waves of the thick stub between her fingers.

Murthy, on the other hand, looks disappointed. “Shit,” he says. “Nothing apart from tobacco?”

“I may have something,” says Swamy. “In the car.” He and Murthy exchange glances, each willing the other to shake the laziness from his feet, get up, and go to the car.

“I’ll go,” says Ashwini.

She returns with a small tin box, which Murthy appropriates and reverently opens. “Kerala Gold,” he says, sniffing deeply. “The best fucking grass south of Manali.”

He proceeds to roll two joints with the concentration that he brings to all important tasks, before lighting one, inhaling, and passing it on.

As young schoolboys, they had gone through a phase of reading Billy Bunter, enjoying the antics of the English school boys, and puzzled by the little Indian prince’s inability to speak a word of comprehensible English. Or as the English author would have His Royal Highness, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, Nabob of Bhanipur (called “Inky” by his associates), say: the incomprehensible-fulness of the spoken English in its very mystification is terrific.

The other thing Murthy likes to do when he is high is to paraphrase the little nabob; to say, every now and then:

The Thingfulness of the Thing

In its very Thingness

Is so Thing.

This is a lispy mouthful even when sober; when Murthy is high he seems rather proud of being able to say it at all.

Now Swamy waits patiently, but before Murthy can speak, Rahul is already turning his head inquisitively towards him.

“You were based in Palo Alto, right?” Rahul’s persistence shows that a party invitation will soon be in the offing. Couple of those, and then Rahul will be able to tell everyone that yes, Swamy is a good, damn good, friend of his.

“After graduate school, yes,” says Swamy.

Their second apartment was very different from the first, and not just because it entailed a shift to California from their previous East Coast university existence. By the time they graduated, both Murthy and Swamy were sought after by different software corporations, and they had finally signed on, with enormous bonuses, with the same one.

“What are your housing plans?” Murthy had asked, not lifting his eyes from his bank statement, which, post-bonus, exercised a strong fascination over him.

Swamy’s reply had been prompt. “A house in Palo Alto,” he’d said. With a lemon tree on the side and a new (no, not secondhand, never) car parked in the drive.

“That’s expensive,” Murthy said, mindful of the fact that Swamy, like himself, was a dutiful son, and would be sending money home to his parents.

“Yeah,” said Swamy. He hesitated; now that they had a choice, he was suddenly reluctant to put Murthy on the spot. “I was actually planning on a roommate. Maybe advertise for one, or something. You?”

Oh, something similar, Murthy said. Or, bastard, maybe I’ll just answer your advertisement.

They bought furniture from Ikea, with king-size beds in each room, which would prove useful when they brought girls home. They argued over the merits of Ford Escorts and Honda Accords, but finally settled on buying Toyota Corollas, one each but in different colors, taking turns parking them in the one-car garage. They shopped at good stores and ate in nice restaurants. They worked out and ate health food from different countries and made interesting friends who spoke intelligently and well and played jazz on the weekends. They were finally living the American Dream.