The Red Carpet Page 10

  Priya shrugged her shoulders in unfilial irritation. That was her father all over. Completely missing the point.

  “I don’t want to see the tourist stuff. I want to experience the real India. . . . You know, it would be so great if I could actually stay in someone’s home instead of in a hotel.”

  “That’s easily arranged,” her mother said. “If that’s what you want.”

  And so her itinerary fell into place. Priya didn’t have any immediate aunts or uncles in India; all of her parents’ siblings were scattered across the globe, in America, Canada, England, and Australia, returning to India only for annual pilgrimages along with her mother. Priya would be staying, therefore, with distant relatives in Bangalore: Mr. and Mrs. Iyer; her mother’s cousin’s husband’s sister, strangely enough, married to her father’s second cousin.

  “That’s not a relation at all,” she told her mother.

  “No, no,” her mother said. “We’re very close. The Iyers will look after you well. Such fun it will be!” her mother said. “I wish I were coming with you.”

  Her father simply said: If things in India are not as you imagine, promise me that, when you return, we will have a serious chat about your future.

  Oh, don’t worry, said Priya, shrugging off the seriousness in his voice. They will be.

  Priyamvada packed her bags carefully, mindful of the advice she’d read in the Lonely Planet guidebook (“Modesty rates highly in India”). She took long pants, full-sleeved shirts, and skirts that fell below her knees. She even went one step further and raided her mother’s closet, the very thought of which would once have shocked her. (Among other things, Priya and her mother disagreed on dress.) But to her mother’s closet she went and unearthed the special section her mother reserved for her own trips to India: full of sarees and salwar-khameez suits.

  “I don’t think I’ll take any sarees,” she told her mother.

  “No, you most certainly will not,” said her mother, staring indignantly at the pile of salwar-khameez outfits that Priya had selected.

  She flew to New York and spent a celebratory night with friends. She barely made the airport the next morning, avoiding (by inches) complete annihilation by a passing yellow cab, whose driver cursed her in a colorful New York–Jamaican patois.

  “Yeah, yours, motherfucker,” Priya yelled back, in a show of unity with the colored peoples of the world, and waved good-bye to America.

  “It is a truth, universally acknowledged,” said Mr. Iyer, “that brahmins are clean, disciplined, and intellectual. You are agreeing with me?”

  A voice in Priyamvada’s mind begged to differ, but she stifled it. Mr. Iyer, she already knew, didn’t really expect a response from her. He liked to ask a profound question (“What means brahminism?”) and immediately answer it himself (“You see, there is a cultural aspect, and a philosophical aspect . . .”), sweeping aside any interim waste-of-time discussion period. Conversation, for Mr. Iyer, was a one-man dialectic played to an attentive audience.

  She had wondered, at first, if he was bothered by her incessant questions, but he had quickly reassured her. He enjoyed sharing his knowledge, he said, with a Bright Young Person. It reminded him of his days as an Indian Railways bureaucrat.

  “Clean,” she said now. “You mean, like, baths and stuff?”

  “Oh, no. Well, that is to say, baths, definitely. But much more . . . It is a glorious tradition,” Mr. Iyer said. “It is, after all, brahmins who have given the world the concept of zero, and yoga, and the philosophies that underlie Vedantic and Buddhist thinking. And it is all linked—the notions of cleanliness, personal discipline, and intellectual thinking. Holistic,” he said, relishing the word. “Is it not?”

  As before, Priya nodded reluctantly. There was some rule, she knew, about observing native behavior without interfering. Was that out of her sociology classes or from Star Trek? She couldn’t remember, but she decided to play it safe and say nothing. She quieted her unease by reminding herself that Mr. Iyer was talking of times gone by. The caste system, relic of India’s cultural past, had nothing to do with the whole modern Mahatma Gandhi liberté, égalité, fraternité thing, pardon her French.

  “And next week,” said Mr. Iyer, “you will be seeing a function that celebrates that very essence.”

  In a movie? asked Priya.

  “In my cousin’s house,” said Mr. Iyer. “It is time for his son’s poonal ceremony. The thread ceremony. It is only a ritual, of course, nothing more, but you are most welcome to attend. After all, you are not seeing such things in America. Also, the ceremony is an invocation to knowledge, and with your academic background, you will enjoy.”

  Mr. Iyer, Priya knew, utterly approved of her dedication to the academic life. It was one of the things she liked about him. “Ah yes, a PhD,” he had said, pleased. “Your mother said. It is a good thing.” In his view, a bachelor’s degree alone was no education at all, and fit only for foreigners, perverts, and other deviants. He liked to moralize about a young woman of his acquaintance (his cousin’s neighbor’s daughter) who, perhaps due to some environmental oversight, had suddenly decided to abandon the banking job and the MBA course applications that had so gladdened her parents’ hearts, and to write books instead. “Storybooks,” said Mr. Iyer. “And they say she has also started smoking.”

  His own children were excessively educated: his son a lawyer and living in Delhi, his daughter with a PhD in computer science and now working in a software company in the fabled Electronic City that had attached itself like a pimple to Bangalore’s bum. “She is in BPO,” said Mr. Iyer, with his usual love of acronyms. “She and her husband also. BPO for banks.”

  “Business process outsourcing,” Mrs. Iyer later explained, with the air of someone who has carefully committed the phrase to memory.

  Mr. Iyer lived a quiet life with his wife in the Bangalore suburb of Malleswaram. Their house was small, single-storied, and flatroofed; painted a dust-covered white, separated from the road by bits of broken pavement and an open ditch, and from the neighboring houses by six inches of air and a compound wall. Haphazard black wires snaked dangerously over and into the house, and provided cable television.

  Inside, the house was very clean, and rather spartan. A living room, a dining room, bedrooms with attached bathrooms that contained no shower or tub, but instead a bucket placed below hot- and cold-water taps, and a mug to sluice oneself with. In Priya’s bathroom, as a concession, Mrs. Iyer had placed a roll of toilet paper on the shelf, alongside a bar of Rexona soap still in its lime-green paper wrapping, a tube of Colgate toothpaste, and an orange-and-white tin of Cuticura talcum powder.

  The furnishings were plain, a triumph of function over form. Cane furniture on the verandah, Rexene-covered sofas surrounding the small synthetic carpet in the living room, a melamine-laminated table in the dining room. There was a cheerful carelessness in the placement of a calendar here and a photograph there. Art was represented in solitary splendor by a Tanjore painting of the god Krishna as an infant, wearing nothing but a smile, some jewelry, and a peacock feather in his hair, the divine testicles picked out in pink and gold. Blue plastic flowers in a vase; a television; two wooden bookshelves, one filled with encyclopedias and books from Reader’s Digest, the other stacked with the Tamil magazines that Mrs. Iyer enjoyed, invariably depicting pink-cheeked, long-haired females wearing sarees that threatened to slip off the slopes of their plump bosoms. On a corner table, competing with the television for pride of place, was the computer, a fancy model bought for them by their children; maintained with pristine reverence, used for e-mails and correspondence, and kept carefully enclosed, when not in use, in thick white plastic covers.

  Mr. and Mrs. Iyer, Priya soon discovered, kept time to a different rhythm from the rest of the world. They awoke early and cheerfully in a hungover world; they prayed with unfashionable devotion; their vegetarianism was ancient, not trendy. Yet they were not precisely immune to outside influences: Mr. Iyer spent his days snorting
over the contents of the newspapers, while Mrs. Iyer never missed her evening television, one hour of a Tamil soap opera that dealt, it seemed, with Family Anguish— cruel mothers-in-law, rebellious daughters, sons who wouldn’t show respect, in a world where Fate, it seemed, continually thwarted Desire. Mrs. Iyer would click her tongue in sympathy, while Mr. Iyer snorted in derision. Priya’s eyes would swivel between the television and the soft syncopating mutter of clicks and snorts.

  Priya could not help being fascinated. The Iyers still adhered faithfully to the conservative Tamil Brahmin lifestyle that her parents had forsaken to immerse themselves in Money and Mc-Nuggets. This was how things Might Have Been in her own family. Mr. Iyer was her own father’s Alternate Reality. The two men were even similar in face and build, except that Mr. Iyer lacked the spit-and-polish conveyed by Americanization, Italian suits, and hundred-dollar haircuts.

  Mr. Iyer liked to sit on the verandah, on a swing made from a sturdy plank of rosewood, leaving his wife to bustle about the house and occasionally step out with tumblers of piping hot coffee. He himself was retired and spent his days reading his newspapers in a skirt.

  “Not a skirt,” he said, pained when Priya first phrased her careful inquiry. “Not a skirt at all. It is a veshti. A lungi, a dhoti. Men’s wear. Just like suitings, shirtings, and cuff links. But,” he said, “more comfortable for the heat.”

  “Oh, a sarong,” said Priya.

  “No,” said Mr. Iyer. “A veshti.”

  As with all of Mr. Iyer’s utterances, Priya made a note of this in her diary that evening. “A veshti,” she wrote, “is a long piece of cotton cloth worn wrapped around the waist. Sometimes it can be folded in half at the knee. It is similar” a postscript added in defiance of Mr. Iyer, “to the Southeast Asian sarong.”

  That evening she sent an e-mail to her father.

  She wrote: “Have you ever worn a veshti? They seem very comfortable. Would you like me to bring one back for you?”

  He wrote back: Yes I have. They are indeed. Do bring one back. I’m sure it will be a big hit with the other partners in the Chicago office.

  Now, Mrs. Iyer joined them on the verandah where they sat, shaded from the Saturday morning sun. “Anasuya called,” she said. “She is on her way over. Are you ready?”

  Priya nodded. Anasuya was Mrs. Iyer’s niece (about Priya’s age, Mrs. Iyer had said), and about to take Priya for an outing. “You will enjoy so much.” Mrs. Iyer said, “Meeting some youngsters. You cannot only be sitting with us old people. So boring for you.”

  Priya was carefully and conservatively dressed for this excursion, in a long-sleeved shirt and a skirt that ended around her ankles. She knew better than to inflict her American ways upon these people. She would act with decorum and sobriety. Though, already, a week of abstinence from smoking was giving her a headache and a marked impulse to bite passing strangers in the ankles.

  A small tallboy car came to a halt in front of the house. A young woman got out, and, watching her, Priya was immediately glad of the way she had dressed. Anasuya was wearing jeans, which were covered to the knee by a long kurta shirt, full sleeved and high collared. Her long hair was tied back in a pony-tail. She waved cheerfully towards the verandah.

  “Do you want coffee?” her aunt asked her as she approached. “This is Priyamvada.”

  “Hi,” said Anasuya. “Nice to meet you. And no, thanks, Sundari Chithi. I got hungry, so I bought something to eat.” She came to a halt in front of the verandah and waved a plastic bag at her aunt.

  “Come in,” said Mr. Iyer. “Anu is in public relations,” he told Priya. “Doing very well, very well. Come in.”

  Anu shook her head. “After I finish this,” she said, sitting down on the front steps.

  Mrs. Iyer peered suspiciously at the green bag, from which Anu pulled out a chapati roll filled with something spicy. “You bought something? But I could have made something for you quickly. . . . You should not eat that rubbish. Chicken, onions, garlic—I can smell the stink of it all the way here.”

  “It’s delicious,” Anu said, with a grin. “Want a bite?”

  “Tchi, tchi! You please wash your hands afterwards.” Mrs. Iyer bustled away to make coffee.

  “Your aunt is right,” said Mr. Iyer. “You should not eat these foods. Vegetarianism is not only part of your brahmin heritage, it is also very fashionable today, is it not? Priyamvada here is vegetarian.”

  Vegan, Priya wanted to say, but she had brought it up once before, and Mrs. Iyer had looked at her mystified and said, Wagon? and Priya had not felt up to explaining.

  “You’ve convinced my mind, Vasu Chittappa,” said Anu. “Now you just have to convince my tongue.” She bit into her chapati roll.

  “Work is going well? Is that a new car?” asked Mr. Iyer, looking at the tallboy parked in front of the gate.

  “Yes,” said Anu. “But I bought it secondhand, for a good price. Very cheap. Very low mileage, too, so it worked out well.”

  “How so? If it has low mileage, why are they not asking a good price for it? Perhaps they have tricked you. All sorts of cheap goondas are doing anything to make money these days.”

  “No, no,” said Anu. “You know these people. Mrs. Ranganathan?”

  Mrs. Iyer emerged, carrying a tray of coffee steaming gently in steel tumblers, and caught the last bit of the conversation.

  “That woman! Mrs. Ranganathan,” she said. “Thinking she is the only one with good news in this world. As though our children are not doing well. Here, drink it while it is hot.” Mrs. Iyer sat down next to her husband on the long wooden swing and used one of his newspapers to fan herself. “And she cannot talk about anything else. Even when I went to give her sweets after our son got that job. No time for my happiness, only, oh, see how well Sita does. . . . But what else to expect? That woman is an Iyengar, after all.”

  “Iyengar?” Priya asked as she drank her coffee. Hot and milky and sweet, it was very different from the black coffee she preferred.

  “Tamil Brahmins,” said Mr. Iyer. “Just like us Iyers. Same caste, but a subsect, so to speak.”

  “Nonsense! Not just like us! We Iyers are different. Those Iyengars do things all wrong,” Mrs. Iyer explained. “Like sometimes putting coconut in their rasam.”

  Mr. Iyer snorted. Mrs. Iyer ignored him and leaned forward. “Frankly,” she said, “they are not supposed to be as intelligent as us.”

  “Oh, yes,” her husband concurred happily. “We’re supposed to be the brainy ones, while they have all the good looks.”

  Mrs. Iyer smoothed her hair back defiantly. “Well, I don’t know about that,” she said, “but we are definitely brighter. Why are you talking about Mrs. Ranganathan, anyway?”

  “I bought Sita’s car,” said Anu. “She gave me a great deal on it. I think she’s buying a new one, something larger.”

  “What is that?” said Mrs. Iyer, shocked. “You bought her car secondhand? But this is not right! What are we, poor people to take their castoffs?”

  “Well, I think it’s okay,” said Anu. “I mean, it’s not as if she’s gifting it to me; I paid good money for it.”

  “Tchi, tchi. This is not a right thing to do. I am going to speak to your mother about this. And does she know about this chicken-eating?”

  Priya responded immediately to the mute appeal in Anu’s eyes. “I’m ready when you are,” she said. Anu stood hastily. Priya held her hand out. “I can take that for you, if you like,” she said, reaching out for the plastic bag that contained the debris of Anu’s snack. “I’ll throw it away in the kitchen.”

  “Oh no!” three people chorused, and Priya froze, her hand still extended.

  Anu laughed. “Sorry about that, but my aunt is quite strict in her madi practices, you know.”

  “No, no. Not strict at all. How things used to be in the old days! Now we are all quite relaxed.”

  Anu caught the look of confusion in Priya’s face and explained. “You know, stuff like not even carrying a wee
bit of nonveg food into the house. No onions, no garlic. No alcohol or cigarettes . . . that sort of thing. I’ll have to throw away this bag in the rubbish dump at the end of the street.”

  “Oh, right,” said Priya. “I knew that.”

  “But we are not strict at all,” said Mrs. Iyer, appealing to her husband. “We are quite modern.”

  “Well, certainly, in traditional terms, we are not following all the madi rules,” Mr. Iyer said. “When I was a boy, things were quite different.”

  “Vasu Chittappa, things couldn’t possibly have been stricter than in this house,” Anu teased. “Shall we go? Would you like me to fetch anything for you from the shops, Chithi?”

  “No, no, thank you, kanna. You go now. Enjoy yourselves,” said Mrs. Iyer. “And when you come back, I shall keep some ice cream in the fridge for you.”

  “And that,” said Anasuya, putting her arm around Mrs. Iyer, “is my dear aunt being gay to dissipation.”

  They climbed into the car and drove away. When they turned the street corner, Anasuya parked the car next to an overflowing rubbish bin and threw the plastic bag away. When she was done, she didn’t set the car in motion immediately. As Priya watched, she shrugged out of her kurta shirt, revealing a tank top tucked into her jeans below. Then she removed the rubber band that tied her hair together and shook her head until the hair flowed free over her shoulders. She opened her handbag and pulled on a pair of shades.

  “Ah,” she said, looking at herself in the little rearview mirror. “That’s better.”

  Mrs. Iyer threw her hostessing energies into organizing sightseeing and shopping expeditions for Priya; Mr. Iyer, from his post on the verandah, simply offered his services as an encyclopedic reference point on any subject that Priya cared to name. Brahminism and the caste system; the willfully malingering government; the misuse of monosodium glutamate in Chinese cooking; the operational differences between jungle bandits in South India and the ravine dacoits of Madhya Pradesh; yoga; genome theory and the implications of Dolly the cloned sheep on the Australian economy (footnotes on New Zealand included); and why America’s corporate scandals were caused, in part, by a lack of meditative self-awareness in its chief executive officers, and further exacerbated by improper breathing techniques.