The Red Carpet Read online

  The candles set in holders that let the beholders think on, meditate, on their ability to imitate . . . The music changed, and Sita’s feet began to tap while, next to her, Christine’s feet came to a complete halt. Sita looked up to see her consternation.

  “I can’t believe they’re playing this . . .” said Christine. Eminem. Eminem! Who the fuck would confuse the fucking anger in his voice, she said, with easy listening?

  Sita listened to the voice saying, Working at Burger King, Spitting on your Onion Rings. It’s American, she explained. Creates the right atmosphere. Good rhythm.

  But the lyrics. The fucking lyrics. Aren’t people offended?

  I don’t think it matters, Sita said. As long as it sounds American and popular.

  Don’t tell me, said Christine, that people cannot distinguish between this song and the Billy fucking Joel that was playing earlier?

  Well, you know those Americans, Sita said. They all sound alike.

  After that final telephone conversation with Christine, Sita stayed behind after almost everyone else had left. The office was quiet, pooled in darkness, half the lights switched off except for her corner, which was brightly lit, and another one further down. Sita found herself avoiding her spreadsheets and surfing the Internet. She felt strangely reluctant to leave the office, held in her seat by Ramu’s presence. He was waiting, in his turn, to receive a conference call from America, from Christine and the rest of her team.

  Her ears heard every move he made, the squeak of his chair as he pushed it back, the gluck-gluck of the water as it spilled down his throat. The sound of the bottle being replaced on the table. She had a similar bottle on hers. A glass one that she kept filled with water from the cooler at the other end of the office. It glistened now, the bottle, catching the overhead light. It glistened maliciously, seeming to taunt her.

  He was talking into his cell phone. “Let’s meet for a drink,” he was saying, to one of those women from the restaurant, or perhaps someone who looked like them. His head was turned away from her.

  What if she picked up the glass bottle that stood on her table and brought it down upon that neat and glossy head of hair? Did it once, and then again and again until the water mingled with his blood and he lay imprisoned in the floor beneath her feet?

  Her fingers moved of their own volition; they curled tightly around the narrow mouth of the bottle. She lifted her hand and, with the exhilaration of a music conductor waving a baton, brought the bottle down against the side of her table. The glass shattered and curved like a scattered wave over the floor, the water puddled at her feet, her hand dropped the remaining piece as the tremendous sound of the crash washed through her shocked body.

  “Oh my god. What happened?”

  She could see Ramu peering in her direction. She could see him move towards her, his face registering curiosity, then amazement, as he absorbed the tears that were spilling out of her eyes, and the blood that seeped from her fingers.

  He pulled out a starched white handkerchief from his pocket. “Take it easy, butterfingers,” he said, and wrapped it carefully around her hand. “There.” He smiled down at her.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to give me the SigmaSoft spreadsheets by tomorrow?” he asked.

  The writer on the Internet suicide hotline suggested that, in times of Pain, it is wise to increase one’s Pain-Coping Resources. Accordingly, Sita went home that night and, over dinner, told her mother everything. Her work. Christine. Ramu. Her mother’s eyes were gentle with sympathy and comfort. She listened and spooned food onto Sita’s plate and urged her to eat. And even as she felt the soothing solace of her mother’s concern, Sita wondered what her father would have said. Stand up and fight, or flee, flee, flee. Flee this earth and hope for better luck next time.

  She woke up in the middle of the night, the darkness of her dreams still upon her.

  She could hear her mother crying in the room next door. She felt herself falter. She was too full of her own emotion to try and absorb any more. But her mother’s tears did not stop. Sita got out of bed.

  “Oh,” said her mother, “I thought perhaps you had decided not to come.”

  I’m here, I’m here, Sita murmured, and patted her mother on her back.

  “Who do I have? Tell me that? In my troubles, who is there to stand beside me and help?” Her mother’s voice broke in the dark, heavy with tears.

  I am here, Ma, I am here.

  No, said her mother. You are not. You heard me crying, and yet you paused before you came. You are in your own misery, over that boy.

  What, you think he is going to marry you?

  Who will touch you, with your family’s stigma? Do you think of that? Did your father think of that? He took his life, and our life with it, yours and mine. Did he think? No, even in death, he was selfish.

  You are becoming like him. You were there for me once, but no more. Well, go from here.

  Go. Go! Get out of this room. Your father got out, didn’t he? Well, you get out too.

  But Sita stayed, holding her mother’s hand. She said nothing, the water draining silently out of her eyes and down her cheeks. Her mother finally fell into exhausted sleep, and Sita went out to the living room. She sat on her father’s favorite rosewood chair, feeling the weight of the air upon her body, pressing down on her face, sinking like lead into her lungs, pushing her arms and legs into the hard wood beneath. Her fingers splayed stiffly against her leg, unbendable. The room was freezing.

  Her mother shook her gently awake the next morning. “ Kanna,” she said. “Darling. Want some coffee?”

  As she had for the past three days, Sita studied the newspapers for stories of the socialite, feeling a strange yearning in her blood.

  Now Sita finds herself directing the car to Palace Towers. There is a fragility to her body, as though all the pieces of it are being held together by willpower alone. She parks the car, squeezing it between two others, and climbs out. She stumbles slightly over the broken pavement, and water sparks unreasonably in her eyes. The watchman hands her a little yellow parking receipt, and she digs in her handbag for twenty rupees. “You can pay later,” he says. “That’s okay,” she says.

  The lift is empty of all save the lift-boy. “The restaurant is closed,” he tells her. “Not open for lunch, only dinner. But the coffee shop is open.”

  That’s okay, she tells him.

  The socialite jumped in the middle of the night. Some people said she jumped stone-cold sober, without a whimper, flying through the air like a fashion fairy, borne on wings of dark despair. Others said, no, she drank herself into a stupor and simply stepped off the roof when she could drink no more. In the after pictures, her face was unrecognizable; bruised and swollen and blackened with pain.

  Sita sometimes wondered what led the socialite to choose this particular method—had she thought about alternatives? A sharp razor aimed at her wrists, slicing neatly into the flesh the way meat-eaters sliced into their food; or, perhaps, the uncomfortable swallowing of many pills? What about picking up a knife and plunging it with full force into the stomach? Or driving a car superfast right into a joyfully welcoming tree. Finding a gun amongst her family’s gun-running resources, and pointing it at herself, staring at her triumphant reflection in the mirror right up to that last moment when it is obscured by flying flecks of blood. Or that culturally preferred Indian manner of self-immolation, revered by myth, of drenching one’s clothes with fuel and then lighting a match, allowing the quick-jumping flame to dance lightly over the body. Why jump from a tall building? Sita has imagined it repeatedly: the wind blowing stiffly, lightly drying the wetness on the cheeks, the slight sense of vertigo; the fascinating pull of the earth far below, and the wondrous comfort that the next time she touches that earth, all the pain will be gone.

  The coffee shop is one floor below the restaurant. Sita enters it on sudden impulse. It is part of a new chain that is sweeping through the city, all brass and glass and air-conditioning, a sterile anti
dote to the potholed dust and noise of the street below. Sita reads the menu of coffees available, pausing over each one. The socialite in Delhi drank a cup of french-pressed Java coffee the day she died. This is also the same coffee that Christine prefers. Sita hesitates, and then orders the same thing.

  The coffee scalds her lips when it arrives and she sets the plastic cup down in a hurry. The brew seems too black, too thin, too foreign for her taste. Her mouth is trained to the traditional Mysore coffee prepared every single morning by her mother: wake up before sunrise, roast and grind the beans, and filter them through the compact steel decoction maker until the coffee flows thick and dark and strong. Temper with the bitterness and sorrow of a lifetime and mix with freshly boiled, steaming hot milk that has the cream frothing on the top. Add sugar and serve in tall steel tumblers, resting in flat-bottomed steel bowls, or davaras. That is the coffee that flows in Sita’s veins. But in these newfangled coffeehouses, all you get are weak-kneed innovations: café americano, café mocha, café latte. Sita cautiously adds a bit of milk and tries again. Sticking out her tongue, dipping it into the fragrant liquid, waiting for the alien flavors to climb gently into her mouth.

  At a very early age, Sita understood that her father’s death had somehow set her and her mother apart—divorced from friends, and later, from suitors; bound together, her mother and herself, to each other, in a separate universe. Her mother has always maintained that, between the two of them, they could get through almost anything, and for a long time Sita carried that hope within her like a talisman.

  Now she suddenly wonders if her mother had ever said that to her father as well.

  She feels herself beginning to shake. She abandons her coffee and leaves the coffee shop. The staircase is hidden next to the elevator. She walks up to the next level; it is deserted, the restaurant is closed. The balcony next to the restaurant looks out over the central atrium of the building, which soars lavishly to the roof.

  Sita balances her hands on the railing and stares at the mosaic floor ten stories below. Seductive, compelling, it beckons to her.

  Once more, she can feel the touch of her father’s hand on her shoulder.

  In America, she’d been taken one day to a Burger King by Christine, who didn’t connect the burgers on offer to the cows that Sita could not consume. Sita nibbled at onion rings and stared as the couple seated at the neighboring table fought with each other. They had no problem expressing themselves. They were not impeded by helplessness, caught between divergent controlling impulses that urged them to act in one way and simultaneously forced them to hold back.

  They shouted freely, back and forth. They called each other names. Their words jumped on top of each other, muscled each other to the ground.

  You whore, he said. You’ll do anything for money. You fucking whore.

  You started it, asshole, she said. Fuck you.

  Eventually, the woman burst into tears and ran into the bathroom. While she was away, the man picked up her coffee cup and spat into it, stirring his rage deep, so she could swallow it down when she returned. Sita tried to control her nausea and heard Christine say: “I hope you won’t mind me saying this, but in America, it’s considered bad manners to stare.”

  Her father flies past her, pulling her mother’s life behind him. The socialite raises a bottle to her lips and drinks.

  Sita’s hands tighten around the balcony rail. The conflict and loss within her suddenly begin to change form.

  She says out loud, words mixing with angry flecks of saliva: You whores, she says. You fucking whores. You’ll do anything for money.

  And she can feel herself stepping back, away from the balcony. She will now return to the office.

  She will go to her computer, and use her mouse to select the folder marked SigmaSoft. All her research, all her hard work. And then she will carefully drag that folder and all its contents straight to the Recycle Bin. Trash. Gone. Deleted. There you go, everybody. And then she will spit on them and laugh and make sure her tears stay well concealed.

  She walks slowly to the lift and presses the button. When the door opens, the lift-boy smiles and says, Had your coffee, madam?

  Yes, Sita says. I did.

  BIRDIE NUM-NUM

  It is two days after her twenty-seventh birthday, and Tara has returned home, to her parents’ apartment in Bangalore. She spends the first morning in her old bedroom, setting up her computer and removing the posters that exist layer upon layer as an archeological debris of her popular interests (Jim Morrison over ABBA over Mickey Mouse in strange febrile promiscuity), and replacing her Betty and Veronica comic books with Rushdie, Theroux, and crime fiction.

  Her movements are reflected in the mirror, which is edged with old photographs of Tara and her school friends playing dress-up, gawky giggles spilling from mouths painted bright red, in frozen contrast to the image in the mirror, clad in jeans and T-shirt and serious intent.

  The tape player is another relic of her teenage years; the music scratchily echoing pubescent dreams of wanting to be part of a star-spangled banner of swedish pop tarts. Can you hear the drums, Fernando? I remember long ago another starry night like this . . .

  Mrs. Srinivasan sits on the edge of the bed, watching Tara unpack and set up and rearrange. Her hand absently strokes the candlewick counterpane that covers the bed. It is a gently faded pink in color, bought ten years earlier to match the silk curtains that hang at the windows. She is struggling with the awareness that, after all these years, much about her daughter is strange to her. All the strangeness that comes with growing up and away. Naturally, she doesn’t say so, but it is odd to think of having Tara back on a full-time, albeit short-term basis. Tara has visited her parents often, during college vacation, but every visit has been a compulsive return to childhood, a willful wallowing in old memories and behaviors. Now, however, Tara is back on work. And, already, Mrs. Srinivasan can see her looking around her room with fresh eyes, trying to make it grow up in a hurry.

  Tara has vanished underneath her desk.

  “Surely Appa can send someone from his office to help you with that,” says Mrs. Srinivasan, in some surprise.

  Tara plugs in the last cable and presses a switch. The computer monitor blooms into life.

  “All done,” she says. She smiles at her mother and reaches for the stack of her favorite MOMA prints that she has brought to keep her company for the next few months. Tara has been absorbed in a postgraduate existence in America; her PhD course-work is finally complete, having meandered tediously through classrooms, in front of computers, in libraries, and in hopeful professorial conferences. Now it is just the thesis that remains, and she is in India to research Indian labor policy for her thesis proposal.

  “I will get you some tape for those posters,” says her mother.

  Tara holds aloft a spool of Scotch tape, but her mother has already left the room.

  Mrs. Srinivasan eventually returns, with tape, a cup of hot coffee for Tara, and two brightly colored envelopes.

  “You have returned,” she says, “just in time to attend these.”

  Tara sips her coffee and watches her mother open the first envelope, patterned ominously in red and gold.

  “The Shetty wedding,” her mother says. “Their daughter is getting married. They spent a huge amount of money on her beauty treatments, you know. Nose operation, skin-lightening, weight loss. She is still ugly like a monkey, but her mother talks as if she is a beauty queen. You are much better looking, without a doubt. They say the boy is settled in a good banking job in Singapore, but I heard from somebody else that he just got fired. We are called to all the functions.”

  “Who,” says Tara, “are the Shettys?”

  “The Shettys! You know the Shettys. Or perhaps,” says her mother, sorting through the cards, “not. There is a sangeet evening, the mehndi, the wedding itself, and the reception. There is also sure to be a young people’s party. I will call and see that you are invited. You will like them,” she says. “Th
e daughter is quite charming.”

  “Oh,” says Tara. “Thanks, Amma. But I don’t think . . . I mean, I won’t have time for parties and things.”

  “You must go. How will you meet people otherwise?”

  “I will be busy working, Amma. I’m not really here to meet people.”

  “If you are here and do not attend, it will not look nice. We will talk about it later. This other invite, I know you will be pleased about.” Tara instantly grows more wary as her mother picks up the cream-colored envelope decorated with a large Om symbol. “This is for your Vasu Athimber’s birthday, his Shashtiabdapoorthi.”

  “Heavens, is he just turning sixty? I thought he was much older.”

  “That is because he suffers from prostate trouble, poor man. Anyway, you can meet and catch up with your cousins. I don’t think you are keeping in close touch with them.”

  Vasu Athimber is married to her father’s second cousin. Tara glances at her mother, who meets her gaze and defies her to refuse this invitation also.

  Some serious negotiating is in the offing. But perhaps not today.

  Mrs. Srinivasan’s hand hovers over the stove, poised to bestow a spicy benediction into the oil heating in the kalchatti, the rounded black stone vessel reposing like a museum piece on top of the fancy gas range with the four burners, the built-in hot plate, the grill, and the electric oven. Mrs. Srinivasan is a purist; she received the kalchatti from her mother when she set up her first kitchen after her marriage, and she has used it to make vathal kuzhambu for thirty years. Teflon and Pyrex dishes may abound in her kitchen, but in some matters, she believes, traditional ways are best.

  She likes to think that the kitchen has always captured the essence of their family life. The perimeter of pantry, storeroom, and countertops act like a newspaper headline—one glance and you know the news of the day: houseguests, dinner party, schooltime or holidays, major illnesses, festivals. Today it wears all the signs of Tara’s homecoming dinner. Subbu, the cook, has prepared the fiery, watery rasam, the cabbage-and-peas poriyal, and the potato roast, and now stands to one side, proudly wearing the Casio watch that Tara has bought for him. He has cooked for them since Mrs. Srinivasan’s marriage, except for the times, like today, when she likes to make the “special dish.”