The Red Carpet Read online

  Tara walks in, to the sputter and pop of mustard seeds dancing with the other spices in the stone kalchatti.

  “Finished unpacking?” Mrs. Srinivasan asks.

  She can feel her daughter standing at her right elbow, just where it is most obstructive to her movements. Sometimes Tara’s inexperience in the kitchen really shows. Mrs. Srinivasan quickly adds the washed curry leaves to the hot oil and spices, and is engulfed by a volcanic eruption of steam that nudges her daughter away.

  Tara wanders around the kitchen, investigating the contents of the stainless steel kadais that lie decorously covered on the granite kitchen counter, awaiting their turn to be heated and served for lunch. It is the same menu that greets her every time she comes home; the utterly priceless constituents of all the homesick meals she has ever eaten in her cold country dreams. “Yeah,” she says. “Just some reference books and papers left. I’ll do that after lunch. Is that a new fridge, Amma?”

  Mrs. Srinivasan smiles; she didn’t think Tara would notice. She picks up the bowl of tamarind soaking in water and works the flesh with her fingers, loosening the pulp from the fiber and mixing it well with the water. Then, using her loosely cupped fingers as a strainer, she filters the brew directly into the kalchatti, relishing the hiss that rises as it strikes the oil, carrying the sharp bite of tamarind straight to the nose.

  “You know, I really should learn to cook this stuff.” Tara is back at her elbow, watching the process with great interest. “Maybe I’ll learn this trip.”

  Mrs. Srinivasan should be thrilled to hear this, but, in fact, she has much larger plans for her daughter during this visit than just learning to cook. Or completing that old PhD, for that matter.

  Mrs. Srinivasan likes to rest after lunch with a novel, but today her mind is restless with plans. Her novel lies unread, her eyes wander over the pile of gifts that Tara has brought home to her parents and that are heaped on the bed. A Rosenthal decorative plate; single malt whisky and sports shirts for her father; cosmetics and perfume for her mother. A bottle of dry Amontillado sherry, which Mrs. Srinivasan inspects dubiously. She is used to her Bristol Cream, which combines the merit of being a sherry with all the sweetness she requires in her evening drink. Tara has tried to nudge her out of the habit. (“You may as well drink Pepsi and get it over with.”) Mrs. Srinivasan suspects that this new bottle is another of her daughter’s attempts to upgrade her.

  The best way, she finally decides, is to plan a cocktail party in the house.

  That is something Tara cannot avoid, cannot manufacture some silly excuse to escape. Mrs. Srinivasan has waited patiently for years, for a lifetime of dealing with her daughter has given her patience to rival geological time. But now she has made up her mind: on this visit, Tara will be presented properly to all her friends. Not just casually, on a home-for-the-holidays, oh-hello-aunty basis, but properly, as someone who might one day be part of their own families. She is all too aware of the calendar. In three short years Tara will be thirty. And by that time, Mrs. Srinivasan fully intends to hold a grandchild in her arms.

  “And how is Madam, madam?”

  “My mother’s fine, thank you. In fact, there she is.” Tara turns her attention from the head steward of the Club and sips her gin-and-tonic as she waits for her mother to join her. Around her, wood-paneled walls soar up to the high ceiling, displaying a collection of stiff-necked animal heads; gloomy, glassy-eyed, decapitated and stuffed decades earlier by Englishmen crazed by the noonday sun, captured also on the Club wall in photographs, posing with catch and game and natives, and staring in turn with glassy-eyed gloom at the same natives disporting themselves in their club, in their chairs, affecting the mannerisms that they had once patented.

  Mrs. Srinivasan seats herself opposite Tara, placing an overstuffed shopping bag on the floor and arranging her saree dexterously about her knees. “So tiring! The Club stores are so crowded,” she says. “Did you meet your friend Rohini? She’s married, isn’t she? Yes, I thought so, so nice. Are you ready to go? No, no, finish your drink.”

  She waves to a friend across the room. “Poor woman!” she says. Tara is probably not paying attention, but Mrs. Srinivasan’s mouth runs on from old habit. “Her daughter, getting divorced, no children. And her son, they say, is having a boyfriend. Such shame! In my day, such things were not even spoken of.”

  To her surprise, Tara looks at her quite seriously. “All of which is happening for a reason, you know.”

  “What reason?”

  “Well, see,” says Tara. “Look at the changes that have taken place over the past hundred years.”

  Her mother, who is fifty-one, tries unsuccessfully to do so.

  “The species,” says Tara, “is not threatened anymore. We have a sufficiently large population to ensure survival.”

  “What species?”

  “Human beings, Amma. And furthermore, look at the changes in technology. That explains a lot.”

  “What technology?”

  “Reproductive technology. To create a viable baby, the sperm doesn’t have to meet the egg in the womb anymore. They can meet in a petri dish.”

  Mrs. Srinivasan glances at the approaching waiter, to see if he has overheard this embarrassingly explicit conversation. She shakes her head at Tara. Later, we can talk about this later, she wants to say, but Tara is already continuing:

  “In fact, they don’t even have to meet. Babies can be cloned.”

  “What does all this rubbish have to do with that poor woman’s son and daughter?”

  “I’m telling you. Because of these changes, women can now delay or cancel their breeding without threatening the species. And that’s what you’re seeing nowadays. And furthermore, for the same reason, if you’re inclined to sexual experimentation or same-sex relationships, you can go right ahead. The human sexual relationship,” says Tara, “has been forever freed from the Need to Breed. What are you doing all this shopping for?”

  Mrs. Srinivasan is shocked. “For the party. Tomorrow evening. What else?”

  “Oh, gosh, Amma. What a waste of energy. Don’t fritter away your time on this. I brought a movie from the video store that I want you to see when we get home. It’s an absolute classic.”

  “Is it?” Mrs. Srinivasan says, vaguely, her mind once again on the menu for tomorrow evening. She is always careful to maintain a nice blend of Indian and international foods for her parties. This time they will start with batter-fried baby corn with a peanut satay dip, and hummus, served with carrot wedges and that expensive broccoli that she acquired after a four-day stake-out at the Club’s cold storage supplier. Mushroom vol-au-vents and minced mutton kebabs. Grilled chicken and pesto canapés. Delightfully crisp cocktail samosas with a tangy chutney. Those shrimp and bacon things that people seem to enjoy so much. What on earth does Tara call them? Angels on horseback, yes. The food will be a hit, Mrs. Srinivasan knows. It always is. She declines a drink, impatient to get home and check if the cook is doing everything on schedule.

  “Are you going to wear that new salwar-khameez suit that I bought you?” she asks.

  “What, right now?” Tara asks, astonished.

  “No. Tomorrow. For the party,” Mrs. Srinivasan says. “Are you going to wear that? What are you going to wear?” This is the third time she has asked the question over the past few days, but she has never received a satisfactory answer.

  “Dear god,” Tara says. “Amma, why don’t you just think about what you are going to wear.”

  “Oh, I haven’t decided,” says Mrs. Srinivasan, though she has. It will be fun to discuss her options with Tara, and to look at the sarees together. . . . Perhaps Tara will decide to wear a saree also. A vision of her daughter elegantly dressed appears tantalizingly in her mind.

  Tara catches the pleased smile on her mother’s face and smiles back. She places her empty glass on a side table and inclines her head towards the exit. “Coming to see this movie or not?”

  Mrs. Srinivasan hesitates. There is a lot to b
e done around the house, but it can wait awhile. “All right,” she says. “What is this movie?”

  “One of my favorites. It’s witty, it’s brilliant. A real classic.”

  “Roman Holiday?” Mrs. Srinivasan asks hopefully. She is very fond of Audrey Hepburn.

  Tara picks up her mother’s shopping bag; the headwaiter ducks his head ingratiatingly as the two women leave the clubhouse.

  The music blares, the titles roll.

  Tara glances at her mother, wondering what she will think of it. Mrs. Srinivasan looks startled, her attention riveted to the television screen. Tara settles back, mouthing the dialogue along with the actors in the movie. It has been a while since she has last seen it, but she stills knows chunks of the film by heart. “Do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris? . . . a Royale with Cheese . . .” Later, Mrs. Srinivasan’s lips are still pursed. She tries to look enthusiastic. “It was . . . interesting. Quite interesting. Except,” she cannot help saying, “for that dreadful language.”

  “Ungrammatical, you mean?”

  “Tchi! It was full of Bad language! Why do they use it?”

  “Fuck knows,” Tara says, but only to herself.

  “It’s so unnecessary!”

  “Amma, it’s a movie about American gangsters. You can’t expect the Queen’s English.”

  “No, but still . . .”

  Tara starts to laugh. “Can you imagine . . .” She assumes an exaggerated English accent: “ ‘I say, Higgins, old chap, take a pop at that ruddy blighter.’ . . . ‘After you, Pickering, old fellow. I insist.’ . . . ‘I desired the waiter in Paris to bring me a minced beef sandwich. Except those French chappies call it a Le Beeg Mac.’ . . . ‘Not really. How droll.’ . . .”

  “Now, that is what I call a good movie,” says her mother. “My Fair Lady. Good music, romantic, witty, lovely costumes . . . Which reminds me,” she says, “what are you going to wear for the party?”

  Tara asks, foolishly, ignorantly: Why does it matter so much what I wear?

  “One must be well dressed for such occasions,” Mrs. Srinivasan says, inadequately, she feels.

  I will be, says Tara. Well dressed. I have been, she says, for years.

  “Good! So, what are your choices? Did you bring anything nice from America? If you don’t like that salwar-khameez, you can wear one of my sarees. I have one that will look lovely on you. With your long hair carefully dressed, and that saree, you will look like a goddess . . . not like that Shetty girl, poor thing. She is scrawny like a starving mouse.”

  As she speaks, she can see her daughter’s face turn towards her in startled comprehension, but it is too late, she cannot recall the words.

  Please don’t tell me, Tara says, that that’s what this party is all about.

  And Mrs. Srinivasan is forced to say: “What nonsense! Why can I not throw a party for my friends when my daughter comes home? . . . Matchmaking? What nonsense! Why do you say such things? I think you forget who you are talking to. No, it is you who are fussing over such a tiny thing!”

  Tara walks out, but not before her mother hears her say, implausibly: What makes you think I’m going to attend this stupid party?

  The sound of the door slamming shut reverberates through the walls and right through Mrs. Srinivasan’s belly. She knows that her daughter is only joking, she has to be—inconceivable to think of absenting herself from her parents’ party, such disrespect—but still, Mrs. Srinivasan feels the whine of tension tighten around her spine.

  The fact is, somewhere along the way Tara has drifted away from her. Now she seems to take after her father instead—freewheeling, impulsive, and self-absorbed when it comes to domestic matters. Mrs. Srinivasan instinctively rebels against this arrangement of things. Behavior that she will excuse and compensate for in her husband is intolerable in her grown-up daughter. After all, men will be men, but shouldn’t daughters be a support?

  And here, Mrs. Srinivasan knows herself to be the victim of a time warp. It isn’t fair, being trained to do something all your life, and then, when it is too late to change, being told that it was all a mistake. By the way, a woman’s place isn’t in the kitchen. How silly you are, you and your kitty parties. Sometimes she doesn’t even know whether things have really changed all that much, or whether Tara assumed some attitude, like today, just to shock her.

  Didn’t young women dream of marriage anymore?

  Was her daughter not lonely?

  Her hand automatically straightens the remote controls into a line. There are three of them, one each for the TV, the VCR, and the DVD player, and Mrs. Srinivasan sometimes finds it difficult to tell them apart.

  Tara pours herself a snifter of cognac from her father’s bar and wanders out onto the terrace garden of the sprawling penthouse apartment. Lavelle Road reposes below in a midnight hush. Behind her, the house is quiet. Her parents are asleep, the servants have long since retired. Tara stands in a blanket of darkness: a lonely lamp diffuses the shadows within the house, but doesn’t penetrate to where she stands; the street below is barely lit, the streetlights in perpetual dysfunction. The dark is echoed in the heavy cloud cover above. There is no rain, but the southwest winds whip past, forcing the monsoon onwards. Tara shivers in the chill, glad of the shawl she has wrapped around herself. She sips her fiery drink, inhaling the fumes from the glass held warm in the cup of her hand.

  When Tara turned eighteen, her parents gifted her with all the further education she could possibly want, along with a tacit understanding that she would be free to choose anyone she liked for a life-mate. A rare, delightful freedom, which Tara fully appreciated, until she grew older and realized that it carried, cunningly concealed within it, a set of maternal expectations embedded like land mines, with the ability to detonate through her life when she least expected it. She had been gifted with the freedom to choose—but not the freedom to delay. Or to refuse. Or to change her mind, no thanks, maybe later, I don’t feel like it, don’t-call-me-about-it-I’ll-call-you. Especially once she turned twenty-five.

  This visit had promised to be different. Tara had hoped that seeing her return home on work would give her mother a different perspective, one that was more closely allied with Tara’s view of herself. Where her mother focused happily, as she used to, on the things that Tara had achieved, instead of chasing after her with the terrible question that dogged her through all her recent visits, from the moment she stepped off the just-landed plane: Have you found Anyone Special yet?

  An autorickshaw rumbles by, the noise echoing in the quiet of the street.

  The shadows of the prostitutes sidle along the pavement, merging every now and then with cars that slow down, stop, and then continue on their way. The police are busy: their whistles sound in intermittent haunting monotones, informing the sleeping citizens that they could rest in peace, and also encouraging the prostitutes to have a successful night; for the policemen, who believe in the Nehruvian socialist ideal that the public sector should support private industry, would be around for their percentage later.

  Her friend Rohini had once asked her whether her mother knew about Derek. And all Tara could think was, Oh yes, that would make for a lovely conversation. “Mother, you know how you keep asking if I’ve found someone? Well, I did, and then he found someone else and didn’t tell me about it, so to answer your question, technically no, I haven’t.” Though, in the misery of the months that followed, Tara had more than once reached for the phone, her fingers dialing the number home. And each time, she had put the phone down, never quite sure if the comfort she needed was the comfort her mother could provide.

  And, now, there was this foolish, foolish party.

  Did her mother not see how demeaning it was?

  From her perch four floors above street level, she has a good view of the city skyline. It has remained unchanged her entire life, and, on every visit, she has gone through the ritual of identifying all the nighttime sights of home: the lone red light atop the Unity Buildin
g glowing in the distance as a warning to low-flying (extremely low-flying, practically landed type of low-flying) aircraft; the dark host of trees silhouetted against the orange haze of the sodium vapor lamps that light Mahatma Gandhi Road. And on the other side, the dense mass of Cubbon Park in the distance; and beyond, the peculiar monolithic Life Insurance Corporation building, shaped like a submarine, and vainglorious Vidhana Soudha, seat of governmental inefficiencies, illumined with all the light that is kept in such short supply to the rest of the city.

  Mrs. Srinivasan leans against the bar and looks around with a feeling of quiet satisfaction. The penthouse looks beautiful in the fading dusk light. The sloping wooden roof gleams with mansion polish. The marble floor has been scrubbed twice with soap and water. She turns the main chandelier on, and gently tones down the brightness of the beam to a gentle glow that will deepen with the dusk, until the wooden roof above gleams red. The lights play off the Baccarat dolphins, and over the dark wood of the piano and the mahogany Masai carvings that she bought three years ago while on safari in Kenya.

  The piano is an old English baby grand that Mrs. Srinivasan still practices on religiously every day. A long, long time ago, Mrs. Srinivasan started Tara on piano lessons, her mind filled with young-mother dreams of playing duets with her daughter to an admiring audience of her friends. Dreams that, like so many others, have fallen blithely away. Tara refused to buckle down to the rigors of classical music, preferring to bang out the occasional show tune when she was in the mood.

  Mrs. Srinivasan walks about, mentally reviewing her check-list. Crisp linen doilies, embroidered by Catholic nuns and bought at the little SSV shop off Church Street, lie scattered about. Wax candles have been placed in all the bizarre and varied candlesticks that are her passion. Of course they have an inverter for the frequent power cuts that besiege the city at the most inconvenient of times, but candlelight really does create a lovely ambiance. Matchboxes that she has hoarded over the years are layered carefully in a ceramic bowl: Taj and Oberoi hotel matchboxes at the bottom, then matches from the ‘21’ Club in New York and Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, and finally, right on top, her favorite: POST-PRANDIAL SLINGS AT THE LONG BAR from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.