The Hope Factory Page 16

  “I’ll send some over,” he promised and watched Valmika rejoin her friends. From a distance, they stood transformed into women, shedding their girlhoods, all glowing faces and sweet-bosomed curves, newly ripened, luscious, bedecked with glitter and silk and stone, endearingly shy and uncertain of their charms. Valmika, he thought, was easily the prettiest of them all. She had evidently inherited more than beauty from her mother; he watched with sudden pride as she moved between her own friends and her parents’ guests gracefully, with no hint of teenage awkwardness.

  Her little brother was a fixture at the fireworks display that had started a few minutes earlier on the street. Anand had positioned him carefully, knowing Pingu’s enthusiasms and worrying about him hurting himself or others inadvertently. He was on the nervous verge of banning his son from the proceedings entirely or, at any rate, condemning him to watching the display from the safety of the garden, when Narayan had appeared to help. “I’ll be here, sir, and take care,” the boy had said, and Anand had immediately relaxed. He rushed back to the bar before Vidya could notice, his eyes beginning their restless scanning of the crowd once more.

  He saw Kavika’s mother first, before he noticed her; the sudden marked similarity between the two women: their lean height, the varying shades of gray, the simple Kanjeevaram silk sarees, and the matching traditional flat ruby collars. This time, Anand didn’t wait for a gesture from his wife; he carried a glass of sherry to Mrs. Nayantara Iyer, but Kavika had already moved on, disappearing into the colored waters of the crowd.

  The guests pressed around the bar; in the drowning waves of noise, Anand glanced upward to the only uncrowded space, the air that stretched and ballooned to the sky, interrupted by clouds and the fluttering leaves of trees. Someone—his wife, his father-in-law—had strung the bottlebrush tree with little fairy lights and, in a semblance of festive fun, hung elongated village dancing puppets from the branches; in the noise and the wind, the long-skirted, blank-faced puppets slowly rotated, looking like dead bodies hanging by their necks, their ghosts animating the crowds below.

  Considerably later, when guests were quite comfortably finding their own way to the bar and the hired bartender, Anand was finally free to leave his post. He made his way automatically over to where Amir and Amrita stood with a group of others, Kavika among them.

  “Ah, there you are! Released from your bonded labor duties, I see …” Amir hailed him with a grin. “Cheer up, bastard…. I’m guessing from your tragic expression that full credit for this party goes to Vidya?”

  “Yeah…. Oh, absolutely,” said Anand, gratefully seizing the opportunity to clarify the matter in front of Kavika. “You know me, yaar. I’m not into these large parties … prefer quiet evenings …”

  He heard Kabir say: “You’re such a bore, yaar. Thank God for your beautiful wife … throws the best parties around.”

  “Thanks also, I think, to our good and benevolent Harry Chinappa. I detect his subtle hand behind the arrangements …” said Amir, raising his glass. “A toast to him.”

  In the distance, Harry Chinappa worked his way around the room as only he could, with a calm tenacity and a bluff smile that apparently hid the darker shades of his personality from the people he encountered. He had the habit of placing one hand lightly on the arm of the person he was talking to, or enclosing their hands in both of his, of staring intently into their eyes as they spoke; by the time the conversation was over, they found themselves committed to a lifelong friendship with Harry Chinappa without quite being aware of how it came about.

  Anand had forgotten to ask who his father-in-law’s very important guests were going to be. At the height of the party, Vinayak, standing next to him said, “Oh my god,” and the rest of the party went silent. And there was Harry Chinappa threading his way through the guests, Harry Chinappa not alone but gilded in his hour of triumph by the man who was following in his footsteps, stopping every now and then to smile at people, to shake hands, to modestly and lightly wear the tingling cloak of celebrity that swept over the room, Vijayan.

  He was not alone; accompanying him was a film actor who had a huge following in the state but even so could not detract attention from the politician he was trailing. Even Amir and Amrita, Anand saw, appeared starstruck.

  Harry Chinappa looked around. Their eyes met; Anand’s first instinct was to pretend that he hadn’t seen him, but he could not avoid his fate indefinitely. He duly made his way over and was introduced to Vijayan. A few words, closely monitored by his father-in-law, and the audience was over. Harry Chinappa placed one hand on Vijayan’s shoulder and turned away, dismissing Anand, swallowed instantly by the thronging crowd.

  The politician and his actor friend were, under his father-in-law’s stewardship, soon seated at a card table, where Vinayak, with unerring calculation, also quickly planted himself.

  Amir began to talk politics—and if Diwali wishes came true, Anand would have guided the four of them—Amir, Amrita, Kavika, and himself—into his study, where they could sit at their ease in the peace and enjoy the luxury of their conversation. And perhaps, after a few minutes, Amir and Amrita would excuse themselves and wander back to the party, leaving him alone with Kavika. He glanced at the woman standing next to him; surely this magical creature would infinitely prefer that to the noise of this rank and fevered crowd? She was nodding now as she listened to Amir, but whatever she was about to say was rudely interrupted.

  “Good point, very good point … now, Amir, bhai-jaan, can you quit being so fucking serious for one evening?” Kabir had reappeared with a tray with tequila in shot glasses, salt, and lime, Vidya laughing by his side.

  Amir shook his head austerely. “No, no. Shots, ugh. What are you guys, college kids?” he asked, as he sniffed reverently at his glass of single malt whiskey. Anand refused the tequila; Kavika, Vidya, and Amrita downed the shots with Kabir.

  The party seemed to shift into a higher gear. The music switched from soothing sarod to muscular, drum-thumping Bollywood, and Kabir immediately swung Kavika out to dance.

  Anand noticed two things: Kavika was a graceful dancer, with all the right moves. And Kabir, in his well-tailored black sherwani, looked like a movie star.

  Anand himself, as a concession to the occasion, was wearing a cotton kurta, rejecting the silk one that Vidya had laid out for him. He had looked at himself in the mirror before the party; he’d appeared normal. He hadn’t been able to tell if that was good or bad. Next to his wife, he had looked plain. Now, he suddenly wondered: was everything Vidya routinely implied about him, in fact, true? He felt it might be; he felt awkward, boring, dull.

  The heat rose within him, he was enveloped in hot glue. The tide and tug of the crowd pushed him this way and that; he smiled perfunctorily at random faces. He had an overwhelming desire to leave immediately, to go home, instantly followed by the despair of knowing he was home; he could not leave. He went to the bartender and collected a glass of beer, watching the foam slip down the sides of the glass, settle, and slowly disappear into the pale yellow liquid. The puppets danced above his head in the wind, laughing at him.

  • • •

  LATE THAT NIGHT, HARRY Chinappa, flushed with the success of the evening, placed his arm around Anand’s shoulders. “Good job, my boy,” he said generously, as though the party was entirely Anand’s doing. “Those tiger prawns … Excellent idea, if I say so myself…. Vidya, did you see how happy Vijayan was? Excellent evening …”

  Vidya, stretched out in exhaustion on the sofa, with her feet up and her hand wrapped around a glass of water, looked at the strange tableau of Anand and her father in silent astonishment. “My father seems happy with you,” she said later, and there was as much doubt as surprise in her voice.

  fifteen

  THE LANDLORD’S MOTHER WAS UNRELENTING. She waved a gleaming sewing needle threateningly in the noonday sun. “Well, boy,” she said to Narayan, “are you going to tell me, or do I have to beat it out of you? You little rascal, keeping me twitc
hing with impatience, like a mustard seed dancing in hot oil!”

  “Amma should be here shortly,” said Narayan, grinning and sidling out of the courtyard. “She will tell you everything.”

  But it was a good hour more before Kamala entered the courtyard; she barely had time to remove her slippers and splash cold water over her feet and face before she was seized by the landlord’s mother.

  “Come and sit,” the old lady said. “You must be very tired. Your son is a monkey and wants a beating. His speech is like this year’s rain—ceaseless when you least require it and a drought of silence when you do. No, he has said nothing, nothing! But what little he saw fit to drop before me, thrown like crumbs to a passing crow, almost made me faint. So we have been waiting for you! Sit, sit. You must be tired, have some coffee.”

  But grimy fatigue chased Kamala first to the bathroom for a cold bath, and it was a good half hour more before she settled down in the courtyard with a sigh of relief, a clean saree draped about her and her washed hair loosed from its customary knot at the base of her neck and spread open and wet across her back. She felt pleasantly light-headed and loose-bodied—like a wet rag squeezed dry and left to hang in the sun. She could relax into speech, knowing that the afternoon held nothing more than the indulgence of a delicious sleep.

  The landlord’s mother and wife fluttered about until they settled down beside her (having pressed a glass of hot coffee into her hand), with their hands full of work, mending, dinner preparations, baby.

  “So,” said Kamala.

  “So, sister, what was he like?” said the landlord’s wife eagerly, her knee gently rocking the baby on her lap to sleep.

  “Oh, oh,” said her mother-in-law, her hands busy peeling potatoes. “Slow down, Daughter! Let her tell the story as she pleases…. But Kamala-child, before this impatient one explodes … what was he like?”

  Kamala could not help laughing. “Very handsome,” she said. “Even more so than he is on the screen. And also very polite.”

  The landlord’s mother and wife sighed in appreciation.

  Vidya-ma’s father had inspected the Diwali party preparations and had duly chastised the household servants and Vidya-ma—but he had also, unwittingly, given them an unexpected reward. His special guest of the evening was some politician full of trumpeting newspaper pride and noise. But, traveling in the politician’s uninspiring wake—like the glowing evening star to his dull new moon—was the truly famous film star.

  “Yes,” said Kamala. “When I served him a snack, he did not just take it, as the other guests might. He made it a point to smile and say thank you.”

  “He spoke to you!” said the landlord’s wife, in an agony of happiness. Her eyes lapsed into the middle distance, savoring the vision in her mind.

  “You are very lucky,” said her mother-in-law. “What was he wearing? And did he speak to you again?”

  “He was wearing a dark blue silk kurta, with gold embroidery around the collar, a gold chain, and gold rings—very smart, very handsome,” said Kamala. “And no—I did not speak to him again. But Narayan did.”

  “Narayan? Our Narayan! What did he do? He did not shame us all by misbehaving, did he?”

  “No, no,” said Kamala, her pride evident. “Quite the contrary.”

  And as she spoke, her mind still echoed with her amazement of the night before—the sights and sounds of the party pasted bright and clear, and in the midst of that, wonder at her son’s daring.

  ANAND-SAAR’S HOUSE LOOKED LIKE a white, glowing pearl floating on the dark earth. Light was everywhere, fighting the night: small bulbs in wired lines limning the outlines of the building and the garden walls; clay-mud lamp holders patterned with peepholes; kuthivellaku lamps—tall brass ones, with strong, firm stems that held the five petals aloft, each with a burning wick at its tip. The lights were interspersed with the flowers that Kamala and Thangam had spent the morning arranging: saffron-white-and-green garlands of marigold, jasmine, and mango leaves. And of course, like thunderous rainfall over it all, the brilliance and dazzle of fireworks, rending the night sky with noise, smoke, and color.

  The thronging guests may have enjoyed the extravagance of it all, but the lights and flowers and beauty of the house held no mysteries for Kamala; she had worked at them all day. She, instead, found herself fascinated by the guests themselves—creatures of rare glamour, the lights of the house captured and glistening about their gilded persons. She had once, in a fit of profligacy, spent money on a pair of tickets for the Capricorn Circus when it came to the city. She had chastened herself for this indulgence, knowing that the images on the posters that appeared on the backs of buses all over the city were nothing but false drama, invention, to act as deceptive lures for the circus—the actual show was bound to be a disappointment and waste of money. No such thing; she and Narayan had sat mesmerized through the show, at the clowns, the animals, and those remarkable flying ladies, who shocked Kamala first by appearing in sequined clothes of extreme indecency—little more than a bra and panty set—and then, when she was wondering indignantly if she should cover Narayan’s young and innocent eyes, they proceeded to swarm up those ladders and fly through the air in a fashion that made her forget her son, their clothes, and everything else.

  That same sense of unreality pervaded Kamala as the party unfolded. She gawked, amazed, as she once had at the ladies in golden chuddies who had tumbled from ring to ring and who had danced playfully around their pet tigers and bears like goddesses immune to the laws of the natural world.

  Every now and then, Kamala and Thangam were required to carry a tray of hot snacks into the crowd. Kamala held the heavy silver tray gingerly, like an alien thing, nervous lest she bump into one of the silk-encrusted guests, gorgeous and gregarious, laughing and chattering, and splatter them with chutney. She (as per her instructions) was to invade each cluster of guests, smile, and proffer the tray, but she could not bring herself to do that. Instead, she carried the tray stiffly and walked steadily around the drawing room and the garden, avoiding all the large clusters and definitely going nowhere near the men clinging boisterously to the bar. Her goal was to return to the safety of the kitchen as quickly as possible, all the snacks on her tray preserved intact if need be.

  She kept a wary eye out for Vidya-ma but did not spot her in the crowds. In the distance, she could see Thangam in a colorful dress, holding out her tray of snacks quite nonchalantly and smiling at the visitors, in an act of daring that left Kamala awed and wondering.

  If she was content to stand at the kitchen door with Shanta, who seemed to have lost her acrid bite and gazed, subdued, into the crowd, Thangam, next to them, compensated with a stream of excited commentary. “Look at that one!” she would say. “Does she not look like a queen?” That hair. That dress. “And see that one dance?” she said, gesturing toward a woman moving enthusiastically on the verandah. “She is doing the dance steps from that disco-dancing movie.” And Thangam’s own feet would move in rhythmic imitation, in steps she apparently knew quite well.

  “Do you know,” she asked Kamala, “how much money they are gambling for on that table?”

  The card tables had been placed in a relatively quiet corner of the drawing room, away from the bar and the dancing and the noise of the fireworks, to enable the players to concentrate on their game and to hear one another’s bids. The tables were draped in white cloth, each with a large silver bowl placed in the center. All the action took place around this bowl: money flung in, cards dealt and displayed; the women, their gold-littered robes of silk and gauze sweeping to the floor, reaching for their cards with eager bejeweled hands; the men, balancing glasses of whiskey and cigarettes and cards; the rising tides of excitement that swept through them all as the silver bowls rapidly filled and then overflowed with money.

  “At that table,” said Thangam, “each game is for hundreds of rupees.” Really? said Kamala. That much? “And there, that table,” said Thangam, “they play for thousands.” Ignoring Kamala�
�s ignorant gasp, she pointed her to the table in the far corner, where the film star sat with his politician friend, Vidya-ma’s father standing by in close attendance, his daughter at his side, laughing and talking. “And in that table,” said Thangam, “they play each hand for a lakh.”

  And thus it was that Kamala overcame her shyness and nervousness and made her way to that table with the next tray of snacks, to serve the film star and politician and others. She wanted to see what one lakh of rupees—two years’ salary—would look like all at one time.

  BEFORE THE PARTY STARTED, Kamala had given her son some words of instruction:

  “Keep yourself to the shadows. Do not show your face where it is not required. Stay in the kitchen with Shanta or, if you so wish, engage in conversation with the tandoori-oven man. Do not think to thrust yourself into the glare of Anand-saar’s party. Be not tempted by the snacks they will serve; I am sure our turn will come later—or so it is to be hoped. Step not on passing toes; speak respectfully to the catering company people; and, in general, keep yourself to the shadows.”

  He had meekly agreed, and she was pleased.

  But, at some point shortly thereafter, he slipped away from the kitchen. She saw him befriending the barman, assisting him by pulling out soft drink bottles from the ice basin where they lay submerged. Eventually the lure of the fireworks was too strong and he darted away, and when Anand-saar summoned her out to the fireworks, Kamala instantly suspected trouble. She rehearsed worried answers and scolds in her mind—she should have locked that mischievous boy in the storeroom. But instead, she was sent to fetch a shirt, a brand-new shirt, worth hundreds of rupees, for her son to wear.

  He reappeared a whole hour later, his face bearing a satisfied grin and his hands the blackened evidence of much lighting of rockets and crackers. Vidya-ma’s father had instructed that they were to be burnt without cessation.