The Red Carpet Page 4

  Mr. D’Costa paid the Good Fellows Bakery man and wondered what to do. He stared across the street for possibly the tenth time, eyeing Rohini Kapur’s curtained windows with some concern. They were usually thrown open at first light, to let in the fresh sweet early morning air. The uncharacteristic closed curtains this morning weren’t the only signs of something wrong. The lights had been on late in the Kapur house last night. Not a party or anything. Just these two women talking and talking by the open balcony doors. Rohini and her friend, that rather alarming Miss Tara Srinivasan, who dashed about carelessly dressed with her long hair flashing, uncombed, in the wind. Nothing to put his finger on really—women, he knew, had this remarkable ability to talk their whole lives through—nothing to engender this vague feeling of unease—except that the first bottle of wine had given way to a second, and then he had seen her cry. Rohini, weeping a deep sorrow into the lap of her friend.

  Mr. D’Costa concluded that it was probably some matter of husband and wife. Certainly, those hugs and kisses, so improperly given at meetings and good-byes, had fallen away many months ago. But that too was natural after the birth of a child. The women got testy and tired, and were best left to revive.

  Mr. D’Costa had missed his usual nightly treat of watching an old-timer movie after his wife departed for bed, movies that took him back to a time when he had been young enough and fool enough to think that yes, someday, he too would be a Jimmy Stewart, a Cary Grant, a Master of the Universe. Instead he had stayed by the window, shirtless and in a banian vest in the cool evening breeze.

  And this morning, closed curtains.

  He wondered what to do. Perhaps she was not well; perhaps there was no one to attend to her, since her husband was out of town. The servants, after all, couldn’t be counted on in a time of trouble. They always seemed to choose the moments when you needed them most to come and complain about their own miserable lives.

  Perhaps he should go across and inquire. After all, hadn’t he helped her once before? Hadn’t he been there to support her when she was most in need? A help in need is a help in deed. And, good woman that she was, she saw to it that he never had cause to regret it, by treating him ever after with a certain special courtesy and respect that came from her eyes and made him feel proud and important and included in her life. It had all happened, he remembered, rather suddenly.

  Rohini Kapur had reached the end of her pregnancy. Her baby was due in just three weeks. Her short, sprightly body had grown bulbous and huge, seemingly overwhelmed by the weight it carried. “Kind of like a back-to-front turtle,” she would joke, when Mr. D’Costa asked her how she was feeling. Certainly she was unrecognizable as the young woman of compact energy she had once been. She had taken to spending long hours sitting on her balcony in front of the French windows, sipping at fruit juices and reading novels and simply staring at the flowers in the garden, her eyes dulled and restless, captured by the nervous tick that kept a countdown on her ongoing pregnancy.

  Mr. D’Costa spied her sitting on her balcony, her head bent over a book, as he left his house to walk the short distance to Ulsoor Market for his daily shopping. Her distant presence triggered a fresh outbreak of the irritation that had plagued him since the previous day. It had been most annoying. He’d watched Rohini busy herself at the dining table with bread, butter, slices of tomato, cucumber, lettuce, and cheese, and he could not resist informing everyone, when they were all gathered around the Good Fellows Bakery man. “Every day she is eating sandwiches for lunch, you know.”

  “Is that so? Just sandwiches, is it? Nothing hot, is it? Tchi, tchi,” said Mrs. Ambekar, for whom lunch had to be hot and homemade, preferably millet bhakdi breads, eaten with hot lentil and legume stews like amti-pitle, vegetables, and a nice pickle, like that spicy gongura that Mrs. Reddy used to make and send over, though not as frequently since her husband died, poor soul. Sandwiches, dry, raw, and inhospitable, were not food enough for one, let alone for two.

  But it was Mrs. Gnanakan, who usually agreed with him on all matters, who had said: “No, no, Mr. D’Costa. How can that be? You must be mistaken.”

  And Mr. D’Costa wanted to say, with an irritation that refused to fade even one day later: Who are you to question me about these people? Do I not know them as if they were my own children? Would not Elizabeth have eaten similar sandwiches while carrying his grandchildren?

  It was, oddly enough, that very irritation that almost made him miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He stepped out of his house with a plastic woven basket on his arm and an old cricket cap on his head, his head so steeped in annoyance that he almost walked twenty yards before he heard the panic-stricken voice, calling from behind him: Mr. D’Costa! He shuddered later to think that, a few yards more, and he would have missed hearing Rohini’s voice completely, thereby leaving the final honors to Mr. Kurien or someone else.

  Instead, it was he who had the pleasure of announcing to Mr. Kurien across the wall, and subsequently to everyone else as well, that he had actually visited the Kapur home.

  That he had helped Rohini out at a very crucial moment, just as a father would.

  As a prospective grandfather would.

  The facts are thus: with Aman Kapur on a business trip and due back the next day, the cook out shopping, the telephone choosing this moment (of all moments) to cross connect and go on the blink, preventing Rohini from calling anyone else, and the baby rushing down with a hasty disregard for anyone else’s timetable, Rohini did the only thing she could. She hailed Mr. D’Costa.

  He rushed to her side, his alarm and helplessness dying down before her own.

  He couldn’t drive her car. The last time he had got behind a steering wheel was twenty years ago, and that had been in an Ambassador car, very different from the fancy new piece that reposed in Rohini’s garage in the building basement. So he walked quickly to the main street and flagged down an autorickshaw. They both squeezed into the back, with Mr. D’Costa awkwardly clinging onto the small suitcase that Rohini had providentially packed just the previous day, and bounced off towards the maternity hospital. The auto-driver rose gamely to the occasion and drove even more like a film star than ever, and the auto lurched and bumped its way through every pothole, unwittingly hastening the birth process to an alarming extent. As soon as they arrived, Rohini was surrounded by her doctor and attendant nurses and rushed off to the labor room, and Mr. D’Costa breathed again.

  He called her mother, in a two-minute call to Delhi, from the IST/STD telephone booth outside.

  He called her friend, Miss Tara, a little nervously, but thankfully got only Tara’s mother.

  He couldn’t call Aman Kapur because Rohini had left the number behind, and he couldn’t afford to pay for the call to Singapore anyway.

  He then bought a box of mithai, sweetmeats steeped in sugar and ghee and celebration, with the last of his vegetable money and waited outside the labor room.

  Every now and then, a nurse would step out and tell him that his granddaughter was doing well, and that everything was as it should be.

  By six o’clock, the baby was still not born, but the waiting had changed in its very character. Rohini’s mother had caught the first plane out of Delhi and was now inside the labor room with her daughter, stepping out only very occasionally with tear-reddened eyes that had cried at her daughter’s pain, to say things like “Arrey baba, more ice cubes!” Rohini’s friend Tara waited silently on a chair, fidgeting and clearly itching to be inside with her friend. Other acquaintances and friends dropped by to check on her progress; they stayed awhile and then left, promising to return as soon as they heard of the baby’s delivery. Aman had finally been contacted by Tara, who had spent a full hour inside that ISD/STD booth, and he was arriving into Bangalore in the middle of the night.

  Amidst all these people, Mr. D’Costa’s presence was indeed redundant. And so he went home, leaving the box of mithai behind.

  The first time Mr. D’Costa saw the baby was about a week after t
he delivery, and shortly after Rohini had returned home from the hospital. He waited until he thought that she and her mother and her baby would be well settled after the shift and then decided to pay a visit.

  He dressed carefully, and crossed the road, feeling absurdly nervous. It was the first time that he was paying a social visit to a place of which he felt he knew every sacred detail.

  He paused outside the Kapur apartment door and frowned. He could hear the noise and chatter of many visitors inside. How had he missed their arrival? No doubt because of the time he had spent getting himself ready.

  Later, when he dwelt upon his visit, it was with great clarity, a series of scenes from the cinema.

  He remembered entering that drawing room—not full of aunts and uncles and people of his generation as he had expected, but instead a whole brood of youngsters, friends of the new parents.

  Overload.

  Mr. D’Costa remembered his confidence faltering, and then Rohini’s blessed face, lighting up and moving towards him in that crowd. He focused in on her. Physically, she was still overblown and bloated, but there was a lightness in her eyes, that earlier, long-forgotten energy gusting out of her in waves.

  “Please,” she said. “Come. Meet my husband.”

  And then her handsome husband, that so very smart young man whom he was meeting for the first time, shaking Mr. D’Costa by the hand and looking serious and yet smiling and thanking him for looking after his wife while he was away, and won’t he please take a seat and have a drink?

  A drink.

  Mr. D’Costa hadn’t had more than an infrequent glass of beer in a very long time. He was sufficiently relaxed by his warm reception to consider the offer seriously. He could sense the eyes of the other youngsters in the room on him, but when he turned around they were all smiling pleasantly enough; one of them quickly vacated an armchair for him. Perhaps they had all been told the story of his adventure with Rohini.

  A drink. Aman was already moving towards the elaborate bar, and the whisky bottle that lay open on it. It was barely teatime, but everyone was in a celebratory mood. Mr. D’Costa caught sight of the label on the bottle and almost gasped. It—lying so casually open, as though it were nothing more than a bottle of water—was one of the most expensive whisky brands in the world. A rare single malt that, Mr. D’Costa quickly calculated, would cost around five thousand rupees even if one were to pick it up in the cheapest duty-free. He had read about it, and had always thought it the province of men who lived large and well and had their pictures taken with beautiful women on the cover of magazines. Five thousand rupees. That was fully as much as he received from a month’s worth of dividends.

  He thought: How much money do these youngsters have?

  And: Yes, he would most certainly like to have that drink.

  He remembered Rohini putting her hand on his arm, and saying: But first you must come and see the baby.

  He nodded dutifully and followed her into the guest bedroom. The baby’s cot, she explained, had been moved from their bedroom upstairs into the room below, where her mother, and now Rohini, slept. This was to ensure that Aman wasn’t disturbed in the night, while she and her mother took turns with the baby. Mr. D’Costa nodded understandingly. After all, the man had to go out to work every day, and that was difficult to do on interrupted sleep.

  And where is your dear mother? he asked.

  Out shopping for baby clothes, said Rohini. She should be back soon.

  And Mr. D’Costa was angry with himself for not noticing her departure either. He felt that his visit was most ill-timed. He couldn’t help notice that the volume level in the drawing room had increased since he left it. There was really no question about it: his presence was a damper on that youthful crowd. They were getting boisterous again, and loud snatches of their conversation came into the guest room where the little bundled baby slept undisturbed. Mr. D’Costa couldn’t help listening. It was simply his habit to do so.

  He heard a male voice say, somewhat pedantically: “. . . so after much discussion, we concluded that labor pain was like getting kicked in the balls.”

  “Fuck!” said a second man. “Come on, Farhan. Nothing can be that bad!”

  “And why not?” said a woman, speaking indignantly. “It probably is a lot worse!”

  “It is a lot worse” came Farhan’s voice, dryly. “By inference, being in labor for a whole day and night, like Rohini, must be like getting kicked in the balls, without a break, for twenty-four hours straight.”

  There was a visceral sucking-in of breath by all the men present, and Mr. D’Costa too could feel a responsive quiver run through him at the thought. He was appalled and fascinated by the frankness of the conversation (no ladies and gentlemen these, for all that they were apparently well brought up), and forced his attention back to the baby, helpless cause of her mother’s carnage.

  He made all the appropriate noises while his mind pondered: stay for a drink of a lifetime and impose some more, or leave while they were still pleased to see him?

  The decision was taken out of his hands entirely.

  He exited the baby’s room with Rohini, his mind still undecided between temptation and dignity, when the front door opened and Rohini’s mother swept in, followed by the houseboy struggling under an armful of packages.

  She nodded amiably to the greetings of her daughter’s friends, and then spied Mr. D’Costa. The immediate joy on her face made it clear: if there was one person who believed that, without him, Rohini would have faced the direst of times, this was she.

  “Mr. Dacosta! . . . So nice! . . . So kind! . . . I wanted to drop in and thank you personally, but so busy with the newborn baby!”

  He was involuntarily swept back into the baby’s room to admire again the newborn infant while she pointed out with pride the reproduction of her son-in-law’s nose and her daughter’s fingers. “Maya,” she said. “We are going to call her Maya.”

  Mr. D’Costa was back in his familiar milieu. There were no mysteries here.

  “Come, Mr. Dacosta.” She led him back to the drawing room, and asked, “Now please have something . . .”

  “I’m just fixing him a drink,” Aman put in.

  “Tchi! Aman! A drink at four o’clock in the afternoon! Nah, nah. What will Mr. Dacosta think! He is not a drunken one like all you people!” She shook her head affectionately at the chorus of halfhearted denials. “Mr. Dacosta will prefer some hot tea and some nice garam-garam snacks.”

  Temptation was swept away on a tide of goodwill; he saw his drink vanish into someone else’s hands and drunk thereafter as though it was the merest home-brew, and Mr. D’Costa found himself meekly agreeing to tea and hot samosas.

  He ate three samosas with chutney, which were indeed delicious, and drank two cups of well-sugared tea. Rohini’s mother sat by his side, and kept his plate filled, and his mouth engaged in exchanging all manner of information crucial to their understanding of each other. He found himself telling her about his son in Australia, and his long-ago job of forty years with British Tobacco. Just so would he have liked to sit across from Elizabeth’s mother, chatting pleasantly about their grandchild and the commingling of their families.

  The back of his mind, however, couldn’t help questioning, over and over: how much money did these youngsters make?

  Surely, surely, it was enough for a plane ticket?

  And today, several months later, closed curtains.

  “You know them so well,” said Mr. Kurien, without intentional malice, “why don’t you go and check?”

  Mr. D’Costa ignored both Mr. Kurien and his own impulses and waited. But when the curtains remained defiantly closed the following morning as well, he decided to act.

  He told himself that he had to go vegetable shopping anyway; it was just a question of stopping en route, a small meaningless diversion, nothing more. He imagined: perhaps Rohini would turn to him, to cry and confide her problems. Perhaps, once again, he was to be her support in distress, what
with his son out of town, her parents living in Australia, and all.

  As once before, he dressed carefully, shaving and bathing and then drying his hair before combing it through with Brylcreem. He ironed the blue-and-pink checked polyester shirt and light blue poplin pants that constituted one of his best attires. He dressed slowly, then removed the pure leather brown belt from the plastic bag at the back of his cupboard. He looped it around his waist and slipped his feet into black crisscrossed Bata sandals. He was ready.

  He looked in on his wife and told her he was heading out to the market. He half hoped that she would comment on his dress, but as usual, she barely paid attention. Her gaze was fixed on the television screen, where a pert-looking cartoon girl dressed in an animal skin stood with arms akimbo. “But, Fred . . . !” went the nasal twang. “Oh, brother!” His wife smiled in response and raised the volume. Mr. D’Costa closed the door behind him as he left.

  It could be nothing. Perhaps Rohini was just sleeping late after a party. Perhaps she had left for a trip while Mr. D’Costa had been away to the market. Perhaps she had changed her housekeeping style. What, after all, were closed curtains? It could be nothing.

  He had to ring the bell three times before it was answered. And then, immediately, he knew his impulses had been correct.

  The door swung open to reveal a darkened, unkempt house. Rohini looked devastated. In fact, she was devastated. Something dreadful had happened in her life, causing her eyes to redden and swell, her skin to blotch, her T-shirt to crumple and stain, and leaving her hair greasy, uncombed, and in tangled disarray.

  Mr. D’Costa’s mind darted about in horror. What could have caused this? An erring husband? An upset with her mother-in-law? A problem with her baby? His grandchildren? Why had his son’s letters made no mention of this?

  A thousand questions bubbled up inside him, but they all died before they found speech, quelled by the unexpected, implacable impatience in her eyes. The eyes of his daughter-in-law, repulsing him. He felt himself falter. What did he really know of the alien being who stood before him?