The Red Carpet Read online

  Whisky soda ginger pop

  Knees together hands on top

  Every evening, Mary climbed the steel ladder to the roof, to collect the clothes that had been drying on the clothesline. She would roll the dry clothes into a bundle and, carrying it carefully in one hand, would feel her way down the ladder with her feet. It was a simple affair: two poles of steel, with holes at frequent intervals to hold the rungs, tightened into place by screws. I had climbed that ladder a million times on my way to the roof and knew it well.

  That evening, I followed Mary to the terrace. I waited until she was busy with the clothes, before removing three rungs set fairly high up on the ladder, one right after the other. She would not see them missing, I knew. Her feet would feel for them routinely, already lowering her weight onto them, before she realized the futility of doing so. Her arms would be of no use to her, I knew. They would be too full of clothes. And I would stand back at that moment, and watch her foot slip into the lightness of air, and I would watch the weight of her body tumble, like a bird with wings of sunbaked clothes. And I would watch her land, and the clothes settle lightly about her, and I would watch the clothes turn red, then brown, as they dried once more.

  And I would replace the rungs, and nobody would ever know. I waited in the shadows, beneath that ladder, listening to Mary approach. Some instinct stopped her; she called out from the edge of the terrace:

  Put them back, missy, or I will create even more trouble for you.

  That’s when I stepped out and said: “Go ahead.”

  And perhaps she finally saw the newfound strength in my eyes that day, staring up at her, but she never bothered me again. She stayed with my mother for another fifteen years, a silent figure in the background; silent, wretched, underpaid; careful and polite around me, still obsequious around my mother.

  I didn’t care. School was still the place that mattered. Five years later, I became Games Captain and a School Prefect, and Mrs. Rafter laid a heavy hand about my shoulder. “Well done, my girl,” she said, her potent breath wheezing into my face. “I always knew you could do it. One of our best girls,” she would tell visiting parents.

  And I would straighten my blazer and smile politely, ignoring the younger girls who clustered eagerly around.

  THE RED CARPET

  Rangappa was content to live in a realm of different names. Officially, as per his one-page bio-data, prepared for a small sum by one of the roadside typists who serviced the lawyers outside Bangalore’s Mayo Hall, his name was T. R. Gavirangappa.

  Tharikere Ranganatha Gavirangappa. Anyone reading his name would instantly know that he hailed from the village of Tharikere, near the hills of Chikmagalur, and that he was the son of Ranganatha. His family called him Rangappa for short.

  But at work he was known as Raju.

  This nominal transformation was announced to him, quite casually, at the end of his job interview.

  “Your driving test was satisfactory,” his prospective employer said. “The job is yours, provided you are courteous, prompt, and steady in your habits.” And then: “Oh, and on the job, you will be called Raju.”

  It had not really occurred to him to protest, so everyone in the house, from the cook to his employer’s little three-year-old daughter, called him Raju. It had taken him three days to get used to it. And, after a while, he had even begun to like it. There was a film star called Raju. It was that kind of name: snappy, spry, a certain air about it. After many months on the job he suggested to his family that perhaps they too should consider calling him Raju, but his father laughed at him and that was that.

  He had heard about the job from his cousin, who worked as an office boy and whose boss needed a driver for his family. It would not be a company job, unfortunately—those were the best kind, with all sorts of perks and bonuses and (best of all) membership to a union that prevented you from getting fired easily. Instead, he would be hired directly by the boss’s family; but they were good people, his cousin said, and would pay well. Raju (or Rangappa) heard this out with a sense of reserve; if he got the job, his cousin would be sure to earn a tip, and the promise of that was bound to make any boss look good.

  He was to go interview immediately with the boss’s wife, a Mrs. Choudhary.

  His heart sank at the news. His father, also a driver, had once worked for a Mrs. Choudhary. He had taken the young Rangappa (or Raju) to see her, hoping to receive a gift for his son— some money, perhaps, or even a packet of biscuits. Rangappa remembered standing with his father on the steps of a large house, not daring to sit, waiting for Mrs. Choudhary to emerge for her ritual round of morning shopping. He remembered a formidable woman, clad in silks and jewelry and with a round red bindi on her forehead so large it seemed to swallow him up. His father presented him; she ignored him and told his father to hurry up with the car. Rangappa-soon-to-be-Raju had never been more scared in his life.

  He wished he could turn his cousin down. He decided he didn’t like the sound of the job (the other Mrs. Choudhary’s voice resonating frighteningly through the years), and besides, he didn’t really want to be beholden to his cousin, whom he suspected of harboring evil designs on his younger sister. Far better to say no: to his cousin, to this Mrs. Choudhary. Far better, indeed, to spend his time on getting his younger sister married off and safe.

  But he didn’t have a choice. His salary had to support his parents, his sister, his wife of four years, and their baby daughter. The driving job he had right now paid enough to feed any two of them, after deducting his daily bus fare to and from work. They were all always a little hungry. This new job, this Mrs. Choudhary job, offered much more—at least, according to his cousin.

  He woke up early on the morning of the interview, rushing to fetch two buckets of water for his house from the pump down the road. He hastily washed his face and hands before joining his family for morning prayers in front of the pooja altar, manufactured by placing the colored portraits of various deities on a shelf and decorating them with flowers, turmeric and red kumkum powders, and a bit of green velvet with gold trim. The smoky fragrance of the incense sticks filtered through his senses. He chanted the Sanskrit verses for the spiritual welfare of his family and the good of the world along with his father, but his mind charted an alternate course of prayer: for this new job, and a little bit of money.

  Afterwards, he stood in front of a mirror that hung lopsided on one cracked and peeling wall. He felt sticky and tired from the heat of the night, but the water shortage in the district prevented him from having a bath. Two buckets of water would have to wash and feed his family for that entire day. He took a little coconut oil from his wife’s bottle and rubbed it into his hair before combing it neatly through.

  “You should take a bath,” his father said, from the stoop in front of the house. He had sat there every morning since his injured back had forced his retirement, sipping his morning tumbler of coffee. “And, very important, you need a new, clean shirt. Otherwise they won’t hire you. You should look smart. I know these things. Daughter, give your husband a new shirt.”

  Rangappa’s wife looked timidly at him. He had no new shirt, hadn’t had one for a while. “There is no new shirt, Appa,” Rangappa told his father. “Never mind. I’ll go as I am.”

  “Well, don’t blame me if you don’t get the job. I know about these things. If you come back empty-handed, don’t blame me.”

  The Choudhary house stood in a large garden, two stories high and gleaming whitely at the end of a cement driveway edged with rosebushes whose blossoms would never be plucked for the altar but would remain in the garden to wither and die at their master’s pleasure. Rangappa’s first glimpse of the house didn’t reduce the tension in his back. He knew that the obvious wealth of his prospective employers didn’t automatically translate into better working conditions. Some of these memsahibs could fight over the last rupee with all the possessive fierceness of those old crones who sold vegetables in the early morning market.

  The watch
man at the gate escorted him to the front door, surrendering him to the maid who answered. She asked him to leave his shoes at the door and step into the foyer. “Wait here. I’ll tell her you’ve come.”

  Rangappa studied the maid carefully. She looked well fed. She wore a saree that he would have loved to buy for his wife. She didn’t seem cowed or rude. These were good signs.

  “Who is it?” A woman’s lazy voice came from the landing of the curving staircase in the corner and Rangappa looked up. He felt himself seized by shock. He stared at the apparition for a quick instant, and immediately looked down at the floor in embarrassment. The voice said: “Someone for the driver job? Oh, good. Ask him to wait, I’ll be right down.”

  Rangappa’s thoughts held him paralyzed in disbelief. He couldn’t reconcile the bizarre figure he had witnessed with the haughty memsahib of his imaginings. That slip of a girl, no older than his teenage sister surely, was practically naked: wearing nothing more than a man’s banian vest and a pair of loose shorts that, together, exposed most of her legs, all of her arms, and a good bit of her chest. The maid didn’t seem to be bothered by this, and Rangappa immediately worried: what manner of a house was this?

  He was a decent, respectable man.

  The marble floor beneath his feet ran in every direction, giving way, here and there, to carpets that glowed with the jewel-bright colors of a silken wedding saree. Rangappa’s eye traced the dull gleam on the heavy bronze sculptures, which, along with the sofas and the paintings and the dark wooden cabinets rich with objects that glistened and shone, reminded him of a movie set. But instead of stepping away at the end of a day’s shooting, these people lived on, in their movie-star lives.

  Except, from what he had seen, this set seemed to lack a proper heroine.

  The next time Mrs. Choudhary appeared, she had aged about a decade and a half. Gone was that young sprightliness, vanished behind a thick robe that stretched from shoulder to ankles and belted at her waist. She seated herself on a sofa and asked the maid to bring her some coffee. Her voice was soft and polite, but Raju had seen memsahibs with soft and polite voices turn into screaming banshees when faced with a minor transgression. He stood alert. She sipped her coffee and studied his résumé, which he’d presented to her in a tattered envelope: a single sheet of paper, folded and refolded, marked with brown creases, smudged with fingerprints, and with the words BIO-DATA typed at the top of the page in large capital letters.

  When describing it all later to his father, he portrayed his role in the interview with a savoir faire he’d never really felt, and omitted to mention how his hands had left the steering wheel of the car sticky with perspiration during the driving test. He did talk about how she’d made him drive right into the worst traffic the city had to offer, and had praised the way he’d handled it. He talked of her commandments, completely contrary to the prevalent conventional wisdom on the crazy, unruly city roads: when driving for her, he was to drive slowly and, oddly, to follow the rules, follow the rules, follow the rules.

  Back at her house after the driving test, she resumed her seat on the sofa, her face set in stern lines behind her glasses. His relief at her praise instantly abated. Now began the inevitable battle over his qualifications and his salary, between his need and her whimsy. And, by the looks of her, she would not be a pushover.

  “Your driving test was satisfactory,” she said. “The job is yours, provided you are courteous, prompt, and steady in your habits.”

  He waited. He hadn’t mentioned his expectations, wanting to hear what she would offer first. Then, if it was too low, perhaps no more than what he was currently earning, he would try bargaining, begging, pleading. He would tell her of his family’s poverty and the many mouths that needed to be fed. Not that it would work, necessarily; memsahibs always treated such stories as just that—stories, tales that their domestic staff conjured up out of the air for a momentary amusement. He waited.

  She nodded briskly and named a salary that was two and a half times what he was making. In his elation he forgot all about the first rule in a wage negotiation: keep an impassive face, and hold out for more. He grinned happily, and barely heard what she said next:

  “Oh, and on the job, you will be called Raju.”

  At home, later, he handed around celebratory sweetmeats and recounted to his family how he was then told to go around to the kitchen; how the cook, Julie, an immense woman (obviously a devoted servant of her own art), had introduced him to the other servants in the house: Shanti, the baby-ayah, who’d opened the door to him that morning; Thanga, the top-work maid, who cleaned the house; and Gowda, the silent little gardening boy. How she had given him hot, sweet tea and a freshly made rava dosa, the semolina batter mixed with onions and green chilies and fried thin and crisp and delicious. And how she had told him that as long as he worked there, all his meals would be catered for from that large kitchen, as per the memsahib’s orders. Breakfast when he arrived, lunch at one, tea or coffee on demand.

  Rangappa-now-Raju did some boasting that day. He never did share that extraordinary first moment, though, when his employer had cavorted into his presence in the most indecent of clothes, like one of those scandalous females on the foreign TV channels. He never mentioned that. And a full week passed before he told his family of the change in his professional name.

  And so he settled down to working for Mrs. Choudhary. Of course, he didn’t call her that. When he first started work, he’d refer to her as “Amma,” but soon found that even that wasn’t quite suitable. The other servants in the house called her Madam, pronounced not as the word’s English originators had imagined but rather “May-dum.” As in “May-dum kareethidhare ”—Madam wants you. “May-dum oota maduthidhare”— Madam is eating her lunch.

  His routine remained unchanged through the first year. He’d arrive by eight, catching two buses to do so, and straightaway wash and polish both the cars, hoping to finish in time to grab a quick cup of coffee before driving May-dum’s little daughter and her ayah to school. He always finished cleaning the big black car first. It was one of the latest brands, and May-dum’s husband, the Saibru, drove it himself, jealously refusing to let anyone else touch the wheel. Raju always had it clean and ready for the Saibru when he exited the house at 8:30 in a hurry. Raju would salute him and receive a nod for his pains; the two men hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words to date.

  Then he’d clean her car, which was just as smart. Even smarter, Raju thought, loving its gleaming whiteness and fancy interior. He was aware that she didn’t share his opinion on this. The car had arrived from the showroom about six months after he’d joined. He had inspected it with extreme pride and possessiveness. This was his car, really—the one that he would drive, the one that he’d be seen driving. It was a prestigious make. He had peeped inside at the opulent furnishings: the velvet seats, the rich tone of the red carpet. His fingers itched to take the wheel.

  She’s going to love this, he thought.

  She didn’t. She came out to inspect it with a girlfriend, and her first comment was “Oh god, not white!”

  Raju threw the door open for her inspection and immediately she groaned. “Will you look at this, Anu? Velvet seats! Oh god, and that red carpet! Could anything be in worse taste?”

  Her friend, Miss Anasuya, considered the matter and said, “Well, at least the windows aren’t tinted black.”

  “That’s true.” May-dum laughed. “Then it would definitely look like a greasy politician’s car!”

  “Oh, it still does,” said her friend.

  Whatever their opinion, Raju still felt proud of the car. He just wished his family could see him driving it.

  Some time passed before he realized that there was more to this job than just driving a car. His father had been right, after all.

  “You must act smart,” the old man had said. “You don’t know how to act smart. You are going to lose this good job because you must act smart and not like a coolie. When that happens, don’t blame m
e.”

  At first he’d ignored his father, especially when he’d carry on about how to open the car door (“Open the door, hold it open while she gets in or out, and then close it firmly but not loudly”), demonstrating on an imaginary car handle and clutching his aching back all the while. And then one day it dawned on Raju that perhaps his father was right. Previously, Raju had worked as a transport driver for small manufacturing companies that used little minivans to transport goods and people. Cost and speed were of the essence there; the niceties of life didn’t really matter. But now he was in a different sphere. He started to pay attention to how other drivers did things, at the big hotels, or at the Club, where May-dum liked to meet her friends. It was true. The smartest drivers acted so. One evening he really listened to his father’s lecture, in the surprise of which the old gentleman enthusiastically lengthened his words by a half hour, and got up to demonstrate so often that his back suffered for it the whole night long.

  The next morning, Raju was ready.

  As soon as May-dum appeared, he leaped to open the door, standing (smartly, he hoped) to attention. She paused, surprise and amusement warring on her face, and then she smiled. “Thank you,” she said, and slid into the car. The warmth of that smile stayed with him the entire day.

  From his father he learned to greet her cheerily the first thing every morning. He bought a can of air freshener with his own money, and, as he’d seen another driver in the Club do, he’d spray the car interiors with it before driving from the car park to the main clubhouse to pick her up. He learned to anticipate her movements, running to carry her bags as soon as she emerged from the shops, staying alert for the sudden sound of her voice. Watchful to see which side of the car she approached, so that he could have the car door open and ready for her. After a while, he learned to tell, just by looking at her dress, whether she wanted to visit the gym, go shopping, or meet with her friends. Sometimes, he could even guess correctly what music she would play on the car stereo.