The Red Carpet Page 8

  And in return, she never raised her voice at him.

  No screaming at him when the car got stuck in traffic. No shouting that he was a fool, and the son of fools. No muttering that he should be fired, the idiot, the rascal, just let him try and get another job as good as this.

  That was the nicest thing about her; nicer in a way than even the wages, or the good meals, or even her carelessly handed-over parcels of food and old but still excellent clothing that made her especially interesting to his family. She never raised her voice. She was always polite. Raju’s father would shake his head slowly when he heard that. “That’s rare,” he would say. “Very rare. Son, don’t be stupid and lose this job and allow your family to starve. Take my advice. You won’t get such a place again easily.”

  She didn’t shout even when things went wrong, when, for instance, he dented the side of the new car by backing into a truck that wasn’t supposed to be there. That was a moment when, he felt, she was fully entitled to lose her temper and lecture him angrily. Instead, she just went over the incident with him in detail, accepted his fervent apologies, and asked him to ensure that it never happened again.

  The other servants in the house seemed to be aware of this as well. In a mixture of fashion and harsh reality, it was routine for domestic workers to complain to each other about their work conditions: the rotten food, the meager salaries, the unsympathetic memsahibs; at times it seemed almost a competition on who had it worse. The staff here never did that. Certainly, when eating together and gossiping, they traded hard-luck stories. That was only to be expected, for who did not have sorrow in their lives? But then, they would also tell him: “You know, if you have any problems, you should talk to May-dum about it. She’ll help.”

  But in those early days he couldn’t see himself taking the liberty. Besides, just the previous day, for the first time in years, he had bought a chicken on the way home from work, and the rare sweetness of the meat still flowed in his veins, mellowing his view of the world.

  After a while he gave up trying to resolve the inherent contradiction in May-dum: that someone who made such an ideal employer—who, indeed, redefined his very notion of memsahibs—could also, simultaneously, present what he could characterize as nothing other than a Lax Moral Outlook. It wasn’t just her style of dressing: scanty outfits that revealed her arms, her midriff, her legs in fashions most suitable for a prostitute or a film star or a foreigner. It was also her style of speaking with her friends: curses, jokes, comments, and conversation of a frankness that, on the whole, made him grateful that he could barely follow the English they spoke.

  And then, she smoked. When Raju’s younger brother had started smoking, their father had thrashed the living daylights out of him as soon as he found out about it. His brother still smoked, but was always careful to do it discreetly and never in front of the family elders. Not so his May-dum. She lit up casually, elaborately, luxuriously, all over the place, leaving a trail of noxious fumes behind her.

  He was still very new when, one day, he’d driven her and one of her girlfriends out to lunch. She’d introduced him laughingly as her new driver, and he had smiled politely and touched his forehead at the friend. When they were both inside the car, he heard the friend comment: “Wasn’t your last driver also called Raju?”

  “Actually, his name was Murugesh.”

  “Hm. I could swear . . .” The other woman looked confused.

  Raju knew all about this Murugesh-also-called-Raju. A competent driver, he’d been fired for drinking on the job. At first this had pleased Raju, as evidence of his employer’s probity. But that was, of course, before he knew May-dum better. It was not the drink that she objected to; it was driving while drunk. He’d rapidly learned that firsthand.

  Sometimes, on a Friday or Saturday, she’d ask him to stay late, past his six o’clock end-of-duty. She’d pay him extra for his overtime, and give him dinner, so it wasn’t really a problem. His family liked the extra money. The first time, she’d gone out to a formal dinner, dressed in a saree and looking lovely.

  The next time had been different: she was dressed, first of all, in a skirt so short that it couldn’t have been longer than the span of his hand. Then she asked him to drive her to a pub. He knew all about such places: they were nothing more than elaborate versions of the drinking hells that dotted his own neighborhood, where men he’d known as boys had become dissolute and useless and a burden to their wives and families.

  He had waited outside the pub for May-dum for four hours, watching the stream of fashionable, alien traffic enter a door from which music, lights, and the thin smell of alcohol emerged, until midnight had been and gone. Then he finally saw her again, clinging to the arm of another woman and laughing.

  “Here’s Raju! He’ll drop us home.”

  He’d opened the door and stood there woodenly while the two women fumbled and crawled their way into the backseat. The enclosed car was filled with the fumes of their breath. They both smelled of smoke and dissipation. They’d laughed and giggled, out of control, all the way to their respective homes.

  He knew: this behavior was unacceptable.

  Immoral.

  Should be stopped.

  He also knew that he shouldn’t, by any calculation, like and respect May-dum so much.

  But there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about that either.

  This wasn’t something he could discuss with any of his coworkers—the maids in the house seemed to have developed a strange blindness where May-dum was concerned, excusing behavior in her that they would have condemned in anyone else. And he could never bring himself to mention this aspect of her at home.

  Really, the only person who seemed to criticize May-dum was her mother-in-law—and that was another situation that bothered Raju a lot. A few months after he’d joined, Shanti came out one morning to ask him to have the car by the front door in ten minutes.

  “She’s going to visit her mother-in-law,” she said. “The old lady is just back from a visit to her other son’s house in America.”

  Her mother-in-law? Lives in the same city? Raju inquired in some surprise. Why do they not then live in the same house? This was unheard-of.

  May-dum’s face, when she emerged, was preoccupied. He studied it in the rearview mirror while he drove, as she stared out the window at the passing traffic, looking wistfully at cars moving in the opposite direction. They arrived very quickly at another large bungalow.

  “Keep the car running and ready to leave,” she told Raju before entering the house. He thought about it, and then decided that she must have been joking—there had been an odd note in her voice. He decided to wait where he was; if she was in a hurry, it wouldn’t take him long to start the car. It was a good decision, because she finally reappeared a whole hour later.

  With her, standing on the steps, was a diminutive woman whose voice carried all the way over to him. Was that her mother-in-law? Raju mechanically drove the car up to the steps of the house, opened the door for May-dum, took a set of bags from her and placed them inside the car, before turning to study her companion. He got a shock. The little lady standing next to her was the same Mrs. Choudhary who had terrorized him all those years ago. She was still dressed in silk and large bindis, her voice still had that harsh edge that repulsed, but sometime in the past fifteen years she had shrunk in size. Now, when had that happened?

  As before, she ignored him. She was saying to May-dum: “. . . so wear the clothes I have bought for you. They will suit you more than that rubbish that you always wear. More proper. More suitable. And the frock for Baby is also very pretty, na? Much better than those shorts you put her in, poor thing. I always feel so bad when I look at her, dressed like that.”

  May-dum’s smile didn’t waver, at least until the car was on its way.

  Raju glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her eyes filling with uncontrollable tears. And though Mother-in-law Choudhary’s words expressed his sentiments exactly, at that moment, all he w
anted to say was: please don’t be upset by that woman— she’s awful, I know, but she shrinks with time.

  When they got home, she handed the bags to him. “There are some clothes in there,” she said. “Perhaps your wife will like them. And take the dresses for your daughter.”

  He peeked inside the bag before protesting. He could see expensive sarees in bright colors, a child’s frilly frock in pink. They were lovely, but already he knew that May-dum wouldn’t think so. “But, May-dum, they are brand-new.”

  She smiled kindly at him. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

  Gradually, over the course of the first year, he stopped worrying about her inappropriate deportment and just accepted it as one of life’s irregularities, just like that politician who seemed to have earned all the graces of god through corrupt, wicked living.

  Didn’t think about it, that is, until today.

  Today he was once again concerned about her comportment. Feverishly, anxiously concerned. What would she wear? Something decent, or not? He had a sudden mental image of her appearing in scanty shorts, a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other, and his heart almost failed. What if she did dress like that? Then, he immediately resolved, he would just have to pretend that he couldn’t find the right directions; he had lost his way, lost his mind, something like that.

  He could never take her to meet his family if she was dressed like that.

  This momentous visit was the product of a conversation he’d had with her about a month earlier. It had come about casually enough. May-dum had been busy at her desk all morning, and then handed him a set of bills, the cheque payments neatly attached, along with instructions on where each was to be paid. The last item was her daughter’s annual school fees, a large but apparently appropriate amount for three hours of supervised singing and paint-spattering every weekday.

  “And what about your daughter, Raju?” she asked casually at the end, raising the tip of her spectacles with one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other. “Are you sending her to school somewhere?”

  Raju nodded dumbly.

  Of all the passions of his soul, one reigned supreme. He worshipped his little daughter. She had just turned three, but when she was born, he could already envisage the successes of her life as he held her tiny body in his hands. She would be educated. She would be healthy and well nourished. She would be proud. Well dressed. Beautiful. She would work in an office, in a job that would one day earn her a car of her own. She would be a may-dum in her own right.

  His mother wanted to call the baby Kanthamma, after her own mother, but Raju said no. He’d already decided to call her Hema Malini, after the film actress, his first sight of whom (as a young boy) he had never forgotten: the most beautiful woman in the universe, a dream girl with liquid eyes and glowing skin and hair that tumbled down her back. His father told him it didn’t matter what he named the baby. He commiserated: “Your firstborn is a girl. That’s a shame. My firstborn was a boy. A man should have three sons and a daughter, just like I did. That is glory. But don’t worry. Next time you will have a boy. You are my son, after all.”

  Raju wasn’t worried. He had thought the whole thing through quite a while back and, independent of his father, had made a few decisions. That night, after dinner, while lying next to his wife and listening to the heavy breathing of his parents sleeping in another corner of the same room, he told her his ideas: not having a son didn’t matter; they would bring up their daughter to be strong and self-reliant. In fact, with the cost of living so high, perhaps they shouldn’t try for another child, boy or girl, no matter what his father said. Better to have one child and look after her well than to have more and leave them half-starved. If money improved, then later, perhaps, they could reconsider. In the meantime, they had been visited by a little goddess and they were to be grateful. His wife was herself one of nine children, born into a family where daughters were considered the usual burden. If she was uncomfortable with Raju’s odd ideas, she didn’t comment.

  After Raju got his current job, he was doubly convinced of the truth of his belief. Little Hema, with her tears and laughter and mischief, was none other than a manifestation of the Goddess Lakshmi herself, giver of wealth and prosperity.

  “Where is she studying? She’s three years old, isn’t she?”

  He nodded again, and mentioned the name of the little one-room school that his daughter attended. He expected May-dum to nod and send him on his way, but she didn’t. Instead, she proceeded to ask him a great many questions about his life, and especially about his daughter.

  Before he knew it, he was telling her everything. All his hopes, his dreams, his fondest wishes for his beloved Hema, and the despair that had dogged his footsteps these past few months. For how was he to continue to educate her with so many mouths to feed? His higher salary seemed to be eaten up just as quickly as his old one, in medical bills, and food, and most recently, the need to collect an amount large enough to marry off his younger sister. How could he possibly take care of Hema in the manner of his dreams?

  Later, he’d emerged from May-dum’s study in a curious state of horrified delirium. Horrified that he had divulged everything so freely, he who always kept his own counsel. Delirious, because May-dum had said that she would take care of little Hema’s education herself. He was not to worry.

  Furthermore, she said, she would like to see where the little girl studied, and could he please arrange a visit?

  When his excitement had settled down, it had taken a full month for him and his family to organize things. His father had assumed generalship of the affair, and Raju let him. He himself was at work the whole day, and this was not a matter he could leave to his wife; she lacked the experience. She was not a man of the world.

  Raju and his father would stay up late every evening, immersed in progress reviews: What should they do to the house? Could they afford to repaint it? Didn’t so-and-so’s brother-in-law work in a paint shop? Perhaps he could get some cheap color for them at a discount. And what would they offer her to eat? Would she consent to eat anything at all? Would she show them that respect? And how should they all dress? As if for a wedding? Or more casually? “Respectably,” said Raju, to whom that word evoked the best images. “Respectably.”

  And so they had planned and arranged and organized. Raju spoke to his daughter’s schoolteacher, who was awed and delighted at the prospect of a visit to her little school from such an important patron.

  The day before the visit, he reviewed everything. And now, as he stood outside his employer’s house, cleaning her car as never before, he acknowledged that the only unforeseeable, unplannable catch in the whole event was May-dum herself.

  His family probably envisioned her as a routine memsahib, traditionally and expensively dressed, preaching morality and good family values. And—uniquely—acting upon them too. What if, after all his talk and boasting, she disgraced him? As only she could—carelessly, in the things that were to her utterly trivial, matters of dress and feminine comportment. He would still be loyal to her, but his pride and prestige in his family and neighborhood would be lost forever.

  The car was cleaned and ready and polished. Instead of following his usual practice of going around to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, he stood waiting expectantly, staring at the door. Yesterday she had said that she would be ready to leave around ten o’clock. He still had almost forty-five minutes to go, but he didn’t feel like wandering away, as if that might cause her to change her mind, or tempt her to sneak out of the house on foot or on her daughter’s small bicycle.

  At ten minutes past ten, his heart sank. He scolded himself for getting his hopes up, for expecting this visit to actually happen. He hadn’t yet seen May-dum, but he’d seen enough to know that she wouldn’t be going anywhere that morning. Just five minutes earlier, the bungalow gates had opened to allow a car to come through. It was May-dum’s mother-in-law, come to pay a surprise visit. These could last anywhere from five minutes to a ful
l day, depending on her mood and her daughter-in-law’s quiescence.

  The elder Mrs. Choudhary vanished in a blaze of satisfaction down the drive, exactly one hour later. Raju began to feel nervous all over again. Would May-dum decide to leave now, or would she decide it was too late and that they would have to postpone the whole thing till the next day? Would he be able to? His family had used precious water to scrub themselves clean that morning, and they were all instructed to be on their best behavior. His wife had prepared a sweet and a savory with ghee, the clarified butter that he had bought specially for the occasion. The food wouldn’t last long in the hot weather. He didn’t know if he could marshal all these resources for two days running.

  Shanti the ayah appeared. “She wants you to bring the car to the porch,” she said routinely. His heart skipped. He watched her walk back to the house, and was almost tempted to call her back. He hadn’t yet confided in any of his colleagues about May-dum’s proposed visit to his house. The very idea of it would be as startling to them as it was to him. Would they approve, or would they be envious? They were all good people, but Raju didn’t want even a hint of a jealous, evil eye cast upon this visit. Let it happen, he told himself. Then he would tell everybody.

  He drove the car around to the porch, watching the door and wondering once again how she would be dressed.

  The door opened. He heard her voice call out to the cook to bring her a glass of cold water. Two minutes later she emerged. Raju almost laughed in delight and relief. She was wearing a lovely salwar khameez, the full-sleeved tunic flowing elegantly down to her calves, her ankles modestly covered by the loose pants below, the crisp, transparent, shawl-like dupatta draped and pleated over one shoulder. She looked like a movie star. Better than that, even, she looked every inch the memsahib.

  She paused near the top of the steps and smiled in his direction. “Ready to go, Raju?”

  Raju spent an hour and a half on two buses to get to and from work every day. The gleaming air-conditioned car did the same job in thirty minutes. The route took them away from the posh residential areas of the city, into and past industrial areas, and into regions that weren’t really scaled for human consumption but had nevertheless been colonized by the hordes of workers who fed the appetites of a hungry city. As they neared his neighborhood, Raju kept glancing nervously into the rearview mirror. She was gazing intently out the window. What was she thinking? As he’d done for a month now, he tried to see his surroundings through her eyes.