by Mahesh Rao
Disappointment flooded through her. At least there was no one there to witness her humiliation. She left the room, closing the door behind her, and walked back down the dim corridor. Opposite the stairs a door leading to a verandah was now open, kept ajar by a cleaning trolley. Dimple crept out and climbed over the railing, jumping into a flower bed. She tried to regain her bearings.
And then the miracle happened. On the third floor, opposite where she stood, the actress emerged on a balcony. Dimple crouched down. The actress had her hands on the balustrade as she watched the sun creeping over the distant hills. She looked as though she was still dressed from the night before: her long silk dress fell like water, a horseshoe sparkled at her throat. Dimple stared at the actress, incapable of standing or waving or calling out, her shoes sinking into the soil. The sun continued to rise, shafts of light lancing through the trees on the hillside, their reflections aflame in the glass balcony doors. The actress turned her head toward the room as though someone had called her name, and her expression cracked into one of revulsion. In the next moment, she coaxed a smile back on to her face and disappeared through the doors.
At school later that day, Dimple’s story was heard with disbelief, suspicion, and, eventually, a grudging acceptance. She had never been one of those girls who spun tales to draw attention to themselves, and the ardor with which she described the actress could not be faked. As unlikely as it seemed, of all the girls at school, Dimple was the one who had gotten closest. Once this had been established, there was a quiet acknowledgment of her success in the classroom, a concession that was ominous from the start.
The next day there was a new development. A few girls in Dimple’s class said that the film crew had passed a request on to the school: they were looking for children to be extras in a scene to be filmed on the bandstand and would pick up volunteers outside the school gates the following Sunday. Hasty plans were made around the playground to gather at the appointed hour, and girls who in the past had barely looked at Dimple asked her anxiously if she was going. It was extraordinary how one little triumph had transformed her fortunes.
She decided not to risk asking her mother for permission and simply left a note wedged under a pickle jar on the table. On Sunday morning she wore the lucky blue velveteen dress again and was outside the school gates by six o’clock. She was the first to arrive. She walked up and down the road for a little while, not wanting to sit on the stone benches, in case they left streaks on her dress.
A cart carrying potted plants trundled past, followed by a rickshaw. Rolls of brightly colored blankets went past on another. The silence returned until a man sped down the hill on a motorbike. Dimple perched on the edge of a stone bench and then stood up again, craning her neck to see the back of her skirt. Another rickshaw rolled by.
She ran through the range of complicated reasons why the film crew bus could be late. Several times she walked to the end of the road and back. She had no watch and could only tell that she had probably been waiting for hours when her stomach began to rumble. Crows began to caw above her head, and she felt a quiver run down her spine. She wondered whether she was being watched, but there was no one in sight. She looked again at the line of the school wall, the pink rhododendrons that swept down the hill, the stone bridge above the culvert, the bend in the road. The tug of suspicion grew stronger and turned into a near certainty. There was no bus; there never had been a bus. She had been punished for her ascendancy. Eyes had gathered in nooks all around her to observe her disgrace, hidden behind trees, perhaps in a parked car or peering from the other side of the high wall.
When she returned home, the note was still under the pickle jar. Her mother must have rushed out to one of her meetings without even seeing it. Dimple screwed it up and crammed it into her pocket.
She had been punished then and, as she deleted Fahim’s number from her phone, she realized she had been punished now.
* * *
—
HIGH ABOVE MEHRAULI, there was a pause in the conversation. A remote, clamorous reality unfolded in the narrow lanes below. Deities were lifted onto a bier, and the procession threaded its way through the throngs. Flower sellers bellowed. At the sweet stall, a ladle sank slowly into a giant pot of ghee.
At the rooftop club, a sense of seclusion drifted around like a haze. Ania had keyed in her password and been escorted to the top floor by a man with a walkie-talkie.
“Is that real? What’s it actually for?” she asked.
He looked injured.
“Important staff communications, ma’am. For your safety and security,” he said.
Fahim was waiting for her at one of the tables under the vine-covered pergola. She stepped around the dark waters of the rooftop pond, grasses quavering at its edge in the evening breeze. It wasn’t much of a breeze. The weather had begun to turn warm and muggy. It had been only a few months since she had embarked upon her project to bring Fahim and Dimple together, but it seemed like so much longer.
From the villa at Lake Garda, she had gone to New York, hoping to be revitalized. But she had stayed only a couple of days: their town house was too quiet, the streets too busy, her friends too annoying. She had returned to Delhi a fortnight ago determined to think no more about Adrian Thurley. The rage had abated. But there was a deflation, a lethargy that she had not been able to shake off. She had found it difficult to plunge back into her social life and had spent much of her time in her room with Sigmund, whose rheumy eyes seemed to share her melancholy. She had dropped by Dev’s home and discovered that he was away at a conference. Eventually she met Dimple, who tried to be breezily evasive but in the end gave a full account of those dire hours waiting for Fahim.
Ania was furious. She felt personally snubbed but was even more enraged that Fahim had manipulated Dimple and treated her with such disregard. She ignored his calls and messages at first; her anger turned into a chilly contempt. Of course, stories did break and journalists did have to cancel plans at short notice. But her recent introspection had made her sense that there was some greater ruse at work here.
As Fahim’s appeals continued, however, she began to wonder whether she should agree to see him. She had been fond of him, she reminded herself. And perhaps he was sincere in his desire to give her an explanation. Whatever happened, it would put an end to the ridiculous, uncertain choreography of the last few months.
Fahim stood up as soon as he spotted her approach the table.
He seemed anxious. He had twisted the napkin into a coil, and it had dropped onto the floor. She read that to be a good sign: he would be contrite and responsive.
“Is this table okay? Is it too hot for you here? Shall we go inside?” he asked.
“I’m fine here.”
From their table, Delhi was a maze of treetops and sandstone, arches glimpsed through foliage, balconies nestled high up against weathered façades, dark thickets of acacias. A pair of boys, still in their school uniform, emerged on a pitted wall, their arms outstretched as they took careful steps over the clefts and niches. They leaped off the end of the wall, raced up a half-ruined staircase, and crawled into a tunnel. Minutes later they reappeared on a neighboring rooftop, giddy and triumphant.
As Ania watched them, she could feel Fahim’s eyes on her.
It was still early, and only one of the other tables was occupied. A waiter polished glasses, his back turned.
Fahim continued to be uncomfortable. He gabbled about some inconsequential election, changed his drink order, undid and retied his shoelaces, went off to wash his hands. When he returned, he gestured to the other side of the terrace.
“Come and have a look at the sky; it’s amazing.”
She picked up her handbag and followed him.
The sun was a pale disk at the center of a grand purple billow. There was a great rustle and heave, an endless thrash as a tide of pigeons rose into the air. The light changed again. A mau
ve tinge seeped over the cracked white domes of an abandoned mosque.
“Listen,” said Fahim.
She turned, and his face was far too close. And then she felt the rough scrape of his skin against her lips and then the warmth of his mouth, a wetness.
“What are you doing?”
She pushed him away with all her force.
His face crumpled, overwhelmed by hurt. And then it reconstituted itself, shock and anger etched into his features.
An image of Adrian Thurley flashed through her mind—the chalky skin, the pale eyelashes, the whiskey breath, and the hoarse whisper of “Principessina.” With all her force she swung her handbag, hitting Fahim in the chest.
“What the fuck is your problem?” he shouted.
The other couple turned around, a waiter stopped in the middle of the terrace.
Ania hurried past the tables, through the door, and into the waiting elevator. A sharp pain ran through her finger as she jabbed at the button. The doors closed. She was beginning to sweat, a cough making her chest hurt. At the exit she walked past the desk and then had to return. She mumbled the car’s license plate number to the valet and mauled the inside of her bag, looking for a tissue as the elevator made its way up again. An arrow flared in the dim light as the lift began to come back down. She was still coughing, still sweating. She spotted the car nosing its way up the lane and rushed out to meet it. A motorbike swerved to avoid her. She stepped in a pothole, and the water seeped into her shoe. Reaching the car, she yanked at the door handle, her cough now hurting her chest. The cold blast of its interior made her feel feverish. It was the same fear and disgust that she had felt in Lake Garda. But this time, thoughts of Dimple also crowded into her mind.
She managed to let the words out: “Thanks. Let’s go home.”
She laid her head back and looked at the row of tiny perforations that ran the length of the headliner fabric. The car went past the dark doors of the club but she did not turn to look. They reached the main road and waited for a gap in the traffic. She had stopped sweating. But the cough remained trapped in her gullet.
PART
TWO
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IN ANOTHER FEW weeks, summer arrived with all its ferocity. From the pool there came sounds of a ferocious splashing and a wail cut short. Ania rushed across the lawn, through the horseshoe arch in the wall, and down the steps, wondering whether Sigmund had been nosing around its edge and tumbled in.
As she approached, she saw that the splashing form was Renu, her limbs crashing through the water as though she were powering a turbine. Her head swung from side to side with an uncharacteristic violence. The colonel stood by the side of the pool in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, making encouraging noises. Ania had never seen his pale, thin legs before. She tried not to look and instead stepped nearer to the edge of the pool. Its ultramarine tiles were made more vivid by the white tadelakt-plaster walls that surrounded the pool area. Jasmine cascaded over the roof of the pool house, built in the style of a Moroccan riad, hand-carved wooden doors at its entrance and lanterns from Fez hanging in its many niches and alcoves.
Ania settled on one of the vintage daybeds in front of the pool house.
“Oh, it’s you in the pool,” she said to Renu. “I thought Siggy was drowning.”
The colonel gave her a wave, and Renu stopped mid-hurtle, rising to stand in the shallow end.
“It’s my new life, a sort of baptism,” she said, her chest heaving.
“All right then, time for a break,” said the colonel.
Renu waded to the steps and climbed up them on her hands and knees. The flouncy little skirt of her floral one-piece was now plastered around her hips.
“I’m exhausted. And starving. I never knew swimming brought on such an appetite.”
“Bua dearest, that was hardly a swim.”
Renu giggled.
“That’s a huge improvement, you should have seen me yesterday.”
“Where did you get that swimsuit?”
“Isn’t it just adorable? I’ve missed it. I haven’t worn it since the days when that horribly rude woman would come home to wax me.”
“So what’s with the swimming, all of a sudden?”
“I’ve finally decided to learn. Well, it all began because I wanted to restart my Persian classes and the colonel said that he would like to come too. But sadly my tutor, you remember him, the young man who went to school in a Daimler, he said that he doesn’t have time at the moment because he’s writing his memoir. So instead, I started teaching the colonel a bit of French. And it’s been so much fun. Although the poor darling’s pronunciation is atrocious.”
Ania tried to ignore the swell of annoyance she was beginning to experience. Even though she was responsible for Renu’s marital euphoria, she was not in the mood to witness it. Her efforts to bring Fahim and Dimple together having gone so horribly wrong, she felt she deserved some time to wallow.
“Well, you better be careful the colonel doesn’t get too fluent in French. Lots of women find it a real turn-on, you know. He might end up running off with someone else,” said Ania.
Renu’s confidence had soared to such an extent that she found the prospect hilarious.
“Oh, they’d just send him back after they’d seen what an utter grump he is first thing in the morning.” She giggled.
“In return for the French classes,” she continued, “he’s teaching me how to swim. He was appalled when he found out that I couldn’t. He demanded to know what on earth I used our pool for. I told him that on occasion I used the water to wet a tissue when I needed to clean my glasses.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be off to Australia soon?”
“We’ve postponed the trip. Nikhil has finally confirmed that he’s coming for a few weeks. And you know, he’s really like a son to my dear colonel. I’m just praying that everything goes well.”
“But why wouldn’t it?”
“I’m terribly apprehensive. They have a very special relationship, and what if Nikhil finds that he doesn’t get on with me or thinks that his uncle made a wrong choice or something like that.”
“Bua, stop being so absurd. Even if you don’t get on, it hardly matters. How often do they even see each other?”
“That’s not the point. These are deep bonds, and it’s important that we all come together as a family. You know, it’s really quite nerve-racking. I’m not sure what I have to do to appeal to a young man.”
“Oh my God, would you listen to yourself. So what do we know about him? Give me the essentials.”
“Well, he’s lived in America all of his life, and he’s very close to the colonel because he has a difficult relationship with his own father. He’s smart, handsome—although I don’t know, he looks handsome in photographs, I should say. I learned a lesson or two when they were trying to get me married years ago and kept sending me all those boys’ pictures. And then finally I’d meet them in the flesh. Uff.”
“What does he do?”
“Something to do with financial responsibility. Is that what they call it, or is it corporate responsibility? You know, these large companies, they make them spend some of their money on forests and malaria and zoos.”
“And I remember you saying he’s very attractive?”
“Shall I turn matchmaker for you this time?”
“I’m sorry, darling, but you’d be completely terrible at it. Let’s see what he’s like when he turns up. I still can’t see how his approval matters so much when you’re already married, and he doesn’t even live here.”
“I suppose you’re right. But still.”
“Listen, bua, I need to ask you about a hypothetical situation. Strictly hypothetical.”
“Go on.”
“Have you ever tried to improve someone’s life, you know, out of sheer kindness, lift them up, but then real
ized that the way you went about it was all wrong, but because of other people’s awfulness and not because of anything that you did?”
“Have you been interfering with Dileep’s wardrobe again? I’m telling you, he’s so stubborn, just let him wear those suits with the funny checked trousers. He’ll tire of them in another week.”
“Enough chitchat,” called the colonel from the far end of the pool, “time to get back in.”
He took off his shirt, folded it as though he might have to return it to a shop, and laid it on a lounger. In a flash he turned around, dived off the edge, and sliced into the water with perfect grace. A few seconds later his gray head emerged in the middle of the pool, a quiet pride washing over his face.
“Oh my,” said Renu, “how wonderful, did you see that? Well, I had better carry on with my lesson. Darling, come round to dinner at ours. If I spend any more time here, Dileep will think I never left.”
She stepped into the shallow end and waded through the water, her arms aloft, as though she were delivering some precious cargo.
* * *
—
NINA REACHED FOR a pair of scissors and cut the invitation into little strips. She swept these off her desk straight into the waste-paper basket. So much was trickling out of her hands, but she could still safeguard and ration her most valuable possession, her presence. She lit a cigarette with a great sense of satisfaction that she knew would dissipate in a few moments.
The apartment owners’ association had finally settled on a figure for the refurbishment of the building façade and common parts. She had no idea how she would pay it. An oleaginous letter from her bank had not been able to disguise its malevolent intent. As a result of her recent defaults, her loans were being recalibrated to assist her in abiding by their terms. The mechanisms of this conversion were set out in opaque terminology, but it was clear that the outcome would be stricter vigilance and higher interest payments.