Civil Lines

by Radhika Swarup

  ‘This,’ she whispered. Her voice was wispy, as if she didn’t dare to articulate the thought, and I moved closer to hear her say, ‘This is where we’ll keep the layout of each issue before it goes to print.’

  ‘Maya…’

  ‘Wait,’ she said, holding her hand up. She pushed the table to the end of the room, opening the doors to the garden room. The plants had long since withered and been moved out, but both of us thought instantly of Ma and Tasha-di sitting on the old wicker armchairs of an evening with their whisky and pakoras, and the late-night rasp in their voices, the backdrop to our childhoods.

  ‘This,’ Maya said, then trailed off. I nodded. Her voice had grown heavy, choked equally by memory and potential. Ma was still here, another ghost, and another ruin. She had died in this room. She had been reading a magazine in the morning, a cup of tea by her side, and the rest of the house had only been alerted to her passing by the sound of the cup clattering against the table. They had run in, Maya and Shanti, to find Ma, hands outstretched, head flung back as if at the commencement of laughter or a speech, and a tea stain spreading fast on the floor below.

  I saw Maya looking at the ground, and at the stain that had resisted all attempts at removal. I reached forward to put my arms around her. We hadn’t been overly tactile since my return, and she stiffened against me, but didn’t fight against the contact. That, I told myself, was something. That was a start. We remained together, still and uncertain, as the morning’s shadows stretched their fingers across the room.

  X

  Maya vacillated for days, developing doubts when she was alone, and I had to spend my days walking her through the rooms on the ground floor, painting the picture of the future that could be ours. The house would not have to be partitioned. We would not have to bring in builders, nor tenants. It would just be the both of us and our team—Tasha-di, a second mother, and others we vetted—bringing to life Ma’s old visualisation. By evening, she would be as enthused about The Satirist as I was, but overnight, the gremlins of doubt would set in. She would wake up conscious of the competition we faced, of her own lack of experience, and of my having abandoned her and Ma in the past. ‘I’m not leaving,’ I would repeat to her every morning, but still, she found it easier to bank on disappointment.

  At length, I began to action decisions in the evening after Maya had been worked up into enthusiasm and confidence. We would sit out on the veranda after dinner with our wine, and as the smell of jasmine rose from the garden, we would make our plans. The old library was slowly converted into the magazine’s office. The broken bookcase was relieved of its burden. I suggested to Shanti that we hire a carpenter to fix the woodwork, but she told us Pradeep was more than capable of the work. He came in then, early one morning while Maya and I were on our walk, and by the next morning, he had restored the bookcase to its original structure. The books were neatly arranged on the shelves, the volumes all sorted by size, and as I praised his work, his face flushed deep.

  ‘It’s nothing, Didi,’ he said. He was solemn, his head bowed, but it was clear he was pleased at the praise.

  ‘No really,’ said Shanti. ‘The boy laboured hard. He wouldn’t stop until his work was done.’ She beamed, patting her son on the back, and though he refused to look up, she added, ‘I offered so many times to bring him a cup of tea, but he wouldn’t take a break.’

  ‘He’s a hard worker.’

  Pradeep looked up at this. ‘There is so much more to do, Didi,’ he said. He spoke earnestly, and he looked not at me or at Maya, but at a fixed point between us. ‘The floor below the carpet.’ He rushed to a corner of the room, got onto his knees and pulled up the end of the carpet.

  ‘Pradeep!’ called out Shanti, a recrimination ready on her lips, but Maya and I were following him to where he knelt, and looking at the flooring he was pointing at.

  ‘Look, Didi,’ he said. ‘Pure marble.’

  I looked at Maya, who shrugged. For as long as we could remember, the floors across the house had been carpeted. The patch Pradeep was motioning towards was grey, and I couldn’t be certain of the material. Maya looked similarly flummoxed, but Pradeep nodded forcefully. He scrubbed at the exposed floor, lifting some dirt onto his palms, and smiled proudly. ‘Really Didi,’ he said. ‘I can set the flooring to rights in no time.’

  I looked again at Maya, who didn’t speak. Pradeep was looking at us now, his eyes flitting from one face to the next, and I said, ‘What about your job?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, his face downcast. ‘You’re right, Didi.’

  ‘See how much your Didis care about you, Pradeep?’ said Shanti. She shuffled slowly forward, looking uncertainly at the grimy floor. ‘They are right,’ she added, ‘you need to get back to work.’

  He nodded. He looked at us, and as we both spoke again, telling him how grateful we were to him for fixing the bookshelf, he rose.

  ‘Go, beta,’ Shanti called out. ‘You have to go to work,’ and he made his way outside the house.

  ‘This boy,’ said Shanti. She looked distastefully at the exposed floor. ‘All this mess he’s made.’

  ‘Come on, Shanti,’ Maya said. ‘He was a big help to us.’

  ‘He’s a good enough boy,’ she said. She brought out a broom and began sweeping the dust her son had unearthed, and as she worked, her complaints continued. ‘He’s become distracted of late. His father is insisting he marries, and has chosen a girl for him, a good girl from the village.’

  ‘But that’s great, Shanti!’

  ‘Yes, well,’ the woman sighed. ‘The girl is good, the family is good, but it’s become harder than ever to get a word out of the boy.’

  Maya asked, ‘Is he not happy with the match?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Shanti. ‘The girl is very good.’ The dirt had been swept up, and the carpet replaced, but Shanti kept working, running her broom over new parts of the floor. ‘She is pretty too,’ she said unhappily. ‘And it’s high time the boy was married.’

  ‘But…’

  Shanti was speaking over me. ‘He keeps lurking around.’

  We’d both noticed the same, but I moved to reassure Shanti. ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  Shanti tutted.

  ‘Maybe he isn’t ready to be married.’

  She shifted on her haunches.

  ‘Maybe,’ Maya added, ‘you could talk to him.’

  Shanti huffed again, but didn’t disagree with us. She picked up her broom and dustpan, and though she looked around the floor with dissatisfaction, her eyes lingered on the restored bookshelf. ‘OK,’ she said to herself as much as to us, and made her way from the room.

  Our next stop was to see Tasha-di. She was the family oracle, and we wanted her involvement with the magazine, but I told Maya I had to send off a message before we left.

  I ran up to my room, searched out the spot that offered good reception, and picked up my phone. I looked at Benjamin’s message, still perfunctory, and still expecting my return. I had told myself I wasn’t going to reply, but I typed out a quick text: ‘Staying in Delhi. I’m launching a new magazine.’

  We were sure Tasha-di would be quick to fall in with our plans. She had worried for months about Maya, and since my arrival in Delhi, had begun to ask me what my plans were. I pretended to complain that she wanted me gone, but her concern was clear. I made no mention of my ex-boyfriend, no mention of my work, and no mention of the life I had led in London. I had arrived in Delhi, ostensibly for a few weeks to check in on my older sister, and had made no mention of returning.

  But when Maya told her that we were thinking of launching a magazine, that we wanted, in fact, to resurrect Ma’s old title, she was curiously resistant. We made a strong pitch. This was a bit of Ma preserved, of course, and a purpose for us. There was a purpose for Tasha-di too, of course, and when we asked her to come in and take over the finances and the running of the magazine, she took an age to respond.

  We sat on her small sofa, the three of us, as we had since our childho
od, with her in the middle. I was running my fingers through the fringes of the throw behind me, and Tasha-di addressed me directly. ‘I’m surprised you want to do this, Siya.’

  ‘It’s a great idea,’ I gushed, and then, as she didn’t shift in her survey of me, ‘it’s you who says India is the new growth story. Everyone seems to be downing shutters in England.’

  She nodded thoughtfully. We had come over to her place straight after our morning walk. We brought with us lunch Shanti packed in ancient steel tiffin boxes, joking that it would be our first ever working lunch.

  ‘Really,’ I said as she didn’t speak. ‘We’ve planned it all out. Staffing, budgets, everything.’

  She smiled sadly. ‘I’d better get up,’ she said, pointing to the rug, and the empty tiffin boxes, ‘and start to tidy up.’ She patted me gently on the back, and I worried she considered the matter to be at an end.

  ‘But there’s more,’ I exclaimed. I told her I had money to contribute towards the magazine. My redundancy pay, while not a fortune, was a comfortable sum, and it would surely pay for the running costs of the magazine for a year or more. Tasha-di listened kindly to all I had to say, and then asked me if I had set aside a budget for advertising.

  ‘We’ll build that out,’ I said to her. ‘But I would imagine our ad revenues will only build up as our readership does.’

  ‘I’m not talking about ad revenues,’ Tasha-di told me. ‘I’m talking about the advertising you’ll have to do to get the public’s attention.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, though the enthusiasm with which I responded to her question betrayed my ignorance.

  ‘Costs stack up,’ said Tasha-di with infinite tenderness.

  ‘Sure,’ I repeated. I looked at Maya, who had been following our conversation without interrupting. She looked at me, gave me a small, thin smile, and shrugged. Another dream lost; I saw her think. We would return to our home where we would fight, as we had for weeks before Tasha-di had shown us The Satirist’s proofs, about how to put the house to use.

  Tasha-di was nodding, kindly, so kindly, and I knew she believed the magazine was doomed. ‘It’s a tough business, my darling,’ she was saying, ‘before you know it, you’ll have sunk all your money,’ and I knew she was thinking of her own failed business. It’s a tough business, the same morbid defeatism that Maya always exhibited, and I half-expected my feminist aunt to come out with some sexist trope. It was harder for women. It was the male-led enterprises that flourished.

  I stood up. I picked up the remains of our meal, the leftover rice and gravy and yogurt, piling one tiffin box over the next, and walked towards the kitchen. There, I worked slowly, trying to calm myself, rinsing out the utensils before parcelling them back up, but as I worked, I thought. I knew I wasn’t ready to give up. There would be funding we could source, of course, and in the interim, we could get to work creating the framework of the magazine.

  I heard hushed voices from the living room. This was Maya and Tasha-di, then, trying to work out how to deal with my disappointment. I heard the word gentle, and in a louder voice, Tasha-di saying, ‘She’s been through so much,’ but I shook my head. They were being too defeatist, the two in the living room. There were things we could do. We could source staff and print an issue. We could even launch online. The best magazines in India, especially in the politically charged environment we were living through, were the online ones. They were the ones at the vanguard of investigative journalism as most of their print brethren toed the party line.

  ‘Yes,’ I thought, jubilant, mutinous, unwilling to admit defeat. We could do it. Tasha-di was wrong to be so dour. We could create an online presence and we could print our magazine. And then, as we gained traction, we could seek outside funding. We could present a tangible product as opposed to simply a half-baked idea.

  There were holes, I knew, in my argument, and hurdles I wasn’t anticipating. Sourcing funding would be harder than I expected. We had no pedigree. Maya’s journalistic career had been lacklustre, and my last role had been in marketing for a company that had failed. Tasha-di, for all her wisdom, had always operated behind the scenes. She had no background to speak of, and as a team, I could see we wouldn’t inspire unstinting confidence.

  Footsteps approached the kitchen. Tasha-di came in with a smile on her face. As she made eye contact with me, her smile stretched wide. I knew she was terrified of what I would say, but I went up to her. ‘Don’t worry, Tasha-di,’ I said, and as she swallowed in surprise, I added, ‘I’m not going to be downhearted.’

  ‘No,’ she said, still surprised. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘There’s plenty we can do.’ She was staring, nodding but not smiling, wary of disagreeing and disappointing me further. I said, ‘We have some money, Tasha-di. It allows us to hire a small team, and to print an issue. We’ll do everything in-house to minimise costs—the design, the layouts, the artwork. It won’t be the most polished publication, of course, but it will get us into print. And,’ I added, ‘we can publish online too, like all those new outfits Maya admires.’

  ‘That won’t work.’

  ‘Of course it will.’

  ‘You have to have significant funding before you launch online. I have seen it with others in the industry.’

  ‘We’ll manage.’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ she maintained. ‘The internet is full of noise. To emerge above the clamour requires serious financial muscle. ‘No,’ she repeated, looking at my crestfallen face. ‘Focussing on the internet will mean throwing our existing money down the drain.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Listen to me, beta,’ Tasha-di said. She was looking at me with love, and I knew she was thinking of the past. ‘You print an issue,’ she said. ‘What then?’

  ‘Well look, you never know.’ I smiled at her, but she still had a worried look on her face. ‘We don’t start off online, and we limit ourselves to a small print run. The first issues will be distributed locally. They’ll be free if it gets people to read then. And hopefully…’

  ‘Siya, child…’

  ‘Hopefully,’ I continued, my smile wide. My cheer felt forced even to me, and my jaw was starting to ache. ‘Hopefully, Tasha-di, The Satirist will be a runaway success. Hopefully,’ I said as she pursed her lips, ‘it makes so much money that we never need to worry about money again.’

  Maya hadn’t come in, but I knew our voices were carrying. Tasha-di looked towards the living room, sighed, then asked, ‘And what if the magazine fails?’

  ‘Then,’ I said, still smiling, though I knew I sounded unrealistic. Tasha-di was looking at me with concern, and I knew she was beginning to worry in earnest. ‘We will still have options,’ I said. ‘We can look outside for funding. We can go to a bank, or to a media house.’

  Maya came into the kitchen, a quizzical look on her face, and I shrugged. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘You can be all doom and gloom if you like. But I’m not going to give up.’

  ‘But darling,’ said Tasha-di, ‘you could lose all your money!’

  ‘I could,’ I agreed. ‘But it’s not a life changing amount.’ Maya was frowning, and I said, ‘You’re being too defeatist. What’s the worst that could happen? We spend a year building something. We’ll learn a bit more about ourselves and what we are capable of. We could fail, of course, but I would hate to not try for the fear of not succeeding.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Think of The Satirist as an adventure. We’ll have fun, if nothing else.’

  Maya had been quiet for most of our discussion at Tasha-di’s. She was quiet in the car on the way home, and anytime I tried to speak, she pointed to the road ahead. She was a careful driver, and skittish in Delhi’s congested roads, but we were encountering empty streets, and she still insisted on focussing on her driving. She was always easily daunted, ready to give up at the first sign of a challenge, and I worried she had lost heart.

  As we turned into Civil Lines, I saw her relax. She smiled at me through the rear-view mirror, and echoed a phrase
I had shot at Tasha-di: ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’

  I smiled in response, but there was no time to talk. We had arrived back home to the sight of Shanti at the front door, waving her hands at her downcast son.

  It emerged that Pradeep had been fired from his job. His employers had given him a warning the day he had come to the airport to pick me up. He had been spending too much time, apparently, away from his work and in our service. I thought of the innumerable occasions when he would offer to run an errand for us. We had always been grateful to accept, but then, we hadn’t once thought to see if his helping us was putting his employment in danger.

  ‘This stupid boy!’ Shanti was crying. ‘He never even said a thing to me!’ Apparently, she had grown suspicious, and once we had left to meet Tasha-di, she had set herself the task of tracking him down. She had gone first to his employer’s house, waiting outside the gates for over an hour, but he had neither entered nor emerged. She had asked a passing maid about his whereabouts, and it was the maid who told her that Pradeep had been fired. ‘I was so ashamed when she told me he had been let go a month or more back. Just think,’ she said to Maya, ‘what a fool I felt like.’ Maya nodded, and her affirmation reinvigorated Shanti. ‘And on my way back home, who do you think I see, bold as brass, on the pavement?’

  She hit at his shoulder with her palm, but as she was a good foot shorter than him, her aggression didn’t much disturb her son. He remained as he was, head bowed, hands folded, and rooted to the ground. Shanti screamed in her frustration, lashing out at Pradeep again, and Maya ran forward to contain the old retainer.

  ‘It’s our fault too, Shanti,’ I told her. ‘We shouldn’t have asked him to help us out so much.’

  She shook her head. ‘What is he, a child?’ she asked through a spittle-filled mouth. ‘Can he not take care of his obligations?’

  Maya had her hand on Shanti’s back. ‘He was just being kind.’

  ‘Being kind?’ Shanti roared. Maya shrank back at the vehemence in the woman’s voice, and seeing how Maya reacted, Shanti hit out at her son again. ‘What kindness is there in letting down your employer? What kindness is there in breaking your poor mother’s heart?’ She kept beating at Pradeep with her worn palms, and Maya mouthed at me to help.