THOSE PRICEY
THAKUR GIRLS
ANUJA CHAUHAN
in the backseat of an Ambassador car,
four happy girls sing ‘ten guitars’
once so close, now living afar,
Minni-Ruhi-Nandu-Anuja ♥
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Also by Anuja Chauhan
COMING SOON
Copyright
1
On a still evening in early April, when bees buzz torpidly amidst black-eyed sunflowers and the scent of mango blossom is in the air, one finds Justice Laxmi Narayan Thakur (retd), clad only in his vest and pyjamas, squatting in the grass, busily administering the death sentence to the upstart weeds that have dared thrust their cheeky, encroaching heads in his fragrant dog flowerbeds.
Judge saab is inordinately proud of his house. A pillared creamy-white bungalow sporting dreadlocks of maroon bougainvillea, it is built on a 4,800 gaj plot along leafy Hailey Road, with the ruins of a fourteenth-century stepwell to the left and New Delhi’s poshest commercial district Connaught Place to the right. A seven-feet-high boundary wall circles the garden, topped off with vicious bits of broken glass that gleam in the sun like salt upon the rim of a margarita glass. This precaution is less to discourage thieves (the Judge admits that by the time he finished renovating the original structure, there wasn’t much left inside to steal, anyway) and more to daunt the many amorous males spilling out of nearby Modern School, Barakhamba Road, eager for a sighting of Judge saab’s true treasure – five delectable daughters, each one more beautiful than the other.
Surveying his garden in the evening, inhaling the scent of wet earth and desi gulab, secure in the knowledge that wife and girls are safe within, the Judge is often heard to observe that the word ‘paradise’ evolves from the Persian pairi-diza which, simply put, means ‘walled garden’.
Next door stands the house of Justice Laxmi Narayan’s younger brother, identical in every respect, but somewhat shabbier. But then, Ashok Narayan Thakur has only one son and no daughters to lavish their attentions on either house or garden.
Three of these paragons are now ‘settled’ and only twenty-three-year-old Debjani and seventeen-year-old Eshwari remain at home. The three marriages, truth be told, have depleted the Judge’s purse even more than the renovation of the house has, but that is something he doesn’t like brought up.
‘A, B and C may feel guilty,’ he cautions, ‘and D and E will definitely feel short-changed. But really, Mamtaji, I have no idea how we will give this younger brigade a decent send-off.’
At which Mrs Mamta Thakur pats his bony shoulder and directs his attention to how thickly the kamini is blossoming along the boundary wall.
A lifetime spent with meticulously organized legal files and court libraries has moved the Judge to name his daughters Anjini, Binodini, Chandralekha, Debjani and Eshwari – a decision that has earned him a reputation of eccentricity he doesn’t quite deserve. It has also caused his daughters to harbour a mild (but lingering) grouse against him.
‘Naming us alphabetically, in order of appearance, like we were housing blocks in Chittaranjan Park! It’s so dehumanizing. D’you know, BJ, that that’s how Mr Bumble named the orphans in Oliver Twist?’
At five o’clock every evening, the Judge puts away his gardening tools and retreats to his quarters for a leisurely shower. When he emerges, exuding happy anticipation and Brut 33, a table fan whirs gently in the garden and a green baize table has been set up with a pack of plastic-coated playing cards. The Judge sits down, samples the tea and snacks that have been laid out, and awaits the arrival of his kot-piece cronies. These worthies usually roll in around six. Until then, Judge saab shuffles the cards hopefully and attempts to solicit his busy family to a game of seven-eights, rather in the manner (says his wife) of a street vendor selling dirty postcards. She occasionally plays two hands with him, never more, because – as she always remarks when she rises majestically from the table – some people may be retired but she still has work to do.
But today there is to be no kot-piece. A major event has occurred in the Thakur family, one that has upset all natural order and routine. And it is because of this that, as the Judge unbends from his beloved flowerbeds and straightens out the kinks in his back, Mrs Mamta Thakur hurries out of the house, all silken rustle and important bustle, and tells him to get a move on.
‘Hurry up, LN, you’re still mooning over those flowers! This is such a big day for Dabbu – and it’s happening exactly the way Shastriji predicted it would, remember?’
Shastriji is the family astrologer, and relations between the Judge and him have been fraught ever since the Judge chose to name his daughters so arbitrarily. The Fates are greater than ABC, Shastriji had rebuked the Judge, who had unrepentantly asked why, if the Fates were so great, Shashtriji didn’t become a full-time astrologer and give up selling Sumeet mixer-grinders on the side? Shastriji had responded by predicting the Judge’s imminent demise by a painful, not-very-polite disease, and departed in a huff.
‘That pompous pigtail,’ the Judge snorts now. ‘We should never have told her what he said. The wretched thing has become a self-fulfilling prophecy…’
According to Shastriji, whom Mrs Mamta had consulted after Debjani accidently sat down on a steaming hot pressure cooker when she was five and drove a needle through her own nostril in sewing class when she was ten, Debjani’s stars were in a sleep state known as supta vastha. This was what was causing her to walk into walls, forget to dilute her bucket full of hot water with cold before pouring it over her body, and sink her nose luxuriously into roses seething with teething bumblebees. Her stars would remain in supta vastha until she turned twenty-three, and then – he had snapped his fingers, his eyes glowing behind his rather spiffy, cherry-red spectacles – she would awaken to fortune, fertility and fame.
The Judge tried to discourage this theory from taking hold, concerned that it would give Debjani an excuse to be a slacker in school and pile up too much expectation of her later, but it caught the imagination of her older sisters. Debjani was teased every time she gazed dreamily out of the window (which was often) and many parallels were drawn with the tale of the sleeping beauty who was awakened by true love’s first kiss.
And now, just a few weeks after her twenty-third birthday, Shastriji seems to have proved himself to be amazingly accurate. Because Debjani has achieved the near impossible. She has cleared three rounds of countrywide auditions, conducted over a period of two whole years, to emerge triumphant as an English newsreader on DeshDarpan – India’s one and only television channel. Tonight is her first broadcast on DD’s national programme, which beams out live from Delhi for all of India to hear and see. While the rest of the world is managing to greet this event with equanimity, Hailey Road is all a flutter.
‘Do hurry up, LN, they said she has to report for make-up three hours before the newscast!’
‘Mamtaji, I’m the fastest dresser in this house,’ asserts the Judge, throwing down his muddy khurpee and struggling out of his vest right there in the garden. ‘Heaven forbid anything go wrong with Dabbu-ka-debut! But are the princesses ready?’
They are almost ready. In the little dressing room attached to the airy bedroom that Debjani likes to keep scrupulously neat and Eshwari is always messi
ng up, Debjani stands in front of the full-length mirror, while Eshu kneels at her feet, making final adjustments to the pleats of her sister’s stiff silk sari.
They make a charming picture. Eshwari is slim-waisted but otherwise full-figured, with buttery skin and straight black hair that falls into her sparkling black eyes in a spiky fringe. She takes after her mother, as do her sisters Binni and Chandu. At home, she is mostly to be found sprawled across various sofas, with the general air of a hibernating creature conserving its energy for the really important things in life. But when she walks the crowded corridors of Modern School, Barakhamba Road, there is a swing to her short blue skirt, a bounce in her thick ponytail, and a sassy smile perpetually curves her generous mouth.
Debjani, on the other hand, looks best at home, hair released from its tight plait and falling in loose curls around her oval face, her lanky limbs relaxed in denim cut-offs and baggy T-shirt, the slight, defensive hunch she adopts when out of the house eased away. She is widely held to be a paler photocopy of the family beauty, her eldest sister Anjini. Both girls get their looks from their father – all oval and honey, with hair that has the lustrous colour and curves of shelled walnuts. But the auntyjis along Hailey Road have long pronounced Anjini’s features to be the finer, her limbs fuller, her manner more vivacious. And they don’t like their rulings challenged.
‘Is it okay now, Dabbu?’ Eshu asks patiently.
But Debjani is too busy glowering at the Mole.
This much despised feature is a black spot, the size and heft of a tiny mosquito bite, bang in the middle of her chin. It is so perfectly symmetrically placed that people often think it’s fake and that she’s drawn it deliberately, in the manner of a simpering Hindi movie heroine. Debjani is mortified by the ‘beauty spot’; she finds it appallingly vapid. Besides, she lives in daily terror of it going rogue on her, turning into a witch’s wart and sprouting hairs.
Eshwari bounces to her feet and points out for the hundredth time that things could’ve been worse. ‘It could’ve been right below your nostril, hanging like a bit of dried snot,’ she says as Debjani peers into the mirror, frowning at the thing. ‘Better that people think you’re into sixties’ style make-up, frankly.’
‘Oh, it’s fine for you to talk,’ Debjani says darkly. ‘You don’t have a small doggie tick curled up right in the middle of your chin. At HTA, people were always sniggering at it.’
‘Well, today all those HTA types will see you on TV and regret ever asking you to quit,’ Eshwari tells her. ‘Losers.’
‘They didn’t ask me to quit,’ Debjani clarifies immediately. ‘I decided advertising wasn’t the profession for me. And it wasn’t.’
Still, she has to admit the Hindustan Thompson Advertising executives had looked super relieved when she told them she’d decided to leave. Her fat Bengali boss had wiped his brow and said ‘oh fuck’ again and again with increasing insincerity. And that ethnic, oxidized silver-studded aunty with the wriggly, sperm-like bindi hadn’t asked her to reconsider even once. Instead, she told Debjani that with her ‘dreaminess’, her ‘self-absorption’ and her ‘lack of initiative’ it was probably a good thing she had decided against a career in advertising. Dabbu had ended up feeling quite demoralized.
If you lived out your entire life as a sort of a cut-price Anji didi – she had wanted to tell the sperm-bindi aunty – you would have lacked initiative too.
All in all, if the telegram from DeshDarpan hadn’t arrived three weeks after she stopped working, telling Debjani she had cleared the last round of tests conducted almost six months ago, she would have hit quite a low.
‘Can’t you leave your hair open?’ Eshwari asks as Debjani starts to plait it tightly. ‘It’s your prettiest thing.’
Debjani shakes her head. ‘It’ll come into my eyes and blind me,’ she says sensibly. ‘I won’t be able to read. This is fine.’
‘Okay,’ Eshu says a little doubtfully. ‘I hope I’ve been helpful, Dubz. I wish Anji didi was here. She’s so good at tarting people up.’
‘Oh, please.’ Debjani rolls her eyes. ‘She hums “Hey There Georgy Girl” every single time she gets me ready. It’s like a law or something. Especially the bit about “why do all the boys just pass you by? Is it because you just don’t try or is it the clothes you wear?” I’d rather be dressed by you any day,’ she finishes.
Eshu stands back and hands her a maroon rubber band. ‘Okay, you look lovely. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! I’m so excited!’
‘Perestroika,’ Debjani mutters, taking short mincing steps in her sari, her narrow face intense. ‘Dhimmitude. Hu Yaobang. Thiruvananthapuram.’
In the driveway, the Judge’s bulbous black Ambassador is spewing smoke. Husky young Gulab Thakur, the girls’ good-natured cousin, is working at it with a cranking handle, his bouffant hair bouncing up prettily with every whirl, while the Judge hunches behind the wheel, haranguing him.
‘Arrey, give it a good hard whirl, Gulgul! What’s the use of all that bodybuilding if you can’t even fix a little starting trouble? Fool! Learn how to heat up a cold engine – it’s good practice for married life!’
The engine sputters to life and Gulgul springs away, flushed and beaming. Mrs Mamta and the girls get into the car, Debjani very careful of her sari pleats. The doors slam shut and the Ambassador rolls out importantly through the old green gate onto Hailey Road, where a toli of mangy, khujli-infested street dogs sleeping on a sand pile immediately give it a rousing send-off. The entire family of the dhobi who has ironed Debjani’s sari for this momentous occasion jumps to their feet and waves. Frail old Mr Gambhir who runs the kirana across the road raises both palms in blessing and the driver of a packed DTC bus, his hair standing on end at the Judge’s sudden and supreme arrival onto the middle of the road, slams down his brakes and curses roundly.
‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ Mrs Mamta says happily. ‘Debjani, you’ve got your gate pass, na?’
Debjani has her passes safe, the gate pass and the studio pass, both of which declare her to be a bona fide staff artiste at DeshDarpan Studios. She is feeling anything but artistic, though. As the Ambassador circles Connaught Place, turns into Parliament Street and approaches Broadcasting House, panic wraps its hairy hand around her belly and squeezes. Hard.
‘I’ll be fine, Ma,’ she says as the Judge pulls up the car at the gate. ‘Where will you guys watch me from?’
‘Home.’ Mrs Mamta smiles. ‘Everyone is coming. And afterwards, we’ll come and pick you up and go for chaat, okay?’
Debjani smiles, a slightly lopsided, street-urchin grin that sits oddly upon her angelic face. ‘We’re here,’ she says breathlessly. ‘I’m going in. Wish me luck!’
‘Aap traffic block kar rahe hain,’ growls the truculent guard at the gate. The Thakurs ignore him.
‘Best of luck, Dabbu!’ Eshu hugs her sister.
‘All the best, beta,’ Mrs Mamta Thakur says, sniffing. ‘Your first words – you said them jumping up and down, trying to get your father to put down your sisters and pick you up and swing you instead – were my tunn my tunn. And today your turn has finally come!’
‘My first words were Eshu eat.’ Eshwari grins. ‘Anji didi’s were I sabse pritty. And Binni didi’s were –’
‘Never mind all that,’ her mother remonstrates. ‘Today is Dabbu’s day.’
‘Dabbu-ka-debut!’ the Judge beams, praying fervently that this newsreading stint works out better than the job in advertising did.
‘Traffic is being block,’ the guard tries again.
‘So, um, bye, you guys,’ Dabbu says, turning down the chrome handle and grabbing hold of her sari pleats.
But her family isn’t done yet.
‘I remember,’ says the Judge as he kills the engine and rests comfortably against the steering wheel, ‘when we all went to see The Magik of the Vunderful Vladimir. In Lucknow, you know. I wrangled VIP passes through that IAS whose son I defended for drunk and disorderly conduct. Vladimir – huge intimid
ating chap with bloodshot, kajal-rimmed eyes – asked for a volunteer and I raised my hand. He called me up, made me wear a dam’ foolish looking satin bathrobe and then shut me in a box. Dabbu started to cry – she was only three years old. When he started to stick swords into the box, she started shouting. I could hear her through the box, although its walls were six inches thick. And when he produced a shiny saw to cut the box into two pieces –’
‘She leapt off her seat and charged up to the stage, pulled out a sword from the box and attempted to impale the Vunderful Vladimir,’ Mrs Mamta Thakur finishes, her eyes moist with sentimental tears. ‘Right through the crotch. The sword was too heavy, though – she dropped it on her own foot. The doctors had to put six stitches.’
‘Gutsy,’ the Judge says gruffly.
‘Bloodthirsty little beast.’ Eshwari grins.
‘No, no.’ Mrs Mamta shakes her head. ‘So gentle. You used to hit her all the time but she never once raised a hand on you, Eshu.’
‘Traffic,’ the guard implores. ‘Move kijiye. Please.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the Judge huffs as Dabbu finally alights. ‘We are moving. Oho… ahhh… hrmmph! Left the cranking handle at home. You! Guard babu! Can you give our car a push?’
Okay, that was the most embarrassing moment of my life, Dabbu thinks, mortified, as she walks down the pillared corridor towards the green room with small cautious steps, holding on for dear life to the pleats of her sari. How could BJ do that to me? And what was the need to give Ma the wheel and get out and push the car himself, thus revealing his pyjama naada and bathroom chappals for all the sniggering guards to see? I bet everybody out there is laughing at me. And then he made it even worse by shouting ‘Best of luck, Dabbu’.
Dabbu! But I won’t be intimidated, I won’t. I’ll be coom and caal. I mean, cool and calm. I can do this. I’ve wanted to be a newsreader since I was three. And now I am. I maxed the auditions. I cleared the GK test, the voice test and the camera test. This is not advertising, where I have to be witty every single second. Here I just need to look neat and not hunch, and read from a prepared script. I’ve got this.
THOSE PRICEY THAKUR GIRLS Page 1