NO TRESPASSING
Brinda S. Narayan is the author of Bangalore Calling. She blogs on books, creativity and midlife at www.brindasnarayan.com. She currently lives in Bengaluru.
Praise for the Author
‘Brinda S Narayan’s debut novel takes a sensitive, insightful look into the schizophrenic world of Bengaluru BPOs. A staunch love for all things Indian coexists with stereotypes about Indian quirks.’
Marie Claire, May 2011
‘Narayan’s characters are penned with a disarming candour and her prose peppered with wry humour. Her sympathetic yet gritty gaze proffers a good understanding of her characters.
The Telegraph
‘Her sharp stories underline the extraordinariness of ordinary lives caught up in the maelstrom of globalization.’
The Hindu BusinessLine
‘This book is a must-read.’
Business World
‘Despite this novelistic wealth of detail, the pieces are brisk, gripping reads, and many end without tying up knots too neatly, preferring rather to leave the reader spinning ahead with the narrative.
Time Out
First published by Tranquebar, an imprint of Westland Publications Private Limited in 2019
1st Floor, A Block, East Wing, Plot no. 40, SP Infocity, Dr. MGR Salai, Perungudi, Kandanchavadi, Chennai 600096
Westland, the Westland logo, Tranquebar and the Tranquebar logo are the trademarks of Westland Publications Private Limited, or its affiliates.
Copyright © Brinda S. Narayan, 2019
ISBN: 9789388689137
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
For
Sekhar, Nivrith, Rishika
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRT-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ONE
WHEN MANAS AND I moved from Bangalore to Mumbai, we no longer lived in a quiet community. Instead, we found ourselves in a nondescript flat whose road-facing walls were sullied by the city’s dense smog. In the distance, the sea glistened and roared. Though we tasted its salty sting, our living room overlooked a clutter of boxes and dusty cacti. Previously, we’d have shuddered at the shabby, middle-class vista, refused to live here even. Now we cherished the emphatic retreat from our Fantasia idyll—the blur of dragonflies above our climbing rose, the silvery glint of a sun-speckled lake.
We guarded our anonymity, revelling in the thronging island’s unconcern. And we rarely reached out to the old crowd, doing our best to forget. We replaced our luxury linen drapes with plastic blinds, sealed our crystal trinkets in a carton, sold our Thos. Moser walnut dining table and bungalow-style cherry-coloured settee. We dumped the weekly real estate supplement that accompanied the Saturday paper into the recycle bin, without glancing at new properties advertised.
Our lives were so consciously guarded, the barriers so carefully erected, I wondered if we eventually might start missing those people or missing the place. But my mild-mannered husband, who was rarely baleful, curled his lips and said: ‘Not that place. Never Vedika, never.’
And yet they trickled back in, those years. They slid in with the mail, in tedious quarterly requests for the next loan repayment. They came back when I crossed the street, and caught sight of a glass façade or a sloping red-brown roof, or the polished gleam of a tall, wooden gate. Sometimes it was only a glimmer of something, the way the light flitted across a rainwater puddle, reminding me of the Fantasia lake in the afternoons. Sometimes, a bolt of green fabric in a sari shop. Sometimes, the sound of children squabbling in the park behind the 2nd Main bus stop.
Often it caught me unawares. One afternoon at a beauty parlour, in the midst of a facial, I was sinking into a pleasant afternoon snooze while the woman’s fingers kneaded my forehead. Suddenly, I spotted something in the mirror that set me shuddering in my chair, startling the cosmetician. On the ledge facing the mirror, below an advertisement for a new hair colour, seven wigs were stacked in a VIBGYOR series.
One night, I was muttering in my sleep, as Manas says I often do. Perhaps a large shadow was cast by the neighbours’ tubelight, which penetrated our sheer curtains, or by the dim nightlight that Manas had recently installed. When I woke up, I screamed. Since then, we had had the curtains replaced and the nightlight shifted, but the horror clung to us, as if we had no right to shake it off.
Of late, I had started hiding the bank notices. Not just from Manas, but also from myself. Folding them into discarded India Today magazines, stuffing them behind the mustard and turmeric jars, where brown-yellow stains obliterated their menace. The latest notice, however, slipped under our door on a radiant Saturday morning, had a red line across the envelope. The letter inside warned of raised interest charges. Manas, his reading glasses perched on his slightly crooked nose, creased his forehead into an exasperated funnel: ‘Have to sell it.’
I spooned rice pudding into Karthik’s mouth. Milky residue dribbled from the corners. I scowled, was about to say something, then bit back the barbed words. Did we have to enter that fraught territory again? The unravelling after the glorious beginning, and then our ceaseless bickering about whose idea it had been in the first place:
‘Vedika, there’s no debate, it was your idea.’
‘You wanted Fantasia, all the facilities…’
‘You wanted to move to India.’
I didn’t want to head into that tired terrain, so I focused on my son’s fist, curled around my finger. ‘Let’s take Karthik to the park today.’
‘The market has started buzzing again, we need to move quickly.’ Manas had drawn his lips into a grim, taut line. ‘Any value we can recover will be worth it.’
He was right. There was the loan to contend with, mounting monthly dues and unflinching bankers that we couldn’t elude any longer. Till recently, the market had been dormant, but of late, there were signs of a revival. We needed to act quickly before new forces dampened what brokers had started calling ‘green shoots’.
A month later, when we headed to Bangalore to spruce up our villa for potential buyers, my mind meandered to the early years. To the times before my son was murdered. To the fairy tale beginning.
TWO
I COULD HAVE SPOTTED the signs, even in that first year. But when we moved from Fremont to Fantasia, a gated community in Bangalore, the landscape was so startling I could hardly dwell on flaws, not even on plumbing leaks or faulty switches. I felt li
ke my body had been hurled from our middlebrow existence in Fremont into a cottony dream. Was this India? Really?
Who could have guessed that at one point, these had been untamed outskirts, semi-forested and criss-crossed by a patchwork of lakes and villages? At first the I.T. companies arrived and then the call centres. And more recently, the technology start-ups. The light-scattering glass towers, sprouting amidst bent grass, silver oaks, and bamboo clumps, refracting the allure of jobs and new age lifestyles. Soon the country’s big-league builders alighted on unfenced properties, flashing the designer blueprints of foreign-trained architects.
At Fremont, we had already glimpsed our future. Thumbed through satiny brochures and zoomed into 360-degree views led by a cherry-lipped mannequin. Lingered on faux fireplaces and German kitchens, on veined marble floors and weather-proof tiled roofs. Barely able to believe that such refinement was possible in the middle of the chaos that coursed through our cities.
Still, I had been unprepared for the vision that greeted us when we drove past the wooden arch engraved with the words, ‘Fantasia: So Wildly Kusro.’ Glimpses of Spain, Italy and ancient Greece were transposed into dusty hinterlands in the form of eighty Mediterranean villas set against terraced gardens. These were divided into four clusters, each with an arresting view: Utopia (lake view), Arcadia (golf course view), Shangrila (forest view) and Eden (zen garden view). The centrepiece: a dome-shaped clubhouse, sixty thousand square feet of air-conditioned extravagance with exceptional amenities—a squash court, an amphitheatre, and a well-stocked bar to go with the billiards table—apart from standard ones such as a swimming pool.
More than anything else, I was fitting in and making friends. I had been afraid, with my middle class upbringing, that I lacked the effortless poise imbued by a wealthy childhood. But my neighbours accepted me, even welcomed me into their fold. Invited us to impromptu picnics by the lake, indulgent strolls by the golf course and barbecue dinners in expansive backyards.
We seemed to have everything: two darling children, a stunning home, a shining future. Our days, in such surroundings, acquired the languor of an eternal holiday. How could we anticipate anything else?
A year later, on a Saturday in June, we were fretting about the heat, keeping our central air-conditioning humming at all times. Usually, I would have ignored a child’s screams. After all, children screamed for the flimsiest of reasons, or for no reason at all. But that morning, when I heard the first scream, I felt my limbs go frigid and my heart rate spike. There was something so deathly in the child’s cries that many people—almost everyone at Utopia, our lake-front cluster—rushed out.
When I crossed our front yard, Kalpana and two others were darting about, their faces creased with concern. Whose child was it? I was panicking too. Was it Rhea, my two-year-old? Had she injured herself? Or was it Sajan, my impish six-year-old who bounded about our complex with unabated energy?
Hansika, probably in the middle of her late morning shower, hadn’t stepped out. Before we could reach the rainbow garden, we saw little Ahana, carried in by a security guard. Up the path that led from the lake to the first quadrangle and then onto the cobbled stones of our cluster. The child’s head bled profusely. The guard bore her, neck dangling, into her home, where the cacophony was made worse by her mother, Hansika, who cried out as if her own skull had been cracked open, and by all the other mothers crowding behind her: ‘Get a doctor!’, ‘Call an ambulance!’, ‘Fetch some ice.’ News travelled quickly. Already a few folks from Shangrila, the forest cluster, had joined the group. Damini of course, jostling against a taut-lipped, unsmiling Kalpana. When the child was laid in an anguished Hansika’s lap, Damini raised the head with cushions to stem the blood flow, deftly bandaging it with cotton and gauze. ‘Not a deep wound, darling,’ Damini said. Older than the other women, her generous girth exuded a maternal competence that many of the new mothers lacked. She scurried into the kitchen, set a large kettle boiling for tea, urged the rest of us to simmer down and relax. Raj Mehta, more unsettled by Damini’s overbearing presence than his child’s injury, had summoned the security guards to ascertain ‘what the bloody hell had happened, and how had they allowed this bloody thing, and what the bloody shit were they doing?’ But soon enough, with Ahana’s little head tightly bandaged, and after the doctor’s reassuring verdict—‘just a surface injury’—the calamity morphed into an impromptu party with several hot mugs of tea, sandwiches, and platefuls of steaming pakoras. Our spouses were called over for a potluck brunch. By late evening, we had settled on a movie night and were checking for tickets at the nearest multiplex.
Ensconced in our false sense of security and unaware of a darker force gathering inside our homes, we paid scant attention to the details in the kids’ accounts of the incident: of how Kalpana’s boy, Gaurav, had flung a stone at Ahana as she slithered down the bright blue caterpillar slide. Of how a small fight over whose turn it was had become nasty. Of how Gaurav had lost his temper, and being a mere five-year-old, hadn’t realised how dangerous a stone could be. These things happen, we said, and were happy to forgive and forget and bond like a large family. Kalpana asked Gaurav to apologise and give Ahana a big ‘huggie and kissie’. Soon, the adult conversation drifted to other topics: classes planned in the clubhouse, cultural activities for the community, the progress on the squash court flooring. We loved the place and there was so much to look forward to.
THREE
BEFORE WE KNEW IT, our third blissful year in Fantasia had passed. I was rather buoyant when Kalpana picked Sajan to play the prince for the Diwali drama—an Indianised Cinderella filled with Bollywood songs. Several relatives had commented on how our seven-year-old, with glossy waves that grazed his almond eyes, had an elegant, almost aristocratic bearing. My motherly pride swelled again when Kalpana told me how regal he looked. With her wiry hair drawn into a tight braid and eyebrows pencilled into supercilious arcs, Kalpana flitted showily between conference calls at Intel and our preparations for Diwali. She was rarely frazzled like I was and I must admit, I found her quite daunting.
Practice sessions were held alternately in Kalpana’s home and ours. I had volunteered to write the script, to sculpt paper props and help with rehearsals. That evening, in our living room, the centre table was shoved to a corner, the fabric futon folded up against the wall and the Turkish kilim rolled up against a corner. Rhea, our peaceable three-year-old, circled the backyard in her tricycle, with her stuffed toys loaded into her carrier basket. Occasionally, she wandered into the living room to stare at the other kids. Especially at her much-adored brother, whose silliest antics—tumbling into a pretence fall, punching a pillow, scattering marbles all over—evoked rapturous chuckles from her.
The script was simple and Sajan’s lines were easy enough. Besides, I had spent several hours coaching him on previous evenings. But under Kalpana’s fierce scrutiny, he didn’t seem to recall anything. The littler ones had learnt all their lines, spouting them after the right cues. Some had even started parading their own cleverness to shame my little boy. The stepsisters trod on Cinderella, looking up at Sajan with an exaggerated malice, but he stayed bewildered, paralysed in his role.
‘Sajan, look at me. Say “Who’s that creature? She’s so beautiful.”’ Kalpana’s voice boomed out like a teacher’s. My dashing boy stared vacantly. What was happening to him? Was it stage fright? Just last night, he had skidded into a gallant position on his knees, and repeated the lines to a giggly Rhea.
‘Sajan, are you listening? Please turn to look at Cinderella and say, ‘Who’s that creature? She’s so beautiful,’ I said.
‘Do you think beautiful’s too big a word?’ Kalpana turned to me with a weird gleam in her eye. Sajan was deft with words and had a prodigious vocabulary. Relatives and friends had often been surprised by his use of ‘big words’. But something strange was happening to him now, and I was as puzzled as Kalpana. I might have been less concerned if I hadn’t also noticed it two days earlier, during dinner. Sajan had
stopped eating his broccoli pizza and stared at the plaque on the dining wall with a faraway look. I had brushed it off then, but the strange dimness in his eyes had reappeared now.
‘I don’t think so … but maybe on stage, it’s a mouthful?’
‘You wrote the script,’ Kalpana said, twitching her pencilled eyebrows into an incredulous M.
‘Let’s change it. Sajan, look at Sonika and say, ‘Who’s that creature? She’s so pretty.’’ My son stood rooted, staring at me with his splendid, doleful eyes. Something new had gripped him, an uncharacteristic dullness. ‘Sajan, look at Cinderella,’ I repeated. He turned towards the stepsister, standing in the wings, while our indignant Cinderella frantically called out to her paramour: ‘I’m here, Sajan, look at me!’
‘Sajan, you have to look at Cinderella, not at the sister,’ Kalpana said, with an edgy laugh.
‘Yes Auntie,’ he finally said, but made no move to turn. I was flummoxed. Was he so nervous about an informal production? He was usually fearless, unafraid of strangers or new places. Then why did he seem so distracted, so distant?
Many of the other kids had started tittering, while a rising heat flooded my cheeks and ears.
‘Did he memorise the printout yesterday?’ Kalpana asked, turning to me with an accusatory glare. Was it Kalpana’s domineering presence? Sometimes even I was tongue-tied in her company.
‘He did, Kalpana. But I think he’s nervous now.’
Kalpana did not respond. Her stern eyes scanned the wall behind our fireplace, deliberately roughened to impart a limestone feel. Did she find our house, with its rustic Italian style and overstuffed couches, tacky?
Two mornings later, Sajan’s transient fogginess reappeared, like a cloud slipping over his face.
‘What will you take to school, Sajan?’ I asked, while laying out his breakfast. ‘Pudina or cheese sandwich?’
‘Huh?’
‘Lunch, Sajan? What do you want?’
‘Huh?’
‘Sajan are you listening to me, will you have a cheese sandwich for lunch? Or pudina?’ Even little Rhea piped in, tugging at my salwar with an insistent ‘Pudina, pudina.’
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