Priya

by Namita Gokhale

  In the days of hundred-rupee notes, ten lakhs could fill up a small suitcase. I never thought of it as ‘black money’—that’s such an ugly phrase. Money is money, and it was hard-earned. As Suresh’s legal practice grew, it was a part of my housewifely duty to store his non-cheque income, keep it under lock and key. The cash—it gave me a sense of power, to know of those notes that nestled behind the rustle of my silk saris, in the locker of the steel Godrej cupboard in my bedroom. The musical clink of the bunched keys hanging from my waist, safe in the folds of my sari pleats. Home is where the Godrej cupboards are.

  When the Reserve Bank began issuing five-hundred-rupee currency, it smelt only of paper, never of sweat and human greed, at least for the first year or so. And the thousand-rupee notes, when they entered our lives and lockers, had the impersonal feel of plastic credit cards. I took a wad of notes from the red leather bag and sniffed it. With my vanished sense of smell, even the fragrance of new paper eluded me. I locked the suitcase, and gave the key to Suresh when he came home for lunch. ‘You shouldn’t keep cash lying under your bed like that,’ I said righteously, ‘it’s an unfair temptation to the staff!’

  ‘I’m sorry Priya,’ he replied contritely, ‘but I have to pass it on anyway.’

  We didn’t discuss it any further, and the next day, the red suitcase was no longer under the bed when I checked. Was Kush handling it? Why hadn’t I been told? Was I being dismissed from my custodianship and sacred steel-cupboard duties?

  A spate of calls and urgent sms messages from Pooonam. I gave in to the relentless pressure and called her back.

  She was sobbing on the phone. ‘Darling, darling Priya . . . I need you! We women have to stick together. Men are such bastards. And such liars . . . Never, never, but never believe anything a man tells you!’

  ‘Or some women!’ I thought to myself.

  Another cloudburst of tears. ‘I need to see you, Priya . . . you are one of the few people I can really trust and respect. The only person I can count upon.’

  On the wall before me, a fleshy lizard appeared from behind the curtain and spat out its long tongue to devour an insect, fly or mosquito, all in a flash. The sight jolted me into reality.

  ‘I really find it difficult to believe you, Pooonam,’ I said firmly. ‘Cut out the hysterics, please. And yes—I need to speak to you, too.’

  Something in my tone shook her up. ‘Ooohh—now you are upset with me as well!’ she whined. ‘Please, Priya—we are friends. I need your support.’

  I hung up on her and contemplated the lizard. They usually disappear in winter—what was it doing here? It stared back at me with beady, contemptuous eyes. Of course the phone rang again and Pooonam, at her most persuasive, had me promising to meet her at the coffee shop in the Park Intercontinental.

  I know I should hate her. But she can be charming, and even vulnerable, sometimes. I am drawn to Pooonam by conflicting layers of emotion. Caution and envy compounded by a grudging admiration—for getting what she wants, from men, from women, from shopkeepers, from the whole great marketplace of life. And then, a curiosity, both abstract and practical, about how it is that she manages to fit in boyfriends, lovers, arms dealers, ministers, minister’s wives, into a whirlpool of mutual accommodation.

  How does she have the gall to be that way? Damn Pooonam, I thought, a fresh wave of bile rising within me. But then I told myself: She doesn’t have what I have. A husband, a family, respectability. She can’t ever steal these from me. Can she?!

  Pooonam was sitting by the corner of the crowded coffee shop, wearing an expression that a B-grade actress would emote as ‘sad/ repentant’. On closer examination I could see that she had been weeping. Mascara from her right eye was running in a smudged line parallel to her nose, and Pooonam certainly wasn’t perfectionist enough to have faked that.

  ‘Life sucks,’ she said, as I settled down on the chair opposite her. The French window opened onto an enclosed garden with exotic green foliage. Pooonam was staring at it with exaggerated interest. A stork emerged from behind the plastic palms, and then another. They strutted past us with studied theatrical indifference. Pooonam turned to me, and gave me a forced all-teeth-bared smile. She was wearing enormous diamond-studded hoops in her ears. There was a slash of lipstick on her front teeth.

  I was moved by her sadness. I had never thought of Pooonam as an ordinary being. Glamazon, glamiken, whatever it was that she paraded as, she kept her human frailties to herself. Who was she inside?

  ‘Tell me about yourself, Pooonam,’ I said gently. ‘Your parents, your family . . . where are they?’

  ‘A brief biodata?’ she joked, in a voice that was meant to be funny but was full of rage instead. ‘Well-to-do Gujarati man gets married to Punjabi loiness. Two daughters, the younger one being me. The elder was a real Sati Savitri, and good at studies too. Me—I had a hard time at school. I was always looking at movie magazines and pictures of flim stars instead of studying. My parents, they split up, got divorced. My elder sister was engaged to a nice Guju boy. Is it my fault that he fell in love with the younger sister? Harendra dumped my sister and married me. We moved to London. My parents never spoke to me again after that, although my elder sister still writes to me sometimes.’ She snivelled again, then composed her face into a bright smile.

  ‘But Harendra was rich—I proved my teachers wrong! It’s Stardust, Flim Fare and Cosmo that made me who I am.’

  She called it ‘Flim Fare’, not ‘Film Fare’, but I didn’t comment on that.

  ‘His mom—my ex-sasubai—is the Laddoo Queen of Leicester. Honestly! She sells twenty thousand laddoos every Diwali. She caters for all the desi weddings. But I wasn’t cut out to be a Laddoo Queen’s daughter-in-law. Besides, Harendra had a roving eye. He cheated on me. We got a divorce and I returned home to India. My mom-in-law was loaded. She gave me a golden handshake. I join an events company in Delhi. Then I join Manoviraj Sethia’s company. And then, a repeat of the earlier script . . . As I said before, life is a bitch!’

  She looked as though she were hurting a lot, as though it had cost her something to say this. I squeezed her hand across the table. ‘Life changes,’ I said sympathetically. ‘It gets better.’

  ‘Or worse!’ she replied. ‘But friends get us through. Friends and flim magazines!’

  And it’s true. It’s other people who help us carry on. Women need to hold on to each other, together through the tough times. Pooonam seemed a bit discomfited by her bare-all confessional. She sat up and determinedly rearranged her features. This was the old Ms UmaChand again, the Exocet, ready to aim and shoot.

  ‘Thank God for women friends!’ she declared, with such studied delivery that I suspected she had rehearsed the line. ‘I have a present for you, Priya my darling!’ She scooped the gift out of a swanky bag from under the table and there it sat before me, an utterly elegant white bag. Four letters clinked charmingly from a ring attached to the strap of the bag. They spelt ‘Dior’.

  ‘Women friends, handbags and lipstick—that’s all life’s about, ultimately, Priya!’ she said, her smile coming undone at the corners again. ‘That’s what it boils down to. And yes, there’s diamonds, even if they come attached to the wrong men.’

  I hadn’t rehearsed my lines and didn’t know how to respond. A young, attractive waiter was hovering around us. He gave me an attentive look, and threw an appreciative one at Pooonam. She waved him away with a dismissive gesture. She may be hyper, she may be manic, but Pooonam spells glamour and bling. She’s got what it takes.

  ‘Let me tell it as it is,’ she said. ‘I have to confide in someone . . . and I trust you more than anyone I know! You are sincere and you are kind and you are straightforward.’

  That sounded like me. Her sincere appreciation of my sincerity did it. I felt my heart melt, my resistance falter, even as my mind was telling me sternly to watch out.

  ‘That bastard Manoviraj Sethia has taken up with another woman,’ Pooonam hissed, in a sudden change of mood. ‘F
irst he started off about his ex-wife—that cow Sunita—how he still loved her, wanted to give it another chance, things like that. I told him, No!’ She banged on the glass-topped table with a fork for further emphasis. ‘NO! NO! NO!’

  ‘NO!’ I repeated after her, as though hypnotized.

  ‘You can’t keep switching life-partners without good reason! There’s such a thing as loyalty! That’s what I told the bastard.’

  The storks had begun their parade again.

  ‘Loyalty,’ she stressed. ‘Don’t you agree, Priya?’

  How could I not?

  ‘And then that bastard forgets about his wife and about me and falls in love with a mere hairdresser!’

  ‘Your hairdresser?’ I asked, examining her low-lighted locks with curiosity.

  ‘Yes,’ Pooonam replied, ‘my hairdresser, Jayanti!’

  ‘You mean the Jayanti? The Jayanti is your Jayanti?’ I exclaimed, impressed in spite of myself. Jayanti is a legend, not a hairdresser.

  ‘That Jayanti,’ Pooonam replied, a flash of fire in her eyes. ‘I was a regular in the salon—even loaned her money to set it up. I would sit there with all that goo in my hair—serum, henna, conditioner, colour, vitalizer, revitalizer, whatever whatever. I paid through my nose for those treatments, Priya. I used to pour my heart out to her. I told her about my problems with Manoviraj, how he wanted to return to his wife again. I told Jayanti about how he went for women who dressed in white, how he liked women with eyeliner over the lid but never under. I told her of how he got turned on by dirty Hindi swear-words. And then this floozy, this whore—she MC-BC’d her way into his heart! Never trust an arms-dealer, Priya. That’s all I can tell you . . .’

  Her fleshy fingers were playing agitatedly with a softly glowing diamond and with an emerald as large as a knuckleduster. She took off one of the rings and held it before me.

  ‘Manoviraj gave this to me just last week. It’s a pink diamond, set in gold and platinum.’ A look of lustful joy spread for a second, like a false dawn, across her tragedy-ravaged face.

  I sat there wondering what to say. This was clearly not the moment to confront Pooonam with my own suspicions and jealousies. I decided to play it silent: to watch, listen and observe.

  ‘And then he says—I need to get it re-set, there’s a problem with the setting.’ She was wearing a ferocious snarl now. I could see the lipstick on her teeth.

  ‘There’s a problem with your setting, you SOB! That’s what I told Mr Manoviraj Sethia.’

  ‘When did you find out about Jayanti?’ I asked. ‘Wasn’t she supposed to organize your Botox brunch?’

  ‘Today! I found out today,’ Pooonam replied crisply. ‘But I’ve had my suspicions for some time.’ Her hurt and rage seemed to have subsided; she was examining her pink diamond with the quiet satisfaction of one who has weathered the storm and arrived at a hard-won calm.

  ‘I was going through Manoviraj’s papers—as I always do before he comes into office. Anyway, he’s a really late riser, because of all that partying! I have a right to look—after all, I’m a director of Universal Tools and Weapons, not a hairdresser! And I saw that he had invested in her company. ‘Hair, Cair and Fair. Big bucks in hope of big bangs. The SOB!’

  She looked out of the window again, at the storks; and they looked back, incuriously, at us.

  ‘I asked him if he was screwing her, and he said it was more than that, he loved her. She wears white saris and thick eye-liner like Meena Kumari used to, and has worked on all that filthy mother-fucking language that turns him on. Men are such fools.’

  We both shook our heads in commiseration. For a moment our pain and anger merged, before I shook myself out of it. I remembered the lizard and how it had looped out its tongue to swallow the helpless insect on the wall. Pooonam is not my friend, I reminded myself. She is manipulative and predatory, and it’s only right and fitting that she has at last got what she so richly deserved.

  ‘What goes around comes around, Pooonam,’ I said coldly. ‘Remember well the rule of three: what you do comes back to thee.’

  Some more coffee had arrived, and so I decided to drink it, rather than flounce off and make a scene. Tears were pouring down Pooonam’s cheeks, denting her foundation. Her upper lip was straining to reach down, quivering with an almost frightening intensity. I began feeling sorry for her again.

  ‘I don’t know why you are being so cold with me, P . . . P . . . Priya,’ she stuttered, the runny mascara now smudging both her eyes. She looked like a Chinese panda bear. ‘Nnutasha had warned me that it’s a bad month for Scorpios, and she was right.’

  That got me worked up again. ‘I’m sick of all this superstitious astrology nonsense!’ I said. ‘Why don’t you, for once, take responsibility for yourself? Changing the spelling of your name doesn’t change your actions, Pooonam!’ Uncharacteristically, I had at last recaptured the high moral ground, and it made me feel incredibly better.

  As I got up to leave, Pooonam grabbed the bag and pushed it into my arms. ‘You’ve got to take this with you, Priya . . .’ she sobbed. ‘It’s a symbol of our friendship—even if it’s destroyed.’

  I looked covetously at the white handbag, at its flawless lines and smooth leather and discreet label. In that moment, in the coffee shop, with the storks watching us through the glass, I knew I wanted that bag. I picked it up, held it tentatively.

  ‘Ok, then, Pooonam. I’ll take it—for your sake,’ I said, even as another voice inside was urging me not to. Greed triumphed, appallingly, and I left carrying the Dior bag with me.

  It’s important to be truthful, at least in these pages. To say it like it is, even if somebody were to read this, someday. A handbag is not just a handbag. When, in the time of hunter-gatherers, the female of the family went to the forest to find nuts and pick berries, I’m sure she longed for the most beautiful, best-woven basket of all the women in the cave. No, I’m not ashamed of taking that bag from Pooonam.

  BANO WAS HERE, TO GIVE ME A MANICURE AND PEDICURE AND FLOWER facial, and to update me on Delhi gossip. She opened with the slightly stale scandal of the Ludhiana businessman’s daughter who had a sex change so she could inherit from the boys-only will. Everybody knows about Vimal/Vimla Puneeet Singh, even I. She/ he has been talking about it to the press everywhere. But Bano continued with graphic details of Vimal/Vimla’s body waxing routine, until the gory details piled up to an unbearable visual overload under my rose-water-anointed eyes and I begged her to stop.

  The Sheherzade of Facepacks then embarked on the tale of the Star-TV-crossed lovers and the jealous politician. This story, featuring a famous TV anchor and an unhappy menage a trois, got my ratings if not my eyeballs (which were covered by cucumber slices now) but Bano stopped short of the climax. ‘Arre, Priya didi, you surely know what happened after that,’ she said, with a fine sense of suspense. ‘The whole world knows!’

  She started off next about the income-tax raid on a powerful arms dealer. ‘Model Suji’s father,’ she announced, with proprietary pride. ‘My client since childhood. I was doing her waxing–shaxing . . . now my cousin sister is her full-time beautician. And for her sister Suki also!’

  I grunted encouragingly from under the piled-up face mask to indicate my curiousity and interest. Bano continued on cue. ‘Some staff informer gave a tip off. Income-tax people found diamonds and rubies, and one pooja room full of cash. Even a statue of goddess Lakshmi made of pure platinum—but they cannot take that away.’ A note of righteous censure entered Bano’s voice. ‘We poor people who work hard for a living cannot even imagine how much money they found there—how much gold and jewels!’

  So Manoviraj Sethia had been raided. The news left me unmoved. It is an arms dealer’s karma to be in trouble, and the Russian submarine deal stinks, or so I am told. Her time up, Bano moved from disseminating gossip to showering practised compliments. ‘O Priya didi—you look like a teenager! Kasam se, how your skin is shining!’ and so on.

  I gave her a larger-than-usua
l tip, and she left in a good mood.

  I daydream and panic, alternately, about becoming a mother-in- law. These last few days have passed in a haze—shopping for Paromita’s trousseau, planning in my mind for the big day. Whenever that is, for we haven’t fixed a date or anything like that yet. I’ve bought some traditional Kanjeevaram saris, with broad borders, and some Ikat silks and Benarasi tissues. I’ll ask Paromita to come with me one of these days, to look at lehngas.

  Outside the calm sanctuary of our bungalow, the world is going mad. Important things, big things, are happening. Oil prices are on the rise, as are inflation and anti-government feelings. Bombs keep going off, expectedly, unexpectedly, across the map of India. Detonators, gelatine sticks, RDX, are a part of our daily vocabulary now. But there is something about the heart of Delhi, the wide roads, the gracious trees, the sprawling bungalows, that makes the rest of India and its troubles seem very far away.

  Pooonam phoned several times today, a rising tide of hysteria in her voice. ‘I have to share this with you,’ she said, when at last I took her call. ‘My business partner Manoviraj Sethia is in deep shit.’ (She always evaded describing him as her boyfriend) ‘The papers don’t seem to have picked it up yet, but I wanted you to know.’

  ‘Oh that’s awful! Unbelievable!’ I replied, although of course Bano the beauty lady had informed me already.

  Sethia had been raided on a tip from a business rival, Pooonam continued. ‘Probably the Khoslas,’ she speculated. ‘They were being a little too friendly recently. That’s always suspicious! Isn’t it?’

  ‘It is indeed,’ I said, ‘one has to be careful with so-called Delhi friends.’

  ‘That’s it! Exactly what I meant,’ she replied darkly. ‘But I’m not talking on the mobile. I’m sure these bastards have it tapped. I’ll call from the landline.’