Polite Society

by Mahesh Rao

  But she had been disarmed in every way. It helped that he looked so unthreatening—he was handsome, of course, but in a quiet and almost apologetic way. He blushed readily and covered his mouth with his palm as he listened. There was a puppy-like effort to lay things at people’s feet: compliments, inquiries, the occasional terrible pun. And what recommended him most of all was that he seemed to have developed a deep affection for Renu in no time.

  When Ania first saw them, they were doubled up in laughter listening to something on his phone, sharing a pair of earphones. And for a moment she felt that it might be Renu who needed a quiet word. There was no real pressing need to leap into this kind of conviviality.

  “So I hear you’re writing a novel,” he asked in a low voice, sitting next to her at the table for lunch.

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “I won’t ask,” he said. “I’m sure it’s really annoying for you.”

  She smiled and said nothing more.

  She agreed to meet him for coffee the next day, after her game of tennis. As he walked into the clubhouse, he saw a board that listed strict rules on apparel, cell phone use, and the conduct of maids or nannies accompanying patrons.

  Ania waved to him as he approached.

  “Can you believe that shit?” he said, giving her a warm hug. “Did you see all those rules?”

  “Some of them are a bit over the top. But you do need rules in a chaotic world. Otherwise, the center cannot hold. Things fall apart,” she said, shrugging.

  “Wow. So you have a lot of rules of your own?” he asked.

  “Obviously. Loads. Let me see. Never go through life without a dog. Never go to sleep without taking your makeup off, even if you can barely stand. Never let a man see you cry, that gives him all the power. Never trust someone who is rude to drivers or photographers,” she said.

  She emphasized each rule with a tap on the table, inches away from his hand.

  “It’s okay to toss a boring book after the first fifty pages. What else? Never drink alcohol on long flights. Never, I mean never, date a man with long nails. Never tell anything private to your Delhi hairdresser, the whole town will soon know.”

  He held up his hands.

  “See? Neatly trimmed nails,” he said.

  “Good for you, although I really don’t see the relevance,” she said, trying to keep the smile off her face.

  “You will,” he said.

  The following day Dileep took them all out to lunch at a restaurant famed for its signature egg dish, poached at sixty-three degrees and bathed in heart-of-palm foam. Ania continued her vigilance, but there were no chinks in Nikhil’s charm, no shift from his voluptuous civility. It would all have been too much, too schooled and apt, were it not for the gaffes. The gaffes were superb. At a dinner party he told a wonderful story about Kitty Malhotra’s honeymoon in Fiji, unaware that her aunt was on his other side. He repeatedly mistook the elder Mr. Bandopadhyay for the younger Mr. Bandopadhyay, a galling act as they had not been on speaking terms for more than a decade. Ania remained enormously amused and hoped that his knowledge of Delhi society never improved.

  He spoke often of personal growth and emotional intelligence and living absolutely in the moment. It was a vernacular of self-help that normally made Ania and Dev howl with derision—but Nikhil made it seem acceptable, appealing even, in its naïve but noble intentions. He referred often to family, not just in the sense of kinship; but in its broadest possible sense, as some kind of comity of nations. It sometimes showed even in his physicality, in the way he used his hands, as though he were urging people to come together and listen a little more, in the way he shifted in his seat and gave people his full attention, his lips pursed in concentration.

  His most appealing quality was that she could sense no hidden motives behind his warmth. At no point did she feel that he was befriending her to be able to position himself closer to Dileep, to bask in her presence on social media, or to ask for the use of the Khurana beach house in Mauritius. Ania shuddered at the vulgarity of people who bragged about their money or celebrity—but the fact remained that she was wealthy and well-known. Many of her boyfriends and flings had ultimately wanted her to erase herself in some way. She had found herself making excuses for her connections and supporting those boyfriends unquestioningly in all kinds of idiotic endeavors—at least, until she had tired of them. She had been required to present a certain dullness to set off their weak shine. But Nikhil did not need any coddling or validation. He appeared to be delighted with her true self. It seemed little short of miraculous.

  Ania recognized the weight of her interest in him when she found herself squirreling away funny incidents and anecdotes to tell him. She did not pause to think about what he was doing away from home for so long and the nature of his sabbatical. It seemed perfectly natural to her that a young man would be at leisure trying to wring every ounce of beauty and pleasure from the world. When the colonel questioned Nikhil on their morning walks, the response that came back was that he was exploring opportunities. This seemed like a sensible thing to be doing, so no one felt the need to say anything more about it.

  He joined Ania and a group of her friends on safari in Madhya Pradesh. During the day they swam in waterfalls and watched sloth bears rubbing themselves up against tree trunks; at night they drank martinis outside their tented suites and tried drunkenly to identify constellations. When he roused himself one night to stagger back to his tent from hers, she almost pulled him close and asked him not to go. But her courage failed her.

  A couple of weeks later Ania and Nikhil flew to Hong Kong to go to a masquerade ball, her bespoke Medusa costume having been couriered ahead. When she walked into the hotel ballroom, his hand on her back, she had felt a sudden warmth flow from the roots of her hair to her bare shoulders. The three nights in Hong Kong were spent in a whirl. He had wanted to change hotels on a whim, had taken her to an illegal underground casino, had a couple of grams of coke delivered to him in a cigar lounge.

  Even though she had booked separate hotel rooms, Ania had convinced herself that she would sleep with him there. But somehow it had not happened. She had been drunk and exhausted in the early hours after the party, the next night the moment had seemed wrong, and on the final night he simply disappeared for hours. She wondered whether he was punishing her for something or simply trying to be elusive. When he eventually called her, she had been too proud to ask him where he had been.

  On their way back, they barely spoke in the car. But in the airport lounge, his good humor returned. He began to clown about in a gentle way as they raked over the events of the weekend.

  “Did you notice something about the hotel?” he asked.

  “What?” she said.

  “The elevator music.”

  “I don’t remember. What about it?”

  “It was really scary. Like the music from Jaws.”

  “Why would they use scary shark music there?”

  “I don’t know, maybe it hadn’t been serviced for a while.”

  Hours later, on the flight, when she lifted her window shade, the darkness was strangely comforting: they were cocooned in velvety shades of black. When she stood up she could see over the partition that he was wholly absorbed in a syrupy family drama. When at last he saw her shadow fall across the screen, he lifted his head, smiled without any embarrassment, and touched her arm. She slipped her hand under the sleeve of his sweater and felt the warmth of his forearm. She felt that she had reclaimed him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE FAMILY TROOPED into the Khurana dining room but had to pause to adjust to the dim light after the glare outside. The room’s décor was inspired by a Hammershøi that hung in their Manhattan town house, the painting divided by thin streams of light, shadows in pewter and slate and oyster. A woman in a black dress was seated at a table; the door behind her was ajar; the floor shone. This room ha
d the same sense of space and texture. Its brightest point was the pale yellow ceramic bowl on the ebony dresser.

  “Can’t we eat on the patio or in the kitchen? Sitting around this table is like being at a board meeting,” said Ania.

  “It’s much cooler here,” said Renu, “and it’s all been laid. Plus Dev has just dropped in so I asked him to stay for lunch. It’ll be easier to add a place there next to the colonel.”

  “Interesting how you always drop in around meal times,” Ania said to Dev as he walked into the room.

  “Ania, don’t say such things, he might think you’re serious,” said Renu.

  “Not to worry, Renu, this is how we always talk to each other,” said Dev, “although I’m always defeated by Ania’s rapier wit.”

  “Now we’re just waiting for Nikhil,” said Renu.

  The grays of the room seemed to affect the family’s behavior whenever they took their meals there. Conversation was muted. Heavy foliage blocked much of the light from the windows, and the room had a somber and stately aspect. A clock ticked, cutlery clinked. The door to the kitchen would open and close as a servant passed through. Every so often water would glug into a glass.

  Nikhil’s entrance meant today would be different. He bounded in, went around the table greeting everyone, and then rushed out again to get something from the car. When he returned, he sat down with a great deal of bluster, commenting on the food and the delicious coolness of the room and offering a protracted explanation for his slight delay. Then he addressed a remark or two to each person, as though he were hosting a conference. All the while, Dev barely looked at him.

  Dileep’s special meal was being served in small china bowls next to his plate: chunks of tuna in a seaweed marinade, dehydrated broccoli, a baobab fruit salad. His attitude to his food was unpredictable. He would either spend an hour evangelizing about his latest superfood discovery or sink into a cold sulk if he read any interest in his current diet as an attempt to mock him. The others had learned to maintain a cordial silence with only the occasional peek at his plate.

  The rest of the family were being treated to a special Kashmiri lunch, Dina having managed to engage a cook originally from Sonamarg for the day. The lunch would allow the Khuranas to feel that they were doing their bit for national unity, given the conflict in the troubled state. And it would also ensure that they sampled the sought-after cook’s offerings before their neighbors, the Mehras, who were known to be dreadfully competitive in culinary matters.

  Renu introduced the dishes as though she had cooked them herself: a delicious yakhni made of tender lamb and flavored with cardamom and mawal flowers; a pulao studded with dried fruit and almonds; a bowl of goshtaba, rich mutton meatballs fragrant with ghee. Dileep could not help feeling that she was being inappropriately proprietary, given that she no longer lived in the house.

  “Nikhil, you must try the guchhi, wonderful and rare Kashmiri morels, completely delicious,” said Renu.

  “Yes, Nikhil, you really must,” said Ania.

  Renu threw her an injured look.

  “Hey, guys,” said Nikhil, “here’s something I wanted to ask you.”

  They all turned to look at him, apart from Dev, who hardly raised his head from his soup.

  “I want to know from each of you: what’s your earliest memory?”

  “Why?” asked Dileep.

  “No reason, just a fun thing to do.”

  Dev broke his roll in two, buttered one half lavishly, and popped it into his mouth.

  “All right, mine is from when I was about four, I think,” said Renu. “I was wearing these patent leather shoes, bright red and gorgeous, but they were too tight. And I was scared that if I told my mother how tight they were, she would give them away. So I kept them on, even though I was in so much pain. I remember trying to loosen the buckle for ages and then trying to slide my finger into the side of the shoe. Uff, it was agony. In fact, even the thought of it, I’m sorry, I’m going to have to slip my sandals off for a minute.”

  Dileep speared a piece of baobab.

  “We got them in that adorable shop that we used to go to on Kensington Church Street; do you remember, Dileep? What was it called? Something to do with transportation . . . Tiny Trucks?”

  “What about you, uncle?” asked Nikhil.

  “Someone had died. I remember standing there looking at all the people dressed in white at the funeral. Lots of wailing,” said the colonel.

  “Darling, what a dreadful first memory to have. Couldn’t you come up with something a bit more peppy?” said Renu.

  The colonel shrugged.

  “Ania?” asked Nikhil.

  Ania had often imagined her mother at thirty, the age at which she had given birth, the age at which she had died. She had convinced herself that this ought to be her first memory. She pictured a woman who was beautiful in the way of a woman on-screen, a perfect play of light and shadow, the camera panning away from her face to her silhouette as she walked into the distance. It was a perception of shape and motion that could not be openly discussed and certainly not a vision to be aired in this company over lunch.

  She conjured up a different memory.

  “Painting. My hands were covered with paint, and I was making palm prints on a blank sheet of paper. I can remember the smell and seeing my own tracks appear slowly over the page, like a little animal’s,” she said.

  “Wagon Wheels!” said Renu. “It was called Wagon Wheels.”

  “What’s yours, Dev?” asked Nikhil.

  “I don’t have one. And yours are all inaccurate too. Psychologists have done lots of work on these mental functions. What we claim to be an early memory is usually a fiction.”

  “All righty, I guess that’s that then,” said Nikhil.

  “Oh, Dev,” said Renu.

  She sounded genuinely hurt and disappointed.

  “It’s true,” he said. “These sorts of autobiographical memories are fraudulent by their very nature. We don’t just reach for a snapshot from a filing cabinet in our brains. We cobble together mental reconstructions using different sources, images we might have seen or stories we might have heard much later. We readjust them for trauma, for convenience. We superimpose emotions and senses. The whole process is notoriously unreliable.”

  He spoke with a forceful clarity that made Ania look at him longer than she had intended. His words made perfect sense to her. She had not articulated it to herself in these terms before, but he had expressed precisely the way in which she thought about her mother. She could not possibly have a memory of her, so she had layered other people’s recollections, family anecdotes, the swish of her old saris, the heft of her jewelry, the scenes in photo albums, to create a film of impressions.

  Dev’s mouth was stern; the lines on his brow deep. He looked as though he were trying to find his way out of a predicament. She also had the impression that he was deliberately avoiding her gaze. She wanted to agree with him, but he was all too willing to take an intractable position to spoil Nikhil’s harmless line of questioning. His mulishness could sometimes be infuriating, and she didn’t want to let him know he was right about yet another thing.

  “Well, you can’t dismiss everyone’s memories just like that. Some people may in fact remember things accurately,” she said.

  “I’m pretty sure mine is a hundred percent correct,” said Nikhil. “I have the clearest memory of being high up somewhere and seeing dozens of boats in a marina. We might have been in the Caribbean, I’m not sure, but I can really see the sunlight on the water and all those white boats.”

  “That’s lovely, the way you put it. I can just picture them,” said Renu.

  Ania rolled her eyes, but Renu pretended not to see.

  Dina appeared through the kitchen door.

  “Dina, we are all discussing our earliest memories,” said Ania. “You have to tell us
yours.”

  “No, no, ma’am,” said Dina, “I really can’t remember.”

  “I don’t believe that at all. You’ve never forgotten a thing in your life.”

  “No, ma’am. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. It’s not suitable.”

  “We’ve all shared ours. Please, Dina. Come on, stop being so mysterious, you’ve got to tell us now.”

  “No, ma’am, please, I have work to do.”

  “You are absolutely not allowed to leave this room until you have told us,” said Ania, reaching for Dina’s hand.

  Dina eased her fingers away and sighed. She put her hands into the deep pockets of her smock. Her gaze seemed to travel around the room and finally settled on a carafe on the table.

  “I can’t remember how old I was, but I was still in a cot. The kind that have metal bars. I was standing, and I remember holding the bars, trying to push my face through the gap. My parents were on the bed just a few feet away. They were under a sheet with big pink flowers, and they were having relations.”

  The colonel put down his fork.

  Dina’s expression was trancelike. Once she had started to tell the story, it looked as though she was powerless not to finish it.

  “Of course, I didn’t know what was happening. I must have thought they were having some kind of fight—it looked like they were trying to kill each other. I was trying to reach them through the bars. I was shaking the bars, putting my arms through them. Those pink flowers kept jumping up and down. I was so frightened. It was horrible.”

  She took her hands out of her pockets and inspected what looked like a scratch on the dresser then reached for the empty wine bottle.

  “Another bottle, ma’am?” she asked Renu.

  Renu glanced at the colonel and shook her head.