Polite Society

by Mahesh Rao

  Inevitably, as her wealth and power grew, so did her own hubris and the envy of others. Her eventual arrest made headlines around the world, but she parlayed a guarantee of absolute secrecy for a conditional discharge. Nirmala disappeared to set up an ashram for widows in Rishikesh, leaving her daughter with one of her sisters. While her considerable assets in Delhi remained safe, the rest of the Bakshi family were cast into the wilderness.

  The Bakshis had been ignored for a generation, but Serena’s international success had allowed them a revival. The mistakes of the past were laid to rest. It helped that Serena was single-minded, secretive, charming. She dressed always in black, allowing only a flash of pink lining or the hard green of a gem on her finger. Even with the greatest application, it was hard to see how she could have been kept out of the fold.

  And now trembling before Dileep was the woman who had made the Bakshis acceptable again.

  He let her cry, looking down at the mess on the rug, not daring to ask her why she was so upset.

  “I’m sorry,” he said eventually, “would you like me to leave?”

  She waved her arm at him, and he had no idea what she meant. She stood up and stumbled into the next room. He picked up the caddie, screwed its lid back on, and wondered if he should call for one of the servants.

  Serena emerged from the room, calm, pale, her eyes still puffy.

  “Wait, Dileep, I may as well talk to you,” she said.

  “I’m really sorry; I had no business touching these boxes.”

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

  “No, of course not. But I really don’t understand what just happened.”

  “I’ll get someone to clean that up, but I can’t bear to be in the same room. Come with me.”

  He followed her down the stairs into the formal sitting room. It felt absurd, as though he had committed a gross infraction and was being asked into a grand chamber to receive his censure.

  She asked him to sit but remained standing.

  “About a couple of years ago, everything started going wrong. I thought I was going to lose my job, my friends, my sanity, everything. I was on antidepressants, seeing one of the best shrinks in New York every week on Skype, nothing seemed to help. And I knew Amar was cheating; I had no idea with whom, but I just knew. And then he said he wanted a divorce, and I really thought that was the end.”

  “I’m sorry; I had no idea.”

  “That was the whole point, making sure no one had any idea. I thought about it all the time, you know, how I would do it. Maybe buy a hundred sleeping tablets online or just drive my car at top speed into a building.”

  “Serena, this is awful.”

  “But then someone told me about Mr. Nayak. I was completely skeptical, but I was so desperate that I went to see him.”

  She paused.

  “I haven’t told anyone this. All of you will think I’m crazy. I don’t even know how to describe him. He’s not one of these typical godmen or astrologers. There are no saffron robes or mantras. All I can say is that it’s all so professional. It’s like a real service.”

  “But what does he do?”

  She sat down to face him.

  “I’m so glad to be able to talk about this now. It’s a little like I felt when I first met Mr. Nayak. He just knew about my problems and didn’t make me feel like a crazy person. He was so reassuring about everything. And he knew things about my life that no one could possibly have known. You’re already looking at me like I’m insane, but he just has this sense. And after that, things began to change. Of course, it seems weird, all this superstition, these odd rituals. But I promise you, they work.”

  “He makes you keep those things in the boxes?”

  “Not just that. I have to keep an old broom under my bed, and he’s blessed an amulet that I now wear all the time around my upper arm. I see him regularly, and every time there’s something different. It really is so hard to explain. Sometimes when I speak to him, in that moment I doubt whether he can ever help me. But later when I’m on my own and I’ve had a chance to think about what he said, look at it from different angles and apply it to my life, I realize that he’s given me the greatest thing anyone could give me: hope. Amar and I decided to try harder; work has never been better. All I can say is that Mr. Nayak has transformed my life.”

  Dileep turned to look away.

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked.

  His throat was dry, and he asked her if he could have some water. Serena rang the kitchen and then looked at him, her eyes still pinched, her mouth anxious.

  “No, I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said. “I get it. More than you think I do.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I really mean it.”

  The water arrived, and they sipped it in silence.

  “Would you mind if I met him too?” asked Dileep.

  * * *

  —

  DIMPLE LOITERED IN the gloomy corridor, unsure whether she should go into the room. Others had no such compunction. They came in pairs or in little groups, the men in their navy jackets, smelling faintly of mothballs, the women fiddling with their chunky silver jewelry made by tribes in remote hills. They peered down the passage in both directions and then strode into the hall. They walked with the confidence of people whose ancestors had roads named after them or whose likenesses were captured in busts in parks around the city. The roads might have since been renamed, the busts might have been bespattered by crows and defaced with graffiti, but their gait remained unchanged.

  “Have you seen my daughter?” asked Silky Chhabra, swamped by her silk patchwork coat.

  “I’m sorry, who is your daughter?” asked Dimple.

  “Oh, never mind,” she said and disappeared into the hall.

  The famed Belgian art collector Herman Van den Broeck, now a cherished member of the Delhi art scene, had enlisted Ania’s help to secure a respectable audience for his talk. Always eager to help him, she had rung a few of her friends to remind them that if they did not show Mr. Van den Broeck some appreciation, it was possible that he would return to Antwerp for good. As it happened, the audience was greater than was usually expected at these events: the subject of Mr. Van den Broeck’s talk was the appreciation of the nude in classical Greek sculpture.

  “I can see that Ania strong-armed you into coming too.”

  Dimple spun round to see Dev smiling at her.

  “Hello,” she said, greatly relieved to see a friendly face. “I thought it sounded interesting. I’ve not seen that many nude sculptures.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “I have so many events to go to after I leave work.”

  “Well, I’m sure Herman will make you feel that you’ve seen enough for a lifetime. Shall we go in?”

  “Sure. I just got a message from Ania saying she’s going to be late.”

  “I got one too. Something about logistical problems. Whatever they might be.”

  Dimple giggled. “It’s actually a wardrobe issue.”

  “Really?”

  “She was about to leave but her cape got caught in the car door and ripped.”

  “Her cape?”

  “You wouldn’t know. It’s a fashion thing. And then she got changed, but Sigmund jumped on her with his muddy paws. So she had to go and change again. And now she’s caught in traffic.”

  They sat down in the last row, behind a man wearing an ushanka to brave the fierce air-conditioning, the fur flaps hanging down like a spaniel’s ears. Dimple and Dev had seen each other only once, briefly, since the night of Ankit’s drunken display at Ania’s party.

  “You know, I wanted to thank you properly for being so nice that night after Ania’s party. I really appreciated it. It was all so embarrassing,” she told him.

  “Not at all, please don’t mention it,” he said. “How i
s Ankit?”

  “I think he’s okay. I’ve not seen him much.”

  They watched a few more people arrive and take their seats.

  “It really wasn’t a big deal, what happened. Everyone’s had too much to drink at times and got a bit silly,” he said.

  “It was more than that. It was just terrible.” She paused and then lowered her voice. “I felt so humiliated.”

  “Look, I don’t know what Ania has said to you about it, but trust me, she doesn’t hold anything against Ankit, nor should anyone else. She thinks the world of you. I know that. And she really wouldn’t want you to be upset over something so slight.”

  Dimple twisted the straps of her purse in her hand and nodded.

  Herman Van den Broeck made an appearance at the front of the room, refusing to acknowledge anyone in the audience. It was an essential part of a performer’s mystique that the public be recognized only when the show had truly begun.

  “I’m starving,” said Dev.

  “Me too. Work was so busy, I’ve had no lunch,” she said.

  “Nothing at all?” he asked.

  “Half an apple,” she said.

  “I’ve had lunch, and I’m still starving.”

  “On my way here I passed this little kebab place that I know. I nearly fainted, the smell was so good.”

  “What kind of kebabs?”

  “Dora kebabs. They are incredibly awesome.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “What?”

  “The kebabs. What do they taste like?”

  “Uff, so tender, and that delicious smoky smell just as you pull the string off.”

  “Are they spicy?”

  “Just right. So fragrant.”

  “Oh God,” he said, louder than he had intended. Dev put his head in his hands. And then he stood up. “Come on.”

  “What?” she said.

  “We’re going,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “To your kebab place.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. We’re both starving. Come on, before Ania gets here.”

  “But she’ll be so mad.” Dimple hesitated.

  “We’ll get her some too.”

  “I don’t know if it’s your kind of place. It’s tiny. And not somewhere Ania would go.”

  “It sounds exactly like my kind of place. Hurry, or we won’t be able to escape. I’ll send her a message. She’ll understand. That smoky flavor, I can smell it.”

  Dimple continued to hesitate. She did not want to offend Ania, their friendship only recently having regained its former equilibrium.

  “I really don’t think we should,” she said.

  “You’re actually prepared to see me starve to death in front of your eyes? I’m telling you, she probably won’t even notice. Let’s go,” he said.

  Dimple stood up and followed him into the passage, hurrying to keep up with him as he made for the elevators.

  A few minutes later Kamya Singh-Kaul emerged from the staircase and made her way into A17. She scanned the room before sitting down in the same row that Dimple and Dev had vacated.

  Finally, the chair of the arts society ascended the dais and breathed into the mic. After a lengthy elucidation of Herman Van den Broeck’s many achievements, he was invited to begin his talk. An image of a nude Zeus hurling a thunderbolt flashed up on the screen as Mr. Van den Broeck’s staccato introductory remarks filled the room.

  “Nudity. Lust. Titillation. Engorgement.”

  Ania walked into the room, hot and harried by the misfortunes that had delayed her. She had been further annoyed by Dev’s message telling her that he and Dimple had already left. And she was embarrassed to see that Herman had already begun his talk.

  It was only when she had sat down that she spotted her neighbor adjusting her long glossy braid. Kamya was gazing straight ahead, and it was impossible to tell whether she had noticed Ania’s arrival. Ania’s temples were beginning to throb. She looked straight ahead too, failing to register any of Mr. Van den Broeck’s marvelous examples of Greek musculature. The rest of the audience was rapt.

  She glanced at Kamya, who turned to look at her.

  “Kamya, hi,” said Ania, “I didn’t realize it was you.”

  “Yes, me neither.”

  “How are you?”

  “Good.”

  “Great.”

  “Are you here on your own, Ania?”

  “Yes, I was supposed to meet Dev here. But the idiot’s gone off somewhere.”

  “I know. He was the one who asked me to come. And now he’s not here and not answering his phone. Do you know where he’s gone?”

  An expression of annoyance colored Kamya’s face, usually so cold and unflinching. Ania felt that the evening was finally looking up.

  “No idea. How terrible of him. He must have completely forgotten about you,” she said.

  Mr. Van den Broeck raised a finger in the air, and they all raised their eyes to gaze at it.

  “You will note the obscuring, I could almost say, the erasure of the male genitalia, in this period of sculpture. Why?” he demanded.

  A woman in the front row gave a terrified shrug.

  “I will tell you why. It was to deny them their potency, since these appendages had the power to distract from artistry, from beauty, from what was, after all, a tribute to God.”

  The woman on Kamya’s other side leaned toward her.

  “Excuse me, dear, if I’m not mistaken, are you Kamya Singh-Kaul? The author?”

  Kamya turned to her and nodded, her features having returned to their stony normalcy.

  The woman grabbed her hand and continued to whisper: “I simply can’t believe my luck. I knew it. I was telling my husband, Jolly—this is Jolly—it had to be you. It’s just unbelievable to see you in the flesh.”

  Once again, Kamya nodded.

  “Your book has changed my life. I feel like you somehow climbed inside my head and articulated the world for me. Ask Jolly, he was there when I was reading it.”

  Ania shot a look at the others seated around them. It was an outrageous breach of courtesy, and she hoped that someone would furiously shush the woman.

  “How do you do it? How do you do it?”

  Kamya shrugged and mumbled something into the woman’s ear.

  “No, it was perfect. The intricate facets of the human condition captured in that beautiful way. You have written a perfect book.”

  Ania glanced at the aisle. Even her admiration for Mr. Van den Broeck could not persuade her to tolerate any more. She shifted in her seat and gave him a last guilty look.

  He pointed at the image of a bronze sculpture, a doleful youth reclining against a rock.

  “There is, of course, a crucial difference between nudity and nakedness. If I were to strip in front of you, stand on this stage without a stitch on, I would be merely naked and not nude.”

  From somewhere in one of the middle rows, there came a hiccup.

  “The next slide will show us why.”

  He frowned as the next slide failed to show. Waving an arm, he summoned an assistant who began to fiddle with the laptop on the desk.

  Ania used the break to slip toward the back of the room.

  The assistant muttered an apology and hunched farther over the laptop. Another woman left the lecture. Herman had taken careful note of every departure. It proved, if nothing else, that the barbarians really were at the gates.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “SO WHO ELSE lives with you there in Delhi?”

  It was the kind of question that Dimple would not have found objectionable when she was younger: she would even have expected it to be asked. But now she found herself bristling. A couple months had passed since the debacle with Fahim, and she had felt ready to make the periodic v
isit to her mother. It had been a mistake to take a shared taxi from the station to the small hill town. There were a good forty minutes to go along the narrow road that clung to the slopes, still a smoky blue at this early hour. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the car window, hoping the stranger would think she had fallen asleep.

  “No close family in that kind of city? How can that be safe?” he asked.

  She faked a gentle snore. Ordinarily, she tried to slip back into old ways when she came home, knowing that people would be on the lookout for newly acquired airs, affectations, extravagances. Her mother would, of course, be the most vigilant. It was always best to trudge slowly up the last hundred yards toward their house, her case rattling over the ruts in the road, the signs of a long journey apparent on her face.

  Dimple let herself in, and she could hear that her mother was up: the sound of water drummed into a bucket in the bathroom, and the radio was playing its early-morning devotional songs. Boxes from the printing press sat on the dining table and on each of the chairs. Dimple’s mother was not a history scholar, but she wrote and distributed history pamphlets that she said were far more legitimate than those that relied merely on historical evidence. What was evidence? Anyone could dig up a worthless nugget, misinterpret a dusty manuscript, quote pointless statistics. Her words were emotionally authentic. They contained a greater truth since they outlined the damage to the psyche of the nation, battered by wave after wave of invaders, humiliated and enslaved. And her version of history encapsulated the future too: it showed how the route to self-sustaining glory was to repel the invaders, reclaim the purity of a Hindu nation, and erase that shameful past.

  Her mother emerged from the bathroom, drying her thin hair.

  “You gave me a shock,” she said. “I’ve got so used to being here on my own.”

  They stepped toward each other and executed an indecisive hug.