by Mahesh Rao
It had been raining in Utah too; she had checked. On the website of his addiction treatment facility she had found the daily patient schedule, photographs of the staff, and information on pro-recovery diets. Her son had always been a fussy eater; for a couple of years he had lived on ham and raisins. And then his eating habits had crossed into squalid chaos, like all his behavior. She would find him late at night, standing at the fridge, eating out of serving bowls with filthy hands. He had picked at a scab and bled all over the pale roses on the silk that covered her wing chair. There had been broken syringes, a stench of day-old vomit, the certain knowledge that he had scrabbled around on the urine-spattered floor of a public toilet looking for a pill. She had at least been spared the indignity of having her house burgled by her son, not an uncommon occurrence in their set, she had later come to discover. Although, what difference would it have made? He had shown some restraint but nonetheless there was precious little left in her life that was worth plundering.
A loud laugh sliced through the air. They turned to see a young woman on her phone. Her handbag was the size of a duffel bag, and the neck of her dress scooped low. As she spoke she faced one way and then turned around and then shifted back, as though ensuring that she could be appreciated from every angle. A diamond pendant dived into her deep cleavage. Nina and Renu looked at it at the same time and then caught each other’s eye. A momentary warm current passed between them but it was nothing more than that. The woman laughed again, louder this time. Nina looked away.
“Lovely to meet you. Here, take my card,” said Nina.
She patted Nikhil on the arm, offered Renu her cheek again, and walked out through the sliding doors. As she waited for her car, she felt unusually self-conscious. She had not given anyone her card for a long time. One of the phone numbers it listed had been disconnected, and she hadn’t checked the e-mail address for months.
Two days later, he called her.
“You really must be at a loose end,” she said. “I can’t think what you want with me.”
“I enjoyed meeting you; I think it would be wonderful to have lunch.”
“Presumably everyone else is busy today.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret. I’ve canceled everyone else today.”
“You’re not pretending to flirt with me,” she said, intending it to sound like a command.
He laughed.
But she knew not to trust a young man’s laugh.
They agreed to meet for lunch—and it was a surprise to Nina that neither of them canceled.
The restaurant was almost empty, and she felt a prickle of disappointment. It would be rather fun if a concerned well-wisher reported their lunch date to Renu. It was so tempting, so easy, to lure someone away from her, even, if ultimately, so dull and unrewarding.
She watched Nikhil speak, feeling she could stay silent for the rest of the afternoon and he would not even notice. He had not needed much of a prompt to begin talking about his childhood in New Hampshire. It began early with boys, the belief that their speech had an intrinsic weight and exigency. She knew that it had begun early with her own son although it had taken her a long time to realize it. They were more or less the same age. She thought of a phrase that her son had often used and was on the point of mentioning it when she felt her heartbeat speed up, a sharp warning. It would be better not to mention her son.
“Northern Spy. Early Joe. Wolf River. Maiden’s Blush,” said Nikhil.
“I’m sorry?”
“The names of the apples. They used to fascinate me. We would drive past the orchards and end up in a village that was having a fall festival. A white church in the distance, pumpkins piled high, horses and carts for show. A whole bunch of stuff. And tables lined with boxes of apples, with their names on signs.”
“Wolf River is an apple?”
“Makes the best pie.”
“Dear God, it’s like having lunch with some American salesman from the 1950s.”
He laughed and tried to top up her glass of wine. She shook her head.
“Well, I’m kind of like a bad salesman. I try to make people buy or do things that really aren’t good for them.”
He crinkled his eyes and took a large sip of wine.
The waiter brushed the crumbs off the table with a smart, circular motion, making a soft whooshing sound. After he had retreated, it felt as though the entire room had fallen away and they were seated in a wide open space with only the pristine tablecloth between them.
Before Nina could reflect on the question, she had already asked it: “I’m going to Kolkata for the opening of a photography exhibition. Why don’t you come too?”
He considered her offer, eyes lowered.
The room seemed to return. She caught it through the tail of her eye. The kitchen door swung shut; a shaft of sunlight hit a row of copper pans. A few feet away a businessman rose and did up the top button of his suit jacket. Somewhere behind her, there was a clatter of ice cubes into a sink.
“You know what,” Nikhil said. “I think I will.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
IT WAS ONE of those changeable Paris days when a gauzy shower spattered the newspapers left on café tables, even as the sun continued to shine. Umbrellas in pastel shades were raised and lowered and raised again. One of the fashion label’s publicists led the way through the crowd at the Jardin des Tuileries, and Ania followed close behind, eyes downcast, occasionally glancing at items in the splashy parade for the photographers: a brocade coat, a pair of gold boots, some inflatable trousers.
As she approached the VIP entrance, a fashion blogger stopped her to ask a few questions.
“Do you think the rise of populism in countries around the world will have an impact on forthcoming collections?”
“I think fashion works very much as a reaction against the mainstream, so I believe designers will respond creatively and instinctively, finding new ways to make alternate conceptions come through.”
“Thank you. Is there anything that has really grabbed your attention this season?”
“I loved the asymmetrical beaded headdresses at Balenciaga.”
“Thank you. Do you think we will be seeing some affordable versions of them soon?”
“No.”
“Thank you.”
They showed their passes, and Ania was escorted to her seat, a glitchy bass pounding from the speakers, the black walls and floor shimmering with a blaze from the overhead lights. The chair was tiny and uncomfortable, even by Parisian standards.
Ania should have been looking out for friends and casting her usual discreet glance at the celebrities in the front row across from her—but she was preoccupied, raising her hand to her mouth several times to chew on the side of a fingernail before remembering that she was being filmed. The day before her departure she had seen a message flash up on Dev’s phone. The phone was locked, but she had managed to read the first sentence of the message from Kamya before the screen went dark. Dev was nowhere in sight, and her urge had been uncontrollable. She pressed the home button, the message illuminated again, and she took a photo of it with her phone. She still felt small and grubby.
“Darling! We’re having dinner tonight. Pick me up? Got something for you. Kiss-kiss.”
The message had repulsed her, and she had been unable to dismiss it. She had looked at it several times on the flight, trying to decipher its codes. Dev had already told her that they were only friends—across four continents, if one were to be precise—and she had never known him to lie. There was no reason why they should not be having dinner together. But the message was steeped in a cunning ambiguity, as though it was, in fact, a trap.
“Darling!”
It was an odd choice of word for someone as chilly and undemonstrative as Kamya. The exclamation mark was even odder, an attempt perhaps to convince the recipient of the sender’s warmth and
vivacity. It looked as though heavy equipment had been used to move it into place.
“We’re having dinner tonight.”
It was virtually a command. Ania bristled.
“Pick me up?”
Kamya had departed from her usual glacial imperiousness to a disgusting coyness. In the spaces between the words, Ania could almost see the flutter of eyelashes. It was an unmistakable act of manipulation. Kamya had a driver. Why did Dev have to pick her up?
“Got something for you.”
This did not even bear thinking about.
“Kiss-kiss.”
In a curious way, this was the most redemptive part of the message, since no woman in possession of all her faculties would ever say this to a potential lover. Why was there a hyphen? It almost seemed ironic. It was Ania’s best hope.
There were forces at play here that made her deeply uncomfortable. She had always been uneasy with Dev’s girlfriends, even after she had taken great care to ensure that her assessments were fair and objective. When she looked back at her own relationship history, she could recognize the small mistakes she had made, the impulses she could have curbed. But overall, there had been sufficient distinction; no one had been mortifying or disgraceful. Dev’s exes were a different matter.
There had been the social climber with the nasal whine who taught at the London School of Economics. She was a historian, working on a book that applied Gandhian principles to the new world order. She often spoke about “post-capitalist social ecology” and “anarcho-pacifism” but would have clawed out the Mahatma’s eyes to get an invitation to a Khurana cocktail party. After they had split up, Ania had been brazen enough to ask Dev what he had seen in her.
“Intellectual rigor,” he had said.
“Oh, please.”
“It’s what I always look for.”
A look had passed between them, filled with a kind of mischief, which suggested that they were talking about something else entirely, and she had not known what to say.
His next girlfriend had been jealous and possessive, an absurd creature who sulked for days if he appeared to enjoy a conversation with another woman. On the occasions they had all met, she had been stiff and uncommunicative, relaxing only when Dev’s remarks were directed at her but were also about her. Dev had later told Ania that she had once bitten him in the bath—not a lighthearted nip, but an unprovoked gnawing that had required antiseptic—so one wondered what other terrible details he had kept to himself.
After that he had been engaged to a beautiful psychiatrist who lived in her parents’ mansion in Defence Colony. She dressed in mannish shirts and waistcoats and had a permanently distracted air, as though her patients’ voices were running through her head at all times. Ania was disgusted to see that she stubbed her cigarettes out on dinner plates. She had never seen Dev as unhappy as he seemed to be in the months after the engagement. He worked all hours and never wanted to leave the safety of his university. He slumped silently on sofas, had dark circles under his eyes, and, worst of all, listened to everything Ania said with a terrible earnestness. She had never discovered what transpired between Dev and the psychiatrist during that year, but the engagement was called off a few days before Christmas and his spirit had returned by the new year.
Ania could now see that all these women had mistaken his kindness for pliability, his patience for unworldliness. It was clear that they had seen him as an old, gentle soul at their service. They had no appreciation for the happiness he gained from his esoteric enthusiasms, nor did they see that a bit of gentle joshing could turn him into a boy again. They had never walked up a mountain trail with him, inserting inappropriate lyrics into Beatles songs; they had never been to see a hilariously bad off-Broadway play with him; they had never watched him try to roll out pastry. And now Kamya’s unpleasant proximity meant that Ania would have to renew her vigilance and protect Dev from the negative repercussions of his own fine nature.
She thought of the journal he had sent her in Italy. For a moment, it seemed like the only sign of his existence. She had written in it for the first few days and then abandoned it. That guilt-ridden fact seemed like a dark premonition, and she resolved to return to it as soon as possible.
“Excusez-moi,” said a voice ravaged by cigarettes.
Ania was brought back to the room and to the reedlike woman who was making her way past. The show was now over an hour late. She glanced at her neighbors on either side, but there was no sign of a shared frustration with the moment. On the other side of the catwalk, all along the front row, she witnessed the same bored, courtly rigidity. The celebrities sat there like figures in a play, legs crossed at similarly elegant angles, fanning themselves with their programs, silent and pale like porcelain.
The venerable buyer on Ania’s left finally let out a weary sigh.
Ania broke her own rule and ventured a whisper. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“It’s the muse,” said the buyer, one eyebrow shooting up. “She’s been delayed at customs, and the show can’t begin without her.”
“Wonder what she was trying to bring in.”
“Oh, her mother’s ashes, apparently. I’ve just had a couple of messages. Her mother died recently and loved the Paris shows, so she wanted her ashes to be present here to appease her soul. Something like that. Can you imagine? The urn gets a front-row seat.”
The eyebrow shot up again.
“She’s still at the airport?”
“She must be on her way here now. But it looks like the customs people didn’t make it easy. The French find this kind of American sentimentality horribly vulgar.”
“But how long will we wait?”
“As long as it takes, my dear. The bloody woman won an Oscar last year.”
* * *
—
THE DESK WAS a mess: a ball of tissue smudged with lipstick, a medley of postcards, a ring dropped into a pen stand for safekeeping, a saucer with a faint edge of gilt. On the other side of the room Sigmund was licking a butter dish as though he were trying to bring it to life. Ania had no idea how he had got hold of it but decided that it was easier to let him continue. Her bedroom door was shut and would remain so for the rest of the afternoon.
The day after she returned from Paris, Dileep had said something about bullet-proofing the doors to the house.
“Aren’t you getting a bit carried away?” Ania asked.
“You have no idea what this country is turning into.”
“We live ten minutes away from the prime minister’s residence. It’s not the Wild West.”
Nonetheless a van full of security specialists had arrived at the house, and Dina was guiding them through the rooms. Strange men kept appearing on the landing or in the doorway, asking if there was a balcony at the end of the corridor or if there was a false ceiling in the study. For hours they had been reinstalling alarms and testing cameras.
Ania had begun to notice odd strains of behavior from Dileep: a heightened sense of paranoia and periods of unexpected indecisiveness. She had spent much of her adult life reassuring him about his insecurities—his looks and pastimes—but there was an unfamiliar element to his current disquiet. In the past there had been occasional difficult episodes involving his businesses, but he had never seemed overly troubled. She wondered whether there were serious money problems that he was keeping from her; she wondered for a mad instant whether they could lose everything. It seemed too absurd a prospect to contemplate: like a shoddy dream sequence in a B-movie. Perhaps it was only a prolonged adjustment to the absence of Renu; he missed her much more than he would admit.
Ania shut her bedroom door on the security experts. She and Dimple would emerge only when it was all over.
“What was that Japanese candy in the kitchen called again?” asked Dimple, flopping down on the bed.
“Amezaiku.”
“I couldn�
�t believe how beautiful and delicate they were. Like real works of art.”
“It was fabulous to see. Can’t believe how quickly he worked, all those translucent horses. And he must have been jet-lagged, because he only flew in this morning.”
“I thought he was quite hot.”
“The chef?”
“Yes. There’s something about chefs, na? I don’t know why. Is it because of their hands, all that kneading?”
“Do you think so? I don’t know. As long as they don’t smell of their food.”
“But who is all the candy for?”
“Part of the dessert buffet. For a supremely dull dinner tonight, some American think-tank people. I don’t need to have anything to do with them, thank God, so I’m going to be at Dev’s, making him watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with me.”
“Have you stopped seeing Nikhil?”
“I wasn’t seeing him. But I have no idea what we’re doing. We had such a fabulous time when we went away. And there’s definitely something there, I know it. I really felt that after we got back, it would all happen, but I’ve only seen him a couple of times since then. Maybe he got busy; I’ve been busy too. All we seem to do is like each other’s posts and send flirty messages all the time.”
Ania neglected to mention that she had been scrutinizing his social media interactions with other women too, trying to judge his intent.
“But you like him?”
“Of course I like him. But he does these strange disappearing acts.”
After a pause, she said, “He’s the only guy I’ve met in a long time where I don’t keep thinking, is he okay, have I said too much, should I reign myself in some more?”
“But is there something going on?”
