Polite Society

by Mahesh Rao

  “If you need anything else, just shout. There’s a couple of people around.”

  Kamya went into the house, stepping lightly over the hot flagstones.

  The gifted author did not seem at all troubled by recent events. She certainly did not seem to need or even desire company; no kind soul was required to rail on her behalf at the cruelties of a celebrity-driven media industrial complex or reintroduce her to the small joys of life. As usual, Dev had completely misread the situation. Ania began to berate herself for making the trip and then remembered that, in spite of his ineptitude, she was doing it to make Dev happy. The thought of her loyal sacrifice gave her a sudden warm charge.

  And there would be the opportunity to see them together and discover what cryptic messages Kamya and Dev liked to exchange, the kind of friendship that could blossom over four continents. She felt a tiny pang of loss. He would be in Goa the next day, and then she would leave. She thought of his eyes, bright with amusement, his gentle ribbing. Then it occurred to her that she had never seen him tease Kamya on the few occasions she had observed them together. It was Ania who was always teased. That was something.

  She settled into one of the planter’s chairs on the verandah and sent Dev a message saying that Kamya seemed to be fine. She had a full view of the most famous house on the road, the tree house built by Flavia da Costa, which still attracted the curious and obsessed from all over the world. The house was all elevation and retreat, a human shelter that had opted for a different realm. It looked as though the beams and struts and panes of glass had insinuated themselves into the tree cover, achieving a natural state in spite of the construction’s hard angles and clear surfaces. Ania had been inside the house a few times, and it had been like stepping into a transparent nest, suspended in the crook of a branch.

  Over a decade ago it became known that Flavia had won an important commission from Kazakhstan, leading to much speculation on whether it was a museum, a concert hall, or a vast new presidential palace to break up the terrifying emptiness of the steppes. No substantive progress appeared to have ever been made, but rumors about the project would surface from time to time, particularly when a group of Kazakh men began visiting the village once a year. Their shiny black cars would pass slowly through the narrow lanes and deposit the men outside Flavia’s house, dressed in what looked like their holiday outfits: pale slacks, bright floral shirts and moccasins, and chunky gold bracelets.

  “It’s like an oligarchs’ tea party,” Dev always said.

  But the grand Kazakh edifice remained unconstructed, and Flavia continued to come and go from the village, her talents apparently untapped.

  She was in residence now and appeared at the edge of the verandah in ragged trousers and a sun hat that had lost all shape.

  “Everything all right here? Just checking in.”

  Ania leaped up, thrilled at the sight of someone who could provide relief from the strained atmosphere in Dev’s house.

  “Let me get you a drink,” she said.

  “No, darling, I’m busy in the garden,” said Flavia, waving a pair of pruning shears. “My boys are all useless. I just popped in to make sure you weren’t burning the house down.”

  She turned to leave. And then turned back.

  “But if you girls fancy a bit of an adventure later tonight, let me know. I’m going on a secret mission. Wear old clothes and comfy shoes,” she said.

  She waved again and disappeared down the steps.

  Ania’s mood lifted. If she was to be denied the sight of Kamya in torment, she would happily settle for some late-night entertainment in the wilds of Goa.

  * * *

  —

  ANIA HAD MADE sure that she was on time so that she would be able to sit up front and not be relegated to the backseat like a child. Kamya had finally emerged, wearing enormous dark glasses and sneakers emblazoned with gold medallions. Flavia had given her a look of dismay.

  “You better take those glasses off, darling, we will be back before the sun comes up,” she said.

  “Are you sure you want to come?” asked Ania. “It could be quite a late night. And you might need your rest, you know, after everything.”

  “I’m fine,” said Kamya. “I’m curious. I’m a storyteller.”

  It was well after midnight when they set off in Flavia’s tiny hatchback.

  “I have to give you a bit of background or else you will think I’m crazy. There is an old lady called Mrs. Cardoso, Evelyn Cardoso, who lives on the other side of the village. She has not been feeling very well these days—back problems, arthritis—so she is mainly confined to her bed. Her children are abroad, and it’s getting difficult for her to manage her house and garden. There was a vacant plot next to her place for many years, but now some people have built holiday homes there—three ugly houses crammed next to each other. Delhi people,” she said, looking pointedly at Ania.

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  “Yes, but that is not the problem. In Goa, we are used to outsiders with no taste moving in.” She shifted gears noisily. “The problem in this case is that they know Evelyn Cardoso is not well, and they are dumping all their garbage into her garden. I went to see it yesterday. Mountains of it, poured into the corner of her garden as if it is a dumping ground. The arrogance, the inhumanity.”

  “That’s absolutely terrible; can’t Mrs. Cardoso complain to someone? The police?” asked Ania.

  “The police do nothing, the panchayat does nothing; they have either taken money or they are too lazy to bother anyway. No, this is a case for citizen action. And that is why we are going on a secret mission. It will be great fun, I can assure you.”

  “‘Fun’ probably isn’t the word, but let’s see what happens,” said Kamya.

  They parked some distance away and slipped into Mrs. Cardoso’s garden through the side gate. Flavia turned on her flashlight.

  “Careful, now. There are roots and twigs all over the place. If either of you fall and break your neck, I’m leaving you here.”

  They made their way over piles of dried leaves, clumps of weeds, and sudden tussocks, the pale rings of light trembling over the ground and tree trunks. The cicadas were loud and active; above their heads, there came a low hoot. At the bottom of the garden, Flavia stopped.

  “Look,” she said, the beam from the flashlight flailing wildly over a great sea of trash: bottles, cardboard, blocks of polystyrene, a great slope of plastic bags.

  “Disgusting. See, they throw everything over the wall because they know she is too sick to do anything about it. Bastards. From Delhi.”

  “Yes, you did say. Such terrible people,” said Ania, who considered herself a native of Prithviraj Road rather than Delhi.

  “Careful here,” said Flavia.

  She slipped through a narrow gap between the wall and a thorny hedge. They followed her, staying close to the wall, before crossing the lawn to the back porches of the houses. Flavia took the rucksack off her back and reached inside. With great care, she pulled out a large bag of eggs.

  “I know some poor servant will be made to clear it up. But these fuckers don’t listen to reason, and we need to send a sign. This will be their warning,” said Flavia in a low voice.

  “Isn’t it a bit of a shame to waste all these eggs?” asked Kamya.

  Flavia and Ania ignored her. Having seen her let a bottle of champagne topple on the lawn earlier in the evening, a third of it soaking into the grass, they were unconvinced by this sudden display of thrift.

  The first egg hit the French doors with a satisfying crack, the mess taking its time to slither down to the ground. They listened for a moment to see if the security guard had heard anything. Flavia picked up another egg and tossed it up toward the top half of the windows.

  “Better to have even coverage,” she said.

  Ania picked up an egg and aimed for a spot a couple feet awa
y from the last splatter. She watched it sail through the air and smash against the glass. It was lunatic, unseemly, and delicious. She felt as though a riotous laugh was stuck somewhere in her chest and would come gurgling up at any moment. She picked up another egg. She was contributing to the administration of local justice, a redressal of a fundamental imbalance.

  “Look at these monstrous houses,” said Flavia. “No embellishment is too much, no adornment is left out. Money, only money, nothing else.”

  The splatter of her egg was especially violent.

  The flashlight shone on Kamya’s gold medallions. Ania turned to see that she looked bored and disappointed, obviously having expected a more eventful, or perhaps less parochial, adventure.

  “What happens if the police show up?” Kamya asked. “I can’t get involved in anything like that right now.”

  Flavia giggled. “Police awake at night.”

  Ania decided to emit a supportive giggle too.

  They heard a noise, and Flavia turned off the flashlight. The owl hooted again. But no one came striding around the corner.

  “I know that watchman. He’ll sleep through a storm,” said Flavia. “Now, let’s give the upper walls a nice coating. Get some eggs onto the balconies. They’ll have a lovely smell and beautiful clouds of flies when they arrive tomorrow.”

  Kamya finally picked up an egg and let it drop to the ground. That was the end of her participation. She lit a cigarette and watched the operation proceed, her features settled into renewed tedium, flicking the ash into the wind.

  When every egg had found its way to a target, they crept out the way they had come, Ania wiping her fingers on leaves that they passed.

  “Come in and have a drink to celebrate a successful mission,” said Ania to Flavia at the villa, worrying that she would leave immediately.

  Handblown glass pendants swung lightly in the breeze over the stone decking by the pool, their dim light lapping at the foliage and purple-tinged rocks. The cream parasols had been secured for the night.

  Bottles were opened under the stars; ice emptied into a bucket.

  “Vigilantism is, of course, dangerous, and every vigilante will swear that the righteousness of his convictions justifies the aberrant behavior,” said Flavia, putting her arms behind her head, settling in to her lounger.

  “But there are some situations where we must recognize the absolute repulsiveness of certain behaviors; we must concede that we are not dealing with civilized people. And, you know, there are people who question my right to voice these opinions in the village. Because I am internationally celebrated and spend so much time abroad, they challenge me on my local credentials, try to make me out to be an unwanted interloper.”

  Flavia reached out and took a long sip from Kamya’s glass.

  “But I waste no time in telling them that my mother was born in this village, my grandfather was born here, there are six generations of my family that have known this area. Even when the Portuguese were ruling, ours was one of the few families they respected and came to for advice. My ancestors have founded villages here in Goa; they have built temples, churches, schools, libraries. And I have built that.”

  She waved at the dark contours of her house in the trees.

  “I have every right.”

  She made a fresh round of drinks and gave Ania a little stroke under her chin.

  “I want to tell you a few things about my life,” she said.

  Kamya pulled her glass nearer, laid back on the lounger, and closed her eyes.

  Ania, now brimming with affection for Flavia, felt a sense of outrage against this rudeness.

  “So, Kamya, did you get any stories out of this? You know, as a storyteller?” she asked, forcing her to open her eyes again.

  “No, what I write about is dislocation and liminality,” said Kamya, and closed her eyes again.

  The cat appeared at the edge of the patio, green eyes gleaming, disconcerted by this unexpected nocturnal activity. When Ania called to her, she raced into the garden, a white streak in the night. Flavia continued with her anecdotes, her voice measured and soothing, like the sound of water swirling over pebbles. Before long, she had poured herself another drink.

  At daybreak when the house staff emerged from their quarters, they spotted the three women still by the pool, each asleep on a lounger, as if they had been taking in the rays from the moon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ANIA WATCHED AS Kamya lay in the sun, warming her cold blood, occasionally unhooding one eye and then letting it close again. The surface of the pool winked and sparkled. Ania had agonized over her choice of poolside reading matter, aware that it would be scrutinized and judged. But in the end all she had read were updates on her phone, her eyes flitting to Kamya’s supine form, the braid trailing over a rattan stool. She turned away from her and looked for the latest news on the scandal. The director’s wife’s account looked as if it had been suspended, and his spokesperson had insisted that it was a clear case of malicious hacking. But the speculation continued. Kamya and the director were said to be at a secret location engaging in crisis talks. Memes and jokes were flooding the Internet. The wife’s former psychotherapist issued a damning statement, sparking a nationwide debate on patient confidentiality.

  Ania glanced again at Kamya and thought that perhaps she was more disturbed than she looked, her coldness nothing more than unfortunate habit. She suggested lunch at a nearby restaurant, a shabby, family-run place, famous for its crab. Kamya agreed. They walked the short distance in silence. Ania asked her for a cigarette. It was her fourth that day. It seemed the only way to cope.

  By the time they arrived at the restaurant, the brief goodwill that she had felt earlier had dissipated. Once again she saw Kamya as a performer in a pantomime, a ham playing the difficult, inaccessible artist. A caricaturist would show her eyes creased into little lines of dissatisfaction, her nose in the air.

  They ordered and then waited, as the paper lanterns above their heads swung in the breeze.

  “So you do know this director? It’s not like they completely made the story up?” asked Ania.

  “I know him. We’ve had a couple of meetings. He was interested in adapting a short story I wrote. And, of course, after the novel’s success, he wanted to talk about that. But I’ve no idea where that crazy woman got the idea that we were sleeping together.”

  “You know how it is, you get seen together in public a few times and then that’s it.”

  “I went to his office both times. We talked over green tea. Only about the book.”

  Ania looked across at the open countryside, a canal and a footbridge, paddy fields in the distance with cows grazing at their edges. She did not intend to give Kamya the satisfaction of asking about her book. Infuriatingly, however, Kamya showed no interest in talking about her work either. It was as though she had decided that it was hardly worth the effort, secure in the knowledge that there were many others in her circle, far more accomplished and discerning, with whom those conversations would unfold. Ania felt a misery she had never felt before.

  She glanced up to see that she and Kamya were reflected in a mirror that hung on the opposite wall. Kamya looked serene as she stared at the fields, toying with the straw in her glass; she looked almost happy. The surprising thing was that it was Ania who looked troubled in the mirror—a little pinched and diminished.

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT THE HOUSE, Ania paced from the patio to the cool hush of the bamboos at the bottom of the garden and back to the front of the house, where the sun beat down on the white walls and the bougainvillea. It would still be a few hours before Dev arrived, and Flavia rarely surfaced before the late afternoon. This intimacy, which she had stupidly inflicted on herself, was suffocating. She had seen a long black hair in the sink and stubs of candles in their holders on the side of the bath. In the sitting ro
om Kamya had lain with her feet, toenails painted lime green, resting on a table where family photographs were arranged, an irritating and disrespectful act. The cloying smell of her deodorant lingered in the passage outside her room.

  When Ania went back inside, Kamya was nowhere to be seen, her bedroom door open, the pool deserted, the verandah restored to order by the cleaner. Ania felt relaxed enough to take a long nap in the hammock, drifting off as she watched the dappled green of the trees overhead, occasionally imagining that she heard a male voice murmuring nearby. When she woke and went to the kitchen for a glass of water, it looked as if Kamya was still away. She wondered whether she had packed her bags and disappeared. Perhaps her distaste for Ania’s presence had been even worse than anything Ania had felt.

  “Have you seen Kamya, the other guest?” she asked one of the gardeners tending to the flower beds.

  “Yes, I saw her about half an hour ago,” he said, “as I was riding past the cemetery. She was outside on the road, talking to a man.”

  “A man? What kind of man?”

  “A man. A normal kind of man.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I can’t say. I saw him from the back for a second.”

  “Could it have been Dev?”

  “Maybe. Has sir returned?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

  “I don’t know either.”

  He returned to the oleanders with a sad shrug.

  Kamya did not know anyone in the village and had certainly not been wandering through its lanes making new friends. A flirtation with a local lothario seemed most unlikely. Ania wondered whether Dev had arrived early and some sort of preliminary meeting had been planned. She grabbed a sun hat and then wheeled one of the house bicycles through the gates.