Purple Lotus

by Veena Rao

  He had called or emailed her every day, and sent her photos of the tenth anniversary celebration of the Annette Saldanha Home. The best one was of Cyrus with a group of kids standing outside their home, his arms spread across them, complementing their toothy smiles with deep dents on his cheeks. How the sun radiated on their faces. How happy he looked with them. They all belonged to him, and he to them. Seeing the photo, she had felt a twinge of regret for not going, for leaving herself out of Cyrus’s big family affair.

  But there were unexpected gifts to gladden her heart when Cyrus returned home. He spread them out on the bed as he unpacked. A clay peacock with its feathers spread out, a pink paper fan, a white handkerchief with embroidered red roses in the corners—all artistic creations of the kids. There was even a card addressed to Amma that was signed by all fifty-three children. On the front of the card was a watercolor scene of the sun rising between two mountains and crowned with blue cottony clouds. A stick figure stood on the green grass at the foot of the mountains with an upward curve of a smile. An arrow pointing in the direction of the figure, had “Amma” written on its tail end. Tara laughed at the shaggy long hair that fell to her stick waist; at the way her arms stuck out at rigid angles. She would treasure this Mona Lisa all her life. With so much love from the children, Cyrus could never miss having one of his own. Neither would she.

  As the Georgia chapter of the Annette Saldanha Foundation grew, so did the number of people who walked in and out of Tara and Cyrus’s home. They came every weekend for volunteer meetings: sipping tea, munching on cookies or masala peanuts, making themselves home with discussions, arguments, unrelated banter, and laughter. She couldn’t remember a single time in her life that she had enjoyed large groups. But this group of enthusiasts was different. She nurtured the family—there were eight college kids and two young couples. Only if she nourished the roots would the produce be bountiful. She felt like she was in the center of a mighty giving tree, a bit like the wish-fulfilling banyan tree of Morgan Hill. This tree was empowering. She stepped out of her comfort zone to solicit corporate sponsorships; but even when she prepared her sales pitch endlessly and worried incessantly until a meeting with an IT company boss or a small business owner was over, she discovered bits of herself that fascinated her.

  The first fundraiser that the chapter organized, a 5K run, was a mega success, as the local Indian–American newspaper headlined. The team had raised $25,000 for the foundation’s causes through corporate sponsorships and registrations. She helped with the bookkeeping, with the registrations, taking calls, providing information. She got T-shirts screen printed with an image of a group of Cyrus’s children smiling their winsome smiles, below which was emblazoned, in red, the words, I RAN TO GIVE THEM HOPE, and below it, in blue, the name of their foundation. She handed out these T-shirts to the runners after the race, a smile of appreciation on her face.

  The foundation’s team members were energized by the success of the summer fundraiser. They geared up for a winter fundraiser that would set them on par with the West Coast chapter. Of course, it would have to be an indoor event to be successful. A Bollywood musical evening or a play, they suggested. A play, they decided. A play, Tara and Cyrus agreed.

  “We have an in-house writer,” said Cyrus, without any warning. They all turned to look at Tara.

  “Okay, but, fair warning, I have never written a play before.”

  The team members said they’d improvise on the dialogues during rehearsals. A story appeared on her laptop, a modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. She called it Jahanara. It was set in urban India, the India she knew. She interjected the story with Bollywood song and dance, like the movies she had grown up with. She called her hero Jahan and his heartthrob Anara. She made Cyrus read each of the four drafts and write his suggestions in the margin.

  When the final draft was ready, it threw open a host of questions. Cyrus, and now Tara, were quite the pros at organizing races, but an indoor event was new territory. Who would direct the play? Who would work on the props, the sound, the lighting? Most of them had been part of school or college plays, but none had been involved with the nitty gritty of putting it all together.

  “Nobody is going to come if we don’t do a professional job,” said Shekar, a lanky, third-year student of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech.

  They needed to find an experienced director, they all agreed.

  Devika and Samaresh, the IT couple from Marietta, said they knew the perfect person for the job. All they needed to do was convince her of their cause. Munmun Das taught Odissi to kids in Alpharetta. Tara had seen Munmun’s ad for her dance school in the local Indian–American newspaper, striking a pose in her dance regalia, dark kohl-lined eyes on an expressive face. But what got the team excited, when she readily agreed to be part of their project, was the fact that she had a lot of experience directing plays for the local Bengali association during their annual Durga Pujas.

  Munmun walked into Tara and Cyrus’s lives, graceful in a handloom cotton sari, silver anklets around her pretty feet, thick long black hair cascading down her back like a waterfall. She alighted from her gleaming black Mercedes Benz for their first meeting, followed by her sullen older husband, Dr. Sujit Das, a lean, balding gastroenterologist.

  Tara and Cyrus took turns thanking her for her help in feeding, clothing, and schooling orphaned children. Munmun bowed, touched her chest. Her silky voice was self-assured. “Oh, it is my pleasure. When I heard about your cause, I immediately wanted to help.”

  Tara plated steaming hot upma and fixed masala chai for the team while Munmun read the script for Jahanara and cobbled together a cast for the play. Cyrus agreed to play Jahan to her Anara. Tara declined the role of Anara’s mother. “Somebody has to run the show,” she said.

  Munmun’s silent husband did not accompany her after the first meeting. Every Saturday and Sunday, her bejeweled feet carried news of her arrival even before she appeared, sunglasses propped on her head like a band, her saris or salwar suits always starched and crisp, her tone always self-assured. She knew what she wanted, and she got what she wanted from a team that was eager to please. She divided the rehearsals into sixteen sessions spread over eight weeks. The group met in the finished basement of Tara and Cyrus’s home. The first weekend, they rehearsed Act One, Scene One.

  Tara watched, seated on the plush carpet, face shining, thrilled to see her words being brought to life. She had written much of the dialogue; still the cast improvised as they went along, laughing as they came up with silly one-liners, then amending them to something that Tara and Munmun approved of.

  By the third weekend, Jahan and Anara of Jahanara had grown up. Then they held hands to sing a love song. It was a scene Tara had written. Nevertheless, her smile waned as she watched from the sidelines as Jahan serenaded Anara with a rose from their backyard. She dropped her gaze to the carpet as the lead couple lip-synched to a romantic Hindi song that played on Munmun’s laptop. When she gazed up for a second, she saw her husband’s hand on Munmun’s back, on the smooth, dusky skin left exposed by her sexy, deep-cut sari blouse. She heard Cyrus call out her name after the song ended, asking her what she thought about his dancing skills. She gave him the thumbs up sign. Cyrus had grown up dancing at the famous Saldanha ball every year. She had never set foot on a dance floor. In her family, dancing with a man was considered crossing the line of propriety. Right now, she was being as silly as her parents were with their rules.

  She pulled herself up from the carpet and ran up the stairs to the kitchen to fix hot khichdi for the group. It was not too late to learn. Once their program was over, she would look up dance classes in their neighborhood. She’d convince Cyrus to go with her. She’d learn to dance like the Munmuns and Saldanhas of the world.

  The group met for rehearsals again the next day. This time, Jahan and Anara held hands on a make-believe park bench, which was actually two garden chairs set next to each other. He spouted poetic verses about her in
toxicating eyes, her silken hair that left him breathless. They were good actors, the two of them. They looked the part of star-crossed lovers. What exactly had prompted her to write a love story? She couldn’t remember.

  She hated her irrational thoughts, the way they hovered over her like the vestiges of a bad dream. She looked forward to Monday, when life would go back to routine, and there would be no intrusion of silly thoughts. Meditation, breakfast, a brief phone call from Cyrus during his lunch break, a leisurely dinner that she would have ready when he got home, and an evening that would end with them watching TV, their limbs entwined on the couch, his face drooping with sleep on her shoulder.

  During the week, she went all the way out of her comfort zone, cold calling businesses for sponsorships, setting up meetings. On Friday afternoon, she convinced her ex-boss Srini Reddy to sanction funds for Alpha Tech to become the platinum sponsor of the play. This was her biggest triumph yet. Now, it would be easier to solicit sponsorships from other IT companies. Cyrus was ecstatic. She was left wondering whether her manic drive was to prove something to herself or to assure Cyrus of her value.

  She avoided rehearsals the next weekend, staying upstairs in her office. She had booked the venue during the week, a high school auditorium in Norcross, and registered on Sulekha to sell tickets online, but there was still a lot to get done. She created a checklist—hire a light and sound technician, find somebody to put together the backdrops or find a volunteer, create a design for the flyer and contact a printer to print them for the volunteers to distribute around town. She had the weekdays to get her work done, but she chose to get started right away.

  Cyrus poked his head into their office, sweaty from rehearsals. She gave him a bright smile and waved her checklist in his direction. “So much to do,” she said. “You run along and put on a stellar show. I’ll join you when I finish with all this.”

  The next Saturday, she cooked a difficult Mangalorean meal—neeru dosa and chicken curry with coconut. It was exhausting, spreading watery rice batter across the girdle at least fifty times—enough neeru dosas for the gang—folding each cooked dosa in half before moving it to a hot pot. Neeru dosas for so many people wasn’t a very brilliant idea, yet there was something lulling about the repetitive job that had filled two hours of rehearsal time. When she was done, she wiped beads of sweat off her forehead with a napkin, and went down to the basement to invite the gang up for lunch.

  The group sat on the carpet, talking, sipping bottled water from the basement refrigerator. Only Cyrus and Munmun stood by the window, away from the crowd, deep in conversation. From where she stood, Tara could only see Cyrus’s profile, but Munmun was fully visible. Her shoulder rested casually on the window frame, her hair gathered into a knot at the nape of her neck. The shine on her face, the glint of sweat on her neck, the bright yellow of her handloom sari—Tara absorbed all of this in a glance. The dancer’s hands were participating equally and animatedly in whatever she was saying, but it was her enormous kohl-lined eyes that cut into Tara’s chest—they were transfixed on Cyrus, as if the rest of the world did not exist.

  Enraptured was the word that came to her mind, as she made an about face and walked up the stairs. She was forced to open her mouth to breathe easily as she trudged up another flight of stairs to the master bedroom. She headed to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face from the faucet. She looked at her mirror image, at her troubled eyes. Why had she fled? Why hadn’t she casually joined in the conversation, asserted her position? Why had she acted like Jahanara actually existed?

  She heard voices downstairs. As she patted her face dry with a soft towel, she forced her mouth upward into a smile. The gang had settled down in the family room and around the kitchen table, a cacophony of voices. She found Cyrus in the kitchen, rummaging through the drawers, a bunch of serving spoons in his hand.

  “Star, where were you? The gang’s hungry,” he called out when he saw her. She resisted the urge to snap back at him, to tell him she wasn’t the gang’s servant.

  They sat crowding the formal dining room, some on folding chairs that they had brought in from the deck. They talked about this scene and that and what dialogue would propel the story forward. Munmun sat between Anita’s husband, Manish, and Shekar, discussing a scene, plate perched daintily on a napkin over a crossed leg.

  Tara felt out of place, like an outcast in her own production.

  “How’s the food, guys?” she asked loudly. They turned around to look at her, as if they had only just realized she was present. They were effusive in their compliments. Awesome, delicious, food to die for, they said. Munmun wanted the recipe for the neeru dosas. So soft and delicate, she said. Cyrus pressed his bunched fingertips to his lips and blew her a kiss. But their generous words bounced off her ears. She had to find her peace herself.

  She slipped out to the garage, to her silver Camry. She drove over to Ruth’s and watched, seated on a bar stool, as her friend blended cake mix, sour cream, oil, water, eggs, and sugar for the sock-it-to-me cake she was baking for her former daughter-in-law, Paula. Tara loved being in Ruth’s kitchen; the warmth of the wood paneling, the mild aroma of the cake mix and ground cinnamon were enormously comforting.

  Ruth bubbled with excitement. “Paula’s birthday is on Tuesday. I plan to drive up to Acworth where she lives, and surprise her with her favorite cake,” she said. “I can’t let you taste this cake, but I made a batch of pecan brownies. I’ll put them in a Ziploc for you to take back with you. Would you please tell Cyrus I made them especially for him?”

  Tara smiled. “He’ll be very pleased.”

  Ruth loved Cyrus. Everyone she knew loved Cyrus. What was to stop a sensual dancer with a sad sack of a husband from loving Cyrus? She ran her forefinger across the spatula’s silicon head and licked the cake mix off of it. What was to stop him from reciprocating?

  “It’s wonderful that you have such a great relationship with your ex-daughter-in-law,” she said.

  Ruth looked up from the large Bundt pan she was greasing. “Oh yes, Paula is like the daughter I never had. She never remarried, you know. She and Charlie reconnected and remained friends in the last few years of his life.”

  “Why did they divorce?”

  “Men are such fools. He had an affair with a coworker, and Paula couldn’t handle it. It was totally his fault.”

  “And the affair? It didn’t last?”

  “No. It was a disaster. But it was too late for Charlie to go back. Luckily, Paula returned. She was there for Charlie during his battle with cancer. He was fortunate that way.”

  Tara sighed. “What’s it with men and commitment?”

  “Not all men are bad, my dear. Our Cyrus, for instance, would never hurt you.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Cyrus thinks the world of you. It’s plain as day.”

  “I know.” Tara returned the spatula to the bowl. She watched in silence as Ruth poured the gooey batter into the Bundt pan, as she opened the hot oven to slide the pan in. The longer she swiveled on the bar stool, the sillier she felt.

  She remembered deliberately, foolishly leaving her cell phone in the car. “I think I better get back home,” she said.

  She returned to her car, carrying a large freezer bag filled with Ruth’s moist brownies. Her blackberry had no missed calls from Cyrus like she had expected. As she put on her seat belt, she called him. He sounded his usual exuberant self. “Star, where did you disappear?”

  Sorry, she said. She had promised to meet Ruth that afternoon. She gave no excuse for slipping out of the house even before her guests had left.

  “That’s all right. Munmun is helping me clean up.”

  “And the others?”

  “Oh, they all left, lazy buggers.”

  She sucked in air sharply, mumbled incoherently that she was on her way home. Then she abruptly disconnected.

  The house was empty when she returned. Only the strains of Pandit Ravi Shankar’s sitar played on the
ir Bose surround sound system. She peeped out of the kitchen door, into the yard.

  “Cyrus?” she called.

  He didn’t respond. She scanned the tree house. She thought she heard faint voices from up there. Then she caught sight of a sari pallu through the window—a splash of yellow inside their fantasy place—inside the love nest Cyrus had built for Tara and Cyrus.

  She quickly walked back to the family room, taking the couch, sitting upright, tossing her purse and Ruth’s brownies carelessly on the floor. She crossed her arms across her chest to stop its shivering, to stop the complete loss of control that was building inside her, the urge to run up the tree house with her chef’s knife and plunge it into the woman who had dared to violate her private space.

  He walked in alone after some minutes had passed, looking his usual ebullient self. They had stretched like hours, the minutes she had waited for him. Again and again, weirdly, their own private conversation about making little stars, a conversation they’d had in the tree house, had played in her mind, like a stuck recorder.

  “Hey, I didn’t hear you come in. Munmun just left.” He stooped down to give her a peck on her forehead. “How’s my girlfriend, Ruth?”

  She resisted the urge to strike him. “What was Munmun doing in our tree house?”

  “She said she was dying to see it.” He sat beside her, draped a casual arm around the back of the couch, fingers touching her arm. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Really, Cyrus? The tree house is our personal space. Why would you take her up there?”

  “You gave Devika and Samaresh a tour the other day,” he reminded her.

  That was different, she wanted to tell him. You did not feel threatened by their visit. “Do as you please,” she said instead, picking up her purse and the pack of brownies. She heard him say sorry, that he didn’t think she’d mind, that he’d never take anybody else up to their tree house ever again.