Civil Lines

by Radhika Swarup

  I woke late. Maya must have tip-toed around me as she readied herself; I grew aware of the day as Shanti yanked open the curtains. She went about her work more noisily than usual, and I knew I must have resisted earlier efforts to wake me.

  ‘Quick, baby,’ she admonished. ‘Everyone else is waiting for you in the office.’

  I quickly put clothes on from Maya’s wardrobe and ran downstairs. Ajay smirked as I rushed in, my feet still in my slippers. ‘Good morning, princess,’ he called.

  On the table where Maya had first gathered up the books spilled from Papa’s collapsed bookcase were rows of newspapers. ‘No mention here,’ Sonia said, her mouth held in a grimace, ‘but here, see,’ and she pointed to a slim column on a page inside one of the newspapers. I saw a photo of Raja Singh holding forth with Maya, and a caption below that read: Raja Singh in conversation with founder of new magazine. The accompanying article dealt more with the party’s attendees than with the magazine itself, and though the rest of the team was disheartened, I pointed out that at least the event was covered.

  ‘It’s publicity,’ I told them. I pulled out my phone and told them about the social media campaign I planned to mount. ‘Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,’ I told them, ‘all are going to be bombarded with photos of last night.’

  ‘But it will be like speaking into an echo chamber,’ said Sonia. After the rush of the previous evening, she seemed visibly deflated. More than once I had caught her looking at her watch. ‘It’s no use,’ she added, ‘we’re playing at journalism with our 500 copy print run. No one knows we exist.’

  ‘Have some faith,’ I countered. Within the hour I had posted the photos, tagging key attendees, and several had shared the content. ‘It’s not the overnight sensation you wanted,’ I told her, ‘but it was never going to be.’

  ‘Look,’ added Tasha-di, and I winced. She had consistently been bearish on The Satirist, and I feared she was totting up the money spent on the magazine and the launch party. She took Sonia’s hands in her own, and said, ‘The party last night was a success, no?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘It was,’ nodded Tasha-di kindly. ‘I’ve been the harshest on this enterprise, but even I have to admit that last night was a success.’ She looked at Sonia, still unhappy, and at the rest of the room.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ajay, reaching out to Sonia. He clapped her on the back. ‘It was a resounding success. I had my doubts, of course,’ and as Tasha-di squinted at him, he carried on, ‘but everyone was there last night. All the media bigwigs, all the sponsors, everyone was there. I won’t be surprised if tomorrow’s news carries some more photos of the occasion. And,’ he added, watching me as he spoke, ‘Siya’s efforts will bear fruit too.’

  It was a quieter day than anticipated. The phones didn’t ring with advertisers and with papers looking to cover the reception. I kept refreshing The Satirist’s social media feeds, but after the sparse mentions that had followed the launch party, no other reports followed. None of Raja Singh’s feeds—his portfolio companies’ social media accounts, his own personal ones—mentioned the launch. It was as if he hadn’t attended, and as India woke up to the day’s news, it was as if the launch hadn’t taken place. There was nothing for me to do.

  I rose to go to Mr Seth’s store to take a few pictures of the magazine to post onto our accounts, and the others offered to accompany me. The cover story for the next issue was already assigned and no one seemed in the mood to work. We were all jittery, waiting without purpose. It was too early, we knew, for plaudits, but we were too nervy for any productive work.

  At the store, The Satirist was prominently displayed. I took heart from this, then immediately worried it wasn’t flying off the shelves. A woman hovered over a copy, and I approached her.

  ‘This is ours,’ I said, grinning at her, and as she quickly handed the copy to me, I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, realising my blunder. ‘I meant to say that this is a local magazine.’ I pointed towards my bemused team, ‘We set it up together.’

  ‘Ok,’ said the woman uncertainly. She looked at the proffered magazine, and Mr Seth popped out from the back of the shop. ‘The magazine is free,’ he told the lady. ‘The girls refused initially,’ he added, ‘But I asked them repeatedly to make it free for the local area for the first few issues, and eventually they relented.’ The woman looked up at me, still uncertain, and Mr Seth added, ‘I’m very grateful to you for your generosity.’ He thrust a copy in her hand, repeating, as if it were a mantra, ‘It’s free for the first few issues only,’ and waved her off.

  ‘Seriously,’ he complained after the woman had left. ‘These people are such lemmings. She won’t want to pick up the magazine unless she’s heard about it from her friends, and then she will rave about it to everyone she meets regardless of quality.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I told him, as he stood there, angrily shaking his head. ‘Your support means the world to me.’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘but people are idiots.’ Someone passed by, a driver looking for cigarettes, and Mr Seth grabbed a magazine and shoved it in his face. ‘Here,’ he told him, ‘give this to your sahib.’

  The driver looked surprised, and Mr Seth explained to me. ‘This is Raja Singh’s driver. If he likes the magazine, there’s no knowing what heights you can reach.’

  The driver had set the magazine down by the till, and Mr Seth pushed it towards him again. He reached behind the counter to hand him a pack of cigarettes. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘your cigarettes are on the house today. Just make sure Mr Singh’s eye falls on this magazine.’

  ‘Sir,’ said the driver, thrilled with his free cigarettes. He tripped off, and Mr Seth winked at me. ‘People are idiots. We just need to make sure the right idiots are seen to read your work.’

  Shanti and Pradeep left for the village the same day. We were busy running around with the issue, and with my social media efforts. Ajay had taken to sitting outside the house’s gates with a copy of The Satirist in the hope that he would influence a passer-by to give the magazine a chance, and it was he who first noticed Shanti coming from the servants’ quarters with a suitcase. He offered to help her carry it, and when she refused, asked her if she was leaving, ‘No,’ she said, blushing at the attention. ‘My son is getting married next week. We are going to the village.’

  Maya and I came out at the noise. Shanti put her hands on our heads in benediction. ‘Be good while I’m gone,’ she said to us, ‘take care of each other.’

  Pradeep had emerged by this point. He carried a suit bag and dragged an ancient, battered leather case that had once belonged to Papa.

  ‘Getting married, eh?’ Ajay joshed, but Pradeep refused to look him in the eye.

  Sonia, who had come out too, nudged us, ‘He’s getting embarrassed at the thought of his marriage,’ she giggled. ‘Just imagine.’

  ‘The approaching nuptials,’ I began, then took a look at Pradeep. His face was turned towards the ground, his hands balled up into fists, and I knew the inspection was excruciating for him.

  ‘Come,’ said Ajay, clapping him on the back, and I saw Pradeep refuse to look up. I was sure there would be more jostling, more bawdy teasing, but Ajay took the suitcase from Shanti’s hands, and as she complained, telling him she was capable of carrying her suitcase, he pointed towards his car. ‘Come,’ he said again, ‘I’ll give you a lift to the station.’ He put her luggage in his boot, took Pradeep’s suit cover and draped it over the passenger seat, and as Shanti and Pradeep stood behind the gates, uncertain and alone, he gestured them in. ‘Come now,’ he repeated. ‘It’s a busy day for the magazine, and I don’t want to be back late.’

  This finally got them in the car, and with many expressions of gratitude, the trio was off to the station. We stood watching them off, and Tasha-di smiled. ‘Ajay is the good guy,’ she said. ‘Who would have thought?’

  It was only later, after I had uploaded our photos onto social media platforms and interacted with the two news organisations who showed
an interest in covering our maiden issue, after Ajay had returned, after Tasha-di had brought out the champagne to celebrate our first issue, and after our colleagues had departed for the day, that I asked Maya who she had been speaking to at the party.

  She professed ignorance. ‘There were so many people there.’

  ‘It was a man.’

  She shrugged, though a dark flush stained her face. ‘There were many men there.’

  I smiled in response, and though she pretended not to notice, her lack of composure was clear. She fidgeted, rising from her chair before sitting down again, tying and retying her hair in a bun. ‘It was Kunal,’ I asked as she rose again, ‘Wasn’t it?’

  ‘Kunal?’

  ‘You know exactly who I’m talking about,’ I said. She looked like she would evade the question, and I asked, ‘Was he there are the party last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘I knew it!’ I yelled, as if the victory were all mine, and then said, ‘Why did he come?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, and it seemed like she was genuinely puzzled. ‘I’m guessing Sonia told him about the party. He was at college with her too, don’t forget.’

  ‘But he came,’ I exulted.

  ‘He did,’ she assented. There was a pause for a minute as we both sat nursing our thoughts. It had grown steadily dark, and neither of us had thought to switch on the lights. I saw her move in the dim light, her torso rocking back and forth against her chair before she added, ‘He’s got two children.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He’s separated, he says,’ and as I hugged this little nugget of hope to me, she moved to crush them, ‘but he’s not divorced.’ We were both silent, and her torso didn’t cease its motion. Forward it rocked, like a pendulum insisting on the passage of time, and then relentlessly backwards. ‘He’s not divorced,’ she repeated in a voice stilled of emotion, ‘and he’s still got two school-age children.’

  XVI

  Word of the magazine slowly spread. Mr Seth, our personal PR machine, called to tell me he had run out of stock. ‘If you want,’ he suggested coyly, ‘you can have some more dropped around.’ The magazine’s social media account slowly gained followers. I made sure to post daily; Puneeta disseminated all my posts to the followers of the hotel, and slowly, more people began to respond to our output. My tweets were shared, and my Instagram and Facebook posts liked. We weren’t setting the journalistic world on fire, not just yet, but we had reason to be hopeful.

  We ran into Raja Singh a few days after the launch. He was with another person, a business associate, we presumed, and we smiled politely at him as he walked past. He acknowledged our greeting and didn’t slow his pace, but said to his companion as he passed: ‘These girls have just launched a magazine, Manu. I’ll give you my copy…’

  The two men had wandered out of earshot, but I squeezed Maya’s arm. Raja Singh hadn’t forgotten about our existence. He hadn’t told his companion he loved our magazine, but he hadn’t forgotten about us. That was something.

  A week after the launch, Pradeep and Shanti returned. They brought with them Pradeep’s new bride, a tall, slim girl called Saloni. Just like in her photo, I spied a burst of intelligence in her eyes, but she remained subdued that first day, cowed either by her distance from her parent’s home or by the noise and sounds of Delhi. Maya and I sat her down, and over a cup of tea with Shanti, tried to make small talk. She sat at the edge of the sofa, knees primly glued together, as if worried about seeming too presumptuous. She wore a bright salwar kameez, the fabric a brash, synthetic red shot through with strands of gold thread. It was clear she was conscious around us, avoiding eye contact, tidying down the skirt of her kameez every time she spoke and making sure her plait was tidied away behind her back. I wanted to reach out, to squeeze her hand, to assure her we meant well, but I worried about putting her more on edge.

  She barely spoke. She was polite, painfully so, replying to our questions with great parsimony. Everything was pronounced to be good. How did she like Delhi? It was good. How had the wedding been? Good. How did she like the mother-in-law who had been our second mother? Good. It was impossible to get any real information out of her, and at length, we gave up.

  ‘They’ll make a pretty pair,’ I whispered to Maya as the new bride was escorted out by her mother-in-law. ‘Neither will open their mouth.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ she said in reply. ‘Imagine being put under the spotlight like that. There we were, thinking ourselves so kind to invite her to tea and ask her questions about herself, when she knew she couldn’t claim a similar interest in us.’

  ‘What were we to do? Show no concern?’

  ‘No, no,’ Maya said. I was surprised, both by the interest she had taken in the new girl, and by the empathy she was displaying. When I had called from London, it had often felt that she had no interest in my life. Ma had begun the era of polite disinterest, of course, but Maya had shown no sign of wanting to diverge from the example our mother set. Now, there she sat, feeling the new bride’s discomfort, telling me we had to be kinder. ‘We have to let the poor girl alone. Here she is, married to a stranger who has brought her to a strange city to live with his mother and two other strangers. The least we can do is cut her some slack.’

  Saloni receded into the background. Her main role appeared to be to relieve Shanti’s burden; she cooked and cleaned in the servant’s quarters, and once Shanti’s work was done, she no longer had to return to her rooms to prepare dinner for herself and Pradeep. During office hours for the magazine too, Shanti sometimes enlisted her daughter-in-law’s help. Tea was constantly being ordered, plates of biscuits and snacks forever ferried around, and Saloni took on the role of courier for us. Messages to Pradeep—to buy more supplies, to run to a newspaper with an issue of the magazine—were delivered through his new wife.

  She sometimes lingered in the library, longer than expected, and though instructions were issued, and the girl nodded to show she comprehended, we all noticed she was slow to move. I took it to be lethargy on her part, a slowness of the mind that belied the sharpness I had sensed in her eyes. She was often slow to return from her trips to see Pradeep, and though I associated this with the same sluggishness, Ajay was quick to disabuse me.

  ‘Love,’ he told me, returning from one of his cigarette breaks by the back of the house, ‘is blooming in the garage.’

  I wrinkled my nose at the smell, but he edged closer. ‘I didn’t think the boy had it in him, but I walked in to see him with his arms around his young wife.’ Ajay snapped his fingers. ‘How they jumped apart when I entered!’

  ‘You,’ I scolded. ‘Be kind to them. It can’t be easy trying to get to know each other in a goldfish bowl.’

  He howled with laughter. ‘The boy didn’t look too pleased to be disturbed, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Poor guy,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ assented Ajay. ‘He’s married to a beautiful woman who is ten times cleverer than him’. He looked thoughtful. ‘Poor guy.’

  Later on, as Maya and I sat in the living room upstairs, I observed Saloni. She had come in with our dinner; this she now placed in front of us. ‘Your dinner please,’ she said, speaking in fluent English. She worked neatly, nodding as we thanked her. She watched us for a moment quietly, and as I looked up at her, she shot me a shy smile. ‘Good evening,’ she said in the same eloquent voice before she left.

  Some days later, I noticed Saloni in the office. She had set down a tray with cups of tea, and proceeded to hand the drink around to all of us. Her work finished, she remained in the room. She wiped the tray down with a dishcloth; she dusted the desks, and slowly, she inched towards where the layouts of the next issue were kept. She was tall, and though she had a soft tread, her shadow fell on me, and I observed her out of the corner of my eye. She knew she was trespassing, and she moved slowly, her eyes darting around the office every few seconds. When she reached the table with the layouts, she seemed to relax. She leant over the pages, and
I saw she was reading. She had a graceful neck, her face slender and evenly proportioned, and I found myself echoing Ajay’s earlier thought: here was a woman more attractive and more intelligent than her husband.

  Saloni bent again. I guessed this was to read in greater detail, but I saw that Ajay had noted her presence too, as I saw him rise and walk swiftly to where the layouts were. ‘Hello, hello,’ he said in her ear, and as she jumped in fright, I saw him smile.

  ‘I was just leaving,’ she said, forgetting her dishcloth in her haste. This fell to the floor, and I swooped down to pick it up.

  ‘I’ll return it to Saloni,’ I told Ajay, who shrugged.

  In the kitchen, Saloni apologised to me. ‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ she told me as I handed back her cloth.

  ‘I’ve seen you around the office before.’

  She scrunched her face up apologetically, then noticing that I remained silent, she began to speak. ‘My degree was in English,’ she said. ‘I love to see the magazine coming together.’

  Shanti came up to us. ‘Is all well?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Saloni said miserably. ‘I won’t come into the office again.’ She wrung the dishcloth and folded her hands in apology. Her head was bowed, as if expecting admonishment, and as Shanti asked me what her daughter-in-law had done wrong, Saloni slunk off to the basin, where she started to wash dishes.

  ‘She’s a good girl, really’ Shanti was saying. ‘A bit dreamy sometimes, but her heart is in the right place.’