The Windfall

by Diksha Basu

  “The LRC, sir. The club. But they should be home soon. What time is it, sir?” Balwinder said and moved closer to the car window to try to see Mr. Jha’s watch.

  “Well, hopefully we’ll see him later this afternoon,” Mr. Jha said, and put his window back up and pulled into the driveway.

  Not, however, before Balwinder looked into the car and saw the woman—he assumed the wife—sitting in the backseat, wearing big sunglasses that covered most of her face. Her hair was loose over her shoulders and she looked like she was wearing Western clothes. It was strange that the lady of the house sat in the backseat while the maid sat in the front when the husband was driving—it was usually the other way around. Or, if there was a driver, the maid sat at the front, and the man and woman of the house sat at the back. He would have to remember to tell Mr. Chopra this detail.

  When they pulled into the driveway and Mrs. Jha had pushed the gate shut behind them, Mrs. Ray stepped out of the backseat of the car. She was glad Mrs. Jha had invited her along to see the house today. After the fiasco with the stolen yoga pants (which had shown up one morning, bundled and thrown into a corner of her balcony), she needed a break.

  “Oh, this is just lovely,” Mrs. Ray said. “Look at all the greenery. Who would even know you’re in Delhi? This is beautiful.”

  “It’s silly,” Mrs. Jha said. “It seems a shame to push the city away so much, doesn’t it?”

  “Not at all. The only way to survive in Delhi is to push it away,” Mrs. Ray said.

  She looked around the lawns feeling a hint of envy. Her husband had died leaving her with enough money to get by every month, but she had no way of making her way out of Mayur Palli. Here were the Jhas, Mr. Jha ten years older than her, getting a fresh start, with a new home and new neighbors and friends. It wasn’t even a question of dashed dreams for her; she realized now that she simply had no more dreams. At some point, she had become aware that the number of days she had ahead of her were probably fewer than those behind her. She could dress youthfully, do yoga, and paint her walls red all she wanted, but was there anything left for a childless widow her age to look forward to? She looked down at her flared jeans that were so tight she had a hard time sitting comfortably in them. Her nails were painted pink, but did the girls at the beauty parlor laugh behind her back after she got her pedicures?

  “It’s an oasis of calm,” she said.

  “This is nothing,” Mrs. Jha said. “You should see some of the other houses around here. I peeked in through the gates when I was here last week—the first house on the road has a small racing track built into the front lawn for their children. And one of the houses near the main road is built like a miniature version of the Taj Mahal.”

  Mrs. Jha was glad Mrs. Ray was the first person from Mayur Palli to be seeing it—she hoped it didn’t look too ostentatious. But she also hoped it looked impressive. Seeing it with a friend from Mayur Palli for the first time, she looked up at the home and realized it looked quite regal.

  “Who built a house like the Taj?” Mr. Jha asked. He hoped Mrs. Ray didn’t think the new home looked run down. They just hadn’t yet had the chance to get everything done properly. He would have to remember to get a gardener in soon. He would have to buy some wrought-iron-and-glass furniture, and maybe have some exotic plants flown in from Indonesia. He wanted his guests to forget they were in Delhi. They couldn’t live in a neighborhood like this and not keep up with the neighbors.

  “Sir, sir, the neighbors are here again,” Balwinder said when Mr. Chopra’s Jaguar pulled up to the gate almost two hours later. But Mr. and Mrs. Chopra were not in the car. It was only Upen. Balwinder opened the gate to allow the car in.

  “Sir, please call Mr. Chopra-sir and let him know that the neighbors are here. I could not quite see what kind of watch Mr. Jha was wearing, but his wife was wearing big sunglasses.”

  “What are you talking about, Balwinder?” Upen said, walking toward the front door of the house. At nearly six feet, Upen was taller than his brother and many men in Delhi. And he was slim. His hair was gray and still thick—it was said about men that if they were lucky and their hair started graying before it started falling, it would remain thick as it grayed. Upen was lucky. He had a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard to match his hair, and he had inherited their mother’s light brown eyes that made him look like a North Indian warrior who had descended from the mountains and, if anyone were to see Mr. Chopra and his brother side by side, they would find it impossible to believe that the two were related and that Upen was the elder one. Today he was wearing dark jeans and a plain long-sleeved black T-shirt. “Don’t shut the gate. Nimesh just came to drop me home. He has to go and pick up Dinesh and Geeta from the mall.”

  Balwinder followed Upen to the front door.

  “Sir, please call Mr. Chopra and tell him to hurry home.”

  “Balwinder, you’re a stubborn fellow,” Upen said. “My brother doesn’t know how good you are. I should offer you more money and take you to Chandigarh.”

  Upen dialed his brother on the phone.

  “Dinesh, this guard of yours wants me to tell you that the new neighbors are here. And something about a watch and the wife’s sunglasses.”

  “They’re there now?” Mr. Chopra said. He was at the DLF Mall waiting in line for a scoop of Mövenpick ice cream while his wife collected a stone figurine of pugs in a basket that they had ordered from a home décor shop. “How long have they been there? Have you sent the car back? I hope we get back in time to speak to them properly. Hold on.” Mr. Chopra was at the head of the line. “Two scoops of chocolate swirl caramel. I want it with a wafer cone but keep the cone separate. Put the ice cream in a cup and hand me a cone. Otherwise it gets too soggy and you can’t properly enjoy the cone. Give me two cones. My wife will also like one. But no ice cream; she is gaining weight.” He returned his attention to his brother and said, “I hope they’re foreigners. Then our property value will go up. Upen, why don’t you make yourself useful and see what you can find out about the neighbors before we get home?”

  “I’m not going to pester your poor neighbors. I’m going for a run and if I see them when I’m out, I will be polite, but I’m not going to go cross-examining them about their income. And buy your wife some ice cream. You’ve gained more weight than her.”

  “You look like a fool when you go running through the roads here,” Mr. Chopra said. “People will get nervous thinking you are being chased. Nobody runs here. If you insist on exercising, I’ve told you a thousand times to use the gym at the LRC. It has a wonderful sauna.”

  “You know I don’t like running indoors. And all the ladies at the LRC make me nervous, the way they look at me. I don’t know why you tell everyone I’m widowed.”

  “Widowed is much easier to explain than divorced. Very few of the men at the LRC are widowed; all the widowed women are looking to see if you’re interesting. And most of the other women know that with their husbands’ eating habits, they will also soon be widowed. But nobody wants a divorcé. That is exactly why you should go to the LRC. I don’t know how you can handle being all alone in Chandigarh. Are you putting up with some young college student again?”

  “You go eat your ice cream and do your shopping. I will get changed and go for my run.”

  Upen put the phone down and went upstairs to the guest room to get changed. He had to admit he was also slightly curious about these new neighbors. Maybe they really would be foreigners. He would not usually have cared much, but the truth was that he had recently had a brief affair with Sue, a young American filmmaker who was directing a film in Chandigarh and was using his marble-and-tile warehouse to shoot. The young woman, “a bisexual” she had freely said about herself, was half Irish, half Indian, and was making a feature film about farmers in Punjab. Upen met her the first day she arrived at his factory and spent the next three weeks sleeping with her when she wasn’t filming. After that, she packed her equipment and her actors and headed to Sri Lanka for the next
segment of their filming schedule without even pretending she might be interested in seeing him again.

  Maybe his brother was right about using the gym at the LRC. Part of the reason for coming to Delhi was to meet some new people, after all. Chandigarh got boring day in and day out with its neatly laid-out streets and small-town mentality. He would go for a run outside today and try the gym at the LRC tomorrow. Upen sat and tied his laces on the large wooden swing that Mr. Chopra had installed on the front porch. He could hear voices and activity from the front yard next door.

  Mr. and Mrs. Jha were having an argument about the bathrooms in the house while workers stood in the driveway holding materials for the showers that were going to be installed.

  Mrs. Ray, who was sitting on one of the discarded plastic chairs in the front lawn listening to the Jhas argue over a bathtub, knew she was about to be asked to pick a side, so she stood up and walked toward the gate.

  “I’m just going to walk down the lane and take a look at the other homes,” she said as she opened the gate.

  “A bathtub is terrible for the environment, Anil. Even a shower is much worse than a bucket and mug, but I’ve agreed to that,” Mrs. Jha said.

  “Bindu,” Mr. Jha said. “Why leave a carbon fingerprint when you can leave a carbon footprint?”

  Mrs. Ray pulled the gate shut. Outside, under the banyan tree, Balwinder was snoozing when he was woken up by the creak of the Jhas’ gate. He got up in a rush and brushed off the dirt and grass that was sticking to his pants. Although Balwinder was hoping for another sighting of the pretty maid, he was happy to see the glamorous woman next door come out. He was about to say hello when Upen pulled the Chopras’ gate open and stepped out, and the woman next door looked only at Upen.

  Balwinder was used to this. He was mostly invisible on this street. He didn’t blame anyone. When he went to Sugandha’s neighborhood, he was the wealthy one and he had the luxury of ignoring the poorer, dirtier men who hung around in the narrow alleys around her building. And being invisible here made it easier for him to observe others. The woman next door, in her tight jeans and short red kurta, was beautiful, and Balwinder noticed Upen also taking her in.

  “Good afternoon,” Upen said, bowing his head toward the woman who had just pulled the gate shut next door. Upen had not expected someone so beautiful to step out of that driveway.

  “Good afternoon,” Mrs. Ray said, feeling incapable of saying more. The Jhas had a handsome new neighbor. Handsome in the way none of the men in her world were. Did people in Gurgaon look different from people in the rest of Delhi, she wondered.

  “Lovely day,” Upen said. “You can feel winter around the corner.”

  “Thank goodness. It’s been a hot summer,” Mrs. Ray said, reaching instinctively to stroke her neck. She had meant to stroke it to imply that the summer had been sweaty, but she realized now that her gesture was far too sexual for a woman her age.

  Upen was going to ask her more, for his brother’s sake, when he found his eyes lingering on the spot on her neck that she had just touched. A thin gold chain vanished into the neckline of her kurta and Upen was too distracted to say more.

  “Well, I must be off then,” he said, and walked briskly away in the direction of the main road. He was not used to finding women over the age of thirty-five attractive.

  Mrs. Ray watched him turn and walk away. She wanted to continue the conversation; she wanted to know more about him, but she had lost her window. In any case, his wife was probably somewhere inside their home, and she knew that women rarely appreciated it when their husbands spoke to her.

  “Good afternoon, madam,” Balwinder said from behind her, now that Upen had left. “You have just shifted in, madam?” he asked her in Hindi.

  “My friends. Not me. I have just come with them to see the house today,” Mrs. Ray said. “You work here?”

  “Yes, madam,” Balwinder said. So she wasn’t the lady of the house then, he thought. That means the woman in the tidy matching saris and blouses who sometimes came by taxi and opened the gate herself was the lady of the house. How strange. “I work for Mr. and Mrs. Chopra, and their son, Johnny. Madam, they will be staying here from tonight onward?”

  “No, not yet. They’re just getting some work done today—getting showers fitted, air conditioners, dishwasher, and so on. I think they will be shifting in a few days.”

  Mrs. Ray smiled and nodded good-bye and walked along the lane. It was quiet and one side was lined with trees. She couldn’t see into any of the houses because they all had high fences and gates with guards outside them. Some of the guards had big mustaches and bigger guns, and they ignored her completely. Some of the less imposing ones watched her as she walked past. As lovely as these homes were, she would be lonely living in one of them, she realized. All the lives here were so private. Did more money mean more secrets? If she had more money, she would have entertained the idea of moving to Europe, at least for a little while, after her husband died. Instead she had just worked to continue living the exact life she had been living before his death, with nicer bedsheets and peppermint foot cream. She had never even bought a new bed. She probably wouldn’t actually have traveled the world, but if she had money, she would at least have allowed herself to think about it. She would have imagined walking the streets of Paris or Amsterdam or Lisbon and taking dance classes and reading books while sitting near lakes and ponds and rivers. She would have planned to return to India eventually because she could not bear the thought of dying anywhere but here, but she could have imagined sampling a different life. Only the rich claim that money can’t buy happiness.

  Mrs. Ray continued walking toward the end of the Jhas’ lane and turned left at the end of the street, toward the main road. There were hardly any people anywhere. Unlike the lanes around Mayur Palli, here there were no hawkers on the road selling cigarettes or tiffin boxes or bindis. There were no groups of maids sitting around having lunch and gossiping. There were no stray dogs or cows. It was all empty and quiet and neat and tidy. Even the drains that ran along the side of the road were covered. Who could blame the Jhas for moving when even the government seemed to prefer this part of town? Not just compared to the slums where people lived on top of each other in rooms the size of cupboards, but compared to East Delhi where people like her lived. There was no visible stagnant water anywhere in Gurgaon.

  Near the gate of a house at the corner, Mrs. Ray saw a white BMW stopped but running, with two women standing and talking near it. They both looked, at first glance, like she did—one was wearing jeans and a kurta and the other was wearing black yoga pants and a red jacket. They were probably in their late forties, just a few years older than Mrs. Ray. Or, more likely, they were a full decade older but were better preserved through lotions and potions and less exposure to the polluted Delhi air. Both had sunglasses propped up on their heads. Unlike her, though, diamonds flashed from their wrists, their ears, their fingers, and their noses, and their hair looked professionally blow-dried. They were both wearing makeup that had caked itself into the creases near their eyes. Mrs. Ray heard snippets of their conversation as she walked past.

  “…salwar kameez to yoga class. Just imagine…”

  “…just not the same anymore…”

  “…the new people…”

  “…Upen was at the LRC, I heard…”

  She smiled at the women as she walked past. Both of them went silent, smiled weakly back, and watched her walk away. She wondered what they thought of her. Did she look obviously like an outsider? A poor wolf in sheep’s clothing. Mrs. Ray made her way to the main road, where it felt more like the Delhi she was used to. She could hear traffic rumbling by, and there was a man pushing a cart full of guavas for sale. Mrs. Ray waved him over and picked a ripe guava and asked him to cut it in fours and powder it with the spicy orange masala they all carried in little plastic bags near the fruit. The man did as he was told, displaying no interest in her, asking no questions. Even the street vendors here were diffe
rent from the ones in the lanes around Mayur Palli. Here, they were not interested in her or her life. There, they wanted to know everything, and every interaction quickly turned into a conversation.

  “It’s a good time of year for guavas,” Upen said. He had seen the woman next door from down the street and had composed himself enough to redirect his run her way, anxious to be able to speak to her without trying to see where her necklace fell. He had been caught off guard, yes, but being nervous around women was simply not his style. And, despite his age, he thought he looked quite good out for a jog.

  “It is, yes,” Mrs. Ray said, surprised to see him again. Had he come toward her deliberately? What were the rules of this world? She wondered what the two women around the corner would do in her situation. Would they, like young women in films, toss their hair back casually, make a joke, touch his arm, and laugh? Or was one of them Mrs. Chopra, who would come charging around the corner in a rage?

  “Would you like one?” Mrs. Ray asked, feeling her stomach tighten into a ball.

  Upen smiled and picked a guava and handed it to the vendor to cut.

  “No masala,” he added. “It looks suspiciously orange, doesn’t it?”

  Mrs. Ray looked down at the quarter of the guava covered in orange masala that she was holding and wished she had also asked for it without the added spice.

  “But I’m sure it’s delicious,” Upen added, now having noticed that this woman was eating the quarter of her guava covered with the spice and realizing that he sounded like someone with a weak stomach. He did not want her thinking he might have to run to the toilet after eating this.

  “Sorry, I have not introduced myself. I’m Upen Chopra. I don’t believe I’ve seen you around before.”

  “Reema. I’m Reema Ray. It is very nice to meet you,” Mrs. Ray said, extending her hand to shake his.

  “Well, Mrs. Ray, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Please call me Reema,” Mrs. Ray said. She wanted to say, It’s Miss, not Mrs., but that was too obvious. And how did it work for widows? She wasn’t sure. She still used her late husband’s name, but as a widow, did you get to go back to Miss at some point? Mrs. Ray had never even thought about this. Regardless, the guard had said that there was a Mrs. Chopra and a son named Johnny, so it did not really matter. In fact, this whole interaction did not really matter, and Mrs. Ray was worried she was going to make a fool of herself. She needed to get back to the Jhas’ home.