THOSE PRICEY THAKUR GIRLS

by Anuja Chauhan

  ‘Dead,’ says the Brigadier, walking into the room, looking pale. ‘Gulab Thakur just told me. Poor Balkishen is no more.’

  ‘No more!’ Juliet Bai gasps, her hands clutching her breast. ‘How? Was he that ill, Bobby?’

  The Brigadier pulls at his moustache. ‘He missed three card sessions in the last year. Obviously he was gravely unwell.’

  So now there is a permanent vacancy in the Judge’s kot-piece group, Dylan muses. Debjani Thakur is missing a partner.

  There is silence. Ethan has put down his guitar.

  The Brigadier squares his shoulders. ‘I have to go over to Balkishen’s,’ he says abruptly. ‘Dylan, you drive me.’

  He turns and leaves the room.

  Dylan rises to his elbows and looks around, a half-comical ‘why me?’ expression on his face. Ethan cackles.

  ‘This is all Mamma’s doing,’ he says virtuously, starting to strum his guitar again. ‘She has being praying to the Lord for ages to break up Dadda’s kot-piece gang. She wants him all to herself to coochie-coo with. And look what miracles her prayers have wrought! First, Laxmi uncle and his younger brother practically came to blows. And now Balkishen Bau has fallen dead! What, Mamma,’ he sing-songs, shaking one bony finger at her reprovingly, ‘this is not good what you are doing!’

  ‘Horrible boy,’ his mother replies uneasily. ‘Go do your homework.’

  The Brigadier reappears, wearing a white kurta-pyjama. ‘Come, Dylan,’ he says. ‘Will you come, Bobby?’

  She shakes her head. ‘But I’ll send food, Bobby. They won’t be in any state to cook just now. There’s the chicken biryani – I’ll pack it. Dylan, get off my lap and go get the car keys.’

  ‘Well, at least you’re going where the chicken biryani’s going, Dyl,’ Ethan says as Dylan gets to his feet with a small groan. ‘Maybe you’ll score a couple of mouthfuls. I get to eat bread-butter and Lobster.’

  ‘Pour a bucket of water into the cooler,’ his mother says, putting her head into the room. ‘And then go and study – all my friends say that since I left school you’ve turned into a duffer.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather morbid of them to be playing cards when their friend’s ashes have barely cooled?’ Dylan asks his mother the next day, as she propels him towards the car where his father is already sitting and waiting. ‘Or at the very least, slightly indecent?’

  ‘It’s been two days,’ she tells him. ‘Trust me, for them that’s a lot. Thank you for filling in like this, sonna.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ Dylan returns piously. ‘Poor Dadda.’

  This earns him a smacking kiss on the cheek, and now here he is, sitting in the deceased’s chair, wondering what to call trumps.

  ‘Spades,’ he announces finally.

  Beside him the Judge gives a smug little grunt. The Brigadier chuckles. Dylan looks across the table to see how his partner has taken his call. But Debjani is hiding behind her fan of cards. All he can see of her are slim fingers and the silver ladybird ring.

  Fantastic, thinks Dylan. At this rate, by the end of the month, I might just find out what her sun sign is.

  ‘Um… that’s a really unusual ring you’re wearing,’ he ventures.

  ‘Thank you,’ the Judge grunts. ‘It’s my wedding ring. Entirely ordinary, really.’

  Frustrated, Dylan wonders if Debjani has even registered that there has been a change in players. She seems entirely oblivious to his existence.

  But he needn’t worry. Dabbu has noticed that D for Dylan is back. She could tell you what he is wearing with her eyes shut – a casually snug grey T-shirt that hints at a lean, muscled body and jeans with some rather tantalizingly faded bits. She knows he has a strong jaw and an easy pleasing manner and laughing dark eyes that seem to be seeking hers. She hasn’t forgotten how flirty he is. And how she got goosebumps when he said her name. Her mother told her that Juliet Bai is always bemoaning the fact that her eldest son has the morals of a tomcat. And he dared call her a cat! He’s just out to make a summer conquest, she thinks dramatically, something to vary the Bombay flavour. Well, I refuse to make a fool of myself over him. I refuse to make a fool of myself over any guy.

  And so she drags her mind determinedly back to her woes – the sniggers she’s been hearing in the AIR corridors, the pitying looks she’s been attracting from her neighbours on Hailey Road ever since that wretched article appeared. How mortifying it is to know her father is right, that the good opinion of others matters a great deal to her. Will DD even call her to read again this Friday? How easy it would be for them to replace her, just as easily as her father has replaced Balkishen Bau with the Brigadier’s son.

  And then abruptly, and to her surprise, she realizes just how much she is missing the big brown hmmm hmmming presence of Balkishen Bau across the table. Balkishen Bau would never have said ‘spades’ like Dylan has just done. He was the only one among the four players who insisted on calling the four houses by their Hindi names: hukum, paan, eent and chidi. He did it mostly to irritate the other old men, Debjani always felt, because he thought they were too anglicized. Sometimes he even pretended he didn’t understand the English terms. And always, after he called trumps, he would wink roguishly at Dabbu, to indicate that the two of them were going to blow the others away. And he loved the way she read the news. He said she was Thee Best. And look at her, so fickle, already forgotten him, sitting here hyper-aware of the Brigadier’s cute son, even glad that he’s taken Balkishen Bau’s place. A guilty lump starts to form in her throat.

  With the result that when Dylan finally manages to catch her eye, he finds them suspiciously red-rimmed. A little later, he notices that her shoulders are shaking. And when his hand happens to touch the card she has just discarded it is damp, he is sure of it. Debjani Thakur is weeping behind her cards.

  He slips a hand into his jeans, extracts a large blue checked handkerchief and, on the pretext of reaching for the devilled Maggi noodles, drops it gently into her lap.

  Debbie stares down at the folded cotton square in disbelief. Is this harami tomcat behaviour, she wonders, confused, or just plain niceness? Whichever it is, she can’t afford to be picky. She picks up the blue handkerchief and blows into it vigorously.

  Hearing the sound of snot being evicted so energetically, Dylan smiles, feeling absurdly happy.

  At eight o’clock, he carries the table into the drawing room and sets it down. Debjani lingers, watching him, obviously feeling some sort of explanation is due.

  ‘He would have said hukum,’ she offers finally. ‘Not spades.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Dylan asks.

  ‘And he would have scraped a card across his warts. And winked at me. He was kind and sweet and I’m sorry I said that his balgam rattled and that he was ugly!’

  Dylan, recalling the homely-looking old gent he had seen lying in state at the electric crematorium yesterday, finally makes the connection. ‘You mean Balkishen Bau.’

  At the sound of his name, her eyes start to well up again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dylan says hastily. ‘Er, I can say hukum too, would you like that?’

  She smiles at that, a wonky, watery smile. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘I’m not a baby.’

  Dylan feels his belly do its now familiar head-over-heels ballerina flip. It is definitely time to go home.

  ‘I’m glad you liked my ring,’ she says suddenly.

  He is taken aback for a moment, and then grins.

  ‘You heard me, then.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she replies serenely.

  ‘So, is it purely ornamental?’ he asks. ‘Or does it have any significance?’

  She tilts her head. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, is it a doggy ring?’ he asks playfully. ‘Uniting you and Moti in a bond of puppy love?’

  He is trying to find out if I’m engaged or seeing someone, Debjani realizes. She ought to say something witty and sparkling back to him. But what can she say?

  ‘Moti’s married to Voti,�
�� she replies, deciding to take the question at face value. ‘Voti is Punjabi for wife. And they’ve just had a new litter – Chhoti, Dhoti and Roti.’

  ‘Chhoti is the small one, obviously.’ The long dimples flash as he props himself against the table and crosses his arms across his chest. (Why is he making himself comfortable? Wasn’t he leaving?) ‘Dhoti has a big white bum, am I right?’

  Debjani smiles. ‘Exactly!’

  ‘But Roti defeats me. Unless, wait, is he a glutton?’ ‘He’s light brown,’ Debjani explains. ‘Sort of wheat coloured. So.’

  ‘Of course. Actually, that was a stupid guess. Because Moti would’ve given you a pearl ring.’

  ‘You sound like my father.’ Debjani makes a face. ‘He says I’m going to marry a dog. D for dog, you know.’

  And then she instantly wants to gag herself, because D for Dylan! Oh god, what will he think? Her cheeks turn an incandescent pink.

  She is so transparent, Dylan thinks, amused. Her thoughts might as well appear in neon across her forehead for everyone to read. He starts to make some casual reply but just then, a fair, top-heavy young man shambles into the drawing room, looking supremely disgruntled.

  ‘Bhai, yeh Meenakshi Seshadri cheating karti hai,’ he declares.

  ‘This is my Gulgul bhaisaab,’ Debjani says to Dylan, who has just done a double take at the sight of Gulgul’s gargantuan biceps.

  ‘Hello, bicep,’ Dylan says fascinated, then hastily corrects himself. ‘I mean, hello, bhaisaab.’

  ‘Good joke, good joke.’ Gulgul smiles graciously as he casts an assessing look over Dylan’s body, puffs out his own, far larger chest, hauls his cycling shorts a little higher up his skinny bum, sits down on the sofa and elaborates on his theme. ‘Haan, toh this Meenakshi, she looks like she is wearing an Amar Chitra Katha outfit – you know, only a white cloth floating on her upper body – but agar close-by se dekho toh she is wearing a full-sleeved, neck-to-waist skin-coloured blouse! And I’m rewinding and rewinding and looking and looking and wondering ki, bhai where is her toondi? Batao!’

  Debjani chokes.

  ‘What’s a toondi?’ Dylan asks, totally at a loss.

  ‘A navel,’ Debjani manages to say. ‘Gulgul bhaisaab, I’ll just see Dylan out, and come and chat with you, okay?’

  ‘Hain? But… I needed a favour from you, Dabbu.’ Gulgul clears his throat and the tips of his ears turn a delicate shade of pink. ‘I came to ask specially.’ In a louder voice, he addresses Dylan: ‘Can you excuse us, please?’

  ‘Of course, I was leaving anyway.’ Dylan nods formally at Debjani and walks out of the room.

  Debjani is suddenly disappointed. ‘What is it, Gulgul bhaisaab?’ she snaps.

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’ He kicks off his sandals and, drawn by some irresistible urge, shoves his large foot into the ballet slipper that Dabbu has just discarded to sit cross-legged on the sofa. ‘Hehe! Look at my foot in your shoe, Dabbu!’

  As Gulgul’s leg is skinny and hairy and the ballet slipper deep purple and pointy, this is not a pretty sight, but Gulgul appears to find it fascinating. He arches his foot up and down, lost in a reverie, humming a happy little tune.

  ‘What did you want to talk to me about, Gulgul bhaisaab?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ He looks up. ‘Er, Dabbu, see… you know I’m serious about my bodybuilding, na?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nods impatiently, peering out at the garden.

  ‘Ya, well, I was reading Arnold’s book on bodybuilding – and in all the pictures in that, the men have no hair.’

  ‘Okay,’ Dabbu says uncomprehendingly.

  ‘They are all chikna and oiled, so all the rips and cuts show… And I am toh, you have maybe not noticed, quite, uh…’

  ‘Hairy,’ Dabbu supplies, tapping her foot, wondering if she can still catch Dylan at the gate. ‘I’ve noticed.’

  ‘Yes! And I can’t wear a skin-coloured blouse like Meenakshi Seshadri. So, I was thinking…’ He pauses, and then continues in a rush, ‘Can you wax me? Not everything, just the chest. If I go to the parlour they’ll laugh at me – I’ll pay whatever it costs, of course.’

  Debjani stares at him, speechless. One moment you’re flirting with a tall dark handsome man who wants to know if you’re engaged, and the next you’re being solicited to make intimate contact with your short cousin’s thick black chest hairs. Such is life. Gross. Grim. Avoidable.

  ‘But chest hair is so manly,’ she says weakly.

  ‘Please, Dabbu. It’s to help me attain my dream. I want to open my own gym one day! I’m going to call it Gulab’s Gym. Cool, na?’

  He fixes his large gulab jamun eyes upon her beseechingly. The very hairs of his eyebrows seem to quiver in a tremulous ‘please’. Everything about him is supplicating. And path blocking. She gets the distinct impression that he isn’t about to let her go anywhere until she says yes.

  ‘Okay,’ she says in a strangled voice. ‘Come over early tomorrow morning. We’ll do it in the kitchen because I have to heat the wax.’

  Gulgul beams.

  ‘You’re so good, Dabbu. So kind! Not like Eshwari… not like Binni… not like Anjin –’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she cuts him short. ‘Now can I have my shoe back?’

  Putting it on, she rushes outside.

  It is dark in the garden. Debjani comes out to find that Dylan is being interrogated by the two old men, who have him backed up against the green front gate.

  ‘So you think journalists should be answerable to nobody, eh? Not to the government, not to the judiciary?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Dylan is replying steadily. ‘I think the press should be answerable – but only to its readers.’

  ‘To its corporate masters, you mean!’ the Judge snorts. ‘You people can’t see the big picture. Every third division BA with a pencil in his sweaty hand thinks he is a journalist nowadays! You have no concept of the law – that’s why your reportage of courtroom trials is so botched up. You should all be made to get a law degree before reporting on legal matters.’

  ‘And all lawyers should get an MBBS before defending doctors, I suppose,’ Dylan replies pleasantly. ‘And judges should attend IIT for five years before presiding over a civil engineering case.’

  The Judge gives a short bark of laughter. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘BJ,’ Debjani calls out. ‘The cricket highlights are coming on TV.’

  The old men’s eyes light up. Without a word, they hurry into the house. Debjani finds herself alone with Dylan.

  ‘Don’t mind my dad,’ she says with a slight roll of the eyes. ‘Mine is just as bad.’ He grins.

  A little silence. Dylan looks over the gate at Voti nursing her puppies upon the sandpile.

  ‘They look drunk,’ he says softly. ‘Look at their eyes, totally glazed over. And their tummies are as tight as drums.’

  Dabbu stands next to him watching the puppies too, completely tongue-tied. There is something a little too intimate about the situation, she feels. The puppies make tiny slurping sounds, then one by one, let the nipple slip from between their teeth and fall asleep, their tiny mouths slack.

  ‘Hardworking little buggers,’ Dylan says, his voice a husky whisper. He turns to her, his dark eyes warm, and her pulse jumps crazily. God, what is this?

  ‘So, are you reading the news again this Friday?’

  DD hasn’t yet informed Debjani when her next broadcast is to be. Or if it is to be, she thinks miserably.

  She lifts her chin. ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘No reason,’ he replies quickly. ‘Just, you seemed so upset over your Balkishen Bau.’

  Debjani frowns down at the sleeping puppies. She is feeling like a bit of a fake. She twists her wavy hair into a thick rope over one shoulder and looks up at him impulsively, making him think yet again, for some inexplicable reason, of wings.

  ‘Look, I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m a very good person.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Because I was crying o
ver an old uncleji,’ she explains. ‘You might think I am very nice. But I’m not. Not really. It’s just that it suddenly hit me that he was dead… really, actually, dead… and the sun was setting, and frankly I’ve been moping about a nasty review of my newsreading in the India Post. So it was probably thirty per cent Balkishen Bau, seventy per cent nasty review. Actually, eighty per cent nasty review,’ she amends scrupulously.

  Dylan doesn’t know what to say – this is more honesty than he has encountered in a while.

  She squares her shoulders and looks up at him. ‘Perhaps you saw it?’

  He tenses. It’s a question he has been dreading.

  ‘The newscast? Yes.’

  She fixes her luminous eyes on him.

  ‘Did you think it was dreadful?’

  ‘Uh, listen, Debjani, I –’

  ‘It was dreadful,’ she bursts out. ‘I knew it!’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he says hastily. ‘The stuff they give you to read is such crap, I’d look like a zombie too if I had to read it out.’

  ‘I looked like a zombie!’ she says tragically.

  ‘Not a zombie, just a bit, er, wooden.’

  ‘Like Pinocchio!’

  He somehow manages not to laugh. Instead, he reaches out and squeezes her shoulder lightly. ‘Stop being such a tragedy queen! Where’s your ball-squeezing spirit?’

  It is meant to be a friendly, encouraging gesture. Only, it doesn’t play out quite like that.

  Because his hand is large and warm and strong. Which sounds calming, but the effect it has on Debjani is completely panic-inducing. Act casual, she tells herself chaotically. Say something. People in Bombay probably touch each other all the time to emphasize a point. Hell, people in Delhi touch each other all the time to emphasize a point! It doesn’t mean anything.

  ‘It’s the autocue,’ she says with credible composure. ‘In the auditions, we read from sheets. That thing freaks me out.’

  Meanwhile Dylan is having the weirdest urge to touch her bare shoulder again. Because her skin is smooth and firm and cool and because… Because I’m feeling guilty, he realizes. Of course, that’s it. I’m feeling guilty because I’ve screwed up this poor girl’s life with that hastily written, unnecessarily personal piece, and now I’ll feel like crap until I fix things.