No Trespassing

by Brinda S Narayan

  ‘Okay,’ he said, as if he still hadn’t heard me.

  ‘Cheese sandwich okay for lunch?’ I repeated, like an obsessive mother. Manas, impatiently thumbing through his smartphone, responded with an annoyed, ‘He said anything’s fine, Vedika.’

  ‘He didn’t say that. Why does he not pay attention? Or listen to what I’m saying? He’s doing this at rehearsals too.’

  I consulted our paediatrician. Rhea was due for another shot and I persuaded my son to tag along. But during the visit, Sajan wasn’t foggy in the least, responding to the doctor’s questions with a startling alertness.

  The doctor brushed off my concerns with a lighthearted, ‘You know something? Even my kids don’t listen to me. It’s a parent-child syndrome.’ I was relieved to get this medical verdict, and convinced myself that it was all in my head. After all, Le Meilleur International, where Sajan was in the first grade, hadn’t said anything.

  At the next play practice session, I was reassured that Sajan seemed to comprehend Kalpana’s instructions on stage positions and movement. But at the third rehearsal, when he needed to mouth lines, I could sense Kalpana’s patience rapidly ebbing.

  Sonika, the perky four-year-old who was playing Cinderalla, sniggered, while my heart sank at my child’s state of confusion.

  ‘Do you think we should change his part?’ Kalpana asked.

  I was afraid this was coming. Kalpana, whose sanctimonious kids mouthed shlokas with a belligerent clarity and whose husband, Vicky, submitted to her whims with agreeable chuckles, wouldn’t tolerate slip-ups. But I knew how desperately Sajan wanted this role. He had already called his grandparents to relay the ‘big’ news. I had been dyslexic as a child, and so I could empathise as few other mothers could, with a disobliging brain. Whether his issue was transient or not, Sajan could always count on my support. ‘I’ll work with him, Kalpana, he’ll be fine.’

  The session went on and on through a lot of prompting and retakes, and with Kalpana eventually shrugging her shoulders and saying: ‘Vedika, it’s your job to make him learn these lines. You do know all the selectors will be there.’

  ‘Why does everyone make such a big deal of the selectors? They’re just residents like the rest of us.’

  Kalpana’s dangling black metal earrings shook at the sheer temerity of my question. ‘They’re Kusro’s friends. So please, work with him.’

  Our community, with its hundred acres stitched into a magical arc, was the signature project of the bizarre but brilliant Kusro. With five gated projects spread across four cities, and the nation’s ultra-elite lining up to occupy his nouveau riche mansions, he was considered the Cartier of Indian builders. His tagline, So Wildly Kusro, displayed on his brochures and website in clean Century font, signified promised lands unfettered by constraints. But to me, that was just marketing hype. Why did everyone treat him like a demigod?

  I received other badgering calls. From Raj Mehta, the self-appointed President of the Fantasia Residents Association. From Manjushri, the Cultural Committee Head.

  ‘Vedika, how are the rehearsals going? Is it going to be original enough?’

  And not just from them, but also from a company, a commercial sponsor. From an online food company, that was sponsoring the dinner, lighting and music.

  That night, Manas and I were seated on the terrace outside the master bedroom, amongst the potted ferns, scented candles and silken, embroidered cushions. In our backyard below, a white pebbled pathway snaked between alternating crescents of pink petunias and yellow dahlias. A scene worthy of a postcard. Yet my irritation was rising. ‘Why,’ I said, loudly crunching on our sautéed asparagus, ‘does the play need to be perfect? We’re just performing for ourselves, aren’t we?’

  My husband’s profile was lit by a candle. His chin prominent; his eyes, shaded by shaggy eyebrows and flecked with brown, even in the dim light. Attractive, but surprisingly unconscious of his own appeal. There wasn’t much that could ruffle Manas’s even temper inherited from his bureaucrat father. A necessary foil perhaps to my jumpier and constantly wavering emotions.

  Manas studied me with a bemused smile. ‘Why do this? Why get involved?’

  ‘As long as we’re here, I might as well, don’t you think?’ How could I explain to my husband, who had had an enviably well-adjusted childhood, that my involvement was driven by a rather ordinary desire: to gain friends inside this place.

  It was a familiar tumult. At school, I was often hauled up to the principal’s office, for not working hard enough. For not learning chunks of history or geography. My dyslexia wasn’t diagnosed, the term wasn’t well-known then. My teachers added ‘defiant’ and ‘cheeky’ to the list of other adjectives routinely used to describe me: ‘lazy’, ‘indifferent’, ‘dull’.

  Even worse, all my classmates sniggered at my stupidity. The nerds scoffed at my struggle with words. To the popular crowd, I didn’t exude the necessary cool. I lacked a certain dress sense, a type of walk and talk. Or other invisible signs that coated them with an enviable aura. During lonesome lunch breaks, I smiled hopefully at passing classmates and masked my hurt feelings when ignored yet again.

  Making friends became a lifelong obsession. When my father narrated the story of a Japanese girl, a Hiroshima survivor who tried to fold a thousand paper cranes to overcome her leukemia, I took to folding crane after crane. But even when I reached the magical thousand, the friends did not materialize. I transmuted my yearning into my paper forms. At least, my origami crabs and ducks and herons seemed to empathize with my troubles.

  I could hardly talk to my mother, a literature professor at Presidency College. At a younger age, I venerated her. Her erudition, her neurotic obsession with long-dead writers, her grim outlook, her dismissal of all things hedonistic, entertaining or popular. Until my turbulent teens, my mother’s views were upheld as the family’s, unquestioned by my taciturn scientist father. A small woman with tiny, pinched shoulders and a face furrowed with worry lines, Ma radiated an intensity in her brittle voice that was impossible to ignore.

  I was twelve years old when a less admirable version emerged for the first time. My mother’s brother in Florida had persuaded my parents to spend four weeks with his family and had even dispatched round-trip tickets for the three of us to travel from Kolkata to Orlando. One night, after we had arrived at his rickety Florida home, my uncle suggested a trip to Disneyworld.

  ‘Not for us,’ Ma said, drawing her lips into a familiar tight line.

  ‘You may not want it Deba, but think of Vedika. She’ll love it.’

  ‘We don’t want to go. We’re not that kind of family.’

  My uncle turned to me with his eyebrows raised.

  Disneyworld! My classmates had talked of nothing else for a while when I hesitantly mentioned our Orlando trip. A few girls had even promised to befriend me if I brought back souvenirs from the Disney Store. Afraid of evoking my mother’s strong condemnation, I convinced myself that my uncle’s scruffy backyard was as enchanting as the Magic Kingdom. ‘I don’t want to go,’ I said. Then burst into tears. After I emerged puffy-eyed from a crying bout in the toilet, my uncle made a pact with my mother. He would escort me to the main park for a day, but wouldn’t indulge me with ‘tacky’ souvenirs.

  In my teenage years and beyond, I wasn’t as compliant. I wore halter necks and mini-skirts, streaked my hair, painted my untrimmed nails blue and silver. This didn’t impress the cool crowd but stoked my mother’s worst fears. With rising desperation, Ma tried to read Pride and Prejudice aloud while I moulded myself into a smooth-coated otter. And dreamt of encountering a Shah Rukh Khan look-alike.

  Absurdly enough, I did. During the first year of my Fine Arts degree, I bumped into Manas at a second-hand bookstore in Kolkata. I was standing tip-toed on a stool, reaching for an old edition of Northanger Abbey. Manas was crouched by a lower shelf when a stack of Austens tumbled down and smacked him on his arched back. I was aghast, unprepared for how good-looking he was, for his crooked nose and
disarming smile, for the way in which he handled raggedy old editions of Persuasion. A few minutes later, we were seated at adjoining tables inside the attached café. He seemed mildly surprised as I ripped off page 27. Then watched with mounting absorption as I neatly tore out Page 75, and then Page 138. Soon, my saucer, the sticky rim of my coffee cup and the plastic stirrer were festooned with dragonflies and turtles. I foolishly thought he was enchanted by my art. But to Manas, who was raised in a Tam-Brahm household that revered books, I might as well have been desecrating his family idol.

  With a flushed face, he said, ‘How can you—with a book?’

  I was about to respond with a snarky ‘You mean this book has other uses?’ but there was something about him, a sincere outrage, that made me think better of it. ‘My mother always nagged me about reading books. I hate reading, still do. So I turn them into bugs.’

  He stopped sipping his coffee and then laughed, his eyes disappearing into his face: ‘Never met someone who’s pretentious about not being intellectual.’ With an extended arm, he reached for a dragonfly and carefully studied its folds. As he gently unfurled it, he asked: ‘So you like movies then?’

  ‘Those that revolve around odd people making friends.’ We spent the next two hours dissecting our favorite movies: We both loved As Good As It Gets and Khamoshi, but Manas was an uncritical Star Wars fan, while I couldn’t care for space fantasies.

  He then fished out a large tome from his college backpack titled, Advanced Cost Accounting, by Praveen Varma. ‘Let’s see what you can do with this.’

  Manas, the waiter and a small crowd of other customers gathered around my table. The pages were thick and large, and a self-conscious flush radiated from my cheeks. Even as I coaxed a praying mantis from Cost Accounting principles, the space between me and Manas felt charged with something. We didn’t touch even, but I felt currents tugging at me.

  When recounting our first meeting, Manas always said, ‘When you turned Praveen Varma into an insect with pointy front legs, I was won over. Even if I hadn’t seen those gorgeous Bengali eyes behind those ugly glasses.’ Then, he’d crack his lame joke. ‘But I wasn’t in my senses, you hit me with Sense and Sensibility.’

  Till then, I had always considered myself plain. With a face that blended into crowds, a composite of averages. Wavy hair, inky eyes, a nose that wasn’t narrow or broad, a sultry complexion. Accustomed to being ignored by peers, I was astonished when Manas, a management student at IIM Kolkata, showered me with that kind of attention. And perhaps the cancer was already surging in her body, because my mother received him with a shocking grace, delight, even. ‘So what if he’s Tamil, you can speak to each other in English,’ she said.

  When we moved from Kolkata to Fremont, I had been surging with excitement. Both California and my new marriage seemed to glitter with possibilities. So when I got there, I was surprised by how homesick I was. Or India sick. In those impeccable surroundings I missed the bedlam of tiny repair shops, of pavement crevices, of scooterists skidding across monsoon puddles.

  Besides, the neighbourhood was less excited about my arrival. I was surrounded by high-achieving Indians and Chinese, mostly engineers, who briskly dismissed my worth with a few questions: ‘Where do you work? What car do you drive? What did you study at college?’ It was almost like they carried a mini-test in their heads, and I had been assigned a low grade for not being an emphatic status wielder or seeker. My designed-to-unsettle response that I had a degree in Arts and spent most of my time turning square sheets of paper into fish and birds was met with commiserative glances.

  I watched with swelling disappointment as other women congregated into cliques. Some belonged to a posh set that flaunted their here-and-there white friends and appreciation of French wines. Others seemed to live dual lives. An American one at work, a painstakingly Indian one at home. Groups clustered according to language and region of origin. Being a desi in the Valley seemed more circumscribed than it was in India. More deliberate, more effortful. Since my atheist mother hadn’t transmitted knowhow of religious rituals, I couldn’t forge strong ties inside the Bengali community. All this might have been overlooked if we had been perceptibly wealthier. But as Manas was just starting out in his career, we lived in a modest single-storey condo that didn’t impress anyone.

  Later when I had my kids, even my parenting seemed inadequate. I didn’t seem as equipped to crack highly sought-after school admissions, or adept at enrolling Sajan in a plethora of after-school activities.

  Besides, I also insisted on saving up for our return to India. It wasn’t just the sights of India that I missed. After our move, Manas’s parents had died in quick succession. His father of a heart ailment, his mother of a kidney disease. Their deaths heightened my anxiety about my father, who was growing frailer at every visit. Moreover, the Indian economy was booming and real estate prices spiraling upwards faster than the values of Californian homes.

  When Manas received an invite to buy a home at Fantasia, I was torn. Though his inheritance could fund the purchase, the price seemed outlandish even by American standards. A villa at Fantasia cost two million dollars. Manas, who planned to found an online startup after his software stint, was convinced that it was a sound investment. Besides, I wanted it too. My neighbours’ measures had seeped into me. The ordinary life no longer seemed enough. The Indian community in the Valley seemed to abound with extraordinariness. Billionaire VCs, violin maestros, and technology whizzes emerging from a heady concoction of ambition, talent and wealth. ‘Networks’ was an operative buzzword, with whom you knew mattering more than anything else. Fantasia felt like a chance. Here, at last, I could enter a coveted club, and more importantly, build a community of friends.

  All along my mother’s derisory voice hissed in my ear: ‘We are not that kind of family.’ But I swatted it away, as I had her other urgings to grow into a different kind of person.

  So, after a few weeks of vacillation, I succumbed. Like Manas said, we weren’t doing anything illicit. Wasn’t this the acme of our strivings?

  As much as I disliked buckling to Kalpana’s diktats, I was rattled by the idea of our selectors watching a slipshod production. Rattled enough to spend hours with my son, going over and over his lines. There were times when he got it pat. But then his fogginess returned and he seemed to forget what he had just said, a few minutes ago. Our sessions were punctuated by Sajan’s tears and my occasional outbursts: ‘Sajan, we just went over that line, you just said it a few minutes earlier.’

  Manas, who detested conflicts of any kind, suggested we drop it. I partly agreed. Why wilfully drag ourselves into a futile battleground?

  ‘Do you want to drop out? This play’s not a big deal, we’re just performing for neighbours.’

  ‘No,’ he pleaded, in an almost teary voice. ‘I’ll learn it, Ma, I promise.’

  Surely the selectors, however influential, were less important than my child’s yearning to perform? In the meantime, I had also fixed another appointment with our paediatrician.

  We had many more practice sessions after that, besides my one-on-one sessions at home. I tried my best to work with my kid, but had reconciled myself to a patchy performance. Distracted by a crisis at work, Kalpana had dropped out of her directorial role, leaving me in charge of the production.

  Unfortunately, she insisted on holding a dress rehearsal in her living room the week before the performance. Given her fanatical obsession over her classical Victorian interiors complete with satiny cushions and bronze fittings, she had shrouded her sofas and rugs with sheets and newspapers. ‘To avoid juice and cookie stains,’ she said, a conspiratorial glimmer in her eye.

  When our rehearsal ended, she touched me on the shoulder: ‘Vedika, is he having problems at school also?’

  I was unnerved by her question and her tone. ‘No,’ I said, though I was fearful that he was, and that the teachers hadn’t informed me as yet.

  ‘School’s different. Here, we have a really high-profile crowd.’


  ‘He’s trying his best, Kalpana,’ I said, my voice almost breaking. I was high-strung, not just about our performance but about our impending appointment with our doctor. Her secretary had said the earliest we could meet her was six weeks away. Could I contend with six more weeks of not knowing what was wrong?

  Kalpana’s eyebrows zigzagged into a displeased W and then settled again into thin arcs. ‘Well, it’s your play but think about it, we hear that Kusro himself might be there this year.’

  FOUR

  ON D-DAY, THE CLUBHOUSE looked festive with silver diyas and white candles; lights strung out across its florid ceilings and etched Burmese screens. Inside the lobby area, where the creamy marble floors and rosewood lounge bar shone with the lustre of a five-star hotel, the community board flaunted the sponsor’s message: ‘Instameals Wishes You a Very Happy Diwali.’

  The crowd was already clustering inside the air-conditioned party hall for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres before the show. The women were wearing their party or festive best: black cocktail dresses with low-cut backs, sequinned churidars of chiffon or georgette, netted saris studded with spangles. Styled and straightened hair cascaded down bare backs, twists of platinum accented thin wrists and necks. Bouncing off the teak-panelled flooring, honeyed voices circled around lacquered lives and new age successes: coffee estates in Coorg, start-ups IPO-ed at Nasdaq, fortunes spun at Wall Street. Words and worlds that held a tantalising appeal because they seemed so removed from the stark commonness of my childhood. Perhaps such brushes with glitz tinted our visions so we could no longer see the grit inside our complex.

  There was a stir in the room about the builder, Kusro, agreeing to turn up as our Chief Guest. Kusro was the reason we were here, the brand we had bought into. His mystique was heightened by his absence from social media, from tabloids and magazines. ‘A hermit,’ Kalpana said, wiggling her eyebrows. ‘Never seen at press conferences or real estate events.’ The room swirled with breathless rumours about his luxurious and very private life. His mansions in London, his apartments in Hong Kong and Monaco. His fetish for pedigree horses, diamond-studded neckties and Bugatti Veyrons.