One Amazing Thing

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  With relief she heard Malathi’s voice. “I will give you my story. But my English is not so good, and I want you to understand everything properly. So Mr. Mangalam must translate it from Tamil.”

  Mangalam jerked up his head, frowning with wary surprise. He looked like he was about to refuse, but Malathi spoke as though he had assented already. “Better not change even one word. I know enough to catch you if you do.”

  9

  When I failed tenth grade for the second time, my parents figured it was no use wasting more money on my school fees and decided to marry me off. I had no objections; it was not as though I had anything else to do. Having navigated their way through the weddings of two daughters already, my parents knew that the local matchmaker would ask for a photograph. If they could provide her with one in which I looked better than normal, my chances of finding a husband—and theirs of negotiating a smaller dowry—would be highly improved. Though in general thrifty and suspicious, they knew the importance of a well-chosen investment. That is how I ended up at Miss Lola’s Lovely Ladies Salon, the premier beauty shop in Coimbatore.

  My mother had been to Lovely Ladies only twice, but Miss Lola knew her right away. “The bridal photo special, again?” she asked. When my mother nodded, Miss Lola looked me up and down and pronounced that I would require more work than my sisters. My mother gave a sigh but did not disagree, and the two of them fell to bargaining about the price of my beautification. When they had reached an agreement, Miss Lola gave a volley of staccato instructions to the pink-uniformed girls who worked for her, ending with “Bridal Special Silver Level with Hair Oil.”

  Two girls whisked me to an inner sanctum filled with elegant women undergoing the complex and painful process of improving upon nature. I was settled into a reclining chair and shrouded in cotton sheets. And it was here, in this moist, air-conditioned room decorated totally in shades of pink (Lola’s favorite color) and fragrant with astonishing and exotic substances which my naïve nose was incapable of identifying, that I saw as though illuminated by lightning the path of my future.

  Until this day, I had thought of marriage as an inevitable destination. The only other choice a girl from a middle-class Brahmin family, handicapped by respectability, had in our sleepy town was to teach at the Sree Padmavati Girls Higher Secondary School. But teachers were meagerly paid and resembled chewed-up sticks of sugarcane, and I had no desire to become one.

  I confess: sometimes from our veranda I spied on other kinds of women, receptionists and typists who worked for Indian Oil and Godrej, and waited across from our house for the company vans to pick them up. Torn between disapproval and envy, I noted the dresses that exposed their knees, their shoes with platform heels, their permed hair. They wore lipstick even in daytime, erupted in laughter at frequent intervals, whispered prodigiously when men in expensive cars drove by, and ignored the lascivious remarks aimed their way by lesser males. But they were Kerala Christians—members of a forbidden, scandalous species that I could never join.

  Lola’s girls, though, with their perfectly arched eyebrows, glowing skin, and prettily coiffed faces hanging over me like radiant moons, were different. As they plucked and exfoliated and massaged oil and pinched blackheads and slathered my cheeks with Fair & Lovely cream, clucking soothingly when I yelped and assuring me that the end result would be worth it, I felt a strange kinship with them. They camouflaged me with sufficient foundation, face powder, kohl, lipstick, blush, and Vatika Pure Coconut Hair Oil to pass as one of Lola’s lovely ladies. They attached a glistening bindi to my forehead and clipped fake diamond earrings to my ears. They pinned a sequined sari, kept in the salon for this very purpose, to my upper body (since that was all the photo would show) to manufacture curves where none had existed before. One of them ran to fetch Lola’s nephew, who ran the photography business next door, while the others demonstrated facial expressions guaranteed to delight mothers-in-law, causing me to burst into laughter, something I never did in the presence of strangers. But they were no longer strangers. They had charmed me with their daring jokes, their code words for particular beauty procedures, their gallant laughter in the face of the drudgery that I guessed awaited them once they stepped out of the magical perimeter of Lola’s salon.

  The next morning, when my mother armed me with a parasol to protect my newly lightened skin and dispatched me to the bazaar to buy bitter gourd, I used the money to rent an auto rickshaw. Half an hour later I was at Lola’s, begging her to let me work for her. Lola must have seen something—perhaps a glint of determination in my eyes reminded her of her own younger self. Although she had a room full of clients, she took the time to listen to my pleas. When I finished, she asked, “What’s the matter? You don’t want to be a bride?”

  To which I answered, “I’d rather be a bride maker.”

  Lola, who had been divorced twice and thus knew what was what, said, “Smart thinking.”

  And just like that—although she hadn’t really needed another employee—I became one of Lola’s girls.

  There was a dreadful hullabaloo at home, as you might imagine. My parents stormed into Lola’s, demanding that I be handed over. But she coolly informed them that the wife of the police high commissioner (her client for many years) was due in that very day for a gold-leaf facial. One word to her, and my father could end up in jail with charges of harassment. Once they crumbled, she took pity on them and pointed out that I would be excellently compensated. And if I should change my mind and wish to take on the yoke of domesticity, I would be provided with a Bridal Special Diamond Level photo, gratis. A Diamond Bridal photo was not to be sneezed at. My parents gave grudging permission, expecting me to tire soon of catering to spoiled society ladies.

  Freed of parental interference, for the next six months I soaked up everything I could learn, from eyebrow threading to hot waxing to clay masking to hair perming. This last, most difficult skill Lola taught me herself. It was a job she entrusted only to her top girls. Pride filled me as I memorized the different kinds of rolls and tongs and end papers, the distinct amounts of time that provided Lola’s clients with various degrees of curliness, and the secret proportions of potent chemicals that, if used wrongly, could exact a heavy penalty.

  AMONG THE CREAM OF COIMBATOREAN LADIES WHO FREQUENTED Lola’s, the richest and most powerful was Mrs. Vani Balan. Wife of an industrialist who had made his money in cement, she visited Lola’s every two weeks and underwent our most expensive regimes. In spite of the substantial tips she left, the girls avoided her. They didn’t like the way she flicked the rupee notes at them. Besides, she was finicky and hot-tempered and had been known to throw things if a treatment did not turn out the way she had envisioned it. Only Lola was capable of handling her at such times, and even she would pour herself a full glass of rum and Coke after Mrs. Balan exited the premises.

  For some reason that no one at the salon was able to fathom, Mrs. Balan took a liking to me and began to ask specifically for me when she came in. Although I was nervous around her, I was flattered, particularly when, one time after I assisted Lola in perming her hair, Mrs. Balan said I had a gentle touch.

  I was not Mrs. Balan’s sole favorite. She had a maid named Nirmala who often accompanied her to the salon and sat in the waiting room looking through the latest American magazines, which Lola’s other nephew, who worked in a government office in Hyderabad, procured for her through unorthodox means. A slim, sweet-faced girl with surprisingly elegant hands, Nirmala would turn each page with attentive consideration, although she could not read. When Mrs. Balan emerged from the inner sanctum, she was ready with a flask of chilled juice. When they left, Nirmala carried with utmost care the packages of expensive foreign cosmetics Mrs. Balan had purchased. Once, in preparation for a wedding party, Mrs. Balan was undergoing a whole-body makeover that would take several hours; I asked the girl if she wanted a snack. She shook her head shyly, though I could see that she was hungry. When I brought her an orange, she was taken aback. “For me?” she
said, as if she could not believe someone would consider her important enough. She thanked me several times, calling me Elder Sister. The appellation touched me. I could see why Mrs. Balan, who was surrounded by people who believed that the world owed them everything and then some, would find her refreshing.

  MRS. BALAN TALKED INCESSANTLY ON HER CELL PHONE. SHE had perfected the art of speaking without moving her facial muscles and could thus continue to destroy reputations from under a substantive swath of seaweed or a coating of alpha-hydroxy peel thick enough to render most women immobile. Thanks to her, I became privy to all manner of skeletons lurking in the closets of our fanciest mansions. Were I so inclined, I could have blackmailed large numbers of addicted husbands, unfaithful wives, and grown offspring with questionable sexual preferences. But we at Lola’s had our code of honor. And we knew that to meddle in the affairs of the powerful was akin to riding the proverbial tiger.

  Mrs. Balan wasn’t the only gossip at the salon. On days when she was absent, I learned from the conversations of the other women, who viewed her with a mix of hatred and adulation, that her husband (whom she ignored) was overly fond of the young secretaries at his corporation, and her son, Ravi (whom she adored), was studying abroad. She had gone into a deep depression when Ravi insisted on going to America—to get away from her, some of our less charitable clients suggested. She had revived only after a spate of shopping trips to Chennai and Bangalore. Now Ravi was returning to Coimbatore, with a degree in psychology and a head full of Western notions.

  “You tell me now, what good is a degree in psychology of all things, that also from, what’s that place, Idahore, that nobody has heard of?” Mrs. Veerappan said.

  It was a rhetorical question, but her friend, Mrs. Nayar, was happy to respond. “No good. No good at all. But then, he doesn’t need to make a living, not like our sons.”

  “I hear he wants to open a school for poor girls,” Mrs. Subramanian ventured from the corner.

  “Pouring money down the toilet hole, that’s what he’ll be doing,” Mrs. Veerappan pronounced. “Oh well, that family certainly has no lack of it. Some of it might as well go to poor girls—the father has ruined enough of them.”

  MRS. BALAN GAVE US FURTHER DETAILS. “WHAT TO DO, MY RAVI has always been a sensitive boy, gets it from my side of the family. Wants to improve the lives of suffering people, just like Mahatma Gandhi. I said to Mr. Balan, how can we stand in his way, let us buy him the old Sai Center building like he is asking. Mr. Balan didn’t want to do it. Finally I told him, keep your money for those secretary girls—what, you thought I didn’t know about them? I’ll sell my diamond set and buy the school myself, and don’t think people won’t hear about it. He signed the papers right away, but grumbling all the while, as if Ravi wasn’t his own flesh but some beggar child we picked up from the street.”

  On a suitably auspicious morning, coconuts were broken; prayers were chanted; camphor was burned; ribbons were cut by political dignitaries; applause was offered by the newly hired teachers; copious amounts of idli-sambar, bondas, and coffee were consumed by the invitees; and Vani Vidyalayam was open for business.

  “Can you believe, Ravi named the school after me,” Mrs. Balan told us when she came in to get her hair styled for the celebratory dinner party she was throwing. There were tears in her eyes, something we’d never seen before. She blew her nose, not caring that it turned red. “He wants me to volunteer there. Maybe I’ll do what he says.” It struck us that we might have been too quick to dismiss Mrs. Balan as heartless and shallow. Perhaps mother-love would work a transformation upon her.

  AT FIRST, THINGS WENT WELL. LURED BY THE PROMISE OF FREE education, along with a free lunch and two uniforms, a good number of parents sent their children to the Vidyalayam. Mrs. Balan started visiting the school once a week at lunchtime, when she would walk up and down the canteen wearing a starched hand-loomed sari that Gandhiji himself might have woven, gingerly patting the heads of the cleaner children. Then she would go into the office and terrify the clerks into efficiency. Who knew where this might have led? But just when we conceded that Mrs. Balan had surprised us, Ravi decided to expand his philanthropy beyond the boundaries of the school compound. He insisted that the Balans’ servants should attend, each evening, an English reading and writing class. He would teach it himself, on their terrace. Mrs. Balan was not happy about this disruption to her household, but she was unable to refuse her son.

  The servants were, at first, intrigued by this novel development, especially as it afforded them an hour’s break from their duties. But they soon tired of it. The older ones didn’t see how their lives, into which they were comfortably settled, could be improved by reciting sentences out of children’s books. The younger ones were bored, because in spite of his noble intentions, Ravi was a poor teacher. The servants came to class late and left early, pretending to be busy with housework, until finally they did not come at all. But by then Ravi did not mind because he had found his star pupil, Nirmala.

  Who can guess what had been in Nirmala’s mind when she started attending the class? It is possible that she longed for the education that birth had deprived her of. Can you blame her if, along the way, she fell in love with the way Ravi looked earnestly into her eyes as he urged her to remember the strange sounds of English, the shapes of its contorted letters? He was as close to a prince as anyone she knew. Aided by the romantic movies she had seen, she might naturally have cast herself in the role of the beggar maid whom he rescues. But all this is conjecture. The only thing we know for certain is what one of Mrs. Balan’s servants witnessed.

  One evening Mrs. Balan, home early from the club, climbed to the terrace to check on the progress of her servants’ education. To her shock, she discovered Ravi and Nirmala sitting side by side, heads almost touching, his hand guiding hers as she traced letters into her notebook. She saw the girl’s shining face as she completed her task and looked up to be complimented, and she saw Ravi put his arm around the girl and give her a hug.

  If Mrs. Balan had curbed her temper, sent Nirmala downstairs, and spoken quietly with Ravi, the situation might have been resolved. But seeing her beloved son’s lips just a few inches from those of her maid drove strategy from her mind. She strode forward and delivered a stinging slap to Nirmala’s cheek, screaming at the cringing girl for being a conniving hussy. She would have hit Nirmala again if Ravi had not grabbed his mother’s wrists and told her to pull herself together.

  Mrs. Balan went a little crazy then, calling Nirmala worse names, threatening to make sure everyone in her home village knew how she had repaid Mrs. Balan’s many kindnesses with treachery. Then she turned on Ravi. Had he lost all sense of proportion, living in America? Had he forgotten that servants needed to be kept in their place? Couldn’t he see that a low-class girl like Nirmala had probably been planning all along to trap him?

  Ravi made threats of his own, delivered in a quiet voice. If his mother fired Nirmala, he would return to America. She would never see him again.

  Faced with this ultimatum, Mrs. Balan was forced to allow Nirmala to remain. The defeat confined her to bed for several days. She rose a different woman, older and frailer. At first she avoided her son. But when he apologized for the harshness of his words (though he did not take them back), she wept and embraced him. In a few days, things seemed to have returned to normal in the Balan household. Nirmala carried out her regular duties, even accompanying Mrs. Balan when she went shopping.

  “The lessons were stopped, of course,” Mrs. Veerappan told Mrs. Nayar as they both underwent Hibiscus Oil Hair Therapy. “But in a big house like that, is it difficult for a young man and woman to meet in secret?”

  “Not difficult at all,” Mrs. Nayar said. “Do you think they are…?”

  “Oh no,” said Mrs. Veerappan. “It’s much worse.” She went on to relate what her sweeper girl had heard from the Balan cook. One evening, when his wife was away at a bridge party, Mr. Balan, who noticed much more than his wife gave him
credit for, asked Ravi to join him for a glass of whiskey-soda. He then inquired whether the young man would like to set Nirmala up in a little flat where he could visit her without disrupting the peace of the household. Scandalized, Ravi said he had no intention of taking advantage of Nirmala. He praised her intelligence, her belief in the goodness of the world, and her willingness to improve herself. He ended by stating that he thought rigid class boundaries were the bane of Indian society and should be broken down.

  “You think he means to…?” Mrs. Nayar asked, aghast.

  Mrs. Veerappan spread her newly manicured hands to indicate the thoughtless perfidy of children. “Naïve, idealistic, stubborn, and rich—when a young man’s like that, anything can happen.”

  THOUGH NEWS OF THE FATHER-SON TÊTE-À-TÊTE MUST HAVE reached her, Mrs. Balan did not seem overly concerned. A few weeks later, she swept into Lola’s with Nirmala in tow, as high-nosed as ever. I scrutinized her from behind a beaded doorway as she informed everyone that she was going to Chennai to attend the fiftieth birthday celebration of her cousin-brother, Mr. Gopalan, who owned a five-star hotel franchise. The festivities would go on for an entire week. Gopalan, a bachelor and a playboy of sorts, loved parties and spared no expense. Mrs. Balan was leaving this evening, though Mr. Balan and Ravi couldn’t join her until the weekend. She had to have a facial and a manicure at the very least, and perhaps a deep-steam cleanse as well. She insisted that Lola take care of her personally for this important occasion.

  “Are you taking your maid with you?” Mrs. Veerappan asked sweetly.

  Mrs. Balan replied, equally sweetly, that she was. She couldn’t do without Nirmala for even one day. Who would iron her clothes, keep track of her jewelry, carry her packages from the best shops in Chennai, remove her makeup, and give her a bedtime foot massage? “No doubt you’re accustomed to doing all these things for yourself, dear Mrs. Veerappan,” she ended, “but I’m afraid Mr. Balan has quite spoiled me.” Then she stated that she wanted Nirmala to get a facial, too.