Priya

by Namita Gokhale

I didn’t take the call, and specifically informed the office staff to tell Pooonam UmaChand that I wasn’t at home if she telephoned. It’s a tested New Delhi dictum that bad luck is contagious, and I didn’t want to put our good luck under scrutiny. I didn’t tell her about the engagement, either. I’m not crazy, inviting trouble into my life when everything is going so well.

  Suresh is leaving for Bhopal to lay the foundation stone for GEECC, a Green Energy Efficient Cold Chain Infrastructure. And Kush is accompanying him. I packed vests and underwear and handkerchiefs for my husband, and two sets of freshly dry- cleaned cream safari suits. His cupboard was a complete mess, the shirts and kurta-pyjamas mixed up, the Jawahar jackets lying crumpled in a corner. I resolved to clean it after I returned from my walk.

  It’s a new routine I’ve begun. I intend to look good for the wedding. Chugging along the crowded walking track at Lodi gardens, with the tombs to my left, a vista of palm trees to my right, I was just beginning to get into stride when a familiar figure came into view. It was Pooonam, dressed in a glamorous military jacket, narrow-leg trousers and studded high-heeled boots.

  Here she was again, the stealth missile! ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s called military chic,’ Pooonam cooed. ‘It’s all about attitude.’ She held me in a detention clinch and awarded me a red lipstick smear on my cheek. I’m sure she was reeking of perfume, but thankfully I couldn’t smell it.

  ‘What a surprise!’ she exclaimed. ‘Let’s walk together. Pleeze?’

  ‘Somebody could name a glue after you,’ I remarked acidly. ‘Or you could be a brand ambassador for an adhesive company!’

  ‘Very funn-eee. Let me give you an update on my life, Priya,’ she said firmly. ‘Now that Mr Sethia has been raided, the ball is back in my court. The CBI is bad enough but it’s always the DEO that’s the real killer.’

  ‘What’s the DEO?’I asked.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ she replied, genuinely shocked by my ignorance. ‘The DEO are the Big Boyz! The Department of Economic Offences, of course! And that means the Finance Ministry which means Mr So-and-So is paying the high-ups to get at Manoviraj!’ Pooonam sounded unduly upbeat about the prospect.

  ‘They are on Mr Manoviraj Sethia’s case,’ she continued smugly. ‘The DEO want to play fill-in-the-blanks on Mr Sweetheart Submarine Deal. And they want to play footsie with Pooonam Umachand. For I, and only I, know the details of Mr Manoviraj Sethia’s numbered accounts. I know about the hanky-panky he has done with the high-ups in the Defence Ministry. I have taped his conversations, I have photocopies of files, I have saved every SMS he ever sent me.’ Her lips locked into a determined pout: ‘Pooonam UmaChand will go for the jugular.’

  ‘What will you do?’ I asked, wonderstruck by her balls, her sheer gall.

  ‘Well, Pooonam UmaChand has two choices,’ she said, continuing to speak about herself in the third person. A thoughtful note had entered her voice. ‘First choice is to turn approver; after all, I have all the dope. Or . . .’ and here her voice turned dreamy, even romantic, as she kicked at a stone that lay on our path. ‘Or else, Option Two. Pooonam UmaChand might decide to marry Manoviraj Sethia. The time is ripe!’

  ‘What!’ I exclaimed, genuinely shocked by this brazen declaration.

  ‘It’s known as the Moll-Girls Choice,’ she responded deadpan. Just like that. ‘Mrs Pooonam Manoviraj Sethia. PMS. How does that sound, Priya?’

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ I said, ‘and very appropriate. But I’d really much rather walk alone. You slow me down and I have to do another round. I have to be back soon. I have things to do.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ Pooonam persisted. It was futile. She just never gives up.

  ‘I need to sort out Suresh’s cupboards.’

  ‘Oh goodie,’ Pooonam exclaimed. ‘Can I come back with you? I want to see Suresh. I need his advice on this. Suresh is such an absolute darling—always so helpful!’

  Suresh. Something snapped inside me when Pooonam mentioned him. Suresh was my territory. He belonged to me.

  ‘Such a darling . . . always so helpful!’ I mimicked. Then I took a deep breath. ‘Please keep away from my husband, Madame Slut!’ I heard myself say. ‘And I mean that. Now listen—this park is large enough for both of us to walk here at the same time. In two different directions. And it’s chock full of important politicians and bureaucrats. Why don’t you bump into them instead, and chipko there, like a cheap adhesive, and leave my husband and family alone!’

  Pooonam didn’t miss a beat.

  ‘All right then, Mrs Menopause,’ she replied briskly. ‘I’ve done my best to be nice to you, but I guess some people never learn.’ She executed a little pirouette as she said this, and stuck her tongue out in a schoolgirl gesture of defiance. Then she stepped off the walking track onto the grass, and prettily stomped her way out of my life. Or so I hoped.

  ‘Remember this, Priya,’ she said, turning her head back for one last barb. ‘We all get the best friends we deserve.’

  It’s becoming a struggle to read the morning papers, and even the computer has begun to strain my eyes. I stopped at the opticians in Khan Market to get my eyes tested. Peering through the double lenses on a steel frame, I watched the letters on the screen change from sharp to fuzzy to sharp again.

  DENHFB

  PTEFLAU

  UNHCADT

  . . . Or some such cryptic sequence of letters. My distant vision hasn’t changed, but my near sight seems to be worsening. I struggled with the small print on the lit-up rectangle that the optician handed me.

  ‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,’ it said. ‘What is beautiful to me may not be beautiful to you and what is’—(the print got bigger at this point)—‘What is beautiful to your neighbour may not be so to you . . .’

  And then everything became clearer, if only for a moment. It’s all in the lens, and the focus, and how you view the world.

  ‘New frames!’ I told myself. ‘Nothing but the best!’ I ordered an elegant rimless style, and it’s true, the world does look different, without my usual elongated schoolmarmish frames.

  MUMBAI AGAIN. SURESH RETURNED FROM BHOPAL BY THE MORNING flight, and we crossed each other at the airport. Dolly has been calling for days now, and I’ve been evading her. Finally she managed to get across, and informed me that my nephew Tanmay was getting engaged the following evening. That’s today. The words spilled out of her like a suburban train speeding on sarcasm. ‘You are my sister-in-law, Priya didi, and my husband’s only living relative. As blood is thicker than water, I thought it was my duty to inform you. I know we are not VIP’s but mere commoners. Still, I must do my duty and invite my royal sister-in-law.’ The bitch—trying to put me on a guilt trip. Why does she hate me when I’ve always been nice to her?

  There was no option but to leave for Mumbai post haste. I still haven’t told my brother’s family about Luv getting engaged. Not yet. I’m superstitious about these things. It would have been nice, though, to have Paromita accompany me. That would make Dolly burn.

  I booked a room in the Taj, to establish a clear social and geographical distance between south Bombay and my suburban sister-in-law. With hours of solid traffic between us, I intended to turn up at the engagement dinner, which was in some remote marriage hall in the boondocks, for the briefest possible time. I’d resolved to teach her a thing or two about family duty, and about VIPs.

  I sat in my room in the old Taj, luxuriating in the carpeted quiet. Outside, the Arabian sea lapped at the rocks, and gaily decked boats bobbed in the water. Buggys and Victorias laden with happy tourists passed by under my window, the faint clip- clop of the trotting horses climbing up through the double-glazed windows into my room. I felt nostalgic and happy at the same time. I smiled down at the balloon sellers and the bhelpuri- wallahs. Life was good.

  On an impulse I telephoned BR. His number was in the tiny diary I carry in my purse, although it is prudently deleted from my phone memory.

>   ‘My one and only Priya!’ BR exclaimed. ‘What a pleasure and privilege to know that you are here in Mumbai, breathing the same air as us mortals!’ I was, as always, left speechless by his charm. BR continues to have that effect on me. I gulped and wondered what to say next.

  ‘I am coming over this very minute to pick you up, my love,’ he continued. ‘I shall see you in the lobby in precisely forty minutes.’

  I watched the sun plop into the Arabian Sea. The lights in the boats flickered on, one by one. The sky was dark, but a wisp of pink cloud continued to float on the horizon. Then I realized with a start that BR would be waiting in the lobby. There was no time to fuss—a smear of lipstick, a whoosh of perfume, and I was in the lift, heading down.

  He walked into the lobby just as I did. He was limping slightly, but otherwise he looked like the BR I remembered—dapper, debonair, handsome.

  ‘Ah my sweet!’ he murmured, lifting one eyebrow in a well remembered gesture as he examined me appreciatively. ‘Let us have a drink together and hold hands again.’ And then we were in the rooftop bar, doing precisely that. A bottle of Merlot, the sea, the flares from Bombay High—it was as though I was in a dream, in a film script, in a bubble of ageless romance.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ he said, in a gentle teasing voice.

  A series of inconsequential images passed through my mind. ‘Oh, I was thinking of Marine Drive, and the Queen’s Necklace, and the traffic lights glittering like diamonds, and a diamond necklace somebody gave me,’ I confessed. That sounded quite poetic.

  ‘Well, after all, girls will be girls, Priya,’ BR responded, clutching my hand even harder. His fingers felt ancient and clawlike, and I recoiled ever so slightly.

  ‘If you were my wife I would load you with diamonds. I hope that fellow Suresh is doing his duty in that department,’ he continued.

  ‘Suresh,’ I said, playing with my gold bangles as I spoke, and wishing I had the courage to say ‘yes please!’ to his diamonds. ‘Suresh is an extremely honest politician.’

  ‘Only joking, my sweetheart, only joking!’ he replied, squeezing my hand again. We quaffed the wine at a good speed. BR also ate a surprising quantity of crisps and roasted peanuts. I observed him with concern. It didn’t seem right, at his age.

  ‘I grow old, I grow old . . .’ he recited, in a dramatic stage whisper that was quite effective really.

  ‘. . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.’ He looked out at the sea with a melancholy look, then turned to me.

  ‘Who said that, Priya?’ he asked. ‘I mean, who wrote that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I confessed.

  ‘T.S. Eliot,’ he declared gravely. ‘A great poet but forgotten. Nobody reads T.S. Eliot anymore. Like me, he too has been discredited and shorn of his greatness.’

  I didn’t know what to say to that, and so we went back to drinking the wine. BR sent for the bill and signed it with a flourish.

  ‘And now I shall take you for a drive through my city,’ he said, and led me, down the lift and through the crowded lobby, into the car. It was an old Mercedes, but not old enough to be vintage. The driver was decrepit and unshaven, perhaps even a little drunk. Something was wrong with the air conditioning, it wasn’t cooling properly. I could feel a hot flush coming on. ‘Mrs Menopause’, Pooonam had called me. I found an elaichi in my handbag and chewed on it. The cardamom made me feel better, at least for a bit.

  The familiar streets of South Mumbai. Marine Drive, the Queen’s Necklace, Peddar Road, the road to Haji Ali—we drove through restless crowds and fierce traffic, past jogging millionaires sweating on the streets, past silent, joyless prostitutes, past limbless beggars and homeless vagrants. BR was holding my hand again, his fingers were cold and his nails were biting into my flesh. At the traffic lights before Haji Ali, an emaciated woman tried to sell us her last string of wasted jasmine and mogra buds. From the other window, a beautiful young boy with an intense stare held out a bunch of withered red roses. I avoided eye contact with both.

  BR had been silent all this while. Suddenly he began talking to me, in a confiding voice, about the Bombay club, and the importance of a level playing field. ‘Nobody buys sewing machines any more,’ he mused. ‘The FMCG market is doing fine, and so is the Milan Mixies segment, but housewives don’t stitch their own clothes nowadays. Silly fag fashion designers do the job for them. And the small tailor is a dying breed too—we are witnessing the death of the darzi! Sita Sewing Machines has to concentrate on industrial machines now, for the garment industry, and for exports. That’s saturated too. China’s done us in! There’s just no place left in your modern world for the housewife’s friend.’

  He fell quiet for a while again, and then he turned to me with a sharp look. ‘That fellow you married—what’s his name?— Suresh. He’s done rather well for himself, hasn’t he? You must be proud of him.’ I don’t think he expected an answer to that, and I didn’t give him any.

  The driver seemed to know the route he was expected to take. We passed Mahalaxmi, and Parel. The beloved city of my youth. There were people everywhere, spilling out of restaurants, stepping into dark buildings; and suddenly there were patches of empty silent road, alternating once again with the same frenetic pattern of activity.

  BR was dozing now, in the seat beside me. His breath fell out in short unexpected bursts. He had let go of my hand, and his head lolled back, as though he were examining the roof of the car with his eyes closed. A sliver of spit glistened at the edge of his mouth.

  Then he was awake and all charm again. ‘I was dreaming, not sleeping,’ he said. ‘Now we must return you to your hotel. Pawar, turn the car back to the Taj. And some music, please.’

  Farida Khanum’s liquid, ageless voice rose like a slow wave around us. ‘Aaj jaane ki zid na karo . . .’ I was surprised. In the old days, when he was my boss, BR had scorned ‘local’ music and scrupulously adhered to western classical.

  When we reached the hotel, Farida Khanum was still singing. ‘Turn this bloody racket off, Pawar,’ he shouted to his driver. In the sudden silence, he recited a line of poetry.

  ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,’ he whispered. ‘I do not think that they shall sing to me.’ And he was gone.

  Back in the hotel, I ordered a bitter chocolate ice-cream from room service and ruminated on love. Or was it just lust and loneliness? Would I ever see BR again, hobbling into the Taj to hold my hand in the rooftop bar? Do we ever grow wiser as we grow older?

  Lately, I’ve been brooding about love. What is it, what does it do to us? I think of me and BR. Of BR and Paro, and Paro and Lenin. Of Luv and Paromita. Kush and himself. Me and Suresh. I think of Pooonam and Manoviraj Sethia. I try not to think of Pooonam and Suresh. And why should I? There’s nothing to think about!

  There must be some rules to love, surely. Something that makes the world go round. I thought about it all through that night, even after the clip clop of the horses had stopped and the moon had set somewhere behind the Gateway of India. I thought of this game called love.

  Dear diary, I can share this only with you. If anyone were ever to read it, they would split their sides laughing. They would think I was completely crazy, and I’m not. I’ve tried to be a decent human being and to hold on to my marriage and my duty and my family, whatever happens. So I’m not crazy. But love is. Crazy. I thought about it and came to some conclusions.

  The fundas of love are as follows:

  Rule # 1: Love Is Not Room Service.

  This came to me when the waiter knocked and I answered the door. This ancient Angrezon ke Zamaane ka Taj waiter swept in holding the scoop of bitter chocolate ice-cream with a wafer sticking out of it as if the tray held the crown jewels. Or the Kohinoor. I know I’m rambling, but what I mean is this: Love Is NOT Room Service. It’s never delivered on demand. There’s no price, no menu, no tip we can pay. No final bill of settlement either, when we check out of the hotel.

  Rule # 2: If it hurts, it’s pr
obably love. Or if it makes your heart go thump, or gets you smiling for no reason at all.

  Rule # 3: It comes and goes. If love stops hurting, it’s gone (like any other disease). Or it has become a chronic case and you’ve got used to the pain.

  IF ONLY WE COULD CHOOSE OUR FAMILIES. ATUL BHAIYYA IS OKAY, BUT I find Dolly profoundly depressing. The engagement was a nightmare. It was hot, with the feeblest air-conditioning in the Sabhaghar hall hired for the trans-continental occasion, and some shaky pedestal fans wheezing away. The bridegroom, my nephew Tanmay, appeared annoyingly pleased with himself. Dressed in a dark blue lounge suit, with a yellow silk handkerchief peeping from the front pocket, he paraded importantly among the guests, pausing every now and then to strike a pose for the video cameras which were avidly recording his every move.

  As the Most Important Relative, I was given the full nine yards. Mrs Suresh Kaushal was proudly introduced to a medley of curious neighbours and inquisitive colleagues, all of whom rolled out a gratifying display of the middle-class respect for political clout. The larger half of Atul’s boss posed for the cameras with me. She searched for her husband to join in the picture, but he was not to be found.

  Dolly produced a machine-made gold necklace, which she draped around my neck in full public view. ‘Can you wave to the camera please, Priya didi?’ she requested ingratiatingly, as she moved my sari pallav around to better display her expensive gift to one and all.

  ‘But where is your daughter-in-law to be?’ I asked. I had brought a tanchoi sari for the unfortunate girl, and an embroidered pashmina shawl for my sister-in-law, to atone for what might seem like arrogance (but is actually a biological irritation, like an allergy).

  ‘Oh, Tanya is on the screen—theer before you,’ Dolly said brightly. ‘Perfect astro- match for our Tanmay. She is NRI, you know. Full green card holder Non Resident Indian.’ I could see the dollar signs gleaming in Dolly’s eyes. ‘Our Tanya she works in Communications Technology company and so her friendly colleagues they set it up for us. Look—she is smiling at us now!’