The Red Carpet (12 page)

The poonal ceremony began, developing its own ancient rhythm to the chants of priests, who were dressed in white, richly bordered veshtis, chests bare, with their sacred threads over their left shoulders. Their heads were shaved, but not completely; Priya noticed that each priest had a small tuft of hair at the back of his head, a few inches long and knotted at the end. Their foreheads were painted with their caste mark: three horizontal lines in white. Her eyes wandered, mesmerized, from the priests, to the flower altar, to the floor, which was decorated with
kolam
designs, colorful and geometric, drawn by hand with rice flour. Coconuts were balanced on the narrow mouths of squat brass pots, decked with mango leaves, vermilion, and strings of jasmine flowers, next to huge silver trays laden with fruit. Every now and then the head priest would add things to the fire with his right hand: sacred reeds, ghee. Mahesh and his father, dressed in silk veshtis, sat alongside the priests around the fire. Anasuya and her mother sat close by, getting up occasionally to fetch things that the priests needed for the ceremony.

The room became warmer, with the blazing sacred fire and the collective heat of all the people crowded into that shrinking room. Women developed heat-delineated arcs under their armpits; wisps of hair escaped the fastenings of braids and top-knots, flowers and oil, to curl and frizz around their faces. The chanting seemed to get louder as the air thickened about Priya. The heat slipped under her skin: she felt the warmth rushing to her head, and descending down her brow to rest on the bridge of her nose in drops of water, thick and heavy. The cumbersome silk saree embraced her body like clingwrap.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked around to see Anu smiling down at her.

“Are you all right?” Anu asked. “Want something to drink?”

“I’m okay,” said Priya.

“It’ll be over soon,” Anu whispered, squeezing her arm before moving away.

The drums and nadaswaram picked up in tempo. A white silk shawl was opened and spread over Mahesh, his father, and one of the priests. Under that protective covering, cocooned from eavesdropping ears, Priya knew, the young boy would be initiated by the priest into the ancient, secret wisdoms of brahminhood. When he emerged, he would officially be ready to practice Brahmacharya: to pursue knowledge with purity and devotion, to strictly eschew all sensual pleasures for the duration of his studies.

The ceremony over, the noise level rose to deafening proportions as the chatter exploded from the whispers that had earlier confined it.

Anu joined Priya. “Hi,” she said. “Did you find that interesting?”

“Very,” said Priya. “But tell me, isn’t your brother a little too old for this? Mr. Iyer tells me it’s usually done at about eight or nine years of age.”

“Yes, Mahesh is twelve years old,” said Anu, “and this ceremony is the result of a four-year war of attrition between him and my parents. Mahesh finally agreed, or, rather,” she said, “succumbed to the bribe of a new CD player.”

Mahesh’s parents received everyone’s congratulations, while Mahesh, under the strict supervision of an aunt, went around the room seeking the blessings of all the elders present by performing his
namaskaram,
his obeisance, before them; stretching himself out on the floor, full length, facedown, and touching his forehead to the feet of those whose blessings he sought. After about ten minutes of this, he looked a little tired. The route to a CD player was long and hard.

“So,” Anasuya said. “My brother is a Brahmin. And tomorrow he will no doubt celebrate by eating a beef burger.”

“Did you have to go through this, too?”

“Oh no,” said Anu. “This is strictly a male thing. Come for lunch.”

Lunch was served under the big tent in the garden, and eaten off banana leaves laid on long trestle tables. Priyamvada found herself seated next to Anu and Farhan. She watched what other people did, and tried to imitate them. The guests seated themselves and washed the big banana leaves by ceremonially pouring water from the water tumblers into their cupped right hands and sprinkling it over the leaves. Then the caterers, who had been cooking all morning in the backyard, walked quickly through with their big buckets of vegetarian food, precisely ladling each item onto its prescribed location on the banana leaf—a place for everything and everything in its place: salt, pickle, sweet, relish,
papad, vada,
varieties of vegetable
poriyal
and
aviyal
—twelve different types of side dishes altogether, and, finally, steaming mounds of rice. Plain rice served with ghee and lentil
sambar;
ghee and spicy, watery rasam. Lemon rice. Coconut rice. Tamarind rice. Curd rice. All of it followed by huge servings of sweet jaggery-and-coconut-flavored milk
payasam
.

“Where,” whispered Farhan, “are the fucking chicken kebabs?”

“Shh,” said Anasuya. “Someone will hear you.”

Priya had read somewhere that, in India, table manners while eating with the hand stressed not dirtying more than the tips of one’s fingers. This was a text that a lot of the poonal guests were apparently not familiar with. Their right hands surrounded the mounds of rice on the banana leaves, squeezing and squashing until the glutinous rice emerged in pasty white tendrils from the gaps between the fingers. The rice was then mixed with sambar and rolled into a ball before being tossed into the mouth and masticated in an enthusiastic dance of teeth and tongue.

Priya wondered if she should ask for a spoon, but only for a moment. This was clearly a moment to Act Local, but not Think Global. She placed her right hand over the rice and squeezed, feeling like a child allowed to play, messily, squashily, happily.

She found herself asking Farhan: “Would you like to leave all this and live in America?”

“No, but I can see why your parents would,” he said, answering the question in her mind. “Things were different for them. Today, I can work in the same firm as your father, without leaving India. He couldn’t. Things are different. We have choices now.”

Choice. It was her father’s word, one he used whenever Priya pressed him for an explanation of why he came to America. “Choice,” he would say, which Priya had always assumed was his own particular synonym for “Money.”

After lunch, Priya waited for Mrs. Iyer to say good-bye. She clutched a bag that had been offered as the parting gift to all guests. It contained all manner of propitious things: a coconut, two betel leaves, packets of red
kumkum
and turmeric powders, an
elakki
banana. And, with it, a small silver coin as a memento of the occasion, and a small bunch of jasmine and frangipani flowers strung together. Anasuya joined her again. Farhan had left, discreetly, with other guests.

“Would you like a
paan
?”

Anu’s mother was seated on the verandah, rolling paan for everybody: spreading the betel leaves with chalky white
chunam,
tucking in the crushed betel nuts, and rolling up the leaves in a swift gesture that was born of long practice. “You may not like it,” said Anu. “It is very bitter. But if you chew it long enough, it will stain your mouth a bright, lovely red.”

They strolled about the grounds together, chewing paan, and made their way over to where Mahesh was, on the far side of the verandah. He looked miserable and bored, ensconced with the priest whose business it was to teach him the sacred Gayatri Mantra. He stuck his tongue out at Anasuya, and turned his attention back to the priest, who was by now looking almost as desperate as Mahesh.

“It’ll come, boy. It’ll come,” he told Mahesh in Tamil. “Repeat after me, one more time . . .
Om bhoor bhuvah suvaha
. . .”

The Gayatri Mantra had first been whispered into Mahesh’s ear under the protection of the ceremonial shawl. Priya listened, and then turned to Anu.

“So, you don’t know this mantra, right? Since it’s only for brahmin males?”

Anu laughed, and recited, without pause.

Om Bhoor Bhuvah Suvaha
Tat Savitr-varenyam
Bhargo Devasya Dheemahee
Dhiyoyonah Prachodayat

O supreme brahman, earth, universe, and heavens,
O sun, supreme brahman, source of all creation manifested,
Supreme enlightened of all celestial energies,
Let my intellect be ignited

“My uncle taught it to me,” Anasuya said. “A very long time ago.

“Mr. Iyer,” she explained, in response to Priyamvada’s look of inquiry.

“Oh,” said Priya.

She waved good-bye and walked to the car, the sonorous Sanskrit verse still singing in her ears with the sweetness of a stolen secret.

Priyamvada returned from the poonal ceremony and sat before the computer. Her hand halted on the keys.

His last e-mail said: We are missing you. When do you plan to return?

The night before her departure, he had wandered into her room and said: Look, why don’t you just go and see the Taj Mahal and have a good time?

His tone was conciliatory, but Priya had been insulted.

She had lectured him, and then swore that if things didn’t go as she’d anticipated she would eat her hat, or rather, seriously consider any career choices he might suggest. Even if this meant her suiting up and going to work in a corporation that worshipped greed and destroyed the environment and spread American pop culture like a disease through the world.

Now, with hands poised on the keyboard, what she wanted to say to her father was an inchoate jumble of thoughts, all bumping into each other: Do you know the Gayatri Mantra? she could ask. It is so beautiful, so powerful. I heard it from Anu—right after she told me the problems that she and Farhan would face with their respective families. And that is India, she could say, segueing into a lecture—divisive, a maddening mixture of ancient values and modern pop culture, of great wisdoms and blank ignorance.

Or she could simply shut up, say nothing, go quietly to see the Taj Mahal, have a drunken good time and then, heading home, offer to report for work in a corporation of his choice. Though, with sudden insight, she knew that he would not really ask it of her. He would continue, as he had always done, to let her find her own path.

Or she could just spit it out, say-it-loud say-it-proud, put the words on the screen in bold black on white and send them off to him: I can see why you made the choices you did, and I thank you for allowing me to make my own.

Her hands remained still and silent. She switched off the computer and covered it carefully with the plastic sheets. She glanced at her watch. In a very short while it would be evening in India and morning in America, and her father would reach for the telephone. And she would discover whether she had the courage to say to him, in person, what she couldn’t bring herself to write.

On the verandah, Mr. Iyer was poring through a reference book. “We are,” he said, “in a very modern city.” He handed the book to her.

The Limca Book of Records,
it said on the cover. It had all sorts of rankings inside. Bangalore, Priyamvada learned, had the first online retailer in India. It had India’s first oxygen bar and largest wine-and-cheese shop. The Cyber Crime Police Station was the first in the country to solve any sort of cyber crime. Bangalore was also the first Indian city to hold a Biotechnology Quiz, and was home to the first-ever Indian Institute of Cartoonists.

“Is it not impressive?” Mr. Iyer beamed. And then he asked: “You are enjoying your trip?”

Yes, he said, I can see you are.

MYSORE
COFFEE

The socialite in Delhi jumped from the hotel roof on Tuesday night.

She fell a hundred feet to a smooth tiled floor lined with flowerpots. The socialite was related by blood and marriage to some very prominent political and arms-dealing families, which (some people said) were one and the same thing, and the pictures of the suicide were on the front pages of all the newspapers.

Sita saw the news with her morning coffee. She read it from beginning to end and then she tore the article out of the paper, tucked it into her briefcase, and carried it with her to work.

By the end of the week, Sita had built up quite a collection of news scraps, with photographs of the socialite and articles that focused on the day of her death, as though that were the important thing and not all the days that preceded it.

Sita had never met the socialite in Delhi.

To be perfectly honest, she had never heard of her before her suicide. Over this week, of course, Sita felt that she had come to know her quite well. She could recite, from memory, where the socialite went to college, the names of her children, and where she liked to lunch. She repeated the information to herself at odd moments, and scanned the news every day for more.

The office is humming, as it usually does on a weekday morning. The décor is standard-issue open plan, the low-walled cubicles sown with men in ties and women in sarees and pretty secretaries all in a row.

Sita avoids all conversation.

Instead, she forces her attention to the financial spreadsheet on the computer screen. SigmaSoft, it says in the heading. It is the in-depth analysis of a client’s accounts, which has taken her days to complete. She usually enjoys this part of her work, there is a satisfaction to stacking the numbers neatly, and watching the columns balance out at the end. Assets greater than Liabilities equals Positive Shareholders Equity. There is an even greater pleasure in playing with the numbers on her screen, running calculations of financial ratios to determine short-term liquidity and the rate of return on assets. These are the magic spells of her world, incantations that reveal the truth about everything.

The numbers never lie.

She has worked hard at it, but today she scrolls through the document, apathy swirling through the edges of her brain. She vaguely considers calling in sick, but only for a moment. The idea of staying at home, with her mother hovering solicitously, curiously, apprehensively, around her, is even less appealing.

Better to stay hidden behind her computer and just let the day drift to an end.

“Hi, Sita.” Ramu makes his way to her desk and props himself against the side of the table. Sita can feel her face begin to flush.

Ramu is handsome, with laughing eyes. He is handsome, and discussing work is the only way that Sita knows to have a conversation with him.

“Listen,” he says. “I want to be able to work together with you on this,” he says. “Okay?”

Sita stares back at him. His face is leaning into hers, so close that his features dissolve into separate parts. His nose, slightly hooked, separating eyes rendered even darker by their intensity, placed under well-defined brows. The neatly trimmed goatee resting on his chin. His mouth, stretching into a smile, speaking words that take a long time to reach her ears. The expensive shirt and carefully coordinated tie that encase his neck.

She can smell his cologne, long after he walks away from her.

She tries to read the numbers on the screen. Her hand travels over her head, locating the stray hairs that are uncurling, one by one, from the tight thick braid. She has forgotten to apply the coconut oil that keeps her hair smooth and shiny, braided and quiescent. Behind her back, her hair slyly attempts to break free.

No, it is no good.

The restlessness in her mind has seized her body. It is fidgety, unhappy. It wishes to slap at the air around her, tear her braid loose, rip her clothes off one by one, and laugh and weep.

She tells her office that she has work at the Registrar of Companies and walks to the exit. She passes Ramu’s desk. He is seated at a cubicle similar to hers, but with the air of someone who is confident of moving into one of the glass-encased offices, reserved for senior management, that line the windows. As she walks by, he is scrolling through his computer screen and flipping through a document on his desk while talking into the telephone cradled on his shoulder.

Godlike multihanded activity managed with élan.

Sita glances at her watch and knows, instinctively, that Ramu is talking to someone in America. Someone, she knows, who will not let the fact that it is late at night in America prevent them from discussing the work ahead, or from laughing joyously at the slightest joke.

As she walks by, Ramu looks up and winks.

Sita goes to her car and wonders where to go, what to do.

The socialite in Delhi on her last day did a great many things. She woke up, as she usually did, at noon, and drank some freshly squeezed carrot juice. She then dressed herself in Prada jeans and an embroidered vest from Rajasthan (she was famous for the mixing of traditional and trendy) and went out to lunch at the stylish new restaurant Monsoon Orange with her best friends, Mimsy Kumar and Pinky Chawla. She ate a large green salad, tossed with sun-dried tomatoes, olives, and a lemongrass vinaigrette. The socialite, who was fastidious about her health and appearance, didn’t eat any of the desserts that the restaurant was famous for. Instead she ordered french-pressed Java coffee, which she drank black, with no sugar. After lunch she shopped, returned home, played with her children for a little while, and got ready to go to a party. The newspapers carried photographs of that party, held in a five-star luxury hotel.

Six hours later, she climbed to the roof of the hotel, and jumped.

Driving usually soothes Sita, steadies her, helps her focus.

She likes the disorder on the roads, it binds all the crazed vehicles together as they rush about, cars, scooters, buses, trucks, skipping schoolboy pedestrians, wandering cows, bicycles, bullock carts; honking and cutting through traffic lanes as they speed to offices, to shops, to homes, to schools, to various government jobs in the sewage and electricity boards—where, naturally, the whole thing, the urgency, the rush at the traffic lights, the life-or-death driving, the swerves and near misses, the almost-airdashes, comes to a crashing halt and time slows down, time catches its breath, time covers its face with a hanky and goes to sleep, only to wake up peevishly complaining about the tedious inefficiencies of the water and electric supply and the general breakdown of social discipline.

Usually, Sita is an active part of the chaos on the roads, but not today.

This morning, she is paralyzed. The traffic flows around her, cutting into and out of her lane, scowling faces darting angry looks at her through windows flashing past. The air-conditioning inside hums softly. She bought the car after her last promotion. It is new, glossy, and will take five years to pay off. Behind the wheel, Sita can feel the pinch of her bra tighten around her, a line of sweat that digs into her lungs, squeezing her breath and marking the skin below in red lines that will take a day to fade.

The previous night, Sita stayed late at work and, ignoring the computer spreadsheets she was supposed to be working on, started searching the Internet instead. There were seventy-eight thousand results for the phrase “suicide hotline.” She chose one at random and clicked on the link. She was immediately led to a page that was colored in serious black, with the message IF YOU ARE THINKING OF COMMITTING SUICIDE, READ THIS NOW pasted at the top, with the words “suicide” and “now” picked out in bright bloody red. Sita did as they suggested and read the page through. Just give me five minutes, the writer urged. Five minutes to explain how suicide can seem like a solution when the mental pain you feel exceeds your abilities to cope with that pain. Or rather (with mathematical elegance) how

Pain greater than Pain-Coping Resources equals Suicide.

Or rather, when grief and anguish build and build, layer upon layer, within the mind, without relief, ceaselessly, even while you smile and laugh and act so normal that people later look at each other in complete surprise and disbelief.

This was presumably what happened to the Delhi socialite.

And what had happened, twenty-three years earlier, to Sita’s father.

When she was young, they told her that her father had been killed on the way home from the barbershop. This scene had played itself over and over in Sita’s mind. Her father, hair neatly trimmed, odd remnants of it still clinging, dustlike, to his white shirt, climbing onto his scooter and weaving his way home, behind a truck that failed to heed the squeak of the scooter horn and turned suddenly to the right. He’d had no choice, they told her, but to cleave right into it, killing himself instantly. Sita could imagine it happening: the traffic swirling around his fallen body in baffling patterns, accompanied by the squeal of horns and the shouts of drivers.

Even now, there was a part of her that was reluctant to give up her father’s accident; it was a truth embedded deep within herself. Even now, she found herself telling strangers that, yes, my father died in a traffic accident. Yes, so terrible, I know.

But of course, that was a lie.

Twenty-three years earlier, Bangalore had been a very flat city. The highest one could go was perhaps three stories in the saree arcade on JC Road. And then, things changed. Overnight, some tall buildings began to appear. The Unity Building was the tallest on Mahatma Gandhi Road, and then came the flats built by the Mysore Builders on Cunningham Road. People went to look at them, to marvel and to feel proud. Skyscrapers meant that the city was, finally, growing up. When the third building went up, the Palace Towers (also on MG Road), it was said to be the prettiest of all, a full ten stories high, and covered with sandstone.

Sita went with her parents to see. They climbed to the top, and Sita’s mother peeped over the edge, holding her husband’s shirtsleeve with one hand. “Giddy!” she giggled, and wouldn’t let Sita take a peek. They went down, stopping at the vendor to buy hot corn roasted over charcoal and smeared with lime and green mint chutney, perfect for the chill post-monsoon winds of September.

Her father stared up at the building, which towered over them. “Looks like your father’s nose,” he said to his wife, who didn’t frown as she usually might at such a comment. She giggled again, her laughter contagious. Sita remembered laughing herself, and seeing her father do the same. They finished their corn and went home, Sita’s father driving the scooter, her mother daintily sitting sideways on the seat behind him, one hand wrapped protectively around her daughter, who was placed between them, sandwiched snugly by the warmth of her parents’ bodies as she gazed at the world that flashed by.

The next day, her father came back by himself, climbed his father-in-law’s nose, and threw himself over.

The building was still there. Tall, covered in sandstone. Sita had avoided it for twenty-three years. But earlier this week she rode the elevator to the terrace and stayed there for two hours. She did not really have any choice in the matter. On Tuesday night, her boss took his entire team to Palace Towers to eat.

“The new restaurant there is supposed to be very good,” he said. “And the views are fantastic.” Everyone in the office was pleased; this was a reward for work well done. They arrived as a group, six men, three women. They parked the two cars that had brought them in the basement, and clustered together inside the elevator that sped right to the top. Half the restaurant was enclosed in air-conditioning, the other half spread out over the terrace, with tables dressed in yellow-checked tablecloths and candlelight and vibrant with blue and orange crockery. Their boss said, “I love trying out new restaurants. Especially when there is such a good view,” and Sita had watched him stand near the railing and gaze at the twinkling lights of the city.

She had prepared her mind for North Indian food, dishes like chicken tikka and tandoori fish and mutton biriyani, or, in her case, their vegetarian equivalents, loaded with the garlic and spices her traditional Tamil brahmin mother never used. Instead the menu card was full of Western dishes that Sita spelled her way through, unsure of what they were and how to pronounce them. She heard Ramu say, “The bouillabaisse sounds good . . .” and her boss reply, “Mm, yes. And the chicken tagliatelle.”

The conversation grew animated, cheery, the laughter moving freely back and forth. Sita sat quietly, with the force of long habit. It had always been so with her. The confidence she felt in analyzing her spreadsheets eroded when she was face-to-face with clients or in meetings—the words of explanation that leaped to her mouth fading away. She was used to seeing the fruit of her work being usurped by noisier, louder colleagues who knew less than her but who were better with words, and who seemed to thrive in an environment that placed undue value on the glossiness of their hair, the crispness of their attire, and the smoothness of their speech.

“Do you like this restaurant, Sita,” her boss asked her heartily. “I remember when this building was first built,” he said. “God, Bangalore was an entirely different city in those days. No traffic, so peaceful. You were probably too young to remember it.”

Sita smiled mutely. On the other side of the building lay the speckled mosaic floor, a hundred feet down, unchanged after twenty-three years, spattered with the inlaid spots that still contained traces of her father, his smile, the feel of his hand resting on her shoulder, captured and imprisoned along with her mother’s laughter.

Her father had been an accountant like herself, working in a small office of six people. He made a mistake, one day. It was an honest mistake, but one that unfortunately could not be corrected in time. It cost the client an additional four thousand rupees in taxes. Such a silly, small amount of money. Four months of her father’s salary, then. Today, no more than a single monthly installment on Sita’s car loan, or the cost of dinner on Tuesday night for nine people at the new restaurant.