The Red Carpet (15 page)

Tara catches the pleased smile on her mother’s face and smiles back. She places her empty glass on a side table and inclines her head towards the exit. “Coming to see this movie or not?”

Mrs. Srinivasan hesitates. There is a lot to be done around the house, but it can wait awhile. “All right,” she says. “What is this movie?”

“One of my favorites. It’s witty, it’s brilliant. A real classic.”

“
Roman Holiday
?” Mrs. Srinivasan asks hopefully. She is very fond of Audrey Hepburn.

Tara picks up her mother’s shopping bag; the headwaiter ducks his head ingratiatingly as the two women leave the clubhouse.

The music blares, the titles roll.

Tara glances at her mother, wondering what she will think of it. Mrs. Srinivasan looks startled, her attention riveted to the television screen. Tara settles back, mouthing the dialogue along with the actors in the movie. It has been a while since she has last seen it, but she stills knows chunks of the film by heart. “
Do you
know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris? . . . a
Royale with Cheese
. . .” Later, Mrs. Srinivasan’s lips are still pursed. She tries to look enthusiastic. “It was . . . interesting. Quite interesting. Except,” she cannot help saying, “for that dreadful language.”

“Ungrammatical, you mean?”

“Tchi! It was full of Bad language! Why do they use it?”

“Fuck knows,” Tara says, but only to herself.

“It’s so unnecessary!”

“Amma, it’s a movie about American gangsters. You can’t expect the Queen’s English.”

“No, but still . . .”

Tara starts to laugh. “Can you imagine . . .” She assumes an exaggerated English accent: “ ‘I say, Higgins, old chap, take a pop at that ruddy blighter.’ . . . ‘After you, Pickering, old fellow. I insist.’ . . . ‘I desired the waiter in Paris to bring me a minced beef sandwich. Except those French chappies call it a Le Beeg Mac.’ . . . ‘Not really. How droll.’ . . .”

“Now,
that
is what I call a good movie,” says her mother. “
My
Fair Lady
. Good music, romantic, witty, lovely costumes . . . Which reminds me,” she says, “what are you going to wear for the party?”

Tara asks, foolishly, ignorantly: Why does it matter so much what I wear?

“One must be well dressed for such occasions,” Mrs. Srinivasan says, inadequately, she feels.

I will be, says Tara. Well dressed. I have been, she says, for years.

“Good! So, what are your choices? Did you bring anything nice from America? If you don’t like that salwar-khameez, you can wear one of my sarees. I have one that will look lovely on you. With your long hair carefully dressed, and that saree, you will look like a goddess . . . not like that Shetty girl, poor thing. She is scrawny like a starving mouse.”

As she speaks, she can see her daughter’s face turn towards her in startled comprehension, but it is too late, she cannot recall the words.

Please don’t tell me, Tara says, that
that’s
what this party is all about.

And Mrs. Srinivasan is forced to say: “What nonsense! Why can I not throw a party for my friends when my daughter comes home? . . . Matchmaking? What nonsense! Why do you say such things? I think you forget who you are talking to. No, it is you who are fussing over such a tiny thing!”

Tara walks out, but not before her mother hears her say, implausibly: What makes you think I’m going to attend this stupid party?

The sound of the door slamming shut reverberates through the walls and right through Mrs. Srinivasan’s belly. She knows that her daughter is only joking, she has to be—inconceivable to think of absenting herself from her parents’ party, such disrespect—but still, Mrs. Srinivasan feels the whine of tension tighten around her spine.

The fact is, somewhere along the way Tara has drifted away from her. Now she seems to take after her father instead—freewheeling, impulsive, and self-absorbed when it comes to domestic matters. Mrs. Srinivasan instinctively rebels against this arrangement of things. Behavior that she will excuse and compensate for in her husband is intolerable in her grown-up daughter. After all, men will be men, but shouldn’t daughters be a support?

And here, Mrs. Srinivasan knows herself to be the victim of a time warp. It isn’t fair, being trained to do something all your life, and then, when it is too late to change, being told that it was all a mistake. By the way, a woman’s place isn’t in the kitchen. How silly you are, you and your kitty parties. Sometimes she doesn’t even know whether things have really changed all that much, or whether Tara assumed some attitude, like today, just to shock her.

Didn’t young women dream of marriage anymore?

Was her daughter not lonely?

Her hand automatically straightens the remote controls into a line. There are three of them, one each for the TV, the VCR, and the DVD player, and Mrs. Srinivasan sometimes finds it difficult to tell them apart.

Tara pours herself a snifter of cognac from her father’s bar and wanders out onto the terrace garden of the sprawling penthouse apartment. Lavelle Road reposes below in a midnight hush. Behind her, the house is quiet. Her parents are asleep, the servants have long since retired. Tara stands in a blanket of darkness: a lonely lamp diffuses the shadows within the house, but doesn’t penetrate to where she stands; the street below is barely lit, the streetlights in perpetual dysfunction. The dark is echoed in the heavy cloud cover above. There is no rain, but the southwest winds whip past, forcing the monsoon onwards. Tara shivers in the chill, glad of the shawl she has wrapped around herself. She sips her fiery drink, inhaling the fumes from the glass held warm in the cup of her hand.

When Tara turned eighteen, her parents gifted her with all the further education she could possibly want, along with a tacit understanding that she would be free to choose anyone she liked for a life-mate. A rare, delightful freedom, which Tara fully appreciated, until she grew older and realized that it carried, cunningly concealed within it, a set of maternal expectations embedded like land mines, with the ability to detonate through her life when she least expected it. She had been gifted with the freedom to choose—but not the freedom to delay. Or to refuse. Or to change her mind, no thanks, maybe later, I don’t feel like it, don’t-call-me-about-it-I’ll-call-you. Especially once she turned twenty-five.

This visit had promised to be different. Tara had hoped that seeing her return home on work would give her mother a different perspective, one that was more closely allied with Tara’s view of herself. Where her mother focused happily, as she used to, on the things that Tara
had
achieved, instead of chasing after her with the terrible question that dogged her through all her recent visits, from the moment she stepped off the just-landed plane: Have you found Anyone Special yet?

An autorickshaw rumbles by, the noise echoing in the quiet of the street.

The shadows of the prostitutes sidle along the pavement, merging every now and then with cars that slow down, stop, and then continue on their way. The police are busy: their whistles sound in intermittent haunting monotones, informing the sleeping citizens that they could rest in peace, and also encouraging the prostitutes to have a successful night; for the policemen, who believe in the Nehruvian socialist ideal that the public sector should support private industry, would be around for their percentage later.

Her friend Rohini had once asked her whether her mother knew about Derek. And all Tara could think was, Oh yes, that would make for a lovely conversation. “Mother, you know how you keep asking if I’ve found someone? Well, I did, and then he found someone else and didn’t tell me about it, so to answer your question, technically no, I haven’t.” Though, in the misery of the months that followed, Tara had more than once reached for the phone, her fingers dialing the number home. And each time, she had put the phone down, never quite sure if the comfort she needed was the comfort her mother could provide.

And, now, there was this foolish, foolish party.

Did her mother not see how demeaning it was?

From her perch four floors above street level, she has a good view of the city skyline. It has remained unchanged her entire life, and, on every visit, she has gone through the ritual of identifying all the nighttime sights of home: the lone red light atop the Unity Building glowing in the distance as a warning to low-flying (extremely low-flying, practically landed type of low-flying) aircraft; the dark host of trees silhouetted against the orange haze of the sodium vapor lamps that light Mahatma Gandhi Road. And on the other side, the dense mass of Cubbon Park in the distance; and beyond, the peculiar monolithic Life Insurance Corporation building, shaped like a submarine, and vainglorious Vidhana Soudha, seat of governmental inefficiencies, illumined with all the light that is kept in such short supply to the rest of the city.

Mrs. Srinivasan leans against the bar and looks around with a feeling of quiet satisfaction. The penthouse looks beautiful in the fading dusk light. The sloping wooden roof gleams with mansion polish. The marble floor has been scrubbed twice with soap and water. She turns the main chandelier on, and gently tones down the brightness of the beam to a gentle glow that will deepen with the dusk, until the wooden roof above gleams red. The lights play off the Baccarat dolphins, and over the dark wood of the piano and the mahogany Masai carvings that she bought three years ago while on safari in Kenya.

The piano is an old English baby grand that Mrs. Srinivasan still practices on religiously every day. A long, long time ago, Mrs. Srinivasan started Tara on piano lessons, her mind filled with young-mother dreams of playing duets with her daughter to an admiring audience of her friends. Dreams that, like so many others, have fallen blithely away. Tara refused to buckle down to the rigors of classical music, preferring to bang out the occasional show tune when she was in the mood.

Mrs. Srinivasan walks about, mentally reviewing her check-list. Crisp linen doilies, embroidered by Catholic nuns and bought at the little SSV shop off Church Street, lie scattered about. Wax candles have been placed in all the bizarre and varied candlesticks that are her passion. Of course they have an inverter for the frequent power cuts that besiege the city at the most inconvenient of times, but candlelight really does create a lovely ambiance. Matchboxes that she has hoarded over the years are layered carefully in a ceramic bowl: Taj and Oberoi hotel matchboxes at the bottom, then matches from the ‘21’ Club in New York and Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, and finally, right on top, her favorite: POST-PRANDIAL SLINGS AT THE LONG BAR from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.

During the party, Lily, who is the maid Elsa’s daughter, will serve the snacks, while Elsa herself will wash dishes and help Subbu in the kitchen. A boy from her husband’s office will serve at the bar.

Downstairs in the kitchen, the big Wedgwood plates that will hold the snacks are waiting on silver trays that Lily will carry as she has been taught—offering the guests a snack and a napkin from the dainty silver holder that rests alongside. The bar is ready: the crystal glasses have been meticulously washed, air-dried, and polished with a soft cloth and now glisten quietly on the ornate counter built from Karaikudi temple carvings. The bootlegger has been by, leaving expensive foreign whiskies and brandies in his wake for the menfolk. Wine, sherry, and soft drinks for the ladies. The after-dinner cognac and liqueurs are, strictly speaking, not necessary for a cocktail party, but people do ask for the strangest things sometimes.

Mrs. Srinivasan peeps into the powder room to ensure that the embroidered hand towels and scented soaps have been laid out ready to use, and then wanders out onto the verandah. The white-painted rattan furniture is arranged in premeditated conversation clusters around the terrace garden.

Mrs. Srinivasan loves her garden. Loves the way the sloping tiled roof and the climbing rose trellises that fall carelessly over the verandah give the house the appearance of the estate homes in which she spent the early years of her marriage, when Mr. Srinivasan joined the Madras-Malay Trading Company as a young management trainee and was posted to the company’s coffee estates all around the Nilgiri hills. The terrace garden is at tree level, and the astonishing Bangalore greenery that surrounds it and spreads in every direction almost gives one the impression of being far away in the green hills rather than in a penthouse in the middle of town.

Standing on the lawn, one can look through the long windows into the glowing drawing room. The potted flowers outside are echoed in the lavish flower arrangements within. The vases spill over in a riot of birds-of-paradise, purple gladioli, and orange carnations. Delicate orchids float in crystal bowls on the low coffee table.

She had once enrolled a prepubescent Tara in an ikebana flower-arranging course, organized by her friends on the Club Ladies Subcommittee. It would be so nice, now, if she could point to all the flower vases and say to her friends, see, that is what my daughter has done, as proof of Tara’s skill in the domestic arts. But that is another idle fantasy. As with so many other things, Tara had fought her way out of doing the flowers a long time ago.

And Mrs. Srinivasan’s mind cannot help asking: all said and done, what is wrong with being skilled in maintaining a good home? Career or not, women need to know this—it is an essential female something, to do with being mothers and wives, and nurturing families and societies. None of which, try though Tara might, can one negate. After all, if you look at it scientifically, the whole biological purpose of being female is to bear children. No children equals no femaleness. And without femaleness, where would her daughter’s beloved feminists be?

Mrs. Srinivasan searches in her own past: had she ever clashed so with her own mother? Certainly they had argued. But, fundamentally, they had both understood the importance of women’s work, disagreeing only on the best way to get it done. The rights and wrongs, for instance, of Mrs. Srinivasan supporting her husband’s decision to depart from a traditional Iyer Brahmin lifestyle, and to anglicize their life in accordance with the culture of his firm. Or the wisdom of sending one’s only child to America for further studies instead of, as the old lady suggested, getting her married at home.