The Red Carpet (2 page)

He pulled himself out of the water and headed back to the men’s changing room. His gaze wandered automatically over the long hair and tight jeans of the young woman standing to one side. She appeared to be waiting for someone; from the tetchy restlessness of her manner, Ramu guessed it was probably her son.

She couldn’t enter, naturally, since the men’s changing room at the club was inviolate; an ode, like Michelangelo’s David, to pristine male nudity, and she seemed to resent her exclusion. Ramu had heard her speak: he knew her voice to be husky and melodious, as attractive as the rest of her, but now it changed, rising quickly up the scale and increasing in volume until she sounded shrill and irritable.

“Hurry up,” she called. “Do you think I have time to waste?
Jaldi! Jaldi!
”

He could tell when she became aware of his presence: her body tensed, and she favored him with a small, tight-lipped smile; a grudging acknowledgment of distant acquaintance. Ramu nodded back as he walked past, refusing to point out that while the acquaintance might be grudging, at least on her part—it was far from distant. He had dated this woman, many years ago. This was, of course, before she had married—and definitely before her husband had started working in the same office as Ramu.

Now, the implacable gods of social propriety forced her into a convenient amnesia, and Ramu humored her, all the while wondering what his colleague would say if Ramu interrupted one of their business discussions with the information that his wife had once spent an entire evening with Ramu’s hand between her thighs.

Nothing more, alas, but those were the days when Ramu and his male friends had been happy with whatever they could get. That was when dates had consisted of the best cheap dinner that one could afford, followed by driving one’s car (borrowed for the occasion from some tolerant uncle) furiously to dark corners of the city for dessert: a half hour spent in industriously attempting to explore the Inner Woman. Any inner woman.

That was, in short, when they were twenty, and achieving consensual sex with skittish young women whose knees were pressed tightly together by the weight of Indian morality was a triumph in itself. It had been enough to say:

I’ve been and gone and done it.

To say: I found a hole and dived right in.

To say: I fucked her. And to dream enviously of their western counterparts; men who, being blessed with women of Easy Virtue, reportedly did their fucking much younger. Eighteen. Sixteen. Fourteen. Twelve. In some countries, the rumor said, they were
born
copulating.

After twenty-five, things changed. The women relaxed, were easier, and suddenly who you slept with became more important than what you did. Quality, dear boy, quality over quantity.

But it was only now, at thirty, that the true Call of the Patriarchy began to make itself felt: the urge to father, to provide, to pay bills for More Than One. Ramu never discussed this with his bachelor friends, for to do so would be to acknowledge the strange conundrum they faced.

For a decade, it seemed, they had been festooned with women, all sorts, from the cute, the silly, the please-domesticatemes, to the independent, the fiery, the I’ll-sleep-with-but-won’tlove-yous, and further beyond, to the Plainly Bizarre. And they had frolicked and gamboled with happy abandon, and no awareness of the fate that quietly awaited them: the moment notions of “settling down,” marriage, became reality—they found themselves, absurdly, stuck for choice. All those women, those sillys, those feistys, those Saturday-night-mainstays, had simply vanished. All of them. Together. Birdlike, in a great migratory movement (to somewhere else), these chicks had flown. They had married, dispersed, dehydrated.

The club lawn was festive, with little tables covered in red-and-yellow-checked cloths that fluttered in the evening breeze. Ramu’s friends were seated at one of the tables, drinking beer.

“You’re late, fucker,” said Swamy, “as the man said to his mother-in-law. Have a beer.”

“Where’s KK?” Ramu asked. “He isn’t ditching us, is he?”

“He’ll get here eventually,” Murthy said. “He must be with that new girlfriend of his.”

“Enthu bastard,” Swamy said. “He should just bring her here to meet us. Instead of making us wait while he drops her home, and dries her tears, and kisses her good-bye.”

Ramu had known these men almost his whole life; they had grown up together, and now he felt a sudden wave of affection towards them. There was Swamy, whose mercurial brilliance Ramu had secretly admired long before the media had made it fashionable to do so. And Murthy, calm, quiet, and who, Ramu occasionally believed, harbored the same well-concealed feelings of hero-worship towards
him
. And the absent KK, of course, always ready with a laugh and a helping hand. Between them, they had achieved a cordial comfort that to some extent, Ramu realized, he would like to replicate in his ideal marriage.

Murthy stared at Ramu’s wet hair. “You swam? How come? I thought you usually swim in the mornings.”

For a brief, tempting instant Ramu debated the wisdom of sharing his marital plans with his friends—of speaking breezily on the trials of enlisting his mother as a Connubial Pimp intent on trading his economics for the unlimited use of a vagina, a womb, and a free lifetime supply of conversation at cross-purposes—but something held him back. Better perhaps to wait until all the details were in place: the who, the when, the where.

Luckily, their attention was immediately diverted.

“There he is. . . . You know, KK, you’re crazy. It’s never going to work.”

“What?” KK: big, genial, sweating mildly in the late evening sun, chuckling imperviously at Swamy.

“You’re wasting your time dating that kid. Cradle-snatching
behenchuth.
She can’t be a day older than, what, twenty-two? . . . Beer? Or something else?”

But Ramu could vaguely recognize KK’s action for what it was: a fallback position. When you have failed with your generation, you wait for the next one to ripen. Ramu had seen KK’s new girlfriend, and she was lovely. If KK dumped her, as he usually did, and he wasn’t a married man by then, Ramu wouldn’t mind dating her himself—if it weren’t for that golden, unarticulated rule: a woman once involved with any of them remained off-limits to his friends.

This kept life simple.

KK refused to respond to Swamy’s needling. He just grinned and contented himself with taking a big gulp of beer. Through the desultory conversation that followed, Ramu studied KK’s unusual reticence, and was struck by a sudden realization.

KK, perennial dater of women, was serious about this girl.

Serious enough to propose? And be accepted?

And Ramu was enthralled by a startling vision of the future: he and his friends, gentlemen used to wrapping themselves around the nearest beer and saying it with burps—doing so with an assortment of wives about them. A Mrs. KK, a Mrs. Ramu, a Mrs. Murthy, and, god forbid, a Mrs. Swamy.

Mrs. Ramu.

Ramu’s mind worried ceaselessly at the elusive cipher those words conjured up, like a dog with a difficult-to-grasp bone. It seemed to him unfair that there should be such a gap between decision and execution—after having resisted matrimony for a decade, surely his very eagerness should now suffice to guarantee an array of suitable women for his selection?

Mrs. Ramu.

Who was going to fill that lacuna in his life?

“There’s Ashwini,” said Murthy, as though reading his thoughts.

Indeed, there she was. Walking over the lawns towards them.

Ramu felt himself retreating into a watchful, speculative quiet. He focused his attention on Ashwini, observing her manner as she interacted with his friends: a pert reply to Swamy, a wink for KK, her smiling conversation with Murthy. She refused a beer but lit a cigarette, after first checking carefully to see if any of her parents’ friends might be about.

She listened with amused delight to the story of KK’s nickname: his real name was Prasad Rao, a name rejected by his friends early in his career in favor of something more colorful. They had finally (over his protests) settled unceremoniously on “Karadi Kundi.” Bear-Bottom. Because, said Swamy, his arse, like the rest of him, was big, black, and hairy. Karadi Kundi, KK for short.

Ashwini laughed in all the right places.

She
was
vivacious, attractive, really. Ramu did a quick inventory: she was dressed in a smart jacket and pant ensemble, with—surprise, surprise—thin wire-rimmed glasses on her nose. They gave her an unexpected, agreeably intellectual air. That was good, adding a sobriety to her image that Ramu found pleasing. Her manner with him was easy—he guessed that she still hadn’t been told about the discussions between their mothers. She smiled in his direction—and for the first time Ramu wondered: was she attracted to him?

Ramu toyed with that notion for a little while, and found himself disturbingly pleased with it.

Later that night, the delicious prospect of bedding Ashwini was slowly superseded by other considerations.

Of all the women he was considering for a life together, she was undoubtedly the best choice. And yet, and yet, so dreadfully inadequate an option. Ramu knew himself to be well read, deliberate, with, he assured himself, a certain Depth of Purpose that extended beyond foolish, frivolous conversation and endless social preoccupations. Shouldn’t there be some compatibility of natures for this sort of thing to work?

Ramu mentally revisited their encounter at the club and anxiously listed to himself the possible signs of Ashwini’s superficiality.

The manner, for instance, in which she coyly insisted on questioning Swamy about his work. Swamy hated small talk about the software company he had founded. It was his baby, not to be trifled with. This was a message that Ashwini, in her social delight, seemed oblivious to.

Her insistence on dropping names, especially names she’d left behind in Bombay.

Her habit of referring to a fat-pocketed bore, whom Ramu despised, as a “dear friend”—instead of, correctly, as a pompous turd accompanied (as such turds often are) by a lot of verbal flatulence.

The unwarranted number of expensive brand labels on her clothes, a type of wanton advertising that Ramu could not condone.

Worst, her anglicized nickname: her close friends, it seemed, called her “Ash,” and she encouraged them to do so. Ramu abhorred that: converting a thing of beauty into a thing for western convenience.

Perhaps her nickname provided an apt metaphor for her progress through his mind: Ashwini, the star-like, consort of the sun, rapidly reduced to a lump of dusty carbon residue.

It was his mother, naturally, who first noticed the difference.

A lifetime of training had rendered her excellent at reading Ramu’s moods, though somewhat indifferent at interpreting the causes. She gazed at him uneasily at mealtimes and redoubled her energies towards finding him a wife. Ramu sidestepped her efforts and kept his thoughts to himself, as though that might in some way contain them, reduce them, send them packing.

But the depression that had set in kept growing, his desires trapped between his unenthusiastic appraisal of Ashwini (and the even less appealing choices conjured up by his mother) on the one side, and the loneliness that was beginning to whisper through his life on the other. Ramu had long conversations with himself about frying pans and fires, and in the endless watches of the night, knew not which he preferred.

Increasingly, he found himself staying away from dinners at the houses of his married friends. Changing the subject in the face of KK’s obvious happiness. Changing television channels in irritation, switching from the mating habits of birds to the hero who found comfort in the arms of a deep-bosomed lovely to, finally, the news, which offered no romance whatsoever.

Occasionally, the scorn he poured on Ashwini’s head missed its target and fell, splashing, towards him instead, covering him with self-doubt. Perhaps he was intrinsically unsuited to the quotidian pleasures of marriage?

Inadequate in some way?

The thought wrapped itself depressingly around him until, one day, he decided: it was no use; it was time to call a halt to this whole foolishness.

Time to tell his mother to stop looking.

He never got the chance.

His mother came to the dinner table one evening with the irritated expression of a woman who’s been had.

“You are not going to believe this,” she said. “I mean, how could she not tell me? Does this not affect us? Will we not have an interest if you marry that girl? Is it not important?”

Ramu waited patiently for his mother to come to the point.

“You can’t marry Ashwini,” Ma said, slapping a hot roti down on his father’s plate. “Out of the question.”

Uh-oh, thought Ramu. She’s heard about the dope.

No.

“I mean, I realize she has one left. I am not a fool. But what if that fails? It has been known to happen. Then you will be left a widower, and my grandchildren will be motherless.” She answered the question in Ramu’s eyes. “It happened two years ago. Ashwini gave away one of her kidneys to a cousin. For a transplant.”

Ramu stopped eating.

“I’m not saying that it is not a nice thing to do. But still,” Ma said, “of course, we cannot consider her now. Her mother should have told me earlier.”

She surfaced once from the ensuing discussion with his father to say consolingly: “Never mind. There are other girls. If you want modern, I will find. I will find lots of modern girls. Don’t worry.”

KK’s engagement party was the usual extravaganza, a mini– wedding reception, with three generations of people stuffing themselves at KK’s parents’ expense. Chi. Bear-Butt and Sow.
Baby-girl to wed and become Mr. and Mrs. Karadi Kundi.

Ramu stared at the crowd feeling oddly light-headed. He traced the outlines of his goatee with his thumb and forefinger, sensitive to the transition between smooth, carefully shaved skin and the trimmed outgrowth of hair. He had chosen his clothes with care. He felt the urge in him to make a good impression and he’d catered to it, doing so with a slight, self-aware smile.