The Red Carpet (4 page)

Through the years, they had roused themselves, the D’Costas, to read and discuss the letters dutifully mailed to them once a month by their son, with whom they had been blessed late in life and after two years of saying Hail Marys three times a day and sometimes in their sleep. Now Mr. D’Costa read the letters to himself, sharing the news with the pastel walls of his house. He too was an investment banker, their son, just like Aman Kapur, but settled with a foreign wife and two children whom they had never seen in Australia. There was no question, financially speaking, of Mr. D’Costa paying for a ticket to Australia, and no question, it appeared, of their son bringing his family to visit them. Mr. D’Costa tried not to be hurt. No doubt his son would come when he could. After all, didn’t he sometimes send money along with the letter, his son? A sizable amount, perhaps as much as twenty Australian dollars, which Mr. D’Costa would convert at the bank and happily add the four hundred or so rupees to his account.

There was a deep kernel of truth in what he’d told the neighbors. In his heart of hearts he felt sure that the life his son led in Australia couldn’t be all that different from what he saw across the road. His son and his son’s wife, Elizabeth, both working; his grandchildren being looked after by god-knows-whom. When she was not working, his son wrote, Elizabeth cooked dinners and played golf and tennis at the club. All of which was apparently why she was always too busy, too tired, to write or send them pictures of their grandchildren.

But that was the life his son preferred. And Mr. D’Costa consoled himself that times had changed, even though that fact seemed to have escaped Mrs. Amberkar’s son, a chartered accountant who dutifully lived with his parents, and whose wife was expecting their second grandchild, as Mrs. Ambekar reminded everyone with distressing frequency. It was with no small sense of irritation that Mr. D’Costa found himself frequently plunged into daydreams where his own son did the same, and he could take his grandchildren with him to the Ulsoor vegetable market.

Mr. D’Costa found himself staring across the road, with worry etched upon his face. He was not alone. A group of neighbors stood with him, and seemed to share his concern.

“Why don’t you go across and inquire, Mr. D’Costa?”

“Yes, yes, something is definitely wrong, Mr. D’Costa. That nice young girl. Good mother. Such a sweet baby she has. As pretty as my own granddaughter.”

“Where is the husband? I did not see him. Traveling, is it?”

Mr. D’Costa paid the Good Fellows Bakery man and wondered what to do. He stared across the street for possibly the tenth time, eyeing Rohini Kapur’s curtained windows with some concern. They were usually thrown open at first light, to let in the fresh sweet early morning air. The uncharacteristic closed curtains this morning weren’t the only signs of something wrong. The lights had been on late in the Kapur house last night. Not a party or anything. Just these two women talking and talking by the open balcony doors. Rohini and her friend, that rather alarming Miss Tara Srinivasan, who dashed about carelessly dressed with her long hair flashing, uncombed, in the wind. Nothing to put his finger on really—women, he knew, had this remarkable ability to talk their whole lives through—nothing to engender this vague feeling of unease—except that the first bottle of wine had given way to a second, and then he had seen her cry. Rohini, weeping a deep sorrow into the lap of her friend.

Mr. D’Costa concluded that it was probably some matter of husband and wife. Certainly, those hugs and kisses, so improperly given at meetings and good-byes, had fallen away many months ago. But that too was natural after the birth of a child. The women got testy and tired, and were best left to revive.

Mr. D’Costa had missed his usual nightly treat of watching an old-timer movie after his wife departed for bed, movies that took him back to a time when he had been young enough and fool enough to think that yes, someday, he too would be a Jimmy Stewart, a Cary Grant, a Master of the Universe. Instead he had stayed by the window, shirtless and in a banian vest in the cool evening breeze.

And this morning, closed curtains.

He wondered what to do. Perhaps she was not well; perhaps there was no one to attend to her, since her husband was out of town. The servants, after all, couldn’t be counted on in a time of trouble. They always seemed to choose the moments when you needed them most to come and complain about their own miserable lives.

Perhaps he should go across and inquire. After all, hadn’t he helped her once before? Hadn’t he been there to support her when she was most in need?
A help in need is a help in deed.
And, good woman that she was, she saw to it that he never had cause to regret it, by treating him ever after with a certain special courtesy and respect that came from her eyes and made him feel proud and important and included in her life. It had all happened, he remembered, rather suddenly.

Rohini Kapur had reached the end of her pregnancy. Her baby was due in just three weeks. Her short, sprightly body had grown bulbous and huge, seemingly overwhelmed by the weight it carried. “Kind of like a back-to-front turtle,” she would joke, when Mr. D’Costa asked her how she was feeling. Certainly she was unrecognizable as the young woman of compact energy she had once been. She had taken to spending long hours sitting on her balcony in front of the French windows, sipping at fruit juices and reading novels and simply staring at the flowers in the garden, her eyes dulled and restless, captured by the nervous tick that kept a countdown on her ongoing pregnancy.

Mr. D’Costa spied her sitting on her balcony, her head bent over a book, as he left his house to walk the short distance to Ulsoor Market for his daily shopping. Her distant presence triggered a fresh outbreak of the irritation that had plagued him since the previous day. It had been most annoying. He’d watched Rohini busy herself at the dining table with bread, butter, slices of tomato, cucumber, lettuce, and cheese, and he could not resist informing everyone, when they were all gathered around the Good Fellows Bakery man. “Every day she is eating sandwiches for lunch, you know.”

“Is that so? Just sandwiches, is it? Nothing hot, is it? Tchi, tchi,” said Mrs. Ambekar, for whom lunch had to be hot and homemade, preferably millet bhakdi breads, eaten with hot lentil and legume stews like amti-pitle, vegetables, and a nice pickle, like that spicy gongura that Mrs. Reddy used to make and send over, though not as frequently since her husband died, poor soul. Sandwiches, dry, raw, and inhospitable, were not food enough for one, let alone for two.

But it was Mrs. Gnanakan, who usually agreed with him on all matters, who had said: “No, no, Mr. D’Costa. How can that be? You must be mistaken.”

And Mr. D’Costa wanted to say, with an irritation that refused to fade even one day later: Who are you to question me about these people? Do I not know them as if they were my own children? Would not Elizabeth have eaten similar sandwiches while carrying his grandchildren?

It was, oddly enough, that very irritation that almost made him miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He stepped out of his house with a plastic woven basket on his arm and an old cricket cap on his head, his head so steeped in annoyance that he almost walked twenty yards before he heard the panic-stricken voice, calling from behind him: Mr. D’Costa! He shuddered later to think that, a few yards more, and he would have missed hearing Rohini’s voice completely, thereby leaving the final honors to Mr. Kurien or someone else.

Instead, it was he who had the pleasure of announcing to Mr. Kurien across the wall, and subsequently to everyone else as well, that he had actually visited the Kapur home.

That he had helped Rohini out at a very crucial moment, just as a father would.

As a prospective grandfather would.

The facts are thus: with Aman Kapur on a business trip and due back the next day, the cook out shopping, the telephone choosing this moment (of all moments) to cross connect and go on the blink, preventing Rohini from calling anyone else, and the baby rushing down with a hasty disregard for anyone else’s timetable, Rohini did the only thing she could. She hailed Mr. D’Costa.

He rushed to her side, his alarm and helplessness dying down before her own.

He couldn’t drive her car. The last time he had got behind a steering wheel was twenty years ago, and that had been in an Ambassador car, very different from the fancy new piece that reposed in Rohini’s garage in the building basement. So he walked quickly to the main street and flagged down an autorickshaw. They both squeezed into the back, with Mr. D’Costa awkwardly clinging onto the small suitcase that Rohini had providentially packed just the previous day, and bounced off towards the maternity hospital. The auto-driver rose gamely to the occasion and drove even more like a film star than ever, and the auto lurched and bumped its way through every pothole, unwittingly hastening the birth process to an alarming extent. As soon as they arrived, Rohini was surrounded by her doctor and attendant nurses and rushed off to the labor room, and Mr. D’Costa breathed again.

He called her mother, in a two-minute call to Delhi, from the IST/STD telephone booth outside.

He called her friend, Miss Tara, a little nervously, but thankfully got only Tara’s mother.

He couldn’t call Aman Kapur because Rohini had left the number behind, and he couldn’t afford to pay for the call to Singapore anyway.

He then bought a box of
mithai
, sweetmeats steeped in sugar and ghee and celebration, with the last of his vegetable money and waited outside the labor room.

Every now and then, a nurse would step out and tell him that his granddaughter was doing well, and that everything was as it should be.

By six o’clock, the baby was still not born, but the waiting had changed in its very character. Rohini’s mother had caught the first plane out of Delhi and was now inside the labor room with her daughter, stepping out only very occasionally with tear-reddened eyes that had cried at her daughter’s pain, to say things like “
Arrey baba,
more ice cubes!” Rohini’s friend Tara waited silently on a chair, fidgeting and clearly itching to be inside with her friend. Other acquaintances and friends dropped by to check on her progress; they stayed awhile and then left, promising to return as soon as they heard of the baby’s delivery. Aman had finally been contacted by Tara, who had spent a full hour inside that ISD/STD booth, and he was arriving into Bangalore in the middle of the night.

Amidst all these people, Mr. D’Costa’s presence was indeed redundant. And so he went home, leaving the box of mithai behind.

The first time Mr. D’Costa saw the baby was about a week after the delivery, and shortly after Rohini had returned home from the hospital. He waited until he thought that she and her mother and her baby would be well settled after the shift and then decided to pay a visit.

He dressed carefully, and crossed the road, feeling absurdly nervous. It was the first time that he was paying a social visit to a place of which he felt he knew every sacred detail.

He paused outside the Kapur apartment door and frowned. He could hear the noise and chatter of many visitors inside. How had he missed their arrival? No doubt because of the time he had spent getting himself ready.

Later, when he dwelt upon his visit, it was with great clarity, a series of scenes from the cinema.

He remembered entering that drawing room—not full of aunts and uncles and people of his generation as he had expected, but instead a whole brood of youngsters, friends of the new parents.

Overload.

Mr. D’Costa remembered his confidence faltering, and then Rohini’s blessed face, lighting up and moving towards him in that crowd. He focused in on her. Physically, she was still overblown and bloated, but there was a lightness in her eyes, that earlier, long-forgotten energy gusting out of her in waves.

“Please,” she said. “Come. Meet my husband.”

And then her handsome husband, that so very smart young man whom he was meeting for the first time, shaking Mr. D’Costa by the hand and looking serious and yet smiling and thanking him for looking after his wife while he was away, and won’t he please take a seat and have a drink?

A drink.

Mr. D’Costa hadn’t had more than an infrequent glass of beer in a very long time. He was sufficiently relaxed by his warm reception to consider the offer seriously. He could sense the eyes of the other youngsters in the room on him, but when he turned around they were all smiling pleasantly enough; one of them quickly vacated an armchair for him. Perhaps they had all been told the story of his adventure with Rohini.

A drink. Aman was already moving towards the elaborate bar, and the whisky bottle that lay open on it. It was barely teatime, but everyone was in a celebratory mood. Mr. D’Costa caught sight of the label on the bottle and almost gasped. It—lying so casually open, as though it were nothing more than a bottle of water—was one of the most expensive whisky brands in the world. A rare single malt that, Mr. D’Costa quickly calculated, would cost around five thousand rupees even if one were to pick it up in the cheapest duty-free. He had read about it, and had always thought it the province of men who lived large and well and had their pictures taken with beautiful women on the cover of magazines. Five thousand rupees. That was fully as much as he received from a month’s worth of dividends.

He thought: How much money do these youngsters have?

And: Yes, he would most certainly like to have that drink.

He remembered Rohini putting her hand on his arm, and saying: But first you must come and see the baby.

He nodded dutifully and followed her into the guest bedroom. The baby’s cot, she explained, had been moved from their bedroom upstairs into the room below, where her mother, and now Rohini, slept. This was to ensure that Aman wasn’t disturbed in the night, while she and her mother took turns with the baby. Mr. D’Costa nodded understandingly. After all, the man had to go out to work every day, and that was difficult to do on interrupted sleep.

And where is your dear mother? he asked.