In the Convent of Little Flowers (15 page)

The one thing they all have in common is wealth. Of course. And it was easy enough, even in college during their undergraduate years, to see who had money and who didn’t. The cars that brought them to their classes each morning were Mercedes-Benzes or Volvos. Sat’s father owned a Maserati and only allowed him once, in the four years they spent at college, to drive it into the campus. All other times, he had to make do with a BMW. The poor chap. Ram thought that his father was an unfair man.

So their combined wealth, flaunted or not, brought the eight of them together. Vish lit the first joint that Ram smoked, late one night when they drove out to the campus and climbed the concrete bleachers in the stadium to huddle together at the top right corner. From here, they could see and not be seen. The grounds below were swathed in darkness, but as they became progressively and gently stoned, they saw a white dog cross the field, and the college phantom, a man with a limp and a scythe held on his shoulder, its curved edge around his neck. They both saw the man and
watched him scuttle across the beaten mud
maidan
with its faint white running track lines painted in an oval.

Ram drove home that night in a daze. He thought he remembered being stopped by a policeman on Boat Club Road; the next morning, a policeman knocked at their gate, and his mother sent a maidservant out with five hundred rupees in a brown envelope. Ram never recalled what he hit on the road on his way back home. A dog? A cat? A … ? But he also never smoked a joint again.

He never smoked cigarettes (none of the eight members of the club smoked), he never drank in excess (even when he was in college), he never overate and became fat, and he never tried marijuana or any other drug again. He had the money; it was easily accessible. And that was the reason why Ram kept some virtues—there was never a curiosity in him for things that his money could buy. He suspected that it was much the same for the other members of his club. Wealth, power, position, prestige, privilege—they had it all, and they had all. Except … and so, they started the Key Club.

Ram spent two years in the United States acquiring an MS in mechanical engineering. His grades in college had been good; his GRE scores were actually almost perfect. He sat for the Advanced GREs in Mathematics and Physics and aced them both. For a lark, because he had little else to do the summer before he went to America, Ram took an AGRE in biochemistry, cell and molecular biology also, and scored
spectacularly in it. He had wanted to be a doctor at one point, in tenth standard, and then gave up the wish to do so because it would involve far too much work. Sita found his biochemistry AGRE score sheet one day in his study and asked him, a look of puzzlement on her face, “Why?”

“I don’t know why,” Ram had replied. “Just because. I wanted to. I did well, you know.”

She held the paper in front of him. “Obviously.”

Ram was awarded a teaching assistantship at the U.S. university, which he refused. His parents paid for his MS degree. They also paid for his apartment, the furniture in the apartment, and the 1967 Chevy Camaro with a V-8 engine that Ram had painted indigo blue with thin pink stripes along the sides in a body shop. Ram opted for the university he went to because both Sat and Vish were there also. Summers, they dumped duffel bags with their clothes into the Chevy’s boot and drove across the country, the windows rolled down, Pink Floyd on the music system, picking up girls where they stopped for the night. They came back to India with photos from Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore, and Yosemite. Ram also returned with a perfect 4.0 GPA for his graduate degree—Sat and Vish didn’t do quite as well, but neither of them had gone to America to study. They had jobs waiting for them at home, regardless of how they spent their postgraduate years.

In college in the city, whether it was because of the Maserati or not, Sat was Ram’s closest friend. They were both in
mechanical engineering, both in the same year; both also looked alike with the same hand-on-hip stance when they were quizzical, a similar smile when they saw a girl they liked. And there was a girl they both liked very much in college. Her name was … well, her actual name doesn’t matter, they call her Sara now.

Ram saw Sara first. She was a year older than them, also in mechanical engineering, and different from the girls they had known and dated before. Sara’s parents did not have money, and that summed up the difference more accurately than anything else could. Sara was a serious, studious girl. She had long hair that she plaited down her back and thick eyeglasses that gave her a mild squint. She wore only
salwar-kameez
sets, rarely pants or skirts, and she took the city bus to college. She had a lovely, sweet voice, and this Ram and Sat heard for the first time when the principal of the college called Sara up onstage at the morning assembly to sing the national anthem when the regular singer was absent. They took notice then, glancing at each other during the anthem.

That afternoon, Ram passed Sara and a group of girls under the shade of a tree on campus and stayed there below the outermost fringe of the tree’s leaves watching as a breeze brushed over her clothes, molding the thin cotton cloth to her breasts and her hips. She laughed and took off her glasses to wipe the laughter from her eyes. The wind swept gently over her hair. And Ram, who had never been denied anything in his life, went up to her, among her friends, and
said, “Would you like to get a cup of coffee at the canteen with me?”

She said yes. Of course. But not before she had put her glasses back on and bowed her head in shyness. Ram was enchanted.

The next day, Sat said, “You took her first, you bastard.” And that was all he said. Ram and Sara dated all through college, for the next three years.

The children leave the room and Sita rises from the bed to go to the bathroom. When they were first married, it was her walk that most irritated Ram, a sort of jerk and go, jerk and stop. Sita used to flail on high heels, pleading that she had never worn them before. Ram taught her how to walk, not just walk toward him, but walk away from him so that she captured his gaze and kept it. She uses it now, unconsciously graceful, loose-limbed from sleep, her hair cascading down her back. He likes watching his wife walk. Even at the club meeting, as she approaches the glass bowl with the keys, she walks so that no one can look away. Not just because of what she is about to do, but because they all either want her or want to be like her. And Ram has taught her this.

She is silent as she shuts the bathroom door. He will not hear her speak again today, and her first words to him will be tomorrow evening when he holds out his hand for her after the Laugh Class. He will say, “Coming home?”

And she will say, as she always says, “Sure.”

Ram goes out of the bedroom to the guest bathroom for his shower and his shave. After breakfast, he calls the hotel to confirm the reservations. In the afternoon, he sleeps for an hour and plays solitaire for two.

When Ram left for his graduate degree in the United States, he also left Sara behind in India. Her parents couldn’t afford the plane ticket and so she couldn’t go to America even though she had a fellowship for a master’s degree for a full two years. She found a job instead at a local company. When they broke up, it was almost as if she had expected it.

“You’re going, aren’t you?” she had said.

“And when I come back …” Ram shrugged. “Sorry.”

“You aren’t really coming back,” she said. “I’m sorry too. I thought I knew you, Ram. But I think I know you only too well.” And then she said, most astonishingly to him, “Good luck. With everything.”

He had been almost shocked by those words. He had never needed luck in his life. He had money. He could not marry her because he would marry money. Dating in college was fine, but marriage … it was a practical institution. His mother had married his father for a reason, well, several, of which could be counted money, power, family name, and some itinerant dabbling in local politics that also translated into money, power, and family name. His uncles and aunts had done the same. His sister was already married to a
shifty-eyed man who could not keep his pants zipped. But he had money … and the rest of it.

When Ram, Sat, and Vish returned to India, they started to work in their parents’ companies. Ram’s mother had told him that he must work for at least a year before he could get married, and he agreed. It was his time for freedom. When the year passed, his mother brought Sita to the house one evening with her parents. They were of old money. And their wealth came from property—a hundred thousand acres of prime, arable land in the delta of the state’s biggest river; irrigation was never a problem, there was plenty of water, and there were no fickle monsoons to rely upon. They had a sprawling house at one edge of the property, with brilliant green lawns, lush palm trees, peacocks in the gardens. They had three hundred in-house servants.

But for that walk, that stumbling, childlike walk, Sita was beautiful. She was fair, she had huge eyes, she had dimpled elbows with smooth, smooth skin. She had three sisters, all younger than her, and the moment Ram and Sita married, two more were married off to equally prosperous sons-in-law.

Ram and Sita had their first child twelve months after the wedding, the second came along three years later. Both were boys. By the fifth year of their marriage, Sita had lost ten kilos, played tennis with the marker at the Gymkhana Club, spoke English fluently (more fluently than she had before in her country and village upbringing), and learned to walk
toward and away from the members of the Key Club without tripping once in three-inch-heels from Italy.

That was a few years before the Key Club was formed.

The only time Ram ever felt a want, or perhaps a betrayal, was the year that he had returned home to India to work at his mother’s company as a (beginning) Managing Director. The year he was to wait until his mother found him Sita. He had thought about Sara a lot in the first few months, wondered where she was, if she was married, to whom, what she looked like now … if her singing voice sounded the same. And then, a few months later, he had come upon her in a restaurant, clad in a lavish silk sari, a necklace of diamonds around her neck, diamonds in her ears, gold bangles tumbling down her slender arm. Her eyebrows were cleanly arched above eyes that sparkled—contact lenses, Ram thought, why had she not worn them in college?

He rose from his table and went to greet her, and felt a sense of shock as the man seated next to her turned and showed him a laughing profile as he touched Sara upon the shoulder with a settled hand. It was too intimate a gesture in public for it to mean anything other than what it was. That man was her husband. And that man was Sat.

“Dude!” Sat said, turning to him. “I married her, you see? You left her, I married her.”

And he had always wanted her, Ram thought. Even when Ram and Sara had been dating. Though not once, and he
cast his mind back deliberately to ponder on this, not once had there been even an ounce of impropriety in Sat’s behavior toward Sara when they were in college. But since, yes, since there had been.

They told him of their two-year correspondence through letters, emails, and phone calls when Ram, Sat, and Vish had been in the United States. Sara mentioned the trip to Yellowstone, the photos of them in front of enormous brown bison, their backs to the animals as they posed with fingers splayed in a V for victory sign. “How silly of you,” she said. “You might have been gored if the bison had so chosen.”

Silly, Ram thought. He had been silly. He wondered then if she had felt a pang of longing when she saw him in the photos, or if he had been let go as easily as … he had let go of her. But standing there, looking down upon the two of them, married a mere six months, Ram knew that he had been not just silly, but outrageously stupid. He was in love with Sara. But still, the Key Club, when it came into being, was not Ram’s idea, but Sat’s.

Ram and Sita drive to the hotel in silence. They leave the children in the middle of a fight—between the two of them, that is—and leave the maid to sort it out, to hush their tears, to feed them their dinner and put them to bed. As it is almost every evening whether they are at home or not. As it was, Ram thinks as they wait for a light to turn green, when he was growing up. His mother always wore her hair short, a
boy-cut they called it then, and now. Clipped around her ears, a razor edge at the back, a slop of hair over her forehead. One of the things he had been grateful for in both Sara and Sita was that they had long, old-fashioned hair, in Sara’s case, hitting the back of her knees. Sita has long since cut her hair to fall just below her shoulders, layered and styled into loose waves. Tonight, she wears a simple pink chiffon sari, a wisp of a blouse with two strings across the back, silver high heels, and a pair of silver hoops in her ears.

Pink Floyd’s “Money” booms softly on the car’s CD player. Ram feels like singing along, but he is quiet. And then Sita says, “Why did you ever form this damned club?”

He brakes suddenly and horns blast out at him. The windows are rolled up against the summer night, but he can still hear an autorickshaw driver as he leans out from under the canvas awning of his vehicle and shouts, “Yo, did ya warn them at home before you left, stupid?”

A common slang-curse—did you tell your dear ones before you left home that you were planning on dying today? Stupid.

“A damned club?” he says. “You seem to like it well enough.”