‘Mama, how many times am I to tell you he is too old to be fed! If at this age he can’t feed himself, we may as well institutionalize him.’
His grandmother glanced sideways at Rehan. He spluttered, ‘Ma, it was me. I asked Nani to feed me.’
She looked up at Udaya with satisfaction.
‘Shut up, you’re a child. You don’t make these decisions. I, as your mother, am telling you that you will feed yourself.’ Then,
as if addressing her in another language, Udaya said to her mother: ‘And, Mama, cut it out. I know what you’re doing. I’ve made my
decision but, in the meantime, I will not have you retard this child with your religious crap.’
Her anger spent, Udaya looked tenderly at Rehan.
‘Anyway I’m off to dinner. Go to bed soon, baba.’
With this, she turned around and strode out of the house, leaving a trail of perfume to settle over the smell of food. Rehan jumped up, and putting a conciliatory hand on his grandmother’s
knee, trotted out after his mother.
He caught her at the end of the cement drive, where, in a small patch of lawn, with a thin grass cover, bare earth showing through in places, there were beds of dahlias with scraggly manes. It
was here, almost magically, that amid the drabness of the house and the malnourished plants, a rare gardenia flourished. The tree had a knotted trunk with a slender curve that brought its canopy of
fleshy leaves to the centre of the garden. Deep within each cluster, like shallow wells of moonlight, grew white scented flowers, as heavy as fruit.
The gardenia was another point of tension between mother and daughter. It had come with the house, but Rehan’s grandmother hated the tree, accusing it of stealing light from the other
plants. Udaya thought it beautiful and suspected that the real cause for her mother’s antipathy was the tree’s bewitching aspect, its poison and femininity. She had convinced Rehan that
it was really a rakshasa, waiting to reveal its true form when the moment was right.
Rehan made out his mother standing near the Suzuki in the light of a single caged bulb.
‘Ma, Ma, wait.’
‘Baba, why are you barefoot?’
He looked down at his feet, felt he was losing critical amounts of goodwill, but pattered on regardless.
‘Ma, sorry, I’ll put some slippers on. I just have to tell you something,’ he said, approaching quickly. He felt his mother much bigger in her heels, her head lost to some dark
summit.
‘Listen, Ma,’ he said, taking the adult tone of voice she often adopted with him, ‘I understood what you just said to Nani. I know what the “decision” is; but I
don’t think we should do it; I don’t think we should move.’
Udaya came suddenly out of shadow and Rehan was struck by how beautiful and strong she seemed. She gave him the special look she used when they were having a private joke.
‘Baba,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen a very nice flat and believe me, you’ll love it. You’ll have your own room. Your own bed. You can have your friends over whenever
you want and Nani won’t be far, but we must have our own place.’
The idea of the flat filled Rehan with unease. He hated the thought of being in some other part of town, separated from his grandmother. But in speaking of it to him as a secret undertaking, his
mother won him over for the time being. He felt it important not to let her down. He waited till the Suzuki’s red brake lights had disappeared down the still and silent street, then went back
inside.
The next day, when the sun blazed and the white edges of the city’s pavements throbbed, Udaya received an unexpected call from Rehan’s school. She had been in her
own thoughts all morning, recalling impressions from the night before. It had been a beautiful party; there had been many journalists and politicians, a handful of diplomats. The French ambassador,
Servain, had expressed a special interest in the meaning of her name. ‘Dawn?’ he asked, holding her hand as he spoke. ‘No,’ she had replied, ‘of the dawn, I
believe.’ ‘Udaya, udaya,’ he muttered softly to himself, ‘not dawn, but of the dawn.’ Udaya flushed with embarrassment.
They were interrupted by their host. ‘Enough, you dirty old dip,’ he had said, only half-jokingly, it seemed, ‘keep to your own women. I invited this lovely lady so that
I
could speak to her.’ Amit Sethia had a brash, clumsy style, Udaya had thought at the time, but she was flattered by the attention he paid her. After the upheavals of the past few
years, there was something exciting about being out and about again, desirable to men. It felt like the return of normal life.
The voice on the other end of the phone was too frazzled to explain why she wanted Udaya to come in person to pick Rehan up from school; she couldn’t say what the matter was. He was safe;
‘there was no cause to worry’; but he outright refused to leave and was insisting that his mother come to fetch him. He had never done anything like this before, never even been
homesick. And Udaya, sliding the Suzuki’s keys off her glass-topped desk, had a feeling of dread.
The road in front of the British School was crowded when she arrived. The imported embassy cars made a barrier of sorts, their shapes smooth, their gleam hard. Her own car windows were thrown
open as if in distress, and as she could find no place to park, she stopped in front of the school gate, trying to spot Rehan through gaps in the glittering wall of steel and tinted glass. At last,
raising herself up on the car floor, she caught sight of him over the white caps of chauffeurs. Rehan ran out to her, his brown water bottle banging against his thighs. Bolting past the line of
cars, he made her heart race. The next thing she knew he had jumped into the seat next to her, which he was not allowed to do.
It was Rehan’s first time in the front and Udaya insisted that he wear a seat belt. Suzuki had been the first to introduce them in India, but they didn’t seem very secure: the grey
belt, clinging to a thin strip of exposed green metal, hung loosely around her son. The car felt light, too light; it felt tinny and destructible. Udaya had bought it in part from money lent her by
her mother and in part through a system of monthly instalments, which she always brought up when Rehan asked for something expensive.
‘Ma, can we turn the AC on?’
‘No, baba, you know we can’t. Don’t you remember what happened the last time we did?’
‘The engine started to cough?’
‘Yes.’
He had told her to buy the model with in-built air conditioning, but she had felt it was too much. His grandmother had said to buy the cheaper car and install the air conditioner later. But the
heavy machine that hung from the car’s dashboard put too much strain on the engine. And so, the AC remained off, its blue and orange lights unlit, its wide black grill mute, the dark gaps,
like cartoon teeth, grinning impotently.
The heat was terrible. The Suzuki’s plastic seats softened, the short shadows of trees shrank from the day, Rehan pulled at his seat belt. Which after being violently extended, only
partially returned to its original position.
‘Don’t, baba.’
‘But it’s hot!’
‘I know, but if you do that, you’ll have to sit in the back. Do you want to sit in the back?’
‘No.’
‘Then sit properly and don’t pull off the seat belt. It’s to keep you safe.’
‘But what if the car is going to explode and I need to run away?’
‘It’s not going to explode . . .’
‘If!’
‘Then you open the belt and run away.’
‘If I have to run away quickly?’
‘Then you open the belt quickly and run away.’
Rehan, enjoying his mother’s fluency, chuckled. ‘But what if I need to jump out of the window?’
‘Rehan!’ And his name said in this tone, under these circumstances, contained a threat. Rehan gauged it well. He seemed to be about to speak, but then looking out on the day, itself
an element of his fear, he became quiet.
‘What, baba?’ Udaya prodded him gently.
They passed a blue ice-cream cart on the side of the road. A man with an open shirt and a small, bird-like chest lay asleep on its cool aluminium surface.
‘Ma, can I have a chocolate bonanza?’
‘Baba, now? Really? The man’s asleep.’
Rehan looked at her with a stern expression, as if appalled that she could mistake his genuine need for childish whim. She pulled over the car and honked her horn. The man rose drunkenly and
came over to the window. Rehan waited patiently for the transparent plastic cup, through which it was possible to see a swirl of real chocolate coiled many times about itself. The cup had a lid
that fitted neatly into its bottom, making a stand of sorts, and in Rehan’s mind, spoke of a special imported elegance.
A spoon or two in, he began: ‘The twins’ grandmother is dead.’ The twins were his best friends in school.
‘O, baba! I’m so sorry,’ Udaya said, though not quite sure why the death of this apparent stranger should have so unnerved her son.
Rehan, sensing something false in his mother’s tone, added: ‘She was murdered. In a flat!’
‘Oh, God,’ Udaya said, wanting to shield him from his own news.
Rehan began to describe the afternoon scene of the old woman asleep; the doorbell ringing; her rising to open the front door. Then he couldn’t go on. Something too vivid, too jarring had
seized him. Udaya, through his sobs, couldn’t understand the rest of what he said – doorbells and door eyes, broken chains, men in leather jackets, money taken or not taken.
It was only later that evening when she reached home and called the twins’ mother that she was able to learn more. The old lady had lived alone in a flat in south Delhi and had been
murdered by a man wearing a leather jacket. They knew this because he had tied up the maid, but spared her life; and yes, it was strange that he took no money. But the twins’ mother was less
mystified than Rehan by this: she felt he might have got scared and in a panic killed her mother-in-law and fled the scene.
They were due to move in a few weeks, but Rehan now would not hear of it. His opposition became so violent Udaya couldn’t even persuade him to see the place she had
found. She decided at last to show it to him by subterfuge.
One Saturday morning, soon after the rains arrived, and Delhi’s roads glistened and steamed, she offered to take him for a drive. On the way she said she wanted to stop at a friend’s
place.
‘Why?’
‘Just, to see what it’s like and to pick something up.’
But Rehan was not so easily fooled.
‘We’re going to the flat, aren’t we?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ he said, confirming his decision with a sigh. ‘OK. Let’s go.’
The barsati of 187 Golf Links overlooked a garden, now sodden with rainwater. A dim staircase, smelling of food and damp, served all the flats. Rehan and his mother climbed to the top and came
to a white painted door.
Expecting to enter a closed space, Rehan let out a gasp when the door opened onto grey skies and a light monsoon breeze. At the centre of a vast terrace, there was a cottage of sorts bounded in
with potted plants. Rehan’s face lit up.
‘See, baba! I told you that you’d like it.’
And he did. Walking through the room that would be his, shown a place where he would have his first bed – a bunk bed, his mother promised, where school friends could come and sleep over
– Rehan reached for his mother’s hand. They passed a recess in the wall and he could not resist trying it out for his gods. He let go of Udaya’s hand and wandered up to the
alcove, placing an action figure in it. And she, like an estate agent assured of her client’s intentions, left his side for a moment and went to speak to the landlord.
For some seconds after she was gone, Rehan was fine, the magic of the place still working on him. Then looking around, he became aware of her absence. His gaze fastened on the judas in the front
door, and he was conscious now of an awful daytime quiet, without the comforting din of Nani and her servants. Rehan decided to face his fear. He stood on his toes and peered through the door eye.
At first he was cool as a man looking down the barrel of a shotgun, but when he saw the world become remote and threatening, through its cold lens, he began to lose his nerve.
There was something so unprotected about this flat. The limp chain between the door and frame that could so easily be axed away; the neighbours who could hear and be heard, and yet pretend not
to have seen when it counted; and yes the judas planted in the door suggesting security, but through whose dwarfing lens murderers and tradesmen would appear alike.
When Udaya returned, she found Rehan transformed. Staring at her, he said, in a tone borrowed from his grandmother: ‘But, Ma, aren’t you worried
what people will say about a woman living alone?’
Udaya laughed, making him angrier still. ‘You’ve been spending too much time with your nani.’
‘She’s right, you know. People could say you’re a keep.’
‘A keep? A keep!’
She took hold of him by the wrist, as if to give him a tight slap, then without saying a word more, dragged him down the humid stairs.
When they arrived back at the house, Udaya, wishing to speak to her mother, was surprised to find her in a meeting. This was strange, not only because it was Saturday, but
because she had never had any meetings before, especially not with men in suits, and trays laden with jalebis and samosas. Udaya recognized one of the visitors as Mr Cicada, the accountant. The
other was an elderly gentleman with a stern moustache and a margin of fine white hair bordering the shiny expanse of his head.
‘Kailash Nath ji,’ Udaya’s mother said piously, ‘meet my daughter and grandson.’
The elderly man smiled into his moustache, bowing slightly.
Udaya, recognizing the name as that of a famous Delhi contractor, was forced to swallow her anger and return the greeting.
Her mother, in the meantime, smiled knowingly at Rehan and gestured to a large box wrapped in garish paper.
‘Nani,’ Rehan gasped.
‘Yes, baba Re, it has come in. My ship has come in.’
Rehan tore open the parcel and was within seconds moving his pantheon of gods, which till then had sat on a ledge near the cooler, into the plastic ramparts of Castle Grayskull.