"But I didn't really understand why she had to die in the end!"
Her jowls quivered, and flawless South African diamonds winked at me from between the thick folds of her pythonesque neck. Fat tart! I don't know why my heroine had to die either. The book was already 106,000 words, and I was growing bored.... Would that be explanation enough?
I looked at the members of the Calcutta Ladies Club. Most of them were friends of my mother. All had husbands who earned enough to keep them swathed in silk and festooned with diamonds in the city's fabled Park Avenue. One bloated idiot tried to stifle her imminent yawn by waving stubby, ineffectual fingers in front of a cavernous, toad-like mouth.
What a relief I don't look like this bunch! I arched, stretching my long legs and slim arms, enjoying the feel of the thin silk skirt on my painted toes, knowing full well that the heavy set was watching my every move. There were no journalists in the crowd. The ladies had assumed their enlightened discussion of my latest work would be bait enough for me to attend. I wouldn't be able to see my new book panned by the resident hack in tomorrow's Calcutta Times. I picked up my clutch and walked out, the lazy smile I'd practiced all day in front of the mirror in place on my face.
In the car, panic grabbed my shoulders and spun me around to punch my stomach. I drew in my breath as I reeled from his punch, and watched him uncurl his fist and spread slow cold fingers throughout my body. When was I going to write The Novel? Once I had thought that was all I would do—write serious books, books that would dent those who read them, marking my readers for life, so one would know, looking at them, that these are Smita Ghosh's tribe, twisted and twirled and into fantastic shapes by her thoughts, her view of life....
Where do such Novels come from? I asked myself as I squeezed my car into the narrow lanes of the Howrah slum. No choice—driving through the slum, I mean. Bannerjee Road was blocked—some bunch or the other on strike for or against something or the other that won't matter a fig in the long or short or run. Hence the route picturesque.... A twig-hued man was lying on the pavement, vomiting quietly, copiously, into a gutter gummed with shit. I watched him through a thicket of passing human and cow legs and wheels. No one gave a damn—not me, either. Except for one woman who was crouched by him and howling, her eyes fierce like a hawk, tearless. Must put in a call to Mother Theresa's conversion squads, I thought. Give the heathen Jesus before he dies...
I parked in a lot by the Howrah Bridge and looked at the river at my feet, winding placidly to some distant sea. Ganges—river of purity, sanctifier of human sins. Even you could not retain your ethereal nature in Calcutta. Cigarette butts, soda cans, old magazines and a dead rat floated by, all flaunting their right to the river. Up ahead, fighting through the haze of smog, the skyline—such as it is—of the city: grey and huddled like a congregation of beggars; a great grime-streaked mess, haphazardly thrown together as if by a mildly retarded child or our best government-anointed architect—take your pick. Even the buildings in this city are sheepish and apologetic, crests bowed, cringing with need. Who can write anything but crap in this city? I asked myself. It was such a fortifying question.
A car bursting with college boys passed by, and the even more fortifying melody of their appreciative whistles fluted through the din of the ever-present Calcutta traffic. This at forty, after two children! I slew my nemesis—panic—with their sword-sharp mating calls. I drove to Anoop's clinic in Park Avenue.
It was his lunch hour—that's also when his wife plays bridge at the club, and can be counted on to not pop in. I walked through a crowded waiting room. A starlet with a blonde mustache that was showing its dark roots tried to meet my eyes, and simpered when she finally did. Basking in whatever glory there was to be had in being the doctor's twin sister, I entered Anoop's office—without knocking, of course.
He was sprawled in his wing chair, pulling his lower lip, eyes cloudy, brooding. I locked the door behind me.
"What ails?" I asked.
"This and that. Everything." He got up and stretched, fluid as a reptile. I saw his sharp shoulder blades rise and ebb beneath his foamy shirt.
He said, looking out of the window, his back to me: "There's a new chap two streets down. Opened up his practice. Grand opening last week. He's UK-returned. Damn these NRIs!1 If you choose to leave this country, stay the fuck out!"
He picked up steam: "There's a rumour—I think it's a rumour, and one he started, by the way—that he treated one of the royals in London—not Diana, the other one, the fat one—Sandra...?"
"Sarah," this from me, who didn't give a fuck about the royals, but knew all trivia.
"Right. Sarah. He cured her of some mild case of adult acne.... That's on the grapevine—put there by him. And the morons here who think shit doesn't stink if it's foreign-returned have started to go to him..."
His shoulder blades were held for a moment in a state of tensile tension, then started to rotate, like the swishing blades of a thresher, to the tune of his bitter gloating: "So I put a bug in Mrs. Sinha's ear: that he botched even simple peel jobs in London, which is why he's here—why else would he come back, if things were so great there?—and telling Rupa Sinha is like beaming it from a satellite—"
"Any of it true?" I "cut to the chase," as Americans, reared on movies that culminate in life-defining chases, have taught us to say.
Anoop turned slightly. Rewarding me with a-not-quite half profile: an aquiline nose; full, sneering lips: "Any of what true?"
"About him botching face peels," I replied.
"No," he said, after some silence. Then chuckled, my incorrigible evil twin. "Two can play the game." "What game?" I asked, as I moved towards his mobile and expressive back. "There's no game. You're playing a game with yourself. Shadow-boxing with paper tigers..."
I put my face in the hollow between his shoulder blades—a sheltered, safe valley. His pricey cologne mingled with his own particular musk. Intoxicating. I checked my watch—not much time. I reached around and stroked his thing until it quivered awake in my hands like a grumpy pet snake. The snake's owner turned around to face me, then kiss me. I kissed him back. It felt like it always did: I looked into my eyes, kissed my lips, tasted the brine of my skin. Everything familiar—apt word; deriving, after all, from family—his still tentative-after-all-these-years-touch and his savage mouth and the calluses on his thin palms.
"Smita, I feel the rains coming." he whispered, checking his watch with (what he thought was) a discreet flick of his eyes.
"And I'm scared," I replied.
It did rain that afternoon, though....
1 Non-resident Indian
