Happy Birthday! And Other Stories Part 4

I fill my jeans pockets with fifty thousand rupees, an amount that will cover return train tickets from Mumbai to Delhi for twelve girls, along with twoathree days of lodging expenses. I hand the jeans to Mary and tell her that I'm going to drop Sara to the airport, that she should wash my jeans before seeing herself out of the house. Then I take Sara's hand in mine, as Lalit picks up her suitcase, and bid a cheerful adieu to Mary.

When I'm back home, three hours later, my jeans are hanging on the clothesline and the fifty thousand rupees are no longer there.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!.

Nadia didn't mean to stare at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but it was difficult not to when they were exposed like that, between the plunging neckline of her gold-amber dress. Dolly was known for her clothes as much as her parties, one of which Nadia and Danesh were attending today. Gold was the theme of this party.

Nadia probably stared too long because Dolly's eyes were looking at her, sharp but not surprised, chillingly polite from below the gold sparkle lacing her thin pencilled eyebrows.

Dolly turned to Danesh. Air-kiss. Raspberry lips.

*Welcome to my home,' she said with a sweep of her arms, smugness and approval lighting her diamondshaped face, her movements smooth despite their latent keenness. *Danny, you're looking dapper as always.'

Danesh grinned in acceptance, as if receiving compliments was a way of life for him. It was a way of life for him, Nadia thought ruefully, with his ineffable charm glossing over the shrewdness that had made him the CEO of GluMart at forty-two. None of his complaints over the past ten days about how a man, any respectable man, could be seen wearing gold, showed on him now, as he stood tall and proud in a gold-tinged suit Nadia had had custom-made for him.

*Shoes over there,' Dolly pointed, her wrists thin and clever hands unwavering. Nadia obediently bent down to remove her shoes, but Danesh hesitated as if actually considering not doing it. Nadia was mortified. Dolly was not someone who took *no' for an answer. She saw as Dolly tilted her face sideways at Danesh, and noted with surprise that the hostess had no adornments-no earrings, no necklace-nothing except a green-and-beige striped hairband at the base of her thick springy black hair, which she'd pulled back into an elegant coiffure.

Under Dolly's glare, Danesh leaned one hand against the wall and with his free hand began untying his cream lace-up shoes. Nadia groaned quietly; she had told him to wear slip-ons so he could remove them easily, and as usual he had dismissed her. Now Dolly and she stood looking at each other, Nadia finding no words with which to fill the silence. She had met Dolly only at parties like these, and exchanged nothing more than pleasantries. She wondered if she should tell Dolly that it was her birthday today and that she'd made no other plans, just so that she could be here.

But there'd been no question of missing Dolly's party; Dolly's husband Makhija and Danesh were due to sign a partners.h.i.+p in the coming week that would make GluMart the exclusive adhesive supplier to Makhija's paper company. No, Nadia decided, it was Danesh who should tell Dolly and the other guests that it was her birthday.

But did he even care? This morning, Danesh had given her a three-carat diamond solitaire-an impersonal pendant she guessed his secretary had bought from the jewellery store below their office-and a card-not a crude or witty card, but the sort of card you give an acquaintance whose taste you cannot guess, with a drawing of a small bouquet of daisies tied with a thin red ribbon whose tail spelled out the words, *Happy Birthday'. This had marked Nadia's birthday celebrations.

Danesh finished taking off his shoes, and Dolly promptly turned around, leading them to the living room, where the party was in full swing. Nadia stared at the back of Dolly's head, admiring her hairstyle, and as she fretted that she could never make her hair look like that, Dolly's hairband moved. From behind the thick of her coiffure emerged two lifeless eyes and out darted a tail. Nadia gasped, stopping. She grabbed Danesh's arm with both her hands.

*Her ha-hair ... it's moving-'

Danesh looked from Nadia to the moving hairband and said coolly, *Nice chameleon you have there, Dolly.'

Dolly turned around, almost purring, and lifted a hand to run along the chameleon's long green-beige body, *I knew you'd like it, Danny.'

Nadia held Danesh's arm tighter, as he turned to her and said, *Animatronics.'

Dolly and he looked at each other, exchanged a small smile.

Then Danesh stepped in line with Dolly, and Nadia had to let go of his arm.

Blood rushed back to her legs and she walked faster to catch up with the duo, even as the chameleon's head vanished back into the coiffure, once again becoming a hairband.

They entered the living room that was bursting with energy and splendour, a state in which all its days seemed to pa.s.s. It possessed a sense of expectation so palpable that Nadia felt late. She had only ever seen it like this-low lighting, candles on the mantelpiece, Swarovski-laden golden sheers, gooseneck lamps, authentic Husain paintings, a Chinese rock garden opening into the terrace.

The penthouse was large, but chopped up as most Mumbai homes were, with every room buzzing with activity, like a beehive. Below, the city stretched out in all directions, humming and clanking like an engine, unwavering in its business, the streets coiled into knots. But none of its chaos reached the guests, who'd left the streets behind, the city behind, even their country behind, for this apartment could have belonged in New York and this party could have been in Marrakech; there was nothing Indian about it.

Dolly vanished, probably to greet another guest. According to rumours, Dolly hadn't wanted to move to this towering penthouse because she'd read in Cosmopolitan that high-rise apartments were anti-gravity, putting residents at greater risk of developing wrinkles. Nadia imagined Dolly throwing a tantrum over this, her perfectly made-up face contorted with anger, her manicured fingers curled into thin fists, Makhija rea.s.suring her, making a quid pro quo that allowed Dolly to s.h.i.+mmer in her diamonds and host endless parties in lieu of living here. The rumour, as intended, made Dolly sound like a silly woman, the way in which smart people are often dumb. Nadia didn't like her the better for it.

Nadia turned to Danesh, who was already nodding to a stout man in the far corner of the room. He absently held her arm for a moment, not taking his eyes off the man, and said, *I'll be right back.'

Nadia knew she'd be alone for the rest of the party.

She walked among the swarm of people, noticing a buckle, a detail of fabric, the occasional pensive look, a half-smile from some partially recognizable face. She was dressed wrong, as usual. Though her sari was as bright as the chandeliers in the high ceiling, the women around her were flaunting their a.s.sets to greater effect: the lower the neckline and shorter the dress, the richer they were. Yet, despite their many plastic surgeries and b.o.o.b jobs, most of them looked like elderly girls-girls who were suffering from some wasting disease.

Knowing that no one would wave her over to join their little clique, Nadia searched for another woman she knew would be in a sari, Mrs Kapur. She found her alone, looking soft as a sponge, as if she would return to her original shape if you squeezed her and then let go. But she was someone on whom Nadia could rely and who, in return, only demanded that Nadia behave blandly cheerful.

Mrs Kapur's light conversational chatter caused a dreamlike state to come over Nadia. Her eyes searched for Danesh and she found him just a few feet away, standing on a rug next to the mini-pond, talking to someone, driven with purpose from one person to another, impervious to everything except his own internal script.

Despite not wearing shoes, he looked taller than anyone else in the room; he probably wasn't. His dark hard feet sank into the rug. Each joint was capped with a little pink-brown node of skin, each toenail curved forward into the thick wool, and each heel was like the scruffy end of a cricket bat. She knew he hated his feet (as much as he loved the other parts of his body), and didn't want others to see them; yet he stood barefoot and confident, like it didn't even bother him.

She wished that, like in the movies, he would turn to catch her eye, and they would stare at each other in the middle of this crowded room, declaring their love in unspoken words. But nothing like that ever happened. He didn't look at her when other people were around.

Nadia watched him for a while and noticed that he'd spoken to everyone but Dolly. His ignoring seemed deliberate.

Without warning, Nadia was gripped by a dreadful array of feelings, and she couldn't settle on which one to succ.u.mb to first. She excused herself from Mrs Kapur, mid-sentence, knowing she was welcome back there, and walked over to another room, from one room to the next, till she found an empty one. It was a study with a gla.s.s cabinet full of mismatched travel souvenirs-a Venetian gondola, a Norwegian troll, the Petronas Towers replica, j.a.panese ladies in swirling skirts.

Nadia picked up a miniature silver vase, identical to the one she had in her living room, bought by Danesh on a recent business trip to Cairo.

*Do you know that this vase is a symbol of fertility?' a man's booming voice interrupted her. She dropped the vase on the ground and looked up from the clanking into soft brown eyes. She wondered if he was mocking her, if he knew of the phantom pregnancies she'd had, of the foolish time in their thirties when Danesh and she had looked at each other and, thinking their love would last, had bravely said: we don't need children, we have each other. So the children didn't come and though she didn't particularly miss having them, she did wish that there was someone to witness their life, their marriage, someone who would understand, even judge, or hate, but at least be there to see it all. She knew that only a daughter, or perhaps even a son, might have challenged Danesh in his own home, thawed his cold, set ways. For as a wife she could never say or do things that a daughter or son could.

*I don't think we've met. I'm Baman Tata,' the man said, extending his hand. His name sounded familiar and Nadia placed him at the centre of a recent scandal, as the man whose wife had left him for a potato-chip baron, earning him the nickname Batata. Baman Tata-Batata. They were a tough crowd.

Nadia was struck by his appearance.

He wore a plaid suit with pencil lines of gold, and a gold tie. The skin on his face was lumpy, like the surface of sour milk, he had thick brown lips, like those of a smoker woman, and his hips were plump. He was probably in his forties, losing hair like most other men, a few strands of grey poking out from beneath the gel plastering his scalp; would anyone dye such a scanty crop of grey?

He was in many ways plain, but so were, in her opinion, most men his age. Where did he get his confidence from then? It could only be from too much money or too little happiness.

She said her name and by the blank look on his face, she a.s.sumed he'd never heard of her.

*I didn't mean to follow you here-' he said.

*You followed me?' Nadia asked, surprised. She sensed his resolve, and there was a twitch of alarm inside her.

*I do apologize. I meant no harm,' he said quickly. *You are so beautiful. A vision in gold. So feminine in this sari, unlike all the women outside. I couldn't help myself.'

Nadia was startled. In a way she was honoured that he chose her, but it also seemed like a violation of her, as a woman alone in a room.

Be polite, agree with people even if they ask for everything without knowing anything about you, is what her mother had taught her. Retaliate quietly, by making your own wrong a.s.sumptions, she had learnt.

*I ... uhm ... am married. I have a husband, outside,' she said weakly, still hoping that the word *husband' might carry the weight of pride and reproach.

*So you're married?' he said, very lightly, as though marriage was a matter for amused contemplation.

She laughed in a way she hoped was disarming, her mask of brightness securely in place: spirited and capable, not crumbled and damp.

*Yes, very happily. Very happily married.'

His leaky eyes widened, and he laughed, *That's the biggest lie man has invented-happy and married in the same sentence.'

She detected a stupid triumph in his presumptuous voice and wished that Danesh was here to tell him that there was something like a happy marriage, that Nadia had shown it to him. But Danesh wasn't here, wasn't looking for her, and would not until after dessert at exactly thirty minutes past twelve, when amidst the clinking of the champagne gla.s.ses he'd tell her they were leaving, insisting that it was an appropriate time for a good guest to set out.

*So where is this very-very-happily-married husband of yours? And why has he left you alone? Or is it you that left him?'

Nadia stared at Baman, not wanting any silences out of which ugly truths might tumble out. Danesh had a horror of any kind of negative talk about them, however remote. Quietly, Nadia shared the same fear, often dreaming of huddles of women gathered around a dark sticky centre of deception, shutting her out with their lowered voices and smouldering glances. What if Nadia told this strange man the truth? What then?

She bent down to pick up the vase. He kneeled down next to her, staring into her eyes: *You are really quite beautiful.'

Then his fingers were on her face, coursing lightly over it. Her skin tingled under the trace of his touch, bursting to life. Her face, which she had forgotten, came back into focus, emerging like a b.u.t.terfly from an extended coc.o.o.n.

*Beautiful in such a simple, earthy way. Like a lotus.'

Nadia saw his lips pucker. Baman Tata was leaning over to kiss her. For a moment she almost relented, curious to know what it'd feel like to be kissed-really kissed-after years, to have her lips meet another's, to communicate what words couldn't. But her legs resisted, making her stand up straight, and she walked off, leaving Baman on the floor with the vase.

It was Nadia's first victory over a man in many years. She imagined Baman chewing on his words, his actions, as she often did after meeting a person. He'd follow her, she knew, to apologize for his impudence-impudence being his habit, and apology his way of sustaining that habit.

Nadia walked to her husband, noticing from afar what a good-looking man he was: a tall man with an upright, square face, tidy dark hair springing straight up from his forehead and strong hands with fingernails as clean as soap. A man like that would never have looked at her, even in her heyday, which she believed was in her early twenties. She had him because his mother had liked her plain looks, her yielding manner, her soft chapattis and misleading childbearing hips.

But in the early days of their marriage he had told her otherwise. In warm whispers he'd said he loved her, her simplicity, her stillness, her strength, speaking to her like a boy who'd caught a luminous b.u.t.terfly. Nadia held on to the memory of these compliments the way a rock climber holds on to a st.u.r.dy ledge.

Now as she stood beside Danesh, he glanced at her for only a moment before turning back to the man he was talking to.

Nadia tried not to focus on the way her stomach curled. After all, Danesh had lost his way with her a long time back; twenty-one years of marriage had rid him of any interest in his lightweight and easy-to-brush-aside wife. Now whenever they met someone, he'd direct his attention resolutely towards that person, as if he was a ball facing the front wall of a squash court.

It wasn't his fault though, but Nadia's. She had drawn a false picture of marriage, despite being told several times that the real thing could never live up to the expectation. It was nothing unusual, her psychiatrist had convinced her, later asking if Danesh made her feel like the furniture at home, an oft-used term Nadia took to mean someone essential who went unnoticed. She'd said no, she was not like furniture but like the air Danesh breathed, something he needed all the time without being aware of it.

She heard trolleys being wheeled forth and knew, without turning around, that dinner was being set: platters of shrimp, sus.h.i.+, slices of roast beef, duck a l'orange, and a sculpted pyramid of caviar on a salver with points of toast. Various finely cut vegetables would be fanned out on a platter, preserving their colour more faithfully than the vegetables she regularly saw.

An hour later, the dessert tray would come: a tall meringue cake dwarfing the coconut lime tarts topped with kiwi-even if it was out of season-and chocolatecoated pastry horns stuffed with whipped cream, none of which would be touched by the calorie-conscious guests. Then, among much cheering and toasting, two servants wearing chef caps and white gloves would wheel in another silver trolley with champagne gla.s.ses.

Indulgences were served like clockwork to the exacting stomachs of the rich.

Sometimes Nadia wondered if things would be shuffled around-the champagne gla.s.ses coming out before dessert or not at all-but it was a game, and the routine worked with the predictability of a dull old spinster.

Her roving eyes caught Baman's. She realized how disconnected Danesh and she appeared from each other. Danesh engrossed in someone else, Nadia s.h.i.+fting in awkwardness as though lacking something essential, both of them facing each other at an angle that suggested a quarrel. She could cry for her humiliation.

No, she scolded herself. She would not let herself be this way. Especially not when Baman Tata was staring at her with a peculiar gentleness, like she was some kind of nourishment.

Glad for his stubbornness, glad that at least someone knew what to do, she walked over to him, firm, smiling. He was picking up sus.h.i.+ rolls with his fingers, tossing them straight into his mouth, sipping white wine from a full gla.s.s. Danesh would never be caught indulging like this in someone else's home, barely touching the food or drinks, to make it known to the host that he was there for nothing else save their company.

*So you must be planning to be very very happily married sometime in the future?' Baman said, grinning, teeth bared.

The possibility of a smile brushed Nadia's lips. Baman Tata was disarming in a way that she hadn't first recognized.

*I can only account for what I did in the past, and present, not in the future,' Nadia replied, finding it a rather clever phrase.

*Do you talk to him about that, really talk about your past, future?'

Nadia looked at him to see if he was still mocking her, but she saw a rare sincerity in his eyes, as if his question had been sp.a.w.ned from the slime of some long-nurtured realization.

*We communicate,' she said evenly, not to betray her hurt at the truth.

*Shame,' he said, in a way that made the word sound more shameful. *If I had the chance, I would listen to your voice all the time, hear every thought you have, every experience, till I could turn you inside out and nothing new would fall out.'

Laughter flexed Nadia's throat, as she envisioned Baman turning her inside out, as she did with Danesh's trousers when checking for loose change.

She leaned in and whispered shyly, *It's my birthday today.' She said it as if telling him that she loved him.

*That is wonderful! Now we can tell our grandchildren that we met on your birthday.'

Nadia had such a fit of laughter that she nearly choked. She rarely laughed at Dolly's or any of Danesh's friends' parties, for if she stepped out of their highly strung amiability, Danesh would want to leave.

The more money he made, the less he laughed.

And then Baman said, *I don't understand why your husband would ever look at another woman.' He said it so quietly that for a moment Nadia thought it was her own voice speaking. She looked into his eyes and realized that this was not random flirtation. He had not picked her out for her gold sari or pleasing looks. He thought that she was in the same boat as him. That she would help him piece together why his wife had abandoned him the way others abandon clothes. Empathize with why he'd become a Batata.

*Is that what you thought of your wife? That she would never look at another man?' she said angrily.

Baman started, shuffled his feet and took a long sip of his drink, so long that he emptied out the gla.s.s.

*Is that what men still expect of women?' she continued. *That they'll choose a man they no longer love over happiness? Wake up and look around you. Look at these women; they have choices.'

*And you?' he asked softly. *Do you have a choice?'

Nadia looked at Dolly; it was difficult not to spot her even from afar. She was standing alone, instructing one of her many servants. Dolly was taller than Nadia, but with narrower shoulders and hips, long legs and a stubborn chin. She wore pale green lenses, a surprising colour against her olive skin, and hard to look into. She held her head slightly lowered, slightly tilted, a wariness hardened and deliberate, her att.i.tude indifferent but uncompromising, like a cat's.

Nadia could detect nothing of herself in Dolly.

Odd choices are easier for men to make, her psychiatrist had said.

*Are you okay?' Baman asked.

No, she thought silently, she was not okay. She'd existed too cautiously within her marriage, Nadia had, as if there were shards of gla.s.s all around her. She had to realize that Danesh and her life together was a misstep, not a car crash. Something could change.