The Smoke is Rising (5 page)

A few minutes later Girish called the Director of Customer Relations again but was met by the same collapsed voice telling him in three languages that the mobile phone he was trying to call was either switched off or out of range. He tried the Director’s secretary once more. Sarita answered on the second ring and stated again that sir was in a meeting but yes sir, she had already passed on the message sir, when sir had emerged for a break, and sir had said that he would call sir as soon as possible, but you know how these meetings are sir, especially the meetings with sir, so she really could not specifically inform sir as to when exactly sir would be free to speak to sir but, of course sir, without a doubt sir, she would make sure that she reminded sir when he next emerged, not to worry sir, thank you sir, good afternoon sir. Girish knew she was lying; he could picture her face, like a boulder wearing a
bindi
. He also knew he would call her again in half an hour and hated himself for it.

Susheela’s left ear was beginning to smart so she transferred the receiver to her other side.

‘We’re having the downstairs bathroom redone. It’s been such
a torture, I can’t tell you, and now that the workmen are finally in, life is even worse. Yesterday when I came back they had left the front door wide open and were nowhere to be seen. Now the stupid company has sent the wrong shower door and I’m going to have to sort all of that out,’ said Priyanka, Susheela’s elder daughter.

‘I know, everything goes wrong at the same time,’ said Susheela.

‘Exactly. And Vivek’s in Brussels again, so that’s really helping. Actually he called last night but the line was so bad. It’s been happening the last few times. I think they’ve sold him the same
dabba
mobile that they sold me, remember? And of course, he’ll make me go and sort all of that out because he’ll claim to be too busy.
Amma
? One sec, one sec, okay … just got to get this.’

Susheela’s mouth felt dry and chalky as she listened to Priyanka’s travails. She swallowed hard, having completely lost the thread of the conversation some minutes ago. This in itself was not unusual. Their fortnightly conversations had come to mean progressively less to Susheela. Of course, it was lovely to hear from Priyanka and there was still that warm ripple when she remembered things Susheela had mentioned the previous fortnight. But their worlds had caromed apart a few years ago and the ties had grown flaccid and indistinct. Priyanka’s chatter now seemed like the background buzz from television or titbits gleaned from mobile phone conversations in the doctor’s waiting room. There were vague allusions to Katherine and Carlos, Jude and Alice, Matt and Chris. The call would be interrupted at times by mumbled asides to her PA or her husband. Susheela had noticed that of late Priyanka seemed to have a stock set of questions that she would clatter through, often hurriedly ending the conversation, promising further detail by email. These emails would arrive a few days later, stippled with exclamation marks and breezy references to Merzbau installations,
shochu
bars, experimental dance and city breaks to Stockholm and Berlin.

Susheela had not consciously withdrawn from Priyanka’s elaborate life. She would not even have recognised the growing distance as a consequence of her own actions. Her retreat was subliminally pre-emptive: she had begun an instinctive process of shutting out before she was cast as the lonely interfering mother gazing at her daughter sashaying into the distance. As far as Susheela was concerned, the important thing was that the precepts of form and propriety were maintained. So calls were made, emails read, cards sent. To proceed otherwise would be to descend into sloth and chaos.

Priyanka’s job entailed something incomprehensible in London to do with capital markets. Where once this had been a matter of accomplishment and esteem, Susheela had quickly understood that the current mood was very different. It now seemed that most of the recent global financial scourges could be tracked back to Priyanka and the incumbents of her world. Heads shook slowly at Mysore dinner parties, expressing disgust at the greed and recklessness of these brash, aggressive bankers and the mercenary politicians who had allowed them to gamble away the futures of decent savers from Caracas to Chennai. Susheela’s feelings remained ambivalent. Where once she had quietly skimmed along on the tide of her daughter’s achievements, she now stood tacitly at the shore, facing the other way.

She would be affected as much as anyone else by the tribulations of global finance, a widow with no actively earned income. There was a sum of cash in fixed deposits garnering a comfortable amount of interest: a combination of accumulated savings, the pay-out from the life assurance company and the entitlement received from Sridhar’s provident fund, following twenty-five odd years of service at House of Govind. She owned the house outright and had no debts. Her circumstances had never impelled her to examine closely the small portfolio of shares that she had inherited from
Sridhar. From all the talk on the news, she surmised that it was probably worth very little.

There were gifts from Priyanka too: a new television one Diwali; extravagant bouquets and jewellery on her birthday; and two or three times arbitrary cheques for thousands of rupees which Susheela had been embarrassed to accept but too disconcerted to refuse. There was talk now of sinking banks, plunging interest rates and the end of the property boom. Her instinctive response was to look into some belt-tightening options; not easily done, as she did not regard herself as remotely extravagant.

Priyanka had rung off. There was someone at the door and she had to be at her Pilates class in fifteen minutes. Susheela sat by the window, still holding the telephone, looking out at the front lawn. Swirls of pale green, brown and white roiled across the ground, enraged at the lack of water. The
mali
had left the hosepipe in a great coil in the middle of the lawn, as if to provoke it further. There was a sudden rushing noise, followed by a few beeps. The power had gone again.

She sighed and began to sort through some old envelopes in the magazine rack. The situation was quite different with her younger daughter Prema, who had left Mysore for California on a celebrated scholarship. Her work had eventually led her to a research post involving the application of genomic knowledge to the development of fertility drugs. Prema offered up little about her life. Her telephone calls were more irregular, her emails hardly worth mentioning. Her life seemed to revolve around the lab and weekend rock-climbing trips. Even so, Susheela felt an implicit candour there that seemed to be missing in those lengthy conversations with Priyanka. The call from Prema could last five minutes or half an hour, but Susheela remained a participant. They talked about the most useful exercises for lower back pain, Obama’s sparkling speeches or the easiest way to get an intense smoky flavour in a
baingan bhartha
. Beyond these moments, Susheela knew that it would be advisable not to probe further. Prema was like a piece of parchment that revealed certain limited truths but which, if inspected too closely, would crumble into a fine dust.

Mala slowed down as she approached the busy junction, easing the scooter to one side. She had been living in Mysore for over two years but some of the routes still confused her with their sudden one-way systems and riots of side roads. City officials had helpfully provided a profusion of signs and arrows at this circle, but they all seemed to look skywards in despair. Matters were not improved by the proprietors of Sheethal Talkies, who had covered up a number of signposts with posters for their morning feature,
Desires of the Night
, a work chronicling the renaissance of a girl who moved to a large city from an inconsequential town. It was unlikely that Mala would ever have the opportunity to compare experiences with the film’s central character but there were one or two similarities.

Mala had grown up in Konnapur, a three-road town choking in its own dust. It was famed for its Eeshwara temple, a Hoysala masterpiece that today sat among ramshackle lean-tos housing doleful purveyors of
pooja
items. Little hummocks of vermillion and turmeric rose amid baskets of chrysanthemums, jasmine and marigolds. Coconuts were piled into bushels under unsteady wooden tables. Framed photos of Shiva and Ganesh stood propped up next to brass plates containing twists of sandalwood paste, incense sticks, lozenges of camphor and glistening fans of betel leaves. A little further, at a slightly more respectful distance, a selection of
beedi
and
paan
shops nudged the periphery of the temple complex.

The temple was the town’s spiritual and economic hub, providing focus for most of its devotees, traders, handlers, speculators,
brokers, priests, academics, itinerants, beggars and charlatans. Mala’s father, Babu, had paid his dues as a secondary school teacher, poet, real estate broker and areca nut dealer before ending up as a tour-guide-cum-travel agent. His business cards confirmed that he was a ‘History and Heritage Specialist’, thereby adding a scholarly sheen to his entrepreneurial activities. Dressed in oversized dazzling white shirts and pleated navy trousers, Babu would tell tourists that he chose not to tie himself down with premises and staff, preferring instead to meet his potential clients in the hallowed domain of the temple courtyard. In his professional ministrations he was finely attuned to the fascinations and appetites of his clientele.

‘Welcome, welcome to Konnapur’s magnificent treasure,’ he would say expansively, as if personally responsible for the temple’s architecture.

‘I can see that you have come here looking for something very special, and I don’t mind telling you, beyond any doubt, you will find it.’

For teenaged gap-year drifters he spun salacious accounts involving multiple gods, endowing the mace, the trident and the conch with an unparalleled lewdness. To salvation-seeking freethinkers Babu elaborated on the transcendence of the self required to discover the eternal identity and, naturally, highlighted Konnapur’s key role in various Vedic milestones. For wealthy North Indian dowagers he played up the Konnapur deity’s impressive record in reversing astrological ill omens, granting male grandchildren and bestowing longevity.

The truth was that while Babu tried to turn his natural resourcefulness and broad knowledge to some personal gain, his love for Konnapur and the Eeshwara temple was profound and enduring. Much of his childhood had been spent loitering around the shrine vestibule, sheltering behind the carved balustrades and watching
swallows take off from the moulded lintels. There was little competition among Konnapur’s open sewers and garbage-strewn alleys. Babu’s investment in the temple, and his certain knowledge that destiny had no greater plans for him elsewhere, kept him rooted to the centre of Konnapur. If his embellishments of the temple’s historical and architectural significance resulted in some modest additional income for him, what was the harm?

At the age of twenty-three, Babu’s prospects had been scrupulously appraised by older family members as a precursor to marriage negotiations. Of course, as the saying went, parents would adore their child even if it were a bandicoot, but such subjective regard had to be put firmly to one side in the important business of nuptial assessments. Fortunately Babu’s parents had never had to avail themselves of such undiscerning devotion, nor later face any harsh realities. Babu was tall and broad-shouldered, with an open, confident face that invited further analysis. As a man, however, his looks were hardly of the greatest significance.

Hailing from a prominent Brahmin family that could number among its antecedents several Sanskrit scholars, a tax collector, a leading astrophysicist and the founder of a hospice for destitute widows, the initial outlook had been buoyant. Allowances then had to be made for a schizophrenic aunt and a great-uncle who spent his Sundays dressed as a former maharani of Mysore. There was also some speculation regarding the occasional presence of Babu’s father at an illegal gambling house. It was duly noted that Babu did not stand to inherit land of any great value, the bulk of the ancestral property having found its way into the hands of an alternate branch of the family. Being a graduate, his value had appreciated, but not by much. Years of Nehruvian planning and entrenched official venality had meant that he would still be adrift in a sea of lettered young men, unless a benevolent patron emerged to ease his passage into professional life. This was not an impossible
occurrence. The astrophysicist’s son still passed through Konnapur on occasion. As a senior official at Western Railway who lived in a sprawling pistachio-green mansion in Baroda, there were plenty of favours he could grant.