Vikram Chandra - Love and Longing in Bombay

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So now Sheila was on the hill, not quite on the top but not quite at the bottom either, and from this base camp she began her steady ascent, not quickly — she had patience and steadiness. It was done over years, it cost money, and the hill resisted, it fought back right from the start. In that first year Sheila threw cocktail parties and lunches and Derby breakfasts, and it became clear to her that the top of the hill was the Boatwalla mansion, which stood on a ridge surrounded by crumbling walls, overlooked by the frame of a new apartment building coming up just above. The mansion wasn’t really on top of the hill, and it was dingy and damp, but Sheila knew it was where she had to go to get to the real top, the only one that mattered. For that first year Sheila sent invitations to Dolly Boatwalla every other week and received typed regrets one after the other, she saw Dolly Boatwalla at parties, and finally she was introduced under an enormous chandelier at a plastics tycoon’s birthday party. Dolly Boatwalla was long and horsy-looking, she looked down an enormous nose and murmured, “ Ha-aaloo ,” and looked away into the middle distance. Sheila understood that this was part of the rules of current diplomacy and was happy all the same, and even when the next weekend at the racecourse somebody by mistake introduced them again and Dolly said “ Ha-aaloo ” as if for the first time, Sheila didn’t mind a bit and took it as part of her education. Sheila smiled and said, “You look wonderful, what a lovely scarf.” She was willing to let Dolly have her way, and if Dolly had been a little less Boatwalla and a little more sagacious, she could have adopted Sheila and taught her and patronized her in a thousand little ways, but Dolly saw only a little upstart, which Sheila was, Dolly didn’t see the ferocious political will, that hidden glint. This is how wars start.

How it all really began was this: finally Dolly accepted one of Sheila’s invitations. Actually she had no choice but to accept, which may be why she went from being coolly condescending to openly sarcastic. And it started. What happened was that Sheila had finally been able to join the Lunch Club. Not many people in Bombay knew that the Lunch Club existed. Most of the people who knew what it was also knew that they couldn’t be in it. The women in the Lunch Club met once a month for lunch at one of the members’ houses. After lunch they played cards. Then they had tea and went home. That was it, nothing very exciting on the face of it, but if you knew anything you knew that that was where marriages were arranged and sometimes destroyed, deals were made, casually business was felt out, talk went on about this minister in Delhi and So-and-So’s son who was school captain at Mayo. It was the real stuff, you know, masala -grinding, how the world works. So Sheila’s name came up, naturally, several times, and, every time, Dolly sniffed and said, Not our type, really, and that finished off Sheila’s chances. But then Sheila made friends, fast ones, and they pushed it, they liked her, for her money, for her nippy wit, for her snap, and maybe it was also that some of them were tired of Dolly, of her Boatwalla sandwiches served soggy but with absolute confidence, of her pronouncements and the delicate way she patted her pursed lips with a napkin after she ate pastries. So they insisted, and it was clear there would be either agreement or a direct struggle, and Dolly decided that it wasn’t worth risking defeat, so finally she flung an eyebrow towards the roof, sighed, and said, “All right, if you must, can we talk about something else, this is really so boring.”

So this was how they all gathered at Sheila’s home. Her new house, that is. It was a white two-storied mansion, really, with a bit of lawn in front and a little behind, and of course even though it was big money for the time it was nothing on the sprawling Boatwalla jungles from colonial times, when you could buy land on the hill for nothing. Still, a house was something, actually it was a lot, and the Lunch Club oohed and exclaimed as they came up the short flight of stairs and into the front room, Sheila had it absolutely right, there were the big double doors inlaid with brass and then a carved wooden elephant’s foot with walking sticks in it and a Ganesha that was chipped and old and grey stone and it had to be some major antique, two huge plants on either side, and a diffused white gleam through a skylight, and in the halo, changeless and eternal as the day that Bijlani threw his future kingdom at her feet, was Sheila, her skin glowing, her hair as dark as a Malabar wave on a moonless night. She welcomed them silently, smiling as they chattered around her, she led them through a long hall, past a study with a huge brown desk and a brass lamp, past a room full of leather-bound books and brown-and-red Kashmiri rugs, and finally into the dining room, where on a stone-topped dining table gleamed twelve place settings in silver. Here, finally, Sheila spoke her first words of the afternoon, “My son,” because a young boy was standing near the table peering at the fantastic ikebana flower arrangement at its centre. Sheila ruffled his hair, and he turned his head to look at her, and the ladies murmured. He was certainly very good-looking. Bijlani’s stolid bulk had passed into a sort of slow, unblinking expressiveness in his eyes, a kind of silence, and he had Sheila’s sharp features. “Say hello,” Sheila said, and he did, shaking hands with each one of them. Mani Mennon laughed over her shoulder as he gravely bowed over her hand, and she said, “Better watch out for this one.” Meanwhile Sheila leaned into the corridor and called, “Ganga! Take Sanjeev to his room, will you?”

Ganga came in, a short wiry woman with her hands still wet from dishes. She had her red sari pulled between her legs and she pushed back a strand of loose hair with one hand. As Sheila walked Sanjeev to the door, Ganga took his other hand, and they smiled at each other over his head. “Isn’t he so cute?” Mani Mennon said, and as she did, Sheila turned and saw the look on Dolly’s face, a kind of absurd pursing of the nostrils, an unmistakable look of offense, as if she had just begun to smell something bad. As everyone went towards the table, Mani Mennon hung back and whispered at Sheila, “She has French maids.” It was true. They weren’t actually French, usually Keralans, but all the same the petits fours at the Boatwalla mansion were served by maids in black dresses and those frilly things around their heads. Mani Mennon rolled her eyes. She was Sheila’s main supporter in the Lunch Club, her sponsor, and she hated Dolly Boatwalla but was absolutely silenced by her, robbed of speech and presence of mind by Dolly’s height and ruthlessness and way of commanding a room. Mani Mennon was short and funny and plump and couldn’t think of any reasons why she should be silenced by Dolly, but always was anyway “Boatwalla bitch,” Mani Mennon hissed. Sheila shrugged and took her calmly by the elbow and led her to the others.

“Have some quail,” she said. The food was unusual, small and spicy, made by a Lucknow cook from a Nawabi family. The tastes were light and chased each other across their palates with such foreign essences that they had to exclaim that it was all perfect, because they had never tasted anything like it before. Dolly held a silver fork at an angle and sawed at a tiny wing, and even she was puzzled and pleased, you could see that. Afterwards they sat on the sofas, luxuriously sunk in the pillows and lingering over the sweet dish, a concoction of almonds and cream so light you barely felt it on the tongue. Dolly began to be funny. She sat on a couch by herself, one leg bent over the other, in her cream pants suit, all long lines from the silk sheen of her leg to the nose, which was a little bony but very elegant. She told cruel little stories about people they all knew. All the stories were about people doing silly things or embarrassing themselves or just being stupid and not knowing about something that everybody knew. Dolly had a great sense of timing and was a good mimic and it was impossible not to laugh at her stories. The women sat in a little semicircle around her and laughed. Sheila laughed, and Mani Mennon laughed. Mani Mennon whispered to Sheila, “She must tell stories about me, too,” and then she laughed at a story about a Punjabi woman at the club who pronounced “pizza” the way it was written and who dressed her daughters in too much gold.