‘Kashi mama says he’s going to be poor forever,’ Dhan informs the car seriously. ‘And if his chinnin want the good life, they’ll just have to suck up to their boozy boujee bua.’
‘Perfect!’ Natasha claps her hands delightedly. ‘I’d love to be boozy, boujee bua! We’ll make all the little Kashi-lings really grovel before we sign them in for cheap daaru and dancing on Thursday nights, won’t we, Dhanno?’
‘Hands on the wheel, Nattu!’ The brigadier frowns.
‘For heaven’s sake, Daddy, I’m thirty years old!’
‘We should never have sent him to boarding school.’ Mrs Mala Dogra’s voice trembles slightly. ‘He feels closer to his wretched friends than to us – that’s why he’s moved out to live with them in that dismal barsati in Nizamuddin.’
‘But that’s healthy!’ The brigadier thumps the dashboard. ‘That’s normal! Besides, he can’t commute from Noida daily! Do you want to smother the boy, Mala-D?’
‘Don’t call me Mala-D!’ Mrs Mala Dogra hugs her grandson harder and sits back, disgusted.
Her mother-in-law, a fluffy, bird-like lady, dressed in a creamy chiffon sari and pearls, looks at her uncertainly, a question in her rheumy old eyes.
‘Nothing happened, Mummy.’ Mrs Mala Dogra pats the old lady’s arm reassuringly. ‘So exciting, no? We’re going to the Club to play Bumper Tambola!’
As the old lady nods and breaks into a sweet smile, the Maruti Swift swings onto Aurangzeb Road and joins the long line of cars inching towards a set of imposing black wrought-iron gates monogrammed with the horse and jockey insignia of the Delhi Turf Club. A moustachioed guard, standing next to a gleaming metal sign that reads ENTRY FOR MEMBERS ONLY, notes the DTC sticker on the windshield of the dilapidated Swift, snaps to attention and waves them in.
The DTC’s website declares it to be a world in itself – ‘a haven of graciousness and elegance, merging the historical past with the modern present’ – and on this particular winter morning, with the sun out, and the white colonial main bungalow gleaming in the middle of the sprawling thirty-two-acre lawns like a Fabergé egg in a bed of emerald-green velvet, the claim does seem to ring true. Pillared, bougainvillea-festooned verandas fan out from the main bungalow like fine filigree work; there is the glint of swimming pool turquoise, tennis court ochre, and skating rink peat in the distance, and a giant arch of multicoloured helium balloons sways airily across the East Lawn. A gay banner flutters below it.
‘COME ONE COME ALL! ANNUAL CHARITY BUMPER TAMBOLA!’
‘What’s with the balloons?’ Mrs Mala Dogra grimaces. ‘Looks like a birthday party.’
‘Some bloody lala trying for an out-of-turn membership, I say,’ Brigadier Dogra replies. ‘He sponsored free balloons to suck up to us. These baniyas are all the same.’
‘Daddy!’ Natasha throws him a reproving look.
‘I like the balloons,’ Dhan declares decidedly.
‘So do I,’ replies his mother firmly, as she swings into the senior citizen parking spot, right next to the main porch. ‘Woohoo, Dadi, are you feeling lucky? We could go home millionaires!’
Brigadier Dogra’s mother prods his back with her membership card. When he turns around, she holds up ten fingers, her eyes anxious and fever-bright.
‘Ten,’ she says. ‘Ten.’
‘Yes, I’ll get ten tambola tickets, Mummy,’ he replies gently. ‘Five for you – and one-one for the rest of us. And Fanta-beer shandy and shaami kebabs for everybody!’
The old lady thrusts her membership card at him urgently, and he takes it with a slightly overdone cry of delight. ‘Wow! Dadi’s treat, everyone!’
‘Thank you, Dadi!!!’ all of them chant in a well-practised chorus. The old lady smiles proudly. The tension in her face eases and she sits back, satisfied. Paying for the eats is the sweetest part of visiting the DTC for her, and the family does not let on that they actually never swipe her card.
The brigadier produces a hat and pulls it low over his head.
‘Behra Mehra and Urvashi Khurana are bound to be haunting the place, soliciting votes,’ he mutters darkly as he exits the car. ‘I’m going in incognito!’
‘Mummy, they call the numbers so quickly – how will you tick five tickets at once?’ Mala Dogra asks her mother-in-law, sounding worried. ‘The stress will be too much for your heart.’
‘Kashi and I will help Dadi,’ Natasha says, turning around to wink at the old lady. ‘And we’ll all split the spoils.’
Mrs Mala Dogra rolls her eyes and sighs.
‘That’s if he shows up.’
In the dappled shade of an ancient peepal tree growing miraculously right out of the pavement at the edge of a scraggly park in Nizamuddin, a callow adolescent in a bright orange shirt holds a long, sharp blade to the throat of a young man about ten years his senior. They are watched by a circle of rummy-playing taxi drivers, a one-eyed shakkarkandi-chaat seller, several urchins and a skinny cow.
‘Please don’t kill me, Firdaus.’
This entreaty, uttered in a deep, smiling voice, causes the trainee-barber to pull his blade away, his expression reproachful.
‘Why you’re joke, Kashi sir? Would I kill my best client?’
‘Your only client, you mean,’ sniggers the chaat-seller as the puny Firdaus tips his victim’s chair backwards to rest against the peepal’s ancient trunk, stippled with the jointed names of lovers now long sundered. ‘Akash sa’ab, better you than us!’
In reply to this sally, Akash Dogra, lathered to the cheekbones and tilted back till all he can see is the peepal’s canopy (festooned with grimy string and a torn pink kite) lifts both hands in a fatalistic gesture to the Heavens. Seen from this angle, he is revealed to have thick, dark hair, a broad forehead, a large nose and comically panicked dark-brown eyes. As the blade scrapes away at his face, a firm but full-lipped mouth comes into view, and, gradually, a square, well-defined jaw and a column of muscular neck.
The
