The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,18
praise your cooking, always.”
“Indeed, Shanta, we all are,” said Thangam, eagerly reaching for a last dosa. But before she could lift it up and place it on her plate, a voice rang out from the dining room.
“Oh, my god! So little has been done! And there’s simply no time left for anything!” Vidya-ma appeared at the kitchen door, and her face was set in scolding, panicked lines. “Come along, everybody, do not linger. So much to be done! This is not the time for relaxing!”
Every now and then, Vidya-ma and Anand-saar liked to invite guests to their home, in intimate gatherings of ten to large crowds of a hundred, and the staff work varied accordingly. “I thought twenty couples,” she had said to Anand-saar over breakfast one morning. “It will give Kavika a chance to meet some people …”
“Great,” he had replied. “That sounds nice.”
“Should we not finish the upstairs first, Vidya-ma?” Thangam’s query was waved aside. Vidya commandeered all the staff—the maids, Narayan, the driver, the driver’s wife, the watchmen, and even, briefly, the transient gardener—to roll the carpets out of the way, push the sofas to the walls, and shift the coffee tables from the center of the room to the edges. She walked about, talking aloud to herself.
“The caterers will set up there, and the bar will be here; this area should be kept free for people to stand and mingle, the tall lamps here …”
But it appeared that arranging the main ground-floor rooms for the evening was neither a quick nor a simple process. “Oh yes,” Vidya-ma would say as the sofas and tables and potted plants settled in place and, two minutes later, “No, that really doesn’t work, does it?”
She did not expect agreement from them, so they kept silent as she devised anew. The telephone, never silent, seemed to ring today with a great energy and tenacity. Vidya-ma refused no telephone calls, and as she talked—“Oh, I’m so glad. Looking forward to seeing you then,” or “Oh, no special occasion, extremely casual evening, just throwing together some food and friends, making no effort at all, really”—she continued to direct them in their dance; waving them about, sending them staggering this way and that, and shaking her head. Occasionally, she would scold: “Be careful!” and “Please, do as I say! Do you not understand me?” and “Careful, you fool!”
Kamala did not mind the scoldings, but she wondered anxiously if her son would be able to follow Vidya-ma’s complicated instructions. She need not have worried: in the swirl of words—move this, shift that, no, not so much, a little more this side—Narayan seemed to grasp the end result Vidya-ma was looking for before it actually happened. And right toward the end, he spoke up.
“Shall I place it there, amma?” he asked softly, as his mother’s employer contemplated an exasperating side table, which was always out of place and never at home. Kamala tensed. Vidya-ma looked cross and irritable. “Where?” she said, her irritation undiminished. Narayan pointed to the far side of the room, and her face magically relaxed into smiles. “Why, the very place!” she said. “Clever boy. Yes, do so.” As Narayan scurried over to move the side table into position, Vidya-ma said to Kamala, “Your son, no? Smart boy.” Kamala quickly controlled the untoward display of happiness on her face for fear of provoking the jealousies of the others.
She had worried so much and, it appeared, so needlessly. The night before, she had hardly slept, envisioning all the things that might go wrong: Narayan accidentally breaking the best crystal; or his choosing this day of all days to play some mischievous trick; or having his friends appear at the gate of the house in boisterous, upsetting fashion. Now, in her pleasure, she pulled at his ear gently. “You little rascal,” she whispered, and he grinned.
But pleasure was soon offset by a growing fatigue: the day was not yet half over, there was still so much to be done, and Kamala could sense herself faltering. Finally, long after Thangam’s face had turned sour and sulky, and the gardener had absconded, and the driver’s wife had conquered her shyness to start a slow muttering under her breath, Vidya-ma sighed. “Yes, I think this will do….” she said. “And now you must start on the brass polishing…. And I want someone to help me with the garden chairs….”
“But, amma!” said Thangam, voicing a query that was growing in Kamala’s mind as well, “is the upstairs not to