The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,57
her hips to persistent Hindi film music, who, in turn, gave way to the artsy interior-decorating aesthete who wore bright green glasses and patronized art shows and plays that questioned the meaning of life in modern India.
It had never bothered him until now—now, it bothered him intensely. The previous week, she had returned home with a haircut. The hair that had swung down to her waist and been straightened religiously each week at the beauty parlor was cut short to her ears. He had gazed at her, startled.
“Well?” she said, and there had been a challenge in the question.
It’s different, he said. When he hastily added, “It’s nice,” she said with a particular satisfaction, “I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
Now she was wearing a Fabindia kurta, the block-printed tunic reminding him, appallingly, of another woman: his wife had chosen, this time, to turn herself into a horrifying, inadequate facsimile of Kavika.
He wanted to weep.
THAT VIDYA WAS EXPERIENCING her own difficulties with this particular transmogrification was evident when she came to the study to discuss the annual Diwali party with him. This itself was unusual.
She settled herself on the sofa, placing an ankle over her opposite knee, a masculine pose that he at once recognized as belonging to another woman.
“I would so much prefer to keep the whole thing simple,” she said. “A return to simple values. A simple, quiet affair.”
He refused to help her. “Why don’t you?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course…. The thing is, my father …”
Anand knew precisely what the thing was. Harry Chinappa was not a subscriber to his daughter’s current transformation. Especially now, in the face of Diwali. Over the years, what had commenced as a gentle, mocking advisory to his daughter’s annual Diwali party, received by Vidya as a happy counterpoint to Anand’s own perennial indifference to such matters, had escalated into a complete takeover, with Harry Chinappa orchestrating both the party arrangements and the guest list, filling it, much to his daughter’s starstruck gratitude, with many of his own acquaintances. Anand, with a certain resignation, had confined his own involvement to matters of budget alone, a tail meekly attached to a kite as his wife swirled along on myriad social winds, the string that held her aloft amidst her buffeting firmly guided by the authoritarian hands of her father. The previous year, a hundred people had infested the house for the Diwali party; Anand had thought that about ninety people too many—a view apparently shared by no one else, least of all his wife, until a few days previously, when Kavika had leaned her elbows against the table in a restaurant and started talking animatedly about the Diwalis of her childhood.
They were at a Lebanese restaurant, Anand and Vidya, Amir, and Kavika. Amrita had stayed away, pleading work, and Anand had planned to do so as well—until he learned who else would be there.
“You know, it used to be this really simple affair …” she said and proceeded to describe customs that Anand recognized, in an instant moment of joyous enchantment, as identical to Deepavalis from his own childhood: a small family affair that started well before sunrise, with children setting off fireworks on the street in the chill early morning air until they were chased down by their mothers for the ritual predawn oil bath and donning of new clothes. Readings from the Ramayana followed by a breakfast of hot idlis and a spicy spoonful of ground herbs in a leghyam that his sister hated, finding it too strong and peppery, but that he rather enjoyed, before a day of visiting relatives and eating homemade sweetmeats and an evening of more fireworks.
He had never expected this, this gift of a shared communal past: to discover the shadings of simple brahmin austerity behind Kavika’s current international sophistication.
Her words triggered within him a fund of memories of his childhood life in Mysore. He wanted to tell her these things as he had never told anyone else. She would listen in her sympathetic, intelligent way—and she would understand. She would not judge him. And she would help him make sense of these things, of the passage of his life, help him bridge the frozen, awkward moments of the past with the speed of the present.
Usually, when she was around, he found himself tongue-tied, sneaking occasional darting glances at her, fiercely concealing the dreadful exhilaration and the plunging depression that chased each other within him like mischievous children on a playground.