The Red Carpet Read Online Free PDF Page A

information about her husband’s drinking habit with equal efficiency. His scooter would get its daily wipe just when the Good Fellows Bakery man trundled down the lane on his bicycle, balancing the big metal bin full of bread, currant buns, shortbread biscuits, and mutton puffs behind him. As the neighborhood ammas and ayahs, the madams and maids, collected around, Mr. D’Costa abandoned his scooter to gather news and confirm his sightings of the morning.
    “Your husband not well, Mrs. Ambekar? Didn’t go to office this morning . . .” That’s right, Mr. D’Costa, he has a cold.
    “Yenu,
Muniamma,
amma nimage
salary
eevage kodalilava?”
No, sir, she hasn’t paid me my salary yet. Late as usual, and how do I settle my children’s school fees?
    More important, he dispensed information on what everyone else was doing, and with whom, discussing neighborhood matters with a weighty sense of deliberation that always impressed his listeners. Personal questions addressed to him, though, were always answered with a brisk, uninformative, “Fine! Very fine!” Everyone knew that Mrs. D’Costa lived a subterranean life deep in the recesses of their bungalow; she rarely surfaced for any kind of social dialogue. It was even rumored that she had succumbed to some terrible forgetful dementia; if that was true, Mr. D’Costa never confirmed it.
    Of all the changes that had taken place in the neighborhood, the block of flats opposite his house proved the most interesting. It was a large, three-story building painted a gleaming white, surrounded by green lawns and colorful cultivated flower borders— the product of a real-estate developer’s zeal and the purchased remains of three square bungalows. The inhabitants were not inaccessibly wealthy, yet they were fascinatingly different from anything Mr. D’Costa knew. He’d read about them in
India Today
magazine. Something about the new young professionals and their cosmopolitan lifestyle.
    “Puppies,” he explained to an astonished Mrs. Reddy. Or guppies. He couldn’t remember which. From his research, he knew that the apartment building contained two people in the software industry, a tax consultant, an oncologist at the glamorous, recently built Modi Hospital on Airport Road, a German engineer, a Lipton’s man, and in the ground-floor flat directly opposite, an investment banker married to an advertising professional.
    It was the last couple who succeeded in fully capturing Mr. D’Costa’s migratory interest. The banker, Aman Kapur, and his copywriting wife, Rohini.
    He’d noticed them the day they’d moved in: young, very young, as he had once been, but utterly different in their ways. They were as Indian as he was, but they had about them the strangeness of an inexplicable foreign movie. It wasn’t just the matching clothes: both husband and wife were clad in shorts and T-shirts, which looked nice on him, but skimpy on her. It wasn’t the quality of the richly upholstered furniture that was being carried in piece by expensive piece. It wasn’t the large shiny car painted black, with jazz music blaring through the open doors. It wasn’t the way they laughed together, or even the appallingly casual manner in which they held hands on a public road, without once being aware of the impropriety of it all.
    Mr. D’Costa was instantly enthralled. After years of even-handed interest around the neighborhood, he found his attention increasingly tugged across the street, right into the Kapur apartment. His favorite perch at the upstairs window gave him a delightful bird’s-eye view straight through their French windows, directly into their sitting room, and, if he squinted hard, to the conjoined dining room beyond. He quickly learned the rhythm and flow of the household opposite, the arrivals, the departures, when they rose and when they slept.
    For a long time, they kept to themselves, as did the other people in that apartment building. They didn’t have a housewarming