The Red Carpet Read Online Free PDF

party for the neighbors, or bring trays of sweets around the lane to introduce themselves. They just moved in and started their life, which, in the beginning, didn’t seem to center around their flat at all. They were rarely at home; both of them worked all day, and then frequently went out again in the evening.
    When they did stay home, that was the signal for Mr. D’Costa to settle by his window seat, watching. At mealtimes, he studied the distant dishes on their dining table, wondering what food they contained. The same Goan meen curry and vegetables that he ate, or something impossibly foreign and romantic? He wondered what it was they discussed when they sat around with their jean-clad friends in the drawing room, or in the sunken garden, drinks in hand and listening to the harsh, too-loud music that seemed to have neither melody nor delicate rhythm and whose volume was finally tempered several months later by the baby’s arrival. Fragments of conversation wafting across the road revealed unabashed Americanisms in what had previously been unquestioned English territory: “That’s great!” instead of “Lovely!”; “Cool!” and “Awesome!” for “Good show!” Nice guys had replaced good chaps.
    And through it all, the hand-holdings and the hugs and the kissing hello and kissing good-bye, in full view of the neighbors, who, it was increasingly apparent, didn’t really exist or matter to this couple.
    It was a fascination that did not wane.
    Late in her pregnancy, to Mr. D’Costa’s delight, Rohini Kapur gave up her job and made her first appearance as a neighborhood memsahib. She liked to stroll heavy-footed down the little lane in her new avatar, taking in the slumberous leafy world she lived in, smiling politely at all the neighbors who, for months now, she had seen only as blurs through her car window. It took Mr. D’Costa two days to introduce himself, and one more week to gently entice her into his information net.
    “Ah, Mrs. Kapur,” he would say. “Not buying bread today?”
    Not today, Mr. D’Costa.
    “Your husband is not eating bread-toast for breakfast?”
    Yes, yes, he does. Toast and coffee.
    “I see. I see. . . . Where he is working? Bank, no? . . . Good job, uh?”
    Quite good, Mr. D’Costa. He likes it, anyway.
    “And your good health? You are . . . keeping well?”
    Very well, thank you.
    “Very good. Very good. Right-o, then.”
    Try as he might, Mr. D’Costa could feel no chord of similarity between the life the Kapurs led and his own long-ago, mustily remembered youth. It went beyond mere cultural differences; of times then and times now.
    Mr. D’Costa remembered: the treats of his boyhood were to munch on Huntley Palmer biscuits and to visit the cinema; the goals of early manhood never transcended a burning desire to dress and act like an English gentleman. To have the grand good fortune to study in England, and perhaps the ultimate blessing of being able to make a home there, or perhaps in Australia or even America. They had tried so hard and so faithfully to cross all those impossible cultural bridges—shyly, self-consciously feeling out the way; diffident of their Indian habits, of their accents, of the way their wives spoke English.
    It had been a time, he remembered, when the prized jobs were still in the plantation companies, run by British bosses who retained their power and their membership to whites-only clubs, unswayed, even after Independence. When it had still helped to have a name like Peter D’Costa, and not, like his colleague, Nagendra Pani, whose moniker their English superiors had brutally shortened to Nag. And made jokes about it, too.
    Now what was he to make of these youngsters across the road, who acted with all the assurance of a people who have forsaken those jewel-bright foreign jobs that feverishly glisten and beckon from across the oceans, siren whispers that taunt you in your dreams; forsaken those jobs to return to their country with an ease and