The Red Carpet Read Online Free PDF Page B

an air that indicates that this is perhaps not a very big thing to do at all. My goodness, Mr. D’Costa. My word.
    Vaguely he had known, through reading the papers and the magazines, that things had changed in this country. But this, opposite, was proof.
    Every now and then he shared the information he gleaned with the other older neighbors, but in a most casual way, never revealing the depths of his interest in the Kapurs, or the duration he spent gazing into their living room from his hidden niche by the window. To ward off further inquiry into his methods, he sometimes said that the Kapurs lived a life that was utterly familiar to him.
    “Like my son,” he said, to Mrs. Nizamuddin. “In Australia.”
    “Like my daughter,” she said, quick as a flash. “In London.” But there Mr. D’Costa had his doubts. Mrs. Nizamuddin’s daughter was married to a young man whom Mrs. Nizamuddin carefully referred to as a chef, which sounded to Mr. D’Costa’s ears like
chess
pronounced through a toothless mouth,
che-ff,
but which he knew to mean nothing more than a cook. And what kind of a profession was that? Mr. D’Costa’s son, he never failed to remind her, was an MBA.
    “And like my daughter too,” said Mr. Kurien irrelevantly. His daughter lived up the road and held no mysteries for Mr. D’Costa. She had chosen to disregard her parents’ views and marry an inappropriate young man in a headstrong, falling-in-love way, a proceeding that, as Mr. D’Costa said, was always filled with foolishness.
    He wanted to discuss this changing-times business with his wife. Once, she would have been interested in such topics, her alert mind composing some acerbic comment on the absurdity of youngsters the world over that would make him laugh and give him comfort. But her declining brain rarely took an interest in anything these days; conversation between them had slowed and finally trickled to a stop. They had turned away from each other, his eyes actively roaming over his neighborhood and the retired world he knew, hers increasingly fixated by the television set and the Cartoon Network. The bright colors and simple plots kept her riveted. Unlike other channels, it didn’t seem to matter that her mind wandered, and her eyes weakened. She was also getting increasingly deaf, and Mr. D’Costa was chased all over his house by extra-loud shrieks and thuds of animal mayhem, by music that jumped and giggled with crazy glee.
    He attended to the household matters: did the shopping, went to the bank to deposit their dividends and pension payments, supervised the plumbers and electricians who routinely battled to preserve the increasingly decrepit house, and paid Sakamma the ayah, who for ten years had cleaned and cooked and stolen what she could. Now and then he’d look in on his wife, but she barely noticed, her eyes on the screen, her face bizarrely painted in the yellows and blues thrown by the TV into the darkened room, her lower jaw moving rhythmically over a toothless mouth whose dentures reposed unused in a muddy glass of water by her bed.
    The doctor said that he should expect such decline to continue. As yet, no cure was available. As time went on, the doctor said, she would recognize less and less of her life. Mr. D’Costa did not reply that the gradual erasure of his wife had rendered his own life unrecognizable as well.
    Through the years, they had roused themselves, the D’Costas, to read and discuss the letters dutifully mailed to them once a month by their son, with whom they had been blessed late in life and after two years of saying Hail Marys three times a day and sometimes in their sleep. Now Mr. D’Costa read the letters to himself, sharing the news with the pastel walls of his house. He too was an investment banker, their son, just like Aman Kapur, but settled with a foreign wife and two children whom they had never seen in Australia. There was no question, financially speaking, of Mr. D’Costa paying for a ticket