“I mean, everything done by vague verbal arrangements. Nothing, properly filed and accounted for. And such enormous reliance on pulls, and influence, and knowing someone in the government who will arrange licenses and import permits and whatever.”
“Well, it’s a miracle to me that we ever get an issue of the magazine out, considering that none of the typesetter speaks English, and they have to make up the forms in a language they don’t know mirrorwise and by hand.”
“But at least you don’t have to deal with the family as well. The amount of deadwood in the form of aged great-uncles, dimwitted second cousins, who have to be employed!”
“Can’t you suggest they be pensioned off?”
“Don’t think I haven’t. My father just smiles and says I’ll settle down soon. What’s the use?”
Our discussions nearly always ended with one or the other of us saying, with exaggerated weariness, “Well, so it goes. Back to the salt mines now.” I never added that I enjoyed my job.
That day we didn’t realize until we were on the point of leaving the Taj how many people were lunching in the big dining room whom we know. On our way out, we smiled and nodded at a number of people and stopped at several tables to exchange greetings. With rising irritation, both of us were aware of the carefully unexpressed curiosity behind the pleasant formalities of speech.
Anand and I sauntered in silence down the wide, shallow stircase of the hotel. And it was only when we reach the road that be exploded. “Damn them,” he said. “The prying old cat!”
“It was the wine,” I suggested. “Even people who have been abroad a lot don’t think wine at lunchtime.”
“So? What’s it to them?”
“Well, Dissolute Foreign Ways, and besides you’re what they call a catch, so it’s only natural that they wonder.”
Anand frowned as we crossed the road to where his car was parked against the seawall. He opened the door for me and then climbed in behind of steering wheel. He didn’t start the car for a moment, but sat with hands on the wheel and his head turned away from me, looking at the threatening light of the early afternoon, which would darken into rain any minute. Suddenly he clenched his fingers and said, “Well, the devil with them. Let them talk, if they have nothing better to do.”
“Yes. Anyway, who cares?” I said, hoping it didn’t sound as though I did.
We lunched at the Taj several times after that, but on each occasion a bit more defiantly,a bit more conscious of the appraising looks, always knowing we were only “unattacheds” lunching together. The others were businessman, or married couples doing duty entertaining, which, for some reason, they couldn’t do at home, or ladies in groups, or foreigners.
Bombay is a big city, but in its life it is more like a conglomeration of villages. In our set, for instance, everyone knew everyone else at least by sight. So, of course, everyone knew that Anand and I lunch together a couple of times a week, and certainly our families must have been told.
My parents never mentioned the matter to me, though there was a certain wariness in their manner whenever Anand’s name came up in conversation. If Anand’s mother ever lecture him on getting talked about, he evidently didn’t think it worth repeating. Of them all, I daresay she was the most troubled, being orthodox, wanting a good, conservative marriage for her only son, being bewildered by what must have appeared to her –it seems astonishing in retrospect- sophistication.
Occasionally Anand would take me home to tea after our offices had closed. I think he did this out of an unadmitted consideration for his mother, to set her mind at rest about the company he was keeping, to show her that I was not a Fast Girl even if I did work on magazine. I don’t know how much I reassured her, with my short hair and lipstick, no tika in the middle of my forehead. But she always greet me politely, bringing her hand together in a namaskar, and gave me canny looks when she thought I wasn’t noticing. We couldn’t even speak to each other, since we came from different communities and she spoke only Gujarati, while my language was Hindi. She would always wait with us in drawing room until one of the servants brought the tea; then she would life her comherable figure out of her chair,nod to me, and leave us alone.