She stepped into the Green Room, and felt dazed. Books everywhere, signs saying ‘Award Winners’, ‘Staff Picks’, ‘New Books’, ‘Bestsellers’, it went on. The website said this was the smallest room in the City of Books, and yet you could go away with tons of books without even getting past it. She stepped into the slightly less crowded ‘Pacific Northwest’ section to one side at the back of the room to catch her breath: ‘Portland’, ‘Oregon’, ‘The Northwest’. She remembered something about a store map. That would bring some sanity to the proceedings, a stay against the almost accusing press of books every time she stepped into a library or bookshop. ‘Read me!’ ‘No, read me first!’, ‘Do you even know I exist?’, ‘Ha, ha! You’ll never read me!’ It must have been last in the Renaissance when a person could claim to have read every single book ever written; maybe not even then, wasn’t that a time of hidden texts, palimpsests – pentimenti? –when one had to be a certain very precise type of person – male, monkly, maybe Italian, okay, there was no Italy then – before you could access them; forget about the palm-leaf scripts at home. It was funny. When you were young, you had time but no money to buy books. Now, a bit more money but not enough time. She pushed her ‘lifetime to-read list’ out of her head; she was here for a very specific purpose – books the store classified as ‘American Studies’; she would browse through those racks, not be distracted, and then leave. What she wanted was the Purple Room.
When a whole-hour-passing-like-a-minute later she pulled out her wallet to pay, she felt something hard in an inner compartment she hadn’t noticed before in the handbag she had borrowed from Kamala. She checked what it was when she was done at the counter. It was a diamond bracelet – she remembered it from when it was bought. That Kamala! What a careless creature she was. She wondered if her sister had even noticed its loss. She pulled out the spare cell phone that Kamala had given her to tell her. Her sister sounded more indifferent than relieved. God, what a fat cat she had become!
Tara was standing at the appointed time at the appointed place on the street outside Powell’s when Madhu drove up after marking half a day’s work at the dentist’s. Apparently as a special treat, Madhu was taking her to an Indian restaurant for lunch.
‘Oh, no,’ Madhu said, ‘not more books!’ seeing her hands full of bursting paper bags. ‘How are you even going to take them home?’
‘Yes, more books,’ she said, not in the least bit defensive, ‘better than those trashy romances of yours. Let’s go. And turn off that horrid music, do you even listen to it?’
At Navaratna Indian Restaurant, shaped like an extra-long railway coach from front to back, the puny, grey-haired head waiter in a dirty white uniform that hung on him like a marquee came rushing up. ‘Madam, welcome, saar not come? Who is this, your daughter?’
She looked at Madhu.
‘What, does she look like my daughter? Go have your eyes checked, old man. She’s my mother!’ Madhu said.
‘Yes, madam, sorry, madam,’ he stammered, pulling out a chair and running away inside. The knot of waiters near the inner door looked at them and sniggered, their hands covering their faces. She looked at herself in her jeans and T-shirt, then at Madhu in her tights and unflattering figure-fitting top better worn by someone twenty years younger. They were definitely saying nothing complimentary.
Madhu sat down, not looking at Tara. Another waiter came up with menus and handed them over with ritual obsequiousness. Madhu looked at hers without looking at it.
‘We’re practically the same goddamn age,’ she said. ‘Do I look that awful?’ She pulled out a compact from her bag, flipped it open, and looked at herself.
‘Come on, Madhu, what’s the matter with you? Put that bloody thing away.’
‘Just because I’m a little overweight! You’re just lucky to be thin. It’s not like you had kids or anything!’
Tara wanted to point out that she hadn’t had any either. ‘Good Lord, he’s just some stupid man. Let’s order lunch.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like to be married to someone who has no interest in you,’ Madhu said. ‘You don’t even know what it’s like to be married, what a pressure it is.’
Tara looked up from the menu, stayed silent.
Madhu stared at her. ‘Whatever happened with Adi? Are you just going to remain single?’
Tara laughed a little. ‘Are you recommending marriage now?’
‘No, but you need to settle down, have someone, are you going to grow old alone?’
‘If I have to,’ Tara said, going back to the menu. ‘Adi has given me an ultimatum. There was a bit of a – showdown – before I left.’
‘Tell me, tell me,’ Madhu said, keen to be distracted from her own problems, to embark on a grisly girly conversation.
Tara forced herself not to be repelled by the attempt at female intimacy – that horrific arc of romance ending in gynaecology, discussions of which women seemed to thrive on. ‘Nothing to tell. A few epithets traded in rather loud voices. I have to say yes or no when I go back. Or rather, if it’s no, I’m not to call at all. Ever.’
‘You’re awfully cool, aren’t you! Stiff effing upper lip and all that.’ She giggled with fear at her own use of a four-letter word. ‘Poor Adi, I know what it’s like to chase someone who doesn’t care!’
‘Okay, I don’t want to talk about it, all right? Let’s just eat,’ Tara said.
‘You never want to talk about anything! Don’t you want kids and stuff?’
‘Okay, then,’ she said, pushed. ‘What about you and Vinod, how come you guys don’t want kids?’
She looked at Madhu, mentally beat her head against a wall for being so fucking dumb. If the Updike of Couples had personally come and explained the situation to her, she couldn’t have been surer of what she had seen the previous evening in Madhu’s house, how Vinod, in the middle of a conversation, had oh-so-casually stepped out on to the deck at the back of the house to take a phone call ‘from work’, betrayed only by the small unconscious movement of smoothing what remained of the hair on his head. She had looked at Madhu, chattering on as she cooked, and knew that she knew nothing. In the background, the Home Improvement channel was on.
Around them was the usual mish-mash of Indian kitsch: terrible derivative modern Indian art, curvaceous maidens with bulbous eyes and bazooka breasts favoured by popular male artists suffering from a Ravi Varma and/or Bengal School hangover, badly finished handicrafts from every part of the country, green, flourishing fake ferns, and real plants dying bit by bit, their leaves more brown than green. If everything had been outsize in her sister’s house, in Madhu’s, it was miniature. A little girl’s kitchen set, complete with stove and pressure cooker and teacups, small brightly coloured wooden Kondapalli houses with birds sitting on the roof, tiny replicas in wood and brass of Indian musical instruments, almost like the remnants of a lost, unlived childhood persisting obstinately into the present. What did it say about their respective takes on life? There was also something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It had to do with the clocks that were everywhere: some antique, some faux-antique, some hideously contemporary, some tasteful, likely by default, even one of those typically American so-called anniversary clocks, with shiny gold parts, glass dome and rotating pendulum. Except that it was still.
All the clocks had stopped. She had looked around to make sure again. Yes, they had stopped, not all at the same time, as though marking some significant moment in the house’s life, but at different times. There had been something sad about it. Madhu kept talking: how she had modified Indian recipes to suit American conditions, where the good Indian stores were where they could go shopping if Tara liked, the temple that they were making a contribution to (why couldn’t they just send the money home, where god knows there were people who needed it?), where Madhu went to see Hindi and Tamil movies, how she would move if a black family moved in next door. Vinod had come back from his call after ages and sat through dinner with remote eyes, plasticine smile in place.
‘Don’t ask me, ask Vinod,’ Madhu said now, pushing her plate away from her, and wiping her mouth with the paper towel. They both got up with something like relief.
Rootless. That’s what women without children were. She hoped her face had not betrayed her. She was glad to escape the soupy daytime darkness of the restaurant and step out into the bright and freeing air. In the car ride back, she didn’t ask Madhu to switch off the Shahrukh Khan songs that came on automatically.