‘Ah, you’re here? No,’ Sathya raised his eyebrows, ‘that crazy bitch was asking. Between you and me, she’s a bit of a stickler for timekeeping.’ He threw his head back and laughed. His voice was deep and musical, but also slightly hysterical. ‘Silly cow,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about her. I told her you were in the bathroom. Cigarette? I’m going to the gulag for one.’
Leela grinned. ‘Maybe a bit early for me. Give me half an hour.’
‘Not a problem. If that cretin comes with the coffee, could you grab me one? Assuming he’s bothered to put any coffee in it today.’
Leela nodded. She hung her bag on her chair and turned on her computer. The processor began to whirr and gurgle; the screen thrummed into life.
Tipu Sultan, the tea boy, came in. He was shortly followed by Joan, the third person who sat in the office, which was a room in the solid mock-Gothic building.
‘Ah! Leela!’ said Joan. ‘I was looking for you. Sathya said you’d –’ The pause was dramatic and indicated doubt.
‘Yes,’ said Leela. She picked up papers from her desk, and moved them in front of her. They included the ten grant applications remaining from yesterday, which had to be logged in the new database, and some post addressed to her predecessor, who’d gone to England to work in an auction house. Every time Leela saw her name, Radha Gupta, on an envelope, she felt a frisson of connection, and nostalgic envy.
‘Right, well, there are a lot of things piling up. I think perhaps you and I should have a meeting,’ Joan said.
She had already done this three times in the fortnight Leela had been there. Each time she made Leela sit on a rickety, uncomfortable stool near her desk. Joan had the air conditioner near her turned up high. Leela sympathised in principle, but the cold made her soporific. ‘Hot flushes. Think about it, explains why she’s so fucking crazy,’ Sathya had said over a shared Gold Flake in the gulag a couple of days earlier.
‘Could I clear my pending workload first?’ Leela asked. ‘I don’t want to let things pile up. The database records the difference between the date we receive an application and when we log it in the system.’
Joan’s face darkened. She went to her desk and began to type. She hated and feared the database; Leela had been hired partly in order to keep its malevolence under control.
‘Chai, kaapi?’ said Tipu Sultan patiently. His name was not Tipu Sultan but Chhotu. It can’t have been Chhotu either, but that is what everyone other than Sathya called him. Sathya, in his friendly, offensive way, had decided the boy, an ageing perpetual adolescent, looked like Tipu Sultan because of his twirly moustache. He could be jocularly rude to the tea boy but also, Leela found out much later, paid his fees to go to an evening class and get a diploma in basic computer studies, one of the many kindnesses he concealed from general view.
‘Coffee, do, strong,’ Leela said. He held out the wire tray; she chose two darker looking glasses. When Sathya returned he would take out the tin of Nescafé from his desk, and offer Leela a supplementary spoon, murmuring, ‘Bilge … look at us, like addicts.’
The ancient standing fan turned her way. A strong breath hit her shoulders and neck, and blew her hair aside. She sighed, enjoying it, hung onto her papers. When it had passed she looked down again.
Application for grant. Name of body making application: Nritya Dance Trust. Date of application: 2nd February 2004.
She heard Sathya exhale. In the background, Joan was quarrelling on the telephone.
Leela opened a new record in the database. She hated its interface, ugly and grey, and the clunky buttons on screen. She continually had to pay attention to it, which she disliked, yet there was no way of shining at her work.
A bird sang outside; a crow cawed. At twelve, she would be starving. Tipu Sultan would come around again, with tea. She’d drink it, and turn her stomach.
At one thirty, Joan went to the canteen to meet a friend. Leela had tried but failed to imagine her having actual conversation with anyone. Perhaps instead she and her friend simply complained at each other.
Sathya would sigh, and get out his paper and the tiffin his mother sent for him. He was in his forties, grizzled and plump, and lived with his parents. They periodically tried, he said, to marry him off. ‘Who the hell would want to marry me?’ he enquired of Leela, who said, ‘Er, there must be people …’
‘I’m happy,’ said Sathya. ‘I have companionship, I have my interests.’ Leela envied him.
She picked up her bag when Joan had left for lunch. ‘Go,’ Sathya said with a wink. He said he told Joan, whenever she returned, that Leela had just left. But Leela was often back within half an hour, for she had little purpose. She began by hurrying down the stairs, with their red-earth spittle stains and stencilled notices (Do Not Spit), and emerged below into the short lane where yellow school buses were parked.
Bougainvillea, hot pink and orange, hung over the school walls. Expensive cars and their drivers waited; some drivers held tiffins. The lane was dusty and hot. She hurried through the waiting people.
Sometimes, she wandered into the Khadi Bhavan. It remained a temple to the Gandhian nation that seemed never quite to have come into being. Its dark wood counters still held rolls of khadi, some fine and soft as voile; there were displays of ahimsak chappals made from the hide of cows that had died a natural death. Upstairs, the gifts: puppets from Rajasthan, bags from Gujarat, rosewood and ivory elephants, things made of sandalwood. She knew, thanks to her father, that kantha saris were beautiful, and could tell in which ones the work was good; she could admire bedspreads of kalamkari or blockprint. She moved through the sections with a borrowed expression of knowledge tinged with cynicism.
Today she stopped at a counter of wooden toys and picked up a painted cup with a handle, attached by string to a wooden ball. She and her sister had once been given a pair of these, the sort of handcrafted toys one’s parents’ friends thought were charming. Leela had carried hers around for a while, pretending to play with it; Neeti had broken hers at once and looked happy.
‘Where are these from?’ she asked the salesman.
He eyed her. ‘Madhya Pradesh.’
‘Can I see that?’ She pointed at a pink Ganpati.
He brought it down. Gingerly, she turned two of its rounded arms, one ending in a hand bearing a laddoo, the other upraised, palm flat in benediction. They moved cheerfully.
‘Here.’ The salesman took the idol from her and turned the arms more vigorously. There was another pair behind them, one carrying a mace, one a snare.
‘These ones don’t move?’
‘No,’ he said. He gave her back the statue. The god sat on a dark pink base, where a tiny mouse was painted.
‘How much is it?’
He turned it over. ‘Hundred fifteen.’
At the hostel she removed the stapled paper bag. The pink Ganpati came out. She dusted him, put him on top of the small bookshelf, and after her bath said her prayer in front of him; he afterwards looked quite as pleased as before.