The Red Carpet Read Online Free Page B

doubtless to offer him the same treatment, and from somewhere deep inside him, Ramu found his voice: Swamy and I were just on our way out, he said, stepping away. We’ll see you guys later. Coming, Swamy?
    As he walked away, a slight smile forced upon his face, he could hear Ashwini say, “You know, this is quite a small affair, really. Engagement parties in Bombay are twice this size.”

CLOSED CURTAINS
    Mr. D’Costa lived with his wife in a cul-de-sac off Ulsoor Road, in a pastel pink house that was square and squat and small, with a sloping cement roof and no garden space to speak of. It was identical to the houses that flanked it on either side, except that the others were pastel blue, pastel yellow, and pastel green. They were designed as affordable middle-class housing at a time when Bangalore was small, and everybody lived in houses, and apartments were some sort of unseen exotic Bombay invention. Even today, they spoke of identical resident lifestyles: with windows meshed, barred, and tightly shuttered; with pastel walls scarred and fissured by monsoon rain; the smell of steamed rice idlis and spicy sambar that floated in the air in the mornings; the potted hibiscus plants on the narrow cement footpaths that ran between house and compound wall, interspersed with dusty jasmine and bougainvillea creepers that hugged and further blinded the lower-floor windows in overgrown disarray. The driveways held Bajaj scooters, and sometimes, perhaps a very old, rarely used Fiat car that had been carefully husbanded over the decades.
    There had been more of these houses at one time, lining the lane right up to where it met Ulsoor Road. Thirty-five years ago the area had been considered respectable but certainly not upmarket; a good place to bring up a young family. Now, of all the old neighbors, only a few remained: apart from the D’Costas, there were the Ambekars; the Nizamuddins; Mrs. Reddy, relict of the late Wing Cdr. (Ret.) Reddy; the Kuriens next door; and three doors down, the Gnanakan family, where the money that Mrs. Gnanakan painstakingly earned through arranging flowers at minimum expense in her “Daisy” florist shop, her husband discreetly drank away.
    The rest of the neighborhood had been swallowed up by the pressures of a growing city. Escalating land prices had nudged the little lane into prime real estate. People had sold their homes and moved further away, leaving behind the detritus: those who didn’t have the energy or desire to realize the sudden astonishing worth of their properties and readjust their lives to localities far from the center of town. Grand new bungalows came up on the ruins of the old, inhabited by people who air-dashed to delhi-london-tokyo so often, they had no time for friendly neighborhood pursuits. Witness the Lakshminarayanans and the Jaffers, who, between them, had bought and converted five of the old houses into two palaces that now guarded the mouth of the little lane in stately fashion. Mr. D’Costa wouldn’t dream of dropping in on them for a chat and a cup of tea, as he might with Mrs. Ambekar or anyone else of the old brigade. They probably wouldn’t even know who he was, so he left well alone, stealing occasional glimpses of their lives by peeping into their gardens as he walked to the Ulsoor Market, and chatting with their servants as they scurried to and from work or came to buy fresh bread from the Good Fellows Bakery man.
    Since his retirement ten years earlier, Mr. D’Costa liked to regard himself as a Neighborhood Elder. It gave him a sense of purpose, and rendered meaningful his habit of standing at an upstairs window and conducting a detailed survey of his neighbors in a still, intense manner, born of lingering time and low energy.
    He would follow this up by popping out of his house to hold discourse several times a day. He timed his trips to the vegetable market to coincide with the hapless Mrs. Gnanakan’s morning walk, gleaning plump morsels of pumpkin and