Three Bargains: A Novel Read online

  “I’ll get some dessert,” Madan said. He slipped outside to where the food tables were set up. The dessert station, he knew, would be full of creamy pineapple pastries, layers of cherry-studded Black Forest cake and spirals of orange gooey jalebis. Always there were the jalebis bobbing merrily on the surface of the hot oil. He got himself a coffee and walked out into the hotel’s gardens. Away from the hotel building and the humming tent, there was a pleasant gust of air and calming, muted light.

  The century had turned, and that in itself felt momentous. Ketan-bhai and Madan had started their leather business at an opportune time, in the boom of the nineties when the overseas demand had surged. Their first order from the American buyer gave them a taste of their partnership and its possibilities, and they hadn’t remained middlemen for long. They were exporters themselves now, with their own factories manufacturing shoes, jackets, handbags, belts and wallets. They had recently ventured into real estate and had been discussing their project in the car on their way to the wedding when Nalini said, “Can you men talk of something besides work? Madan should be thinking of settling down, starting a family. Who are you doing all this for, anyhow, Madan?”

  Contemplating that question, Madan veered off the garden path and into the deep shadows of the hotel’s lawn, where hidden lights illuminated clumps of champa trees encircled in stone. He loosened his tie, undoing the top button of his shirt. Immediately he felt more relaxed. Slipping off his shoe, he placed his foot on the lawn. Through his sock, the grass was cold and wet with dew. Like the grasses of Gorapur. It was as if a century had passed since he had left. Seeing the bride, her head bent with the weight of the flower garlands, her small smile peeking out from under her lashes, her brother by her side, a hand on her elbow guiding her, he thought of his mother. This wedding was what his mother had wanted for Swati. He could give her that now. He could give his mother the home she dreamed of and the wedding she wanted for her daughter, but the longer he was here and the harder he worked, the further away they both seemed. He wanted to pick up the phone or send a letter. He thought about sending them money. But he never did.

  “Hey! Hello!” A girlish voice intruded on his silence. Madan slipped his foot back in his shoe.

  “Do you have a flashlight?”

  The girl had come from the wedding with her heavily embroidered pink lehenga and the glittering necklace around her delicate throat.

  “No,” he said.

  “I lost my earring by the bench,” she said. “My mother’s going to kill me.”

  “I have this.” He took out his cell phone from his pocket. It was a new model and the reception was erratic but he had felt the need to splurge on it.

  “Wow,” she grabbed the phone from his hand. “Is it a Nokia?”

  The small screen glowed as she pressed the buttons. Without asking Madan, she headed back to the bench stationed at an angle under an arbor of jasmine. Madan followed her. He didn’t want to let the phone out of his sight and she seemed to have a penchant for losing valuable things.

  “My ear was hurting, so I took the earring off for a minute, but it slipped out of my hand when I was putting it back on.”

  She crouched down, the skirt of her lehenga billowing around her, and scanned the ground with the light from his phone. “My mother took it out from her bank locker just today, and made me promise to take care of it.”

  Madan got down too and felt around with his hand. Abruptly she got up and sat on the bench, leaving him to hunt alone. “What will I say to her? I tell my kids to be careful with their belongings, and here I can’t take care of a small earring.”

  She seemed too young to have children but here in the fuzzy light it was hard to see clearly.

  “Wear artificial, my mother told me. These days everybody wears artificial and keeps the real jewelry in the locker. But of course I didn’t listen.”

  Madan felt she really should be looking instead of talking. He was about to interrupt her when he brushed against a nubby, hard shape in the dust.

  “I got it,” he said.

  “Thank god! You saved my life.” She leapt off the bench and exchanged Madan’s phone for the earring. A life delivered from harm, just like that, Madan thought. By the finding of a trinket. No fury or rage, no treachery or carnage needed.

  “Preeti, I got a flashlight.” A young woman carrying a hefty black flashlight joined them, and a pack of finely dressed men and women trailing behind her descended upon them, swirling around Preeti like rings of gold.

  “No need,” Preeti said. She flashed her bejeweled ear. “Found it.” There were exclamations of relief. “Guys, this is Madan,” she said to her friends. They said hello, and then Preeti and her group turned and went back to the party.

  “Wait,” Madan said. “How do you know my name?” But she was gone.

  He stood still for a moment, surprised and confused. Sometimes he couldn’t shake the feeling that Avtaar-Singh knew where he was. Did this pretty girl somehow know Avtaar-Singh? The tranquillity of the garden vanished with the disturbing thought. He went back to the party, finding Nalini and Ketan-bhai at the table where he had left them. They were ready to leave.

  “What happened to you?” Ketan-bhai asked, noticing Madan’s strained expression.

  “Just something . . . strange,” Madan said.

  “We are at a wedding,” Ketan-bhai affirmed, helping his wife up. “And marriage is the strangest business of all.”

  The land before them was an unceasing stretch of untilled field taken over by scrub and a withered tree. Tractors were driving over the hillocks of dirt, and rolls of chain-link fencing lay about in disarray.

  “This is gold, I tell you. Gold!” The real estate developer flapped his arms up and down to underscore the desirability of the barren land on the outskirts of Delhi. “It does not matter what you have on the land, a small hut or a mansion. The real value is the land.”

  “You don’t have to convince us, Sourav,” Ketan-bhai said. “We are with you already.”

  Sourav came from a town in Punjab half a day’s journey from Gorapur. With his similar background and hardscrabble success, Madan felt an affinity with Sourav that Ketan-bhai failed to see. Sourav had grown up watching his father’s small cement factory start and fail many times. When he came to Delhi he was a nobody, but in the years that followed he used a few remaining family connections to ingratiate himself with every politician controlling state construction projects, ensuring through any means that his company would be the sole supplier of cement for the large, unwieldy projects. His family business went from a small, puttering establishment to a recognizable name on every sack of construction gravel. Once Sourav had shown Madan an AK-47 clumsily wrapped in a towel in the backseat of his jeep. He had brandished it about but claimed it wasn’t his and that he was keeping it for someone. Madan knew better than to mention the incident to Ketan-bhai, who was already disturbed by Sourav’s bragging tales of violent altercations and dirty deals.

  Sourav’s assistant unfurled a roll of sketches on the hood of the jeep. It was the second multistory apartment project they had invested in with Sourav, and the drawings laid out the plans for the complex of high-rise buildings with ample parking, power backup, and access to the megalith malls sprouting along the highway out of Delhi.

  “So much expansion going on, so much demand for this type of housing,” Sourav said. “How many people can really afford to buy and live in Delhi anymore? And all these multinational companies opening here. These suburbs are where they are finding the best of both worlds. But first, we start with the land.”

  “Someone once told me that land is like a pot in which there is always food,” Madan said. “It can feed you forever. If you lose the land, you lose yourself.”

  “Whoever said that is right,” said Sourav. “And there’s enough to keep us busy for some time. Next, people are talking about developing Manesar, and then onwards. The way things are going, soon you will be able to go from Connaught Place all the w
ay to Pakistan, and it’ll all be a suburb of Delhi.”

  “And where will our farmers go?” argued Ketan-bhai. “My family used to be farmers. Had land in Abohar.”

  Sourav and Ketan-bhai continued to discuss the changing landscape. The land they were discussing included Gorapur as well, and Madan couldn’t tell yet if the thought of turning the farmland of his hometown into a modern suburb filled him more with excitement or with dread. Madan couldn’t imagine Avtaar Singh relinquishing the soul of his beloved Gorapur to such change. When Avtaar Singh talked about land, he talked about Gorapur. If he lost Gorapur, he would lose himself. And Avtaar Singh had never lost anything that was dear to him.

  “This is just the beginning,” Sourav said. “By your next visit you’ll not recognize this land.”

  The driver opened the car door, and Madan and Ketan-bhai slid inside. “That man can talk. And why he insists on bringing those goons with him, I don’t understand,” said Ketan-bhai of Sourav’s two bodyguards, who had stood in the shadows throughout their meeting. “As if you or I would ever hurt him. We wouldn’t know which side is the trigger and which side the barrel.”

  “Where I grew up I was taught to shoot when I was thirteen.” Madan rarely talked of his past, but he was fixated on the idea of Gorapur gone, covered over with shopping centers and modern houses.

  “You? No. I can’t believe it,” Ketan-bhai said. “You’re not like these thugs. You don’t even raise your voice when things get rough.” He paused to give Madan a chance to elaborate, but Madan said nothing more.

  Ketan-bhai turned thoughtful, changing tack as if he did not want to think about what Madan had revealed. “This land has withstood so many invasions,” he said. “The Greeks, the Turks, the Mongols and the Musalmans, the British, all wanted to rule it. Now we are left, but in the process of making ourselves kings, what damage will we do?”

  “You can leave me at the office, if you’re going home,” Madan said to Ketan-bhai as the car approached the city. It was the end of a long day but he could fit a few hours more in.

  “You are coming with me to my friend Dilip’s house,” Ketan-bhai said. “Remember, I told you about it last week.”

  Madan remembered the invitation, but he could not recall agreeing to go. Dilip belonged to Ketan-bhai’s chess club, and though Madan had met him a few times, he could not think why Dilip would have invited him. Madan had neither the time nor the inclination to go.

  “Drop me off at the office,” Madan repeated to the driver.

  “Madan, please,” Ketan-bhai said in his dogged way. Madan shot him a shrewd look, and Ketan-bhai sighed. “I want you to meet Dilip’s daughter. Nalini thinks it’s a good idea too. Now the business is growing, you must take care of other aspects of your life before it becomes too late. Very decent family.” Ketan-bhai was adamant. “She will suit you. You are coming with me to have a look.”

  Reluctantly, Madan gave in. Driving through the hamlet-like neighborhoods, the air thick with the carbon fumes of rush hour and his mind overflowing with work, he resigned himself to a few wasted hours. They pulled up in front of the nondescript two-story house.

  Dilip and his wife Sarla welcomed them in. He saw that Nalini was already sitting in the living room. “I have new respect for your Ketan-bhai,” Nalini said to Madan, when Madan sat down next to her. “I never thought he’d be able to get you here.”

  The door opened, and Madan first saw the wide serving tray wobbling with the weight of its contents. Sarla grabbed the tray before it tilted over, and helped her daughter place it on the table.

  It was the girl from the wedding. She was dressed in a simple churidar suit, her hair casually tied back, with small gold studs in her ears. There was a flutter of a smile behind her sober expression. Preeti said her hellos and served everyone before sitting down quietly with her mother, while the conversation skipped from the traffic on the way over, to their business expansion into retail outlets. “It’s keeping us very busy these days,” Ketan-bhai said proudly.

  After tea, they sent Preeti and Madan for a stroll and she led him to the park in front of the house. “Thanks for not mentioning the lost earring,” she said. “I was sure you’d blurt something out.”

  “I am good at keeping secrets.”

  Gentrified bungalows peered down into the park, and in their balconies old couples rested on wicker chairs with their own cups of evening tea. Preeti and Madan strolled along the stone pathway encircling the park’s manicured grass center. Groups of ladies in salwars and sneakers passed them by at a clip, having deep, animated conversations. Children swung from the monkey bars, their maids standing nonchalantly by, warning them now and then to be careful.

  “I wondered how you knew my name,” he said.

  “My dad had pointed you out before. You think I’ll allow my parents to call anyone home without having a look first? I am not a handbag for sale in a shop window that you check out and then move on. I look, then you look.”

  “So I passed the ‘looking’ test?” Madan grinned, charmed by the unintended compliment, and she seemed embarrassed that she had revealed something she had not intended. Ketan-bhai would have a good laugh to see him joking and flirting with a girl.

  She had a degree in education and was working as a kindergarten teacher, an only child, born and brought up in Delhi. “Never missed having a brother or sister,” she said. “I’ve lots of close friends who keep me so busy. That’s why I don’t read as much as I like to, maybe some magazines,” she said. “Ketan-bhai said you enjoy reading.”

  “I don’t get as much time as I used to either,” he said.

  “You and Ketan-bhai have worked very hard. We’ve heard how you made your business over the last eight years.”

  Madan lost count of the many times they circled around the park, and when he found he had run out of questions to ask, she chatted on, filling his silences. He could have continued walking with her, but the park was emptying and her parents were awaiting their return. They stepped out of the revolving gate and headed to her house.

  The next morning, in his top-floor apartment, he watched the sun crest over the water tanks and the crenellated brick terraces lined with pots of bougainvillea. Besides the bed, there was a desk and chair, a bookcase and a sofa handed down from Ketan-bhai and Nalini. “Is this a home or a cell in Tihar Jail?” Ketan-bhai would never fail to comment when he stopped by. “Put up a picture, at least.”

  Madan was never home, so he didn’t see the need to decorate, but now he was irritated with the sparseness, and with the spreading water stain on the living room wall that had appeared during the monsoons. The seepage was causing the paint and plaster to blister and flake. There were doors that would not shut properly, and because he would either eat out or at Ketan-bhai’s, he never got around to applying for a gas cylinder and the kitchen remained unused. How long could he go on living this half life? But weddings and relationships were for other people, not for him.

  If the buildings were cleared north of his window, he would see all the way to Gorapur. Sometimes he wondered if it had actually been him on those well-trodden byways, his arm flung around Jaggu’s shoulders, their faces turned to the sun, laughing, their hair soaked from a dip in the river, where the fish in those murky depths darted in surprise from the boys who knew no fear.

  He would tell Ketan-bhai to give up the whole matchmaking business. He had blundered grievously once, and because of his mistake, there was a child somewhere going to school, or begging on the street, or more likely dead.

  Yet she was suitable, as Ketan-bhai had said. Well educated, well spoken and attractive in a way that was not too disarming. And if she called now, he would forget the nonsense troubling his head and would be at her house, ready to walk with her in the park again, and for a few moments he would know what it was like not to be so alone.

  He collected his briefcase and grabbed a cold slice of bread from the fridge for breakfast. He chewed slowly as he went down the stairs to the street.The
driver opened the door for him, and he settled in, the street-sweeper wishing him salaam as he cleared the fallen leaves into piles with his long-handled broom.

  Their courtship began with a series of long phone calls each evening after work. Soon, every Saturday he would turn up at her doorstep and they would go out for dinner or a movie or a drive around town, meeting up sometimes with people she knew. With Preeti, suddenly everything in the city that he had found mundane or ridiculous became alluring and fun. He discovered a city full of lively establishments where the revelry continued into the early hours of the morning. He and Preeti slurped bowls of hakka noodles, shared wood-fired pizzas and watched late-night shows. Where he was quiet, she was full of chatter. She possessed a certain type of equanimity that reminded him of a young Swati, before their father had destroyed her. But Preeti’s imperturbability came from a different source. Preeti had never hungered or truly despaired or felt any hurt beyond minor transgressions. Her largest fears were abstract and far removed.

  “When my dog Candy died, it was the worst day of my life,” she said. “She was a dachshund mix, so cute, and I can’t think of getting another dog now. Did you have a pet?”

  He thought about Prince, and how he had carried the squirming Pomeranian in his arms up and down the back streets of Gorapur, afraid all the while of getting a speck of dirt on his white fur, the dog’s continuous yapping giving him a blasting headache.

  “No,” he said. “Never liked animals much.”

  A month after submitting their registration forms, Madan and Preeti were married in court, as Madan wanted. When her parents wanted a religious ceremony as well, Madan refused. There would be no temples and pandits. Her parents were stricken at the thought of forgoing God’s blessing for the union, and Ketan-bhai tried to smooth things over, but it was Preeti who took Madan’s side. “I know it’s unusual,” she said to her parents. “But it’s like you both always say: we’re blessed enough already.” She was firm in her position, but gracious and respectful, bringing them around without rancor. If he had any doubts about her, or marriage or the step he was taking, they were gone in that instant.