Secrets and Lies. Jaishree Misra

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СКАЧАТЬ journalist, she’d received a rare pat on the back from her editor. The funny thing was that it had not been at all difficult to get the old man to come to Bush House. Like many self-made men, Dinesh Raheja wore his success rather like a matador would use his cape, probably petrified that everyone would forget how hard-won it had been. So despite his predilection for strutting, his inability to tone down the Punjabi accent he had carried over from India and his rough-edged manners made his millions seem somehow more deserving.

      His son Binkie, married to Bubbles, was another matter altogether. Having made his first million while Binkie was still in high school, Dinesh Raheja had been proud to send his only child to England when he turned fourteen—to Harrow or Eton, Anita could never remember which. But, having had a relatively late start at the whole business of becoming staunchly Anglophile, Binkie had taken to it with alarming relish, changing his name by the time he got to university from the admittedly dull Rajesh to the positively preposterous Binkie, speaking in a strange faux-Wodehousian tongue, and buying himself a metallic mauve Bentley Continental GT as soon as he was old enough to drive. From what Anita could tell, he seemed to be worsening as he approached his forties, getting his battery of butlers and valets to perform the most ridiculous tasks, such as ironing the morning papers and trimming their edges so that the pages were perfectly aligned before he would deign to glance at the day’s news with his eight-minute egg (not seven or nine minutes, but exactly and precisely eight). His only concessions to Indian-ness lay in the kind of things that apparently made life hell for Bubbles. These boiled down to two main things: an utter and complete devotion on Binkie’s part to his dragon of a mother, and maintaining the promise she had extracted from him that, despite all their money, he would always and only stay in the same house as her. Some house it was too, in the heart of Belgravia and with miles of corridors and multiple floors, each square inch of which would be worth thousands of pounds according to Anita’s calculations. Raheja Mansion had in fact been formed by knocking together two palatial town-houses that had belonged to a pair of Kuwaiti brothers, which explained why the pool house looked like something out of the sets of Caligula, complete with Piedmont urns, artificial palms and bare-breasted marble nymphs with golden nipples. But, unsatisfied with such largesse, Mrs Raheja had even bought the lower ground floor flat next door to the main house and installed the kitchen in there so that there was no risk at all of Binkie’s delicate nostrils being assailed with the smell of curry. Then there were the houses in Paris and Cape Cod, the country pile in Bucks and the baronial manor in Scotland…but it was almost laughable that, despite such a profusion of global real estate, poor Bubbles had nowhere to call her own, nor any place where she could really get away from her mother-in-law.

      ‘It’s like I’m married to her rather than him, Sam!’ Bubbles was wailing again, taking another slug from her flute, whose edge was now encrusted with almost as much lipstick as was left on her mouth.

      ‘I know, I know, darling,’ Sam consoled, ‘but couldn’t you persuade Binkie to take you to the Paris flat when the schools close next month? The children will be going up to their summer camp in Switzerland as usual, won’t they?’

      ‘Bobby will be at camp in Montana, although Ruby’s still trying to make her mind up. But, you see, Ma’s already arranged for me to be in the Bahamas with her and Auntie Poppy and Poonam Maasi…I told you about that cruise for Papa’s sixty-fifth. She’s hired a 300-foot yacht and is taking her whole family, and obviously I have to be there.’

      ‘Oh yes, of course, you did say,’ Sam said, subsiding back into silence, remembering how they had dissolved in giggles at the thought of a bunch of Punjabi matriarchs sunning themselves in voluminous one-pieces when Bubbles had first mentioned it.

      ‘How about we go somewhere together after the summer then? Just us girls,’ Anita offered, rousing herself briefly. ‘We’ve only ever talked of it so far, and now that both your kids are old enough to be left with their nannies, it should be fine, shouldn’t it?’

      Sam’s face wore a doubtful expression. ‘I don’t know…Akbar doesn’t much like the concept of girlie holidays…’

      ‘Oh, fuck Akbar,’ Anita replied crisply, ‘about time you told him where to stick those fine concepts of his.’

      ‘I’m not sure Binkie would like it either—you know how he seems to think my main role in life is to keep his mother company. Unless…’ Bubbles’ face was starting to clear. ‘The only place I can get away to without any of them in tow is my parents’ house.’

      ‘Delhi,’ Anita exclaimed, ‘now there’s a plan.’

      ‘No one can stop us from going to see our parents, I guess,’ Sam said slowly.

      ‘Be too bloody hot till November though.’

      ‘You weren’t thinking of December, were you? I mean…Lamboo’s invitation…?’

      The three women looked at the letter, still lying on the table before them, and then at each other in the candlelight. Bubbles’ eyes suddenly looked like hollows in her head, and Sam, wrapped in her cream pashmina, was a sad and portly ghost. Anita shuddered, feeling uncharacteristically nervy. She was dying for a cigarette. ‘I’ve never been back there since we left school,’ she muttered.

      ‘Nor me,’ Sam said softly after a pause.

      ‘I’ve been past those gates, oh, I don’t know, at least a hundred times,’ Bubbles said. ‘Every time I go to Papa’s Connaught Place shop, in fact. And, you know, it’s like a bad habit, but I still cross my heart and mutter “Our Father” when I see the school church. But I’ve never once stepped through those gates since we left. I’m not sure I’ll be able to take it, actually’

      ‘Look,’ Anita cut in, sitting up and trying to sound more brisk, ‘I know there’s good reason for us never having gone back. But I’m not sure it’s really helped, y’know. Sometimes things just seem to get worse the longer you leave them.’

      Her two friends were silent for a few seconds before Bubbles spoke up. ‘My therapist sometimes says I’ll only make real progress when those old issues are resolved…’

      ‘It’s more than that for me,’ Sam said. ‘More like…atonement.’

      ‘Well, if we don’t do it now, we never will,’ Anita said, taking Sam’s hands in hers. ‘I get some leave around Christmas, so shall we try to go together by, say, mid December? Let’s see what it is that Lamboo wants. We owe her that much. Time to try and lay some of those ghosts to rest.’

       Chapter Three

      DELHI, 1993

      ‘Have you heard? We’re getting a new girl in class,’ Sam said, putting her satchel down on her chair to take out her lunchbox and flask of iced lime juice and position them carefully in the inner recess of her scuffed wooden desk.

      Even Anita, slumped lifeless over Flaubert at the back of the classroom, looked up, shoving her glasses back up her nose as various classmates started instantly to quiz Sam.

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Where’s she from?’

      ‘I hope she’s not pretty, yaar.’

      ‘Or over-smart.’

      In her usual calm manner, Sam ignored them all until she had hung her satchel СКАЧАТЬ