Miss New India - Bharati Mukherjee [125]
Rabi was her only confidant, but he and she had traveled to Dollar Colony from different planets. He might sneer at the oversize houses in Dollar Colony, but she could admire them as monuments of self-made men to their epic struggle. Auro, she knew from his cocktail-hour chatter, had slogged his way up from the rented apartment of his Kolkata boyhood. Her curiosity was coming alive. She decided to tease out of Auro why he had chosen Dollar Colony for a permanent home.
"You really want to know?" He poured himself the first of his two nightly Johnnie Walker Blues on the rocks. It was rare that only Auro, Parvati, and Anjali were dining at home. Rabi was away on a photo shoot for a travel magazine. The older of the "kitchen sisters" was listening to music on an old-fashioned portable disc player the size of a salad plate; the younger and the dog walker were watching TV; the watchman was on duty in his wooden kiosk at the top of the driveway. The two dogs gnawed lamb bones at Parvati's feet. "My personal reasons? Nobody's ever asked me that." Auro looked both startled and pleased. "You want the long answer or the short answer?"
Parvati looked up from the thick paperback she was reading and smiled indulgently. "How about a medium-long answer that makes its point before dinner is served?"
He helped himself from the hors d'oeuvre platter of mutton keema samosas. "Did Parvati tell you we were among the first batch to build here when it was still forestland? I bet not, since she was dead set against moving out of Bombay."
Parvati slipped a filigreed ivory bookmark to keep her place in a thick American book, a prizewinner called The Echo Maker, sent by Tara from California. Every year, her writer-sister sent her the American and British prize-winning novels. Anjali had tried reading it, but it was too complicated. Still, she would not have understood two sentences just six months earlier. She would never even have opened it.
"I still miss Bombay," said Parvati. "Well, I miss the company flat on Nepean Sea Road. I miss looking out on water." She left the room to instruct the older of the kitchen sisters to start frying the prawn cutlets and roll out the dough for roti. She would make the boiled rice herself. No matter how many world cities Auro had lived and worked in, his palate had remained Bengali, which meant that he devoured a heaping serving of boiled white rice at both lunch and dinner and insisted that only his wife could cook rice perfectly. Anjali heard the cook calling up to her sister from the stairwell and then Parvati worrying out loud, "I hope there's no hanky-panky going on. I don't want to have to confiscate the TV."
It wouldn't be the end of the world, Anjali thought.
Anjali couldn't remember being in a room with Auro and no one else before. She had not taken up Auro's offers to teach her origami. Now that she was his sole audience, she was forced to train her attention on him. He was a moon-faced man, sharp-nosed, thin-lipped, with close-shaven cheeks and a brush mustache that crept into his nostrils. He didn't seem to detect her awkwardness. Pouring himself a second Johnnie Walker Blue, he launched into his pioneer's version of the history of Dollar Colony.
"This block was mostly unsold lots when I bought. There was one Mediterranean-style bungalow with a red-tiled roof on the corner lot, long gone now, and a half-finished California-style mansion across from it. Parvati took one look and said,