The Secret Keeper of Jaipur by Alka Joshi
17
MALIK
Jaipur
We’re still in the lobby, making our way back to our seats after the refreshment break, when we hear the crash. Followed by shrieks and groans, the plaintive cries for help. All at once, people are stampeding—into and out of the Royal Jewel Cinema. They’re pushing one another to get to the lobby doors or running inside the theater to tend to the injured. For a split second, our group—Kanta, Manu, me, the Singhs—stands frozen, in the middle of the lobby, as desperate people dash frantically around us. Baby is now awake and screaming.
Then Samir is fighting to get inside the ground floor of the theater. Manu is right behind him. I can hear Samir yelling at everyone to evacuate the theater immediately.
He calls for Ravi, who is nowhere to be found. I run toward the lobby, shouting at the ushers to open the doors and pleading with the crowd to quickly go outside. The exodus is a tidal wave, but there’s also an opposing force—people fighting to get in to rescue loved ones who remained in their seats during the intermission.
While Samir disappears inside the theater, I tell Sheela to take her children and Parvati and Kanta outside. But she shakes her head, hands the baby to her mother-in-law, and tells her and Kanta to go home. Then she runs inside the theater. I follow her.
Groups of men and women are lifting the mound of rubble off the injured. Sheela and I join them. We can hear pleas for help underneath the chunks of concrete, rebar and bricks.
I spot Samir talking to the theater manager, a man I know only as Mr. Reddy, whom Samir hired from a smaller movie house in Bombay.
Hakeem is standing next to Mr. Reddy. That’s strange. I’d expected to see the accountant earlier with his wife and daughters up on the balcony. Hakeem is nervously swiping at his mustache as if he’s wiping away the memory of the accident that’s just occurred. Samir is barking orders. Mr. Reddy wipes the sweat from his brow and snaps into action. Hakeem runs after him.
Manu looks as if he’s in shock; he keeps asking Samir how this could have happened.
The police arrive in short order, and for the next hour, about a hundred moviegoers who escaped from the building without injury help them rescue the wounded buried under the debris, lifting steel and concrete off the people underneath and making bandages from shirts and dhotis. I see Sheela rip her fine silk sari with her teeth and quickly fashion a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding of a crushed leg. By the time we get the injured to the lobby, a ragtag convoy of cars, trucks, scooters, cycle rickshaws, motor rickshaws and tongas are waiting to transport them to nearby hospitals. Sheela is efficiently directing who goes where. The few ambulances in Jaipur are privately owned and come only when called.
When I glance at my watch, I see that it’s now 1:00 a.m. For the past three hours, I haven’t stopped to think; I’ve been engrossed in what needed to be done. My arms ache from the effort of lifting bodies. I rub the back of my neck to ease the headache that I’ve just become aware of. My throat feels parched—from thirst, or from the dust of the debris? I go inside the theater, again, to see what I can do. One side of the theater is almost completely destroyed. That’s where a good part of the balcony collapsed. The theater’s other half appears to be intact. But no one knows, yet, why the structure in the one area failed, and so we can’t assume the rest of it won’t. Better we clear the building just in case the worst happens.
Samir is standing, arms akimbo, in the middle of the wreckage. The theater is almost empty. He’s speaking again to Mr. Reddy, whose face, and Nehru jacket, are covered in plaster dust. The man’s perspiring; he looks dazed. Mr. Reddy removes a handkerchief from a pocket, blows his nose, then wipes his eyes. He nods to Samir, walks around him, goes past me and heads through the corridor that leads to the back of the stage.
Now Samir stands alone, his back to me; I’m not sure he knows I’m watching him. His silk coat’s torn neatly down the center back seam and across one shoulder. His hair and clothes are covered with mortar dust. He cocks his head; something on the floor seems to have caught his attention. He leans down to pick up a broken piece of cement concrete. He examines it, turning it over in his hand.
I survey the rubble, too. I look up at the innards of the balcony, the skeleton of rebar and cement mortar. Three seats, still securely bolted to the now exposed balcony floor, lean precariously toward the gap, as if, at any minute, they, too, might let go. I can see that two columns supporting the balcony gave way, sending several rows—maybe fifteen, twenty seats—to the ground floor. These are the seats that landed on the audience sitting directly below.
I study the torn carpet, littered with chunks of building material, broken seats lying askew, covered in plaster and mortar dust. All at once, I feel pity for Ravi Singh—a thing I never thought possible. All the work that went into this building. All the hours. And the money, and the talent. He had planned this grand opening down to the last detail.
I kick one piece of broken brick, and it rolls over. I can tell by the indentation on one side that it was a decorative brick. Strange. I squat and pick up another piece. Also a decorative brick. Manu once showed me that one side of each decorative brick is stamped with the manufacturer’s logo. Suppliers take pride in their work.
But the bricks I’m looking at have no factory stamp—just a shallow indentation where the logo would usually be. I spot another brick without a logo. Then another. These, too, have the same rectangular well in the center. Why are there so many decorative bricks? I look around the theater. Bricks weren’t used to adorn either the walls or the balcony facade. I think about those invoices I’ve been logging in. Every invoice for bricks came from the same place: Chandigarh Ironworks. So where’s their stamp?
I weigh the brick in my hand. It feels lighter and looks more porous than the bricks Manu showed me. If I were to pour a glass of water on any one of them, I’m pretty sure the water would flow through and saturate the brick in record time.
“Abbas?”
I raise my head to see Samir standing next to me. Dust has settled in the grooves of his forehead and the crevices around his mouth as if he were a stage actor made to look older than his years. I stand up, a piece of brick still in my hand. Samir looks at it, too.
“I told everyone to go home. Tomorrow morning, my people will start cleaning up.” He takes the brick fragment out of my hand. “After that’s done, we’ll sort out who’s doing what, and when.”
“But, Uncle. How could this have happened? So many people worked on this. The building was inspected many times—”
He holds up a hand. “I know no more than you do, Malik. But, for now, take Sheela home. She’ll be exhausted.” He looks directly into my eyes as he says this: “Ravi must have escorted the actress back to her hotel. He may not be aware of what’s happened.”
Is he guessing that’s the case, or is he telling me? It doesn’t matter. I’m too tired to argue, much less disagree.
Sheela and I are quiet in the car. We’re sitting in the back seat, as far away from each other as possible. Mathur’s driving. It’s almost 2:00 a.m. When we finally arrive at Sheela’s house, every light in is on. She looks at me.
“You’ll stay for a little while?” she asks. There’s a tremor in her voice.
I hesitate because of how it was the last time I was here, alone with her. I’m not impervious to her charms. Tonight, though, she and I have been through a catastrophe we could never have imagined, and I’m sympathetic to her need to talk to someone, someone who experienced what she experienced tonight.
When she says, “Please,” I ask Mathur to wait in the drive until I return.
Asha opens the front door and cries out, “Oh, MemSahib, please come inside. Samir Sahib called Mrs. Singh to let her know you are all right. It must have been so terrible! Mrs. Singh said she would keep the children tonight so you can rest. I was to wait for you, then go back to her house so I can take care of Rita and Baby in the morning.”
Sheela nods faintly. Her sari is in tatters. Her hair is disheveled. The ayah hesitates. “Ji, there is blood on your arm. Shall I get a plaster?”
Sheela looks at her arm as if seeing it for the first time. “It’s someone else’s blood,” she says.
The ayah’s eyes go wide, but she says nothing more about it. “I will serve the food,” she says. She locks the front door and steps around us to head to the kitchen, barely giving me a glance.
Sheela looks at me, as if to see if I want dinner. I shake my head.
“Asha,” she says, “we’re not hungry. You can go.”
The maid turns, her expression puzzled. Sheela shakes her head again. Then, with a quick glance at me, Asha heads down the hallway, to the back door where she’ll leave this house and walk the hundred yards to Samir Singh’s.
Sheela steps into the library. At the mirrored cocktail cabinet, she fills two glasses with Laphroaig. I’m still standing in the foyer when she holds out a glass to me. After everything that happened at the movie house, the frenzy and the chaos of it all, my body is too tired to move.
“Come,” she says.
I step into the room. “Thought you couldn’t stand the stuff.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” she says.
I take the glass from her. We sip the whiskey; this is not a night for offering a toast.
Now she smiles. “You’re a right mess.”
“Look who’s talking,” I reply.
I turn her by the shoulder so she can see her own face in the mirror over the fireplace. She looks at her reflection: face covered in dust, her blouse torn at the shoulder, her tattered sari, a tendril of hair that seems to be standing at attention while the hair on the other side of her head looks flattened. She takes a deep breath in, then lets out a whoop of laughter.
Her laughter takes me by surprise, and hearing it is a relief. This Sheela, this disheveled girl who’s laughing at herself, is a reprieve from everything that happened earlier tonight. It almost makes me happy. At fifteen, a privileged girl with rosy cheeks who thought herself a queen, she was too good to tolerate my presence. But at this very moment, I can almost believe I’m seeing the real Sheela, the one without polish, without pretense.
With her glass of scotch, Sheela gestures to my pants, ripped at the knees and covered in grime. We do look a mess: a pair of ruffians, or beggars. She covers her mouth with her hand to keep from spitting out her liquor. Then she starts to hiccup, and it’s one more thing we find hilarious. Now we’re doubled over, giggling. We’re in tears, because we’re giddy and exhausted. And we’re still alive, despite the mangled bodies, and the blood, and the tears and pain. It’s hard to believe it really happened, even if we saw the chaos for ourselves, the people suffering and people helping others, even when they couldn’t know if more was coming—more destruction, more suffering, more death.
When we finally stop laughing, Sheela wipes her eyes. Her kajal has smudged her face so that the area beneath her lower lids looks bruised. She studies her ruined makeup in the mirror, suddenly serious. Then she takes another gulp of scotch and glances at me.
“People died,” she says.
“Only one,” I say. So far.
She raises one eyebrow. “And that’s supposed to be a comfort?” She goes over to the cabinet to fill her glass again. “I saw that boy—the one whose tibia was smashed. He’s Rita’s age. And that actor, who plays everybody’s favorite grandpa—Rohit Seth. Millions of his fans will miss him...” She takes another sip of her drink. “How many injured? Forty? Fifty? This calamity will... There will be consequences. None of this will go away.”
Sheela has that look I’d seen on the faces of Omi’s children when they were feeling hurt and didn’t know what to do about it. The feeling of betrayal, when things went wrong, or didn’t happen in the way they expected. Tonight was supposed to be Ravi’s triumph. And she had stayed to help knowing full well that her husband was with another woman, oblivious to what’s happened. She must know that the others in their circle—the tennis club, golf club, the polo club—know about it, too.
When one of Omi’s children was confused, or sad, I’d sing a song and rub their back until they fell asleep. I can’t do that with Sheela, but I think of the remedy Auntie-Boss taught me years ago.
“Come,” I say, and take her elbow. “Do you have lavender oil?”
She frowns at me as, not sure why I’m asking. “Ye-es?”
“Good.” But in my head, I hear warning bells: Bevakoopf!Her husband isn’t home. Remember the last time you were alone with her? Can you trust yourself? I answer my own questions: she’s spent, traumatized, she needs comfort. I’m doing nothing more than drawing her a bath.
She’s a little unsteady and lets me lead her, drink in hand, upstairs. She points to their bedroom. I gently sit her down on the bed, covered in white satin. Then I remove my jacket, roll up my shirtsleeves and go into her bathroom, where I turn on the faucet to fill the bathtub.
I’m not surprised to see the bathroom’s made for comfort. Samir designed it, after all. The claw-foot tub is generously sized. It’s made of porcelain and occupies at least a quarter of the room. White Carrara marble he must have imported from Italy covers the floor and the walls.
In the cupboard, I find a box of English bath salts and an indigo bottle of lavender oil; I dump a handful of salts into the steamy water, and a capful of the oil, then I go back to the bedroom. Sheela hasn’t moved. She’s sitting, staring at the Persian carpet; her glass of scotch now empty.
I put my hands on my knees and bend at the waist so we’re looking at each other eye to eye, the way I might approach a child. “Let’s get you in the tub.”
She stares at me, uncomprehending. I help her to stand and point her to the bathroom. Then I pick up my jacket, salaam her and leave the room.
I’m at the bottom of the stairs before a chilling thought occurs to me: since we arrived, she’s put away two healthy glasses of the scotch, and she’s been drinking on an empty stomach. If no one else is with her, might she drown?
I run back up the stairs and into her bedroom, throwing my jacket on the empty bed. The voices in my head are screaming now: Bevakoopf!Mat karo! The bathroom door is open, and I step inside. Sheela’s hands are holding on to the sides of the tub, but the rest of her, including her head, is under water.
“Sheela!” I run to the tub, grab her under her arms and haul her up.
“What?”she says. She sounds annoyed. She can see from my expression that I’m panicked, and it makes her chuckle. “I was only wetting my hair. In any case, you’re just in time to shampoo it.” She’s slurring her words.
I’m looking at her naked body, when I wonder what I’m doing here, and back away as if I’ve just been scalded. The cuffs of my shirt and suit coat are soaked, and my hands are dripping water on the sari, blouse and petticoat she was wearing tonight, lying next to the tub.
She raises her eyebrows and points. “Abbas,” she says, “shampoo!” Now she is the girl with the cut-glass surface: imperious and spoiled. But then she looks at me, offers me a playful smile and says, politely, “Please.” She points me to the shelf above the sink, where I can see the shampoo bottle. It’s as if the Sheela that I’m dealing with tonight has two sides: the first haughty, used to giving orders to the help, and the second needy, wanting company and consolation.
“And if Sahib comes home?”
“He won’t,” she says. “He has a thing for actresses.”
She sinks under the water again as if to put an end to any conversation about Ravi. When she comes back up, she wipes her face with her palms.
I’ve spent a lifetime serving others. I’m good at it, and always have been. But only so long as it serves me, too. I do it gladly, willingly, when I can see the benefit. When the benefit is questionable, or when there might be consequences, I weigh the two. Usually, the end result is a zero sum. What’s the harm? I ask myself. It doesn’t make me lesser if I’m helping someone who’s in need of a simple service I can provide.
I sigh, take off my jacket again—now mostly wet—and roll up my shirtsleeves again. I take the shampoo bottle from the shelf and stand behind her, squeezing a generous amount of shampoo onto her scalp.
“Where’d you learn how to make a tourniquet?” I ask. A question I’ve been pondering all evening; how she knew just what to do, despite the chaos.
“Maharani Latika taught us at the Maharani School for Girls. She taught us Western dancing, how to set a table for ten guests and how to save a life in an emergency.”
Sheela cleans under her fingernails while I massage her scalp. “She’d boarded in Switzerland for school, and guess where the Red Cross started?”
She turns her head to look at me.
“Close your eyes,” I tell her, “or I’ll get shampoo in them.”
She closes her eyes and faces front again like an obedient child. “I was good at all the medical stuff. I could have been a doctor.”
“What stopped you?”
She sighs. “My father wanted me to marry Ravi so his business could be merged with Singh Architects. And I wanted to marry Ravi.”
She takes gardenia soap from the tray attached to the tub. It takes two tries because the alcohol has slowed her down. Now she’s using it to soap her arms.
“He was such a prize, Abbas. Every girl I knew was hoping to land Ravi as her husband. But I was determined to win. The marriage was arranged when I was fifteen, but his family sent him off to England and we had to wait until he finished his degree.”
My ears are burning, now, with indignation. They sent their son to England to conceal his dalliance with Radha and the son he fathered with her. I’d like to say it, but I don’t. I don’t want anyone to know that Niki’s illegitimate. It’s better that he’s with the Agarwals than with the Singhs. Of that, I’ve always been sure.
Sheela rinses the soap off her arms. “Abbas? What will happen now?” The tremor is back in her voice.
I don’t know any more than she does. I’ve seen rickshaw drivers get a leg smashed by a passing motorist. I’ve seen drunks fall off the second story of the Pink City bazaar. But I’ve never seen anything like tonight’s catastrophe. “Close your eyes,” I tell her.
“Yes, Sahib.”
“Lean forward.” I open both the bathtub taps and fill the steel container that was sitting on the floor with warm water. I pour the water on her head and watch the suds fill up the tub. The fact that I no longer see her breasts, or the dark triangle of hair between her thighs, is a relief. I realize the feeling that I’ve been having is guilt—as if to look at Sheila’s naked body is to cheat on Nimmi. But now that feeling starts to ease.
“It isn’t Ravi’s fault, you know,” she says.
I rinse the remainder of the soap from her hair. “What’s not?”
“The cinema. Tonight.” She turns to face me, the water from her wet hair splashing my face. “I want to show you something.” And before I know what’s happening, she climbs out of the tub, grabs a thick white towel from the rack and wraps it around herself. She runs into her bedroom, still a little unsteady on her feet.
When I open the drain to let the water empty from the tub, the vision of her rising from the water—supple buttocks, slim waist, caramel-colored legs—is seared into my brain. I can hear her in her bedroom, rummaging through her dresser drawers.
“Here it is!” I hear her say. Just as suddenly, she’s standing next to me, her scented body, her warm, damp skin, the water dripping from her hair. She’s pointing to a piece of paper that she’s holding.
It’s a transcript from Ravi’s final year at Oxford. “See? He’s very good in math and material sciences. He understands how buildings work, and how to make them strong. There’s no way he’d have anything to do with the disaster we went through tonight. He couldn’t have. He didn’t.”
Her eyes are begging me to agree with her. I know she wants me to absolve her husband. But I can’t stop thinking of those bricks I saw at the cinema house tonight. Why were they there? If they came from somewhere other than Chandigarh Ironworks, how did they end up in the Royal Jewel Cinema? There’s something off there. I just don’t know what it is. And there’s no way I can confide in Sheela. She loves her husband—I can see that plainly—and will do anything he asks of her. I also see the question behind her question—What if he has done something wrong? I don’t know. And the answer, when it comes, could hurt those who are dear to me. I’m thinking about Manu and Kanta. And Niki.
“I have to go,” I tell her, gathering my jacket and walking to the door.
She calls out to me and I stop to listen but don’t turn around.
“Thank you,” she says.
As I descend the marble stairs, I’m rolling down the cuffs of my shirtsleeves. Ravi rushes in through the front door and runs directly into the drawing room. He calls out, “I heard about the—”
He comes back out of the drawing room and sees me coming down the stairs. “What are you doing here?”
The sight of him—disheveled, frightened, in a panic—fills me with disgust. Where was he when we were taking care of people injured in the building he built, the project he’s been boasting about?
“Taking care of your wife.” I button the sodden cuffs of my shirt as I come near him. “You can take over now.”
His mouth twists into an ugly frown. “You! You stay away from Sheela,” he says. “Think I haven’t seen how you look at her?”
Now I’m standing right in front of him, putting on my damp coat. Ravi smells of alcohol and cigarettes. His eyes are bloodshot. His hair, usually slicked back with Brylcreem, falls in tendrils across his forehead.
I take the cotton handkerchief from my pants pocket and dab the wet patches on my coat. I take my time, letting him wonder why my coat is damp. Then I raise my chin. He’s taller than I am, but that doesn’t stop me looking him in the eye.
“You should look at her more often, Ravi.” I push his chest lightly.
He stumbles back, as if I’ve slapped him.
I step around him. When I reach the front door, I turn. “Sheela helped a lot of people at the cinema tonight. Now it’s your turn.”
The sedan is waiting for me when I walk outside. When I step inside the car, I realize I’ve brought the scent of Sheela’s gardenia soap with me.