Noon (5 page)

Bharat Singh’s face flashed in the greasy pane of the swinging kitchen door. When he saw that it held no answers, frustration tempered only by a love of lecturing arose in Amit Sethia.
‘Can you think, Bharat Singh, why I might have asked you to put the wine out to settle?’

Bharat Singh was not in the habit of answering questions directly.

‘I thought if we needed more, I would . . .’

‘That’s not what I asked you,’ Amit Sethia growled, ‘I
asked
if you knew why I had told you to put the bottle out.’

‘Leave it, darling.’

‘Sumitra, no. This is important. The boy has to learn.’

‘No,’ Bharat Singh confessed, feeling perhaps that he was not without allies.

‘Good. That’s a beginning. I asked you to put the bottle out to settle because with good wine, and especially old wine, there is sediment. It is that that we have to allow to settle
at the bottom before we decant the wine. And the reason we do this?’

Bharat Singh now knew he had only to continue with his stance of ignorance.

‘So that we can maximize the surface area at which the wine is exposed to oxygen.’ So far only ‘wine’ and ‘surface area’ had been said in English and already
Bharat Singh was lost. ‘Isse hum,’ Sethia continued, ‘“letting the wine breathe” kehlate hein.

‘So,’ he said, with tenderness for his sudden student, ‘if we put one bottle out to settle for the entire day, we must put out every bottle that we intend to drink that day.
Samjhe?’

Bharat Singh nodded appreciatively and dived into the pantry from where he emerged seconds later with two more bottles of the wine the ambassador had sent over that morning.

Sethia flashed three fingers at him and smiled conspiratorially.

‘Now listen,’ his wife said, drawing Sethia’s attention away from the pantry door, ‘you must give me good warning for dinner. There’s pasta so I’ll need
notice of at least twenty-five minutes to half an hour.’

‘Of course, darling. In fact, serve dinner forty minutes after everyone has arrived. And Sumitra . . .’

‘Yes,’ she said, pushing past the kitchen door.

‘Sumitra,’ he repeated, in a tone that implied she should look at him.

‘What, darling?’

He tapped his teeth with the nail of his index finger; his wet lips glistened broadly in a smile. ‘Pasta should be al dente.’

Amit Sethia would never forget that evening. Years later, when the country had changed beyond recognition, when he had dwarfed all the targets he had set himself, both in real
and purchasing power parity terms, when his Crown had been replaced with a Bentley and undisturbed central air conditioning purred through all his houses from Calcutta to Delhi, when he went to the
World Economic Forum at Davos and had wine in his 183-bottle Eurocave that put to shame the ambassadors of three Western European countries, when the lawyer-girlfriend he would trade Sumitra for
had no cares but the small worry that the marquetry in the plane was not quite right, when there was all this and more, there was still the pain of that dinner. He was unable to rid himself of his
one regret: why hadn’t he started without the Rajamata?

From the beginning, Sethia had watched his guests arrive, in a strange out-of-drawing-room trance. The slim effeminate Servain, with his youthful face and his buxom wife.
Brusetti, the Italian ambassador, with dark greasy hair and a giddy American wife, who spoke continuously about the safety of her children in India. His friend Nair, who disappointed him by wearing
a suit and tie. This brought Sethia’s soul into sudden hand-in-glove contact with his body. Grabbing hold of the knot of his friend’s tie, he gave it a violent tug. ‘The
cognoscenti don’t wear this, my friend. This is worn by those who have to.’ Nair gave a confused smile at this unexpected aggression from his friend, but his wife, a large Punjabi
woman, brushed Sethia aside, straightened her husband’s tie and the couple sailed into the drawing room, leaving Sethia’s spirit to drift once more into a stance of watchful distaste.
It was eight o’clock.

For the next hour, from this bitter vantage point, Sethia noticed all the failings of his party. Looking down on the room of bright modern art, leather sofas and Lalique objets, his eye fastened
on the painful details. Why, for instance, after fifteen minutes, was Brigitte Servain’s glass still empty? Why had that idiot Bharat Singh not brought around the canapés? Sethia had
to stop himself from running into the kitchen, grabbing armfuls of champagne and canapés and distributing them among his guests like a schoolteacher sending children on a fieldtrip. Eat,
eat, drink, drink – there’s lots.

The women had taken over the conversation. They were discussing the languages their children would learn to speak simply by growing up in India.

‘It’s like Switzerland,’ Jane Brusetti said in a loud American voice. ‘Shane speaks Hindi, English and because the maid is Tamilian, he speaks a smattering of Tamilian
too.’

‘Tamil,’ Nair’s wife interceded, and smiled knowingly in Sumitra’s direction.

‘Sorry?’ the ambassador’s wife said in confusion.

‘Tamil,’ Nair’s wife repeated, ‘the people are Tamilian, the language is Tamil.’

‘Oh, sorry, Tamil.’

The Indian women smiled with satisfaction.

What was the need to do that? Sethia silently seethed, bloody provincial woman, forever scoring these small points.

‘So yes,’ Jane Brusetti continued, ‘like Switzerland. Except that instead of French, German, Italian, they’re learning, Hindi, English, of course, and
Tamil
.’

‘French, German and Italian would have been better,’ Brigitte Servain said, causing an icy silence to fall over the room.

These men were not lowly clerks, Sethia thought, they were two high-level diplomats and an important businessman; could they find nothing to talk about except the embassy education of their
children? And yet, Sethia himself felt incapable of introducing change. Politics would be too heavy-handed . . . Art! he thought at last.

‘Your excellency,’ he said, rousing Servain from the smiling placidity into which he had sunk, while also reminding his guests of the company they were in, ‘what do you think
of Husain?’

The ambassador stared at Sethia in wonderment, as if faced with the diplomatic challenge of his life. Then with a little cough, he began slowly, ‘Well, you know, before my posting here in
Delhi, I was the deputy ambassador in Tehran.’

‘Oh, really!’ Nair’s wife said aimlessly.

‘Yes,’ Servain continued, egged on by her enthusiasm, ‘and I was always amazed at the passions this man could still awaken in the average Iranian. It was fascinating to see
this fifteen-hundred-year history, still so alive in Iran, as if it had happened just yesterday. You should see them on Ashura, beating themselves in his name.’

‘Oui, mais c’était affreux,’ his wife said.

‘Oui, mais, bien sur. But still, Brigitte, amazing. It would be the equivalent in Europe of Italians marching in the streets of Rome because the city was sacked in 400
AD
or
whatever.’

‘No,’ Brusetti interjected, ‘Jérôme, it’s an exaggeration. It would be as if the Spanish were still angry for the Islamic invasions of the eighth
century.’

‘Yes, fine. But still, hard to imagine.’

Sethia sank into a moody silence, considering with sidelong glances the two M.F. Husain paintings that, hanging in the far end of the room, had inspired his question. It was nine o’clock
and Sumitra had disappeared.

She returned a moment later, somewhat frantic. ‘When do you want to eat?’ she hissed. ‘I’m making a slow-roast; it will be spoiled if we wait too long.’

‘Can you not see,’ Sethia said, coming to the true source of his anxiety, ‘that all the guests have not yet arrived?’

‘Something must have happened. You should call and find out?’

Over my dead body, Sethia thought to himself. But just then, with the arrival of the ninth guest, a glimmer of hope went through the party. Maggu Mahapatra was a vicious socialite, with ethnic
affectations, launched in India and abroad by the Rajamata. Sethia was loath to have him in his house. But dining tables in Delhi, like in other places, were hungry for single men; and, as he went
everywhere the Rajamata did, he invariably eased conversation.

He was dressed in a pale shade of brown. His salwar, which tightened around the knees, was of a bright silky material; the long sleeveless coat he wore over his kurta was of a duller, coarser
fabric. In his dark slim hand, he carried a broad packet of Dunhills and a lighter. When Sethia leaned in to greet him, he could smell the night air on his clothes, tinged with an oil-based
perfume. His twinkling eyes, Sethia felt, had taken in the room and the Rajamata’s absence, for before releasing him, he said, as if reading to Sethia’s depths, ‘She said to say
she was on her way. Her nephews drove in from Kusumapur this evening and she’s been sitting with them, drinking rum. I love that about her. She switches from Old Monk to DP in a
flash.’

The diplomatic circle giggled, as if out of gratitude to Mahapatra for bringing to their dull gathering news of the outside world.

‘No rush, no rush,’ Sethia said unconvincingly, adding, ‘and you, Maggu, you’ll have your usual?’

Mahapatra understood the implication. And not to be socially outmanoeuvred by an amateur, he said, ‘I’ll have a whisky soda. But Amit, what a wonderful house you have! Sumitra, dear,
do I see your hand in all of this? I wish I had brought something . . .’

‘No, no, what for?’ Sumitra said, rushing up.

‘Well, one should,’ Maggu replied, and stressed: ‘at least
the first time
. . .’

‘Come, come, Maggu,’ Sethia interjected. ‘Monsieur . . .’

‘Servain. Of course. We met at the opening of my exhibition.’

‘How can I forget!’ Brigitte Servain said, cutting in. ‘Jane, you must meet Maggu Mahapatra, the greatest textile expert in India. He has done the most exquisite
things.’

And like this, the diplomatic circle closed around Mahapatra, bringing an atmosphere of great cheer and congeniality to the recently moribund gathering.

But for Sethia there was little joy. The sting of the Rajamata’s lateness and Mahapatra’s prattle had brought the world suddenly very near; and he saw slights everywhere. In a
perverted desire to assert himself and his world, he began a separate conversation with Nair, in loud tones, about capital, equity and leverage. Every now and then, he would interrupt Mahapatra
with a wave of his finely manicured hand, flashing emerald and diamond rings of astrological influence. He enjoyed seeing Mahapatra’s face fall at the rudeness of the interruption; the
champagne gave him a reckless daring; who were these people, after all, to bind him to drawing-room manners? But his interjections were not always successful and were returned with put-downs that
only he was able to ignore. His addressing Brigitte Servain, for instance, as ‘Hey, darling’ was returned with a cold ‘Darling to my husband; Brigitte to you.’ And his
‘Maggu, hey listen, how much liquidity is there in the textile business?’ was answered with ‘None at all. Unless the roof leaks, which, in my exhibitions, it so often
does.’

It was in this hour of pride at his nonconformity that Amit Sethia decided to raise the stakes. Seeing now that it was almost ten o’clock, an idea entered his head. And speaking in a voice
that was loud enough for everyone to hear, he told Sumitra from across the room to serve dinner.

‘What about the Rajamata?’ she rapidly whispered, as she walked by.

‘Too bad,’ Sethia bravely replied.

Sumitra, who perhaps knew her husband better than he knew himself, cast a questioning look down at him. He pretended not to notice and straightened the rings on his fingers, making them catch
the light for his amusement.

If the other guests noticed the exchange, they said nothing.

But no sooner had his wife gone than Amit Sethia felt his resolve break. The eight to ten minutes that the pasta needed were excruciating. They drained him of the light drunkenness that had been
the source of his courage. Why was it taking so long? If only they were seated and eating, the wine in the glasses, the candles lit, he wouldn’t need any more courage to see the thing
through. The deed would be done, the point made.

And so, when Sethia felt Sumitra’s hand rest on his shoulders, telling him dinner was served, he wanted to clutch it and kiss it.

‘Come,’ he said, as if roused from a sleep, his voice growing stronger, ‘excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, come, dinner is served.’

Mahapatra took a sip of Scotch and pursed his lips in a gesture of cruel amusement. The guests rose languidly, looking here and there for handbags and shawls left behind. Beyond the glass doors
that separated the drawing room from the corridor, another set of glass doors gave onto a dining room where a candlelit table had been laid for ten; on either end of it, two open bottles of red
wine stood imposingly on two silver coasters. Just as the party had begun to move through the glass doors, the doorbell rang.

That was when Sethia’s courage left him; that was the moment he was never to forget.

The Rajamata stood in his doorway, like a visiting goddess, framed against the night. She wore a dark-blue silk sari with a silver geometric border, the colours seeming to match the grey
of her short, blow-dried hair and the dazzle of a single sapphire on her wrinkled fingers. At the sight of her, the ambassadors folded their hands and lightly bowed their heads; their wives
curtsied. A cold smoky wind blew into the corridor as though through a tunnel. Mahapatra rushed ahead and held the Rajamata’s frail hand while the diamonds around the sapphire flashed.
Sethia’s eyes sank to the silver border of the Rajamata’s sari, which, with its rising and falling design, seemed to him to describe the fluctuating shape of a lifeline.

Mahapatra was leading her down the row of guests, as though asking her to review a ceremonial guard. She had a word for everyone and when she reached Sumitra, Sethia’s last defence against
. . . well, himself really, against his weakening will . . . a womanly tenderness entered the Rajamata’s manner. She noticed a navratan on Sumitra’s neck that Sethia had given her, and
fingering it lightly in her creased fingers, she said, in a firm gravelly voice, ‘The most beautiful I’ve ever seen. Your husband?’