THE HOUSE THAT BJ BUILT Read online

  ‘Boobie padding,’ she replies shortly. Let him make of that what he wants.

  ‘How, uh, uplifting,’ he murmurs, then bends to kiss her carelessly on the cheek. ‘How’ve you been, little Bonu Singh?’

  ‘Fine,’ she manages to reply nonchalantly. ‘It’s been a while since you visited.’ (It’s been almost three years, actually, but God forbid he ever find out she’s been counting.) ‘Is that your only bag?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s been a while, yes, but I’ve been busy…’

  He trails off, looking about the property, which appears rather shabby. The grass is both overlong and patchy, the trees need pruning, the house needs a coat of paint, one of the lights at the front gate is busted. The only person who’s looking in the pink of health, glowing like an exotic bloom in this muck, in fact, is his brat of a step-cousin.

  ‘But you’re free now?’ she asks.

  It might be an innocent question, but it makes Samar wince. She must have read about the Sparkler Awards incident. Damn.

  ‘Sort of. But like I said, I’ve been busy. I know I should’ve called before I showed up, but I won’t be any trouble. I’ll stay upstairs.’

  Bonu Singh gulps, then quickly recovers.

  ‘Uh…upstairs? You want to live upstairs? But your hissa’s all locked up and I don’t have the key, and it’s probably filthy.’

  Samar grimaces. ‘Ugh. I didn’t think of that. So maybe I can just shack up in one of the bedrooms downstairs?’

  ‘Good idea,’ she agrees instantly.

  His gaze grows speculative. ‘What are you looking so happy about, suddenly?’

  ‘Oh, just happy to see you,’ she assures him demurely. ‘BJ will be happy too.’

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ Samar repeats defensively. ‘The film and so on… But we’ve been talking on the phone. Well, I’ve been talking—he just tends to say a loud and cheerful hello and then zone out till it’s time to say a loud and cheerful goodbye. How is he?’

  Her lips tighten.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  Saying which she whirls around and starts to walk back to the house, her turquoise shawl billowing behind her like a super-heroine’s robe.

  Samar follows at a leisurely pace, taking in the generally run-down state of the house, and also, it must be admitted, the voluptuous figure of the girl in front of him.

  Quite the local hottie, he thinks, amused. Nothing hot about her walk, unfortunately. Whatever devil’s brew she’d sold her soul to buy, drink and thus transform herself from a scrawny brat into this luscious avatar, it clearly hadn’t been potent enough to alter her barrelling strut. She has retained that aggressive, outta-my-way swagger which used to make his stepmother shudder and say, ‘This girl walks like a rapist. Kuch karo iska.’

  He also notices that, because of her nose pin, the tiny ghungroos swinging at the end of her ridiculous gypsy belt, and the stack of jingly bangles around one wrist, she gives the impression of being lightly sprinkled with oxidized silver. There is a slight chhamchhamming quality to the whole package. A chhamchhamming rapist, Samar thinks to himself as they reach the house and she announces him. God help us.

  2

  The Judge recognizes Samar almost immediately.

  ‘Director saab!’

  He smiles sweetly after Bonu mutters a sulky, ‘Look who’s here, BJ,’ and holds out his hands to his tall, strapping grandson. Then he looks around the room and quaveringly asks Lachhu why he hasn’t served the boy some raw green guavas as yet.

  Samar sinks to his knees in front of the wheelchair, a lump rising in his throat, and says, his voice shaking very slightly, ‘Hello BJ, how distinguished you look.’

  The Judge’s eyes twinkle in response, softening the shock of how frail he looks.

  ‘O come ye in peace or come ye in war, or to dance at our bridal, young lord Lochinvar?’

  Chachiji, too awed to speak in front of somebody who has directed two-and-a-half Bollywood movies, stumps off to her flat at Hailey Court next door, to inform the world of the glamorous visitor.

  Samar and the Judge talk all through dinner, covering a wide range of subjects. BJ is unusually lucid, speaking well, listening intently, his gaze focused, his questions pertinent. Bonu is torn between feeling happy that he seems so well, and sulking because she feels so excluded. Sulkiness prevails.

  As they polish off bowls of cool ilaichi phirni, BJ points to himself with a drippy spoon and says, his eyes gleaming with quite their old vim, ‘Great-grandfather.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Make me one.’

  ‘It’s not my job to fulfil your every ambition, BJ,’ Samar returns firmly and changes the subject.

  After dinner, the Judge aggravates Bonu further by taking Samar into his bedroom where they remain cloistered for the next few hours. She sits at the dining table for a while, then springs to her feet, carries her plate to the kitchen sink and flounces off to her bedroom upstairs.

  Why the hell did he have to come? she thinks fiercely as she brushes her teeth, glaring at her reflection in the mirror. I’m happy, I’m sorted, the business is rocking—and now he shows up.

  Her mind flips back to those mortifying days when she was so obsessed with him that she used to call the May-June holidays the Samar vacation and wait like a loser, with bated breath, for him to come back from Mayo. She even used to go to Depaul’s and ask them to put more ‘mayo’ on her sandwich and would get a little thrill every time she said the word ‘mayo’.

  God, I was pathetic, she thinks as she spits and rinses. And I’m still pathetic, my heart was totally thumping when I was talking to him!

  She decides she might as well shower while she’s at it, and impulsively makes it a cold shower. Stop acting like a fool, she tells herself, teeth chattering, as the rusty old shower fixture spurts down water like a tap upon her head. And focus on what’s important. Samar Vir Singh is here—back at 16 Hailey Road. And he’s not stupid, or obsessed with BJ like the mausis, or too lazy to climb up a flight of stairs. He’s sure to want to go all over the house. What am I going to do if he comes nosing about upstairs?

  Eight hours later, Samar wakes up in the bedroom Dabbu and Eshu used to share decades ago, to find the rough leafy branches of the harshringar tree squashed up against the glass panes, trying to get a peep at how big Anjini’s boy has grown. He gets out of bed and opens the window.

  It is a miserable, chilly morning. Green guavas lie scattered, almost hidden in the overgrown grass, speckled white with parrot droppings. Little brown anthill bumps meander through the grass interrupted by the fleshy gleam of toadstools. There are squelchy puddles all along the driveway, some late cannas lie with their orange faces flat in the dirt, a colony of large black ants marches busily towards the rotting guavas, and a few bedraggled crows caw in the champas overhead.

  This place is going to the dogs, Samar thinks in disgust and jumps out of the window to find the lawn mower.

  He is making good headway, going around the lawn in concentric circles, bits of grass flying past his face, a line of crows pecking the ground in his wake, when Bonu appears at the upstairs window, dressed in pyjamas, sipping a cup of tea. Her vivid black brows snap together when she sees what he is up to. Samar, striding along steadily below, feels her eyes boring holes into his grey cabled sweater, so baleful is her glare.

  He stops and turns to stare up at her.

  ‘What?’ he calls, his tone slightly bored.

  She sniffs and looks away.

  ‘Say it!’ he shouts.

  She sets down her teacup, winds her hair into a messy top knot, skewering it into place with a pencil, and vanishes from the window. Two minutes later, she chhamchhams through the verandah and walks out to the lawn to scoop up the soggy newspaper.

  As she goes past him, she says, ‘It’s amusing how you think you can randomly show up, cut some grass and make up for more than three years of gross neglect.’

  He resists the urge to advance upon her with the
lawn-mower and see her jump out of his path. How she would squawk, he thinks wistfully.

  Instead, he rests his elbows on top of the mower.

  ‘Are you mad because I neglected BJ, or the house, or you?’

  She rests her hands on her hips.

  ‘BJ, obviously!’

  Samar doesn’t see what’s so obvious about this. The brat’s nursed a not-very-well-hidden crush on him for years (she seems to have gotten over it in recent times, thankfully), and she’s always loved the house like it was a person, not a thing.

  ‘He’s been pining for you,’ she continues.

  Samar, who already has an unquiet conscience about this, finds himself snapping, ‘Well, I’m here, aren’t I? And he’s happy to see me.’

  ‘But he’ll be miserable when you go. So the net effect of your visit will, eventually, be negative. That’s why I don’t like it when the family visits.’

  He stares at her, perplexed. ‘Then why are you complaining about my not visiting?’

  She shrugs. ‘Anyway, you’re only here because you and your bestie abused the Sparkler jury and all the winners in a bar and they kicked you out of Bollywood and you need a quiet place to lick your wounds.’

  His lips tighten. ‘That’s pretty much it, yes,’ he says lightly, feeling rather proud of himself for not rising to her bait.

  Bonu looks slightly cheated at this low-powered response.

  ‘How long will you stay?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t see how that is any of your business, but whatever. I’ll stay a few days. I want to catch up with BJ.’

  ‘Haven’t you caught up enough?’ she says. ‘You kept him up way past his bedtime last night.’

  Samar stares at her, amused, almost sympathetic. ‘You’re just jealous ’coz BJ welcomed me like a prodigal son and ordered the servants to kill the fatted guava. Poor Bonu Singh. Is he the only man in your life, then?’

  Since she responds to this with a smug toss of the head (which causes her hair to tumble out of its top knot and mantle her shoulders, by the way), he assumes the answer to his question is no.

  ‘I don’t care about men,’ she says loftily. ‘I’m wayyy too busy with my business.’

  ‘Ah yes, how is that crystal meth cooking lab you’ve got going upstairs?’ he asks politely.

  She flushes. This is a mean dig about something that happened a few years ago, when Bonu’s unit was still new and finding its feet. She had attempted to dye some material in-house and it hadn’t gone well, and the chemicals had stained and stunk up the driveway for days.

  ‘It’s a state-of-the-art garment fabrication unit,’ she informs him. ‘And it’s doing very well now.’

  This is not a lie. The business is doing well. Of course she’s not doing one-tenth as well as he is, BJ’s darling grandson with the Sparkler Award for debut director and Page 3 appearances and the 10 Most Important Thinkers of the Year listing in Outlook magazine. But then, she reminds herself, he is six years older than she is. She’ll be exporting all over the world by the time she’s thirty-two.

  ‘That’s nice,’ he replies peaceably. ‘Can I come and have a look?’

  Shit. Shit. Shit. No way can she let him come upstairs.

  ‘I don’t want my tailors bedazzled by Bollywood stardust,’ she says coolly.

  ‘That’s a good point.’ Very white teeth flash in an aggravating smile. ‘I’ll come up when they’ve gone for the day then.’

  Bonu’s heart bounds up into her mouth. She swallows manfully. ‘Why are you being so nosy, suddenly?’

  Samar’s eyebrows rise. ‘I’m being friendly,’ he says mildly. ‘Besides, Ma called me and said I should open up our hissa and clean it out a bit—no one’s been up there for over a year.’

  Bonu coughs loudly. ‘Ermmm…yeah!’ she says. ‘Maybe in a couple of days, okay? I’ve got stuff spread out all over the floor in my half that I don’t want to move. Embroidery panels and all, you know.’

  ‘Cool,’ Samar nods, getting ready to start pushing the lawn mower again. ‘I’m fine with that. Take your time. Like I said, I’m here for a few days.’

  ‘Just stay out of my hair,’ she mutters ungraciously.

  ‘But you have such pretty hair.’

  Bonu Singh’s head jerks up in surprise. ‘Thank you,’ she says blankly, then quickly looks away. Samar looks away too, his lean cheeks flushed.

  Awkward silence.

  ‘I, uh, just shot a shampoo commercial,’ he says eventually. ‘It was a lousy script, but the money was really good—anyway, that’s why I’m, sort of, noticing hair nowadays.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And I will,’ he assures her, fiddling with the handle of the lawn mower. ‘Stay out of it, I mean. Your hair, that is. Er, figuratively speaking. Also, physically speaking.’

  ‘Good,’ she says, red of cheek, and hurries away.

  Breathing hard and moving fast, Bonu chhamchhams up the stairs to the first floor, bursts through the double wooden doors into the tailoring unit, and secures the door behind her, pushing up the old iron bolt and smartly turning it to the right.

  The ladies tailors, bent over their machines, look up and smile.

  ‘Good morning, didi!’

  ‘Morning,’ Bonu pants. ‘Brrrr! What a cold wind, na? That’s why I have shut the door. Consignment ready, Masterji?’

  Daulat jumps forward, his knobbly little face wreathed in obsequious smiles. ‘Haan maidumbji, haan—all the bust-line padding has dried ekdum clean. Check any piece and see.’

  Quickly she inspects the sumptuous Dubai-bound consignment, impossibly decadent anarkali confections in buttercup yellow mulmul, each featuring twenty-six tapering panels heavy with embroidery, foam, lace and shimmer in sizes M, L, XL, XXL and XXXL.

  ‘Keep one for yourself, didi,’ Parveen sighs. ‘So pretty they would look on you.’

  ‘Where will I go wearing this yellow shuttlecock?’ Bonu demands. ‘To Mother Dairy to buy milk? Chalo, let’s pack them… Masterji, tell the courier wala to come up.’ Then she mounts a stool and claps her hands. ‘And now listen, everyone. Listen to me!’

  The entire team, busy bagging the anarkalis, looks up at her trustingly.

  ‘What I am about to say is very very important, okay?’

  Everybody nods.

  ‘You have to keep the main door locked ALL the time. NEVER leave it open. NEVER! Not even for a minute. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, didi.’

  ‘Don’t let any outsiders into the unit. NOBODY. NEVER.’

  She glares around at everybody, her big black eyes seeking an individual ‘yes’ from each one.

  ‘Especially that bhaiyya who has just come from Bombay!’

  They look a little disappointed. ‘The big director? But he’s famous! Why not?’

  Bonu stamps her foot.

  ‘Just promise!’

  Everybody promises obediently, looking a little confused.

  Satisfied, Bonu jumps off the stool.

  ‘Good. I’ve got an important call with Dubai now. Lock up after me.’

  And they do.

  When Samar walks into the kitchen a while later, he finds Bonu sitting at the table eating toast and talking loudly, her cell-phone on speaker mode propped up against a bottle of Maggi tomato ketchup.

  ‘He is requesting what?’

  ‘He is requesting, madam,’ says a patient Middle-Eastern voice, ‘for the monogramming on the jacket pocket to be included, FOC.’

  Bonu tilts her head, chewing busily. ‘Sorry, to be included, what?’

  The voice on the phone rises a little. ‘FOC, madam.’

  Bonu’s nostrils flare, she leans forward. ‘In your business parlance, Mrs Suleiman, FOC might stand for free of charge, but here in India it stands for fuck off cheapskate. The monogramming will cost two US dollars more, per piece.’

  ‘There is no requirement to be offensive.’ Mrs Suleiman’s voice is pained.

  ‘You’re the one who’s being offensive,’ Bon
u snaps. ‘The monogramming is a lot of work—’

  ‘We’ll get back to you,’ says the lady snootily and cuts the call.

  Bonu shoves a savage middle finger into the air and chews her toast moodily.

  Samar clears his throat.

  ‘Er…is there more of that toast?’

  ‘Help yourself,’ she says shortly.

  He sits down next to her and reaches for the bread loaf.

  ‘Work problems?’ he asks.

  She nods.

  ‘Negotiating can be a bitch.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘She was asking for freebies and calling me rude. Was I rude?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he shakes his head. ‘You said fuck off, cheapskate. If you were rude, you would’ve said chutiye.’

  She chuckles. ‘But she doesn’t know Hindi.’

  ‘Ah.’ He grins. ‘You know your shit.’

  She raises her chin. ‘Yes,’ she says proudly. ‘Vicky’s Secret is a world class unit. I filed an income tax return of Rs 2 crore last year.’

  ‘Impressive. As in Victoria’s Secret?’

  ‘As in Vikram Singh Rajawat. My late father.’

  His eyes soften. ‘Of course. Stupid of me not to make the connection.’

  He smiles.

  Bonu looks away. First that random comment about her hair, and now that smile. It is more than she can handle. If he would just stay away for many years at a go, she thinks, frustrated, she would be able to get over him. Or if he got married or something. Or made a truly awful film, or became fat, or best yet, lost all his hair. But the lovely films, the random visits, and the continued singleness and hotness and non-baldness render it impossible for her to get him out of her head. Especially since all the other guys she knows are just…not Samar Vir Singh.

  She pushes away her plate and stands up to get some tea.

  Samar walks up to the toaster, standing far too close to her for her liking, and slides in two slices of bread.

  ‘Butter?’ He looks around.

  ‘Go for it,’ Bonu mumbles, pushing it towards him.

  ‘So did you study design or something?’ he asks as he warms his hands over the toaster. ‘I’ve no clue what you did after school, sorry.’