The Red Carpet by Lavanya Sankaran

the car running and ready to leave,” she told Raju before entering the house. He thought about it, and then decided that she must have been joking—there had been an odd note in her voice. He decided to wait where he was; if she was in a hurry, it wouldn’t take him long to start the car. It was a good decision, because she finally reappeared a whole hour later.
    With her, standing on the steps, was a diminutive woman whose voice carried all the way over to him. Was that her mother-in-law? Raju mechanically drove the car up to the steps of the house, opened the door for May-dum, took a set of bags from her and placed them inside the car, before turning to study her companion. He got a shock. The little lady standing next to her was the same Mrs. Choudhary who had terrorized him all those years ago. She was still dressed in silk and large bindis, her voice still had that harsh edge that repulsed, but sometime in the past fifteen years she had shrunk in size. Now, when had that happened?
    As before, she ignored him. She was saying to May-dum: “. . . so wear the clothes I have bought for you. They will suit you more than that rubbish that you always wear. More proper. More suitable. And the frock for Baby is also very pretty, na? Much better than those shorts you put her in, poor thing. I always feel so bad when I look at her, dressed like that.”
    May-dum’s smile didn’t waver, at least until the car was on its way.
    Raju glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her eyes filling with uncontrollable tears. And though Mother-in-law Choudhary’s words expressed his sentiments exactly, at that moment, all he wanted to say was: please don’t be upset by that woman— she’s awful, I know, but she shrinks with time.
    When they got home, she handed the bags to him. “There are some clothes in there,” she said. “Perhaps your wife will like them. And take the dresses for your daughter.”
    He peeked inside the bag before protesting. He could see expensive sarees in bright colors, a child’s frilly frock in pink. They were lovely, but already he knew that May-dum wouldn’t think so. “But, May-dum, they are brand-new.”
    She smiled kindly at him. “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
    Gradually, over the course of the first year, he stopped worrying about her inappropriate deportment and just accepted it as one of life’s irregularities, just like that politician who seemed to have earned all the graces of god through corrupt, wicked living.
    Didn’t think about it, that is, until today.
    Today he was once again concerned about her comportment. Feverishly, anxiously concerned. What would she wear? Something decent, or not? He had a sudden mental image of her appearing in scanty shorts, a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other, and his heart almost failed. What if she did dress like that? Then, he immediately resolved, he would just have to pretend that he couldn’t find the right directions; he had lost his way, lost his mind, something like that.
    He could never take her to meet his family if she was dressed like that.
    This momentous visit was the product of a conversation he’d had with her about a month earlier. It had come about casually enough. May-dum had been busy at her desk all morning, and then handed him a set of bills, the cheque payments neatly attached, along with instructions on where each was to be paid. The last item was her daughter’s annual school fees, a large but apparently appropriate amount for three hours of supervised singing and paint-spattering every weekday.
    “And what about your daughter, Raju?” she asked casually at the end, raising the tip of her spectacles with one hand and rubbing her eyes with the other. “Are you sending her to school somewhere?”
    Raju nodded dumbly.
    Of all the passions of his soul, one reigned supreme. He worshipped his little daughter. She had just turned three, but when she was born, he could already envisage the successes of her