Chapter 5
The wind-blown look was working for Chhaya Mehta. Her kurta and dhoti pants billowed with a passing drift, which had dislodged her dupatta. Her hair was an unquiet wave.
My eyes shifted to my wrist; she was late again.
Chhaya laughed, unfazed by my subtle attempts to guilt trip her.
I hadn’t seen my friend in a while. I was out of town for a week, chasing a story.
When I returned, she was busy, sucked in by family and work.
Each time we decided to meet, Chhaya would ring at the last hour to call it off.
She was dealing with one kind of emergency or another.
We hadn’t communicated much in the last three weeks, outside of the odd text.
Over the years, Chhaya and I had fashioned a little tradition. Every Wednesday, we met for breakfast at Perky Grace. We’d been doing this for five years. We met otherwise, too, if life permitted, but that midweek outing was our time.
The scheduled hour was 9 a.m., but invariably, I reached a few minutes earlier and she came in humming her favourite tune of the time at least 20 minutes late.
We would order one plate of English breakfast and an egg puff.
There was no need to go through the menu; it was always the same pick.
We’d peck at the food while downing a few rounds of hot beverages, pretending we were lactose-intolerant after the first. The generous tip we left behind was for the brewmaster, who knew just how to wake a girl up. A strong cappuccino.
I usually drove down from the gym, where I showered and changed into office wear.
Home was just two kilometres away, but it wasn’t an option.
Weekday traffic. I arrived balancing two big bags, laptop in one and Eves Essentials in the other.
I’m not comfortable leaving valuables in the car, unless I’ve dunked them in the boot when no one was watching.
Stealing from cars is like slicing bread, it’s all in the technique.
Not surprising then that weights are an all-day feature for me.
Chhaya would park at her office, located two buildings from Morning Herald Towers, and walk over with no more than a clutch, which she promptly placed next to my voluminous tote. ‘You and me,’ she’d say with a laugh. The sum of our differences.
Chhaya only carried a big handbag on night outs.
All she needed in the day were a few relevant cards, a lipstick and some change to tip the parking attendant, besides her phone and car keys.
But on a social outing, she carried her whole house.
A shawl, a vanity kit, a book to read (no idea why she packed that in because she was always the last to arrive), an extra pair of ballet flats in case her stilettos (that cost as much as my second-hand car) gave way.
Chhaya headed her family’s business empire, Mehta’s Limited (ML), which she sometimes called ‘unlimited’.
It included cinema halls in upmarket malls in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune and Bengaluru and a chain of 30-odd eateries that dotted highways in the southern half of India.
Mehta Express had corrupted taste buds with their wallet-friendly north Indian pickings that attracted all sections of society.
ML also owned petrol bunks and 24x7 medical stores in four metros.
Chhaya and I go back 14 years, when the Mehtas shifted to Bengaluru.
Our paths crossed in high school, but it took a while for our friendship to warm up.
Back then, I had a friend, and she had several pals.
I would’ve liked to be popular, but I was the basic model student.
Chhaya and I moved in the same circles but in different directions.
I remember Chhaya’s first day at Bangalore Scottish; she made a striking entry.
She was the only new entrant to Class IX that year, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
Most of the students were engaged in an eager exchange of opening-day pleasantries when the teacher’s voice rose above the rest, calling for silence.
She made the introduction soon after, telling the room of 30 teenagers that Chhaya Mehta would join our section.
‘Wow!’ a random voice from the back rows exclaimed. It might’ve been mine.
She was tall, having grown most of her 5’10” by then.
My height made me awkward, hers gave her a Teen Vogue air.
Her wavy brown hair was tied in a loose braid.
I preferred the green of her eyes to the shade of her tunic, which was different from the rest of the class because she had gone with a lighter weave.
She had only just stepped into our midst when she was expressly roped into the fashion clique, a group of girls who had everything money could buy, including boyfriends.
They called themselves the ‘StyleStahs’.
I wondered if the second half of the half-baked acronym was ‘sisters’ or ‘stars’.
They were four in number until that June morning.
I was at the periphery of this bunch of expensively-turned-out teens by default. Meena Iyer, who was the epicentre, was my closest friend in school.
Ours was an unlikely association. I didn’t have the fashion sense or hail from that kind of money that gives one admittance into these leagues.
But Meena was a generous soul. She looked out for me.
If I didn’t tag along to their outings every time she invited me, it was only by choice.
I had no great longing to be a charity case, even back then.
I took care of Meena’s homework. She attempted it most days but couldn’t complete it.
Juggling outings, outfits and boys was time-consuming.
When the StyleStahs fragmented two years later, following the Class X board exams, each going separate ways, Chhaya and I drifted towards each other organically.
Unlike Meena, however, Chhaya rarely telephoned me once she was home. She came home often though, dined with us, slurping glasses and glasses of my mother’s ‘sumbarrr’, which she later bastardized for her eateries, calling it exactly that.
My first visit to the Mehtas was years later, after I joined Morning Herald.
Chhaya had invited me to lunch with her family.
I used to think Chhaya lived in an apartment complex, not as tired looking as ours, but a flat all the same.
However, she lived in a bungalow with a circular driveway.
At the centre of the lawn was a marble fountain. Liveried guards manned the gates.
Chhaya greeted me at the door, standing a little behind her uniformed housekeeper, Mrs Molly.
As she led me to the formal dining hall, she apologized for her father, who was away on work.
A giant door opened into the grandest room I had ever seen, fit for a state banquet.
My whole house could flow into it comfortably.
My eyes were so busy taking in the walls and the high ceiling that I failed to notice the two people seated at the other end of the mighty teakwood table.
A lady in Juicy Couture tracks and an awkward-looking boy.
Chhaya introduced me to her mother. I smiled involuntarily. My eyes were still on the boy.
‘And this is Chetan,’ she said, ‘my brother.’ She smiled as she spoke; I heard it in her voice. Chetan made snorting sounds. His eyes were like Chhaya’s, his skin was pale, and his neck didn’t hold.
I had thought that, like me, Chhaya was an only child. I would joke about it when we were in school, and she never once corrected me, going along, even teasing me.
‘Chetan has cerebral palsy,’ she said softly as we settled into our chairs, ‘but we’re making sure the palsy doesn’t have him.’
I turned to my friend and smiled. She responded with a laugh.
It was then that I saw for the first time, beyond the mesmerizing colour of her eyes, a quiet sparkle that reflected in everything she did.
Long ago, the Mehtas had made a family decision not to talk about Chetan. They never hid Chetan, but they didn’t advertise their life either. They wanted to protect their daughter.
I stole glances as mother fed son, making soft, cooing noises, comforting him.
She was telling him about me, ‘didi’s best friend’.
He tried to get up from the chair and move towards his sister.
His mother didn’t stop him. Instead, she followed him, and his sister rose from her chair and reached out to him.
She ran her hands through his hair and pecked him on the cheek.
Later that evening, as I chatted to a photograph of my mother, I told her that, like me, Chhaya had everything.
Chhaya and I were similar people with distinctive tastes.
She drank tea, and I was a coffee lover; she had a sweet tooth, while I devoured savouries; our political ideologies were not opposite but different; reading habits, Hardy and Austen.
She liked milk chocolates, and I enjoyed them dark and bitter; she flaunted easy lines, and I liked my clothes fitted, but we were united by a toughness we instantly recognized in the other.
As she settled into a garden chair opposite mine at Perky Grace on this windswept Bengaluru evening, I was quick to verbalize the elementary questions of ‘how’ and ‘why’. I forced her to speak first. I was buying time.
We had broken with our Wednesday breakfast tradition, reuniting as we were after three weeks. Any time of day or night would do.
Chetan had contracted a virus; his body temperature had risen to 104 degrees. They thought they had lost him. He cried all day and night, his limbs wracked in pain. He would scream and turn violent even. Chhaya and her mother took turns nursing him, and her father never left the room.
They could afford all the help in the world, but the Mehtas took care of their own.
Chhaya was exhaling. Her eyes widening in terror, her fuchsia-stained lips twisting, her voice strained in part until it gave way to laughter.
I rode the roller coaster with her.
As I drained the last of my once extra-hot, now ice-cold cappuccino, my eyes were still on her.
‘Enough about me,’ she said suddenly. ‘What’s going on with you, babe?’
The drama in my life didn’t compare to what she had gone through these last weeks. I was caught between a sob and the excitement that was growing within me. I didn’t know what to say.
Chhaya stretched out her long legs and wrapped her arms across her chest.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
I had a choice, of smiling and putting it all off for later, or I could just tell her. I chose the latter. It would be a good distraction for her, and it would make me lighter. Win-Win.
‘Andrew Brown has joined Morning Herald.’
My revelation was met with radio silence, which is Chhaya’s standard reaction to an unexpected shift in conversation. She needed time to digest. A whole tea cake could be sliced in the interim.
‘Who?’ she asked lamely, holding my gaze before her eyes shifted to a spot beyond me, as if she was trying to place someone in the distance.
I nodded.
‘What?’ she asked as she pulled herself together, sitting upright. ‘The Andrew Brown? Our schoolmate?’
‘The very same.’
‘Are you happy? Wait, you have to be happy… No… Savage!’ Then finally, ‘But where has he been all these years?’
My friendship with Chhaya had gaps, from when we first said hello to each other to when we started chatting.
Then, again, after school. Chhaya pursued a business management degree, which at first took her away from Bengaluru, after which she sought a transfer and came home, while I studied humanities at a local campus.
We didn’t drift apart; we just didn’t keep in touch after stray attempts in the early months.
She got busy with her course and family while I was otherwise engaged.
Some three years later, a chance meeting on MG Road got us back on track.
I was rushing to the office with a takeaway coffee in my hand when I heard someone call, ‘Myra.’ Chhaya had stopped her car in the middle of Bengaluru’s busiest road and was hollering.
I turned abruptly, and the coffee was all over me.
‘Wait right there. I’m coming in a minute,’ she said.
Just like that, we were back in each other’s lives.
Her eyes widened briefly, replaced by a wicked smile.
‘He’s a super-successful journalist,’ I said.
‘And so are you.’ She was laughing, but it had a hysterical ring to it. ‘Have you met him?’
I nodded.
‘The ghost who walks!’
‘I’d have stopped at ghost.’
I gave her the lowdown on the Andrew Brown hire, the money and the madness.
I listed the pros and cons of Morning Herald’s most high-profile addition to the editorial team in recent times, but I kept going back to how the whole exercise had flown over my head. I’d had no idea, none at all.
‘Is he married?’ Chhaya asked, her eyes twinkling.
I shrugged. Like men wear mangalsutras!
‘Is he dating?’
‘How would I know?’
‘What’s he joining as?’
‘He’s not the peon.’
‘Myra!’
‘For now, as the political editor, but the plan is to make him executive editor or whatever. If he st–’
‘Have you guys spoken?’
I nodded slowly.
‘What the fuck! When… How did this happen? Why didn’t you call me?’
I shrugged again.
‘The dress,’ she said, looking at me like she was seeing me for the first time. She was pointing at my navy-blue outfit that had ridden up my legs.
I didn’t adjust my skirt; there was only that much of it.
She was smiling now. ‘I don’t remember seeing it before,’ she said, leaning forward.
She hadn’t. It was new.