Meenakshi got up to do his bidding.
‘Now get out,’ shouted Arun. ‘Go and have dinner with your Shamshu-drinking friends. And don’t let me see you anywhere near this house for the rest of the evening. And let me tell you here and now that I won’t put up with this sort of thing from you at all. If you live in this house, you bloody well abide by its rules.’
Varun looked uncertainly towards his mother for support.
‘Darling, please do what he says. You look so much nicer in a shirt and trousers. Besides, that button is missing. These foreigners don’t understand. He’s Arun’s boss, we must make a good impression.’
‘He, for one, is incapable of making a good impression, no matter what he wears or does.’ Arun put the boot in. ‘I don’t want him putting Basil Cox’s back up, and he’s perfectly capable of doing so. Now, Ma, will you stop these water-works? See – you‘ve upset everyone, you blithering fool,’ said Arun, turning on Varun again.
But Varun had slipped out already.
7.6
ALTHOUGH Arun was feeling more venomous than calm, he smiled a brave, morale-building smile and even put his arm around his mother’s shoulder. Meenakshi reflected that the seating around the oval table looked a little more symmetrical now, though there would be an even greater imbalance between men and women. Still, it was not as if any other guests had been invited. It was just the Coxes and the family.
Basil Cox and his wife arrived punctually, and Meenakshi made small talk, interspersing comments about the weather (‘so sultry, so unbearably close it’s been these last few days, but then, this is Calcutta –’) with her chiming laugh. She asked for a sherry and sipped it with a distant look in her eyes. The cigarettes were passed around; she lit up, and so did Arun and Basil Cox.
Basil Cox was in his late thirties, pink, shrewd, sound, and bespectacled. Patricia Cox was a small, dull sort of woman, a great contrast to the glamorous Meenakshi. She did not smoke. She drank quite rapidly however, and with a sort of desperation. She did not find Calcutta company interesting, and if there was anything she disliked more than large parties it was small ones, where she felt trapped into compulsory sociability.
Lata had a small sherry. Mrs Rupa Mehra had a nimbu pani.
Hanif, looking very smart in his starched white uniform, offered around the tray of hors-d’oeuvre: bits of salami and cheese and asparagus on small squares of bread. If the guests had not so obviously been sahibs – office guests – he might have allowed his disgruntlement with the turn of affairs in his kitchen to be more apparent. As it was, he was at his obliging best.
Arun had begun to hold forth with his usual savoir-faire and charm on various subjects: recent plays in London, books that had just appeared and were considered to be significant, the Persian oil crisis, the Korean conflict. The Reds were being pushed back, and not a moment too soon, in Arun’s opinion, though of course the Americans, idiots that they were, would probably not make use of their tactical advantage. But then again, with this as with other matters, what could one do?
This Arun – affable, genial, engaging and knowledgeable, even (at times) diffident – was a very different creature from the domestic tyrant and bully of half an hour ago. Basil Cox was charmed. Arun was good at his work, but Cox had not imagined that he was so widely read, indeed better read than most Englishmen of his acquaintance.
Patricia Cox talked to Meenakshi about her little pearshaped earrings. ‘Very pretty,’ she commented. ‘Where did you get them made?’
Meenakshi told her and promised to take her to the shop. She cast a glance in Mrs Rupa Mehra’s direction, but noticed to her relief that she was listening, rapt, to Arun and Basil Cox. In her bedroom earlier this evening, Meenakshi had paused for a second before putting them on – but then she had said to herself: Well, sooner or later Ma will have to get used to the facts of life. I can’t always tread softly around her feelings.
Dinner passed smoothly. It was a full four-course meal: soup, smoked hilsa, roast chicken, lemon soufflé. Basil Cox tried to bring Lata and Mrs Rupa Mehra into the conversation, but they tended to speak only when spoken to. Lata’s mind was far away. She was brought back with a start when she heard Meenakshi describing how the hilsa was smoked.
‘It’s a wonderful old recipe that’s been in our family for ages,’ said Meenakshi. ‘It’s smoked in a basket over a coal fire after it’s been carefully de-boned, and hilsa is absolute hell to de-bone.’
‘It’s delicious, my dear,’ said Basil Cox.
‘Of course, the real secret,’ continued Meenakshi knowledgeably – though she had only discovered this afternoon how it was done, and that too because the Mugh cook had insisted on the correct ingredients being supplied to him ‘the real secret is in the fire. We throw puffed rice on it and crude brown sugar or jaggery – what we in this country call “gur” –’ (She rhymed it with ‘fur’.)