Although there was no broad and direct road to the airport, even the narrower streets of North Calcutta were deserted at this hour, and driving was not intrinsically difficult. Arun roared along, blowing his horn loudly from time to time. But suddenly a child rushed out from behind a cart straight into their path. Arun swerved wildly, narrowly missed hitting it, and came to a halt before a lamp-post.
Luckily neither child nor car was damaged. The child disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.
Arun got out of the car in a black fury and started shouting into the night. There was a piece of smouldering rope hanging from the lamp-post for people to light their biris with, and Arun started pulling it as if it were a bell-rope. ‘Get up – get up – all of you – all of you bastards –’ he shouted at the entire neighbourhood.
‘Arun – Arun – please don’t,’ said Meenakshi.
‘Bloody idiots – can’t control their children – at three in the bloody morning –’ A few destitute people, sleeping in their rags on the narrow pavement next to a pile of rubbish, stirred themselves.
‘Do shut up, Arun,’ said Billy Irani. ‘You’ll cause trouble.’
‘You trying to take charge, Billy? – No good – good fellow, but not much there –’ He turned his attention to the unseen enemy, the breeding, stupid masses. ‘Get up – you bastards – can’t you hear me?’ He followed this up with a few other Hindi swearwords, since he could not speak Bengali.
Meenakshi knew that if she said anything, Arun would snap at her.
‘Arun Bhai,’ said Lata as calmly as she could. ‘I’m very sleepy, and Ma will be worried about us. Let’s go home now.’
‘Home? Yes, let’s go home.’ Arun, startled by this excellent suggestion, smiled at his brilliant sister.
Billy was about to suggest that he drive, then thought better of it. When he and Shireen were dropped off near his car, he was in a thoughtful mood, though he said nothing except to wish everyone goodnight.
Mrs Rupa Mehra was sitting up late for them. She was so relieved to hear the car drive up that when they came in she could not at first speak.
‘Why are you up at this hour, Ma?’ said Meenakshi, yawning. ‘I will get no sleep tonight at all thanks to your selfishness,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘Soon it will be time to get up.’
‘Ma, you know we always come back late when we go dancing,’ said Meenakshi. Arun had meanwhile gone into the bedroom, and Varun too, who had been woken up at two by his alarmed mother and forced to sit up with her, had seized the opportunity and slunk away to bed.
‘Yes, you can behave as irresponsibly as you like when you are gallivanting around by yourselves,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra. ‘But not when you have my daughter with you. Are you all right, darling?’ she asked Lata.
‘Yes, Ma, I had a good time,’ said Lata, yawning as well. She remembered the tango and began to smile.
Mrs Rupa Mehra looked doubtful. ‘You must tell me everything you did. What you ate, what you saw, whom you met, what you did.’
‘Yes, Ma. Tomorrow,’ said Lata with another yawn.
‘All right,’ conceded Mrs Rupa Mehra.
7.25
LATA woke up almost at noon the next day with a headache that did not improve when she had to give a recitation of the previous night’s events.
Both Aparna and Mrs Rupa Mehra wanted to know about the tango. After she had absorbed the details of the dance, the scarily precocious Aparna wanted reassurance, for some reason, on one particular point: ‘So Mummy tangoed and everyone clapped?’
‘Yes, sweetheart.’
‘Daddy also?’
‘Oh yes. Daddy clapped too.’
‘Will you teach me to tango?’
‘I don’t know how to tango,’ said Lata. ‘But if I did, I would.’
‘Does Uncle Varun know how to tango?’
Lata tried to visualize Varun’s terror if Meenakshi had tried to prise him away from a table onto the dance floor. ‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘Where is Varun anyway?’ she asked her mother.
‘He went out,’ said Mrs Rupa Mehra shortly. ‘Sajid and Jason turned up, and they disappeared’
Lata had only met these two Shamshu friends once. Sajid had a cigarette that hung down, literally hung down with no apparent means of support, from the left side of his lower lip. What he did for a living she did not know. Jason frowned toughly when speaking to her. He was an Anglo-Indian, and had been in the Calcutta police before he had been thrown out a few months earlier for sleeping with another Sub-Inspector’s wife. Varun knew both of them from St George’s. Arun shuddered to think that his own alma mater could have produced such seedy characters.