Minor Disturbances at Grand Life Apartments

by Hema Sukumar

Genres: City Life; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

A warm-hearted debut novel set in the beautiful coastal city of Chennai.

Grand Life Apartments is a middle-class apartment block surrounded by lush gardens in the coastal city of Chennai, India. It is the home of Kamala, a pious, soon-to-be retired dentist who spends her days counting down to the annual visits from her daughter who is studying in the UK. Her neighbour, Revathi, is a thirty-two-year-old engineer who is frequently reminded by her mother that she has reached her expiry date in the arranged marriage market. Jason, a British chef, has impulsively moved to India to escape his recent heartbreak in London.

The residents have their own complicated lives to navigate, but what they all have in common is their love of where they live, so when a developer threatens to demolish the apartments and build over the gardens, the community of Grand Life Apartments are brought even closer together to fight for their beautiful home...

(P) 2023 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: July 28, 2023

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 304

Sample

1

Kamala

Every evening, Kamala stood purposefully in front of her gods, armed with a carefully planned and numbered agenda. First and foremost, she prayed for her daughter Lakshmi’s health and happiness. Second, she prayed for her daughter to do well in her studies – a subject she considered important enough to be discussed as a separate line item. She had prayed for this every day, and hadn’t that worked? Didn’t Lakshmi top her class and win a scholarship to study abroad? Her third prayer was somewhat half-hearted, and she only included it because she considered herself a good person. She prayed for the well-being of all mankind, but even as she mumbled words in Sanskrit, she knew that however almighty her gods, and however numerous their numbers, they were simply not equipped to deliver adequate results on this front.

On that particular Saturday, with her daughter’s annual visit less than ten days away, the sense of anxiety that usually underlined her prayers was replaced by a sense of eager anticipation. However, she didn’t let that tempt her into taking any short-cuts, and she opened her eyes only when she was finished. She struck a match and carefully lit the lotus-shaped silver lamps in front of her gods as they continued watching her actions impassively through a smoky haze of jasmine incense.

The sun went low in the windows, casting a pool of amber light in the corner of the kitchen partitioned into a prayer room. Kamala could hear the shrieks of children playing in the distance, muffled by the sounds of a cement mixer at a construction site nearby. She did the time-zone conversion that she was now very familiar with and knew that it was noon where her daughter lived, where a more mild-mannered sun ruled the British summer sky. Wiping her hands on the edge of her cotton saree, she decided to check if her daughter had replied to her question about what she wanted for her first meal back at home.

She stared intently at the screen of her laptop as her emails loaded, as if it would not do its job properly if left unsupervised. Whenever Lakshmi visited, she would tease that this was the only laptop in the world that was never moved from its place nor was ever kept on a lap. Kamala would smile indulgently in response but make no attempt to move the laptop from its designated spot on the coffee table, where it sat importantly on its own tassel-edged embroidered mat.

Kamala felt a small flicker of disappointment when she saw that there were no new emails from Lakshmi. Peering at the keyboard with her spectacles perched at the edge of her nose, she typed with the tips of her index fingers, reminding her daughter to let her know whether she wanted potato roast or ladies finger fry for lunch the day she arrived. Sweet potatoes would also be in season, she added, making a mental note to buy some from the shop across the road, just in case.

She switched the television on and walked back into the kitchen to cook rice for dinner, humming the familiar theme song of her evening soap mindlessly. Her saree was hitched up to her waist and her long hair, which had suddenly turned very grey at fifty-five, was tied into a neat bun at the nape of her neck. Her heart-shaped face had aged gracefully, and girlish dimples still puddled her cheeks when she smiled, but she didn’t believe in smiling unless it was absolutely necessary.

In the time that it took for the pressure cooker to puff up and whistle, she came back to her laptop and clicked the button that fetched new messages from the internet. When she saw a new, unopened envelope appear next to her daughter’s name, her heart leapt with familiar pleasure. However, she soon felt a frown arrive on her lips as she started reading the message. Lakshmi sent her regular emails, but they were usually short messages giving cursory updates about her life. She would say things like, The weather is so cold. I need the wool monkey cap you use in Chennai – lol, or Made Maggi with vegetables for lunch.

Her message that day was unusually cryptic – Amma, there’s something I need to tell you when I’m there. Hope it doesn’t make you too upset. See you soon.

She read the email carefully again, adjusting her spectacles to be closer to her eyes. Her brain cycled through various worrying possibilities. Was something wrong with her daughter’s health? Was she planning to change her major from computer science to something that made no practical sense, such as history, like her colleague Dr Raman’s son? Or worse, did she want to marry a British boy whose accents she had previously described as – using one of those ­peculiar modern words – ‘cute’?

She was just about to reply to her daughter’s email, when Sundu rang the doorbell, arriving early for dinner.

‘Unbelievable,’ Sundu declared as soon as she walked in through the doors, shaking her boyishly short hair for additional emphasis.

Kamala simply nodded in response and motioned her inside. Sundu, shortened from Soundaravalli, was Kamala’s closest friend and had the habit of using the word ‘unbelievable’ to describe a wide variety of topics, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be entirely believable.

‘This General Motors diet. I told you about it, didn’t I?’ Sundu asked, still sounding belligerent.

‘What about it?’ Kamala enquired, although she was unable to recall any conversation about a diet that seemed to have an unlikely association with a company that sold motors.

‘I gave up that diet yesterday. I was supposed to eat nothing but bananas and milk on the fourth day. Can you believe this nonsense?’

‘No, I cannot,’ Kamala replied with appropriate indignation, although she could. Sundu constantly worried about her weight and approached diets in the same way that cats approach a ball of yarn – with a sudden burst of frenzied attention before assuming their natural state of doing nothing. Kamala, on the other hand, had always been on the thinner side, and was often reminded by Sundu about how lucky she was that she didn’t have to worry about losing weight. Like most people born with some sort of good fortune, Kamala didn’t understand why others valued it so much – so what if you had a few extra kilos here and there? she would ask Sundu, who would look back at her with unconcealed exasperation.

Sundu stood leaning against the kitchen sink eating peanuts and Kamala was about to ask her to save her appetite for dinner, when she smelled the rain – the sweet smell of salt, mud and summer reprieve – before she noticed the darkening clouds outside the kitchen window.

‘I’ve left clothes out to dry on the terrace,’ she exclaimed, and they picked up a plastic bucket each and went briskly up the stairs.

The terrace was shared by all the residents of Grand Life Apartments and was sliced by a zigzagging clothesline from which sarees and towels hung crisped from the day’s heat. The tops of mango and coconut trees encircling the terrace rustled softly, and dark rain clouds hung low and ripe from the sky. The rain still seemed undecided whether to start pouring or not and was leaving large, thoughtful circles on the concrete floor.

‘Not too long to go now, for Lakshmi’s visit, is it?’ asked Sundu as she removed a saree with one hand and folded it deftly into the bucket.

‘Yes, only eight more days. By God’s grace.’

Sundu had a newly-married son, who lived within easy reach in Bangalore. Although Kamala couldn’t be more proud of Lakshmi, she wished she could see her whenever she wanted as well, without having to wait fervently for her annual two-week appearance. The days before her visit would pass by slowly, with her stripping off each day eagerly in her calendar, and the two weeks Lakshmi was at home would pass by quicker than the time it took to fry mustard seeds in a pan. After that, she would have to start the excruciating countdown for the next year before she could see her again.

‘Both of you come home for lunch when she is here.’ Sundu’s assertive tone tapered away distractedly as her eyes fell on Jason, who had also come up to the terrace. Tilting her head towards him, she asked, ‘That new tenant in the apartment – he is a foreigner, isn’t he?’

Kamala replied that blonde-haired, blue-eyed people in Chennai usually tended to be.

‘Why would a young foreigner choose to stay in Chennai of all places? Instead of lying around half-naked on the beaches of Goa? Or getting up to no good on houseboats in Kerala?’

‘Well, there is the Marina beach here, I suppose,’ Kamala said, feeling the need to defend her city.

Sundu continued in a louder voice than Kamala would have preferred. ‘He looks like a young James Bond, doesn’t he?’

Kamala, who didn’t watch English movies, but had a functioning knowledge of who James Bond was, thought that Jason looked nothing like an action-movie hero. If anything, his lanky frame and shy demeanour made her think that he must be pursuing a good, sensible profession, like accountancy. Nevertheless, she nodded in agreement.

Jason, who was removing clothes from the other end of the terrace, seemed to sense their interest and waved at them with a hesitant, friendly smile. Sundu smiled and waved back over-eagerly as if it were actually James Bond who had made an appearance on their terrace to rescue some towels in distress. Kamala waved diffidently back.

The rain suddenly seemed to make up its mind and started sending sharp slivers of water down their way. Kamala and Sundu ran down to the sheltered safety of the apartment, grinning widely, the act of running with swinging buckets in their hand making them feel younger than their years. The rain soon gained momentum, and they listened to the cracks of thunder and the sound of water pouring down in torrents while seated at Kamala’s dining table. Rice, tomato rasam and potato kari were laid out in stainless steel vessels, and a few fried appalams were heaped in a blue Tupperware bowl.

Kamala doused a heap of rice in the fragrant, soupy rasam and mixed it with her hand. With her other, she served Sundu the potatoes that were cut into exactingly thin pieces and fried a deep golden brown, just the way she knew her friend liked them.

Sundu protested that she was serving her too much but ate all of it appreciatively, exclaiming, ‘Your potatoes are excellent, as always.’

‘I made more than enough. Let me pack some for you to take back.’ Kamala had already kept some aside in a stainless steel box in anticipation of Sundu’s compliment.

As they were eating, the nasal sound of a cell phone ringing called for their immediate attention. Kamala got up to check her phone to see if it was Lakshmi calling her, flakes of rice still stuck to her hand. The call turned out to be for Sundu, who mouthed to Kamala that it was her assistant. She continued to give elaborate instructions on the phone while still seated at the dining table. Sundu had only started studying law in her late thirties but had managed to build a successful career, and now had a retinue of assistants who fell over each other to do her bidding. Kamala worked flexible hours as a dentist at a hospital nearby and often found herself summoning up the courage to remind her part-time nurse that she was expected to work for part of the time.

After dinner, Sundu switched on the TV and changed to the sports channel where a cricket match was in progress. ‘At least it isn’t raining in Australia. The Indian team was giving those Sri ­Lankans a run for their money when I had checked the score.’

Kamala would have preferred to continue watching her evening soap that involved a standoff between an evil heiress and a righteous cop on Sun TV, but on listening to her friend’s exuberant cheers, she resigned herself to the corner of the sofa in front of her laptop. This was one of the reasons why their friendship worked – Kamala felt more comfortable giving up control instead of putting Sundu through the perceived discomfort of what she would have liked to do instead. However, on the rare occasions that she did have a strong opinion, she could be very stubborn and Sundu usually knew when to back off by just looking at the set of her jaw.

Kamala leaned forward towards her laptop and typed an email to her daughter, asking her what this important thing she needed to tell her was. Sundu was also typing emails on her phone while the cricket match on TV was interrupted by an advertisement for ­mineral water claiming to be freshly bottled at the foot of ­Himalayan glaciers. Without looking up from her phone, Sundu asked, ‘So, what is our girl saying?’

‘Well . . .’ Kamala started, trying to translate her concern into words. ‘Nothing. Just the usual one-line telegrams,’ she finished. Sundu’s attention turned towards the television again and the noisiness of a sports stadium filled the living room.

*

The next day, Kamala tried calling Lakshmi, but Lakshmi declined her call swiftly. She texted back, saying that she was in classes all morning. Kamala closed her laptop after checking for new emails one last time and sighed, feeling vaguely distressed. Kamala and Lakshmi used to lead lives that revolved around each other, as it had been only the two of them for such a very long time. At the end of a long day, they would sit on the terrace folding away clothes that had been left out to dry, enjoying the late evening breeze from the coconut trees nearby. Even as a teenager, Lakshmi used to accompany her to the vegetable market, although she would stand a little distance away from her mother in embarrassment while Kamala haggled over the price for a kilo of carrots. However, ever since Lakshmi left for Oxford, Kamala had felt herself become slowly obsolete from her daughter’s life. Perhaps, this was inevitable, she surmised. Parents spend their entire lives trying to make their children more equipped for the world, and maybe this was the end goal – the bittersweet liberation of not being needed.

She went to Lakshmi’s room to check that the air conditioner hadn’t died from lack of use. Summer had truly arrived, accompanied by a humid, all-pervasive heat, and she couldn’t have her daughter sweltering during the short time that she was here.

Kamala sat apprehensively on Lakshmi’s bed as the air conditioner made a strange wheezing noise at the effort it took to cool the room.

This room had been Lakshmi’s since she was a toddler, when Kamala had moved into Grand Life Apartments so that they could be within walking distance of a good school that produced ­students delectable enough to be immediately consumed by the best ­engineering and medical colleges in the country.

Now that Lakshmi had followed the path paved for her by Kamala, her room was preserved in the same condition that it had been on the day she left for her studies abroad. A framed photo of the two of them, taken on the terrace of the apartment to mark one of the rare occasions in which Lakshmi had worn a saree, was displayed on a shelf, protected by two layers of crinkled plastic wrapper. ­Bottles of nail polish, moisturisers and perfumes stood unused on the dressing table, although they were dusted periodically. She made a mental note to finally confer with Lakshmi this time on which ones to keep and which ones to give away.

She opened the grey cupboard in Lakshmi’s room and decided to pick some kurtas that she could send for washing and ironing, so they would be ready for Lakshmi to wear when she got here. The cupboard was packed with clothes from Lakshmi’s teenage years that had not made the cut for a spot in her going-abroad suitcase – salwar kameez sets, hand-painted T-shirts from her fabric painting phase and some unused exercise clothes. There was also her photo album in the middle of these clothes, and as Kamala reached for it, she found a faded blue dupatta wedged underneath.

The long piece of cloth unfurled a memory from over fifteen years ago when Kamala had returned from work to find an eight-year-old Lakshmi pacing the floor of the house with a very adult-like, ­worried expression on her face. Lakshmi was part of a school play the next day and was urgently in need of a blue dupatta. Kamala had brought out her own blue dupattas for her to inspect, but with each one, Lakshmi had started looking more teary-eyed because it wasn’t the correct kind of blue. Perplexed, Kamala had asked, ‘Well, what is the correct kind of blue supposed to be?’

‘It needs to be the colour of copper sulphate because I am going to be playing that compound in the science play tomorrow!’ Lakshmi had wailed, sobbing into a clearly not-copper-sulphate coloured dupatta. Kamala was familiar with these educational plays – ­children would hold a placard indicating which chemical they were and wheel around on stage, forming chemical reactions in accompaniment to some exuberant commentary from their science teacher. ‘Why can’t you play something simpler, like sugar or salt?’ she had asked playfully, which had made Lakshmi’s saucer-like eyes well up with tears.

They had then walked to Ranganathan Street and climbed up and down the stairs of multiple shops without luck. Finally, they landed in a musty tailoring shack with walls filled with sketches of necklines for blouses. The owner took them up a flight of cramped stairs and brought out a blue muslin cloth from a spool and rolled it over the splintered wooden table. Lakshmi jumped up and down with excitement as if she were seeing the Indian ocean glinting under the morning sun for the first time.

Kamala vividly remembered the image as if she had taken a picture of it – Lakshmi’s dimpled grin over her braces, her eyes sparkling with happiness while her head was draped in that blue piece of cloth. She wished that she could take the same little girl out of this mental picture and ask her to confide all her worries to her.

As she folded the dupatta pensively, she was interrupted by the loud trilling of the phone. It was Sundu, continuing a previous conversation without any preamble. ‘So, what did we decide – are we going to Aruna’s daughter’s wedding? I need to confirm my ­schedule with my assistant.’

‘It is the second Saturday of the month, isn’t it? I won’t be at the clinic, so we can go together,’ she said resignedly. She usually didn’t look forward to social events that involved more than a certain critical mass of people. Kamala and Sundu were now more than used to being viewed differently for going about their lives without husbands by their sides, but now their children’s lives had started to come under scrutiny as well. (‘Sundu, two years since your son got married – any good news?’, ‘Kamala, I know this boy in the US, good family, doesn’t drink or smoke – would be perfect for our Lakshmi! You just say the word.’) However, Aruna was a good friend who had also been Lakshmi’s teacher at school, so she decided that she was worth running the social gauntlet for.

‘By the way, I had meant to ask, do you want me to send my car to pick up Lakshmi from the airport?’ Sundu asked.

‘No, I have booked a taxi already,’ Kamala replied and, after a moment’s hesitation, added a little sheepishly, ‘Lakshmi sent a strange email the other day, actually.’

‘Strange?’

‘She said she had something important to tell me when she got here. Not sure what it is.’

‘Young people these days,’ Sundu started, in the exasperated tone adopted by middle-aged parents all over the world, ‘have no clue what is important. My son said he had something important to tell me the other day. Turned out he was getting a tattoo. Of his wife’s name of all things. Can you believe that?’

Sundu continued without waiting for Kamala’s response, ‘I told him that his forehead would be an appropriate place for the tattoo if he still needed my opinion on anything, that is.’ She then paused for appreciation from Kamala for her sassy retorting skills.

However, Kamala’s eyebrows were getting increasingly knitted with worry. As if Sundu could see that down the phone, she added, ‘I wouldn’t worry about Lakshmi, though. She is such a sensible and clever girl.’

When Kamala got off the phone, her eyes roamed over the various proofs of this cleverness, framed and displayed as certificates and golden goblets in the living room. They were arranged behind a glass-walled shelf, interspersed with multiple photos of Lakshmi. Amid all these pictures of her daughter, however, there was only one picture taken with her father. It was a picture of Kamala’s husband holding a two-year-old Lakshmi in his arms, both of them pursing their lips seriously at the camera. Her husband, a surgeon whom she had immediately liked from the kind and respectful way he had addressed her parents on the day they met, had died in a bike accident shortly after that picture was taken. Life had been hard afterwards when she had to continue living with her in-laws, but she was grateful to them for allowing her to continue working. Although this was all long ago, the memories of her husband evaporated like pickling mangoes under the summer sun, she still missed having someone who would marvel along with her at her daughter’s achievements or share seemingly frivolous concerns such as the one she was having right now.

Kamala redialled Lakshmi’s number, and when she heard her daughter’s voice after a few rings, she was momentarily suffused with happiness.

‘Hello? Ma?’ Lakshmi’s words came out in a straightened accent that usually indicated that she was surrounded by friends.

‘How are you doing? All well, I hope?’

There was some murmuring on the other end before Lakshmi’s voice came on the phone again, louder and without the accent. Kamala could now hear the sound of traffic in the background, which probably meant that her daughter had stepped outside from wherever she had been.

‘Hi, Ma. Sorry, I was eating lunch at that Mexican place I have told you about. Is everything OK? Is it about the email? I probably shouldn’t have sent it.’

‘Oh, did I disturb your lunch? Go back and eat properly. I will call again later.’

‘Is it anything urgent, or is it just about my email?’

‘Nothing urgent. I was only wondering what the important thing you wanted to tell me was. I am just worried, you know. But you go back and eat. We can talk later when you have finished.’

There was a pause before Lakshmi replied, ‘I wrote that email very late at night – I know that I should have just spoken to you when I got home. Listen, Ma, don’t worry about it.’

Kamala detected a catch in her daughter’s voice that made her more persistent. ‘If it’s nothing to worry, you should be able to tell me what it is about? Is anything wrong with your health?’

‘No, Ma, my health is fine.’ Lakshmi was now using the mildly annoyed voice that she usually adopted just before she was about to dismiss Kamala.

‘That’s good to hear. Then what else is wrong?’ Kamala pressed.

‘Listen, Ma. I know you think that I don’t drink.’

Kamala was silent. She could hear a bus honking thousands of miles away. Had her daughter, the one who didn’t even drink coffee until she was fifteen, now succumbed to the allure of alcohol in this new country? Maybe it was just a passing phase. This wasn’t as bad a revelation as she had feared, though.

‘Not the kind of heavy drinking in your television serials, but a glass of wine now and then.’ Kamala could hear Lakshmi half-smile at the other end at her own description. ‘Anyway, I wrote that ­message after a couple of drinks. I didn’t intend to make you worry unnecessarily. We need to talk in person and not over the phone like this, Ma.’

‘Oh,’ said Kamala in surprise. She had thought that Lakshmi’s confession was over. Lakshmi used this pause to explain that she needed to get back and quickly ended the call.

Kamala had meant to ask Lakshmi a couple of things – whether she wanted cashew nut or plain Good Day butter biscuits to be bought before her visit and whether she had remembered to pre-­order the Asian vegetarian meal for her flight home. Instead, she just looked at the phone accusingly as if it were the one that had ended the conversation. The phone hummed back unsympathetically in response.

2

Revathi

The last time Revathi had met Shreya was over a year ago. These yearly meetings were a recurring theme with Reva’s friends – they had all left Chennai for foreign shores and she met them during their annual visits home, accompanied by a fog of new accents, hand sanitisers and baby powder. Shreya was one of her closest friends in college, so she was glad that this would not be another superficial conversation where she would need to pretend that her life was extra-awesome just to keep up with the more awesome lives that allegedly happened abroad.

Reva waited by the entrance to Hotel Saravana Bhavan, ­standing next to a man setting up a cotton candy machine, who smiled ­leeringly at her. S. . .