Love in the Time of Affluenza Read online

  Love in the

  Time of Affluenza

  Love in the

  Time of Affluenza

  Shunali Khullar Shroff

  BLOOMSBURY INDIA

  Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

  Second Floor, LSC Building No. 4, DDA Complex, Pocket C - 6 & 7 Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110070

  BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY INDIA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published in India 2019 This edition published 2019

  Copyright © Shunali Shroff, 2019

  Shunali Shroff has asserted her right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as Author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publishers

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes

  ISBN: PB: 978-93-86826-03-9; eBook: 978-93-868260-05-3

  Created by Manipal Digital System

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  To my wonderful mother Shobna

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  I nearly fall face-first into the meat section at the supermarket today. As a vegetarian, it’s especially surprising. But I see I’ve gotten ahead of myself here, so let me start at the beginning.

  The driver is off sick, so I have groggily done the school run at the crack of dawn. While I’m driving back experiencing a glow of pride at having managed to not kill myself and my three children, the cook – who thinks I work for him – rings to dictate an urgently needed list of provisions. I turn into the first mall I see near their school and head towards Green Bazaar to find arborio rice and shiitake mushrooms and just as I’m walking in, I see someone who looks exactly like my friend Trisha.

  Spotting a friend at a supermarket isn’t usually this suspicious a happening, only Plaza Mall isn’t anywhere near Trisha’s house and also Trisha is to domestic errands what Donald Trump is to environmental conservation. In addition, while she’s given to a bit of bling, why on earth is she wearing red lipstick with her Lulu Lemons this early in the morning? I wave to say hello, but she doesn’t see me and turns into another aisle. I go towards the aisle and am about to call out when I see a man in a checked shirt – quite possibly made from a French tablecloth – move towards her, put his hand on her back and whisper something into her ear. Trisha responds by throwing her head back and letting out a volley of such merry giggles that either he’s the funniest man on earth or she’s flirting with him. The man taps her jokily on her head with the baguette he is carrying and that unleashes another torrent of giggles. And then when I see Trisha turn in my direction, I do the only thing I can – I dive behind the closest aisle where I find myself nose to nose with a bag of frozen chicken thighs. I realise I haven’t missed meat, having left it about five years earlier. I peer out to see Trisha and the mystery man’s back walking down the Bath & Shampoo aisle, with him trying to hold her hand and she, belatedly remembering that she is married, yanking it away and looking left and right in the manner of a woman who’s really bad at having an affair.

  I make a dash for the tills to pay and leave before being spotted by Trisha and Tablecloth Man but on seeing them emerging from the baked goods aisle facing me, I’m left with no choice but to abandon my basket, shiitake mushrooms and all, pull out my phone as if receiving an important call and run out of the supermarket. As I scurry to my car, heart thumping loudly, it occurs to me that it’s a bit much that I’m the one hiding and not the woman cheating on her husband. And also, how dare she does not tell me? I mean, it’s one thing to lie to your partner but to the person you call your best friend?

  Driving out of the mall, I take a deep breath on hitting the main road and ring her from the first traffic light I hit. I’m not especially surprised when she does not respond – too busy giggling, I’m sure. God, I wonder how long this has been going on. Or if she just randomly met this man at the supermarket. No, that would be too weird. I have theorised to the point of exploding by the time a message from her flashes on my screen five minutes later.

  Can’t talk, at the dentist. xx

  The dentist? Really Trisha, is that the best you can do? I take another deep breath. I’m going to wait for her to tell me. There’s no point getting involved, no good can come of it. The next thing I know I’ve pulled up on the side of the road.

  No problem. Just wondering if that man that I saw you getting cosy with at the supermarket was your dentist???

  No response. I think of the colour draining from her face and while I’m still totally bewildered, I have a little smile on my face.

  I get home and ask Shambhu to bring me a cup of coffee. Clearly, this is a situation that demands drugs, and caffeine is about as exciting as it gets in my house. Shambhu asks if he should take the groceries out of the car. I have no idea what he’s talking about till I remember the basket abandoned at Green Bazaar. ‘No groceries,’ I tell him, ‘there was an emergency.’ I can’t believe he’s bothering me with questions about food at a time like this. He brings the coffee out on a tray and I’m about to ask him why he hasn’t served my almond milk along with the coffee when I remember that it too was sitting in that basket that got left behind. Damn you, Trisha!

  She eventually rings some twenty minutes later.

  ‘Hello?’ I say, icily.

  ‘Natasha don’t be mad at me. I…I can explain,’ voice faltering.

  ‘What’s left to explain? I saw everything with my own eyes. And then you tell me you are at the dentist’s! Why would you lie to me, Trisha? Why, Trisha, why?’ I say. I know I’m prone to being a little dramatic sometimes but I think this conversation calls for it.

  ‘I have yoga in forty-five minutes. Meet me for coffee at Yoga House and I’ll tell you everything,’ she says enigmatically. I so badly want to know that it doesn’t even occur to me to say, ‘No, adulteress, I don’t have a driver today, you come here and tell me.’

  Draining my coffee, I make a dash for Yoga House, feeling light-headed with anticipation. I wedge the car into the only free spot I can find, praying that it’s actually intended as a parking space. Driving around the narrow lanes of Bandra without running a life form over is in itself an achievement. Besides, I have bigger things to worry about.

  Trisha is at the organic café on the second floor. Expecting to find her filled with contrition, if not outright panic, I’m quite surprised to be greeted by an utterly sanguine woman who appears to have just reapplied her lipstick. Not even French women wear red lipstick this early. Madam is insouciantly sipping carrot juice and asks me to sit on the sofa next to her. One glass of beetroot juice and two cups of coffee later, I still can’t make head nor tail
of it.

  Not only has Trisha – one half of what I thought is the loveliest couple I know – been cheating on Nakul for eight months now, but who has she found worth risking twelve years of marriage and the happiness of two lovely children for? Guneet from Vasant Kunj.

  They’d met at a coffee shop in Istanbul last October. Trisha had been to see her cousin in Crete and was availing of the free Turkish Airlines stopover in Istanbul to buy affordable fur and carpets from the Grand Bazaar on her way back. Cupid struck at a sidewalk café in the upscale neighbourhood of Nishantashi. Only Trisha could go to the threshold of Europe and find herself mesmerised by a Punjabi from Delhi.

  She glows as she tells me about their first meeting and the moment when she decided that she was willing to take that next step. ‘He lives in Delhi with his wife, their marriage sucks, you know,’ she says as if that justifies everything. ‘But we are making it work, he keeps coming to Bombay for work and now also to see me,’ Trisha adds coyly. I listen to their love story with a sentiment that can be best described as nausea. The only time she looks worried while sharing details of her romance with me is when I mention her twins.

  ‘They’re my world,’ Trisha says, ‘but I only have this one life and at the moment I want to do this for me. You’ll love him when you meet him!’ she gushes, ignoring the disapproval writ large on my face.

  ‘Meet him?’ I say, aghast. ‘I’m going to do no such thing, Trisha,’ I say, ‘what’s more, this ends here.’

  ‘I can’t guarantee that,’ she says shrugging her shoulders as if she cannot guarantee whether or not she can accompany me to a morning walk on Juhu beach. I look on bewildered. ‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone,’ she says.

  I look at her blankly. If Varun had been at home and not out playing polo, I might already have told him.

  ‘I know you won’t say anything, I trust you implicitly,’ she says, the manipulative so-and-so. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell you about him for so long, Natty,’ she says, ‘I just didn’t know how to. I think the universe wanted you to know and that’s why it sent you to the supermarket to find us sneaking around there!’

  ‘I was at the supermarket because Varun has been asking for risotto for dinner and we didn’t have any arborio rice, Trisha,’ I say but she continues to look at me as if she was the teacher in The Karate Kid and I was the naïve disciple, unable to process the cosmic wonder that is life. When she’s done, she laughs and, planting a scarlet adulterer’s kiss on my cheek, disappears into her Ashtanga class.

  I leave the cafe to find that my car has been towed. It’s divine justice for my having agreed without protest to be complicit in Trisha’s adultery. God has towed my car.

  As I head home in an auto, bumping my way over the potholes, I think about Trisha and the complexity of my relationship with her. In life, you choose some friends and some friends are thrust upon you. I had many misgivings about Trisha when Nakul had first introduced me to her as his prospective bride. She seemed ambitious, had borderline tacky dress sense right from the start and came across as someone who was born with the singular intention of always being the belle of the ball, even when there wasn’t a ball. After her marriage to Nakul, we started seeing so much of each other that I had to just accept her for what she was, warts and all. She has her redeeming qualities, but I’m in no mood to go into them while being tossed around inside an auto.

  Not when I am worried about the school pick-up. If it wasn’t hard enough already to ferry the kids to and from school without a driver, I realise it’s going to be even harder without a car. There is also the stress of planning how to get the car back without Varun discovering what happened. He gets this look on his face, you see, when I make a mistake – it’s this little knowing smile. I adore my Varun, don’t get me wrong, but that little my-wife-is-such-a-flake smile of his makes me want to claw his eyes out.

  ***

  Well, the children have been fetched in an Uber, I nearly forgot my son Sumer though, what with my mind still disturbed after what I have witnessed this morning. I kept thinking of Trisha and Tablecloth Man having sex. It was a revolting thought, let me tell you. Thankfully, Ria reminded me to wait for her brother, just as I was walking towards the school gate with her and Sofie, my oldest and most temperamental child.

  Anyway, after attending to my brood’s après-school needs, I’m now sitting in front of my laptop, going over the details of this eventful day, letting it all sink in. I’m also trying to get a start on my weekly column that I do for City Reflections. Unfortunately, while inspiration doesn’t strike, my awful mother-in-law, Rani Devika Kumari, does, in the form of a phone call.

  ‘Natasha’, she begins, without hellos, imperious from the get-go. ‘I need you to go to Ravissant for me to pick up a gift for Bhabhisa’s birthday. Can you do that by tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’ll be hard for me to make it all the way to South Bombay today, Ma,’ I say, as evenly as possible.

  ‘Oh, I understand, the thing is that I don’t want to ask Varun, knowing how busy he is. So, I thought, why not ask you since you are mostly free.’

  The unhappy realisation dawns on me yet again that I will never, ever, be able to outmanoeuvre my mother-in-law. I blame my upbringing. My parents are softies; decent, kind and utterly devoid of Machiavellian tendencies, all of which has left me with a clear disadvantage against Her Ladyship.

  I know what you’re thinking – I’m overreacting to Varun’s mother asking me to do a spot of shopping for her. That’s because you don’t know her like I do. Let me see if I can help.

  My mother-in-law, Devika Kumari, is a natural born princess. Even today she is an arresting beauty. In her youth, she was famous for her looks and featured in more than a few coffee table books about India’s glamorous royals. Beneath her Ming dynasty cheekbones, her almond eyes and her still lustrous hair though, lurks Nietzsche’s abyss.

  When she was eighteen, she could have married anyone – she was deluged with proposals from princes and assorted titans. But the heart – or whatever it is she carries in her chest – wants what it wants, and she chose my dashing father-in-law, the heir of a minor principality. They met at a polo match and the aristocratic beauty fell for him right away. Bhairon Singh’s good looks and Etonian education enchanted her into turning her back on her immense fortune and vast property to move to the far humbler Srilampur. She’s been in a foul mood since. This isn’t to say that she has lived in penury as Bhairon Singh’s wife. They lived well – travelling in style, often buying beautiful things wherever they went, living between tastefully done family-owned havelis and hobnobbing with the chic set in well-appointed living rooms, both in India and abroad. They gave their son the best education money could buy. But compared to the wealth and lifestyle of the rest of her family, such a life always stuck like a thorn in her side. And then when she lost her husband it not only broke her heart but also occluded her from many a social opportunity.

  Rani Devika Kumari has not stopped competing with the royals higher up in the pecking order, and her sense of being hard done by was only heightened by her failure to forge an alliance between her beloved son and a princess from a relevant blue-blooded clan like the Gaekwads of Baroda or some pretty thing from the Mewar dynasty.

  As a non-royal, I’m ideal for her lost prestige target practice, and she misses no opportunity in making herself feel grand by trying to make me feel like something she scraped off her shoe. She articulated her horror at me joining the family the very first time she invited me over to tea after Varun proposed.

  ‘Your background,’ she said, uttering the word as if it were a dead rat she was holding by the tail, ‘is somewhat different from ours. I had rather thought Varun might marry someone more like us. Still, perhaps you can adapt to our ways,’ she had said, sounding as if she thought this was hugely unlikely. I’ll give her something, her complete lack of respect for me has at least been perfectly consistent. Just last month I went to a family wedding with her and she saw my nec
klace, diamonds borrowed from my mother, put both her hands on her cheeks in horror and started shrieking, rather like she was trying to re-enact The Scream. ‘Your set is SO bright, Natasha. I can’t even look at it with my naked eye!’

  ‘It’s my mother’s, and I happen to love it,’ I had snapped back in the hope of shaming her into silence but I am more a fool for not realising after all these years that insults fell from my mother-in-law’s mouth as the indifference of rain in England.

  ‘Now that you are a part of our family, it’s high time you started grooming yourself like one of us and left the loud pieces to the nouveau riche!’ Small mercy then that Devika Kumari lives far away from us with her mother, Nanisa, in Jhalakpur. If she lived any closer, I might have left Varun by now.

  Still, my mother-in-law had been the one blip on the glowing horizon of wonderfulness that has been my life with Varun. We met at Heathrow where I had been in the middle of an angry exchange with the staff at the check-in-desk at the British Airways counter. The London-Mumbai flight that I was heading home on, after a wonderful holiday largely spent shopping, was overbooked and I had unceremoniously been bumped off. The duty manager was trying his hardest to get rid of me till Varun, a business-class passenger on the same flight, stepped in and managed to convince him otherwise. Once we’d boarded, he found me and invited me to join him at the bar, and we sat there chatting and laughing all night till we were forced to return to our seats to buckle up for the descent into Bombay. I was in love before we even touched down in India. And who could blame me? Varun was every bit the prince you read about in fairy tales – upright, decent, chivalrous and hardworking, which was virtually unheard of among India’s famously indolent royals.

  When I met him, he’d just started his architectural firm, Paradigm Design. Turning his family havelis and palace into heritage hotels, done with his sense of ingenuity and strong work ethic, has kept his family afloat while his royal peers struggle to keep up appearances. Then he partnered with his dearest childhood friend Nakul and started another successful vertical called V&N Consultants. Poor Nakul! Someone has to tell him about Trisha. God! I hope it doesn’t have to be me.