The Two Faces of Radha

(First published in Verve)

It was a hot day, so excruciatingly hot in fact that Radha had the air conditioning turned up to max in her car as she drove down to the lunch meet she had with her lawyer at the J W Marriott. She tapped her fingers at the wheel impatiently as she idled at a red light, waiting for it to turn green when there was a rap at the window. Looking through the corner of her eye, she saw a girl, in her late teens, her hair bleached by the sun and nutritional deficiencies into the kind of highlights that Radha had spent good money and time at B:Blunt to acquire. The girl rapped again, insistently, noting that she had got Radha's attention. She was carrying a snot-nosed baby tied to her with a cotton sling, a baby that seemed to be in too deep a slumber for it to be natural. Radha had heard stories of how these begging rackets operated, with children being kidnapped and made into cripples. Her bullshit meter rose skywards and she pushed the button to let the window slide down. "Tumhara bachcha hai?" she asked, the scathing edge in her tone at lacerate levels. "Haan," the girl nodded, gesturing back to a toddler playing with some stones seated on the divider, adding "Aur woh bhi," in the most matter-of-fact manner, like it was expected of her to produce offspring even before she was legally an adult.

Radha shook her head to clear the red wall of rage bubbling up behind her eyeballs. "What do you want?" she asked, rather unnecessarily, given that the girl obviously was begging at the signal and grabbed her handbag from the adjacent seat where she had flung it, in order to retrieve her wallet. "Thodi si thandi hawa," the girl replied and put her face down level to Radha's, closing her eyes, taking in the coolness of the blasts of air coming from the air conditioning, holding up the baby's face to it. The car behind honked impatiently; the light had changed to green. "Thank you, Madamji," the girl replied, and moved back into the straggly shade provided by an errant tree on the pavement, dragging her toddler behind her with an ungraciousness tempered with maternal instinct.

HS was already at a table when Radha stood at the top of the flight of stairs looking down at the expanse of the Lotus Café that looked out onto a pretty Zen garden, complete with lotus pools to go with the name of the café and the huge picture windows meant to admire them. He waved at her as she scoured the premises for him, and rose to his feet as she descended. She was well aware of the fact that every eye in the café was on her; she had that effect wherever she went and did her best to maximise it by wearing body-con clothes that accentuated every curve of her ferociously fit body. "So good to see you!"

"You too, HS, you're looking much fitter, have you been working out?"

"The same old routine, but I've cut out carbs and switched to a raw food diet for the past three weeks," he replied. HS was a true blue metrosexual male, who coordinated his tie with his socks and discussed facials, Brazilian blowouts, fish pedicures and intense diets with no tinge of embarrassment whatsoever. He was also her family lawyer, to be more accurate, his father had been her father's lawyer and now HS had taken over the baton, given that the old gentleman had retreated into a slow decline into Alzheimers.

"So what is this about me needing to go back to the native village and living there in order to inherit the haveli?"

"Sorry, that's a clause in your grandfather's will, there's nothing we can do about it. You need to live there, alone, for three months in order to inherit the property, or we have to sell it off and give the proceeds to a charity trust that will work towards modernising the village."