Priyamvada & Co.

Chapter 1

Prithvi just missed the car on the right, racing him to the last empty parking spot next to his new apartment in HSR, Bangalore.

"Hey," he yelled, slamming the brakes of his Ford Ecosport. He slid the window down and stuck out his finger at the red Maruti, which had grazed the right side of his car as it fled past. "Hey, you!"

But the reckless driver had already dived into the spot, parking badly, and was now jumping out to make a run. A woman, he realised, dressed all in white—white kurta, white dupatta and white churidar. As she sped past, his gaze snagged at the hard-to-miss, mismatched pair of slippers on her feet—one with a large yellow bow on top and the other with two thick lines of beads—before she became a blur. He craned his neck to catch the last of her, her long, unruly curls spilling over her shoulders as she whizzed through the gates of the very building he was going to.

In the back of the car, his mother, Vinodini, deep in slumber, stirred. "What happened?" she asked groggily, and promptly went back to sleep before he could answer.

He cursed and got out, his walking stick—the result of a recent injury—hitting the ground first. The silver paint on the right side of the car was streaked with three long gashes. "Fuck!" He kicked the tyre and scanned the street for an alternate spot, regretting that he hadn't thought to ask for his underground parking number.

On the opposite side, diagonally across, was a spot. If it were only him he'd have parked there and walked back. But with his mother and her wheelchair...he grunted.

A jarring honk from the back startled him and he clambered back in, still fuming. He put the car in gear, and moved it to the side of the road, so that the car behind him could get past. Then he got back out to unload his mother.

His mother was smacking her gums in her sleep as he got her wheelchair out of the boot. Her care-giver, Daisy, sat right beside her, snoring with her mouth open, her buck teeth on prominent display.

"Daisy!" Prithvi called to her. Daisy's mouth opened wider. "Daisy!" he shouted, louder.

The unflower-like Daisy sat up abruptly, wiped the spittle off her cheeks, and looked at him in a daze. "Entha, Kuttan Sir? What happened?" She called him "Kuttan Sir" because his mother called him "Kuttan." Daisy was the third certified nurse from the Red Cross in the last six months since his mother's fall. His mother loved the new nurse, the thirty-something, hardworking and honest Daisy, who, to Prithvi's annoyance, smelled oddly of raw fish and burnt coal.

The ten-hour, non-stop ride from Kochi to Bangalore, cooped up in the car with her in the back seat, had suffocated him. But finally, relief! He took in a breath of the cool, fresh air. "We've reached," he told Daisy. "Let's get Ma out. Give me a hand from the other side, will you?"

Prithvi scooped his mother out of the seat while Daisy hitched up her hips.

Vinodini, a one-time actress from decades ago, fluttered her eyelids open, in slow motion, and flashed him a gummy smile. "What was all the commotion?" she asked, smacking her gums, once again.

She reminded him of the old and skinny Betaal from the Vikram Aur Betaal TV show from his childhood. How much his mother had changed! Her skin was shrivelled, her nails mottled and bent. When he'd left India to study in the US twenty-five years ago, she was still a beauty. Now, a grey bob cut replaced the knee-length black tresses she used to have, and the arms that held on to him with a tight grip were wrinkly.

But she still hadn't lost her theatrical booming voice. "Get my teeth before people see me like this."

Daisy hurried out with Vinodini's precious dentures swimming in a leak-proof jar filled with water. In two thwacks, Vinodini had clamped them into place.