Mr. and Mrs. Somethingani

Mr. and Mrs. Somethingani of 7, Barrow House, were very well-to-do.

The dream they lived was better in every aspect than the one most sought – the American dream. If you were rich in India, you had nothing to complain about.

But being rich was getting increasingly common. What mattered was where the money came from. If it was newly-earned, well…

Luckily, Mr. Somethingani had inherited his money from someone who had also inherited his money. Intelligently, Mr. Somethingani had also “inherited” the acumen required to grow it.

Mr. Somethingani had grown up in the flat he now lived in with his wife. It had high ceilings. Newer flats in Bombay, he noted, didn’t have high ceilings. He would often smile to himself when he remembered that.

He refused to call the city by its newer name. “Mumbai is just another city,” he would say, haughtily and dismissively. Then, with a passion that cannot be feigned: “Bombay is the life that fuels it.”

And then, he would laugh the way his father had – slowly, assuredly, heartily, as though he had all the time in the world to be amused.

Mr. Somethingani wasn’t a bad man. He was both a proud and a humble man. To the world, he showed his humility. Inwardly, he indulged in pride. He loved the poem If, by Rudyard Kipling. He loved the line: “If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue…” – he thought he abided by it. He walked with the common folk (of course, he would never dare to call them common folk), and still, as nice as he was to them, his nose remained firmly in the air.

Mr. Somethingani would talk flirtatiously with the occasional woman. It was the harmless, gentlemanly sort of flirtation – the kind laughed off by society. He was a married man, and this wasn’t Hollywood. So what if he made a woman feel good about herself? His wife didn’t mind at all. She liked that her husband was a charmer. It was simply how he – and many like him – characterised the world they lived in.

Mrs. Somethingani was fond of her husband. It was why she had married him. He made no fuss about opening doors or pulling chairs back, or kissing cheeks in greeting. He would call her darling, and she would call him my jaan – but only after she’d had a glass of wine. When he would playfully poke fun at her, she would take it like a good sport.

It is important to note that Mrs. Somethingani did not love her husband.

Often in the evenings, Mrs. Somethingani would saunter to the balcony outside the living room. She would rest her hands upon the railing and smile. Piercingly, she would gaze out at the glimmering blue Arabian Sea, and the yachts that sailed on it, and the old, hilly islands. But once her eyes tired of the view, she would look at the promenade below.

There, she would see the youths. She would see boys and girls sitting on bikes hidden between parked cars. She would watch them laugh, and talk, and hold hands. She would see them smoke cigarettes, and, if they were loud enough, she would sometimes hear them curse.

It reminded her of the life she never had.

Her mind would take her to twenty-five years ago, to her days in college. There, she would find herself with the subtly snobbish crowd. It was understood within themselves that they were different, that their upbringing, their habits, their clothes, their accents – everything – separated them from… others. Still, as polite society demanded, they adopted a kindness and used it often. Its genuineness could be questioned.  

Back then, she was a Miss Somethingelseani, and it was interesting how the suffix of her name hadn’t changed.

The young woman wondered why her friends were the way they were. From her interactions with everybody else, she derived that it was no big deal to be who she was. Everybody else seemed to have a personality, a fire, a loudness that inspired awe like nothing else did. They weren’t afraid of saying things or of how they said things. Everybody else, she thought, was human.

And somehow, among everybody else, she’d found him.

He, she blushed in remembrance, would throw her flirtatious glances across the room. Horrified, she would ignore them. In classes, he would speak very loudly and very frankly, and whatever he would say would differ greatly from her own point of view. He would use words she had heard only when the windows of her car were rolled down. He would show up in shirts that were too big and with hair that was too long. He would play cricket with the boys outside – the ones who had no place to call home – and he would make them laugh. He could make anyone laugh.

It only took a month for her to fall in love.

She imagined how her life would look if she had married him. Her friends would have very politely and very cleverly excluded her from their circle. Her father would have winced every time her husband said anything, and her mother would have pursed her lips and withheld tears. Uncles and aunties would have shifted uneasily. Her dadimaas and dadajis would have turned over in their graves. She would have been civilly shunned.

But she would have been happy.

She wouldn’t have been Mrs. Somethingani – she would have been Lalita. When was the last time her name really mattered? She would never have been eclipsed by a marriage certificate, or a fancy surname, or an idea of a person. He would never have stood for it.

There were times when the temptation to complain was strong, and she would will herself not to give in. She couldn’t complain. She hadn’t been forced into marriage – she had chosen it, and had known throughout its course that it was not a bad one at all. Her husband was a gentleman, and treated her the way many women envied. There was no false idea of picture perfection, and nothing rotting behind a façade. Bickering, if any, was of the same variety one would find in any household. Life wasn’t kind enough to give her a reason to dislike her husband. She really was fond of him.

She wondered, sometimes, if he really loved her. He had told her he had, on anniversaries, or when he had felt inclined to say it. Then again, so had she.

If he did love her, she pitied him. The more she pitied him, the more she hated herself.

Mrs. Somethingani felt a hand on the small of her back. She turned.

“Good evening, darling,” her husband said.

“Good evening, my jaan.”

Mr. Somethingani put his hand around his wife’s shoulders and took in the sight that lay stretched out in front of them. He knew nothing of the dream he had snatched her away from. She lay her head on his shoulder.

She was not unhappy. He wasn't, either.

They lived happily enough ever after.