The Spy Who Lost Her Head by Jane De Suza

Author:Jane De Suza
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-93-5029-605-9
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

20

After the ups come the downs. Like the hills and vales, like the see and the saw, like the stock market’s bulls and bears, like the rain – oh, wait, that only comes down – the next day dawns gloomy. The heavens crack open and unleash a torrential downpour on the hapless city.

Gulabi has promised to meet Ashwin in a café. He has promised her a surprise. An engagement ring? Another rally? So we find her twirling her umbrella in the rain, singing as she skips daintily over puddles, as most heroines do in films. Heroines are always overjoyed about getting drenched in the rain, and the front-benchers in the audience are even more overjoyed. Nostalgia washes over her as Gulabi thinks of her village in the monsoon. She misses the cry of the buffalo-boy who has spotted black thunder clouds beyond the hills, the scattering of chattering women who run to pull in their sunning pickles and drying clothes, the crackle of joy that bursts from the farmer’s parched lips. She misses waiting, watching the sky, seeing the first fat drops of rain slice through the dusty air, the drumming of water on a tin roof, the yodelling of barefooted children charging out to gather the first mangoes that you can’t touch until the first showers. She misses the sudden green of everything that was dusty and brown.

She looks around her. There is no green and the crowds do not look pleased to meet the rain at all. They look like their important agendas have been thrown off balance and they teeter on their toes to step across potholes. The braver ones wade through the gushing brown slush with their trousers rolled up to their knees. Life must go on. The big city does not let you stop – not even to turn your face up to the raindrops that come crashing down.

She passes the window of a glitzy restaurant under the awning of which a few pedestrians huddle. The people dining within look totally unaffected by the slush outside. They chatter away, laughing at things the drenched people outside are not privy to. She sees the handsome profile of a man, his head bent forward, a smile playing on his lips, whispering sweet nothings – from his double-crossing, lying, rat-faced, rhesus monkey mouth!

So her Bemba is not out-of-town tripping then, as he had claimed to be. He is not even her Bemba. He has been feeding her lies, while he feeds other women on the sly. He sits there, across the white-clothed table from a woman she knows, through an instinct women have had since pre-historic times, to be the mother figure in his life: the coma-inducing Anastasia!

Gulabi feels her whole world drowning. She is not sure whether it is the rain streaming down her face or just old-fashioned tears. But time freezes while she stands looking at her Mister’s mother. She is beautiful. Gulabi will never look that way, not even if she stands in the stork position till her other leg falls off.

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