French Lover Read Free

return to that same house in Calcutta, staring at the same sky and the same clouds—that house where she had said her last goodbyes. When Nila, the pauper, came out with her two suitcases, it was past noon and almost dusk.
    Kishanlal, Sunil and Chaitali were waiting still there. When they spotted Nila, three half-dead souls pounced and fell almost on top of her. The short, stout Kishanlal wearing boots, suit, tie and a coat on top of it all, grabbed the luggage trolley and said, ‘What’s the matter—what took you so long? We have been waiting here since early morning.’
    Sunil, tall, fair and lanky—the matchmaker—gave a broad smile and said, ‘We had almost given up hope.’
    Chaitali was trying to neaten the smudged bindi on Nila’s forehead as she said, ‘Must have been a terrible journey.’
    The moment she left the airport, the sharp, wintry needles pierced her to the bone. Chaitali took the extra coat off her own shoulders and draped it around Nila. For someone who had justcome in from the burning heat, the wintry needles seemed to weave a wrapper of elation around her body.
    Sunil said, ‘We’d have waited for two more minutes and then called Calcutta to check if they sent you back by the return flight.’
    Nila said, ‘It was all because I haven’t taken my husband’s last name. Otherwise I’d have come out long ago, just like everyone else.’
    Sunil bent down and got into the car as he said, ‘Oh no, even if you had the same names, everything would have been the same.’
    Nila relaxed in the seat beside the driver and said, ‘If I had more dollars it would have been okay.’
    Sunil cleared his throat, coughed and then laughed, ‘Not at all. They would have still caused you the same misery.’
    A thousand questions arose in Nila’s eyes, ‘The passport and the visa—they are all genuine. Why then?’
    Sunil laughed and so did Kishan. It was as if the question demanded that one answer—ha, ha.
    Nila wasn’t happy with that. ‘What was the reason for that misbehaviour?’
    ‘The reason is the colour of your skin—it’s not white enough.’
    Before Sunil finished speaking, Chaitali added, ‘And your passport—it’s not of a rich country.’
    Nila didn’t think she was all that dark and in comparison with the Senegalese, she could be called very fair indeed. She crinkled her fair nose and eyes, described that man’s stretching and drinking and then said, ‘He seemed to get away.’ Nila’s voice resounded with indignation, mainly at the Senegalese’s getting away.
    She examined her own face in the car window and said, ‘I didn’t expect to see dark-skinned people in Paris.’
    Kishan, Sunil and Chaitali all hated the black people: they were the root cause of all misery. They just sat idle and took the government’s dole and indulged in antisocial activities. Because of them, the almost-whites like them had to suffer.
    Sunil was the first to speak, ‘These blacks have made our lives hell.’
    For a while they bashed these people verbally, in pure Bangla.In a group of Bengalis, the non-Bengali Kishanlal stuck out.
    He eyed her: red, juicy piece of meat. Whoever said that vegetarians didn’t like meat! When she sensed his lusty eyes on her, Nila immediately tensed, just as she always did when the roadside romeos whistled at her. She covered her bare arms with her sari and then realized that this was, after all, her husband and there was no need to hide from him. She had slept with him for only two weeks after the marriage in her Calcutta home. After the sex, they both turned the other way and slept. Except for a few urgent matters discussed in broken English and Hindi, Nila hadn’t even talked much with her husband. Before Nila said yes to the match, Molina had said, ‘Should you marry a non-Bengali boy whom we don’t even know very well? Why don’t we wait and look for a good Bengali boy?’
    ‘Forget it, Ma—we’ve seen enough Bengali boys, haven’t we?’ Nila had gulped