The Red Carpet Read Free

years ago. This was, of course, before she had married—and definitely before her husband had started working in the same office as Ramu.
    Now, the implacable gods of social propriety forced her into a convenient amnesia, and Ramu humored her, all the while wondering what his colleague would say if Ramu interrupted one of their business discussions with the information that his wife had once spent an entire evening with Ramu’s hand between her thighs.
    Nothing more, alas, but those were the days when Ramu and his male friends had been happy with whatever they could get. That was when dates had consisted of the best cheap dinner that one could afford, followed by driving one’s car (borrowed for the occasion from some tolerant uncle) furiously to dark corners of the city for dessert: a half hour spent in industriously attempting to explore the Inner Woman. Any inner woman.
    That was, in short, when they were twenty, and achieving consensual sex with skittish young women whose knees were pressed tightly together by the weight of Indian morality was a triumph in itself. It had been enough to say:
    I’ve been and gone and done it.
    To say: I found a hole and dived right in.
    To say: I fucked her. And to dream enviously of their western counterparts; men who, being blessed with women of Easy Virtue, reportedly did their fucking much younger. Eighteen. Sixteen. Fourteen. Twelve. In some countries, the rumor said, they were
born
copulating.
    After twenty-five, things changed. The women relaxed, were easier, and suddenly who you slept with became more important than what you did. Quality, dear boy, quality over quantity.
    But it was only now, at thirty, that the true Call of the Patriarchy began to make itself felt: the urge to father, to provide, to pay bills for More Than One. Ramu never discussed this with his bachelor friends, for to do so would be to acknowledge the strange conundrum they faced.
    For a decade, it seemed, they had been festooned with women, all sorts, from the cute, the silly, the please-domesticatemes, to the independent, the fiery, the I’ll-sleep-with-but-won’tlove-yous, and further beyond, to the Plainly Bizarre. And they had frolicked and gamboled with happy abandon, and no awareness of the fate that quietly awaited them: the moment notions of “settling down,” marriage, became reality—they found themselves, absurdly, stuck for choice. All those women, those sillys, those feistys, those Saturday-night-mainstays, had simply vanished. All of them. Together. Birdlike, in a great migratory movement (to somewhere else), these chicks had flown. They had married, dispersed, dehydrated.
    The club lawn was festive, with little tables covered in red-and-yellow-checked cloths that fluttered in the evening breeze. Ramu’s friends were seated at one of the tables, drinking beer.
    “You’re late, fucker,” said Swamy, “as the man said to his mother-in-law. Have a beer.”
    “Where’s KK?” Ramu asked. “He isn’t ditching us, is he?”
    “He’ll get here eventually,” Murthy said. “He must be with that new girlfriend of his.”
    “Enthu bastard,” Swamy said. “He should just bring her here to meet us. Instead of making us wait while he drops her home, and dries her tears, and kisses her good-bye.”
    Ramu had known these men almost his whole life; they had grown up together, and now he felt a sudden wave of affection towards them. There was Swamy, whose mercurial brilliance Ramu had secretly admired long before the media had made it fashionable to do so. And Murthy, calm, quiet, and who, Ramu occasionally believed, harbored the same well-concealed feelings of hero-worship towards
him
. And the absent KK, of course, always ready with a laugh and a helping hand. Between them, they had achieved a cordial comfort that to some extent, Ramu realized, he would like to replicate in his ideal marriage.
    Murthy stared at Ramu’s wet hair. “You swam? How come? I thought you usually swim in the