The Smoke is Rising by Mahesh Rao Read Free Book Online Page A

can’t tell you, and now that the workmen are finally in, life is even worse. Yesterday when I came back they had left the front door wide open and were nowhere to be seen. Now the stupid company has sent the wrong shower door and I’m going to have to sort all of that out,’ said Priyanka, Susheela’s elder daughter.
    ‘I know, everything goes wrong at the same time,’ said Susheela.
    ‘Exactly. And Vivek’s in Brussels again, so that’s really helping. Actually he called last night but the line was so bad. It’s been happening the last few times. I think they’ve sold him the same
dabba
mobile that they sold me, remember? And of course, he’ll make me go and sort all of that out because he’ll claim to be too busy.
Amma
? One sec, one sec, okay … just got to get this.’
    Susheela’s mouth felt dry and chalky as she listened to Priyanka’s travails. She swallowed hard, having completely lost the thread of the conversation some minutes ago. This in itself was not unusual. Their fortnightly conversations had come to mean progressively less to Susheela. Of course, it was lovely to hear from Priyanka and there was still that warm ripple when she remembered things Susheela had mentioned the previous fortnight. But their worlds had caromed apart a few years ago and the ties had grown flaccid and indistinct. Priyanka’s chatter now seemed like the background buzz from television or titbits gleaned from mobile phone conversations in the doctor’s waiting room. There were vague allusions to Katherine and Carlos, Jude and Alice, Matt and Chris. The call would be interrupted at times by mumbled asides to her PA or her husband. Susheela had noticed that of late Priyanka seemed to have a stock set of questions that she would clatter through, often hurriedly ending the conversation, promising further detail by email. These emails would arrive a few days later, stippled with exclamation marks and breezy references to Merzbau installations,
shochu
bars, experimental dance and city breaks to Stockholm and Berlin.
    Susheela had not consciously withdrawn from Priyanka’s elaborate life. She would not even have recognised the growing distance as a consequence of her own actions. Her retreat was subliminally pre-emptive: she had begun an instinctive process of shutting out before she was cast as the lonely interfering mother gazing at her daughter sashaying into the distance. As far as Susheela was concerned, the important thing was that the precepts of form and propriety were maintained. So calls were made, emails read, cards sent. To proceed otherwise would be to descend into sloth and chaos.
    Priyanka’s job entailed something incomprehensible in London to do with capital markets. Where once this had been a matter of accomplishment and esteem, Susheela had quickly understood that the current mood was very different. It now seemed that most of the recent global financial scourges could be tracked back to Priyanka and the incumbents of her world. Heads shook slowly at Mysore dinner parties, expressing disgust at the greed and recklessness of these brash, aggressive bankers and the mercenary politicians who had allowed them to gamble away the futures of decent savers from Caracas to Chennai. Susheela’s feelings remained ambivalent. Where once she had quietly skimmed along on the tide of her daughter’s achievements, she now stood tacitly at the shore, facing the other way.
    She would be affected as much as anyone else by the tribulations of global finance, a widow with no actively earned income. There was a sum of cash in fixed deposits garnering a comfortable amount of interest: a combination of accumulated savings, the pay-out from the life assurance company and the entitlement received from Sridhar’s provident fund, following twenty-five odd years of service at House of Govind. She owned the house outright and had no debts. Her circumstances had never impelled her to examine closely the small portfolio of shares that