Read Online The Red Carpet by Lavanya Sankaran - Free Book Online Page B

lost.”
    Supposing someone finds it, I asked, my hand still smarting. “Don’t worry,” said Tash. “Nobody will find it.
    “Okay, here’s the story,” she said. “It’s a Famous Five one.”
    Oh goody, we said, and made sure that no one was close to us, listening.
    “Julian, Dick and George and Ann are driving along in the car to a picnic.”
    What color was the car? we asked. And what were they wearing?
    “The car was . . . okay, blue. And they weren’t wearing anything. They were Naked.”
    I went home that evening, eager to talk to my mother about Mary.
    I never got the chance.
    I was met by my mother, who didn’t smile, who didn’t hug me, or ask me how Sports Day practice went.
    “Explain this,” she said, holding out a five-rupee note.
    “I found this in your desk drawer,” she said.
    No, I wanted to say. You could not have. I had hidden it up on the terrace the previous evening, in a hiding place I thought only I knew. A little niche, hidden by brickwork. Big enough for small secrets.
    Except I should have remembered that, years ago, it was Mary who had first shown it to me.
    Later, I heard my mother crying to my father: “I forced her to apologize to Mary. Bad girl. So shocking. We have never had trouble like this with Ramu. Yes, of course I am going to punish her. I was going to make puri-palya for her lunch tomorrow, but now I won’t.”
    I stayed awake for a long time that night. I waited for my parents to go to sleep, before slipping from my bed and running into the drawing room. I still had one more thing to do that day, for our club meeting.
    Tomorrow was my turn, and I wanted to outdo them all. I couldn’t make up stories the way Tash did, but alternatives were acceptable. They were just more dangerous.
    The drawing room was lined with books. I switched on the torch and spelled my way through the titles, until I came to the one I wanted. “Harold Robbins,” it said. It was on the Forbidden shelf, banned not just to me but to my brother Ramu as well. But of course he had read every book on that shelf, and from things he had said, I knew that this was the book I wanted. I was slipping it off the shelf when I heard her voice, clothed in darkness:
    Oho, missy. And what would your mother say if she saw you now?
    I ran.
    Ran back to my room, and threw the book under the bed.
    And waited for Mary to follow.
    She didn’t, and the house grew quiet. After a while, I rescued the book and tucked it into the bottom of my schoolbag. I went to sleep.
    But the next day, in school, when I triumphantly gathered my club members around me, the book was missing.
    Our club had started, as most school stuff did, during lunch break.
    Lunchtime in school was fifteen minutes of urgent swallowing, followed by half an hour of play. When we were ten, we would take our lunch boxes to a far corner of the big field and have a picnic. Lunch was usually sandwiches: cucumber, coconut-and-mint chutney, cheese, or jam, packed into plastic lunch boxes that had a separate compartment for chips or biscuits. Sometimes our mothers would provide roti rolls instead: chapatis with cooked vegetables rolled up inside, or jam, or spicy mango pickle. The four of us would trade bites, everyone else’s lunch always tasting better than our own, and fantasize about the meals we would really like to have. Naturally, all our secret food fantasies revolved around English food, exotic fare that Enid Blyton said tasted better than anything else in the world. Steak and kidney pie. Roast beef. Ham and watercress sandwiches.
    And then we’d walk round and round the field, and talk endlessly, about our classmates, our families, and when we would get our menstrual periods, in the manner of girls who are just discovering the art of female conversation.
    It was Tash, naturally enough, who escalated the thing to a whole new level. She announced impressively one day: “Yesterday I had sex.”
    Sandwiches were forgotten. Really? Why yes, she said.