Under the Rain Canopy

by Preeti Madhusudhan

[box]Roma leads a quiet, secluded life, in her ancestral home that is everyone’s dream. She, however, aspires for and dreams of something different. And as she dreams on sitting in a house located amid fine deodars and firs, her life takes a turn. Preeti Madhusudhan writes a riveting story of a woman’s life, tracing the colours of change while the rains lash outside.[/box]

Roma looked out of the window at the gentle fir-and-spruce-covered slope that ran down along the length of her home, ending at the narrow wild gully that you could hear when it was very quiet. The house was everyone’s dream and the envy of her cousins who worked and lived at the fashionable cities at other parts of the country. She had inherited what she thought was a cumbersome burden. She had never been pretty and had never considered education as a means to fulfill her dream, which was to cavort around trees and slyly receive a kiss from a victorious Salman khan-like-someone who wiped his mouth triumphantly with the back of his hand.

She had waited patiently by her window as years rolled by, rendering her parent-less, wrenching away her youth, the heir to what she called a dump. Cousins and acquaintances invited themselves to annual vacation to the quaint old hill-home till her dour and acrid temperament finally drove away the free-loaders. Here she was now, blinking at the disgusting deodars, disagreeable firs and the disdainful spruce. The scene that a cubby-hole owner in Mumbai would have described as serene and heavenly or an author as ethereal, revolted her. The trees on the slope taunted her. The gentle gurgle of the gully was a mockery on her despair and the gay tweet of the birds tempted her to put to use her father’s rifle that adorned the stone wall above the fireplace. She survived on her father’s pension which was trivial once the property tax and maintenance bills were paid off. The antique rosewood furniture and chandeliers that dotted the house in abundance, the ancient copper wired electric connection, the Victorian-era plumbing added to her woes. She yearned for the glitzy, shiny things that adorned the glossy pages of the film magazines she religiously bought every month. She would have gladly traded this monstrosity that was a noose around her neck for one of her cousins’ tiny pigeon holes and thought with black rage and jealousy of the shiny plastic furniture and bright lamps that gave out harsh light in the windowless living room of a cousin she had visited in Mumbai a long time back.

“What a relief that must be! Not to look at the god damned deodars every moment of one’s life,” she thought.

The foulness of her temper increased as a thunderous, heavy downpour began.

“Bahadur!” she bellowed, calling out to the Nepali cook who was also the gardener, the housekeeper and the odd-jobs-man. The tinny Bollywood music that had been blaring from a dubious radio ended abruptly as Bahadur scrambled to the study.

“Tea, Memsahib?”

Bahadur stood pretending to listen as obscenities poured forth from his mistress’ mouth. After a five-minute rant, she puffed her face a beetroot-maroon and threw up her massive arms in frustration and rage, uttering an unlady-like blasphemy.

There was a deafening clap of thunder as though in response to her profanities. She jumped up involuntarily as the window panes clattered in their rosewood frames, a glass on the grand piano shattered and the one on the portrait of a dour family ancestor cracked. Before cognition dawned, she had hit her knee on the Burma-teak writing desk while attempting to rise from the leather arm-chair and bumped her head on the tall lamp (or torch of death, as she called it) which promptly electrocuted her. She passed out as a whirring energy passed through her.

Bahadur and a tall, white figure with golden hair peered at her as she painfully opened her eyelids. “So this was how it looked and the tall, iridescent form is God?” she wondered.

It apparently was an American, a backpacker who while trekking through the silly deodar and the likes had run for cover when the torrential downpour began. After it became apparent that nothing other than a mild concussion was to be expected from all that drama, Bahadur brought Roma and the firangi some tea with biscuits. Unabashedly taking off his wet T-shirt, the American, noisily slurped his tea and looked around the house with what Roma perceived as disgust. He was middle-aged and bald-headed, tall and gaunt, but very fit. The American, Tom, wasn’t very talkative, seeing how uncomfortable he made her. Could he stay there as a paying guest? He promised not to be in her way and expected the same from her.  Before she could open her mouth, (not that she would have said anything intelligible as she hadn’t recovered from the shock – or anything intelligent, as she wasn’t used to that), he proposed a certain amount as rent per week, which left her open-mouthed.

The backpack was all he had and it wasn’t much except a camera with a bunch of lenses that he fished out of a dirty canvas rucksack from the backpack. He ate what he was served without questions, and left the house quite early and came back after dark, and sat with a cigar in his mouth in the porch listening to the rain or the occasional cuckoo when it didn’t rain. Roma needed the money, and Tom, if that really was his name, stayed clear out of her way like he promised he would. He was gone in a month, and with the money he paid for his time there, Roma refurbished the entire house with glee. She tore out the “darned” teakwood floorboards and wall paneling, replaced the “senile” rosewood furniture with glitzy new ones from a cheap contemporary furniture shop that produced tens of thousands of such each year. Gone were the “grandma” electric layout and “great grandma” plumbing.  She was proud and happy of her horror by the hillside.

It was another rainy afternoon. The dingy deodars were still visible through the new, gold printed rayon curtain sheets of the study room window. Bahadur answered the door after being yelled upon by Roma, who didn’t want to discontinue her perusal of the recent Showbiz. A testy courier boy handed Bahadur a small package that he left on Roma’s study table before getting back to his radio. Roma tore open the wrapper with excitement as she never got a courier. It was a book, by a Tom Swift( so that was the American’s  last name), “Backpacker Haven”, and listed third out of a total of ten in Asia, Roma’s own rat-hole, as she used to think of her old home. It was described as a charming, Dickensian cottage and also addressed it as the one of the last few perfect bastions of the Anglo-Indian hill-station cottage that had in the state of excellent preservation, turn-of-the-century electric layouts and  plumbing that were unparalleled. Within a fortnight, Roma received 12 applications for stays at various seasons, from all over the world. She never replied to a single one and seldom ever stirred from the shiny, white steel chair in her new study.

Preeti Madhusudhan is a freelance architect/ interior designer living in Shanghai with her husband and six-year-old son. She is passionate about books and is an ardent admirer of P.G.Wodehouse. She inherited her love for books and storytelling from her father, a Tamil writer. Preeti is trying to publish her maiden novella in English. 

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