Serious Men

usually right. She studied her man. He was in a Rin-white full-sleeved shirt, smartly tucked into grey trousers. His black formal shoes were newly polished. And he was wearing a watch. He wore that only on special occasions. And he was smelling good.
    ‘You should wear that coat you have,’ she said. ‘You look like a hero in it.’
    ‘No, no. You are not supposed to wear a coat for something like this. You are supposed to look like you don’t care much.’
    ‘Adi,’ Oja screamed, ‘finish your bath.’
    Adi was in the stained-glass enclosure in the corner of the kitchen. And he was singing aloud, ‘D-I-S-C-O. Disco, Disco.’
    ‘Adi, get out now.’
    The boy emerged in a towel. Oja went hastily into the enclosure, giving him a foul look. ‘Disco, disco,’ Adi told her.
    Ayyan dried him, glancing at the stained-glass bathroom he had once built with love. The boy showed the hearing-aid to his father. Ayyan helped him put it on. He bound the small white box around Adi’s stomach. A white wire ran out of the box. He blew into the boy’s left ear to dry it. Adi giggled. So Ayyan did it again. Then he fitted the earpiece into Adi’s ear.
    When Oja stepped out of the enclosure, she looked at them for approval. This is a very beautiful young woman, Ayyan thought. He pouted his lips at her in a raunchy code. She smiled. She didn’t mind dirty thoughts because she didn’t have to do much beneath them. She went to the full-length mirror of the cupboard. Ayyan and Adi watched her closely as she bulged her eyes and drew around them with a black pencil.
    They had an argument in the taxi. Oja had wanted to take the bus or walk. Ayyan wanted to take the taxi.
    ‘It’s going to rain,’ he told her.
    Adi was squeezed in the back seat between his parents.
    ‘It does not rain inside the bus,’ she said angrily.
    ‘And from the bus-stop to the school?’
    ‘We have umbrellas, don’t we? And anyway, I don’t think it’s going to rain.’
    ‘It’s just twenty rupees.’
    ‘Little grains make a fat man’s meal,’ Oja and Adi said together, and that made them laugh.
    By the time the taxi approached the gates, Oja had fallen silent. She was nervous. The left side of the lane was completely taken up by parked cars. And there was a commotion near the gates. Drivers who couldn’t find a parking space were trying to turn around, and that was causing a jam. The guard looked at Oja, breast to toe, and beamed at Ayyan.
    ‘All the rich folks have come,’ the guard said.
    ‘I have to go to the class,’ Adi said, extricating his finger from his father’s fist. ‘Parents have to go to the hall. Students will come in a line,’ he said. Then he gave quick instructions. ‘Parents don’t have to walk in a line. They can walk anyway they want.’ He pointed to the main block to his right. ‘The main auditorium is here. Don’t call it “hall”. It is called “The Main Auditorium”.’
    He walked briskly down the front path towards the stairway. After a few paces he turned and gave a knowing smile to his father. Oja waved at him, and for a moment tried to decipher what the stealthy smile between father and son was about. She went quietly with Ayyan towards the main block. Two little girls in blue pinafores, much younger than Adi, were walking in front of them and talking animatedly in English. Oja laughed. ‘So fast they speak in English,’ she said.
    Outside the auditorium’s rear entrance, parents chatted above the din of the festive murmurs coming from inside. They directed occasional glances towards the students who were arriving in orderly lines and vanishing through the front door.
    ‘Should we go in now or later?’ Oja whispered to her husband.
    ‘Why are you whispering?’
    ‘I am not whispering,’ she whispered.
    They were standing a few feet away from a group of parents, about a dozen of them, who were talking about the horse-riding classes in a new international board school that had sprung up in the suburbs. The mothers were in T-shirt and jeans, and trousers that reached just below their knees, and long skirts. Some were in salwars. All of them – they looked so expensive. Oja inched closer to her husband.
    Ayyan studied the fathers. His own shirt, he knew, was good. It had cost him five hundred rupees, but there was something about the shirts of these men and their trousers and the way they stood, that made him feel that he looked like their driver. In the morning, when he had inspected