The Windfall: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Diksha Basu is a writer and occasional actor. Originally from New Delhi, India, she holds a BA in Economics from Cornell University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and now divides her time between New York City and Mumbai.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2017 Diksha Basu

Mr. Jha had worked hard, and now he was ready to live well. “Now that all of you are here, we have some news,” he said to the neighbors assembled in the small living room of his home in the Mayur Palli Housing Complex in East Delhi. He was nervous, so he looked over at his wife, who was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and his son, Rupak, who was at home for the summer vacation, sitting on a dining table chair. His wife met his gaze and nodded gently, expectantly, encouraging him to hurry up and share the news. And he knew he had to, before the gossip spread through the housing complex. Tonight they had invited their closest friends—Mr. and Mrs. Gupta, Mr. and Mrs. Patnaik, and Mrs. Ray—to tell them that after about twenty-five years (they had moved in when Mrs. Jha was eight months pregnant) they were moving out, and not just moving out, but moving to Gurgaon, one of the richest new neighborhoods of Delhi.

It would have been easier, in a way, to announce a move to Dubai or Singapore or Hong Kong. Mr. Jha himself had often been part of conversations that criticized families for moving to different Delhi neighborhoods the minute they could afford to.

And certainly nobody of his generation had moved out in recent years. He was fifty-two years old, his wife was forty-nine, and their twenty-three-year-old son was in business school in Amer­ ica. The move was going to be seen as an unnecessary display of his newly acquired wealth. And since the money had come from the onetime sale of a website, everyone in Mayur Palli treated it with suspicion. Nobody believed it was hard-earned money. "A lucky windfall," he had heard Mr. Gupta call it. But Mr. Jha knew that it had been anything but luck; it had been hard work.

If an outsider, a stranger, were to see them all gathered here, would he see that Mr. Jha was different, Mr. Jha wondered? He was five foot eight and was neither impressively fit nor impres­sively fat. The fact that he didn't have the traditional trappings of success worried him these days. He liked fitting in.

The new house in Gurgaon was a two-story bungalow with front and back yards, and they knew nothing at all about the neighbors yet. The house was tucked into a quiet lane away from the traffic and chaos of the rest of Delhi. Unlike in other parts of the city, all the drains were properly sealed and the streets were swept and cleaned on a regular basis. Big, decades-old neem trees lined both sides of their lane, and it was the kind of quiet that made it a place that hawkers and beggars avoided.

It was a much more lavish home and neighborhood than Mr. Jha had ever imagined himself living in. Not only did the doors fit in their frames, but most of the light switches had dimmers. There was a separate servants' quarter at the back, and a wall went around the periphery so nobody could look in or out. Unlike Mayur Palli, and the rest of East Delhi for that matter, the houses in Gurgaon were spaced grandly apart and interactions between the neighbors seemed minimal. Mr. Jha knew he was supposed to want that-that was how rich people's tastes were supposed to be.

Above his head a fat fly thumped repeatedly against the tube­ light. The new house had better screens in the windows to stop flies and mosquitoes from invading. Mr. Jha took off his rimless glasses and wiped them with the white handkerchief he always kept in his shirt pocket. He wished he had opted for a short­ sleeved shirt today instead of the long-sleeved blue one he had neatly tucked into his khaki slacks.

The Jhas were one of the original residents of Mayur Palli when they moved there in 1991. Mayur Palli meant, literally, the home of the peacock, but Mr. Jha had never seen a peacock any­ where near the area. Four buildings, each five floors high, were built around a dusty courtyard small enough for everyone to be able to peer into their neighbors' windows. Every morning, wet laundry hung from ropes on the balconies, water dripping down to the courtyard. Downstairs, what had once been a space for the children to run and play and ride bicycles was now a clogged parking lot. A parking lot filled with scooters and Marutis and maybe the occasional Honda, bought for aging parents as a gift by adult children living abroad.

But now, on top of the fact that the Jhas were moving, the Mercedes Mr. Jha had ordered had arrived early and, embar­rassingly, he had to take possession of it here in the old housing complex. He hadn't wanted the car salesperson to see his current home, or his current neighbors to see his new car. What must the delivery person have thought driving it across the bridge to the wrong side of the Yamuna River? The silver car was big and shiny and completely out of place in the middle-class neighborhood and was nearly impossible to navigate past the cows in the narrow lanes. And clearly the car was annoying others. Just the previ­ous morning, the undersides of the door handles had been cov­ered with toothpaste and Mr. Jha had had a very minty-smelling morning drive. He was grateful it was only toothpaste.

Sometimes Mr. Jha himself couldn't believe how much money his site had made. It had been such a simple dream-www.simply call.com-that began as an online resource for local Delhi phone numbers and services. Mr. Jha had been trying to call his old friend Partha Sen in Chittaranjan Park to reminisce about their college days but had accidentally called another Partho Sen from the directory. He had chatted with the unknown Partho Sen for a good four minutes before either of them realized it was a wrong number.

But he had sold the website a little over two years ago, after working on it for five years, Mr. Jha said to himself. And before that he had had several more complicated ventures that had failed completely. But all that was in the past. This was now and he had to break the news.

"You've found a bride for Rupak?" Mr. Gupta said before Mr. Jha could continue. He was leaning back on the sofa and holding a fistful of peanuts in one hand and a glass of whiskey with ice in the other. He wore a crisp white kurta and pajama, his uniform of choice ever since he had become the president of the housing complex, and his feet were bare and resting on top of his sandals. "Is she also living in America? Don't let her family talk you into having a wedding in America."

As the current president of the housing complex, and one of the biggest gossips in the neighborhood, Mr. Gupta was the one who was going to take the news the hardest. He would see the move from Mayur Palli as a betrayal. The Patnaiks, who were a few years younger than the Jhas and were quieter versions of the Guptas, would probably try to move on the Jhas' heels. Mr. Pat­ naik already dressed similarly to Mr. Jha and had recently bought the exact same pair of glasses but then claimed it was a coin­cidence. And if anyone asked Mr. Jha to describe Mrs. Patnaik without looking at her, all he would be able to say was that she had strangely curly hair but no other discernible features.

"That is true," Mrs. Gupta added. She was also eating pea­nuts, one of which had fallen and was cradled on her glasses, which were hanging off a metal chain around her neck. She wiped her hand against her sari and leaned forward to pick up her glass. "Our nephew got married there and all the Indian weddings end up in the huge halls of the local Hilton or Marriott. You make sure the wedding is in India, in a temple."

"Or outdoors," Mr. Gupta said. "Lots of young people these days want to get married outdoors."

"Personally I don't think that is a good idea. You don't want

the flame of the fire to be blown out during the ceremony," Mrs. Gupta said.

"The...