Secrets and Lies

‘Such a terrible time. I still dream of it sometimes. Not just think of it, but dream of it. There’s a difference, you know. My Emotional Freedom therapist once said so,’ Bubbles put in.

Normally, Bubbles’ array of therapists was meat and drink to Anita’s sarcastic sense of humour, but today she didn’t have the heart to rise to the bait. The friends fell quiet again and Anita looked away. Her stomach churned with guilt as she saw Sam press a tissue over her eyes and put an arm around Bubbles, who had also started to weep.

MUMBAI, 2008

Night had fallen in its usual glittering manner over the pulsing city of Mumbai when Zeba Khan lay back in the claw-footed bathtub of her sumptuous designer bathroom. She took deep breaths of the Yves Rocher bath oil recently purchased from Zurich, sighing with relief and pleasure as her tiredness melted slowly into the tepid water. She had asked for all the Jo Malone scented candles to be lit, and now she half-opened her tawny brown eyes, seeing the flames flicker quietly, turning the cream Italian marble of the walls and floor to molten gold. It had been a long, long day. Despite her superstar status these past ten years, she knew better than to mess with up-and-coming directors like Rohit Mirchandani and had stayed the course, out in the midday sun with the rest of the crew, despite being desperately jet-lagged from her European trip. As the son of a legendary director, Rohit had no doubt enjoyed a head-start in the industry, but his last two films had both been massive hits and Zeba had heard about a new one due to start filming this winter. She had done her damnedest today to find out if the casting had been done but couldn’t get anything out of the canny young man, who was obviously enjoying the power he could suddenly wield over her.

Zeba felt a few tendrils of hair escape the luxuriant pile on the top of her head, and reached out for the silver seashell that housed an array of clips. She sighed as she slid a few more bobby pins into her hair and sank back into the water. Rohit had always secretly loathed her, having grown up with the knowledge of her decade-long liaison with his father and, as a result, immersed in his mother’s bitterness. It was to Rohit’s credit, though, that he had never advertised his abhorrence, careful to stay not just on his father’s right side but Zeba’s as well. It wouldn’t do for an up-and-coming director to upset Bollywood’s top actress. And so they continued to play this ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with each other, dodging and side-stepping but never confrontational, and always, always most carefully and deliberately civil to each other when they were on film sets. Was it any wonder she felt so exhausted today?

Zeba leaned back again, massaging her temples. Rohit was one of a whole new breed of directors that were changing the landscape of Bollywood unrecognisably these days. Now they were all American-educated and slick and media savvy. And, consequently, far less inclined to be worshipful of her own star status. The older boys had been so much easier to read and seduce, but they were all fading into obscurity in their hillside mansions, seemingly content to feebly hand the directorial reins over to the next generation while they totted up figures in ledgers and kept a tight hold on their purse strings. Half of the new crop of directors were gay too, and that didn’t help one bit.

Zeba knew the time had come to tread carefully. She was thirty-two this year, it was most unusual for a heroine in Bollywood to have stayed at the top for so long. At first people said that her popularity was because she looked equally sexy in both Indian and western clothes, but as she had got older and her attractiveness to audiences had not diminished, she was gradually acquiring the makings of a legend. Despite an astute unspoken self-awareness regarding her own meagre acting talent, Zeba could not help hoping she would become as iconic as Nargis or Madhubala someday. After all, like those two actresses, she was equally beloved to audiences whether playing mother, sister, lover or even prostitute. It was almost touching how her fans just couldn’t seem to get enough of her, and the only reason why producers and script-writers had kept running to her door these past ten years, trying to keep up with the demand and putting a steady supply of roles her way. Indeed, her popularity in India was of such a scale that she could quite safely turn up her nose at Hollywood, a place that—as journalists sometimes liked reminding her—had never shown any interest in her. Oddly, it was India’s great unwashed that particularly adored her—the market vendor, the paan-wallah, the coolie—doggedly spurning the new stick-thin, size-zero girls flooding the industry from modelling agencies in favour of her own more traditional curves. It was they—those sun-darkened, wizened figures that thronged the city’s streets and sometimes tapped piteously on the smoked-glass window of her Mercedes—who had made her what she was. She had never forgotten that—hence her recent idea of founding a charity for street children.

Zeba sighed, reaching out for the loofah. She scrubbed her elbows, thinking of what hard work it was constantly thinking up new ways to climb that very shaky pedestal marked ‘legend’. Firstly, there were a hundred others clawing at her ankles, trying to pull her down, upstart teenagers with bigger bust-lines and tighter butts and, of course, new top directors to be their godfathers. Sometimes in Bollywood the latter was the only attribute required to become a legend. Which, if she was to be honest, had worked out rather well for her. Old Shiv Mirchandani had, after all, been completely loyal to her all these years, both professionally and in a personal capacity, and despite being aware of her other occasional dalliances. He had even said something sentimental the other day about growing old together which had quite terrified her, given the ravages of age he already wore so cheerily on his cheese-grater face.

Zeba raised a long, shapely leg from the bath water and eyed it contemplatively as it shone wet and gleaming in the candlelight. Perhaps she should call for Najma to scrub and exfoliate her heels. Feet and hands were what first gave away a woman’s age, her Ammi had always said. Additionally, Zeba had spent all afternoon in an excruciatingly uncomfortable pair of stiletto heels, playing the role of a corporate boss in Dubai. But she had to be up again early tomorrow morning and was on the point of dropping off right here in the bath. She sat up in the water, her ample breasts glistening as they floated among the shiny bubbles. Perhaps she would treat herself to one of Sylvio’s famed pedicures at the Taj instead, after tomorrow’s shoot. They were wonderful there and always used their private suite at the back of the salon to assure her complete privacy. Zeba reached out for the bell by the bathtub to summon Najma who would help wipe her down and fetch a fresh silk nightie. She hoped that the hot bath and her familiar bed would dismiss jet-lag and aid a good night’s sleep.

After Zeba had been carefully patted dry by her maid and massaged with Crème de la Mer, another recent acquisition from Zurich, she padded her way through her dimly lit, cavernous bedroom. Someone—Gupta probably—had left a little stack of papers for her to go through under the bedside lamp. She picked up the rubber-banded bundle after she had climbed into her white leather water-bed and pulled a silk razai over her legs. Freeing the pack from their band, Zeba scowled, her sweeping eyebrows meeting in a furrow above her nose. The first letter was from a cousin, asking for a loan—that would have to be a ‘no’—it wasn’t as if she hadn’t helped him before and he would merely surface again after another few months with some new tale of hardship. She had much better things she could think of doing with her hard-earned money than passing it on to blood-sucking relatives. Her newly founded charity, for one.

Discarding the letter onto the floor by the side of her bed, where it would be picked up and binned by the sweeper in the morning, she reminded herself to stop frowning so much and swiftly cleared her brow. Luckily, the next letter offered much pleasanter fare—a request from Vanity Fair to be cover girl on their inaugural Indian publication—a definite ‘yes’. The next was an invitation to a private party being thrown by liquor baron Ramsy Fernando on his Madh Island home—hmmm, probably a ‘yes’. At least there wouldn’t be much of the film crowd there, Ramsy was too much of a brown-sahib snob for all that. But…what was this? The unseemly scowl returned to Zeba’s beautiful face.

Zeba scanned the words quickly:…soon going to retire as principal of the school…needed to meet her girls…a reunion…a reunion?! Was this someone’s idea of a bloody joke? Zeba turned the letter over as though searching for clues. Gupta must have got rid of the envelope…there was nothing else but a suggested date in December and a small scratchy signature at the bottom. She ran her eyes again over the spidery writing that was both familiar and yet uncharacteristically weak, becoming virtually illegible in the last few lines. Goodness, it was crazy to think of St Jude’s old Princy still alive and kicking and rattling around in that cottage next door to the school. The woman was probably in her mid-seventies now. It was no surprise, of course, that the convent had not retired her yet; school principals like Miss Lamb were hard to come by these days—the archetypal English spinster, willing to dedicate her whole life to the school. Victoria Lamb. What was it they used to call her back then?…Lamboo! Lamboo, for her long, noodle-like appearance. But then girls were cruel creatures under those coy exteriors.

And that niece of Lamboo’s…Lily. ‘Doan’t be silly, Lily’, they had tittered behind her back on her first day at the school, quoting the villain in that ridiculous film. But they found out soon enough that Lily wasn’t silly at all. Not in the slightest. But that she was very, very manipulative and go-getting indeed. In fact she was clearly trying to become the star from Day One—not the best course of action in a girls’ school that was already full of stars like Zeba. This had always puzzled Zeba: that clever little Lily had not been clever enough to see how many enemies she had made in her short time at the school. She should have considered treading more carefully, but on the other hand she had seemed genuinely not to care about earning anyone’s approval. It was almost enviable, that kind of self-satisfaction.

Zeba put the mail away on her bedside table and smoothed her fingers gently over the middle of her forehead. She had recently noticed the deep furrows that her mother had between her eyes, a permanent record of the stresses she had suffered in bringing up three rambunctious children under the watchful eye of an autocratic husband. So far the skin on Zeba’s face had remained taut and unlined, but she did have to watch out for bad genes—letters from the past that set off dark thoughts weren’t likely to help. She slipped off her silk camisole and tucked her legs under the sheet, wiggling her toes and taking a few deep breaths.

Lily D’Souza, good God, what a chest-thumping blast from the past. Even though she hardly ever stopped to remember her old classmate, Zeba did have to admit that, over the years, she—the great film star Zeba Khan—had in fact taken a useful leaf out of Lily’s book when it came to developing a supreme nonchalance to one’s detractors. Enemies were an undeniable part of working in an industry like Bollywood; perhaps they were an undeniable part of life itself, particularly when one was beautiful and accomplished. So what was the point of treading around so carefully that you never got anywhere? Still, even though one never made any real friends in a place like this, it was at least worth knowing who your enemies were. Zeba pulled the sheet over her shoulders, feeling a sudden chill.

The world probably saw her as supremely controlled but, suddenly, Zeba could feel something inside her quail and shrink as an almost visceral memory tumbled back unbidden, reminding her of how deeply she had hated Lily, virtually from the very first moment the girl had set foot in the classroom. Zeba let her head sink into her pillow, trying to relax her shoulders. She felt a small shiver, born from either guilt or satisfaction as she realised that she was now all the things that Lily had probably imagined she would one day be—an acclaimed star, the adored darling of India’s teeming audiences. Heroine to millions of people willing to queue for hours outside those crummy tin-pot cinema halls in slum areas on the night of a Zeba Khan blockbuster release. Now that was the real thing, an ambition worth fighting for. Quite unlike a stupid, inconsequential little school play. But that was what all teenagers were like, surely, narcissistically allowing the silliest things to take on the kind of significance that was impossible to comprehend in later life. Zeba scrabbled around in her bedside drawer and, finding a phial of Valium, swallowed two tablets with a little water from the crystal flagon that was always kept on her bedside table.

Two hours later, Zeba awoke from a ragged sleep, sweating profusely. Either the air-conditioning had broken down or she was having one of those ghastly night-sweats one heard about. She lay on her bed, listening to the roar of the sea outside and the lapping inside her own water-bed. Even on quiet nights, the combined watery sounds drowned all else. It was strange how people were willing to pay so much extra for properties lining the Arabian Sea, never thinking that its crashing waves provided such great cover for the city’s stalkers and burglars. The alarm system Gupta had tried installing a few years ago had caused all sorts of problems, tripping and going off every time the voltage fluctuated even slightly, leaving Zeba to rely on the time-tested method of security guards. She employed a whole army of them, but remained unsure of how much she could really trust such dangerous looking men who undressed her so unashamedly with their eyes.

Something cracked loudly in the garden outside, making Zeba jump. She lay frozen for a few minutes and contemplated ringing her panic button for the servants. They were probably all sleeping the sleep of the dead (or the drunk, more likely) on a hot pre-monsoonal night such as this, the useless dolts. What did they think she paid them over the odds for? She turned over and tried to close her eyes but the clamouring in her head was too much. Perhaps she hadn’t taken enough Valium, although she had promised her doctor she would try to cut down. Tonight it was the fault of Lamboo’s bloody letter. What was Gupta thinking, leaving it on her bedside like that? Almost willing these nightmares on her. Would she even contemplate going to something so ridiculous—a school reunion, for heaven’s sake! Reunions were meant for ordinary people, not stars; for bored wives to enviously eye up each other’s husbands and empty-headed mums to compare notes about their little darlings’ teeth and teachers. Zeba knew she would have absolutely nothing to say to any of her old classmates now—although, tossing her sweating body around again, she suddenly recalled having bumped into Samira Hussain (now Samira Something-else, of course) at Heathrow a few years ago. They had exchanged phone numbers and said all the glib things old classmates did when they met, about how marvellous the old days had been and how they really must stay in touch. Neither of them had mentioned that traumatic final year at school, of course, and they had parted knowing that both of them had grown too far apart in their respective lifestyles and sensibilities to maintain all but the briefest of contact.

Sam had, with typical dependability, attempted the occasional phone call after that meeting, and Zeba had tried her best to reciprocate, but they had lately drifted once again into sending each other only an occasional card or email, many of which Zeba, rather guiltily, got Gupta to deal with anyway. Even back in school, Sam had been the antithesis of Zeba, one of those annoying good girls who never got into scrapes of any sort and whom all the teachers adored. But at least she had not been the tattling sort, Zeba recalled, and so an unlikely bond had formed between them as they had travelled together from kindergarten to high school. However, from the short conversation inside the first-class lounge at Heathrow, it had seemed to Zeba that Sam had grown dull and vapid with age. Perhaps it was just the mumsiness that some women took on so earnestly with the acquisition of husbands and children, but Zeba could tell that even the little they’d had in common as schoolmates had now shrunk to virtually nothing. Sam had provided news of some of their other classmates, though: Anita, predictably still single, working with the BBC in London and, oh God, who didn’t know that Bubbles was married to the son of international textile tycoon Dinesh Raheja. Zeba had once seen Bubbles in the pages of Verve magazine, attending a flash corporate party at the Grand Maratha and clinging to the arm of a thin, nattily-dressed man. ‘Binkie and Bubbles Raheja, golden couple from London, gracing Bombay’s shores’ the accompanying caption gushed, going on to divulge that Mr Raheja’s suit was Armani while Mrs Raheja was in Zac Posen, a Boucheron piece around her neck. Zeba had pored over the picture, examining Bubbles’ clothes and shoes, or whatever she could make of them in the grainy photograph. She sure looked good, Zeba couldn’t help noting with a twinge, although she had not been able to put her finger on whether her envy was over the rich husband and private jet that had been mentioned in the small accompanying article, or the ease with which wealth had come to the woman. Bubbles Raheja had almost certainly not had to do a day’s work in her life, and probably didn’t even know the meaning of the word ‘schedule’. But who’d have thought that the spotty fat kid at school was the one who’d end up snaring a millionaire. She wasn’t even from a big business family herself—a chain of sari shops was all her parents had, as Zeba had seen when Bubbles had got married and the whole class had attended her wedding. There was nothing interesting to say either about how she’d done it: snag the millionaire, move to London and transform herself from plump and pimply teenager into an international jetsetter. It was all, in the end, just a matter of luck and timing; Zeba knew that better than most.

Well, if that lot were going to attend Lamboo’s planned reunion, it might actually not be a bad idea to go along, Zeba thought suddenly, surprising herself. She climbed out of her bed, now wide awake, and padded barefoot across her collection of antique Persian rugs to the large bay windows that ringed her room. Drawing the heavy tussar curtains aside, she looked out at the Arabian Sea, calm and black and lapping gently against the white sands at the bottom of her vast garden. Sometimes fans of hers managed to get to the beach and loiter, hoping to catch a glimpse of her until chased away by one of the guards. But tonight there were surely neither fans nor burglars prowling around those neat shrubs and flowerbeds lying peacefully in the moonlight below her bedroom window. Through the trees Zeba could see light in the guard’s gate-house shining dimly and she pulled the curtains shut, feeling a bit better. She smiled suddenly. It might actually be fun to spend an evening with old classmates exclaiming over how well she’d done for herself. Minus a husband too!

Her gaze fell on the stack of film magazines that Gupta had placed on her replica Louis XIV desk. Every page that carried a photograph or news piece about her would be obediently marked with a Post-It note, and Zeba could see the usual profusion of yellow bits of paper sticking out from the pages even in the faint glow of the night-light. She turned on the table lamp and sat before the pile of magazines, drawing them towards her with satisfaction. Leafing her way to the first marked page in Cineblitz, she thought of how her old schoolmates must pore over her pictures in the society pages of magazines and newspapers, admiring the rocks she wore on her hands and her chain of male escorts, with as much envy as she had felt when she’d read about Bubbles’ private Learjet.

Zeba opened the drawer of her dressing table, searching for her old BlackBerry. She remembered having keyed Sam’s details in there. Even if she couldn’t find it, Gupta would probably be able to fish it out for her in the morning from one of his dusty old diaries. Zeba squinted at the small green screen. There it was: Samira Hussain, and a London phone number. She reached out for her telephone.

LONDON, 2008

While Zeba sat sleepless on that hot Mumbai night, telephone held to her ear, night was falling on the other side of the world, turning London’s rainy skies to a cold slate-grey. The three girlfriends had been drinking steadily for the past two hours and Bubbles was by now quite drunk. As was usual, the third Kir Royale had plummeted her into the most abject depths of despair, and she was now weeping in such earnest that she had even managed to scare off their fervent Lithuanian waiter to the far end of the restaurant.

The letter had started it off, of course, bringing back memories with a force so powerful that each of the three women had, at different times in the evening, looked into their glasses of alcohol and felt a little sick. They had obviously never forgotten anything, even though their old pact had forbidden speaking of it. Bubbles had, predictably, allowed the collective reminiscing to plunge her back into dwelling on her more immediate territory of grievances against Binkie and his parents. Anita, slumped on her pouffe, was only half-listening as she knocked back the vodka tonics in an attempt to recover from her 5 a.m. start. Luckily, she could rely on Sam to pay attention to Bubbles, and saw through her drunken haze that their ever-reliable friend was nodding sympathetically and occasionally passing Bubbles scented tissues from her handbag.

Bubbles’ life had never seemed that dreadful to Anita. Her dear friend had a dire mother-in-law, without a doubt, and the father-in-law, Dinesh Raheja, was a horrendously unethical capitalist who couldn’t give a toss about the environment: the kind of person Anita normally reserved her deepest bile for. However, Anita had found it hard to dislike Dinesh Raheja from the day he’d uncomplainingly turned up at short notice for a BBC interview at her request, for which, as a rookie news-room journalist, she’d received a rare pat on the back from her editor. The funny thing was that it had not been at all difficult to get the old man to come to Bush House. Like many self-made men, Dinesh Raheja wore his success rather like a matador would use his cape, probably petrified that everyone would forget how hard-won it had been. So despite his predilection for strutting, his inability to tone down the Punjabi accent he had carried over from India and his rough-edged manners made his millions seem somehow more deserving.

His son Binkie, married to Bubbles, was another matter altogether. Having made his first million while Binkie was still in high school, Dinesh Raheja had been proud to send his only child to England when he turned fourteen—to Harrow or Eton, Anita could never remember which. But, having had a relatively late start at the whole business of becoming staunchly Anglophile, Binkie had taken to it with alarming relish, changing his name by the time he got to university from the admittedly dull Rajesh to the positively preposterous Binkie, speaking in a strange faux-Wodehousian tongue, and buying himself a metallic mauve Bentley Continental GT as soon as he was old enough to drive. From what Anita could tell, he seemed to be worsening as he approached his forties, getting his battery of butlers and valets to perform the most ridiculous tasks, such as ironing the morning papers and trimming their edges so that the pages were perfectly aligned before he would deign to glance at the day’s news with his eight-minute egg (not seven or nine minutes, but exactly and precisely eight). His only concessions to Indian-ness lay in the kind of things that apparently made life hell for Bubbles. These boiled down to two main things: an utter and complete devotion on Binkie’s part to his dragon of a mother, and maintaining the promise she had extracted from him that, despite all their money, he would always and only stay in the same house as her. Some house it was too, in the heart of Belgravia and with miles of corridors and multiple floors, each square inch of which would be worth thousands of pounds according to Anita’s calculations. Raheja Mansion had in fact been formed by knocking together two palatial town-houses that had belonged to a pair of Kuwaiti brothers, which explained why the pool house looked like something out of the sets of Caligula, complete with Piedmont urns, artificial palms and bare-breasted marble nymphs with golden nipples. But, unsatisfied with such largesse, Mrs Raheja had even bought the lower ground floor flat next door to the main house and installed the kitchen in there so that there was no risk at all of Binkie’s delicate nostrils being assailed with the smell of curry. Then there were the houses in Paris and Cape Cod, the country pile in Bucks and the baronial manor in Scotland…but it was almost laughable that, despite such a profusion of global real estate, poor Bubbles had nowhere to call her own, nor any place where she could really get away from her mother-in-law.