‘Who is this?’ I asked. I was panicking.
‘When Noelene dropped those hints about my grandfather, she was fiddling with the watch. Moving it up and down on her wrist. She was smiling.’
Coy was the word Andrew wasn’t using.
This was harsh, but I had to ask. ‘Do you remember that conversation with Noelene?’
‘She only said, “Your grandfather is someone famous.”’
Sometimes Andrew is so slow when he speaks, I could bake an apple crumble between sentences.
‘I asked her, “How famous? Shah Rukh Khan famous?”’
‘Is he an actor?’ Where in god’s name was this going?
That had been Andrew’s question, too, after Noelene told him that his grandfather wasn’t as famous as Shah Rukh Khan.
‘She knew him because she had worked for him as his secretary. At that point, I thought he was money, he was a businessman. But no.’
I was feeling faint, but Andrew sat before me, straight back and square shoulders. His face was pale. There was a similitude somewhere, though the writing was not in the features.
While Noelene hadn’t named her lover, only giving her grandson a broad outline of the situation, she had emphasized that it was only her version of events. It was how she saw things. There was no drama in the revelations.
Andrew didn’t have to say it, but it was obvious that Noelene had lived much of her adult life with a broken heart. She had told Andrew that she had known all along that her boyfriend wasn’t going to marry her and that she, and she alone, was to blame for the situation she found herself in.
That, I thought, said more about Noelene than what may have transpired between the paramours.
Andrew cleared his throat. ‘Last evening, I checked it again, just to see if I had read it wrong.’
I nodded.
‘He knows, and that was the only confirmation I needed.’
Andrew returned the case to his cargoes and crossed his hands across his chest. ‘Ravi was adopted; I wasn’t accepted.’ He shrugged.
I wanted to reach across the table of untouched food but picked up my coffee instead. ‘Why?’ I mouthed. I was a journalist; there had to be a question.
Andrew shook his head.
‘No!’ was all I could manage. I had meant yes, but not that it mattered. Yes, what? I had no idea.
So, Noelene’s lover was Hari Rao. The doe-eyed Noelene, frail but not fragile. Not a strand of grey in that fall of brown that touched her waist on the rare occasions she let her hair down. They had a child, a daughter, who died when giving birth to a baby boy, who was now the man sitting across the table from me.
Andrew Brown was Hari Rao’s grandson. By blood.
Andrew looked a lot like his grandmother. He definitely had her eyes. His grandfather’s mark wasn’t as distinct. Like with Ravi.
Andrew was on his feet. ‘I’m going back to the office,’ he said.
To lose himself in his work,I thought.
I leaned back in my chair and watched him disappear into the evening crowd that was swarming all over Church Street.
There was the odd horn that blared, the sound of motorbikes coming to a screeching halt. The road was an ill-tempered space.
There was a general buzz in the air, but you rarely heard words or caught a conversation from the next table. Perky Grace was that kind of a place.
And Bengaluru was that kind of a city – where grace and disgrace were hard to separate.
