Paying Guests

In a tightly packed paying guest accommodation in Mumbai, a new entrant disturbs the order of things. People begin to lose friends, belongings and even bits of their dreams.

Image by Vijit Gupta for Soup

When I first met Fran, I found myself wanting to impress her. It wasn’t anything excessive, I just wanted her to think well of me. The day she arrived we were all in the common room, Janaki was next to me on the corner sofa, Mona and Bhavna were occupying the couch in the centre like they owned it, Neeti sat on the floor painting their toes. We had arranged ourselves around the TV, like we were at the altar of a temple. But our glazed eyes were fixed on a show no one was really watching. When Fran walked into the room she went straight to the couch in the centre and Mona grudgingly shifted aside to make space for her.

We all stole looks at her, I even tried smiling but she didn’t look up from her book. Mona eventually asked her something obvious like, “new, here?” or some such, I can’t remember.

What I do remember is that she smiled widely, stretching her cheeks upward in a practised gesture that didn’t reach her eyes, making her face looked fleshy. She is one of those few people a smile cannot improve. Fran introduced herself and we welcomed her by offering her the banana chips that were going around. After carefully selecting a few chips she set her book aside and watched TV with the rest of us. It was as though she’d been waiting to be acknowledged so she’d have permission to share the TV with us.

The way she was dressed, the way she crossed her legs like a tight pair of scissors –– she seemed like she was neat and responsible. Someone who’d tuck the corners of her sheet firm and taut into the sides of her mattress. Someone who’d part her hair unwaveringly down the middle of her scalp. Someone who’d file her own taxes, without help from her father. And apparently someone who would change the channel to Star Movies even when Mona was in the room, inhaling Bollywood songs on ZeeMusic. When I saw her do this I looked at Fran without blinking until she finally looked back at me. I smiled at her then, as if to thank her for changing the channel and she gave me an answering wobbly-cheeked smile.

I was dating a guy in those days, someone I’d met through a friend. I’d started staying over with him even though I didn’t like him all that much. He tended to criticise my appearance but he would also say things like “you’ve left but the pillow is still warm.” I have often been in relationships with people who don’t treat me well and unsurprisingly I found myself drawn to this guy. After a whole week at his place, I finally went to my paying guest accommodation to prepare for the coming week. I shared my room with Janaki in those days and despite her conservative ways I was quite fond of her. Although we didn’t know each other when we lived there, we’d grown up in the same town. We were as different as two people could be- I was still struggling to find myself and with Janaki what you saw was what you got. She was precise and polite, without an extra word to spare and toed an imaginary line set by her family. Although she didn’t say so, I got the impression that she disapproved of my late nights and sleepovers. But people that share childhood towns and cities are often bound by familiarity and we found it easy to get along.

That day I came back to find that my side of the room was as messy as it always was, but Janaki’s side was spotless, which was unusual. Her sheets had been pulled out, laundered and folded neatly, there were no clothes piling up on her chair and her four shoes weren’t stuffed under the bed next to her suitcase, in fact they were nowhere to be seen.

It was a Sunday that day, and my PG accommodation was empty, everyone had stepped out to make the most of the weekend. I felt a sudden, sharp pang of loneliness –– I had no one to call or meet; I was still only two-months-old in the city. I contemplated calling my mother, but hearing her bright voice and trying to match my enthusiasm with hers would’ve felt like failure, so I didn’t. It was in this broken sort of mood that I went down to buy a cigarette, even though I didn’t smoke.

I bought a single cigarette from a packet of Classic Milds at the tapri downstairs, along with a box of matches. I had smoked before, so I knew how to inhale nicotine. I went back to my room, cracked open the only window and stood by it, lighting my cigarette and letting it dangle down my fingers a tad theatrically. Outside my window a large peepal tree dipped into the backyard reminding me of home. A backyard was an anomaly in Mumbai and I was lucky to have gotten into this house- an ancestral home, its top floor repurposed as a paying guest (PG) accommodation. Although the rent was steep by PG standards, it was a well-maintained bungalow where our widowed land lady lived downstairs and the floor above was occupied by 6 of us girls. The top floor was tightly packed, there were three beds in one room, two in mine and two in another. Mine however was a special room as it came with an attached toilet. I’d tried to make it as personable as possible by tacking a Jamini Roy print to my lavender wall and stringing fairy lights along the length of my bed. Lost in the sea of printed flowers on my Bombay Dyeing bed sheet, swathed in the glow of dim lights, I sometimes felt like Ophelia, floating down still waters, fast asleep or quite dead.

I tried to make rings with the cigarette smoke but ended up coughing. After just two drags, I was already light-headed. I thought of all the movies where newcomers in Bombay sift through the city looking sad-eyed in bus windows.

When Janaki walked in she found me leaning against the window and probably felt a pang of guilt. She greeted me softly, asking me where I’d been. I shrugged in answer, unwilling to tell her that I’d had nowhere to go.

“How come you got so clean?” I asked her gesturing to her side of the room.

Janaki sighed and sat down heavily on the bed, and a pile of cream bottles shuddered with the impact, sending one of them rolling down. I picked it up, and smirked- it was a Fair&Lovely bottle.

She ignored the smirk and said a bit stiffly, “listen, I need to tell you something.”

She crossed her legs uncomfortably, she was wearing thick, neatly ironed pants and collared tee that she’d buttoned right up to her neck. She looked silly, like her legs were supposed to go for a meeting but the top half of her had decided to golf.

“I’m shifting to Fran’s room, there’s an empty bed there…” she said, interrupting my thoughts.

Immediately I felt betrayed; something I had no right to feel and so it felt worse.

But I only said, “oh.”

“…you’re never here,” she said to justify her move, “and Fran was saying, we are always together so it would be fun for me to stay there. I’m so lonely here.”

“You’re always with Fran?”

“I’ve started spending time with her. She’s really nice actually, works in finance…”

I was angry and so I reasoned that two dull people would do very well in each other’s company. I told her she was doing the right thing but resolved to freeze her out.

“Why don’t you come out with us for dinner? We’re going to a Goan place.”

“You’re vegetarian, what’s the point of going to a Goan place?” I said and went to the bathroom, taking care to shut the door softly.

I slept naked in bed that day since there was no one in the room. The cigarette, the nudity and the boy I often stayed with made me feel superior to Janaki and her dull life. I thought of how the room she had moved to looked like a bottle of Digene had been splashed on its walls. It was a pink that reminded me of indigestion.

On Monday, someone had taped a note to the fridge, “The curd belongs to Fran DeSa, please do not touch.”

Under it Janaki had taped another note, “Milk belongs to Janaki Ravichandran.”

I snorted at the note just as Neeti walked into the kitchen, Neeti rolled her eyes, poured Janaki’s milk into her glass and microwaved it.

That night I came across Fran in the kitchen, she asked me what I did for a living–– I told her I worked in film production. She had nothing to say to that so she complained that someone was still stealing her curd, the dabba was peeled open and half-empty every day. I wasn’t interested in small talk but then she asked me if I’d slept well the previous night. So I told her about a dream I’d had where I opened a dabba of curd to find maggots inside.

“So strange,” she said laughing uncomfortably.

“I know, your curd dabba must be embedded in my subconscious,” I told her.

I’d had no such dream. I was a bit shocked though, when I heard her repeating the dream to Neeti the next day as if it was her own. I was in the common toilet next to the kitchen using the washing machine, so they couldn’t see me, but I could hear them.

“I had a strange dream last night, I opened my dabba of curd to find maggots swirling inside,” she told Neeti

“Weird,” said Neeti, sounding bored.

“The curd must’ve been embedded in my subconscious,” Fran continued.

I should have known right then that she was a thief.

Three weeks later it had become common practice to tack notes to the refrigerator door. “My pizza, don’t touch. Neeti.” “Buy your own curd.” (this was obviously Fran) “Please don’t eat my dinner, I haven’t had lunch today,” said an unnamed person, piteously.

There was a meeting in the common room one Monday morning. Our landlady, a bird-like East Indian woman called Daphne had asked us to gather at 7:45 AM, no excuses. She was still in her housecoat when we all came to the common room.

“Good morning girls. I’m sorry to call this meeting on a Monday morning which is so busy for all of us,” she started.

Neeti whispered that the only one troubled by the meeting was Daphne herself who woke up at 11:00 AM every day. No one liked Daphne because even though the scent of homemade plum cake, fugias and roast chicken wafted upstairs every Christmas, she never offered us any. Not even when we went downstairs to wish her. Last Christmas Neeti and I had rung the bell downstairs and chorused “Merry Christmas aunty,” convinced that we’d be offered cake since we’d chosen to wish her personally. But Daphne who’d opened the door just a crack had first looked startled, after which she’d nodded politely and shut the door on us.

“This was an urgent complaint, many of you have reported missing things in the past two weeks. Neeti has lost a Chanel nail polish…”

“Your nail polish was Chanel?,” I whispered to Neeti who nodded sadly. Her family was in Dubai so she had the best of things.

“Mona says her purple bag is nowhere to be found.”

“I’ve lost 500 rupees too,” Janaki chimed in.

I wondered what I was missing, I hadn’t been checking.

“Who isn’t missing anything?” Daphne asked sounding like Hercule Poirot who’d soon announce that those without missing things were the suspects.

Bhavna and I raised our hands, Bhavna said she’d have to check again to confirm. Fran didn’t say anything.

“Hmmm…please be careful with your things. I’m always here when Kalpana comes to clean so it can’t be her.”

With that statement the meeting seemed to have come to an end and all of us shuffled back towards our respective rooms. But I looked back to find Neeti following me to mine.

“It’s Fran ya,” Neeti told me inside my room.

“Why would you think so?” I was invested in this allegation, baseless or not.

“I just find her so annoying. Goody-two-shoes.”

Things continued to go missing from our rooms, I lost a cell phone charger, Bhavna lost 800 rupees, Mona dramatically announced that some bitch had stolen her earrings. No one suspected anyone in particular but we’d all begun to lock our rooms. Around this time I went to the guy’s house again, I had made him dessert––Marie biscuits smushed with butter at the base of a bowl, topped with whipped cream and diced strawberries, I poured melted chocolate over the whole thing. He wasn’t home when I arrived so I left it outside his door. He didn’t text me, call me or answer my calls for two days in a row. On the third night I took an auto with Neeti to his apartment complex. Once we got there, I asked the auto driver to turn off his headlight and watched the guy’s bedroom from the darkness below. His lights were on, but I couldn’t see anything. I told Neeti to leave, “are you sure?” she asked me, she seemed to be enjoying this. I didn’t answer her, I jumped out of the auto and took the elevator to the 4th floor, to his house. When I rang the bell, I heard someone in the house shuffle, someone else giggle but no one answered. I rang the bell 15 times incessantly- I didn’t care if he opened the door, I wanted to make a point. But after the 15th ring, I left. He sent me a message later saying that my dessert was amazing but we had nothing in common and he wanted to call off “whatever this is”. Later I wept into my pillow in a way that told me that I cared about him more than I had wished to admit.

Fran knocked on my door that night.

“I heard you crying. I mean…I could hear it in the kitchen,” she said when I opened the door after wiping my face dry.

“Yaa…this…” my face scrunched up and I couldn’t form words because I was thinking of Janaki now. I hated this city and everyone who had left me for someone else.

Fran walked into the room uninvited and sat down on Janaki’s side. “That guy? Janaki told me there was some guy…”

I nodded yes.

There was something calming about her, her prim long-sleeved peach coloured shirt and grey pants ending in sensible shoes.

“You dress like this to work on your own or…it’s some kind of company requirement?” I asked her abruptly.

“I work in finance, we all dress like this, it’s like a uniform they don’t tell you about but you just know.”

She asked me about the guy and I spoke about him as if I was meant to marry him. Until then he’d just been a distraction but after he’d dumped me I had to justify my sadness by inflating his importance in my life. The truth was that my ego had been hurt. The guy wasn’t particularly clever, interesting or good looking, he was just the only person I’d been romantically involved with after moving here. Fran and Janaki took me out for dinner and I felt grateful for their company, even if our conversation was restricted to gossip about people in the house. I watched Janaki absorbing everything Fran said as if she was marinating in her words, the red lights in the restaurant adding a touch of drama, making her look reverential towards Fran. We were at the same Goan place they’d invited me to earlier, and I watched in surprise as Janaki also bit into a crunchy piece of sungta maria. “Do you know that’s prawn?” I felt compelled to ask her.

“Janaki eats fish,” Fran answered for her.

It was mostly only Fran who spoke that evening, even though I’d ordered a too-sweet and too-strong Planter’s Punch- my tongue hadn’t loosened with alcohol. I was still oddly wary of Fran and a bit cold to Janaki who hadn’t asked me a single question about how I was feeling. Fran mocked Mona for being unemployed, “how does she get the money to go out every night?” And then “Neeti doesn’t value money, she just leaves it lying around. When she has so much of it, why should she care? ” She was right about most of those things, Neeti did have expensive tastes that none of us could even aspire to. In fact she may have never lived in our paying guest accommodation but her parents wanted her to stay in a safe, chaperoned place. None of us envied Neeti but Fran pronounced these statements so viciously that it seemed more like a judgement than an observation.

The next day was a Sunday and I tried to cook rice but ended up burning it. Fran happened to walk in just then, and I felt a slight pang of fear, I was afraid she would think of me as another one of the privileged, irresponsible boarders in the house. But she just smiled and taught me how to make a pot of rice the right way until it came out fluffy and light, each grain separate from the other. She was nice I decided even though I’d recently lost 750 rupees which in all likelihood was her doing.

Janaki followed Fran around like a little lamb, they had begun to make calls together to Fran’s brother in Goa. And on those calls which they usually made loudly in the common balcony, I could hear Janaki simpering at everything Fran’s brother said. It made me a bit sick and I couldn’t understand why.

“Phraan,” said Neeti one day, mocking Janaki’s south Indian accent. I giggled along, because somewhere deep inside I was still hurt about Janaki’s decision to change her room.

“We have a plan,” Neeti whispered, “we’re planting 500 rupees on my bed tomorrow and we’re all leaving the house, everyone except Fran. So when the note disappears we will know for sure that it’s her doing, the stealing.” Neeti told me. I noticed that her eyes were shining, I didn’t say anything and went back to stuffing my dirty clothes into the washing machine.

“What? Are you in?,” she prodded, eager to have everyone on her side.

“What about Janaki?”

“She’s working tomorrow,” said Neeti who had planned everything seamlessly.

All of us except Fran went to watch a movie the next day, I could hardly concentrate on the film which was about a lot of people driving a lot of cars, a subject I simply wasn’t interested in. After the movie, we had dinner at a fast-food joint, at the table, as everyone dug into their fried chicken burgers, no one spoke even though we all had the same thing on our minds. Bhavna broke the silence finally, claiming that Fran had made her book an insurance policy, “I just felt guilty about not saving, so I agreed,” she said looking around helplessly at us.

“No money to pay the rent and she wants to save,” Mona quipped and all of us including Bhavna laughed because their endless unemployment was a joke now. I still don’t know what they did in the PG accommodation or in Mumbai; partying every night, sleeping through the day with no job to wake up for.

When we went back home, I followed Neeti into her room, her bed was in the corner by the window, usually a mess of strewn clothes and bags- her bed was extraordinarily neat that day. I immediately noticed that the 500 rupee note was missing. Fran was folding her clothes on the bed next to Neeti’s, in the centre of the room. Neeti casually asked her if she’d seen a 500 rupee note.

“No,” Fran replied, folding a maroon underwear and tucking it into the middle of a pile of laundered clothes. “You should be more careful,” she added coldly. Neeti was too shocked to sat anything at that. Besides, it was always Mona who took the lead in all kinds of bullying.

“Fran, open your wallet,” she said barging into the room like she’d been waiting for this moment.

“What on earth for?”

“We know you’ve stolen the 500 rupees, open your wallet and stop pretending,” Mona said taking obvious pleasure in her role as aggressor.

“No,” Fran said with a dignity that was admirable, given the situation.

“Open it, or we will call the police,” Neeti injected a bit hysterically, I thought.

“I’m not opening anything, you can check whatever you want to,” Fran’s voice was unwavering despite all our eyes on her.

I didn’t participate in this, because I didn’t feel good about cornering her. However, it also seems relevant now that I didn’t support Fran either. I didn’t want to be involved as a participant, I was far more comfortable as an observer. Later, I watched the girls rummage through Fran’s belongings, unnecessarily upsetting her things, scattering the neat pile of clothes on her bed, kicking her shoes and tossing her books all until they found a slim brown purse tucked under her pillow. Inside the purse between two other 500 rupee notes was one with a tell-tale red nail polish stain.

With this evidence in hand, the girls surrounded Fran in an aggressive circle, and she cowered on her bed, finally defeated. She mumbled something about always having to work hard, about Neeti being too rich and too careless- at this Neeti flared up- so she changed her tune again, promising to replace everyone’s things, promising to make up for what she’d done. But I couldn’t help but notice that she hadn’t apologised. Not even once.

I expected Fran to vacate the house after her humiliation but she did no such thing. I continued to bump into her in the kitchen, sometimes I felt that her eyes were puffy from crying, but she still smiled at me every morning.

Over time everyone accepted Fran once again, they made space for her on the couch in the common room and joked around with her once in a while. The only thing that had changed was that Fran’s notes on the fridge had gotten even more obnoxious. Now they named names, “Neeti, please buy your own curd.” Or “Whoever ate my lunch will have to pay me Rs 250.”

Despite proof of Fran’s doings, Janaki continued to be her friend, I could not detect any strain in their friendship. But many years later when Janaki got married, I noticed that Fran had not been invited for the wedding.

Written by Meera Ganapathi