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.
‘It’s like I’m married to her rather than him, Sam!’ Bubbles was wailing again, taking another slug from her flute, whose edge was now encrusted with almost as much lipstick as was left on her mouth.
‘I know, I know, darling,’ Sam consoled, ‘but couldn’t you persuade Binkie to take you to the Paris flat when the schools close next month? The children will be going up to their summer camp in Switzerland as usual, won’t they?’
‘Bobby will be at camp in Montana, although Ruby’s still trying to make her mind up. But, you see, Ma’s already arranged for me to be in the Bahamas with her and Auntie Poppy and Poonam Maasi…I told you about that cruise for Papa’s sixty-fifth. She’s hired a 300-foot yacht and is taking her whole family, and obviously I have to be there.’
‘Oh yes, of course, you did say,’ Sam said, subsiding back into silence, remembering how they had dissolved in giggles at the thought of a bunch of Punjabi matriarchs sunning themselves in voluminous one-pieces when Bubbles had first mentioned it.
‘How about we go somewhere together after the summer then? Just us girls,’ Anita offered, rousing herself briefly.