The Red Carpet is Lavanya Sankaran’s debut collection of short stories. Here she strings together the experiences of people caught at cross roads as the old Bangalore, the Pensioners Paradise emerges into a global metro. The old Bangalore conjures images of morning joggers relishing the balmy April air in Cubbon Bagh, bungalows with sprawling gardens of roses and laburnum, unhurried government employees playing a game of card on the lawns after lunch, outside Vidhan Soudha – all these render a perpetual holiday mood and bestow a bonhomie character to the city. These vestiges of the old city seamlessly merge, in Lavanya’s stories, with the hip-hop culture of the new city that boasts of pubs, shopping malls and neon lit MG road.
 
Lavanya Sankaran’s stories are peopled by a generation of young Indians who see no reason to go to the US of A as they can afford a lifestyle that is similar here in India, to the one in the U. S. They work in MNCs and BPOs and enjoy the best of both worlds. In a shrinking world they glibly talk and clinch deals over the phone, send e-mails that draw to their footsteps opportunities, and boast an upwardly mobile lifestyle that includes breakfast meetings in upmarket coffee shops, official trips to America and Europe.
 
Then there are the young Indians abroad who come back to explore their home as it has become a potential investment hub with scores of affordable software engineers lining the streets of Bangalore.  And of course the desi professionals are aching to leave behind their middle class milieu, this they achieve by working in the MNCs. They tout a cell phone, wear branded clothes, and own cars in which they take their girlfriends to discothes.  Like the bewildered old man Decosta in Lavanya’s story The Closed Curtain, we gaze at the paling away of the familiar world, and focus on the new Bangalore that is emerging.
 
The Red Carpet  can be claimed as a new genre, it ushers home the prodigal who narrates experiences of homecoming, which is a  mixed bag of nostalgia, exhilaration and disappointment. We, the readers, are the Decostas ‘gazing’ at this new brood that has flown come.
 
Lavanya Sankaran interestingly weaves together the various stories in The Red Carpet – the changing soul-scape of the city becomes the binding space where various characters play out their parts. Some characters  appear in more than one story and reveal various shades of their personality in various contexts and in their relationships with different people. The glimpses of these characters over many stories build like layers to reveal the kaleidoscope of human nature.

Trite Relationships

The first story in the collection is Bombay This. Ramu is the most pedestrian of characters we come across in the collection. He dolefully observes that he has definitely reached an age when the girls he took on one-night stands as well as the wives of friends who out of boredom obliged him, have moved on. When his mother suggests Ashwini as a suitable match for him, Ramu engages in an unenthusiastic appraisal of Ashwini whom he had met on different occasions. He draws an impressive checklist on why Aswini is a suitable candidate. But Ashwini chooses Murthy, a friend of Ramu, as her companion. Ramu in his chauvinism constructs a stereotyped identity of Ashwini. This story is truly Ramu’s, he holds the stage. It is in Apple Pie, One By Two, another story in the collection, that we get to understand that Ashwini is more than a party buff  that Ramu makes her out to be. In the story Mysore Coffee we understand why Murthy is a better human being than Ramu, hence a more deserving companion than Ramu for Ashwini.

The Frames Of Emptiness

Closed Curtains the most riveting story in the collection, sensitively traces the isolation and loneliness of old people in a city that has moved on. The city has become  an absorbing spectacle for the voyeuristic Decosta who cannot reach out to the new crop of people who have moved into his neighbourhood and share his city. Decosta lives with his neurotic  cartoon-addicted wife in an old house, his only son has married a non-Indian and settled with his family in Australia. Decosta constructs meaning to his life by identifying himself with the highs and lows of the young couple who have moved across the road; the frame of the window through which he gazes at the happenings in the new family fills up the vacuum of his life. The young wife who gets estranged from her husband, overwhelmed by the imbalance and the mess her life has gotten into, indifferently casts Decosta off, thus excluding him and drawing herself behind a closed curtain. The tale reaches the level of bathos when Decosta immediately identifies another neighbour to draw into his empty world. 
 
The Notion Of Difference

Lavanya explores the subtle ways in which the notion of difference wedges between master/mistress and the servant/driver/ayah. The play of power manifests in multifarious ways. In the The Red Carpet Mrs Choudhary, the young and beautiful mistress takes various avatars based on her diverse roles as wife, daughter-in-law, mother, and teetotaller, and as the benevolent mistress. She wins the loyalty of her servants. The servants have nothing to complain about her, do not engage in gossips about the mistress, they do not deride her, they even turn a blind eye to her wayward ways – so effective does the mistress wield a control over her staff. She obtains her power through different ways. She obliterates the individual identity of her servants; she calls all her drivers Raju. By calling the new driver Rangappa as Raju, she deprives him of subjectivity; he is frozen into a constructed identity.  Raju, like the other servants in the house, is co-opted in the agenda of the rich woman who derives her identity through this subtle expression of power.
 
In another story Two Four Six Eight  Mary, the ayah of the narrator insidiously subverts the hegemony of her mistress/missy. Mary leaves a scar on the tender consciousness of her young ward who is also the narrator of the story. Yet the narrator has moved on, the enchanting world outside her home draws her away from the lonely and embittered woman. The ayah is caught up in her small world where she fawns over and flatters her mistress – the only type of existence that is possible for her.   

Lady Kafka

Mysore Coffee, the darkest story in the collection, is in the mode of Kafka and Kundera. The story lays bare the distressed psyche of Sita who fosters a dark desire to throw herself from the roof of a tall building – the same building from where her father jumped when Sita was only a child. An error in computation cost one of his clients four thousand rupees  – a pittance now for the grown up daughter, whose bill at a restaurant for a dinner of four amounts the same. The feeling of defeat and humiliation weighs down the sensitive man, grief and shame layer his consciousness and the exterior, in an uncanny manner does not betray the bottomless feeling of depression. He takes his family – his wife and his daughter - to see the newly built tallest building in Bangalore, the Palace Tower. The outing, banal in its ordinariness, is beguiling as the father goes back the next day and throws himself from the roof of the building, carrying with him the happiness and sanity of his family. The incident makes Sita and her mother a pariah in the society. The mother and the daughter live in a cocoon – both have the ghosts of the past to handle. Her mother is placid during the day, but is ripped apart by agony and anguish in the nights. The daughter browses the net for suicide hotline and constantly struggles to keep the equation of pain and pain-coping resources in the right proportion to keep away from the rooftop of Palace Tower that keeps beckoning her. 
 
Ramu, the suave man who contemplated marrying Ashwini in Bombay This, is a compulsive flirt in this story. He facetiously deals with Sita because she is pavam and will remain mute even when under her nose he steals the project she had been exploring and working on. 

The Ethnographer’s Tour Through India 

The outsider becomes an insider in the story Alphabet Soup. Priya a second generation American of Indian origin, cannot accept the way her parents have assimilated in the U.S. She sets off on a journey to India, which is an ethnographic trail. She occupies a peculiar position — she is an insider/outsider in India, she occupies the limnal space. She uses the rites, rituals and  practices of Tamil Brahmins as a cultural text to understand and define her identity which she concedes is multiple due to her origin, beliefs, relationships and various social and cultural factors that shape her behaviour.

Another story from the collection Birdie Num-Num states that there is a genetic palimpsest that no one can escape.  Tara is working on her Ph D program in the U.S, and is in India to write her thesis on Labour Policy. Her parents are determined to finalise her marriage and she watches helplessly the predatory manner in which her parents stalk her and rid her of choices. Understanding that no amount of ducking would deter her mother, she consents to have a party organised in her house. What the daughter does not understand, but something her mother always knew, is that there are cultural patterns deep down in her female psyche that she shared with the women of her family, that no amount of assimilation of foreign values could wipe out. 

The Gold Diggers Turn Their Eyes Homewards

What is venture capitalism all about? How is this endeavour different from the merchandise endeavours backed by European government and financers in the 17th and 18th century to different places in Asia, Africa and Latin America – for instance, to India? Ideologically there is not much difference. After three centuries, India is still the hinterland for European/ American capitalism. The venture capitalists look at India as a potential storehouse of cheap professional and skilled workforce. In Apple Pie One By Two venture capitalism has an Indian soul as capitalists are the young Indians who want to invest back home.

Apple Pie One By Two presents the new crop of gold diggers like Swamy and Murthy who come to strike gold back home. These two young men made it big in  the U.S. the hard way. They come from middleclass homes where their overstretched fathers could afford only buying flight tickets to the US. The rest was taken care of by their scholarship money. They realise how pathetically poor they were when they join universities for graduation program. They scurry to garage sale to procure cooking pans, share their meals one by two and hold on in an alien land. Even when they make it big, they can’t forget their homes; when the option of moving back arises they come home. Murthy decides to stay back and tide over the recessions and setbacks in India, while Swamy does not want to feel washed away in a lost land and spend the rest of his life thinking and regretting of America as a far away dream land or golden city that he allowed to slip away out of his hands. The story is a farewell to Swamy who is going back to the U.S of A, it is a toast to his success. But the victor is truly the man who decides to stay in India.