The Red Carpet (2007)
“D’Costa lived with his wife in a cul-de-sac off Ulsoor Road, in a pastel pink house that was square and squat and small, with a sloping cement roof and no garden space to speak of. It was identical to the houses that flanked it on either side, except that the others were pastel blue, pastel yellow, and pastel green. They were designed as affordable middle-class housing at a time when Bangalore was small, and everybody lived in houses, and apartments were some sort of unseen exotic Bombay invent...ion. Even today, they spoke of identical resident lifestyles: with windows meshed, barred, and tightly shuttered; with pastel walls scarred and fissured by monsoon rain; the smell of steamed rice idlis and spicy sambar that floated in the air in the mornings; the potted hibiscus plants on the narrow cement footpaths that ran between house and compound wall, interspersed with dusty jasmine and bougainvillea creepers that hugged and further blinded the lower-floor windows in overgrown disarray. The driveways held Bajaj scooters, and sometimes, perhaps a very old, rarely used Fiat car that had been carefully husbanded over the decades.There had been more of these houses at one time, lining the lane right up to where it met Ulsoor Road.MoreLess
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