The
Windfall, by Diksha Basu
Mr and Mrs Jha have done extremely and unexpectedly
well from the sale of Mr Jha’s start-up company. Even though their son Rupak knows that,
had they been more hard-nosed, they would have
realised ten times the twenty million American dollars they were paid, his
parents are thrilled: it’s time to live
well at last!
And
they do. A lovely bungalow is purchased
in an upper class suburb of Delhi, and a trip to New York is arranged to see
Rupak who is studying for his MBA at a minor American college – oh, life
couldn’t be better; now all that is left
to do is tell their neighbours, who already have their suspicions because of
the brand new Mercedes Benz that glows in its grubby parking space in front of
the Jha’s rackety old apartment building in East Delhi. The parking lot has never been graced with
anything more expensive than a Honda in the thirty years that the Jhas have
been in residence, so a Windfall must indeed have occurred.
So
begins Ms Basu’s lovely comedy of manners, her Indian version of Keeping Up
with the Jones’s – the Jones’s what? In
this case, the Jha’s rich new neighbours, the Chopras, have had the Sistine
Chapel recreated inside a dome in their porch, but modesty has prevailed: Adam, though touched by God, has his privates
encased in black shorts. The Jha’s
counter with a black sofa decorated with Swarovski crystals in uncomfortable places,
but they have much to learn about being rich:
the electronic shoe-polisher that Mr Jha went to enormous trouble to
purchase is surreptitiously returned when Mr Chopra deems said shoe polishers
to be vulgar, and his choice of
alcoholic drinks is greeted with sidesplitting guffaws.
It
doesn’t help that their new neighbours at first mistake Mrs Jha for a maid
because of her low-key not-designer saris;
no: if this is a battle of
one-upmanship, it’s surely time for Mr Jha to bring out the heavy artillery!
The Jha’s trip to New York is not a
hundred per cent successful, either: it
is eventually revealed that Rupak is not doing as well with his studies as he
led his trusting parents to believe; in
fact he has fallen in love with an American – a white girl with blonde hair and
blue eyes! A small consolation is that
the Chopra’s son Johnny is utterly useless, doesn’t work, hangs out with young
girls ALL THE TIME, and wants to be a poet.
That ancient adage ‘Money doesn’t buy happiness’ is proven yet again for both families, as Ms Basu
demonstrates so beautifully in this gentle, funny story. FIVE STARS.
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