MRS. BALAN TALKED INCESSANTLY ON HER CELL PHONE. SHE had perfected the art of speaking without moving her facial muscles and could thus continue to destroy reputations from under a substantive swath of seaweed or a coating of alpha-hydroxy peel thick enough to render most women immobile. Thanks to her, I became privy to all manner of skeletons lurking in the closets of our fanciest mansions. Were I so inclined, I could have blackmailed large numbers of addicted husbands, unfaithful wives, and grown offspring with questionable sexual preferences. But we at Lola’s had our code of honor. And we knew that to meddle in the affairs of the powerful was akin to riding the proverbial tiger.

Mrs. Balan wasn’t the only gossip at the salon. On days when she was absent, I learned from the conversations of the other women, who viewed her with a mix of hatred and adulation, that her husband (whom she ignored) was overly fond of the young secretaries at his corporation, and her son, Ravi (whom she adored), was studying abroad. She had gone into a deep depression when Ravi insisted on going to America -to get away from her, some of our less charitable clients suggested. She had revived only after a spate of shopping trips to Chennai and Bangalore. Now Ravi was returning to Coimbatore, with a degree in psychology and a head full of Western notions.

“You tell me now, what good is a degree in psychology of all things, that also from, what’s that place, Idahore, that nobody has heard of?” Mrs. Veerappan said.

It was a rhetorical question, but her friend, Mrs. Nayar, was happy to respond. “No good. No good at all. But then, he doesn’t need to make a living, not like our sons.”

“I hear he wants to open a school for poor girls,” Mrs. Subramanian ventured from the corner.

“Pouring money down the toilet hole, that’s what he’ll be doing,” Mrs. Veerappan pronounced. “Oh well, that family certainly has no lack of it. Some of it might as well go to poor girls-the father has ruined enough of them.”

MRS. BALAN GAVE US FURTHER DETAILS. “WHAT TO DO, MY RAVI has always been a sensitive boy, gets it from my side of the family. Wants to improve the lives of suffering people, just like Mahatma Gandhi. I said to Mr. Balan, how can we stand in his way, let us buy him the old Sai Center building like he is asking. Mr. Balan didn’t want to do it. Finally I told him, keep your money for those secretary girls-what, you thought I didn’t know about them? I’ll sell my diamond set and buy the school myself, and don’t think people won’t hear about it. He signed the papers right away, but grumbling all the while, as if Ravi wasn’t his own flesh but some beggar child we picked up from the street.”

On a suitably auspicious morning, coconuts were broken; prayers were chanted; camphor was burned; ribbons were cut by political dignitaries; applause was offered by the newly hired teachers; copious amounts of idli-sambar, bondas, and coffee were consumed by the invitees; and Vani Vidyalayam was open for business.

“Can you believe, Ravi named the school after me,” Mrs. Balan told us when she came in to get her hair styled for the celebratory dinner party she was throwing. There were tears in her eyes, something we’d never seen before. She blew her nose, not caring that it turned red. “He wants me to volunteer there. Maybe I’ll do what he says.” It struck us that we might have been too quick to dismiss Mrs. Balan as heartless and shallow. Perhaps mother-love would work a transformation upon her.

AT FIRST, THINGS WENT WELL. LURED BY THE PROMISE OF FREE education, along with a free lunch and two uniforms, a good number of parents sent their children to the Vidyalayam. Mrs. Balan started visiting the school once a week at lunchtime, when she would walk up and down the canteen wearing a starched hand-loomed sari that Gandhiji himself might have woven, gingerly patting the heads of the cleaner children. Then she would go into the office and terrify the clerks into efficiency. Who knew where this might have led? But just when we conceded that Mrs. Balan had surprised us, Ravi decided to expand his philanthropy beyond the boundaries of the school compound. He insisted that the Balans’ servants should attend, each evening, an English reading and writing class. He would teach it himself, on their terrace. Mrs. Balan was not happy about this disruption to her household, but she was unable to refuse her son.

The servants were, at first, intrigued by this novel development, especially as it afforded them an hour’s break from their duties. But they soon tired of it. The older ones didn’t see how their lives, into which they were comfortably settled, could be improved by reciting sentences out of children’s books. The younger ones were bored, because in spite of his noble intentions, Ravi was a poor teacher. The servants came to class late and left early, pretending to be busy with housework, until finally they did not come at all. But by then Ravi did not mind because he had found his star pupil, Nirmala.

Who can guess what had been in Nirmala’s mind when she started attending the class? It is possible that she longed for the education that birth had deprived her of. Can you blame her if, along the way, she fell in love with the way Ravi looked earnestly into her eyes as he urged her to remember the strange sounds of English, the shapes of its contorted letters? He was as close to a prince as anyone she knew. Aided by the romantic movies she had seen, she might naturally have cast herself in the role of the beggar maid whom he rescues. But all this is conjecture. The only thing we know for certain is what one of Mrs. Balan’s servants witnessed.

One evening Mrs. Balan, home early from the club, climbed to the terrace to check on the progress of her servants’ education. To her shock, she discovered Ravi and Nirmala sitting side by side, heads almost touching, his hand guiding hers as she traced letters into her notebook. She saw the girl’s shining face as she completed her task and looked up to be complimented, and she saw Ravi put his arm around the girl and give her a hug.

If Mrs. Balan had curbed her temper, sent Nirmala downstairs, and spoken quietly with Ravi, the situation might have been resolved. But seeing her beloved son’s lips just a few inches from those of her maid drove strategy from her mind. She strode forward and delivered a stinging slap to Nirmala’s cheek, screaming at the cringing girl for being a conniving hussy. She would have hit Nirmala again if Ravi had not grabbed his mother’s wrists and told her to pull herself together.

Mrs. Balan went a little crazy then, calling Nirmala worse names, threatening to make sure everyone in her home village knew how she had repaid Mrs. Balan’s many kindnesses with treachery. Then she turned on Ravi. Had he lost all sense of proportion, living in America? Had he forgotten that servants needed to be kept in their place? Couldn’t he see that a low-class girl like Nirmala had probably been planning all along to trap him?

Ravi made threats of his own, delivered in a quiet voice. If his mother fired Nirmala, he would return to America. She would never see him again.

Faced with this ultimatum, Mrs. Balan was forced to allow Nirmala to remain. The defeat confined her to bed for several days. She rose a different woman, older and frailer. At first she avoided her son. But when he apologized for the harshness of his words (though he did not take them back), she wept and embraced him. In a few days, things seemed to have returned to normal in the Balan household. Nirmala carried out her regular duties, even accompanying Mrs. Balan when she went shopping.

“The lessons were stopped, of course,” Mrs. Veerappan told Mrs. Nayar as they both underwent Hibiscus Oil Hair Therapy. “But in a big house like that, is it difficult for a young man and woman to meet in secret?”