In the middle of the terrace of our 40th floor penthouse apartment are four square concrete pedestals with stainless steel bolts sticking out of them. We asked the builder if we could get rid of them, we were afraid it would hurt our children when they played. "No, no", the builder was aghast. "You see, we have left a provision for a beautiful 80 feet steel tower, like a miniature Eiffel tower on these bolts. Just in case someone else builds a taller building. You'd always want to be in the tallest building, wouldn't you?" My husband had smiled in agreement, perhaps understanding the builder's obsession with the tallest and the longest structure.

Externally, the building is clad with tiny vitrium tiles in royal blue, red, purple and turquoise, as if a child has run riot with his first box of colors. It seems straight out of LegoLand, with its rectangular blocks stacked neatly over one another. In the late afternoons, when the sun sears from the west, I see our building reflected in the glass windows of the structure across the street and squint at the blinding sight. I feel sorry for those who stay in that apartment block. I wonder what it must feel like to see these glazed colors all day long.

From the tall, anodized windows of our duplex flat, we get a panoramic view of a neatly layered city -from the inner, grimy midtown industrial center tucked away in the underbelly, to the Mumbai we show to the visitor- the airport along the wide, lollypopped western expressway, jumping up and down the camel humps of the newly built fly-overs, jostling between glass, concrete and steel buildings and then southwards along the waterfront, hugging the coast with our city's pride- the glittering Queen's Necklace.

But from where we are, you would need a telescope to see the pretty sights- atleast a pair of binoculars. Closer home, immediately adjacent to our plot is a textile mill with its sooty chimney proudly displaying the name of the defunct mill. The mill building has large wide cracks on the walls, a few window shutters are missing from where the splattering rain has washed the inner walls to a shade of patchy grey. But the chimney receives a fresh coat of beige paint each year with the name stenciled out in giant black letters. One year the painters made two mistakes. I suppose they could not read their writing from up close or like most hoarding painters in Mumbai, did not know the English language, simply stringing together alphabets as instructed, and that whole year the chimney read 'The....Spining and Weaving Mils.' A little beyond the mill are serpentine rows of sad-looking squat apartment buildings for the mill workers, mildewed and sagging from years of dust and neglect. Our building has risen, phoenix- like from the ashes of this sick mill, a piece of land carved out from the sprawling estate. A 30 feet vertical trellis over the compound wall on three sides, with overgrown shocking pink bougainvillea, filters out the neighborhood at the podium level. On the west, beyond the vast tract of open land with a circular white picket fence that is the race course, one can see the shimmering bay.

The external fins of our building facade fold insidiously into the recessed French windows, inveigling the strong blues, reds and purples into our home. But other than that, there is almost no color inside the flat. Our interior designer suggested we use white Italian marble flooring to balance these bold splashes of color. It would be fitting to our scheme of things, he said. Muted, opulent and expensive. And so we have a blue veined marble in the living room, a sepia tinged marble in the bedroom and a pink-streaked one in my mother-in-law's room. Over time, I think we have assimilated the temperaments and colors of the floorings-White as marble and just as clean and smooth. My husband, with his translucent white skin and blue veins sticking out of his hands and alongside his bobbing Adam's apple, merges into the living room floor so seamlessly, it is hard to spot him in there, like an image hidden in a hologram. Mummyji, with her mottled white skin, turns a pink brighter than even the streaks on her floor when she is angry, which is not that rare.

White as marble, all of us, except my second born, Rima. She is dark as cinnamon with large black lustrous eyes. From where did she come, this child who is so different from all of us? She was born ten years after my first one, when I had long given up yearning for a son, and when he didn't come, for a child, any child. Rima just happened. While my gynecologist, expecting a protracted labor, had gone to change her clothes, Rima burst forth into this world, impatient, eager and easy. My husband had tried to console me when he first saw this dark little thing with a strong voice and curious eyes. 'We have lots of money, we can always find a groom for her.' They would not understand, not any of them, how happy I was. Mummyji was completely confounded as to how a child so dark could be born into our family- She recalled every family member, no, there was no one who was dark. My parents were very fair too, then how come? "My brother', I'd supplied quietly, afraid that she would doubt my fidelity - It was not beyond her. She had forgotten my brother altogether, the dark member who was hidden away from sight in distant America. She'd glared at my mother then, as if she had been cheated of this vital information when she had selected me for her son. My mother lowered her eyes in guilt. In every generation of our family, my mother had told me once, there was one dark member. A curse on the family, she had said. A reminder that we were not a pure breed.

My older daughter, Neha, is very beautiful. She has a thin straight nose, high cheek bones and large light brown eyes. Her thick mane of dark brown hair reaches her narrow waist. I do not have many memories of her childhood. I do not, for example, remember her coming home dirty after play or with a single strand of hair out of place. Unlike Rima, she has not broken vases, stained the upholstery or beheaded my lipsticks. I can always open her closets without fear of a pile of clothes tumbling down on me. Mummyji's lessons of finishing school had commenced even before Neha had begun primary school. Neha says the right things, her smiles are appropriately measured to suit the occasion. She is the chosen one, Mummyji's little ambassador, a post for which I was long ago found quite unsuitable. I find myself enjoying Neha's rare flashes of anger when Rima has once again done something which has annoyed her. I love to see her eyes transform into a brown lighter than a wild cat's, with the fiery glint of speckled gold. The animated expression becomes her and brings a deep color to her opalescent skin, and at those times the two children ten years apart, wearing identical expressions, seem like products of the same clay baked in the same oven, under-done and over-burnt. But to the outsider, Neha displays no flashes of anger or uncontained excitement. When my brother Nirmal was visiting this time, he asked me, "What's wrong with her, has she undergone a lobotomy?" But then Nirmal is the black sheep. My father had pinned all his hopes on his only son joining the family diamond business but Nirmal took up engineering instead and escaped at the first chance to California where he would not be hounded by the sparkle of diamonds. He returns each year for a month to criticise every aspect of our lives. Being a beautiful daughter, I was married off as soon as I completed my BA. My husband is also a diamond merchant and has offices in New York and Antwerp besides Mumbai. The diamond trade community is a small, closed one, all of us immigrants from a town called Palanpur in Gujarat. Most of us are Jains by religion and believe in non-violence of the subtlest kind. It is said of us that we spare the ants but suck the blood of humans- That is said by those who are jealous- because we are all extremely wealthy. My husband's family is very religious. Each day, after her bath, my mother in-law sits on the katasanu, her woolen prayer mat, for an hour. It is a time of divine peace in the home. The children are in school or college, the servants noiselessly go about their work, dusting, polishing, ironing, cherishing the quiet hour when they are not being instructed to wash cleaner, polish harder or run useless errands. It is the hour when I sit at Rima's warm brown desk, numerous pencil marks streaked across its walnut wood, pull out my exercise book and write uninterruptedly. I write because I have forgotten how to speak. A long time ago, I spoke loudly and intrepidly but it seemed like I was saying all the wrong things. And so I pen down my thoughts in these cahiers which no one will open -they are the additional supplies stocked for Rima's homework, with pictures of a little girl on a bicycle or Ganesha or a boy with a satchel on the front cardboard cover.

My father-in-law goes to the temple every morning for pooja. With a bare, lolling chest, an almost flat stomach and a cream silk dhoti displaying his spindly, alabaster legs, he drives to the temple and parks half a block away, having reversed his car into the no-entry lane. If he is early, he will drive straight into the lane, confident that he would be leaving before a prowling policeman came around. He returns home with a small mustard dot of saffron and sandalwood paste on his forehead. I had asked my mother-in law in those early days how a Jain could wear silk after knowing its process, but she had only glared back at me.

We go once a year for a pilgrimage, before Diwali. The hikes up the hills washed green with the monsoon rains are very enjoyable. In the crisp, cool, October air at dawn, one can hear the temple bells reverberating through the hills. I watch the many old men and women, their bodies doubled up with age or numerous bad pregnancies climb up slowly with the help of a stick, propelling their disobedient feet ahead with a faint chant of 'Jai Jinendra'. For Mummyji, we hire a doli, a wicker basket slung on a stick carried across the shoulders of two able bodied young men. We bargain them down to half their quoted price but by the time we have reached the top, Rima with her incessant chatter has become good friends with these boys who good-naturedly bear with Mummyji's frequent complaints and my husband feels sorry for them and pays them a bonus. We partake in the auction for performing the pooja and outbid the other pilgrims. Neha can conduct an entire prayer session independently. When I hear her reciting the sthavanas, I marvel at her memory for these similar sounding verses. She has a melodious voice and sings with great devotion. She is just nineteen but already we have received many marriage proposals for her. Mummyji says that as soon as she completes her BA next year, we shall get her married. I do not know what Neha thinks about this. Pretty Neha- stolen from me at birth by Mummyji - I look at her and wonder - her life is lived even before it has begun. It will follow a predetermined course- brought up in luxury, married into wealth. A life of buying nice clothes, jewelry, attending and hosting glittering parties, religious functions - A life of cloying predictability.

I do not know what will happen to my little one, with her wondrous, innocent eyes, her wayward ways. I know that she will not be shackled in the way I have been, in the way Neha will be. There is no prince awaiting this dark girl. What then will become of her? I am excited by the promise of a suspenseful life. Mummyji thinks I have let Rima grow wild - She does not sit, talk, behave like a person of our status. How did she turn out like this? She goes to an exclusive private school, our apartment building has a complicated security and swipe card system, how then does she manage to collect a bunch of street urchins around her? "It is the garden you let her go to", Mummyji had commented. "She meets all those kids of the mill-workers". But I do not let these friends come home, they play with her in the garden - gulli-danda, marbles, kabaddi, those games which I had thought had gone out of fashion many years ago, making way for the cartoon channels and the video games. But through Rima I found they exist where our cars find no room to maneuver, between the narrow lanes with TV -less homes where hopscotch- does not yet mean jumping with a whiskey bottle.

One day I saw a louse in her hair. I dumped a quarter bottle of Lycil in her scalp and cleansed off the offending mite. From then on, she was forbidden from playing with those kids. I thought she would sulk for a while, but after seeing that her entreaties were of little effect, she immediately befriended a timid girl from our building whom she could draft into her scheme of things. Rima's dusky ayah, Asha, at eighteen almost a child herself, makes up the required third player in their games. Once when Rima had come home from play and was black and dirty, Mummyji, fed up of it all, had dragged her into the bathroom and rigorously scrubbed her body- her knees, her feet, her elbows- I looked with moist eyes at the bruising of my daughter- But this silly child was squealing with delight- she enjoyed the scrubbing- "It tickles", she giggled, "it tickles so much"-And when Mummyji became a little more rough she laughed, "Dadi, this is not dirt, it's the real color of my knees. Look." I think she does not understand when someone is doing something to hurt her - I worry for her- how will such innocence survive in this world?

Another time, she had come up and asked me, "Mummy, Neha tells me I'm not her real sister. You have adopted me. That's why I'm not fair like all of you. Is that true?" "No." I seated her on my lap and cuddled my big baby. "Some people are born dark, some are fair. Isn't Nirmalmama dark too?", I asked her. She is easily satisfied and before I have quite finished she is off to play with her friend. I think of Neha, my first born. Even as a baby, she did not like to be hugged and kissed, did not like her laced frocks to be wrinkled in my smothering embrace. Today Mrs. Amita Shah is visiting us. Since morning there has been a flurry of activity in the kitchen. I saw the cooks preparing more than twenty dishes for the afternoon tea. How can anyone eat so much at tea time? But Mrs. Shah is no ordinary guest. She is the wife of the wealthiest man of our community. She had seen Neha at a wedding and is keen on her as a bride for her son. He has done his B.Com and joined his father's business. For his 21st birthday, his father had gifted him a Ferrari. Mummyji is ecstatic. This liaison will catapult us into the uppermost echelons of our society. She wants to make sure all is perfect. Neha, after conferring with Mummyji, has planned to wear the purple dress which is the replica of that worn by Madhuri Dixit in the blockbuster film, 'Hum Aapke Hain Kaun?' The tailor had been called home and the Laser disc had been played, replayed and frozen at the song sequence in which the dress was featured until he was quite confident of duplicating it faithfully. Mummyji has organized for Rima to be out all afternoon. "Let her play at her friend's house. I don't want this child hovering around when the lady comes." So Rima is dispatched to the 12th floor. Mrs. Shah arrives half an hour late as befits a person of her stature. I have met her often in weddings and parties. She is always so radiant, so confident, almost invincible. Just like Mummyji. She hugs Neha. "What a beautiful girl. Looks just like Aishwarya Rai. But thank God, she is not as tall. How would we have found a suitable boy that tall in our community?', she laughs. So the prospective groom is not tall. She pats me reassuringly. "Your Neha is meant to live the life of a princess." Yes, I think. Always a princess and never a queen. Because you will not abdicate, ever. Like Mummyji. Mrs. Shah looks at Neha with such warmth and proprietorial affection, as if the deal has already been concluded between her and Mummyji and perhaps Neha. Just then Rima returns from her friend's place. Stomping her shoes, dirty, sweaty, her T-shirt stained with mud, her hair in a tangle, she cartwheels her way into the hall. Seeing her, Mrs. Shah asks, "Is this your servant?" I am too stunned to reply. Mummyji smiles and does not answer, as if the question has not been asked. She gestures to Rima to go inside. But Rima comes instead to me and ensconces herself in my lap. I stroke her damp hair. 'O Aunty, I am Rima, Neha's real sister. Our servant Asha must be in my room, ironing all our clothes. She is very nice. I like her very much. Everyone likes her. Even Dada likes her very much.' 'Mummy', she turns to me, cupping my chin towards her face, ' Do you know yesterday when all of you had gone for a late night show, I woke up for a glass of water and saw Dada kissing Asha over here and here and here?' she gestures to her lips and beyond. I grip her hair so hard, Rima complains it is hurting her. She jumps off me and kisses me on my cheek before skipping away into her room. I do not venture to look up.

Glossary:
Dada- grandfather
Dadi-Grandmother
Aishwarya Rai, Madhuri Dixit- Film stars of Bollywood.
ayah-servant, usually meant to care for children

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