The Lotus POTUS

You should visit us one of these days— there is so much excitement in our USA! No, I don’t mean the famous USA—the Ulhasnagar Sindhi Association of Mumbai.

- K.C. VERMA

I mean the lesser-known Unicorn Society Apartments, where I live. We are a motley group of middle-class householders who have perforce given up our genteel dreams of living in villas and have instead bought the 2-BHKs and 3-BHKs that shady builders pass off as ‘refined living’. For those insulated against middle-class realities, ‘BHK’ refers to a bedroom-hall-kitchen set; even though anyone who calls that cramped living room a ‘hall’ needs spectacles. Or he deserves an award for creative writing!

But let us return to the excitement part. Again, for the edification of the ignorant, every housing society needs to have a residents’welfare association, headed by a president and a vice-president. Till now, the president of the Unicorn Society (POTUS for us) is Jai Bhai. We call him Jai Bhai ‘Dun because he was a lawyer in Dehradun. The vice-president is my neighbour Harish’s wife. She cackles like an old hyena, but her doting husband calls it ‘an infectious and joyful laugh’. Surprisingly, even with that laugh, she puts on airs because of her mixed ancestry, which includes English genes somewhere in her DNA chain. Would you believe that even as her mother had christened her Kamala—the lotus flower—she changed her name to Camilla? After sidelining Jai, she has been behaving as if she is Queen Camilla and not Camilla Harish.