The maid answered the door while Tina was having a massage.

The boutique, as usual, had home-delivered the sari that she had ordered for the wedding reception today. The girl carefully removed the silver and white box from the handmade paper carrier-bag and left it on the huge double bed. Madam was in the sauna/massage room nearby and would appear after her bath to look at it.

Tina’s body gleamed with the herbal oil the Assamese masseur with the magic hands had smoothed on lavishly. She luxuriated in a relaxed stupor on her Swedish massage table till she got up to step into the gold and white Jacuzzi for a warm bath. While the water jets did their dance around her, she felt a prick of anticipation……that jewel embroidered sari had better be good enough to knock the socks off everybody.

Tina knew she was one of the best customers the exclusive and ultra-pricey boutique had. Money was not something she ever thought about. Her own family and now Vivek, were rolling in it. He left her alone to spend as much as she wanted and she left him alone to spend all his time on the corporation that his family owned and that he now headed. He was conservative and did not cheat on her or anything like that but the aphrodisiac in his life was making money. Tina’s chief interest was her reputation as one of the best dressed women in the ultra rich social circuit. She also cut ribbons and wrote out lavish checks for umpteen charities that Vivek and she  patronized.

She threw the wrappings off the sari and looked at the gossamer chiffon on which Swarovski crystals, blue topazes and seed pearls gleamed in subtle chic. They had made sure the gem studded silver, gold and silk embroidery was just as Madam had ordered. The lakhs she threw at them every month ensured special attention as well as the casual way in which she dropped their name in her interviews with glossy magazines that featured her regularly as a fashion leader.

Vivek called to say he would arrive a bit late at the reception and that she should go ahead without him. She wondered if he would actually attend and then remembered that HS was a potential business partner so Vivek would make sure he came to the do, late or not. And Mrs. HS, Meghna was her classmate though not really a friend, from school. Their daughter’s wedding had been one of the social triumphs of the year.

After the personal make up girls and sari drapers had done their job, Tina swept off in her chauffeur-driven silver Mercedes to the venue, a new international hotel reputed to be one of the most expensive in the world. Her new diamonds from Vivek’s recent New York trip dripped alluringly from her ears, neck and arms.

Page-three journalists and photographers from several papers and magazines swooped as she entered the soaring atrium of the hotel. She smiled and posed for them before going to the Royal banquet hall. Meghna plunged forward to meet Tina and they carefully muaaa-ed the air next to each others’ well made up cheeks. Meghna was plump and didn’t give a damn. Tina loved that since it provided a great foil for her own perfection when they were seen together. HS strolled up and threw an arm around Tina’s trim, liposuctioned waist, greeting her warmly while his eyes bulged and crawled all over her torso beautifully displayed in a wisp of a bikini choli.

Meghna's face tightened. She passed her friend on to a younger daughter who took Tina to the special table reserved for Vivek and herself.

A crystal flute of champagne appeared from nowhere and she sipped the nose-tickling liquid. She glanced gloatingly down at her body and arranged herself in the right angle and pose as the wedding videographers’ descended on her. Then she saw it, the brownish red stain on the sari next to the gem studded petal of a flower on the chiffon clinging to her bosom.

She managed to readjust her diamonds to a lower link till they covered the stain and got through the evening without much problem.

The next day, she called the boutique and verbally skinned the manager alive for daring to send her a stained garment. The boutique owner rang her back from a Far Eastern city where she was buying silk and gem stones, to apologize profusely but Tina’s tempest broke in her ear too. The sari was sent back to be cleaned up and returned to Madam ASAP.

There was a fall out to this innocuous and frivolous sounding matter.

The boutique owner got back to scream at the owner of the sweat shop that made the embroidered fabric.

Those who worked there were children whose tiny fingers wrought delicate wonders with needles.

Children from remote rural areas whose parents had handed them over to an “agent” believing they would be placed as domestic workers in urban households.

Children who were then enslaved and hardly seen or heard of after that, slogging away in stuffy rooms under naked 100 watt bulbs, half starved and not even allowed to breathe fresh air, eat or answer the call of nature when they needed to. Delivery deadlines were more important than all that. If one collapsed, there were replacements for these human sewing machines available from the “agent”.

The overseer beat the frail 8-year-old who had dared to prick her finger and stain the chiffon of the sari. His zeal went too far and an early morning jogger found a small battered body dumped near a road. The police sent it for post mortem and established death due to head injuries and choking. The undersized body had also been subjected to sexual abuse before death.

This was an irrelevant life and there were no follow ups to find the killer.

The same papers that covered society and fashion spared three or four lines buried in an inside page.

Tina loved children and her own the most of all. The small print about “child” and “dead” caught her attention. She shuddered delicately and felt sorry for the girl whose life had been snuffed out. She thanked God that her orbit was far removed from the crude, uneducated and violently “bad” people that did such horrible things and that her kids in their Swiss finishing school were safe from all this.

Then she turned to the society pages to admire herself in the photos. Luckily, the stain did not show up in any of them.