if you don’t want to be the army chief, if you feel it’s not for you—”
“That’s right!” he exclaimed and stopped pacing, relieved to have this thought expressed for him. “It’s not for me!”
“Then what’s for you?” she said softly; she laid her face against his chest and stroked it with both hands. But she felt him stiffen. She stepped back to gaze up into his face, which remained closed against her. Her heart beat in anguish; her eyes swept around the room as though seeking some other help. She took in the photographs—most of them were of his children, his handsome young family of two girls and a boy, also some of his wife, who was very beautiful but had always remained cold to him, caring more for her own family, her sister and brothers, than for him.
Sumitra became desperate: “If you resign your commission, we could go away somewhere, you and I. Why not—look at me! I’m willing to do it, why not you? I’d arrange it, everything—we’d go abroad to some place where not a soul knows us and we need never come back here ever again—”
He groaned aloud. If she was desperate, so was he, and now he dared to say this much: “I need to be at home—no, not here but my home—yes, with my family and in my house and on my land and with my people—what shall I tell you!” He broke off, unable to continue and tell her what it was he intended to do.
He told Harry and Monica—but only just before he left. By that time Sumitra was away on one of her cultural relations tours—she had taken a group of potters and weavers to a symposium on handicrafts in Bangkok—so he was relieved of the necessity of telling her at all. She was only away for ten days, but by the time she returned, he was dead. He had been shot in the back of the head, ambushed by the outlaws he had gone to suppress. Harry read the news on the front page of the newspaper, which also carried a photograph of Too’s corpse. Harry hid it from Monica and broke the news to her himself as gently as he could. Both of them were devastated. They could not believe it: Too had left in such tremendous high spirits! He had himself asked to be sent on this expedition and had been looking forward to it as to a tiger shoot. And in a way it had been like a tiger shoot for him: this band of outlaws had for years been harrying the countryside—his countryside! his people!—pillaging, burning, raping, kidnapping, killing, worse than wild beasts. Worse, much worse than wild beasts! cried Too; and if he caught them—and he would catch them, he promised—he would shoot them in cold blood. “Killed while attempting to escape,” was the usual formula, Too told Harry and Monica with a chuckle. He would have them shackled together in a row and them one by one—bang! bang!
It was about this time that Monica had her nervous breakdown, which her daughter Kuku later diagnosed as due to a lack of sex life. Kuku, who had plenty of sex herself, ascribed most malfunctions to this cause; but at the time Sumitra must have come to the same conclusion, for it was around then that she had arranged a marriage for Monica with the ambitious young under-secretary Malhotra. This marriage had only lasted long enough to produce Kuku, and then Monica and her baby had moved in with Sumitra, who was by that time a widow. So Kuku, growing up with these two women, had from childhood been a witness to the fights between them. Monica, who continued to blame her mother for everything, was always on the attack, forcing Sumitra to defend herself. For instance, Monica blamed her for letting Too go on the expedition that had led to his death: “You could have stopped it,” Monica said.
“How? How? I was in Bangkok, I didn’t even know about it.”
“You could have got him some appointment to keep him in Delhi. You could easily have done it, you were in so thick with the Milkman. You certainly got everything out of him for yourself, though goodness only knows what you had to do in return.”
Once, when Kuku was about twelve, her grandmother told her about the Minister, “He was very kind to me.”
“But what did you have to do for him?” Kuku innocently inquired.
Sumitra shrugged: “I suppose I helped him to become the Foreign Minister.”
She always considered that he had done more for her than she had for him, and at a time when she needed it. After Too’s death, she had to contend not only with Monica’s nervous breakdown but with Harry’s increasing alcoholism. He began to drink the moment he got up and continued steadily until his servant helped him to bed at night. He and Monica no longer had their pleasant times together—it was as though, without Too, they had broken apart and each was locked up in solitary misery. Sumitra meanwhile was kept busier than ever, for it was the winter season and many important foreign visitors had to be entertained and taken to see the Red Fort and the Qutb Minar. It was always very late when she was at last driven home; but however late it was, Monica would be waiting up for her. She seemed to have spent the day brooding about her mother, whom she held responsible for Too’s death, Harry’s drinking, and Monica’s own inferiority complex and generally unhappy life. Sumitra, although exhausted after her long day, tried to calm her, and it always ended in the same way, with Monica’s ragé melting into tears and Sumitra tucking her into bed and tenderly kissing her goodnight. It was only then that Sumitra could go to bed herself and give way to her own grief, which she shared with no one.
After Too had refused the high command, the Minister and Sumitra did not mention him again between them; except on his death, when the Minister spoke some conventional words of condolence to her, on the loss of her family friend. At this time the Minister was even more occupied than Sumitra, for besides all the social activities and the official meetings, he was involved in the many secret comings and goings preceding a major cabinet reshuffle. When, at the end of that busy season, he was offered the post he had coveted, Sumitra was the first person he informed of his success. She almost admired him at that moment: he was not a handsome figure—the very opposite, even now after she had done all she could to improve his appearance. But there was something about him in his triumph—an energy, a manliness—that she had known in no other man, not even in Too with all his shining looks and chest full of medals. And where had it all led to, with Too, she thought, shot like a dog by thieves and murderers: and for the first time the tears she shed by herself every night sprang to her eyes in broad daylight and in the presence of another person.
It could not have been the reaction the Minister had expected to his announcement; but it was his life’s business to deal with the vagaries of human psychology and conduct. He scrutinized her face with his eyes that were set too deeply in fat to reveal their penetrating intelligence. Then he joined his palms together like a supplicant and said that there was something she must do for him; that she could not refuse him, must not. He offered her three choices: the high commission in London, the embassy in Washington, and the Indian mission to the UN in New York. He knew it was much too much to ask of her who had already done everything for him, but he needed her more than ever in his new responsibilities, and without her he was helpless as a little child and could proceed no further.
During the following years, Sumitra lived mostly abroad. Although she was already middle-aged during her great years as India’s ambassador to the UN, she had retained her smooth olive skin and her pitch-black hair and sparkling eyes; and she wrapped herself so skillfully in her sari that she appeared merely plump, as she had been, and not fat, as she had become. She had always loved jewelry and now was so laden with it that she resembled a barbaric queen—an impression enhanced by the bolder colors and patterns of her saris, which were of traditional designs adapted to modern tastes. The expression on her face was that of a person used to giving orders to people—in contrast to her manner, her exquisite gestures of courtesy and submission to the point of immolation which were a mark of royal breeding as well as of the courtesan and temple dancer. Her parties were, like herself, an enchanting mixture of east and west. There was always plenty of liquor, but also pomegranate and mango juices and spiced yoghurt drinks; the servants glided around with silver trays of delicacies that were
