and I loved reading the Junior Diplomat, the children’s section, it was very popular. Here, this paper’s old, it’ll crumble.’ Carefully, he refolded the page and put it on the reading table.
‘So you were already published at four and a half?’
Mohan smirked, and sat down in the cane armchair. ‘There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,’ he said. He opened his book again.
Ashish had heard a familiar music in the distance; he listened, part of his brain thinking it might be a song he knew. Then he ran towards his room: it was his phone.
Later that night, he was about to go to sleep when an electronic shrieking began in the flat below; it was in the room underneath his. He cocked his ear and listened: an urgent trill of three rising notes. It must have been Madhavi, the plump girl: she was of the right age to have exams. Setting an alarm for revision, or to signal the end of a timed question, was the kind of thing serious students did. But no one came to switch off the alarm; it shrieked itself into catalepsy and, with a squeak, died out.
Ashish sat at the desk and thought he would read a little more. He was thinking about Sunder, about his lazy, deep voice, and his inarticulateness, and about how they were to meet the next day; at the same time, he was reading, but too fast to notice any of the words that passed his eyes like long distance trains at night, noisy but unmemorable. At once he felt eyes fixed on him, and heard a gobbling sound. Very slowly, hairs rising on his neck, he looked up. Two round white faces, enormous, dark, knowing eyes, and a look of surprise modulated by the polite pretence of disinterest. In the open window of the empty flat opposite sat two white owls. They rocked slightly, their eyes scanning the darkness. As his eyes met theirs, one of the birds unfolded like a threat suddenly swept aside and Ashish’s heart contracted; the whiteness of its wings flashed into a V, then a line; it swooped through the glow of the street lamp and was gone.
His aunt, who couldn’t remember whether the apartment door had been double-locked, came out of her room after midnight to check. On her way back she saw the line of light under Ashish’s door and was surprised; none of their children had studied this late, especially so far before the exams. He must really be serious, she thought. She went back to her room and quietly closed the door.
Her day held its breath until Mohan and Ashish had been safely eased into the world. When the morning’s whirlwind was over – tea cups and clattering arrivals in the kitchen, departures for the bathroom, reappearances in different stages of readiness, last-minute forgetting of things – she felt like a sports coach who retreats into his private life between moments of crisis.
The cleaning over, she went to the bathroom, stripped off the old salwar kameez in which she slept, and watched the red light of the water heater come on. A good stream of hot water came out of the tap and filled up the bucket. She threw half a mugful over herself, flinched, and added more cold water. Her skin was still soft and pale below the neckline. She picked up the cake of citrus soap, streaked in yellow and green; its slight tackiness and the hint of steam, the scent of lemon and clean skin that lingered in the bathroom, were all signs that her husband and Ashish had been there before her.
She came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, and considered what to wear. Her cupboard was full of saris, ironed, folded and stacked like important documents, but these days she mostly wore ‘suits’: long, fitted kurta, baggy salwar, and a matching dupatta. The suits were easier to look after. Unlike cotton saris, they didn’t need to be starched, and they went uncomplaining into the laundry and then to the ironing boys’ blue hut from where they were collected, pressed and submissive, by Mohan in the morning when he was on his way back with the bread and milk.
Still, the sari, and the ceremony of putting it on, retained some glamour. Today she stood in front of the open cupboard and thought she’d wear one. She scanned the shelves: her eye passed appreciatively but without great interest over the heavy silks, the practical synthetics, which in their way had been exotic years earlier, and the few chiffon saris that her daughters had given her, and which she rarely wore. It was hot today: she wanted a cotton sari. She put her hands in and pulled out a slim, pale blue spine. It was a simple one, with large grey dots and discreet embroidery on the border. The matching short-sleeved blouse looked saggy and depressing until worn, when it filled with the authoritative curves of upper arms, shoulders, and breasts. The petticoat too became more graceful, a vestige of a milkmaid’s outfit in a painting, like the one they had hung in the bathroom, a fabric calendar picture of Krishna teasing the gopis. This was an unlikely gopi, of course – she regarded herself, in the latest instalment of the daily conversation with her own image, and checked the lines between her nose and mouth, and the grey hairs at the side of her head. She’d put on a little weight in recent years, and probably looked better for it. But the eyes gazed back, doubtful.
She unfolded the sari, shook it out and examined it for any rents or stains; then, with absent-minded grace, tucked it in so that it made half a round of her petticoated lower body. Her arms danced as cheerfully as the limbs of an automaton to pay out the fabric, pleat it, and secure it at the front. The neatly gathered folds made her think of the last letter they’d had from their youngest daughter, who was working for a computer company in America. Her life was unimaginable; she had no family of her own yet but no help either, and had to work long hours as well as manage her own food, laundry and cleaning, though she said that these were simpler affairs than at home. Lakshmi glanced in the mirror to check the pleats fell straight and her mouth curled; she liked this impudent daughter’s freedom. Megha would find it difficult, though, when she married; there were so many things – but all that was a later worry, and marriages, also, were different these days.
She wrapped a further length of the fine cotton about her body, stretched the remaining cloth along her left arm, scrutinized it for holes, and threw it over her left shoulder. Then she went to the small idol of Ganesh near the window, lit a stick of incense in front of the god, and said a prayer. It was a ritual she performed every day, though not because it was supposed to achieve anything; it was a counterpart of her bath, and created a quiet corner in her mind that might, with luck, survive the rest of the day.
The building was quieter; earlier there had been the sounds of office workers opening and shutting their front doors. Now it was the domestic traffic. Cleaning women were arriving at some houses. Here, too, the doorbell rang loudly; it must be the rubbish collector, a leering, dark, and cheerful youth who wore brightly patterned shirts. He came whenever he pleased between the morning and lunch time, except on Sundays, when he arrived promptly at eight; later, she or Mohan would see him out and about, nattily dressed and with brilliantine in his hair, so that he looked as if he were on his way to meet a girl.
She put her head into the passage. ‘Yes?’
‘Kachra!’
‘Yes yes,’ she replied, ‘wait a minute.’
The kitchen basket already smelled ripe. She picked it up and went forward, her nose wrinkling; she was opening the outer door when something dark and solid, sensing its imminent danger, shot out of the basket, along her arm and off her shoulder.
She screamed.
‘Oh, a lizard! Ugh!’ She found herself trembling with disgust. It wasn’t a pale green house gecko but one of the dark, shameless outdoor lizards that wouldn’t take fright decently even at loud noises.
The kachrawala grinned; wretched fellow, he’d enjoyed the show. ‘It’s good luck,’ he said. ‘You’ll come into some money.’
‘Ugh!’
