neighbour opened her door and began to berate the kachrawala. ‘It’s after eleven. When are you going to start coming on time?’
He smiled and nodded, and gave Lakshmi back her bin.
Ashish had gone out; he said he had to go to college for something. Outside, it was hot and still: the last days of summer before the rains came. The empty hours stretched ahead. She thought of various things she had to do: change the sheets, put more camphor pellets in the cupboards before the monsoon started and insects multiplied; perhaps, in the evening, go and collect a new suit that she’d ordered two weeks earlier from a tailor in the market.
Instead, she sat near the window, looking out at the lane, which had come to a midday lull. The watchman had disappeared, probably for his lunch; the ironing boys were inside their hut; she heard their radio. She could do one of the more infrequent cleaning jobs – the shelf next to the stove, for example, where salt and other condiments were kept. But the idea had neither reality nor urgency. The crows on the electricity wires were quiet after their early morning exuberance; soon they’d find some shade to sit in until it was cooler again.
A single bird sang out: a falling sequence of four notes, with a cheep at the end. It sounded oddly familiar, yet she hadn’t, she thought, heard it before. Maybe it was a bird that used to come near their childhood home, in Tardeo? Its song – she hummed it to herself – brought no specific recollection, only a vaguely poignant feeling.
It was hard to work out, sometimes, how she had come from that house, with a family full of loudly talking, cheerful people, into this one, where, often, each person withdrew into silence, nursing his or her own dreams, oblivious to everyone else. Only her elder son, Gautam, resembled her family; he’d also spent most time with his cousins from that side. He talked and laughed more loudly, didn’t think deeply about every single thing, and, like her, seemed to exist most clearly when he was speaking. Like her, he narrated aloud to himself whichever action he was about to take (‘Hm, I mustn’t forget to get that CD for Alka’), a habit that bemused and irritated his father, who would wonderingly ask, ‘How does saying it aloud help?’ and privately, no doubt, add: ‘And why are you intruding such banal reflections into my world?’
She ran through the rest of the day’s tasks, murmuring some of the words aloud. ‘Vegetables…’ No, she’d looked, there were enough for dinner. ‘Newspapers.’ Yes. She made herself a cup of coffee, and sat near the window where the light was good, the pile of last week’s papers and the scissors next to her. She clipped out a picture of a polar bear, and a recipe for macaroni cheese with baked vegetables, the sort of thing that Ashish might like. It was nice, this process of revisiting the novelties of a few days earlier, which now seemed agreeably tired – it was a habit from childhood, though then the paper had been Navshakti, or old issues of Stree or Kirloskar that a neighbour provided for her scrapbook. There was something she had been meaning to clip, but she couldn’t remember what – it bothered her for a few minutes, and she turned over the pages. Then she found it: a column on the edit page about Seema Kulkarni, a classical singer whom she’d admired very much when she was younger. The article was about the tradition of singers as divas, and the often extravagant caprices they displayed. Lakshmi had gone, more than once, to hear Seemabai sing; she always turned up a couple of hours late, while the audience sat patiently waiting. Finally the singer, richly dressed and made up, with kaajal, lipstick, and an enormous bindi on her forehead, appeared on stage; she smiled, did namaskaar to the audience, sat down, then snapped at the tabla player before closing her eyes and beginning to sing. Here an odd thing happened, each time: the woman of so much personality completely disappeared, and only the music was there till the raga ended.
The newspapers now addressed, Lakshmi piled them near the door, ready for the wastepaper man.
After lunch she found herself drawn to the television, though at this time of day there was nothing she wanted to watch; her favourite serials were aired much later, in the evening. There were two: one ran on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the other on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Both were about the travails of young women newly married into traditional families, and how they dealt with the women around them: their sisters-in-law and mothers-in-law. She preferred the first one, Daughters of the House. On Wednesday, when for fifteen minutes they overlapped on rival channels, she was distracted, flicking between advertisement breaks and trying to keep up with the stories.
She put on the television and waited with the usual tense expectation of pleasure as the screen flickered into a point of light, then animated. There really was nothing to watch – some terribly dry cultural programme on a Marathi channel, endless cooking shows in English – and she turned the television off again and resealed its clumsy plastic wrapper; it was supposed to protect the set from the corrosive sea air, but made it appear to be a sort of cranky deity that had to be kept in check.
‘Sheets…’
She went to get the clean ones from Ashish’s room and became diverted while searching for a packet of camphor pellets that she was sure was in a bottom drawer of one of the big cupboards. Instead, among candles, ballpoint pen refills and curtain hooks, she found a thin envelope with four small pieces of paper inside: ‘Baby boy, 8.34 a.m.’, ‘Baby girl, 5.21 a.m.’ and so on. They were from the nursing home where her children had been born; though they were years apart, the writing was the same politely curling convent-school hand. They had carefully preserved each record relating to the children, in case the government, which might be omniscient in such matters, spotted and rebuked neglect; there was a vague feeling of contributing, by this scrupulousness, towards national housekeeping.
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