THOSE PRICEY THAKUR GIRLS

by Anuja Chauhan

  Tears immediately slid into her bold black eyes and the Judge took a hasty jab at lightening the mood. ‘And if you didn’t understand, I can explain it again in Hindi. Haha.’

  At which Binni gave a convulsive sob and stormed out of the house. She has since filed a case against her father, asking for the partition and sale of the house and the handing over of her one-sixth share. The Judge is livid. It’s been three months since they’ve spoken.

  ‘I’m sorry Binni turned out so bad, Mamta bhabhi,’ Chachiji mutters now. ‘I would speak to her, but she is too high class these days, acts like she never lived with me for all those years. AN acts like that too – though he isn’t too snooty to sleep with the cook.’ Her face brightens. ‘But the Pushkarni’s told me how to fix the Hot Dulari!’

  ‘How?’

  Chachiji beams, her puggish face ecstatic. ‘I just have to take one of her pubic hairs, stuff it into a halved nimbu, add a drop of AN’s blood, then tied a rakhi over it and burn it in the sink. He will lose all lust for her immediately.’ She cackles happily.

  ‘But where will you get hold of the, er, key ingredient?’ Mrs Mamta asks, reeling slightly.

  ‘I’ll figure something out,’ Chachiji replies. ‘Or rather, the Pushkarni will figure something out!’

  ‘Right,’ Mrs Mamta sighs.

  ‘She’s the real reason why LN bhaisaab didn’t lift a finger to help when our house was being sold!’ Chachiji continues tragically. ‘He hates Number 13 – because she died there, na! He’ll be happy to see it torn down!’

  ‘That’s not true, Bhudevi,’ Mrs Mamta says sternly. ‘LN is not so sentimental. Or superstitious. He is an educated man.’

  Chachiji stares at her for a while, her face tense, and Mrs Mamta starts to worry that she has taken her last statement as a sly jab at Ashok Narayan Thakur, who isn’t nearly as well educated as his older brother. But Chachiji’s mind is on a different track.

  ‘I think-so LN bhaisaab ne bhi koi rakh li hai.’

  ‘What?’ Mrs Mamta responds, half amused, half horrified.

  Chachiji switches languages to make things more explicit: ‘He is keeping some woman also.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  Chachiji shoots darting looks this way and that and lowers her voice. ‘He steals out at night to make phone calls. I’ve seen him. Cupping the receiver and talking at Gambhir Stores late at night.’

  ‘You must have seen somebody else,’ Mrs Mamta says dismissively. ‘Your eyesight is faulty.’

  Chachiji regards her with resentful pity. Poor Mamta, she clearly doesn’t want to accept that it is her husband who is faulty.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Anjini’s husband to give us a loan?’ she asks, changing tack. ‘So we can live in some decent place till the flats are built? He is so well off, surely he wouldn’t like to see his wife’s only brother thrown out into the street?’

  ‘Ab what to hide from you, Bhudevi,’ Mrs Mamta says, placing a cup of tea before her sister-in-law. ‘There is tension in their marriage. No good news yet, na. How to ask him for a loan?’

  Chachiji is stumped for a moment, and then tries again.

  ‘What about Binni? Her husband does business, no?’

  ‘Not very well, though,’ Mrs Mamta reveals. ‘His pharmacy business had to be sold. And you know,’ she pre-empts the next question smoothly, ‘we don’t speak to Chandu at all. LN has forbidden it.’

  Chachiji sips her tea, watching her sister-in-law out of malevolent little eyes.

  ‘But we must have some place to live!’

  ‘Our first floor has been rented out,’ Mrs Mamta says with finality. ‘Otherwise you could have lived here…’

  A little silence falls. Mrs Mamta thinks distractedly of poor Debjani, and of how Bhudevi, typically self-involved, has mentioned neither the momentous newsreading on Friday night nor the monstrous article that followed.

  ‘At least give me the Awara set!’ Chachiji bursts out suddenly.

  ‘What?’ Mrs Mamta takes a moment to adjust to this new change in subject. ‘Bhudevi, please, you know the Awara set belongs to the eldest daughter-in…’

  To her horror, Chachiji begins to cry. Huge sobs shake her bulldog frame. ‘Ashok Narayan Thakur never loved me,’ she moans, rocking back and forth. ‘He blew up all his money on randis, and now on that wretched Hot Dulari – god rot her! May she die, may she be eaten by worms, may termites gnaw at her anus!’

  ‘Bhudevi, calm down,’ Mrs Mamta says, distressed. ‘Don’t say such things please, just drink your tea.’

  But Chachiji shakes her head, pushes back the chair and blunders out of the room. Mrs Mamta, mostly unmoved, pours the contents of the cup into the sink and goes into the kitchen to cook the simple lunch that she and the Judge will eat at one o’clock. Her Nepali cook Lachhu has debunked to his village recently, and she and the girls have to do all the cooking and chores themselves – but after listening to Chachiji’s suspicions of the Hot Dulari, maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Not that the Judge would have been tempted by Lachhu. But Eshwari, now, that’s another matter. Eshwari is definitely going through an if-he’s-chinkie-he’s-cute phase.

  Later, when she is sitting at her Usha sewing machine, stitching the embroidered pansies onto a peasant top for Eshwari, the plump black phone starts to ring, causing its pedestal of three fat volumes of the Delhi Yellow Pages to vibrate alarmingly. She picks it up.

  ‘Allahabad se trunk call hai,’ the operator’s voice says. ‘PP for Mrs Mamta. Are you Mrs Mamta?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she replies, a little concerned. Anji usually phones after ten-thirty at night, when the half-rates apply. ‘Please, baat karaiye.’

  ‘Ma?’ Anji’s breathless child-like voice sounds rather subdued. ‘My period started.’

  Mrs Mamta sighs. ‘Don’t worry, Anji. It’s early days yet.’

  But it isn’t. Anji has been married for six years now. And the fact that Binni squeezed out her twins Monu-Bonu in such unseemly haste doesn’t help.

  ‘And for the first three years you didn’t even try,’ her mother reminds her. ‘Because Samar was so young.’

  Anji’s husband Anant was a widower when they wed. Grave, handsome, grieving, trying to look after his six-year-old son. It had all seemed madly romantic at the time. Now Mrs Mamta wonders if it hadn’t been just mad.

  ‘You know the doctor said there’s no problem as such,’ she tells her daughter gently. ‘You’ve got to stop being so tense.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not tense-tense,’ Anji assures her, her voice brighter. ‘I just thought I should tell you at the beginning of the conversation, you know? Otherwise you’d keep wondering. How are you?’

  ‘Okay,’ Mrs Mamta sighs. ‘Bhudevi was here, saying she’s possessed by the ghost of your dead grandmother and demanding the Awara set.’

  Anjini giggles. The Awara set is a double string of diamonds set in white gold with earrings to match, an exact replica of the one Nargis wore in the classic film Awara. It is the sparkling star of a long series of episodes involving the ladies of Numbers 13 and 16 Hailey Road.

  ‘Seriously? Like in Exorcist? And did you give it to her?’

  ‘Of course not. She has to find a bride for Gulab first. When she does, I’ll hand it over. Till then, as the eldest Thakur daughter-in-law of this generation, the set is rightfully mine.’

  ‘Nobody will marry Gulgul,’ Anjini says comfortably. ‘Not till he finishes his law, and that will never happen. Ma, I actually called about Dabbu. How is she?’

  ‘All right.’ Mrs Mamta sits down on the chair by the phone and lowers her voice. ‘Did you see the –’

  ‘Article? Yes. Is she very shattered? You tell her that Anji didi phoned to say the article was all rubbish, but she should try keeping her hair open during the telecast. She can buy those pink sponge-rollers from Depaul’s and –’

  ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘And not to wear such thick silk saris. And to practise wearing mascara every day so that s
he isn’t scared to blink. And has she got her threading done? Because I thought her upper lip looked shadowy. Also her bra was strapped too tight, she needs to – actually, put her on the line, Ma, I’ll tell her myself.’

  ‘She’s gone out,’ Mrs Mamta says. ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘Poor Dabburam. Anyway, I almost forgot, I can dress her myself next week because I’m coming to Delhi for a while. I mean, me and Samar are – Anant has to go to the US on work, and we’re free!’

  Mrs Mamta receives this piece of news with mixed emotions. She loves twelve-year-old Samar, and though his appetite causes the household expenses to swell alarmingly whenever he visits, Anji always subsidizes them. But Lachhu has run away. Besides, she is not sure of the wisdom of having Anji around when Dabbu is so fragile. Dabbu will grumble that Anji didi is trying to turn her into a carbon copy of herself, and Anjini will sigh at all the opportunities Debjani has, living in the permissive eighties. ‘Bauji and you were so much stricter with us, Ma,’ Anji often says plaintively. ‘Eshu and Dabbu get away with murder.’

  ‘That’s great news,’ she says warmly. ‘We’ll talk then – you hang up now, these calls cost a lot.’

  The old sewing machine starts to act up in the afternoon, the bobbins jittering and the needle spitting out the thread repeatedly. Mrs Mamta cleans, oils and re-threads it patiently, only to have the thread snap again just as she is about to finish. By the time the girls return home, she has managed to give herself quite a headache. Which doesn’t improve when Dabbu stalks in, her face stormy, and goes up to her room without saying a word. Eshwari wolfs down a plate of dal-chawal, pulls a philosophical face when she discovers her blouse isn’t ready, and then falls asleep on the drawing room couch, still in her school uniform.

  At four o’clock, Gulab comes home on his scooter. He parks it in the driveway and hurries into Number 16, breathing hard.

  ‘Taiji, suna? Balkishen Bau is no more,’ he announces importantly. ‘Chal basey. Just now. Batao!’

  Mrs Mamta Thakur, always so placid, gives an involuntary gasp. ‘What!’

  Gulgul nods with mournful relish. ‘He was sixty – but if you take no exercise and abuse your liver, you can’t hope to be a long liver. That’s why I do bodybuilding.’

  Eshwari sits up groggily and looks at Gulab like she can’t believe he’s for real.

  ‘Is this any way to break such news, Gulgul bhaisaab?’ she demands. ‘Seriously, don’t you have any sense?’

  Gulab gives a little laugh, rocks on his heels, and pats his bouffant hair nervously.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, I did not mean to be a rude,’ he says. ‘Taiji, please convey the news to Tauji. I have to go tell everybody else.’

  Juliet Bai is massaging oil into Dylan’s hair as he lounges in the khas-scented blast of the desert cooler, his head in her lap, having evicted his youngest brother from this prized spot. The displaced Ethan is now resignedly tuning his guitar in a corner of the room.

  Juliet Bai clucks over the extreme dryness of his scalp, the length of his hair and the new lines around his eyes that only she can see. She regards his thick long lashes complacently and wonders darkly how many girls those full lips have kissed. Just as she is about to ask him this in a clever, roundabout way, Dylan opens his eyes and looks up at her.

  ‘Mamma?’

  ‘What, sonna? Enough?’

  Dylan shakes his head. ‘No, no, don’t stop. I was just wondering, what exactly have you told people here that I do?’

  She blinks. ‘What?’

  He raises himself a little. ‘My job. What have you told people – like that judge friend of Dadda’s, for example? My son is a – what?’

  ‘Investigative editor,’ she replies, looking confused. ‘With the India Post, Bombay. Correct, no?’

  ‘Correct,’ Dylan says, lying back again. ‘Just near the temples now… yeah, there… perfect.’ He closes his eyes.

  So I’m safe, he thinks. Safe from what, he cannot say, but somehow it is extraordinarily important that the entirely forgettable Debjani Thakur does not find out that he is the architect of last week’s rather (come to think of it) brutally worded article on the new DD.

  Juliet Bai looks down at him curiously. ‘I haven’t told them your salary or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I know.’ Dylan smiles at her affectionately. ‘So tell me all your news, Mamma!’

  Juliet Bai sighs. ‘Me! Soon I will be –’

  ‘Dead and buried in Nicholson Cemetery,’ Ethan chimes in helpfully. ‘Before you see any grandchildren.’

  She shoots him a nasty look, but before she can say anything, Dylan interjects hastily.

  ‘So how’s the love of Jason’s life?’

  Juliet Bai wrinkles up her nose. The pressure with which she is massaging Dylan’s temples grows. ‘Wretched girl! Pudding face! Such round-round shoulders she has, like a simpering dumpling. And so shameless! Cheh! He brought her home, introduced her, your dadda and I said hello – what else to do? Then he took her to his bedroom, as cool as you please, and they were locked in there for hours. Just imagine, with your dadda and me at home! Such shamelessness! I didn’t say anything – you know how much that Jason can shout – but the next day, when he went off to college, I quietly took my screwdriver and unscrewed the bolt from the door in his room. Next day, he came home with madam and headed straight for his room. I let them go, they shut the door and then, such a yell, such cursing, like you’ve never heard! Jason came jumping out, his face black with anger, mujhe Jesu, what a tantrum! You have no right, he shouted. I told him, I’ve got a right – and a left – and I’ll give you both if you don’t stop treating my home like some cheap hotel.’

  ‘Mamma,’ Dylan says mildly, ‘you always dramatize things. They were probably just listening to music. Jason’s too much of a funk to make a move.’

  Juliet Bai snorts, yanking so hard at his hair that he groans in protest. ‘Which is a good thing! Don’t talk like it is very great to have the guts to make a move. Half Jason’s problem is that he’s trying to be as gutsy as you.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right, blame me for everything, you always do,’ Dylan says resignedly. ‘What about Ethan here? Why hasn’t he given you any grandchildren yet?’’

  ‘He only lives for Inter-school Western Music Competitions,’ Juliet Bai says dismissively. ‘No conversation, no communication. I feed him and wash his clothes and pray for him. Bas.’

  She glances at her youngest son as she says this, but he’s busy fine-tuning his guitar, holding it close to his ear.

  ‘And you and Dadda?’ Dylan asks next. ‘Is everything good between Bobby and Bobby?’

  She gives him a little push. ‘Dadda and I are fine, we walk together in the park every morning. He even comes with me for morning Mass sometimes. Why you asking so many questions, sonna?’

  Dylan shrugs, closes his eyes. ‘Just. I miss you guys in Bombay sometimes. That’s all.’

  My eldest, Juliet Bai thinks, brimming over with sudden affection for the large male lounging in her lap. My malgado. Such a nice boy. So responsible. When he was small, he used to go on his cycle and do all my vegetable shopping for me. Always got back the exact change. And he never wasted any food, ate everything on his plate, and if the others wasted, he forced himself to eat their left overs too. I only had to look at him and say, It’s wasting, sonna, and he would eat it. Such a good boy – not like these rascals, Jason and Ethan. But sometimes he takes his sense of responsibility too far.

  ‘Stay out of trouble, sonna,’ she tells him. ‘Why must you only take the government to task? Rest of the journalists have no duty or what?’

  Dylan doesn’t reply. Below her fingers, she can feel his temples tense.

  ‘So many positive things are happening in India,’ she continues. ‘Write about that. We’ve got such a handsome new PM – he’s going to dismantle the Licence Raj, do science and technology initiatives, take us into the twenty-first century!’
<
br />   ‘Mamma, the twenty-first century is a time, not a place,’ Dylan points out, his eyes still closed. ‘We don’t need a PM to take us there. We’re gonna get there anyway.’

  ‘You know what he means,’ she says crossly. ‘You’ve come here to poke around in Tirathpuri and do more stories on the Sikh massacre, haven’t you? Tell the truth.’

  ‘No,’ Dylan says steadily. ‘The Special Investigation Commission has been doing all that. I’m just here to get people’s reactions to the findings of the SIC.’

  ‘My friend Gurvinder Singh was pretty happy about the Sikh massacre,’ the incorrigible Ethan volunteers. ‘His mother made him cut off all his hair. All the chicks think he’s hot now.’

  ‘Ethan, don’t talk about stuff you know nothing about,’ Dylan says curtly.

  Ethan smirks and strums his guitar. Dylan glowers.

  ‘There’s chicken biryani with raita for dinner,’ Juliet Bai says quickly.

  ‘Awesome.’ Dylan relaxes, sinking back into her lap. ‘I hope the chicken has at least ten legs, coz I’m gonna eat seven.’

  ‘Chickens should get married to centipedes,’ Ethan pipes up. ‘Then there would be legs enough for all of us.’

  ‘Dylan should get married,’ says Juliet Bai. ‘Then he won’t be homesick.’

  ‘No,’ Dylan says wryly. ‘Then I’ll just be sick.’

  ‘No nice girls in the India Post office or what?’

  ‘No, Mamma,’ Dylan tells her solemnly. ‘No nice girls in the India Post office. Only bad-bad girls. In tight-tight clothes with loose-loose morals who will corrupt me and give me –’

  ‘AID.’ Juliet Bai nods knowingly.

  ‘I was going to say a bad reputation, actually,’ Dylan says, startled.

  Juliet Bai takes no notice of him. ‘They told us all about AID in school, so we could counsel the boys. It’s a terrible sickness. The Devil’s own disease, they say. See how sick and miserable that Rock Hudson is looking – all because of AID only.’

  ‘He… just… wanted… to… get... laid,’ Ethan hums softly to himself, fingering his strings. ‘But he ended up with AID. Oh, it’s just so sayd… and now he’s cold and…’