Satish’s fingers were precise and long. They undid the package, carefully detaching the tape from the paper, which was dark blue with golden stars printed on it. He was sitting in the cane armchair; in this moment it had come to resemble a throne.
‘Oh, an alarm clock!’
Lakshmi’s face shone and then trembled slightly. ‘You said yours had stopped working,’ she said.
‘Oh, that old thing,’ Satish said. His voice conveyed that the clock had been incalculably precious to him, and was irreplaceable. He held up the plastic box that contained the new one, which was silver and sleek, with a white analogue face.
‘Such a nice new clock,’ he said. The glow from his sister’s face returned. ‘Looks expensive,’ he went on.
‘No no,’ said Lakshmi, rather proudly.
‘So many functions.’ He turned the box at arm’s length to peer at the lettering on the back. ‘What’s this: snooze?’
‘Yes, and you can also set it to ring at the same time every day.’ She reached out to indicate a button on the side.
‘Almost too nice to use,’ said Satish decisively. He seemed to be talking to himself, but his voice was quite audible. Mohan, who had been standing near the chair to witness the small ceremony, felt the familiar mix of emotions that his brother-in-law so easily aroused: he wanted to hit him, but he also felt like laughing, so neatly had Satish turned the situation around. But then there was his wife’s face. Mohan became aware of an insect buzzing increasingly loudly as it banged against the glass of the balcony door; he reminded himself not to speak, and drifted towards the kitchen as though to check on something.
Behind him, he heard Satish’s soft, educated voice: ‘Yes, it’s too good for an old bachelor like me. You’d better keep it here, I wouldn’t know how to look after it.’ As Mohan went into the kitchen he turned and saw his wife’s face, which was shocked, like a child’s after it has been slapped. Ashish had gone to the balcony and was using his slipper to try to flick the insect, still buzzing irately, off the glass door and into the warm afternoon.
‘The daal is interesting,’ Satish said. Lakshmi began to smile. ‘Completely tasteless,’ her brother mused. ‘I wonder how you managed it.’ Her face darkened, and she looked down at her plate without appearing to see it.
It entered Mohan’s head to say, ‘If you don’t like the food, get out of my house and don’t come back.’ He didn’t, though; such a spat with Satish’s elder sister’s husband had left him unable to visit her house until she died five years later.
‘Give me the daal,’ Mohan told Ashish instead. He helped himself to more and continued to eat in silence, thinking about Satish and what had become of his early promise. He’d been exceptionally bright as a young man, but his father had favoured the elder children, and Lakshmi, who was the youngest. The crowning injustice had been when Satish, after graduating, had got a job with a British-run textile company. His father had told him to give the job to the eldest brother, Bhaskar, who hadn’t, anyway, kept it for long; he was indolent and good-natured and had married and moved to Nagpur, where he became a college lecturer. It was an incredible story, Mohan reflected, working the daal into the heap of rice on his plate. It was hard to imagine such a thing happening today. Which employer, for one thing, would hire one brother but accept another as substitute? He squeezed a little lime onto the rice and daal mixture, and sprinkled salt over it. At some point Satish’s hopes had given way to sourness; he had never married, and after he retired from his own post as a lecturer in law, seemed to spend his time devising small ways of upsetting his siblings.
To Mohan’s surprise, Ashish began to talk. The boy smiled at Satish who, caught off-guard, smiled back. ‘Satish uncle, I was reading in the newspaper about that case of a Hindu Undivided Family where one of the married daughters changed sex to become a son, what do you think about it?’
Satish laughed; his face became quite attractive. ‘So you read the newspapers, is it? That’s more than many law students seem to do. Well, it’s an interesting case, since there doesn’t seem to be a precedent at this level. But if we go back to the basic concept of the HUF there are two main considerations –’ and he went on talking for some time, while Ashish nodded, his face intelligent.
Mohan chewed a mouthful – the daal wasn’t tasteless, it was comfortingly bland – and thought of the flat in Grant Road where Satish lived. This was where he’d return after spending the afternoon and early evening with them. Mohan had been to the place some years earlier; it was in a dingy building, not very far from the post office, and more resembled a chawl, a workers’ tenement, than a modern apartment block. The main room contained some books, jostling for space in and on top of the shelves, and a steel cupboard for papers and clothes. There was a desk, and a dusty wooden chest of drawers topped with a newspaper, a comb, a hair brush, Satish’s steel watch. The bed was narrow. There had been a sense of monasticism in the place, but without any of the rich stillness that might imply. ‘This is a room a man might kill himself in,’ Mohan had thought, surprising himself.
There was a pause in the conversation. Satish had rounded off his explanation, Ashish had made a joke, and both their faces were flushed with amusement. Mohan pushed a jar towards his brother-in-law. ‘Lime pickle?’ he said. Their eyes met.
Satish smiled – he had, after all, a charming smile – and reached out a thin hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
In the evening, Mohan sat in the circle of light from the hundred-watt bulb above the cane armchair. Become a Writer lay on his lap, unopened. He remembered the pitiable face – dark, thin, desperate – of the man he’d bought it from. A few days later, Mohan had been in a bus on Marine Drive when he’d seen what appeared to be the same man, standing on the parapet and looking down at the waves. The wind blew the white clothes around his thin figure. Noon: it was blindingly hot. As the bus passed, the man had half turned. He’d seemed to see Mohan, and their gaze had held for a moment. Don’t jump, the letter writer had thought. Then the bus hugged the curve of the road, and the man was no longer in view. There was no way of knowing whether he had stepped back, onto the pavement, or forward, onto the rocks.
When Mohan had seen the book last Sunday in Ashish’s room he’d had the feeling that something big was about to happen, and with it, something bad. Neither of these things was negotiable, so it should have been obvious that it was pointless to think about them. He ran his mind over all the usual augurs: the train notice boards, the advertisements in the compartment, the faces of the other passengers and of his customers in the last few days, even the toys being sold on the street stalls. But he remembered nothing remarkable. Instead he found himself thinking of his father, at his desk on a Sunday, that inviolable time; his white shirt very white against the dim room, and books gathered on the table around him. Maybe Ashish had been right; maybe Nandlal kaka hadn’t known what he was talking about; maybe Mohan’s father could have published his stories?
That Sunday Nandlal kaka had come to lunch and afterwards the children had fallen quiet when their father brought out a manuscript, a bundle of pages tied up in a purple ribbon like legal documents. A week later, Mohan’s father had left to meet Nandlal, but when he returned had simply gone into his study, quite silent, and closed the door. The incident had been so terrible, and yet never discussed, that it was as though it had slipped underwater, never to be seen again.
Chapter Four
When Ashish ambled towards the grocer’s at ten thirty the next morning the dosa man was already at his stall, under a tree near the roundabout. He was growling at two put-upon young men. One was sweating, and chopping onions; the other scrubbed the enormous griddle on which, at mealtimes, the dosa man would drop a splodge of batter, then, using a knife so large that it resembled a ploughshare, sweep it into a thin circle that sizzled while it crisped. For now, the lackeys sweated and the dosa man stood in the shade, arms folded; between blasts of sarcastic sounding invective he smiled to himself. He was very dark, with the b
rave moustaches, flourishing sideburns and bouffant hair of a south Indian film star.
Ashish walked back from the grocer’s carrying a packet of semolina wrapped in newsprint. It was hot; the early freshness was gone and he smelled traffic fumes in the air and felt the sun on his face.
He was exhausted. The first time he’d woken it had still been dark; he’d been startled by a moment of dead silence and then by the screaming. It was birds, he realized after the initial horror, shouting about something; perhaps, incredibly, the dawn. Not just the crows, pigeons and seagulls that he was used to, but many more: mynahs, koyals, and another that let out insane, rising whoops then waited for an answering burst of mad laughter.
There was too much space in the room. He’d got up again, gone past the bookshelf, peered out of the window suspiciously and seen no one in the darkness below. This is where I live now, he’d thought, but it had seemed unreal.
When day broke and he saw the first figures in the lane, walking for exercise, he felt better. The crisis seemed to have passed, and he slept in the pale, early light, his body cool and soothed under the fan.
There was another memory of having woken, but this was more vague, like a dream one has when sleeping on a long-distance train: mashed memories of the sulphur-yellow overhead light, the swaying of the bogey, and the abiding sense of transit. When he woke it was with an erection, and in the middle of a confusing dream in which he and another boy, possibly Sunder, chased each other in the colonnade of the college.
From another room, he heard his uncle’s voice, and his aunt laughing.
He ducked into the bathroom, locked the door with relief and set about waking up.
By the time Ashish had bathed, Mohan had already left for work. Lakshmi had discovered that there were ants frolicking in the semolina and sent Ashish out for more; she was going to make him breakfast.
He let himself back into the house now, handed over the semolina, and sat at the table drinking tea and flicking through the newspaper.
His aunt came to talk to him. ‘It’ll be ready in five minutes,’ she said, and her face lit up. She wiped her hands on the cloth she had been holding and sat down near him. He was fond of his aunt; unlike his mother, she had a soft face that seemed to crease easily. She was often vague, unless she was angry, and then she was extremely specific.
‘It’s changed a lot here, you must have noticed,’ she began to tell him sorrowfully. ‘Gopal building, that probably hadn’t been reconstructed the last time you were here.’
‘Oh yes, the white one.’ It was almost opposite, a six-storey tower that stood out next to the small, faded 1960s blocks in the rest of the lane.
Lakshmi made a ‘what can you do’ grimace. ‘These builders are offering a lot of money – they pay you to let them redevelop and take the FSI and then they put up a taller building and sell the extra flats.’
‘Hm.’ Ashish drained his tea and, slightly bored, covertly eyed the newspaper’s city supplement, where the image of a popular film actress on the masthead had been misprinted; the blues and yellows were marginally separated instead of overlaid, and her famous smile, as a result, was scattered.
‘We’ve also had offers,’ Lakshmi went on. ‘But luckily the Gogates, you know, they own three flats, they don’t want to sell. None of us does really, at least not so far. You can’t tell when these people start offering more and more. And then there’ll be construction work going on endlessly – something’s going to start soon, in the empty plot, a builder’s already bought it. I don’t know if they’ll begin now, or wait till after the rains.’
A toasty, pleasant smell came out of the kitchen. She got up and hurried inside; there were sounds of the lifting of a lid, and the scraping of a spoon. She came back with a plate of the hot upma, which smelled delectably of ghee and a roasted red chilli.
‘Here, eat well. You should, since you have so much studying to do,’ she remarked, and, unsure whether the comment was pointed or just another part of her morning conversation, Ashish nodded and picked up the spoon. His aunt put on her spectacles, frowned, and went back to the kitchen. She reappeared with a cup of instant coffee, picked up the city supplement, and moved towards the living room window.
In his room, he half closed the door and wandered around, inspecting the drawers, the bookshelves, the old comics. Later, when lunch smells began to float down the corridor towards him, he panicked. His books waited officiously on the desk, next to a jumble of pens. He sighed and sat down. It was best to be methodical – first of all, he’d draw up a timetable.
Half an hour later, he’d wedged his shoulders and elbows at awkward angles, the better to concentrate, and found a ruler. He was nearly done with plotting out the grid, which accounted for each day in half-hour units from six a.m. to midnight.
‘Ashish!’
He threw out a medium-distance grunt.
‘Lunch!’
Carefully, he finished colouring in the last of the green squares that denoted time allotted to bathing and ablutions in the morning, from seven to seven thirty.
Lakshmi was probably a better cook than his mother; she was usually in a better mood, and that seemed to affect the food. And she was less stingy with the oil, salt and chilli; Ashish’s father, though he had turned fifty only last year, already had cholesterol, and the doctor had hinted darkly at ‘BP’.
Ashish had hogged slightly too enthusiastically at lunch, and now he sat slumped at the desk and eyed the bed and its handloom cover, which was striped, with a prominent slub. It would feel reassuringly rough against his cheek while he slept; but he looked at the bright squares of the study timetable and sighed.
He stared into the sun. A little later, some boys came out to play football in the lane. They seemed to be engaged in a strange dance whose purpose was to cover every inch of the lane with the ball, which slipped between them as though attached to their feet by lengths of elastic. It never got away, nor was it ever caught. Occasionally it flew up, and was knocked down by one of the players, who used his forehead; another dived for it. Ashish read:
The date is out of such prolixity:
We’ll have no Cupid hoodwink’d with a scarf
Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of lath,
Scaring the ladies like a crow-keeper;
No, nor without-book prologue, faintly spoke
After the prompter, for our entrance:
It was enough. He couldn’t understand, and had been a fool to try. At the same time as the words drew him in with their rhythm, they barred his passage. Lath? Tartar? Without-book prologue? He should have stuck to the books of notes that everyone else used to pass. His eyes wandered outside, where the football was making a lovely long curve towards the goal at the mouth of the lane. The watchman grabbed the ball and waved the boys out of the way; Dr Gogate’s new car turned in.
Ashish bent his head down to the page.
The date is out of such prolixity:
His elbow leaned on the desk and his cheek found a resting place in the palm of his hand. He looked into the sun and wondered what had become of Sunder, but the question didn’t seem as urgent as a few days ago. For diversion, he went looking for the book that his uncle had picked up.
‘Aren’t there any family photos?’ he asked his aunt in the afternoon.
‘Photos? You mean of your mother’s childhood?’
‘Yeah, from the old house.’
She paused, and blew on her tea. ‘I’ll have to see, they’re probably in the chest here. You want to see them?’
‘Hm,’ Ashish nodded.
‘We’ll ask your uncle when he gets home.’
‘Okay.’
But a little later, he heard her calling to him from the living room and left Romeo and Juliet to wander out. She had removed the ornaments from the top of the tea chest and opened it; bits of newspaper, cloth, and a few albums lay on the low table. Her face was amused. ‘Come, see?’
He sat next to her on the floor, and they began turning the enormo
us pages, on which card-like black and white prints were affixed by decorative corners. Here was Mohan mama, about six years old, swinging on the gate of the house at Dadar: he looked small, skinny, and mischievous, but ultimately well behaved. Ashish’s mother was in another picture, a young child, pugnacious in a frilly frock with a large bow at the waist. His grandparents, looking young and self-conscious; his grandfather wore a suit, his grandmother wore a nine-yard sari and carried a baby, presumably Vivek mama, in her arms. Various other cousins, aunts and uncles; his aunt speculated about their identity.
They heard the door catch: Mohan was home.
‘What’s this?’ he asked. He took off his sandals and came to stand near them, tentative but eager.
‘He wanted to see some of the old photos,’ Lakshmi explained.
Mohan reached down and took the picture Ashish was holding. It had a white border and scalloped edges, and showed a formal group. A plant stood in one corner; on a sofa sat a woman in a sari, now the ubiquitous six-yard variety, holding a toddler on her lap. Two boys stood next to her; at the side was her husband, his hand on the elder boy’s shoulder.
‘That’s my grandparents with my mother, Vivek mama and you, isn’t it, Mohan mama?’ Ashish glanced up; his uncle’s face was inscrutable.
‘Yes, the three of us and our parents. Look at your mother’s face.’
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