“I know all that. You don’t have to lecture me, I have lived my whole life in this city.”
“Compared to such misery, three people on the verandah is a deluxe lodging,” he said fervently. “But I am not insisting on it. If it’s not your wish, we’ll just go back to our village. The important thing is Om’s marriage. Once that is done, my duty is done. The rest does not matter.”
A week after Ashraf Chacha’s letter, Ishvar found the courage to proceed with the viewing of the four brides-to-be. He wrote back, laboriously forming the words, that Om and he would arrive in a month. “Which will give us time to complete the dresses you brought yesterday,” he told Dina. With his response in the mail, the old calm returned to him, slipping like a shirt upon his person.
Dina found it baffling: a sensible man like Ishvar, suddenly turned irrational. Could he be conducting a form of blackmail? Could he be hoping that her need for their skills would force her to take in Om’s wife?
Her suspicion waxed and waned. It was stronger at times when he kept emphasizing how Dina’s fortune would change if the bride resided in this flat. “You will see the difference the minute she crosses your threshold, Dinabai. Daughters-in-law have been known to transform the destiny of entire households.”
“She will be neither my daughter-in-law nor yours,” Dina pointed out.
But he was not to be put off by a trifling technicality. “Daughter-in-law is just a word. Call her anything you like. The hand of good fortune is not fussy about words.”
She shook her head in frustration and amusement. Ishvar and deceit — the two just did not go together. His inability to dissemble was well known. If his mind was in turmoil, his fingers were never far behind in manifesting the confusion; when he was pleased about something, his half-smile radiated uncontrollably, his arms ready to embrace the world. Cunning strategies did not proceed from such an open nature.
She dismissed her suspicion about blackmail. It would have made more sense in dealing with someone like Nusswan. Now he — he was capable of every devious twist and turn. A person could go crazy trying to predict his actions. She wondered how it would be when the time came for the children to get married. Not children anymore — Xerxes and Zarir were grown men. And Nusswan trying to select wives for them, putting to use all the practice he got when he was set on finding her a husband.
She remembered the years when her nephews were small. What a time of fun it had been, but so brief. And how miserable they were when Nusswan and Ruby and she argued, and there was screaming and shouting. Not knowing whose side to take, whether to run to Daddy or to Aunty to plead for peace. In the end, she had missed out on so much. Their school years, report cards, prize distribution days, cricket matches, their first long trousers. Independence came at a high price: a debt with a payment schedule of hurt and regret. But the other option — under Nusswan’s thumb — was inconceivable.
As always, on looking back, Dina was convinced she was better off on her own. She tried to imagine Om a married man, tried to imagine a wife beside him, a woman with a small delicate figure like his. A wedding photo. Om in stiff new starched clothes and an extravagant wedding turban. Wife in a red sari. A modest necklace, nose-ring, earrings, bangles — and the moneylender waiting in the wings, happy to put the noose around their necks. And what would she be like? And what would it be like to finally have another woman living in this flat?
A picture began to form, and Dina let it develop for two days, adding depth and detail, colour and texture. Om’s wife, standing in the front door. Her head demurely lowered. Her eyes sparkling when she looks up, her mouth smiling shyly, lips covered with her fingers. The days pass. Sometimes the young woman sits alone at the window, and remembers forsaken places. Dina sits beside her and encourages her to talk, to tell her things about the life left behind. And Om’s wife begins at last to speak. More pictures, more stories…
On the third day Dina said to Ishvar, “If you seriously think the verandah is big enough for three people, we can try it out.”
He heard her through the Singer’s hammer and hum, and braked the flywheel, slamming his palm upon it.
“Good thing you drive a sewing-machine and not a motorcar,” she said. “Your passengers would be chauffeured straight into the next world.”
Laughing, he leapt from the stool. “Om! Om, listen!” he called to the verandah. “Dinabai says yes! Come here — come and thank her!” Then he realized he himself still hadn’t done that. “Thank you, Dinabai!” He joined his hands. “Once again you are helping us in ways beyond repayment!”
“It’s only a trial. Thank me later, if it works out.”
“It will, I promise! I was right about the cat… the kittens coming back… and I will be right about this, too, believe me,” he said, breathless in his joy. “The main thing is, you are willing to help. That’s like receiving your good wishes and blessings. It’s the most important thing — the most important.”
The mood in the flat changed, and Ishvar couldn’t stop beaming at the seams he was running off. “It will be perfect, Dinabai, believe me. For all of us. She will be useful to you also. She can clean the house, go to the bazaar, cook for — ”
“Are you getting a wife for Om, or a servant?” she inquired, her tone caustic.
“No no, not servant,” he said reproachfully. “Why does it make her a servant if she does her duties as a wife? How else do people find happiness except in fulfilling their duty?”
“There can be no happiness without fairness,” she said. “Remember that, Om — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“Exactly,” said Maneck, concealing the inexplicable sadness that came over him. “And if you misbehave, Umbrella Bachchan and his pagoda parasol will straighten you out.”
Dina felt that granting consent for the verandah had legitimized a role for herself in Om’s marriage, and given her certain rights. He had come along quite nicely in these past few months, she thought. The scalp itch was gone and his hair was healthy, no longer dripping with smelly coconut oil. For this last, the credit went to Maneck and his distaste of greasy stuff in the hair.
Slowly but surely, Om had reinvented himself in Maneck’s image, from hairstyle to sparse moustache to clothes. Most recently, he had made flared trousers for himself, borrowing Maneck’s to trace the pattern. He even smelled like Maneck, thanks to Cinthol Soap and Lakmé Talcum Powder. And Maneck had learned from Om as well — instead of always wearing shoes and socks in the heat, which made his feet smell by the end of the day, he now wore chappals.
But imitation only underscored the difference between the two: Maneck sturdy and big-boned, Om with his delicate birdlike frame. If anyone was to become a husband, she thought, Maneck seemed more ready, not Om, the skinny boy of eighteen.
Once more, she was acutely aware of the painful thinness flitting and darting about the flat, especially in the kitchen, in the evenings, when it charmed her to watch his flour-coated fingers fly, kneading the dough and rolling out the chapatis. The rolling pin moved like magic under his hands. His skill, and the delight he took in it, had a mesmerizing effect. It made her want to cease her own chores, just stand and stare.
She reflected on the time Om had been living with her. She had observed him devouring hearty meals, quantities that were anything but birdlike. Which removed one possibility — he was not underweight because he ate poorly. And her original suspicion of a year ago wriggled out again.
“It just won’t do,” she said, discussing the matter with Ishvar. “Thanks to you, the boy is going to take on a big responsibility. But what kind of husband and father will he make with a stomachful of worms?”