Though full of energy most of the time, Malati would fall ill every few months or so, and her mother would come down from Agra to Brahmpur to cure her of the evil eye, an influence that lay outside the province of western medicine. Because Malati had such remarkable eyes herself, she was a special target of the evil eye.
A dirty, grey, pink-legged crane surveyed Malati and Lata with its small, intense red eyes; then a grey film blinked sideways across each eyeball, and it walked carefully away.
‘Let’s surprise the kids by buying some of that spun candy for them,’ said Lata as a vendor went past. ‘I wonder what’s keeping them. What’s the matter, Malati? What are you thinking of?’
‘Love,’ said Malati.
‘Oh, love, what a boring subject,’ said Lata. ‘I’ll never fall in love. I know you do from time to time. But—’ She lapsed into silence, thinking once again, with some distaste, of Savita and Pran, who had left for Simla. Presumably they would return from the hills deeply in love. It was intolerable.
‘Well, sex then.’
‘Oh please, Malati,’ said Lata looking around quickly. ‘I’m not interested in that either,’ she added, blushing.
‘Well, marriage then. I’m wondering whom you’ll get married to. Your mother will get you married off within a year, I’m sure of it. And like an obedient little mouse, you’ll obey her.’
‘Quite right,’ said Lata.
This rather annoyed Malati, who bent down and plucked three narcissi growing immediately in front of a sign that read, Do not pluck the flowers. One she kept, and two she handed to Lata, who felt very awkward holding such illegally gotten gains. Then Malati bought five sticks of flossy pink candy, handed four to Lata to hold with her two narcissi, and began to eat the fifth.
Lata started to laugh.
‘And what will happen then to your plan to teach in a small school for poor children?’ demanded Malati.
‘Look, here they come,’ said Lata.
Aparna was looking petrified and holding Varun’s hand tightly. For a few minutes they all ate their candy, walking towards the exit. At the turnstile a ragged urchin looked longingly at them, and Lata quickly gave him a small coin. He had been on the point of begging, but hadn’t yet done so, and looked astonished.
One of her narcissi went into the horse’s mane. The tonga-wallah again began to sing of his shattered heart. This time they all joined in. Passers-by turned their heads as the tonga trotted past.
The crocodiles had had a liberating effect on Varun. But when they got back to Pran’s house on the university campus, where Arun and Meenakshi and Mrs Rupa Mehra were staying, he had to face the consequences of returning an hour late. Aparna’s mother and grandmother were looking anxious.
‘You damn irresponsible fool,’ said Arun, dressing him down in front of everyone. ‘You, as the man, are in charge, and if you say twelve thirty, it had better be twelve thirty, especially since you have my daughter with you. And my sister. I don’t want to hear any excuses. You damned idiot.’ He was furious. ‘And you—’ he added to Lata, ‘you should have known better than to let him lose track of the time. You know what he’s like.’
Varun bowed his head and looked shiftily at his feet. He was thinking how satisfying it would be to feed his elder brother, head first, to the largest of the crocodiles.
1.12
One of the reasons why Lata was studying in Brahmpur was because this was where her grandfather, Dr Kishen Chand Seth, lived. He had promised his daughter Rupa when Lata first came to study here that he would take very good care of her. But this had never happened. Dr Kishen Chand Seth was far too preoccupied either with bridge at the Subzipore Club or feuds with the likes of the Minister of Revenue or passion for his young wife Parvati to be capable of fulfilling any guardian-like role towards Lata. Since it was from his grandfather that Arun had inherited his atrocious temper, perhaps this was, all in all, not a bad thing. At any rate, Lata did not mind living in the university dormitory. Far better for her studies, she thought, than under the wing of her irascible Nana.
Just after Raghubir Mehra had died, Mrs Rupa Mehra and her family had gone to live with her father, who at that stage had not yet remarried. Given her straitened finances, this seemed to be the only thing to do; she also thought that he might be lonely, and hoped to help him with his household affairs. The experiment had lasted a few months, and had been a disaster. Dr Kishen Chand Seth was an impossible man to live with. Tiny though he was, he was a force to reckon with not only at the medical college, from which he had retired as Principal, but in Brahmpur at large: everyone was scared of him and obeyed him tremblingly. He expected his home life to run on similar lines. He overrode Rupa Mehra’s writ with respect to her own children. He left home suddenly for weeks on end without leaving money or instructions for the staff. Finally, he accused his daughter, whose good looks had survived her widowhood, of making eyes at his colleagues when he invited them home — a shocking accusation for the heartbroken though sociable Rupa. The teenaged Arun had threatened to beat up his grandfather. There had been tears and yells and Dr Kishen Chand Seth had pounded the floor with his stick. Then Mrs Rupa Mehra had left, weeping and determined, with her brood of four, and had sought refuge with sympathetic friends in Darjeeling.
Reconciliation had been effected a year later in a renewed bout of weeping. Since then things had jolted along. The marriage with Parvati (which had shocked not just his family but Brahmpur at large because of the disparity of age), Lata’s enrolment at Brahmpur University, Savita’s engagement (which Dr Kishen Chand Seth had helped arrange), Savita’s wedding (which he had almost wrecked and from which he had wilfully absented himself): all these were landmarks along an extremely bumpy road. But family was family, and, as Mrs Rupa Mehra continually told herself, one had to take the rough with the smooth.
Several months had now passed since Savita’s wedding. Winter had gone and the pythons in the zoo had emerged from hibernation. Roses had replaced narcissi, and had been replaced in their turn by the purple-wreath creeper, whose five-bladed flowers helicoptered gently to the ground in the hot breeze. The broad, silty-brown Ganga, flowing due east past the ugly chimneys of the tannery and the marble edifice of the Barsaat Mahal, past Old Brahmpur with its crowded bazaars and alleys, temples and mosques, past the bathing ghats and the cremation ghat and the Brahmpur Fort, past the whitewashed pillars of the Subzipore Club and the spacious estate of the university, had shrunken with the summer, but boats and steamers still plied busily up and down its length, as did trains along the parallel railway line that bounded Brahmpur to the south.
Lata had left the hostel and had gone to live with Savita and Pran, who had descended from Simla to the plains very much in love. Malati visited Lata often, and had grown to like the lanky Pran, of whom she had formed such an unfavourable first impression. Lata too liked his decent, affectionate ways, and was not too upset to learn that Savita was pregnant. Mrs Rupa Mehra wrote long letters to her daughters from Arun’s flat in Calcutta, and complained repeatedly that no one replied to her letters either soon enough or often enough.
Though she did not mention this in any of her letters for fear of enraging her daughter, Mrs Rupa Mehra had tried — without success — to find a match for Lata in Calcutta. Perhaps she had not made enough effort, she told herself: she was, after all, still recovering from the excitement and exertion of Savita’s wedding. But now at last she was going back to Brahmpur for a three-month stint at what she had begun to call her second home: her daughter’s home, not her father’s. As the train puffed along towards Brahmpur, the propitious city which had yielded her one son-in-law already, Mrs Rupa Mehra promised herself that she would make another attempt. Within a day or two of her arrival she would go to her father for advice.