‘What will you do?’ Meenakshi asked dutifully. She had switched off a few sentences ago.
Arun talked on for five minutes or so, while Meenakshi’s mind wandered. When he stopped and looked at her questioningly, she said, yawning a little from residual sleepiness:
‘How has your boss reacted to all this?’
‘Difficult to say. With Basil Cox it’s difficult to say anything, even when he’s delighted. In this case I think he’s as annoyed by the possible delay as pleased by the definite saving.’ Arun unburdened himself for another five minutes while Meenakshi began to buff her nails.
The bedroom door had been bolted against interruption, but when Aparna saw her father’s briefcase she knew that he had returned and insisted upon being admitted. Arun opened the door and gave her a hug, and for the next hour or so they did a jigsaw featuring a giraffe, which Aparna had seen in a toyshop a week after being taken to the Brahmpur Zoo. They had done the jigsaw several times before, but Aparna had not yet tired of it. Nor had Arun. He adored his daughter and occasionally felt it was a pity that he and Meenakshi went out almost every evening. But one simply couldn’t let one’s life come to a standstill because one had a child. What, after all, were ayahs for? What, for that matter, were younger brothers for?
‘Mummy has promised me a necklace,’ said Aparna.
‘Has she, darling?’ said Arun. ‘How does she imagine she’s going to buy it? We can’t afford it at the moment.’
Aparna looked so disappointed at this latest intelligence that Arun and Meenakshi turned to each other with transferred adoration.
‘But she will,’ said Aparna, quietly and determinedly. ‘Now I want to do a jigsaw.’
‘But we’ve just done one,’ protested Arun.
‘I want to do another.’
‘You handle her, Meenakshi,’ said Arun.
‘You handle her, darling,’ said Meenakshi. ‘I must get ready. And please clear the bedroom floor.’
So for a while Arun and Aparna, banished to the drawing room this time, lay on the carpet putting together a jigsaw of the Victoria Memorial while Meenakshi bathed and dressed and perfumed and ornamented herself.
Varun returned from college, slid past Arun into his tiny box of a room, and sat down with his books. But he seemed nervous, and could not settle down to studying. When Arun went to get ready, Aparna was transferred to him; and the rest of Varun’s evening was spent at home trying to keep her amused.
The long-necked Meenakshi turned numerous heads when their party of four entered Firpo’s for dinner. Arun told Shireen she was looking gorgeous and Billy looked with soulful languor at Meenakshi and said that she looked divine, and things went wonderfully well and were followed by some pleasantly titillating dancing at the 30 °Club. Meenakshi and Arun were not really able to afford all this — Billy Irani had independent means — but it seemed intolerable that they, for whom this kind of life was so obviously intended, should be deprived of it by a mere lack of funds. Meenakshi could not help noticing, through dinner and beyond, the lovely little gold danglers that Shireen was wearing, and that hung so becomingly from her little velvety ears.
It was a warm evening. In the car on the way back home Arun said to Meenakshi, ‘Give me your hand, darling,’ and Meenakshi, placing one red nail-polished fingertip on the back of his hand, said, ‘Here!’ Arun thought that this was delightfully elegant and flirtatious. But Meenakshi had her mind on something else.
Later, when Arun had gone to bed, Meenakshi unlocked her jewellery case (the Chatterjis did not believe in giving their daughter great quantities of jewellery but she had been given quite enough for her likely requirements) and took out the two gold medals so precious to Mrs Rupa Mehra’s heart. She had given these to Meenakshi at the time of her wedding as a gift to the bride of her elder son. This she felt was the appropriate thing to do; she had nothing else to give, and she felt that her husband would have approved. On the back of the medals was engraved: ‘Thomasson Engineering College Roorkee. Raghubir Mehra. Civil Engg. First. 1916’ and ‘Physics. First. 1916’ respectively. Two lions crouched sternly on pedestals on each medal. Meenakshi looked at the medals, then balanced them in her hands, then held the cool and precious discs to her cheeks. She wondered how much they weighed. She thought of the gold chain she had promised Aparna and the gold drops she had virtually promised herself. She had examined them quite carefully as they hung from Shireen’s little ears. The danglers were shaped like tiny pears.
When Arun rather impatiently called her to bed, she murmured, ‘Just coming.’ But it was a minute or two before she joined him. ‘What are you thinking of, darling?’ he asked her. ‘You look dangerously preoccupied.’ But Meenakshi instinctively realized that to mention what had passed through her head — what she planned to do with those dowdy medals — would not be a good idea, and she avoided the subject by nibbling at the lobe of his left ear.
1.19
The next morning at ten o’clock Meenakshi phoned her younger sister Kakoli.
‘Kuku, a friend of mine from the Shady Ladies — my club, you know — wants to find out where she can get some gold melted down discreetly. Do you know of a good jeweller?’
‘Well, Satram Das or Lilaram, I suppose,’ yawned Kuku, barely awake.
‘No, I am not talking of Park Street jewellers — or any jewellers of that kind,’ said Meenakshi with a sigh. ‘I want to go somewhere where they don’t know me.’
‘You want to go somewhere?’
There was a short silence at the other end. ‘Well, you may as well know,’ said Meenakshi: ‘I’ve set my heart on a pair of earrings — they look adorable — just like tiny little pears — and I want to melt down those fat ugly medals that Arun’s mother gave me for my wedding.’
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said Kakoli in a kind of alarmed warble.
‘Kuku, I want your advice about the place, not about the decision.’
‘Well, you could go to Sarkar’s. No — try Jauhri’s on Rashbehari Avenue. Does Arun know?’
‘The medals were given to me,’ said Meenakshi. ‘If Arun wants to melt his golf clubs down to make a back brace I won’t object.’
When she got to the jeweller’s, she was astonished to meet opposition there as well.
‘Madam,’ said Mr Jauhri in Bengali, looking at the medals won by her father-in-law, ‘these are beautiful medals.’ His fingers, blunt and dark, slightly incongruous for someone who held and supervised work of such fineness and beauty, touched the embossed lions lovingly, and circled around the smooth, unmilled edges.
Meenakshi stroked the side of her neck with the long, red-polished nail of the middle finger of her right hand.
‘Yes,’ she said indifferently.
‘Madam, if I might advise you, why not order these earrings and this chain and pay for them separately? There is really no need to melt down these medals.’ A well-dressed and evidently wealthy lady would presumably not find any difficulty in this suggestion.
Meenakshi looked at the jeweller with cool surprise. ‘Now that I know the approximate weight of the medals, I propose to melt down one, not both,’ she said. Somewhat annoyed by his impertinence — these shopkeepers sometimes got above themselves — she went on: ‘I came here to get a job done; I would normally have gone to my regular jewellers. How long do you think it will take?’