‘Anyway, what were you quarrelling about when I came up the stairs? And where’s Bhaskar?’ asked Maan, thinking of his father’s recent remarks and trying to change the subject.
‘He’s out with his friends flying kites. Yes, he was annoyed as well. He wanted to wake you up. You’ll have to have dinner with us today to make up.’
‘Oh — uh—’ said Maan undecidedly, wondering whether he might not risk visiting Saeeda Bai’s house in the evening. He coughed. ‘But what were you quarrelling about?’
‘We weren’t quarrelling,’ said the mild Kedarnath, smiling at Maan. He was in his thirties, but already greying. A worried optimist, he, unlike Maan, had — if anything — too strong a sense of his responsibilities, and the difficulties of starting from scratch in Brahmpur after Partition had aged him prematurely. When he was not on the road somewhere in south India drumming up orders, he was working till late at night in his shop in Misri Mandi. It was in the evenings that business was conducted there, when middlemen like him bought baskets of shoes from the shoemakers. His afternoons, though, were fairly free.
‘No, not quarrelling, not quarrelling at all. Just arguing about chaupar, that’s all,’ said Veena hastily, throwing the cowrie-shells down once more, counting her tally, and moving her pieces forward on the cross-shaped cloth board.
‘Yes, yes, I’m quite sure,’ said Maan.
He sat down on the rug and looked around at the flowerpots filled with leafy plants, which Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had contributed to her daughter’s roof garden. Veena’s saris were hanging up to dry on one side of the roof, and there were bright splashes of Holi colour all over the terrace. Beyond the roof a jumble of rooftops, minarets, towers and temple-tops stretched out as far as the railway station in ‘New’ Brahmpur. A few paper kites, pink, green and yellow, like the colours of Holi, fought each other in the cloudless sky.
‘Don’t you want something to drink?’ asked Veena quickly. ‘I’ll get you some sherbet — or will you have tea? I’m afraid we don’t have any thandai,’ she added gratuitously.
‘No, thank you. . But you can answer my question. What was the debate about?’ demanded Maan. ‘Let me guess. Kedarnath wants to keep a second wife, and he naturally wants your consent.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Veena, a little sharply. ‘I want a second child and I naturally want his consent. Oh!’ she exclaimed, realizing her indiscretion and looking at her husband. ‘I didn’t mean to — anyway, he’s my brother — we can ask his advice, surely.’
‘But you don’t want my mother’s advice in the matter, do you?’ countered Kedarnath.
‘Well, it’s too late now,’ said Maan genially. ‘What do you want a second child for? Isn’t Bhaskar enough?’
‘We can’t afford a second child,’ said Kedarnath, with his eyes closed — a habit that Veena still found bothersome. ‘Not at the moment, at any rate. My business is — well, you know how it is. And now there’s the possibility of a shoemakers’ strike.’ He opened his eyes. ‘And Bhaskar is so bright that we want to send him to the very best schools. And they don’t come cheap.’
‘Yes, we wish he was stupid, but unfortunately—’
‘Veena is being witty as usual,’ said Kedarnath. ‘Just two days before Holi she reminded me that it was difficult to make ends meet, what with the rent and the rise in food prices and everything. And the cost of her music lessons and my mother’s medicines and Bhaskar’s special maths books and my cigarettes. Then she said that we had to count the rupees, and now she’s saying that we should have another child because every grain of rice it will eat has already been marked with its name. The logic of women! She was born into a family of three children, so she thinks that having three children is a law of nature. Can you imagine how we’ll survive if they’re all as bright as Bhaskar?’
Kedarnath, who was usually quite henpecked, was putting up a good fight.
‘Only the first child is bright as a rule,’ said Veena. ‘I guarantee that my next two will be as stupid as Pran and Maan.’ She resumed her sewing.
Kedarnath smiled, picked up the speckled cowries in his scarred palm, and threw them on to the board. Normally he was a very polite man and would have given Maan his full attention, but chaupar was chaupar, and it was almost impossible to stop playing once the game had begun. It was even more addictive than chess. Dinners grew cold in Misri Mandi, guests left, creditors threw tantrums, but the chaupar players pleaded for just one more game. Old Mrs Tandon had once thrown the cloth board and the sinful shells into a disused well in a neighbouring lane, but, despite the family finances, another set had been procured, and the truant couple now played on the roof, even though it was hotter there. In this way they avoided Kedarnath’s mother, whose gastric and arthritic problems made climbing stairs difficult. In Lahore, both because of the horizontal geography of the house and because of her role as the confident matriarch of a wealthy and unscattered family, she had exercised tight, even tyrannical, control. Her world had collapsed with the trauma of Partition.
Their conversation was interrupted by a scream of outrage from a neighbouring rooftop. A large, middle-aged woman in a scarlet cotton sari was shouting down from her roof at an invisible adversary:
‘They want to suck my blood, it’s clear! Neither can I lie down anywhere nor can I sit anywhere in peace. The sound of the thumping of balls is driving me mad. . Of course what takes place on the roof can be heard downstairs! You wretched kahars, you useless washers of dishes, can’t you keep your children under control?’
Noticing Veena and Kedarnath on their roof, she walked over the connecting rooftops, clambering through a low gap in the far wall. With her piercing voice, wild teeth and large, spreading, sagging breasts, she made a powerful impression on Maan.
After Veena had introduced them, the woman said with a fierce smile:
‘Oh, so this is the one who isn’t getting married.’
‘He’s the one,’ admitted Veena. She didn’t tempt fate by mentioning Maan’s tentative engagement to the girl from Banaras.
‘But didn’t you tell me you’d introduced him to that girl — what’s her name, remind me — the one who came here from Allahabad to visit her brother?’
Maan said: ‘Amazing how it is with some people. You write “A” and they read “Z”.’
‘Well, it’s quite natural,’ said the woman in a predatory manner. ‘A young man, a young woman. . ’
‘She was very pretty,’ Veena said. ‘With eyes like a deer.’
‘But she doesn’t have her brother’s nose — luckily,’ added the woman.
‘No — it’s much finer. And it even quivers a bit like a deer’s.’
Kedarnath, despairing of his game of chaupar, got up to go downstairs. He couldn’t stand visits from this over-friendly neighbour. Ever since her husband had got a telephone installed in their house, she had become even more self-confident and strident.
‘What shall I call you?’ Maan asked the woman.
‘Bhabhi. Just bhabhi,’ said Veena.
‘So — how did you like her?’ asked the woman.
‘Fine,’ said Maan.
‘Fine?’ said the woman, pouncing delightedly on the word.
‘I meant, fine that I should call you bhabhi.’
‘He’s very cunning,’ said Veena.
‘I’m no less so,’ asserted her neighbour. ‘You should come here, meet people, meet nice women,’ she told Maan. ‘What is the charm of living in the colonies? I tell you, when I visit Pasand Bagh or Civil Lines my brain goes dead in four hours. When I return to the lanes of our neighbourhood it starts whirring again. People here care for each other; if someone falls ill the whole neighbourhood asks about them. But it may be difficult to fix you up. You should get a slightly taller girl than average—’