Priya Goyal for her part was a fiery spirit. Every morning, winter or summer, she paced fiercely along the roof. It was a long roof, since it covered three contiguous narrow houses, connected lengthways at each of the three storeys. In effect the whole operated as one large house, and was treated as such by the family and the neighbours. It was known locally as the Rai Bahadur’s house because Ram Vilas Goyal’s grandfather (still alive at eighty-eight), who had been given that title by the British, had bought and restructured the property half a century ago.
On the ground floor were a number of storerooms and the servants’ quarters. On the floor above lived Ram Vilas’s ancient grandfather, the Rai Bahadur; his father and stepmother; and his sister. The common kitchen was also located on this floor as was the puja room (which the unpious, even impious, Priya rarely visited). On the top floor were the rooms, respectively, of the families of the three brothers; Ram Vilas was the middle brother and he occupied the two rooms of the top floor of the middle ‘house’. Above this was the roof with its washing lines and water tanks.
When she paced up and down the roof, Priya Goyal would picture herself as a panther in a cage. She would look longingly towards the small house just a few minutes’ walk away — and just visible through the jungle of intervening roofs — in which her childhood friend Veena Tandon lived. Veena, she knew, was not well off any longer, but she was free to do as she pleased: to go to the market, to walk around by herself, to go for music lessons. In Priya’s own household there was no question of that. For a daughter-in-law from the house of the Rai Bahadur to be seen in the market would have been disgraceful. That she was thirty-two years old with a girl of ten and a boy of eight was irrelevant. Ram Vilas, ever placid, would have none of it. It was simply not his way; more importantly, it would cause pain to his father and stepmother and grandfather and elder brother — and Ram Vilas sincerely believed in maintaining the decencies of a joint family.
Priya hated living in a joint family. She had never done so until she came to live with the Goyals of Shahi Darvaza. This was because her father, Lakshmi Narayan Agarwal, had been the only son to survive to adulthood, and he in his turn had only had the one daughter. When his wife died, he had been stricken, and had taken the Gandhian vow of sexual abstinence. He was a man of spartan habits. Although Home Minister, he lived in two rooms in a hostel for Members of the Legislative Assembly.
‘The first years of married life are the hardest — they require the most adjustment,’ Priya had been told; but she felt that in some ways it was getting more and more intolerable as time went on. Unlike Veena, she had no proper paternal — and more importantly, maternal — home to run away to with her children for at least a month a year — the prerogative of all married women. Even her grandparents (with whom she had spent the time when her father was in jail) were now dead. Her father loved her dearly as his only child; it was his love that had in a sense spoiled her for the constrained life of the Goyal joint family, for it had imbued her with a spirit of independence; and now, living in austerity as he did, he could not himself provide her with any refuge.
If her husband had not been so kind, she felt she would have gone mad. He did not understand her but he was understanding. He tried to make things easier for her in small ways, and he never once raised his voice. Also, she liked the ancient Rai Bahadur, her grandfather-in-law. There was a spark to him. The rest of the family and particularly the women — her mother-in-law, her husband’s sister, and her husband’s elder brother’s wife — had done their best to make her miserable as a young bride, and she could not stand them. But she had to pretend she did, every day, all the time — except when she paced up and down on the roof — where she was not even permitted to have a garden, on the grounds that it would attract monkeys. Ram Vilas’s stepmother had even tried to dissuade her from her daily to-ing and fro-ing (‘Just think, Priya, how will it look to the neighbours?’), but for once Priya had refused to go along. The sisters-in-law above whose heads she paced at dawn reported her to their mother-in-law. But perhaps the old witch sensed that she had driven Priya to the limit, and did not phrase her complaint in a direct manner again. Anything indirect on the matter Priya chose not to understand.
L.N. Agarwal came dressed as always in an immaculately starched (but not fancy) kurta, dhoti and Congress cap. Below the white cap could be seen his curve of curly grey hair but not the baldness it enclosed. Whenever he ventured out to Shahi Darvaza he kept his cane handy to scare away the monkeys that frequented, some would say dominated, the neighbourhood. He dismissed his rickshaw near the local market, and turned off the main road into a tiny side-lane which opened out into a small square. In the middle of the square was a large pipal tree. One entire side of the square was the Rai Bahadur’s house.
The door below the stairs was kept closed because of the monkeys, and he rapped on it with his cane. A couple of faces appeared at the enclosed wrought-iron balconies of the floors above. His daughter’s face lit up when she saw him; she quickly coiled her loose black hair into a bun and came downstairs to open the door. Her father embraced her and they went upstairs again.
‘And where has Vakil Sahib disappeared?’ he asked in Hindi.
He liked to refer to his son-in-law as the lawyer, although the appellation was equally appropriate to Ram Vilas’s father and grandfather.
‘He was here a minute ago,’ replied Priya, and got up to search for him.
‘Don’t bother yet,’ said her father in a warm, relaxed voice. ‘First give me some tea.’
For a few minutes the Home Minister enjoyed home comforts: well-made tea (not the useless stuff he got at the MLA hostel); sweets and kachauris made by the women of his daughter’s house — maybe by his daughter herself; some minutes with his grandson and granddaughter, who preferred, however, to play with their friends on the heat of the roof or below in the square (his granddaughter was good at street cricket); and a few words with his daughter, whom he saw rarely enough and missed a great deal.
He had no compunction, as some fathers-in-law had, about accepting food, drink and hospitality at his son-in-law’s house. He talked with Priya about his health and his grandchildren and their schooling and character; about how Vakil Sahib was working far too hard, a little about Priya’s mother in passing, at the mention of whom a sadness came into both their eyes, and about the antics of the old servants of the Goyal household.
As they talked, other people passed the open door of the room, saw them, and came in. They included Ram Vilas’s father, rather a helpless character who was terrorized by his second wife. Soon the whole Goyal clan had dropped by — except for the Rai Bahadur, who did not like climbing stairs.
‘But where is Vakil Sahib?’ repeated L.N. Agarwal.
‘Oh,’ said someone, ‘he’s downstairs talking with the Rai Bahadur. He knows you are in the house and he will come up as soon as he is released.’
‘Why don’t I go down and pay my respects to the Rai Bahadur now?’ said L.N. Agarwal, and got up.
Downstairs, grandfather and grandson were talking in the large room that the Rai Bahadur had reserved as his own — mainly because he was attached to the beautiful peacock tiles that decorated the fireplace. L.N. Agarwal, being of the middle generation, paid his respects and had respects paid to him.
‘Of course you’ll have tea?’ said the Rai Bahadur.
‘I’ve had some upstairs.’
‘Since when have Leaders of the People placed a limit on their tea-consumption?’ asked the Rai Bahadur in a creaky and lucid voice. The word he used was ‘Neta-log’, which had about the same level of mock deference as ‘Vakil Sahib’.