‘Your mother likes me, I can tell,’ said Malati.
‘That’s beside the point,’ said Lata. ‘And actually, I’m quite amazed that she does. She usually judges things by influences. I would have thought you’re a bad influence on me.’
But this was not entirely true, even from Mrs Rupa Mehra’s viewpoint. Malati had certainly given Lata more confidence than she had had when she had emerged wet-feathered from St Sophia’s. And Malati had succeeded in getting Lata to enjoy Indian classical music, which (unlike ghazals) Mrs Rupa Mehra approved of. That they should have become room-mates at all was because the government medical college (usually referred to by its royal title) had no provision for housing its small contingent of women and had persuaded the university to accommodate them in its hostels.
Malati was charming, dressed conservatively but attractively, and could talk to Mrs Rupa Mehra about everything from religious lusts to cooking to genealogy, matters that her own westernized children showed very little interest in. She was also fair, an enormous plus in Mrs Rupa Mehra’s subconscious calculus. Mrs Rupa Mehra was convinced that Malati Trivedi, with her dangerously attractive greenish eyes, must have Kashmiri or Sindhi blood in her. So far, however, she had not discovered any.
Though they did not often talk about it, the bond of paternal loss also tied Lata and Malati together.
Malati had lost her adored father, a surgeon from Agra, when was eight. He had been a successful and handsome man with a wide acquaintance and a varied history of work: he had been attached the army for a while and had gone to Afghanistan; he had taught Lucknow at the medical college; he had also been in private practice. At the time of his death, although he had not been very good at saving money, he had owned a fair amount of property – largely in the form of houses. Every five years or so he would uproot himself and move to another town in U.P. – Meerut, Bareilly, Lucknow, Agra. Wherever he lived he built a new house, but without disposing of the old ones. When he died, Malati’s mother went into what seemed like an irreversible depression, and remained in that state for two years.
Then she pulled herself together. She had a large family to take care of, and it was essential that she think of things in a practical way. She was a very simple, idealistic, upright woman, and she was concerned more with what was right than with what convenient or approved of or monetarily beneficial. It was in that light that she was determined to bring up her family.
And what a family! – almost all girls. The eldest was a proper tomboy, sixteen years old when her father died, and already married to a rural landlord’s son; she lived about twenty miles away from Agra in a huge house with twenty servants, lichi orchards, and endless fields, but even after her marriage she joined her sisters in Agra for months at a time. This daughter had been followed by two sons, but they had both died in childhood, one aged five, the other three. The boys had been followed by Malati herself, who was eight years younger than her sister. She also grew up as a sort of boy – though not by any means like the tomboy her sister was – for a variety of reasons connected with her infancy: the direct gaze in her unusual eyes, her boyish look, the fact that the boys’ clothes were at hand, the sadness that her parents had experienced at the death of their two sons. After Malati came three girls, one after another; then another boy; and then her father died.
Malati had therefore been brought up almost entirely among women; even her little brother had been like a little sister; he had been too young to be treated as anything different. (After a while, perhaps out of perplexity, he had gone the way of his brothers.) The girls grew up in an atmosphere where men came to be seen as exploitative and threatening; many of the men Malati came into contact with were precisely that. No one could touch the memory of her father. Malati was determined to become a doctor like him, and never allowed his instruments to rust. She intended one day to use them.
Who were these men? One was the cousin who did them out of many of the things that her father had collected and used, but which were lying in storage after his death. Malati’s mother had cleared out what she had seen as inessentials from their life. It was not necessary now to have two kitchens, one European and one Indian. The china and fine cutlery for western food was put away, together with a great deal of furniture, in a garage. The cousin came, got the keys from the grieving widow, told her he would manage matters, and cleaned out whatever had been stored. Malati’s mother never saw a rupee of the proceeds. ‘Well,’ she had said philosophically, ‘at least my sins have lessened.’