Lata looked back on her wish to elope with Kabir with a kind of amazement, even as she could not shake off her feelings for him. But where would these feelings lead? A gradual, stable attraction such as Savita’s for Pran – was this not the best thing for her, and for the family, and for any children that she might have?
Each day at the rehearsal she feared and hoped that Kabir would come up to her to say something or do something that would begin to unravel once again the unfamiliar, too-solid fabric that she had woven – or that had been woven – around her. But rehearsals passed, and visiting hours came, and matters remained as unspoken and unresolved as ever.
Plenty of people came in to look at the baby: Imtiaz, Firoz, Maan, Bhaskar, old Mrs Tandon, Kedarnath, Veena, the Nawab Sahib himself, Malati, Mr and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, Mr Shastri (bearing a lawbook he had promised Savita), Dr Kishen Chand Seth and Parvati, and many others, including a troop of Rudhia relatives whom Savita did not know. Clearly, the baby had been born not to a couple but to a clan. Dozens of people cooed above her (some acclaiming her looks, others deprecating her sex) and great exception was taken to any proprietary instincts displayed by the mother. Savita, imagining that she had certain special rights to the baby, attempted to protect her from the mist of appreciative droplets that formed a continuous haze around her head for two days. But she gave up at last, and accepted that the Kapoors of Rudhia and Brahmpur had the right to welcome in their own way this freshly-minted member of their tribe. She wondered what her brother Arun would have made of the Rudhia relatives. Lata had dispatched a telegram to Calcutta, but so far nothing had been heard from that branch of the Mehras.
13.13
‘NO, really, Didi – I’m enjoying it. It’s no bother at all. I like reading things I don’t understand sometimes.’
‘You’re strange,’ said Savita, smiling.
‘Yes. Well, as long as I know they do actually make sense.’
‘Would you hold her for a while?’
Lata put the book on tort down, went over to Savita, and took over the baby, who smiled at her for a while and then went off to sleep.
She rocked the baby, who appeared to be quite content in her arms.
‘Now what’s all this, baby?’ said Lata. ‘What’s all this now? Wake up a little and speak to us, speak to your Lata Masi. When I’m awake you go off to sleep, when I’m asleep you wake up, let’s do things straight for a change, shall we, this won’t do at all, will it, will it now?’
She moved the baby from one arm to the other surprisingly skilfully, cradling her head all the while.
‘What do you think about my studying law?’ said Savita. ‘Do you think I have the temperament for it? Savita Mehra, Government Counsel; Savita Mehra, Senior Advocate; good heavens, I forgot for a moment I’m a Kapoor. Savita Kapoor, Advocate-General; Mrs Justice Savita Kapoor. Will I be called “My Lord” or “My lady”?’
‘Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched,’ said Lata, laughing.
‘But they might never get hatched,’ said Savita. ‘I may as well count them now. Ma, you know, doesn’t think law is such a bad idea. She feels that if she had had a profession it might have helped.’
‘Oh, nothing’s going to happen to Pran,’ said Lata, smiling at the baby. ‘Is it, now? Nothing’s going to happen to Papa, nothing, nothing, nothing. He will play his silly, silly April fool jokes for many, many years to come. Do you know, you can actually feel her pulse through her head?’
‘How amazing!’ said Savita. ‘It’s going to be very difficult for me to get used to being slim again. When you’re pregnant and bulge, you are popular with all the cats on the university campus, and people tell you intimate things about themselves.’
Lata crinkled her nose. ‘But what if we don’t want to hear intimate things?’ she inquired of the baby. ‘What if we are quite happy to paddle our own canoe in a pleasant little backwater – and are not interested in the Niagara Falls and the Barsaat Mahal?’
Savita was quiet for a few moments, then she said: ‘OK, I’ll take her back now. And you can read to me a bit more. What’s that book?’
‘Twelfth Night.’
‘No, the other one – the one with the green and white cover.’
‘Contemporary Verse,’ murmured Lata, blushing for some unaccountable reason.
‘Oh, read me some of that,’ said Savita. ‘Ma thinks poetry is good for me. Soothing. Calming.
It was a summer evening,
Old Caspar’s work was done.’