A Suitable Boy(48)

‘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’s 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 onto 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.