The garden was looking a bit dry, despite the fact that it had been watered a couple of days previously; but a gul-mohur tree was in bloom: its petals were almost scarlet, rather than the usual red-orange. Everything, Savita thought, appeared more intense in the garden at Prem Nivas. It was almost as if the plants understood that their mistress, though she would not overtly complain about a weak performance, would not be happy with less than their best.
The head gardener Gajraj and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had been at loggerheads for a few days now. They were agreed upon what cuttings to propagate, which varieties to select for seed collection, which shrubs to prune, and when to transplant the small chrysanthemum plants to larger pots. But ever since the ground had begun to be prepared for the sowing of new lawns, an apparently irreconcilable difference had emerged.
This year, as an experiment, Mrs Mahesh Kapoor proposed that a part of the lawn be left unlevelled before sowing. This had struck the mali as being eccentric in the extreme, and utterly at variance with Mrs Mahesh Kapoor’s usual instructions. He complained that it would be impossible to water the lawn properly, that mowing it would be difficult, that muddy puddles would form in the monsoons and the winter rains, that the garden would be infested with pond-herons feeding on water-beetles and other insects, and that the Flower Show Judges’ Committee would see the lack of evenness as a sign of lack of balance – aesthetically speaking, of course.
Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had replied that she had only proposed an unevenness for the side lawn, not the front lawn; that the unevenness that she proposed was slight; that he could water the higher parts with a hose; that the small proportion of the mowing that proved difficult for the grand, blunt lawnmower dragged by the Public Works Department’s placid white bullock could be done with a small foreign-made lawnmower that she would borrow from a friend; that the Flower Show Judges’ Committee might look at the garden for an hour in February but that it gave her pleasure all the year round; that level had nothing to do with balance; and, finally, that it was precisely because of the puddles and the pond-herons that she had proposed the experiment.
One day in late December, a couple of months after Savita’s wedding, when the honey-scented harsingar had still been in blossom, when the roses were in their first full flush, when the sweet alyssum and sweet william had begun to bloom, when those beds of feathery-leafed larkspur that the partridges had not gobbled down almost to the root were doing their best to recover in front of the tall ranks of equally feathery-leafed but untempting cosmos, there had been a tremendous, almost torrential rainstorm. It had been gloomy, gusty and cold, and there had been no sun for two days, but the garden had been full of birds: pond-herons, partridges, mynas, small puffed-up grey babblers in their chattering groups of seven, hoopoes and parakeets in a combination that reminded her of the colours of the Congress flag, a pair of red-wattled lapwings, and a couple of vultures, flying with huge twigs in their mouths to the neem tree. Despite their heroism in the Ramayana, Mrs Mahesh Kapoor had never been able to reconcile herself to vultures. But what had truly delighted her had been the three plump, dowdy pond-herons, each standing near a separate small pool, almost entirely motionless as they gazed at the water, taking a careful minute over every step they made, and thoroughly content with the squelchiness of their environment. But the pools on the level lawn had quickly dried up when the sun had emerged. Mrs Mahesh Kapoor wanted to offer the hospitality of her lawn to a few more pond-herons this year, and she did not want to leave matters to chance.
All this she explained to her daughter-in-law, gasping a little as she spoke because of her allergy to neem blossoms. Savita reflected that Mrs Mahesh Kapoor looked a bit like a pond-heron herself. Drab, earthy-brown, dumpy unlike the rest of the species, inelegant, hunched-up but alert, and endlessly patient, she was capable of suddenly flashing a brilliant white wing as she rose up in flight.
Savita was amused by her analogy, and began to smile. But Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, though she smiled in response, did not attempt to find out what Savita was so happy about.
How unlike Ma she is, thought Savita to herself as the two continued to walk around the garden. She could see resemblances between Mrs Mahesh Kapoor and Pran, and an obvious physical resemblance between her and the more animated Veena. But how she could have produced such a son as Maan was still to Savita a matter of amusement and amazement.
3.17
THE next morning Mrs Rupa Mehra, old Mrs Tandon and Mrs Mahesh Kapoor met in Prem Nivas for a chat. It was fitting that the kind and gentle Mrs Mahesh Kapoor should have acted as host. She was the samdhin – the ‘co-mother-in-law’ – of both of the others, the link in the chain. Besides, she was the only one whose own husband was still living, the only one who was still mistress in her own house.