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The old hand smoothed the white sheet. Before Lala Banwari Lal was the dull green Godrej box with a stainless steel handle that he used for keeping cash and change. All his life he had sat before such a box, a wooden one in Anarkalli, an old-fashioned steel one in Karol Bagh. ‘After me, you can make what changes you like,’ he sighed.

Yashpal frowned at his brother. They owed everything to their father. If he wanted things to remain the same, they should humour him. His brother was not only supposed to keep this in mind, but to pass this message firmly on to his sons. They were the ones applying pressure, they wanted to gallop the minute they entered the market.

For the next year an uneasy truce reigned among the Banwari men. Vijay was still in college, but Ajay had words with his father almost every day. This meant that Pyare Lal was irritable in the shop while the strain made Yashpal irritable at home.

All day the Banwari Lal men nibbled something. Mid-morning snack, evening snack, feeling stressed snack, visitor snack. They worked long hours, six days a week. Their pleasures lay in discussing what to eat, in anticipation as the order was sent out, in the stimulation of the olfactory senses as the packets unfolded, in the camaraderie of sharing. They unwound over fresh, crisp kachoris with imli chutney, over chola-kulcha with sour onions and sliced green chillies, over savoury samosas and namak para, over fried potato lachchas, cashews, salty-sweet Bombay mixture. And they had to balance the hot and spicy with the sweet: laddoos, barfis, jalebis, and kulfis. In the heart of Karol Bagh, surrounded by eating places, it was mandatory they patronised the suppliers they lived and traded amongst.

It was in the shop one day that Lala Banwari Lal felt a leaden sensation up and down his right side. ‘Lie down, Baoji,’ was Yashpal’s response – his father must be tired, it was around Diwali, and the rush was as usual very heavy.

He lay down at the back. One hour later Yashpal discovered a man whose face was contorted, whose mouth had fallen open, who could not sit up, who needed to be rushed to the hospital, and who would never be the same. A stroke had grabbed Lala Banwari Lal and refused to treat him gently.

The family had to deal with two casualties: Lala Banwari Lal and his wife. ‘How could this happen to him?’ she wailed morning, noon, and night. She cried to the photograph of the Devi, circled adamantly with fresh marigolds every morning, cried to visitors, family, to all within her range of tears. Hush, hush, they responded, enclosing her protectively, Maji so old, frail, and sickly, the shock might harm her irreparably. Hush, hush, they philosophised, it is his karma, there is nothing we can do, but be brave for his sake. Hush, hush, they encouraged, everything will be all right.

When Lala Banwari Lal was brought out of the emergency, the family shifted their positions from the ICU doors to the side of his bed in the ward. Round the clock they alternated shop, home, hospital.

Ten days later he came home, twisted and refracted. The businessman and trader had vanished, as had the head of the family.

For fifty years Yashpal had been used to his father’s protective shadow. He now felt bereft and abandoned. Speechless, dependent, the state of the old man created a similar helplessness within him. He could not bear it. ‘How could this happen to one so good, where is the justice in the world?’ he mourned to Sona.

‘He was truly noble, never gave sorrow to anybody,’ she agreed. Her mind went back to her ten barren years. Ten years of insult and humiliation from his wife, while he had treated her as tenderly as his own. What a pity she hadn’t been his real daughter – being married into the family demanded restraint from her side, distance from his.

Angrily she thought, why couldn’t this have happened to her mother-in-law? If a stroke had to befall the family, they were well able to spare that evil-tongued crone.

Not knowing she was echoing her daughter-in-law’s sentiments, the old woman herself beseeched the gods to punish her instead of her husband a thousand times a day.

Every morning Yashpal sponged his father. Before setting out to work he stroked his head and said to the silent, staring man that soon he would get well, soon they would go to the shop together. His customers were missing him, they kept asking, asking. Nothing was the same without him. The old man could only silently follow him with his eyes as he left.

He was an invalid, though thankfully, in the interests of dignity, he could, with assistance, still use a bathroom. A storeroom was converted into a Western toilet, and the four grandsons acquired practice in humble service to their elders by helping him there. Such levellers are the cement in family architecture.

Meanwhile his wife went on moaning, her prayer beads permanently fastened to her withered hand: ‘When is he going to get better? These doctors know nothing. Take him to a vaid, a hakim, a homeopath. English medicine is very harmful, from the hospital only he has come so weak, cannot walk, cannot talk. They remove the cream from his milk, they do not put ghee on his rotis – they are starving him, how will he get strong?’

Out of pity some of the visitors tried to explain the concept of cholesterol and hardening of the arteries. But they soon gave up, as the family had long done. As she was hard of hearing, the answers had to be shouted, and by the tenth shout much of the original substance was lost.

Sona couldn’t stand the thin, relentless, high-pitched voice and became unpredictably deaf. Over the years the hatred she felt towards her mother-in-law had ebbed and flowed, but now, with the preferred in-law so ill, it was in full spate.

Her antagonism fed on ancient grievances towards Sushila as well. Upstairs and isolated, that woman led a carefree life, while she was mired in every trouble of her elders, her only support the marginal Asha.

Six months later Lala Banwari Lal suffered another massive stroke and died.

The patriarch was dead, and all connected to the family came to condole. Many cloth traders and relatives near and distant gathered at the Karol Bagh house to pay their respects to a man who had embodied all the virtues of the old-fashioned bania, honest, sincere, industrious, whose love had held the entire family together through trials and disagreements. During his entire life he had made no enemies, the many tears shed for him were ample testimony to that.

The family couldn’t believe he had gone so soon. He had not troubled them enough, in itself an indication that he was free from the cycle of death and rebirth, all his bad karma expiated during six months of suffering.

His wife wept ceaselessly. She had been twelve, he fifteen, when they married, and now, after sixty years, she was alone. ‘Why, why,’ she wailed, ‘why did he have to go before me? Why did I have this misfortune? Kill me,’ she begged her sons, ‘kill me so I may go to him.’

They smashed the glass bangles on her wrists; her scrawny, loose-fleshed arms were now bare of colour except for two thin gold bangles. They pulled off her toe rings, they unclasped her mangla sutra, they removed all the coloured saris from her wardrobe and left the white. She insisted this be done. The whole world should recognise her for what she was, a poor old widow, as insignificant and colourless as the clothes she wore.

A month passed. The gloom in the house persisted. Rupa visited her sister every day, privately grateful that at least her Nisha was spared the constant exhibition of Maji’s feelings.

‘I am seriously worried about Maji,’ confided Yashpal to his wife one such evening. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do to help her?’

‘I too am worried,’ repeated the wife dutifully.

‘Maybe Nisha should come back here.’

Sona’s hand stopped in mid-serve. ‘Come back here?’

‘Maji was so fond of her when she was little. She fed her, bathed her, put her to sleep in her own bed. Now she needs somebody.’

And her daughter’s tender youth was to sustain that woman’s crazy age. What Sona said was, ‘Remember how Nisha used to cry. That was why we sent her to Rupa’s. And she does so well in her studies there.’

It was a weak attempt.

‘Sonu,’ reproved Yashpal, ‘that was eleven years ago. The girl no longer cries, nor is there cause for her to be frightened now. She will want to help her grandmother. They were so close,’ he ruminated, finishing his food and belching gently, to his wife’s satisfaction.

‘Ajay and Vijay can spend more time with their grandmother.’

‘They are grown men. What will Maji do with them? Now you get Nisha back,’ said her husband, annoyed at having to insist so much.

That night, on the bed that had seen many wakeful moments, Sona decided to worry her wounds with thoughts of Rupa’s cause. What about her? She also had claims. The child was not a rubber ball to be bounced around to whomever felt the need. Surely Raju was enough to keep any grandmother happy.

XI

The daughter returns home

The next day saw Sona deeply divided. She had to bring Nisha home, but what about Rupa, and more importantly, what about Nisha’s studies? At least she had one child whose performance she could boast about, even though that child was a girl who, despite the overuse of her brains, was only going to get married.

Raju had continued to do badly. He didn’t show the early interest in the shop that had characterised Vicky’s escape from school. All he wanted to do was play cricket and wander around with the boys of the neighbourhood. Sona tried to keep the boy separate from his cousins, she felt they encouraged him in his delinquency, but it was no use.

‘Leave me, Mummy, all this talk of studies makes my life hell. What do I care if I never finish school? Vicky didn’t.’

‘Vicky is at least tenth-class pass. And his wife is from the gullies of Bareilly. Good girls today want at least a BA.’

‘I don’t want to marry,’ said fourteen-year-old Raju rebelliously.

Sona sighed, stroked Raju’s head, and pressed his face against her chest. ‘You say that now, beta, but when she comes you will forget your mother.’

‘Please, Mummy,’ protested the son.

‘What do you know of a mother’s heart? For years I sacrificed for you.’

This oft-repeated statement had still not lost the capacity to make Raju uneasy. He struggled against his mother’s soft bosom, a place he had once liked to nestle in.

‘Your sister shines in school, why can’t you?’ continued Sona.

‘It’s no use. I hate studies, my brain dries up. Nisha is a girl, she has nothing better to do than sit around and read.’

Now, thought Sona, the sister might prove to be a good influence on the brother. Certainly the boy needed it: Nisha was in the eleventh, Raju in the ninth, and their board exams were coming next year.

She would have to break the news to Rupa, though. Of course they were all one family and the two houses were just a ten-minute rickshaw drive apart – one, two, three, four, five rupees away, as the years went by and prices rose.

Rupa came over as usual with Nisha that Friday. While Nisha retired with her book to the angan, Rupa, armed with her knitting, sat cross-legged with her sister on the bed.

‘How is it now?’ she whispered, indicating with her eyes the grief-stricken widow, stinking faintly but permanently of urine.

Sona’s face twitched. ‘The same,’ she murmured.

‘Poor Didi,’ murmured Rupa back.

Soon Rupa would be the one distressed, and it would be her mother-in-law’s fault, thought Sona, fresh hatred surging through well-worn tracks within her.

‘
He
is very worried about his mother.’

‘His mother, after all.’

‘He doesn’t believe she starts groaning ten times louder when he is here. Tired from the shop, he comes, missing Baoji, and then she starts. Her breathlessness, her heart, her joints, her stomach, her stools, her wind, her gripes, her gas, her pains, her blackouts – is there anything that happens to her that she does not force him to worry about? What can
he
do? Is
he
a doctor? She is sucking his life, you can see how he has aged. Only fifty, and looks a hundred. I went to the shop the other day, and a client thought I was his daughter!’

Pleasure and pain were mixed in this statement. Nobody likes having a husband mistaken for a father, though one might register the compliment to oneself.

Sona’s looks were Rupa’s cross and she did not respond now. A heartbeat pause before Sona continued. ‘Now he has got it into his head that it will make his mother happy to have Nisha back.’

This time the pause lasted several heartbeats.

‘She is yours, Didi,’ said Rupa, staring hard at her knitting, willing her hands not to slow down, or the tightness in her throat to become a sob.

‘Mine, yours, Roop – our daughter.’

Not really, when it came to the crunch, not really. What were an aunt’s rights? Could she say, I won’t give her to you, she is mine. Her husband was right, advising her not to lavish so much love on a niece-on-loan. But then her husband was a thinker, he understood the world, she was just a simple woman.

‘What about her studies?’ she asked now. ‘Her uncle sits with her every evening. And during exam time you should see how carefully he goes through her course.’

This was an old story, and with her other troubles Sona could not give such a statement the attention it required.

‘He says a good degree gives you something to fall back on, should you be forced to stand on your own two feet,’ continued Rupa.

‘I know Bhai Sahib is full of qualities,’ said Sona impatiently, ‘but if something happens, God forbid, thoo-thoo (Sona spat lightly on the floor to ward off the evil eye), she has her family, her brothers, her aunt and uncle. What is the need to blacken your face looking for a job, as though you had no one to protect you? Might as well live on the streets.’

‘Times are different now, Didi. You mean to say all working women have no one to call their own?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Sona irritably, rolling up her knitting, now an inch longer. ‘We are old-fashioned people. Tradition is strong with us. So is duty.’

And in the spirit of duty Nisha was transported back to her parents’ house.

Leaving two mourning people in a house that screamed her loss. No noise, no chatter, no singing, no comfort in seeing the girl study, eat, sleep, dress, silent husband and wife with background TV. Rupa was afraid to tell her husband how she felt. His I-told-you-so would prove his prescience and her stupidity.