‘A job?’ questioned Mr Bhagwandas, as if he considered the matter. Sham Pumnani nodded and looked down from a superior height upon Mr Bhagwandas’ head. He noticed the encroachment of white at the base of each ebony wave, the plump diamond-ringed hands, the dapper feet. He tried to smile, to fight down the anger that rose within him.
‘In my trade,’ answered Mr Bhagwandas, ‘our first requirement is trust. That requirement you cannot fulfil, since now you are known as a thief.’
‘I am not a thief—’ Sham began, there was a hot, choking feeling within him. Mr Bhagwandas speared him with a look. The sun beat down upon them before the entrance of the building.
‘But that is now your reputation. It will stick like the tail on a dog. I cannot help you.’ Mr Bhagwandas turned into Sadhbela, swallowed by its dinginess. In a corner of the courtyard, an old woman from one of the back tenements had spread a sheet. From an aluminium pot held on her hip, she ladled out spoonfuls of thin tapioca to dry in the sun to a crisp. She squinted up at Sham, a grandchild played at her feet. He glared at her and turned out of the gate. He crossed the road to sit upon a low wall opposite Sadhbela; behind him was the beach and the sea. He bought some roasted gram from a vendor and settled down to eat. On the beach a beggar squatted, defecating, nearby another fanned a fire beneath a pan of tea. Some children surrounded the corpse of a dog washed up on the tide, and poked at it with a stick.
Across the road the windows of Sadhbela looked down like multiple eyes upon him. His own home was on the seventh and top floor. It did not face the sea, but looked into a dark inner well of the building, white-washed by pigeon droppings. The outer façade of Sadhbela was little cleaner than its inner walls. It was weathered by brine and humidity to a blotched and blackened appeaarance. The residents were conditioned to this grime; they saw it as stability, its layers gave them history. The broken guttering of the fifth floor was from the time Mr Watumal was flooded by a clogged pipe in a record monsoon. Everyone appeared to help in the crisis, sweeping the flood down the lift shaft. The burn on the ceiling of the entrance hall was where Mr Murjani’s son, at the age of four, had let off a Divali firecracker near an open drum of kerosene, and nearly killed himself. The building was streaked by remembrance. The patina of age was a comfort, nobody noticed the dirt.
He had returned from Japan two days ago, and already Sadhbela had reclaimed him more securely than before. Sham gazed at the building in fury. All the small balconies were strung with washing; some had plants in old cooking-oil tins, and rusted trunks crammed upon them. Many people had glassed-in their balconies, incorporating the extra space into the room behind. But, except for Mr Murjani’s apartment and Dada Lokumal’s, these glassed-in additions had washing lines or metal cupboards pushed up close against them still. Only Mr Murjani’s home, which stretched the entire front of the seventh floor, stood out, dominating the top of the building. Sham gazed at the wealth of Mr Murjani’s plate glass, agleam in the sun, and thought of the splendours behind. Of the chandeliers, reflective of sunlight and the movement of waves, of the soft fitted carpets and the crystal chairs from a Maharajah’s palace, worth millions of rupees. And he thought of his own home on the same floor, at the back of the lift shaft, where a half-hearted light filtered through the small windows, netted against large insects. In those rooms now, his father lay dying. He finished the last of the gram and got up to cross the road again.
His mother, Rekha, opened the door and smiled at his return, but Meena frowned, looking up from a magazine, as he entered the room.
‘So he is back,’ she said. ‘For food he has returned. Where have you been? Loafing about as usual?’
‘You will eat now, son?’ Rekha asked, ignoring her daughter’s scorn. Meena shrugged and returned her attention to a film magazine. At her feet her two children played five-stones. She had come home for the day on a visit; she was the eldest of Sham’s sisters. Behind her, Lakshmi massaged old Chachi’s short legs, stretched out beneath a loose tunic in a pair of striped pyjamas. Chachi pulled her veil over her face as soon as Sham entered the room. She had not spoken to him directly yet, to show her disapproval. She was his father’s widowed sister, and the eldest in the family; her anger could not be ignored. From a corner Padma giggled nervously. Veena looked up from where she was trimming lemon rinds, received that morning in charity from Mrs Bhagwandas, to make into pickles.
‘Your father is awake. See him first before you eat,’ Rekha urged. She took Sham’s hand and led him behind a curtained screen, pulling it back with a smile of encouragement. The shadow of a moustache stretched over her lips, a dimple puckered her cheek. Sham tried to imagine her as a young girl, but his mind could not manage the feat. She appeared to have been always as old and tired as his father.
Behind the screen, his father still lay as he had for some months, since a stroke half-paralysed him. Rekha bent towards him, and the old man turned his head. His skin was thin and papery, the bones beneath clearly visible. His face was lopsided, one part dead and slack, the other twisted grotesquely with life. Spittle dribbled from his mouth, and Rekha wiped it with a muslin cloth. The old man stirred, his face began to jerk and at last some sounds issued up. Sham stepped forward, a lump in his throat. His father raised a hand, catching Sham’s fingertips. His voice was slurred.
‘You have come back from Japan on holiday? They are pleased with you, son, in that office? Any promotion yet?’ He had said the same thing the day before. Beneath distorted words there was still the old tone of whining insistence Sham remembered hearing all his life. The lump in his throat hardened, from distress into resentment. The old man grimaced, revealing long yellow teeth.
The day before his mother had ordered, ‘You will tell him you are here on holiday. God willing, he will never know the real shame.’ Beside him now she nodded and Sham stepped back into the room, relieved to get away. His heart was beating fast. Chachi drew her veil over her face again, twitching her sharp, thin nose, and gave an angry snort. Veena and Padma, his younger sisters, giggled. Meena looked up from her magazine and frowned.
‘You are the head of the family now. From somewhere you must get money,’ she hissed. ‘How is Ama to live now you have returned as a thief? Did she raise you for this shame?’
‘Where can I get money from?’ he protested, anger pumping through him. ‘I have nothing.’ He turned his head away. He understood his responsibility; he was the only surviving son. One brother had been killed in a bus accident, two more had died in childhood.
‘Why should you have anything?’ Meena scoffed. ‘When people go to foreign countries they only learn to spend money. They become selfish. They forget their own people at home, who must go without this and that just to send their children to school. There are also some who cannot eat, who have no money for medicines.’ She looked at the screen about their father’s bed.
He leaned forward. ‘Is your head made of wood? How many times must I tell you that I was just a junior in the business there, and my salary was low. I sent all I could.’
She replied cockily; even in childhood she had never let him get the better of her. ‘Only shouting, shouting. How to give respect to elders you have also forgotten, there in Japan. Since you returned you have only once touched Chachi’s feet in respect.’ Chachi sniffed in agreement behind her veil.
Anger made him dizzy. ‘Do you think I am really a thief, that I wanted deliberately to steal? It was you who forced me to it. All of you.’ He turned, spitting out the words at last.
It had begun soon after he arrived in Japan. Letters and more letters. From sisters, aunts and cousins, from his father and his mother, filled with the memory of all he had escaped. Every letter asked for money, but each small amount he sent back only fuelled further demands. Lists of commodities and appliances were asked for, help for sickness, help for schooling. When his father had a stroke the letters hung upon him, heavy as a weight. Money was needed for medicine and doctors. He asked his employer for a loan and was refused. Desperation had suffused him.
At first it had been small amounts of cash he took, collecting slowly until he had enough to send to his family. No one seemed to notice. Then his mother’s letter, describing his father’s paralysis, stained with tearmarks, recalling events of his childhood, made him take a larger amount. This was soon missed and traced to him.
‘You forced me to do it,’ he repeated. Padma and Veena clung together; Lakshmi stood transfixed with an expression that cut him deeply. He had no wish to hurt Lakshmi, she was his favourite sister. She started forward and laid a hand on his arm.
‘Calm yourself,’ she whispered. ‘Father will hear.’ But Meena was already off again, her eyes blazing.
‘What lies you tell. What you earned in Japan in a month would keep us here for a year. You have spent it all, on drinking, on gambling, on bad women. In Foreign these are the evil things that take men’s money and corrupt them. I know. I have read about it in magazines,’ Meena yelled.
Sham raised his arm to strike her, but Lakshmi pulled him off. He saw her face, wet with tears, and sat down on the floor, his head in his hands.
‘There was no money for medicines. He would already be dead without all that you sent,’ Lakshmi comforted. ‘For such reasons how can anybody be called a thief?’
‘I did not ask you for anything,’ Padma said, kneeling beside him.
‘I was lucky just to be sacked and sent back here,’ Sham replied in a low voice. Everyone had remarked on the goodness of his employer in this respect.
After three years away, he had been catapulted back to India in a way he had never dreamed of. There was no hiding the shame; his employer was a cousin of Mr Murjani. Before he returned the whole building knew the reason he was back. What work would he find to keep not only himself, but the crowd of them in this room? And Lakshmi was now eighteen and must be married soon. Where would he find the money for a dowry? Who would marry her if he did not? He had had no reliable job, even before he went to Japan. With a B.A. degree he had worked as a scribe and a typist, writing letters for the illiterate on a roadside stall. What good, he had wondered then, was his father’s brave talk of education? And yet, without this education, Mr Murjani would not have invited Sham into his home one evening, three years ago.
He had eaten the savouries Mrs Murjani offered with a drink, and absorbed as discreetly as he could the effect of silken drapes and banks of glinting crystal. He had left in a daze, and described the place to his father. He told him of the possibility of a job with Mr Murjani’s cousin, a trader settled in Japan, who had asked for a reliable Indian boy to be found, to train for an executive post in his export office in Osaka.
His father did not appear impressed. A sad look settled on his face, a look Sham knew well, called up at talk of easy money or the lowering of men’s mind’s.
‘In the past young men left the villages for work in the towns. Now they leave our India for work abroad,’ sighed Kishin Pumnani.
‘Many have made a fortune,’ Sham said. ‘I shall live like the Murjanis one day.’ His father had looked up sharply. The hot feelings in Sham danced about. He made an effort to control his anger.
‘Do not compare yourself with them. They are people of money, we are people of learning.’ Kishin Pumnani’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, like a cork in his long thin throat. ‘Be content with a decent life and with honest, well-earned money. That has always been my rule.’ He frowned in concern, seeing his son slipping already into the Murjanis’ fat world.
The school he had run in Sind before Partition came suddenly into Kishin’s mind, as he listened to Sham. He saw again its great compound filled with boisterous boys, kicking balls and climbing trees. The school was a group of low buildings, verandahs entwined with flowering creeper. He saw again the infant Murli Murjani running about in shorts, and the eldest of the Bhagwandas boys fighting with Lokumal’s youngest brother, later murdered in Lokumal’s garden. Sind Model High School. A blue board emblazoned the words in white, above the porch of the school. They had lived well in those days, each rupee earned by the power of the mind. He had taken only enough in salary to live with befitting dignity, everything else was ploughed back into the school, to provide the best. He had been able to employ an Englishman, a Mr Bigglesby, a sickly, bony, sallow-skinned man, but with a brain that outstripped his appearance. He had improved the standard of all modern subjects, while Kishin had maintained the quality of those subjects indigenous to Sind, and dearest to his heart. No boy left his school without fluent knowledge of his language, history and literature. ‘We put more of Sind into Sindhis,’ was Sind Model High School’s motto. It had not served Kishin well in Bombay.
He had taught many of Sadhbela’s residents, and they had approached him in those far-off days with an awe that vanished in Bombay. In this city of exile, in circumstances he refused to acknowledge as permanent, waiting always for a return to normal, he had not broken his back to educate Sham for him to earn suspect Bhaibund money. But neither had he urged Sham towards a B.A. to be a scribe for the illiterate, on a pavement stall. The boy had tried hard for a good job, he was not to be blamed. Luck was against him, against all Pumnanis. Kishin sighed, resigned now to any fate. At least Bhaibund money would provide dowries for the youngest girls. He should not oppose the boy.
A decent life? Honest money? Sham looked at his father in disbelief. What decent life had they ever lived, and when had there been money, honest or not? He had no memory of Sind, he had been born in Bombay. Those days of plenty recalled by his father appeared the stuff of fairy tales, so distant were they from the familiarities of Sadhbela.
‘Times were bad,’ Kishin answered, as if reading Sham’s thoughts while removing his glasses, squinting down at them out of rheumy eyes, cleaning them with a handkerchief. ‘This was our destiny. But God has been good. When we needed he provided. You have all been educated. I do not ask more.’
Sham thought of the glitter beyond the Murjanis’ door, the imported cars and foreign travel, the wasted luxuries crammed upon shelves, the throwing away of food for no more than the whim of taste, and felt angry again.
‘Mr Murjani arrived penniless in Bombay, and look at him now,’ Sham insisted.
‘How many could do what he did? In his very blood there is money. In ours there is learning. Our respect in the world is as great as his,’ Kishin answered.
‘That kind of money is power,’ Sham mumbled.
‘Cease this line of thinking. It is corrupting,’ Kishin Pumnani ordered.
Yet his father had cried when it was confirmed that Sham had the job in Japan. His mother had cried too, in a different way from nowadays. She produced a plate of sweetmeats and fed him forcibly. ‘Eat son, eat,’ she had said, and pushed the sweet crumbs between his teeth, laughing and pushing the more he pulled his head away. And his father, emaciated and stooped, diminishing beneath a large bony head, had returned from tutoring wealthy children and banged some mathematics books down on the table. ‘Well done, sir. Well done,’ he repeated, slapping Sham’s back. Then immediately the building knew, for his mother rushed out to tell Gopal the liftman, and Gopal told them all.
*
Behind the screen, straightening the covers on her husband’s bed, Rekha listened to the quarrelling in the room beyond. Even as children, Meena and Sham always fought. Money, money, money. The word passed again and again through the screen. Before that long ago, terrible flight to Bombay, the word held little meaning for her. It was something taken for granted, like the glass of milk, thick and frothing, fresh from their own cow, that as a child had always waited with her breakfast. Now the word produced in her a leaden feeling, lived with like a chronic illness. The pain never left her and had drawn lines of suffering and resignation in her face. Sometimes now, catching sight of herself in a mirror, she stared at the elderly, white-haired woman, cheeks pouched and soft, eyes drooping sadly, and wondered at the change.
Kishin gave a groan, indicating the need to turn on his side. She put her arms about him, pulling the slack, bony weight of him forwards until he was comfortable. His body felt to her now like those chickens, plucked and bare, that the school cook had flung down, one after another, on to the kitchen table in preparation for lunch at Sind Model High School. They lay in an anaemic pile of flesh, all stringy muscle and poking bones beneath a thin, loose layer of skin. And this was now her Kishin.
Their marriage had not been arranged. She had loved him from the beginning, and stood fast through all opposition. The suitability of a match between their families had never been questioned. Both were from Sukkur, both intellectual Amil peoples of equivalent and substantial financial standing; marriages between the families had been made before.
Kishin was teaching in a college when she met him. She was a student in his class; her father believed in the education of women. Kishin’s wife of two years had recently killed herself and their new baby, in a bout of insanity. For all the brilliance of his lecturing, he had a haggard, haunted look. She found herself drawn immediately to him. Soon, their mutual feelings were apparent to everyone. The fourteen-year age gap was insurmountable, said the elders, but more than this, it was certain that a man whose wife had hung herself must have a curse upon him. He would blight any life he touched. No one would consider the match. They were forced to elope, and lived their first year together in scandalous disgrace. Then Kishin’s father died, principal of Sind Model High School, and willed the premises to his son. They had moved in, already with a first child, and things went smoothly from then on.
She remembered the sound of the bell echoing across the school compound, and the rush of boys to their lunch; always hungry, always noisy, always with grazed knees or splinters in their fingers. She smiled at the memory, at the happiness then that had filled her days, between the boys, between her own babies, between the tending and the teaching and the instructing of servants.
Then, and later, there seemed to be always a baby on the way. She bore them easily and they never thought to stop them. ‘Children are from God,’ Kishin always said. Later, she wondered how to stop them. It was said to be possible by modern ways, but the process appeared mysterious, its knowledge removed from her reach. And Kishin still said, ‘Children are from God,’ even without food to feed them.
She had given birth to Anu, her fifth child, on a refugee train out of Karachi. They left the school quietly one night. It had already been closed some weeks, because of the tense situation. Everyone was leaving, and they did not wish to flee in terror before a mob as Lokumal had. At that time they felt sure of soon returning, to open the school again. Their children marched in a crocodile, as if off to a picnic, each with a satchel on its back. At the bend in the road she had turned to look back at the school. The white walls were strangely luminous in the moonlight, and the old carved chair before their quarters lustrous on the verandah. Her mind made a quick inventory of their spacious, well furnished rooms; the covers on the bed she had twitched neatly into place before leaving, the silver bowls and trays hidden in bins of grain, the tea set of English bone china, recently bought from Mr Watumal, that she had stacked in a chest and pushed into a cupboard beneath the stairs. Soon she would return to retrieve these things. She tried not to notice, as she turned away, the heaviness of her heart. She placed a hand on her swollen belly and blamed the child for such feelings.
They were forced to go further than intended, to think of distances and trains. She had given thanks then for a talent of easy birthing, holding Anu in her arms, in a swaying railway carriage. In another coach a woman died as her child emerged feet first. Their journey had eventually ended in Bombay on the advice of Lokumal, whom they had met again in a soup kitchen queue in Delhi. They had arrived in Bombay without their eldest son, eight-year-old Haresh, who had died of a fever as they reached Nasik. Even now that memory brought tears. Rekha bit her lips and wiped a damp cloth over Kishin’s brow.
Above the bed there hung a photo of Kishin, taken soon after reaching Bombay. He stood proud and tall, in spite of recent trauma, hope for the future still at full tide. But soon Kishin no longer looked as in the photograph. Gradually flesh was whittled away, his shoulders stooped, his expression changed and his plump cheeks vanished, throwing his nose into greater prominence.
‘Ssh,’ Rekha soothed, patting his back as he moaned again. Once more Meena’s loud voice disturbed her thoughts. Anger rose suddenly in her and she pushed back the screen, tears welling into her eyes again.
‘Why please are you disturbing your father with quarrels? Brothers and sisters should love, not quarrel.’
Meena drew back sulkily before her mother’s anger. Sham sat with his head in his hands. Rekha stared at him sadly. She had already cried out her disappointment; she had forgiven him. Of shame and facing neighbours she had a lifetime of experience. Things passed; soon a new scandal appeared to take precedence and people forgot. So it would be with Sham. He would find work eventually. He was back with them safely; nothing else mattered. She went into the kitchen and returned with a plate of rice and a bowl of thin watery dal.
‘Eat, son, eat now.’ She put the plate before him. ‘It is late; you are hungry. Meena, bring that mango chutney Mrs Hathiramani has made for us. Give some to your brother.’
Meena glared at her mother but said nothing and fetched the chutney, banging the jar down on the table before Sham.
‘Why are you so angry, daughter?’ Rekha asked. ‘He must eat. We must keep him strong. He will find work, he will give us money soon.’
‘He knows only how to bring shame upon us. I cannot face my husband’s family.’ Meena drew herself up, thrusting out ample breasts. ‘You know how they are in that house, how I suffer.’ Her eyes flashed, the hoops of her earrings swung about.
‘Hush,’ said Rekha, her eyes wet again. The end of her cotton sari seemed permanently damp from wiping tears. ‘Shall I make a paratha for you, son? A little pure ghee is left.’
‘The last ghee our Ama will give to you,’ Meena screamed. ‘What a mother’s heart is for her son. Not for a daughter would she give the last ghee.’
‘Be quiet. Hold your tongue.’ Rekha raised her voice, but Meena would not be stopped.
‘From Japan he did not send me even one electrical appliance.’ Meena gave a sob, remembering the derision of her husband’s family, when the modern gadgets she had boasted her brother would send from Japan never came. Even a single such prestigious, foreign-made acquisition would have made all the difference to her life amongst the women of the family.
Rekha disappeared again behind the screen. Meena sat down and ignored her brother. Her children returned to their five-stones.
Lakshmi resumed massaging Chachi’s legs, and watched Padma and Veena begin to collect up papads, laid out that morning in a patch of sun, to rid them of mould and pests. The girls brushed each wafer with a cloth before putting them back in a box. Old Chachi’s legs, misshapen by arthritis, had the feel of knotty twigs below the swollen knees, and slack lumpy pillows above. Lakshmi’s fingertips gripped the line of Chachi’s shin, pressing and releasing in a steady rhythm, just as the old woman liked. The worn striped cotton of Chachi’s pyjama was frayed at the hem, the texture of her chiffon scarf had thickened with many washings, and aged to the same indeterminate colour as her long loose tunic, shapeless over shapeless breasts. She groaned with pleasure on her string bed, under Lakshmi’s fingers.
Lakshmi could not remember a time without Chachi, who had lived with them in Sadhbela long before she was born. Chachi’s husband had died of pneumonia on the platform of a Karachi railway station, during the flight from Sukkur. She had heard many times how Chachi and her two grown daughters, and Ama and Papa and their small children, had all camped about the invalid on the platform, missing trains to freedom, unable to move him or leave him. Passing doctors, transient refugees themselves, came to look and give opinions, but medicines were unavailable. Soon he died, and when at last they chugged onwards, not knowing if Muslim mobs would stop the train and knife them, Ama had given birth on the floor of the carriage to Anu. And before reaching Bombay had lost her eldest son, Haresh. Birth and death had overshadowed the journey, but without the violence most expected at that time.
In Bombay, Papa had eventually found husbands for Chachi’s marriageable daughters. It had not been easy. The whispered network by which suitable candidates were found, verified and matched, had been destroyed in the chaos. Papa had to depend upon his own judgement of boys whose families he knew nothing of. Neither marriage in consequence was successful, but Papa was rid of the burden of his nieces, and left only with his widowed sister. Lakshmi revolved the ball of her thumb about the old woman’s ankle. Sham ate silently at the table, eyes on his plate. Meena maintained an icy silence, immersed again in a magazine.
Whatever the reason for his return, Lakshmi was glad Sham was back. She did not care about the shame. He was back and everything now would be all right; he would find a way. Awake at night between Padma and Veena, she listened to Sham’s restless breathing and understood the shame, and his anxiety for the future; a future that must now include all of them in this room.
And sooner or later, whether they wished it or not, she and Padma and Veena would, one by one, weigh heavily amongst those anxieties that disturbed his nights. He would be pressured to think of marriages for them. There was no other way. She had dreamed once of going to college and taking a degree, of being a doctor or a teacher like her father, who said she was the brightest of his many girls. His illness had ended all hope of college, and even the means by which to take a typing course. Straight out of school, she could not work like Meena or Anu or her other sisters, who had attained some basic job qualification. As soon as they could the family would be forced to marry her off, for her own good and theirs.
Sometimes she wondered what it would be like in that unknown house of the future, with the unknown man she would call husband. Her heart beat in a confusion of emotion, like the bird she had caught as a child with Sham. She remembered the feel of its claws on her flesh, the bony, feathery movement of it within the cage of her hands, the flutter of its pulse. She must not be fussy like the Watumal girls, for then offers would come and go and pass her by, leaving her a burden on them all. She must accept the first candidate produced, it was what was expected of her. Already, she knew, Ama had mentioned the matter to Mrs Hathiramani and Mrs Bhagwandas. Sooner or later they would return with a reply. She must ready herself, thought Lakshmi, it would not be long. Her heart began to beat again. She pressed down hard upon Chachi’s thick knees, the old woman groaned with pleasure.
Sham concentrated on his food, listening to his mother tend his father behind the screen. There was the slop of water in an enamel bowl, and its running back from a squeezed-out cloth. The smell of antiseptic came to him strongly over his rice and pickles. When he had finished eating, he went to sit on his bed, his back to them all.
He lay down, arms crossed behind his head. Above him on the ceiling, mould, grime and grease made a colour of its own. His life had been spent contemplating its peeling patterns and cracks. Once there had been twelve of them crammed into these small rooms, nine children, Chachi and the parents. On the floor and a couple of beds, they had doubled up in sleep each night, head to toe, a roomful of bodies, like an army slain. The close human smell was suffocating under one fan in the hot weather, the small netted windows gave little ventilation. At these times he had dreamed only of getting away; escape from his home was the recurring fantasy of his childhood.
He had slept on this bed first with his brothers. The girls had not been allowed the privilege of the bed unless they were ill; they slept on the floor. The only privacy his parents had was an old sari pegged up on a washing line around their bed. The screen was new and had come in his absence, since his father was ill. The old sari had been no barrier to the noises that so often issued from behind it, that the listening children pretended not to hear. And afterwards had come Lakshmi and Padma and Veena, and two more born before their time. His thoughts were disturbed by his father’s coughing, and resentment flooded him again. Why make children when you could not afford to keep them? Other men after the chaos of Partition had learned to make money again. Why not his father? Why had he settled so quickly for his meagre living, of coaching the children of Sadhbela in their after-school hours? Many who had studied in his school, and in whom once his name drew awe, waited then for his easy sleep and into his open mouth dropped flies, pencil shavings or chillies. He never reproached his charges or their parents, who always paid less than promised on one pretext or another.
Such gentleness was no virtue. It was hard not to blame him for their suffering. He aspired to the middle-class standards of his birth; to the rewards of education and good marriages for his daughters, while submitting to squalor and whimpering babies, to a pot of watery rice gruel, to darned handed-down clothes or charitable cast-offs. The list went on and on. Sham swung himself off the bed.
‘Where are you going? To spend money you are hiding from us?’ Meena screeched as he opened the door.
‘You will be back soon, son?’ Rekha asked, peering anxiously round the screen. His father coughed again. Sham slammed the door upon them all, unable to answer.