One

A woman’s work is never done. And it will not be done while the woman is lying in bed counting rice grains, thought Mrs Ali. However, she lay there for a few more moments before getting up. She didn’t need as much sleep as she had when she was younger, but her body didn’t have the energy that had enabled her to get up at five in the morning, day after day after day, grind the lentil batter for dosas and idlis in a heavy stone mortar, and make sure that her husband and son never left home on an empty stomach.

The black-granite floor felt cool under her feet. At the door of the bedroom, she glanced back at her sleeping husband. He looked so peaceful – he wouldn’t be getting up for almost another hour. Once again, she envied her husband’s ability to sleep whenever and wherever he wanted – like a baby, as they said. Though, of course, any mother would testify babies didn’t actually sleep that well.

In the distance, the azaa’n could be heard, calling the faithful to the mosque for prayer. As she listened to the familiar, haunting sound, some nightmare that had dogged her during the early hours faded away, leaving just an impression of disquiet, like the high water mark on walls after a flood has retreated.

Hayya ‘ala salat	Make haste towards worship,
Hayya ‘ala l-jalah	Hasten towards the true success,
Al-salatu khayru min an-nawm.	Prayer is better than sleep

There was no danger of the muezzin’s call disturbing her husband’s slumber. It would take an earthquake, or a demolition crew, to wake him up.

It was a full two hours before Mrs Ali had her first moment of respite. By then drinking water had been collected from the pump and the overhead tank filled for the day; breakfast had been made and eaten; vegetables cut up for lunch; soiled clothes soaked for an afternoon wash, water heated, baths taken; the maid seen off after cleaning the dishes and sweeping the house. Mrs Ali went to the verandah in front of the house, sat down in a wicker chair and picked up the newspaper. Her husband, shaved, fed and bathed, had already skimmed through the paper and was sitting at the table of his ‘office’, the self-same verandah.

“Three cheques came in the post today,” he said.

She nodded and glanced at the headlines in the paper – something about elections for the municipal corporation and the state legislature and, below that, the photograph of a famous actress holding an award.

“Three! That’s pretty good, actually,” he said.

She glanced up. Oh, dear, he seemed peeved. “Yes, that’s great,” she said. Her eyes were dragged back towards the paper, but she resisted. “Normally you get none or one, right?”

Her husband still looked disgruntled.

“Where are they from?” she said, to keep the peace.

He held up a light-green cheque. “This is from Hyderabad…”

Luckily for her, the front gate beyond the small courtyard rattled before he could pick up the second one. Aruna walked in, a sleek white car disappearing behind her, taken away by her family’s driver. The young woman looked healthy – her hair bouncy, cheeks glowing and stomach showing a small bump. She must be, what, about four months gone…

Mrs Ali wondered whether Aruna was expecting a girl. In her experience, mothers expecting boys didn’t look as good. They were more tired, their hair limp, their complexion darker – as if the male spirit of the baby was trying to dominate the mother. Not always, of course, which was what made the whole ‘is it a boy’, ‘is it a girl’ question so interesting.

“Morning, madam,” Aruna said, her face breaking into a smile. She turned towards the table. “Morning, sir.”

Mrs Ali got up: time to make her exit. Their house was long and narrow, with all the rooms laid out single file like carriages on a train: first the verandah, then the living room which also had a bed for their son Rehman, the bedroom itself, the dining room, the kitchen and then the backyard. She was still in the living room when she heard her husband saying to Aruna, “We got three cheques in the post today.”

“That’s great! Was one of them from the Bopatla family?”

When she heard the enthusiasm in Aruna’s voice, she felt guilty at her own lack of interest.

The verandah was the office of the Marriage Bureau for Rich People, run by her husband with the assistance of Aruna. Mrs Ali liked the human side of the enterprise – the clients and their requirements, the desperation of some and the pernickety nature of others. But the financial side of it held little interest for her.

The marriage bureau charged fees from clients and spent the money on advertising, postage, stationery, Arunas salary and a myriad other things. As far as Mrs Ali was concerned, they were doing well as long as more money came in than went out – she didn’t care whether the two differed by one rupee or by a thousand. Her husband had retired after a lifetime’s service as a government clerk and they had his pension, modest though it was, to live on. He got caught up in the thrill of getting new members and making money. Just like a man, she thought, to start a task and forget why he was doing it in the first place.

After retirement, her husband had for the first time started spending all his time at home, interfering with her set routines – why don’t you have a specific day of the week to wash my clothes, instead of asking me whether I am running out of shirts? – and they had fought more often in those initial few months than in all the previous decades. She had enlisted the help of her brother Azhar, and the three of them had come up with the idea of a marriage bureau to keep her husband busy. Of course it was gratifying that it had become so successful, but that hadn’t been the primary intention of setting it up.

She remembered that she needed to get the medicines that the doctor had prescribed for her knees. She changed, picked up the prescription chit and her handbag, and made her way back to the verandah.

“I am going out for half an hour to pick up vegetables and medicines.”

Aruna smiled at her. Mr Ali nodded absent-mindedly. Mrs Ali wondered what her husband would have said if she had declared, “I am going away and never returning. Do your own cooking from now on.”

He would probably nod in exactly the same way, not paying any attention. Not that she would ever do such a thing, of course. Long ago, a neighbour had done just that. One day, she had stepped out of the house and vanished. The family had been distraught and in their distress had not thought to keep the matter secret. The woman’s husband and teenage sons had searched high and low for her, following rumours of dead bodies in public morgues and crazed amnesiac women in nearby market towns. It wasn’t as if the woman was particularly pretty or flighty – she had been an ordinary housewife, with a pleasant enough face but overweight, living a seemingly normal life, cooking for her family, making pickles and buying saris. Ten days later, the woman had returned, looking as if milk khova wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and taken up her place in the household, refusing to answer all questions. The woman had never said anything to Mrs Ali either, but for years and years afterwards every time Mrs Ali looked at her, she had wanted to ask, “Where did you go? What did you do in those ten days? Whom did you meet? Why did you go?” And, just as important, “Why did you come back?” It was as if the whole lifetime of activities of the woman – school, marriage, motherhood, innumerable visits to saints’ tombs – were all nothing compared to those ten days of absence.

It was too late to find out now. The woman had died a couple of years ago, taking her mysteries to the grave. Would her husband have taken her back if Mrs Ali had walked away like that? Some things in a marriage just should not be tested, she thought.

At the front gate she came face to face with a young man in khaki shirt and trousers carrying a stainless-steel torch and a notebook. His skin was dark and a saffron-coloured string circled his wrist – a talisman from some temple.

“Namaste, amma,” he said, bobbing his head and smiling at her. His mouth was as wide as the Bay of Bengal.

Her nose twitched – a sure sign that something was wrong. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Meter reader, amma,” he said, showing her an ID card issued by the electricity board.

She stared at it suspiciously for a moment and then felt guilty as everything appeared in order. She supposed he couldn’t help having a wide mouth or obsequious manners.

“There are people inside to show you the meter,” she said and left the house.

♦

Aruna slit open the next envelope and extracted its contents. “Another member, sir,” she said, turning to Mr Ali with a smile. “It’s a festival of cheques today!”

Apart from her salary, she got a commission for every person who joined the marriage bureau. So not only was she happy for the business, she had a personal stake too. Her husband’s family was very wealthy and money wasn’t a problem for her any more, but her parents were poor, relying on what she gave them to run the house and keep her younger sister Vani in college, her father’s pension lasting barely half a month. She would not – could not – use her husband’s money to support her parents and sister, which was why she had continued working after marriage. And she was running out of time. The bump in her stomach was growing by the day and she would have to stop working soon. If only…no! She thought. The baby was hers and Ram’s; it was not a problem. The baby was an accident, it was true, but no less loved for that. The rest of the world would just have to manage somehow.

The door rattled and she glanced up, startled out of her thoughts. A man was standing there, smiling and exposing his teeth. His mouth seemed wide enough to fit in a minister dosa – a six-foot-long pancake reputedly eaten by rich politicians – broadside, without tearing it into pieces.

“Namaste, saar, amma,” said the man, bobbing his head. “I am the meter reader.”

Mr Ali looked at him blankly for a moment before calling out, “Wife…”

“Madam has gone out, sir,” said Aruna. She turned to the stranger and said, “The meter is here.” She stood up and pointed to a wooden cabinet on the wall behind her.

The man flicked his torch on and flashed it into the gloom of the cabinet, then wrote down some numbers in his notebook. “Do you want to verify the reading?” he asked.

Mr Ali shook his head. “That’s all right,” he said. “We trust you.”

The man closed his notebook and the cupboard. “What good people you are!” he said. “I can tell you that there is very little trust in the world. I read hundreds of meters and you are the first people who didn’t want to make sure that I’ve written it down correctly.”

His eye was caught by the letters and the forms on the table, and Aruna got the feeling that he had heard their earlier comments about the cheque.

“What do you do here, sir? That’s a lot of letters you’ve got. Your business must be doing very well.”

Mr Ali smiled proudly. “Yes, we are quite successful,” he said. “We are a marriage bureau.” He saw the man’s puzzled look and continued, “When parents want to arrange the marriage of their son or daughter, they come to us. We take their details and match them to the kind of people they are looking for – same caste, similar economic backgrounds and so on.”

“Oh, like a wedding panthulu!” said the man.

Mr Ali’s face took on a pained expression. Traditionally, marriage brokers went from house to house carrying lists and horoscopes of eligible boys and girls. The panthulu, as they were called, had a bad reputation for pushing unsuitable matches because they were paid only when a marriage was settled.

“Our business is not at all like a panthulu,” said Mr Ali. “We don’t go chasing after our clients. They come to us. And we get paid for our efforts, whether or not the wedding is fixed.”

“I am not married, sir. Can you help me find a bride?” The man’s smile grew even broader, though Aruna wondered how that was possible.

“What is your name?” asked Mr Ali.

“Shyam.”

Mr Ali shook his head and said, “Don’t take offence, Shyam. Our organisation is only for rich people. You must be a college graduate and earn a minimum of ten thousand rupees a month.”

“I am not a graduate,” Shyam replied. “Do you have a lot of members?”

“Of course,” said Mr Ali. “We have Hindu, Muslim and Christian members. We are the most popular marriage bureau in all the coastal Andhra districts – probably in the whole state. People come to see us from faraway places like Hyderabad or Bangalore. The other day, a family from New Jersey in America sat on that sofa and became members.”

“Very good, sir!” said Shyam, looking at the sofa that had been lucky enough to be sat on by somebody from America. “Is there another meter that I need to read?”

“No,” said Mr Ali. “That’s the only meter in the house.”

“Namaste, saar. Namaste, madam,” Shyam said, taking his leave. Aruna had the feeling that he went out just a little more jauntily than he had come in.

♦

Mrs Ali walked up the road back towards her house, reaching the culvert where the road narrowed. The traffic was horrendously bad here – four lanes merging into two, with cars, buses, three-wheeled auto-rickshaws and two-wheelers all spewing smoke and creating a din with their honks. Meanwhile, the steady stream of pedestrians was squeezed to the margins of the road among the roadside stalls and carts selling vegetables, plastic goods and sweets. The culvert was hemmed in by a Muslim graveyard on one side and a mosque on the other.

Across the road from her, hard by the mosque, stood a row of whitewashed shops. Mrs Ali stared with disquiet at the fresh sign that had been hung in front of one of them – Rao’s Marriage Bureau.

“Aapa,” said a familiar voice and she turned, temporarily forgetting about marriage bureaus and competition.

“Azhar, how are you?” Her younger brother had obviously come from the mosque, which puzzled her. “What are you doing in the mosque at this hour?” she asked. “It’s not yet time for the afternoon prayers.”

Azhar shrugged. “Even godly places need worldly maintenance. The mosque committee asked me to oversee the repairs to the rear wall.”

His hair and neatly trimmed beard contained equal amounts of black and white. Azhar was shorter and a bit stockier than her husband, and fitter than most men his age. His skin had darkened after a lifetime of exposure to the sun, but his face held few lines, except around his eyes and mouth.

“There are many men who want to be on the committee,” she said. “But there’s a shortage of those willing to stand in the sun, supervising workers.”

He laughed and asked, “What did you buy?”

“Oh, just some vegetables. Have you seen how expensive onions have become? I told the man that I wanted just a kilo of onions, not his whole cart.”

“It is not only here. I went to the Poorna Market yesterday and it was the same there.”

“Well, the government will have to do something. You can make a ridged-gourd curry if cauliflower is expensive, but onions are used in both. How can we manage without them?”

Despite her disdain for the financial side of her husband’s business, Mrs Ali would have to take more interest in it if costs continued going up like this.

“I am sure they will do something,” said Azhar. “There is an election coming soon.”

“Hmm – ” said Mrs Ali. “I will ask any candidate who comes canvassing for my vote what his plans are for reducing these famine-inducing prices. If people like us are finding it difficult, how can the poor manage?”

They walked away from the mosque and the culvert. The road widened and the traffic eased up. “Can you come to Faiz’s house on Monday?” he asked.

Mrs Ali thought for a moment and nodded. Faiz was Azhar’s granddaughter – the child of his oldest son and just ten years younger than his own daughter, in fact. Faiz had been married about eight months ago to a young man from Kothagudem village who worked in the Rural Electrification Board as a clerk, but his family owned several acres of fertile land in the village.

“It will be best to get the visit out of the way before Ramzaan starts,” she said. Fasting during the holy month meant that travelling was best avoided.

Azhar said, “I am thinking of taking a microwave oven as a gift.”

“A microwave?” Mrs Ali said, doubtfully. She knew that these contraptions could be used to cook cakes and other ‘modern’ dishes, but was hazy on what the difference was between a microwave and a normal oven.

“It’s her first big festival in her in-laws’ house,” Azhar said. “She wanted something that nobody else in the village had.”

At the next street, Azhar took his leave and turned left to his house. Mrs Ali continued straight down the main road, walking along the dusty edge, dodging hawkers, street dogs and parked vehicles. She reflected how her happiness in life was bound up along this one road. Her own house was further up; Azhar and his family, her husband’s younger sister, Chhote Bhaabhi and her family, her many friends, the mosque that they all belonged to, the doctor who treated them and the graveyard where they would be buried when the doctor finally gave up: all lay along this stretch of tarmac.

She reached the medical shop that was her final destination and slid the chit of paper towards the young man behind the counter. On every wall, floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted cupboards were stacked with boxes and bottles.

“Where is the owner?” she said.

“I am the new owner. I bought the shop from the old man.”

“Oh!” said Mrs Ali. “Where is he now? What is he doing? He wanted to give this pharmacy to his son.”

“The old man has retired and gone on a pilgrimage to Haridwar and Kashi. His son didn’t fancy sitting behind a shop counter all day. He got himself a job as a medical rep pushing drugs to doctors.”

Mrs Ali remembered the previous owner. He wasn’t that old – in fact, he was several years her junior. He had run the pharmacy for years and his fondest dream had been to hand it over to his son. “I will continue to sit behind the counter even after my son takes over,” he had often told her. “Until they lay me out feet first.”

He had made his son get a degree in pharmaceutical practice, so he could run the shop. “This is the best way to earn a living, madam. You sit under a cool fan watching the world go by and people come to you for pills if they are unwell and tonics if they are not.”

His son had evidently disagreed and used his education to find a job more suited to his temperament. She hoped that the father had found peace on his pilgrimage. At least the son was using the education that his father had paid for by becoming a medical rep instead of going into something completely unconnected – like computers or insurance, for example.

The new owner glanced at the prescription, went to the second shelf on the right-hand wall and took out a box of tablets. How did these pharmacists know which medicine was where in the shop?

The owner’s mother was sitting at the cash till and she looked at the vegetables that Mrs Ali was carrying. “Have you seen the price of onions, amma?” she exclaimed. “We will have to start weighing them with a goldsmith’s balance at this rate.”

Mrs Ali smiled grimly. “A government can get away with being corrupt and incompetent, but mess with the price of onions and the wrath of millions of housewives will descend on them. The Janata Party fell and Indira Gandhi came back to power in the seventies because of the price of onions,” said Mrs Ali. “If the current trend continues, the current party will share the same fate as that government.”

The medicines were put in a packet made from recycled newspaper and pushed across the counter. As Mrs Ali was paying, the owners mother said, “By the way, amma, if you know anybody who is looking to rent, the upstairs portion of our house is empty.”

After some more discussion about rent, the escalating cost of everything and the difficulty of finding reliable tenants, Mrs Ali finally left, having obtained a ten per cent discount on her bill.