Sometimes the Uncle did not visit his niece for several days. He stayed in his bare, unventilated lodging and fed himself with food from the bazaar. Once, after such an absence, there was a new servant in the niece’s house, who refused to let him in. “Not at home!” the servant said, viewing the Uncle with the utmost suspicion. And indeed who could blame him; certainly not the Uncle himself.
But Nargis, the niece, the mistress of the house, was annoyed—not with the servant but with her uncle. In any case, she was usually annoyed with him when he reappeared after one of his absences. It was resentment partly at his having stayed away, partly at his having reappeared.
“Look at you,” she said. “Like a beggar. And I suppose you have been eating that dirty bazaar food again. Or no food at all.”
She rang the bell and gave orders to a servant, who soon returned with refreshments. The Uncle enjoyed them; sometimes he did enjoy things in that house, though only if he and she were alone together.
That could never be for long. Khorshed, one of her unmarried sisters-in-laws, was soon with them, greeting the Uncle with the formal courtesy—a stately inclination of the head—that she extended to everyone. Since he was family, she also smiled at him. She had yellow teeth and was yellow all over; her skin was like thin old paper stretched over her bones. She sat in one of the winged armchairs by the window—her usual place, which enabled her to keep an eye on the road and anything that might be going on there. She entertained them with an account of a charity ball she had witnessed at the Taj Mahal Hotel the day before. Soon she was joined by her sister Pilla, who took the opposite armchair in order to see the other end of the road. They always shared a view between them in this way. They had done the same the day before at the Taj Mahal Hotel. They themselves had not bought tickets—it had not been one of their charities—but had taken up a vantage point on the velvet bench on the first landing of the double staircase. Khorshed had watched the people who had come up from the right-hand wing, and Pilla those from the left. Now they described who had been there, supplementing each other’s account and sometimes arguing whether it had been Lady Ginwala who had worn a tussore silk or Mrs. Homy Jussawala. They quarreled over it ever so gently.
Rusi came in much later. He had only just got up. He always got up very late; he couldn’t sleep at night, and moved around the house and played his record player at top volume. When he came in—in his brocade dressing gown and with his hair tousled—everyone in the room became alert and intense, though they tried to hide it. His two aunts bade him good morning in sweet fluting voices; his mother inquired after his breakfast. He ignored them all. He sank into a chair, scowling heavily and supporting his forehead on his hand, as if weighted down by thoughts too lofty for anyone there to understand.
“Look, look,” said Pilla to create a diversion, “here she is again!”
“Where!” cried Khorshed, helping her sister.
“There. In another new sari. Walking like a princess—and they owe rent and bills everywhere.”
“Just see—a new parasol too, matching the sari.”
Both shook their heads. The boy, Rusi, took his hand from his brow, and his scowling eyes swept around the room and rested on the Uncle.
“Oh, back again,” he said. “Thought we’d got rid of you.” He gave one of his short, mad laughs.
“Yes,” said the Uncle, “here you see me again. I had no food at home, so I came. Because of this,” he said, patting his thin stomach.
“All dogs are like that,” Rusi said. “Where there is food to be got, there they run. Have you heard of Pavlov? Of course not. You people are all so ignorant.”
“Tell us, darling,” said Nargis, his mother.
“Please teach us, Rusi darling,” the aunts begged eagerly.
He relapsed into silence. He sat hunched in the chair and, drawing his feet out of his slippers, held them up one by one and studied them, wriggling the toes. He did this with great concentration, so that no one dared speak for fear of disturbing him.
The Uncle now forced himself to look at him. Every time he came here, it seemed to him that the boy had deteriorated further. Rusi had a shambling, flabby body, and though he was barely twenty his hair was beginning to fall out in handfuls. He was dreadful. The Uncle, instead of feeling sorry for this sick boy, hated him more than any other human being on earth. Rusi looked up. Their eyes met; the Uncle looked away. Rusi gave another of his laughs and said, “When Pavlov rang a bell, saliva came out of the dog’s mouth.” He tittered and pointed at the Uncle. “We don’t even have to ring a bell! Khorshed, Pilla—look at him! Not even a bell!”
The women laughed with him, and so did the Uncle, though only after he caught his niece’s eye and had read the imploring look there. Then it was not so difficult for him to join in; in fact, he wanted to.
Everyone always thought of the Uncle as a bachelor, but he had once been married. His wife had been dull and of a faded color, and soon he sent her back to her parents and went to live with his brother and with Nargis, the brother’s daughter. The brother’s wife had also been dull and faded; she did not have to be sent away, but died, leaving the two brothers alone with the girl. These three had lived together very happily in a tiny house with a tiny garden that had three banana plants and a papaya tree in it. This was in an outlying suburb of Bombay, with a lot of respectable neighbors who did not quite know what to make of the household. It included an ancient woman servant, who was sometimes deaf, sometimes dumb, sometimes both. Whatever the truth of her disability, it prevented her from communicating with anyone outside the house and quite often with anyone in it. The two brothers didn’t work much, though Nargis’s father was a journalist and the Uncle a lawyer. They only went out to practice their respective professions when money ran very low. Then Nargis’s father made the rounds of the newspaper offices, and the Uncle sat outside the courts to draw up documents and write legal letters. The rest of the time, they stayed at home and amused Nargis. They were both musical, and one sang while the other accompanied him on the harmonium. The whole household kept very odd hours, and sometimes when they got excited over their music they stayed up all night and slept through the day, keeping the shutters closed. Then the neighbors, wondering whether something untoward had happened, stood outside the little house and peered through the banana plants, until at last, toward evening, the shutters would be thrown open and a brother would appear at each window, fresh and rested and smiling at the little crowd gathered outside.
Both were passionate readers of Persian poetry and Victorian poetry and prose. They taught Nargis everything they could, and since she was in any case not a keen scholar, there was no necessity to send her to school. Altogether they kept her so much to themselves that no one realized she was growing up, till one day, there she was—a lush fruit, suddenly and perfectly ready. The two brothers carried on as if nothing had happened—singing, reading poetry, amusing her to the best of their ability. They bought her all sorts of nice clothes too, and whatever jewelry they could afford, so that it became necessary for them to go out to work rather more frequently than in the past. Nargis’s father began to accept commissions to write biographies of prominent members of their own Parsi community. He wrote these in an ornate, fulsome style, heaping all the ringing superlatives he had gathered from his Victorian readings onto these shrewd traders in slippers and round hats. In this way, he was commissioned to write a biography of the founder of the great commercial house of Paniwala & Sons. The present head of the house took a keen interest in the project and helped with researches into the family archives. Once he got so excited over the discovery of a document that he had himself driven to the little house in the suburb. That was how he first saw Nargis, and how he kept coming back again even after the biography had been printed and distributed.
Nargis had no objections to marrying him. He wasn’t really old—in his late thirties—though he was already perfectly bald, with his head and face the same pale yellow color. His hands were pale too, and plump like a woman’s, with perfectly kept fingernails. He was a very kind man—very kind and gentle—with a soft voice and soft ways. He wanted to do everything for Nargis. She moved into the family mansion with him and his two sisters and with his servants and the treasures he had bought from antique dealers all over Europe. Positions were found in the house of Paniwala for Nargis’s father and the Uncle, so that they no longer had to go out in order to work but only to collect their checks. Everyone should have been happy, and no one was. The little house in the suburb died the way a tree dies and all its leaves drop off and the birds fly away. It was the old woman who felt the blight first and had herself taken to hospital to die there. Next, Nargis’s father lay down with an ailment that soon carried him off. Then the Uncle moved out of the house and into his quarters in the city.
Nargis had once visited him there, to persuade him to come and live in the family mansion. He wouldn’t hear of it. He also said, “Who asked you to come here?” He was quite angry. Her arrival had thrown the whole house—indeed, the whole neighborhood—into commotion. A crowd gathered around her large car parked outside, and some lay waiting on the stairs, and children even opened the door of his room to peep in at the grand lady who had come. He bared his teeth at them and made blood-curdling noises.
“Come,” Nargis pleaded. She looked around the room, which was quite squalid, though it had a patterned marble floor and colored-glass panes set in a fan above the door. The house had once been a respectable merchant’s dwelling, but now, like the whole neighborhood, it was fast turning into a slum.
“You needn’t talk with anyone,” she promised. “Only with me.”
“And Khorshed?” he asked. “And Pilla?” He opened his mouth wide to laugh. He got great amusement out of the two sisters.
“Only with me.”
He gave an imitation of Khorshed and Pilla looking out of the window. Then he laughed at his joke. He jumped up and cackled and hopped up and down on one foot with amusement.
“You haven’t come for four days,” she accused him, above this.
He pretended not to hear, and went on laughing and hopping.
“What’s wrong? Why not?” she persisted. “Don’t you want to see me?”
“How is Paniwala?”
“He says bring Uncle. Get the big room upstairs ready. Send a car for him.”
“Oh go away,” he said, his laughter suddenly gone. “Leave me alone.”
She wouldn’t. Usually complaisant, even phlegmatic, she became quite obstinate. She sat on his rickety string bed and folded her hands in her lap. She said if he wasn’t coming, then she was staying. She wouldn’t move till he had promised that, even if he wouldn’t go and live in the house, he would visit there every day. Then at last she consented to be led back to her car. He went in front, clearing a way for her by poking his stick at all the sightseers.
He kept his promise for a while and went to the house every day. But he was always glad to come back home again. He walked up and down in the bazaar, looking at the stalls and the people, and then he sat outside the sweetmeat seller’s and had tea and milk sweets and read out of his little volume of Sufi poetry. Sometimes he was so stirred that he read out loud for the benefit of the other customers and passersby, even though they couldn’t understand Persian:
“When you lay me in my grave,
don’t say, ‘Farewell, farewell.’
For the grave is a screen hiding the
cheers and welcome of the
people of Paradise.
Which seed was cast but did not
sprout?
And why should it be otherwise for
the seed of man?
Which bucket went down but
came not up full of water?”
Then it seemed to him that everything had become suffused in purity and brightness—yes, even this bazaar where people haggled and made money and passed away the time in idle, worldly pursuits. He walked slowly home and up the wooden stairs, which were so dark (he often reproached the landlady) that one could fall and break one’s neck. He went past the common lavatory and the door of the paralytic landlady, which was left open so that she could look out. He sat by the open window in his room, looking at the bright stars above and the bright street below, and couldn’t sleep for hours because of feeling so good.
In the Paniwala house, it always seemed to be mealtime. A great deal of food was cooked. Paniwala himself could only eat very bland boiled food, on account of his weak digestion. Khorshed had a taste for continental food masked in cheese sauces, while for Pilla a meal was not a meal if it was not rice with various curries of fish and meat and a great number of spicy side dishes. Servants passed around the table with dishes catering to all these various tastes. The sideboard that ran the length of the wall carried more dishes under silver covers, and there were pyramids of fruits, bought fresh every morning, that were so polished and immaculate that they appeared artificial. The meals lasted for hours. Plates kept getting changed and everyone chewed very slowly, and it got hotter and hotter, so that the Uncle, eating all he could, felt as if he were in a fever. The sisters talked endlessly, but their conversation seemed an activity indistinguishable from masticating. By the time the meal was over, the Uncle felt his mind and body bathed in perspiration, and in this state he had to retire with them into the drawing room, where sleep overtook everyone except Nargis and himself. The afternoon light that filtered through the slatted blinds made the room green and dim like an ocean bed; and uncle and niece sat staring at each other among the marble busts and potted plants, while the snores of the sleeping family lapped around them.
Once, as they sat like that, the Uncle saw tears oozing out of Nargis’s eyes. It took him some time to realize they were tears—he stared at her as they dropped—and then he said in exasperation, “But what do you want?”
“Come and live here.”
“No!” he cried like a drowning man.
All that had been a long time ago, before Rusi was born. After that event, although the Uncle continued to live in his slum house and the Paniwala family continued to eat their succession of meals, there was a change in both establishments. During one very heavy Bombay monsoon, an upper balcony of the Uncle’s house collapsed and the whole tenement suffered a severe shock, so that the cracks on the staircase walls gaped wider and plaster fell in flakes from the ceilings. What remained of the colored windowpanes dropped out, and some were replaced with plain glass and some with cardboard and some were simply forgotten till more rain came. Also, in the same year as this heavy monsoon, the Uncle’s skin began to discolor. This was not unexpected; leukoderma was a family disease and, indeed, very prevalent in the Parsi community. The Uncle first noticed the small telltale spot on his thumb. Of course, the affliction continued to spread and then the spots broke out all over him like mildew, so that within a few years he was completely discolored. It was neither a painful nor a dangerous disease, only disfiguring.
The change in the Paniwala family was both more positive and more far-reaching. Somehow no one had expected any offspring, so that when Rusi nevertheless appeared, everyone was too excited to notice that his head was rather big or that it took him a long time to sit up. He was three before he could walk. “Let him take his time,” they all said, and his slowness became a virtue, like the growth of a very special flower that one must wait upon to unfold. Only the Uncle did not much like to look at him. Rusi was always the center around which the rest of the family was, quite literally, grouped. With his big head shaking, he tottered around on the carpet making guttural sounds, while they formed a smiling circle around him, encouraging him, calling his name, reciting long-forgotten baby rhymes, holding out loving fingers for him to steady himself on. They nodded at each other, and their soft, yellow, middle-aged faces beamed. And Nargis was one of them. The Uncle did not, as far as he could help it, look at the child; he looked at her. She had changed. Motherhood had ripened and extended her, and she was almost fat. But it suited her, and her eyes, which had once been tender and misty and shining as if through a veil, were now luminous with fulfillment. They never looked at the Uncle—only at her son.
The Uncle tried staying away. At first he thought he liked it. He sat for hours outside the sweetmeat seller’s and read and talked to everyone who had time. He also talked to the people who lived in the tenement with him—especially with the paralytic landlady. She had as much time as he did. She had spent over twenty years lying on her bed, looking out of the open door at the people going up and down on the stairs. Sometimes he went in and sat with her and listened to her reflections on the transient stream of humanity flowing past her door. She was a student of palmistry and astrology and was always keen to tell his fortune. She grasped his discolored hand and studied it very earnestly and ignored his jokes about how the only fortune still left to him was the further fading of his pigmentation. She traced the lines of his palm and said she still saw a lot of beautiful living left. Then he turned the joke and said, “What about you?” Quite seriously, she stretched out her palm and interpreted its lines, and they too, it seemed, were as full of promise as a freshly sown field.
However long he stayed away now, Nargis never came to visit him or sent him any messages. If he wanted to see her, he had to present himself there. When he did, she rarely seemed pleased. His clothes were very shabby—he only possessed two shirts and two patched trousers, and never renewed them till they were past all wear—but whereas before Rusi’s birth Nargis had taken his appearance entirely for granted, now she often asked him, “Why do you come like that? How do you think it looks?” He feigned surprise and looked down at himself with an innocent expression. She was not amused. Once she even lost her temper and shouted at him that if he did not have enough money to buy clothes, then please take it from her; she said she would be glad to give it to him. Of course, he did have enough, as she knew; his checks came in regularly. Suddenly she became more angry and pulled out some rupee notes and flung them at his feet and rushed out of the room. There was a moment’s silence; everyone was surprised, for she was usually so calm. Then one of the sisters bent down to pick up the money, gently clicking her tongue as she did so.
“She is upset,” she said.
“Yes, because of Rusi,” said the other sister.
“He had a little tummy trouble last night.”
“Naturally, she is upset.”
“Naturally.”
“A mother . . .”
“Of course.”
They went on like that, like a purling, soothing stream. They did this partly to cover up for Nargis, and partly for him, so that he might have time to collect himself. Although he sat quite still and with his gaze lowered to the carpet, he was trembling from head to foot. After a time, ignoring the sisters, he got up to leave. He walked very slowly down the stairs and was about to let himself out when Nargis called to him. He looked up. She was leaning over the curved banister with Rusi, whom she was dancing up and down in her arms. “Ask Uncle to come up and play with us!” she told Rusi. “Say, ‘Please, Uncle! Please, Uncle dear!’” For reply, Rusi opened his mouth wide and screamed. The Uncle did not look up again but continued his way toward the front door, which a servant was holding open for him. Nargis called down loudly, “Where are you going?”
At that the child was beside himself. His face went purple and his mouth was stretched open as wide as it would go, but no screams came out. This made him more frantic, and he caught his fingers in his mother’s hair, pulling it out of its pins, and then flailed his hands against her breasts. He was only three years old but as strong as a demon. She fell to the floor with him on top of her. The Uncle ran up the stairs as fast as he could. He tried to help her up, tugging at her from under the child, who now began to flail his fists at the Uncle.
“Yes yes, I’m all right,” Nargis said, to reassure them both. She managed to sit up; her hair was about her shoulders and there were scratches on her face. “Where are you going?” she asked the Uncle.
“I’m not going,” he said. “I’m here. Can’t you see?” he shouted, “I’m here! Here!” very loudly, in order to make himself heard above the child’s screams.
As Rusi grew up, it was decided that he was too brilliant. He did too much thinking. His mother and aunts were disturbed to see him sitting scowling and hunched in an armchair, sunk in deep processes of thought. Occasionally he would emerge with some fragment dredged up from that profundity. “There will be a series of natural disasters due to the explosion of hitherto undiscovered minerals from under the earth’s surface,” he might say. He would fix his aunts with his brooding eyes and say, “You look out.” Then they became very disturbed—not because of his prophecy but because they feared the damage so much mental activity might do his brain. They would try to bring him some distraction—share some exciting piece of news with him regarding a wedding or a tea party, or feed him some sweet thing that he liked. Sometimes he accepted their offering graciously, sometimes not. He was unpredictable, though very passionate in his likes and dislikes.
The person to whom Rusi took the deepest dislike was the Uncle. He baited him mercilessly and had all sorts of unpleasant names for him. The one he used most frequently was the Leper, on account of the Uncle’s skin disease. Sometimes he said he could not bear to be in the house with him and that either the Uncle or he himself must leave. Then the Uncle would leave. Next time he came, Rusi might be quite friendly to him—it was impossible to tell. The Uncle tried not to mind either way, and the rest of the family did all they could to make it up to him. At least Paniwala and his sisters did; Nargis was more unpredictable. Sometimes, when Rusi had been very harsh, she would follow the Uncle to the door and be very nice to him, but other times she would encourage Rusi and clap her hands and laugh loudly in applause and then jeer when the Uncle got up to go away. On such occasions, the Uncle did not take the train or bus but walked all the way home through the city in the hope of tiring himself out. He never did, though, but lay awake half the night, saying to himself over and over, “Now enough, now enough.” Then he thought of the landlady downstairs eagerly reading in his palm that great things were still in store for him. It made him laugh, for he was in his seventies now.
Rusi ordered a lot of books, though he did not do much reading. His aunts said he didn’t have to, because he had it all in his head already. For the same reason, there was not much point in his going to school; he only quarreled with the teachers, who were very ignorant and not at all up to his standards. In all the schools he tried, everyone eventually agreed that it would be better for him to leave. Then came a succession of private tutors, but here too there was the same trouble—there was just no one who knew as much as he did. Those who did not leave quite soon of their own accord had to be told to go, because their inferior qualities made him take such a dislike to them. Once he got so angry with one of them that he stabbed him with a penknife. Although everyone was disturbed by this incident, still no one said anything beyond what they always said: the boy was too highly strung. It came, his aunts explained, from having too active a mind. They recommended more protein in his diet and some supplementary vitamin pills. Nargis listened to them eagerly and went out to buy the pills. The three women tried to coax him to take them, but he laughed in derision and told them how he had a method, evolved by himself, of storing extra energy in his body through his own mineral deposits. He had plans to patent this method and expected to make a large fortune out of it. The aunts shook their heads behind his back and tapped their foreheads to indicate that he had too much brilliance for his own good. When he looked at them, they changed their expression, to appear as interested and intelligent as possible. He said that they were a couple of foolish old women who understood nothing, so what was the use of talking to them; the only person in the house who might understand something of what he was saying was his father, who was going to put up the money for the project.
His father was not seen very much in the house nowadays. It seemed he was very busy in the office and spent almost all his time there. Weeks passed when the Uncle did not meet him at all. When he did, he found him more gentle than ever, but there was something furtive about him now and he did not like to meet anyone’s eye. If he was present while Rusi was baiting the Uncle, he tried to remonstrate. He said, “Rusi, Rusi,” but so softly that his son probably failed to hear him. After a while, he would get up and quietly leave the room and not come back. Once, though, when this happened, the Uncle found him waiting for him downstairs by the door. “One moment,” Paniwala said and drew him into his study; he pressed the Uncle’s hand as he did so. The Uncle wondered what he was going to say, and he waited and Paniwala also waited. A gold clock could be heard ticking in a very refined way.
When Paniwala at last did speak, it was on an unexpected subject. He informed the Uncle that the oil painting on the wall above his desk—it was of the Paniwala ancestor who had founded their fortune—was not done from life but had been copied from a photograph. Even the photograph was the only one of him known to be in existence; he had not been a man who could be induced to pose very often in a photographer’s studio.
“He came to Bombay from a village near Surat,” Paniwala said. “To the end of his days, what he relished most was the simple village food of chapati and pickle. He built this house with many bathrooms, but still he liked to take his bath in a bucket out in the garden, thereby also watering the plants.”
Paniwala chuckled, and both of them looked up at the portrait, which showed a shriveled face with a big bony Parsi nose sticking out of it. Paniwala also had a big nose, but his was not bony; it was soft and fleshy. Altogether he looked very different from his ancestor, being very much softer and gentler in the contours of his face and in expression.
“He was a very strict man,” Paniwala said. “With himself and also with others. Everyone had to work hard, no slacking allowed. My grandfather also got his discipline from him. Yes, in those days they were different men—a different breed of men.” He passed his hands over his totally bald head. When he spoke again, it was to say, “Your expenses must have gone up; money is not what it was. I wonder if your check . . . You’ll excuse me.” He lowered his eyes.
The Uncle waved his hand in a gesture that could mean anything.
“You’ll allow me,” said Paniwala, terribly ashamed. “From the first of next month. Thank you. The little house where he was born, near Surat, is still there. It is so small you would not believe that the whole family lived there. There were nine children, and all grew up healthy and well. Later he brought his brothers and brothers-in-laws to Bombay, and everyone did well and they too had large families . . . You are going? No, you must take one of the cars—what are they all standing there for? Allow me.” But the Uncle wanted to walk, so Paniwala escorted him to the door. He told him how his grandfather had always insisted on walking to the warehouse, even when he was very old and quite unsteady, so that the family had made arrangements for a carriage and an attendant to follow him secretly.
The two sisters also often spoke about their family—not about past generations but about the present one. They were always visiting relatives, many of whom were bedridden, and then they would come home and discuss the case. Sometimes they predicted an early end, but this rarely came to pass. The family tended to be very long-lived, and though crippled by a variety of diseases, the invalids lingered on for years and years. They stayed in their mahogany bedsteads and were fed and washed by servants. There was also an imbecile called Poor Falli, who had lived in the same Edwardian house for over fifty years, though confined to one room with bars on the windows; he was not dangerous, but his personal habits made it difficult for other people. The two sisters spoke about all these family matters quite openly now before the Uncle. It had not always been so. True, they had always been scrupulously polite to him—ignoring his shabby clothes, calling him by his first name, never omitting a greeting to him on entering or leaving a room—but he had remained an outsider. Nor had they forgotten the difference between his family and theirs. But as the years passed they regarded him more and more as one of themselves. This happened not all at once, but gradually, and only after Rusi’s birth—an event, in the eyes of the sisters, that had finally drawn the two families together and made them as one.
The Uncle fell ill with fever. He lay in his room, tossing on his string bed, which had no sheets but only a cotton mat and a little pillow hard as a stone. Neighbors came in and, because he was shivering so much, covered him with a blanket and tried to make him drink milk and soup. He let them do whatever was necessary. His body felt as if it were being broken up bone by bone by someone wielding a stone hammer. He wondered whether he was going to die now. All the time he was smiling—not outwardly, for he groaned and cried out so much that the neighbors were very worried and sent messages to the Paniwala house, but inside himself. Sometimes he thought he was at the sweetmeat seller’s, sometimes he saw himself back in the little house in the suburb with his brother and the old woman and Nargis ripening like a fruit in sunshine. It didn’t matter in which of these places he fancied himself, for they were both wonderful, a foretaste of Paradise. He thought if he were really going to die now, he would never need to return to the Paniwala house at all. When he thought of this, tears welled into his eyes and flowed down his cheeks, so that the neighbors exclaimed in pity.
When Nargis came, he was better. The fever had abated and he lay exhausted. He had not died and yet he felt dead, as if everything were spent. Nargis wasted no time. She paid what was left of his rent and reimbursed the neighbors. They helped her pack up his things. He kept wanting to say no, but he didn’t have the strength. Instead he wept again; only now the tears were cold and hard. The neighbors, not seeing the difference, told Nargis that he had been weeping like that all through his sickness, and when she heard this, she also wept. At last he was carried down the stairs, and as they passed the door of the paralytic landlady, she called out to him in triumph, “You see! It has come true what I said! It was all written in your hand.”
Sometimes, as he lay in the large four-poster in the Paniwala bedroom, he looked at his hand and wondered which were the lines that had told the landlady about the new life awaiting him. It was very still and quiet in that room. He gazed at the painting on the opposite wall; it had been specially commissioned and showed a scene in the Paniwala counting house at the beginning of the century. The Paniwala founder sat at a desk high up on a dais, and his sons at other desks on a slightly lower dais, and they overlooked a hall full of clerks sitting cross-legged in rows and writing in ledgers. It had been done in dark, murky colors, to look like a Renaissance painting. When he was tired of it, he looked at the other wall, where there was a window and the top of a tree just showing against it. Nargis had engaged a servant for him, who made his bed and washed him and performed other personal functions. Khorshed and Pilla came in at least once a day and sat on either side of him and told him everything that was happening, in the family and in Bombay society in general. Rusi also came in; he had been warned to be good to his uncle, and for quite some time he observed this injunction. But as the weeks and then the months passed and the Uncle still lay there, Rusi could not help himself and reverted to his former manner. He was especially gleeful if he happened to come in while the Uncle was being fed. This had to be done very carefully and with a specially curved spoon, and even then quite a lot went to waste and trickled down the Uncle’s chin.
It was usually his servant who fed the Uncle, but sometimes Nargis did it herself. Although she was less satisfactory than the servant and got impatient quite quickly, the Uncle much preferred her to do it. Then he would linger over his food as long as possible. Then Rusi could stand there and say what he liked—the Uncle didn’t care at all. He just looked into Nargis’s face. She always sat with her back to the window and the tree. Even when she got annoyed with him—saying, “You are doing it on purpose,” when the food drooped on his chin—still he loved to have her sitting there. At such times it seemed to him that his landlady had been right and that his life was not over by any means.