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‘Isn’t my son feeling well?’ Sona sometimes asked, her voice trembling.

‘Of course he is well, Mummy,’ soothed Pooja. ‘He is just tired and wants to relax.’ She hastened back, leaving the mother to wonder why he couldn’t relax with everyone else, as he always had. Why did it have to be private and separate? A new wife could take away in weeks what had been theirs all their life.

Sometimes the mother, asserting her rights, knocked on the unwelcoming closed door and announced to her son, lounging on the bed with Pooja, that their house had a tradition of togetherness.

‘Come, come, Mummy,’ Raju would respond heartily and loudly, smoothing the rumpled covers. ‘Sit, sit.’

Desultory conversation followed, before Sona, propelled by the unfamiliar, claustrophobic atmosphere of the room, got up to leave.

‘She is not behaving like a daughter-in-law,’ she complained to her son. ‘She spends no time with the rest of the family, no time with your sister. Look at Rekha upstairs.’

‘Pooja is right. You don’t like her. Why did you marry me to her, then? Was I in such a hurry?’ snapped Raju before returning to his lair, leaving Sona to tearfully narrate the conversation word for bitter word to Nisha and later Rupa. Her son had become the slave of his wife, and was bent on stabbing his mother in the heart.

‘He is newly married,’ said Rupa thoughtfully. ‘They want to be together.’

‘It is not only together, it is
alone
together,’ burst out Sona, thinking of the other newly married couples in the family whose desires had been decently invisible. ‘I thought a girl with such a scar would be humble, grateful, make efforts, but here she is thinking too-too much of herself, and making Raju think the same.’

‘Don’t you see, Didi, how much fuss her family makes over her?’ pointed out Rupa. ‘They have indulged her because of that accident. That is why she is so different from Rekha.’

‘Why is it always my fate to get the worst of everything?’ wailed Sona.

Rupa and Nisha could only be silent when confronted with the workings of fate. One had to accept what was given and the faster one did that, the less one suffered.

July came. Pooja’s family had requested that she be allowed to finish her education and Sona’s desire to see Pooja attend her classes was by now very strong.

‘When is she going to college, beta?’ she asked her son.

‘She’s not going,’ replied Raju indifferently.

‘Not going! Why? She has done two years of BA, might as well finish,’ said Sona, expressing a hitherto hidden enthusiasm for education.

‘She says since I did Correspondence, so can she. In fact, I had to force her to even agree to that much, otherwise she is not keen on finishing. I had to really force her,’ repeated Raju with a secret, ruminative smile.

His mother’s hands tingled with a desire to slap him. ‘When did you decide this? And without consulting your elders?’ she demanded.

Raju looked weary. ‘Mummy, why do you always take everything so badly? She talked to her parents, she talked to me. Now she is married, it will be difficult for her to go to college, she has to be here till I leave for the shop at ten. Besides, why should she study? It is not as though she is going to need a degree, it is only time waste,’ said Raju, exhibiting the maturity that marriage had given him.

And Sona had to live with further evidence of just how good a wife Pooja was determined to be.

Pinpricks grew into wounds and festered. Pooja asked Yashpal to subscribe to another newspaper. ‘Please, Papaji,’ she said winningly. Her mother-in-law was nowhere in sight.

‘There is this one, beti,’ said her father-in-law, rustling the paper he held.

‘But Papaji, he doesn’t get to read it in the morning, and he likes a paper with his tea. My father and uncle each had their own.’

It was a small thing, not worth making an issue of. Yashpal nodded. The next morning, along with
The Hindustan Times
, came a copy of
The Times of India
, which Pooja quickly grabbed.

‘Now a separate newspaper,’ mourned Sona.

‘Why do you make so much out of a little thing?’ demanded her husband. ‘Over one newspaper you are creating tamasha.’

‘Don’t you see she is taking him away from me?’

‘For years you have kept him by your side, so you are finding it strange, that is all.’

‘I have a mother’s heart.’

‘I know, but now the boy is a husband. Let him be.’

But for Sona, letting Raju be was like letting go of life. When he came out of his room in the morning, paper read, bathed, and ready to have breakfast, she would try and feed him, but there was Pooja armed with the things he liked already cooked by her maid, ready to serve him, hover over him, careful that no one else should do the things she had been married to do.

‘Tell the maid to go back,’ urged Rupa. ‘She gives her too much free time. Send her back, then you can at least cook for Raju, she will help you, and you will both serve him, otherwise there will be endless tension. Pooja has to adjust to the ways of this house.’

Sona was quiet. Her samdhin had pleaded about this one thing, please let Pooji keep a maid, who of course will work under your guidance only. Since her accident her father has been fearful of the girl going near fire, he has never let her work in the kitchen. Swept away by the seeming modesty of the request, the lack of trouble to herself, and the deference paid to her, Sona had graciously agreed. Now the chickens were coming home to roost.

Sometimes a car from Pooja’s mother’s house would arrive to pick her up and Pooja would vanish for the day. Raju brought her back in the evening, driving the car he had been given in his dowry.

At times Sona would cry, and Raju would hover over her, distraught. ‘Beta, you have forgotten you have a mother, a sister, a father, all for a wife of less than six months. For this I slaved day and night, for this I sacrificed everything?’

‘Mummy, no, no. Tell me what I have done? Has Pooja done anything?’

It was too intangible. Sona could only cry, while Raju looked helpless, weak, and annoyed.

Sona found that Raju looked most uneasy when she talked about Nisha. She did not hesitate to sharpen such an effective weapon at least once a day.

‘Stop talking about me to him,’ said Nisha, whenever she heard her mother.

‘You don’t know the world,’ said Sona, turning on her daughter angrily. ‘After us, you are your brother and sisterin-law’s responsibility. It is our duty to make sure this is understood.’ Even Yashpal expected the newly married pair and his daughter to make a threesome.

‘Take your sister,’ he said to Raju whenever the couple were getting ready to go out.

Raju remained silent, and it was left to Pooja to say, ‘Of course, Papaji. We will take her. She hardly goes anywhere, poor thing, she is so shy. I will introduce her to all my friends.’

‘I refuse to go with them. They don’t want me,’ protested Nisha to her mother.

‘Don’t be silly. Otherwise you will be cooped up in the house all the time. You are still young, you need to go out.’

Nisha laughed cynically.

Sona took umbrage. ‘It is their duty.’

‘They are younger than me. It is not their duty.’

‘You are too simple. That is the real trouble. Don’t you remember how fond you two used to be of each other, how he never left your side when you were young? Now a wife has come, you think all that is going to change?’

‘You sent me away, how can you blame her for wanting to do the same thing?’ retorted Nisha.

Sona twisted her daughter’s ear.

‘What did you say?’

Nisha stared at her, frightened and defiant.

‘Only the truth,’ she said, despite the throbbing.

Sona twisted a bit more. ‘It was such a sacrifice to send you, and all you can say is we wanted to get rid of you. Let your aunt come, and I will tell her how ungrateful you are.’

Nisha didn’t want her mother to say anything to her aunt. ‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ she murmured. Her mother let go. Ears are hard to hold on to, and this one was now very red.

‘Really, it is a curse to have children – first you, then him, then him, then you,’ lamented the mother.

In the silence that followed, Nisha’s fingers wandered to her head and began to dig and scrape.

Her mother snatched her hand away. How many things could she deal with? ‘Just when you are getting better, you start itching again. You have learnt nothing from your experiences, nothing. You know how black your skin gets when you itch, and still you go on and on, on and on, though thousand times I tell you not to. But no matter what happens, you never listen.’

For Nisha, hating Pooja was an all-absorbing occupation. There was no conflict in this emotion, no divided loyalty, no pain besides the pain of hatred.

No single thing accounted for the loathing she felt, but everything contributed. Each arrogant breath Pooja took, each possessive gesture she made towards her husband, added to the sore in Nisha’s heart. All the evil in her nature is reflected in those burn marks, thought Nisha, staring in fascination at the puckered skin. She thinks she is something. She is not, she is ugly. Ugly. But this seemed apparent only to herself.

Pooja was a snake in the house – unfortunately, a legitimate snake. She slithered towards the family from the fastness of her bedroom with its brand-new double bed and matching teak-veneer side tables. From that site of marital bliss she crept, to sit next to Nisha, call her sister, and gingerly caress the scabbed, bruised arm, pierced through with cortisone injections.

Raju didn’t take part in these exchanges. He didn’t have to. The shashtras declare that wife and husband are one; therefore his glance is included in her gaze.

It turned out that Raju was not interested in the soft furnishing plan his uncle had so casually sketched out to his brother as a reason for the boy’s marrying. He knew nothing about furnishings, his interest was in cloth. He wanted to go into Bridal. This would unite everything they sold.

‘There are so many cloth shops coming up in Karol Bagh, we need a USP,’ he said. ‘People spend during weddings. If we cater to all their needs, they will remember the convenience, spread the word, add to our good will.’

Everybody agreed they needed to expand. But Bridal or soft furnishings? Rent in Karol Bagh or move to South Delhi?

Raju thought Bridal would be best done from the existing shop. The advantage was that they could offer every single clothing item needed for a wedding under one roof. The younger men wanted to break by-laws and build another storey, as was the tradition in Karol Bagh. Pyare Lal and Yashpal remembered the dislocation and bribe money necessary for making their shop two-storeyed and were reluctant to construct. However, other stores in Karol Bagh were expanding illegally, and the fact that the money would be provided by Raju’s dowry gave his vision an edge that could never be openly acknowledged lest it offend.

It took two months to make a room on top of the shop that ran its length. All the clothing one needed for a wedding was there: saris, lehngas, cholis, odhnis, kurtas, pyjamas, churidars, achkans, heavy and light, warm and cool, male and female. In addition were the presentation sets that needed to be gifted to everybody, from grandparents to servants, with prices to suit each requirement.

Alterations were attended to by a tailor, free of charge. Measuring tape around his neck, notebook in hand, he was ready to alter a hundred things if necessary, with the promise of next-day delivery, rain or shine, sickness or accident, births or deaths, festivals or celebrations – none of those excuses so dear to tailors outside the Banwari Lal Bridal Showroom.

Every bit of stress that arose over clothes during a wedding the shop promised to reduce, promised faithfully and sincerely.

The Banwari Lal & Sons Bridal Showroom was advertised in the newspapers, on billboards around Karol Bagh, on telephone poles, and on trees.

They had never been so aggressive.

Nisha minded all this intensely. Raju was being influenced by his wife, somebody in her family had done an MBA. The Banwari Lal approach to business had always been low key. Ever since she could remember her father had liked to silently rest when he came home, slurping his tea softly from his saucer, burping gently, rubbing the sole of his foot as it lay across his leg. Now business permeated all aspects of collective conversation. Raju, Ajay, and Vijay were all shop, talk, plans, USP. As they talked, Pooja smiled contentedly at the floor.

Homebound, Nisha felt more part of her mother’s life. When Rupa came, Nisha joined them on the bed as they lay down after lunch, food heavy in their stomachs, dark curtains drawn across the windows. Rupa put her arms around Nisha, lying in the middle half-dozing, half-listening to the plaintive whispers that floated about her.

‘Of course Madam thinks she is too great to be with us.’

It had started. It continued.

‘She treats the home as though it were a hotel. The minute Raju is gone, out she goes, to her parents, to her friends. Then she phones him at the shop to pick her up. Cleverly she tells him her whole family has cinema tickets, let’s go, making sure that she doesn’t have to take Nisha. After that they go to a restaurant, then they come home, late, late, sometimes eleven, twelve, doesn’t matter if we are waiting. A thousand times I have told the boy the sister is your responsibility, you have to look after her, but she has so many ways to make him neglect his duty.’

‘I don’t want to go with Pooja’s family, Mummy,’ mumbled Nisha, half asleep.

‘Arre, even if you did, are they taking you?’ retorted Sona.

Here Rupa shook her head at her sister’s innocence. ‘Didi, the world has changed. What did you expect? No one cares for their in-laws any more.’

‘But she is so shameless. If I say anything to her, anything to her at all – and you know, Roop, how I don’t like to say anything to anybody …’

The aunt shook her head again. ‘I know, Didi, that is just your problem. Another woman would have made her cry. Instead you give her all the freedom in the world.’

‘The minute I say the slightest thing, she runs and complains to Raju. Arre, a daughter-in-law has to function in her married home, or no?’