Home (7 page)

All the children got new clothes and money. Even Vicky received a four-hundred-rupee watch.

Banwari Lal was a bit uncomfortable about the money spent. Whether five thousand and one came to little Raju from the upstairs uncle, or Ajay and Vijay received one thousand and one each, or Nisha was given a gold necklace she would not wear for another fifteen years, all this had only one source.

On the other hand, for too long there had been an unequal distribution of children, and therefore of expenditure. For once he would have to let family politics govern spending instead of market considerations.

As the children grew, Vicky hovered uneasily between shop and home, between upstairs and downstairs, between his grandparents and his aunts. By the time he was fifteen he was moody and gangly. He looked as though he had worms.

Sona alternated between using him to help with Nisha and Raju, and trying to get rid of him.

When he came home from the shop she and her children had napped, consumed their milk and tea, and now it was time for Vicky to amuse the younger children. Since he was their elder brother, Sona was convinced it was a pleasure for him to take Raju out to the park, push him on his tricycle, put him on the swings, and ensure he did not hurt himself on the jungle gym. Vicky resisted this under the guise of his homework. It was humiliating appearing as a boy servant in the park where he had impressed with his cricket bat.

One evening.

‘Vickeeee,’ screamed Sona in the angan.

No answer.

‘Vickeee, Vickeeeee, Vickeeeeeeee.’

‘Must be upstairs,’ said Nisha, and waited for her mother’s reaction.

‘Always upstairs. Why doesn’t he live upstairs? But no, it is my kismet that he should be a noose around my neck.’

Upstairs Sushila was telling Vicky, ‘Go na. She is calling you.’ Vicky shrugged his shoulders. He was watching TV with his cousins, eating the fried potatoes their mother had provided, and sipping a glass of tea.

‘She must be wanting you to do some work,’ said Sushila, sowing seeds in fertile ground.

‘She always wants that,’ tittered Ajay, faithfully following his mother’s lead.

‘Han, Mummy,’ added Vijay, ‘she doesn’t like it when he comes up here and sits with us.’

‘Don’t talk about your tai like this,’ said the aunt, approval dripping from her voice, touching the corners of her tender smile. ‘She is the eldest in the house. She has looked after Vicky ever since he came here. It is a mother’s right to scold, it goes with a mother’s love.’

Vicky remained where he was, closed face and moving mouth. Finally Nisha arrived. ‘You have to come quickly. Mummy says it is very important.’

Sushila looked knowing. Vicky left, and Sona had to get angry in a low voice, because she knew that prying woman upstairs was listening, and this irritated her even more. ‘For this I clothe you and feed you? So somebody has to dance attendance on you? Why can’t you come when called, two, three times? Deaf, are you? Especially when you know it is time for Raju to go out.’

Raju started to fuss. ‘Out, out, out,’ he shouted.

‘But no, you are too busy enjoying yourself upstairs.’

The boy sullenly grabbed his cousin and tricycle and left. Nisha set up a wail. ‘I want to go too.’

‘You can’t,’ said her mother shortly.

‘Why? Why can’t I?’

‘It is better for girls to remain inside.’

‘Why?’

‘You will get black and dirty.’

‘So what? Raju is black. Blacker than Vicky.’

The mother’s face twisted. The boy’s darkness was a pain in her heart, all the more noticeable next to Nisha’s fairness and Vicky’s nondescript yellow. ‘Raju is the colour of Krishna,’ she now said.

‘He is not. Krishna is blue,’ retorted Nisha.

The mother was momentarily diverted. ‘He is shown blue because no human hand can paint what He is. He is the colour of the darkest clouds on a monsoon day. The blackness people long to see because it means an end to their suffering.’

The girl looked at her mother. Her eyes were dreamy, she seemed to have forgotten her anger. ‘I also want to be the colour of Krishna. I am going to play cricket in the sun.’

‘Krishna is a god. You, you will look like the sweeper woman who comes to the house. You want to look like a kali bhainsi?’

What kind of question was that? Who would want to look like a black buffalo?

Sona drew her daughter on to her knee, and pinched her round white cheeks.

‘You take after me. When I was young people used to say I was like the moon, the champa flower, the lotus. And when your father saw me,’ she stopped and giggled, ‘he said he would become a monk if he couldn’t marry me. Even so, my father was not keen.’

‘Why?’

‘We are service people, not traders, more like Rupa Masi’s husband. My father thought I would have to adjust too much. But then your father threatened to run away, and your grandfather begged my parents to agree.’

Nisha couldn’t imagine her grandfather begging anybody.

‘Now how can you be like me if you get dirty and black playing in the sun?’ continued the mother. ‘Who will want to marry you?’

Another step taken to make sure Nisha grew into the family princess.

Every evening Nisha was dressed in beaded, sequinned, lacy, frilled frocks of nylon, polyester, and cotton mixes. On her feet she wore shiny pointed shoes with little heels, and socks with bows to match the dresses. Her hair was combed into ponytails secured with elastic bands dangling with plastic birds, fish, and multicoloured flowers.

Unfortunately her outfits did not match her inclinations. ‘I want to play in the park,’ she whined periodically, as she saw the boys rush out accompanied by bat, ball, wickets, purpose, and excitement. Soon, however, she became reconciled to preserving her clothes and complexion by playing board games with her grandmother. Occasionally she wished she had a sister. Of her four brothers, Vicky was the only one who paid her any attention, touching and stroking her when he could. When he came home it was usually with something small for her, aam papar or sour churan sweets twisted in a paper cone.

Vicky was by now seventeen. If he could only pass his tenth boards he would be free of school for ever. Free of his aunt’s hectoring, free to sit in the shop all day – one of the men, displaying cloth, running errands, hoping to prove his worth. His grandfather was by now sixty-six; the travelling was all done by his uncles. He could easily go along with them to Bombay, Madras, or Ahmedabad, easily accompany them to the garment fairs they talked about.

But first he needed to shake the dust of school off his feet.

‘Vicky?’

‘Hoon?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the roof.’

‘Why?’

‘To study.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because my exams are coming, and I have to pass. Why else? Because I love to read?’

Nisha giggled.

Because Vicky was fond of Nisha he did not add that on the roof he would not be at the constant beck and call of her mother.

‘Will you pass this time?’ asked Nisha with interest.

‘How do I know? They fail me to get bribes from us.’

‘That’s very unfair,’ said Nisha indignantly.

‘That’s the way they all are. Otherwise I know as much as the other boys.’

‘When can you play with me?’

‘Not now.’

‘I’m also coming. See, I’ve got this.’ She showed him the snakes and ladders board she was carrying.

‘Go find somebody else. I can’t be playing with you all the time.’

Nisha caught him by the arm, ‘Please, na, please.’

‘I’ve told you I have to study. If I don’t pass they’ll cut my throat.’ Vicky drew his long finger across his thin and bony neck. His Adam’s apple stuck out as he flung his head back.

‘You yourself say you know everything. I’ll tell Papaji to talk to your teachers,’ persisted Nisha, with the confidence of a petted child. ‘It’s mean to go on failing you.’

‘I don’t care. As soon as I can, I shall open my own shop. Baoji didn’t finish school, look at him.’

They reached the roof, and Vicky spread his durrie in the shelter of the water tank. Around them jars of pickles and kanji were fermenting. Nisha rolled the pickle around, so that the top pieces would get soaked with the sour juices. She peeked into the black carrot kanji, dipped her finger in, and sucked it, but the rye hadn’t permeated the liquid, and it lacked body. She was disappointed. ‘Look,’ she said to Vicky, ‘the colour hasn’t taken yet.’

‘Hoon.’

‘Do you want a carrot?’ She dropped her fingers experimentally into the jar once more.

‘Mamiji will beat me.’

That her mother would react strongly to any tampering with the jars on the roof was undeniable. Especially if she thought Vicky had a hand in it.

‘Arre, how will she know?’ said Nisha. ‘I will tell her I have taken.’

‘And she will believe you?’

‘Yes.’ The little girl pried open his mouth and shoved the carrot in. Vicky looked at her for a moment and then flung himself on the durrie and moodily opened his books. Nisha arranged the snakes and ladders board, the dice, and the coloured pieces next to him and waited. Vicky started chanting passages from his book. She began to fidget. ‘Why are you always studying so hard? No one else does.’

‘No one else has the same problems passing.’

‘Then why do you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Vicky gloomily. ‘School is good for nothing. You can’t make money with it, I don’t know why I even have to go. Maybe because all of you do, but my school is bad, and yours is good.’

‘Your mother would have wanted it,’ said Nisha, repeating something she had heard her father tell his nephew often.

Vicky did not reply. Nothing in his mother’s life had happened the way she wanted it, and this argument always struck him as convenient rather than true.

‘This time you won’t fail – I say you won’t.’

‘Oh – you are the teacher now, are you? And the Principal – Nisha says don’t fail, and I don’t.’

Nisha tittered.

‘I want to leave school, I want to manage a shop,’ said Vicky, straining towards visions of independence, money, and recognition that would come when allowed to handle customers. Till now he was only an onlooker in the games of persuasion and seduction, could only hear rather than participate in talk of prices, fashion, how well the material would wear, wash, stitch, fall, how many metres of this needed, how many metres of that matching. One day, one day, he dreamt, one day he would be the one showing, he would be the one seducing, he would be the one looking sideways at pretty girls. ‘Meanwhile I live like a poor boy in this house.’

Nisha stared at him while Vicky continued, ‘I know they only keep me because I am useful. It is my fate that no one wants me. How many times has your mother said, even your own father doesn’t want you – so what can I expect from other people?’

They were alone on the roof, there was no one to see or scold, and Vicky allowed himself the luxury of some tears. Nisha, whose tears had always been immediately attended to, couldn’t bear it. She threw herself on his back, and put her arms around his neck. ‘You have me, Vicky, you have me,’ she said, rocking against his back, while Vicky snivelled into his sleeve. ‘And everybody else too,’ Nisha went on. ‘Raju, Mummy, Papaji, Dadu, Dadi, Chacha, Chachi, Ajay and Vijay, all your own blood, Vicky, your own blood,’ parroted Nisha.

‘Don’t talk to me of my own blood. In this world you can trust nobody,’ said Vicky, in turn parroting phrases that suited his vision of the world. ‘One day I will run away from their house and shop. I will show them,’ he continued, flapping the books he loathed.

Pretty, precocious and petted, there was not a lap in the house Nisha was not familiar with. And in those laps, as she was fed, cuddled, and bounced, words flowed around her, and into her, informing her of the ways of her house before she could even think.

And in the ways of the house, the shop was central: travelling for it, buying for it, fighting for it, working and planning for it, collecting its outstanding dues from the market, dealing with its defaulters, being vigilant about shoddy goods, being let down by wholesalers not as scrupulous as they, being worried by weavers and mills, striving to keep their reputation pristine. What else was there for any man of this family but the shop?

Now she dug her puzzled chin into Vicky’s back. How could one show anybody in her home? There were too many. They were not paying attention.

‘Bas. Now get off my back. You are getting heavy.’ He put his hands around the plump legs, stroked them up and down, while trying to pull her off.

Nisha wound her feet around his stomach. Vicky pulled her legs again and she slid around him into his lap, laughing. Vicky looked at her. She was so sweet. If only she was his real sister he wouldn’t have to leave her one day.

Nisha started resetting the upset snakes and ladders. ‘Now you have to play with me. Before you run away.’

‘You will have forgotten me,’ said Vicky. He stretched himself beside Nisha, moodily rolling the dice. Gradually he curled himself around her, his head propped on one hand. She leant against him, her mind on the game. Her dress rose higher as she fidgeted, her legs banging up and down on the durrie, next to Vicky’s nose. Entranced, he put his hand on the inside of her beckoning thigh and whispered, ‘How soft you are, Nisha.’

An intent look came on his face, his gentle fingers kept up a steady stroking. He began to trace the elastic of her panties all around the leg. ‘What are you doing? Chee, that’s dirty, take your hand away,’ she cried, but Vicky was in no state to hear her. Panting slightly, he pushed his hand inside, touching the place where she did su-su, tracing the slit that divided her. Nisha wriggled even more frantically – ‘I’ll tell everybody how dirty you are’ – but his grip tightened, and his arm pressed her thigh down so that both her legs were parted, and the slit was looser. A little su-su she could not help came out and wet his hand. She tried to draw her legs up and away from him, but he forced himself closer.

‘We are not going to tell anybody about this,’ he whispered, holding her. ‘This is our secret. See, you have done su-su. Ajay, Vijay, and I are always doing su-su in front of each other.’