for both of them, aloud for himself and silently for his father. He knows his father’s mind, and there is no approval in it. You wish I was more like Lokend. But he is the least like you. Look at me. Can you not see yourself in me? There is more than a vestige of the old man in his son’s finely carved features, the straight nose and the strong moustache.
Singh Sahib has that twitch in his lip that tells his son the interview is over.
But the son won’t be brushed away this easily. Physically he has the upper hand. Trapped in his inactive body, his father can do nothing. Ram Singh squats close to the old man’s ear. ‘We have to act soon. More and more people are talking about taking loans from that Lala Ram. We have to stop that. I have a plan,’ he whispers harshly.
Lala Ram tried to hide the tin signs collecting in a growing heap in one corner of his shop, even so, they have popped up all over Gopalpur: Hypothecated to the Bank of India, written in curly-wurly yellow paint on black.
‘We are losing ground. There is talk of opening a branch here soon, right in that Saraswati Stores. Then we can forget about getting any interest payments at all.’
‘Huh,’ says the father, who isn’t at all worried about the Bank of India grabbing his share of the loan business. After all, who in Gopalpur is going to fill out a litany of papers asking impossible questions requiring complicated answers? Date of birth? Repayment terms? Security? And on and on. With him, they just have to plant their thumbprints in the lower right corner, place the paper bonding them – sometimes for life, sometimes for generations – in their rafters away from mice and, if they are lucky, termites, and forget about it for eternity.
‘You just give me the word, and I make sure Lala forgets about the banking business.’
Singh Sahib finally opens his eyes. He still has one weapon left: The Look. Ram Singh hasn’t seen that look in his father’s eyes for years now. The last time he had seen it was when he and Lokend fought and he had broken his younger brother’s jaw. His father had lashed him in full view of the servants, continuing the thrashing till the belt broke. Ram Singh still has the scars on his back. After a particularly bad day, he likes to look at them.
‘Lea . . . ve!’
‘Times are changing. You will have to do it sooner or later if you are to survive as Gopalpur’s zamindar. After all, it is my future too. I will not be the one to break with family tradition because of you. You yourself say that tradition and honour are everything . . .’
‘. . . do . . . hnt! Honour! It ish . . . n’t . . . you!’
The ruthlessness of the insult shoves Ram Singh to the wall. Defeated but not crushed he bounces back: ‘I know what you think. You think I have no honour. Do you really think you would do things differently? Say what you like, I am more like you than you know. Honour before Life.’ He shouts out his father’s motto before leaving the room.
Singh Sahib does nothing to curb the hatred that lodges in his throat making it difficult for him to breathe.
‘You leave him alone!’ Asmara Didi accosts Ram Singh outside the door. ‘Remember, I brought you into this world.’
‘Yes, you keep telling me so . . . So damned what, do you think you can take me out of it too?’
‘It would have been better if she’d never had you!’ says Asmara Didi, surprised at her brutality. ‘Your father loves you, I wish you could see that.’
‘Yes, he loves me so much that he never wants to see my face.’
‘That’s not true! Don’t you remember how the two of you used to eat dinner together every night? It was always Lokend who didn’t have his attention.’
‘Lokend may not have had his attention then, but he certainly has his love now.’
‘Give him a chance, won’t you . . .’ she says, visibly softening. ‘He is in a bad way. When your amma died, he stopped living too . . .’
‘He better have, it was he who killed her. She was too good for him.’
‘Ram Singh! Your father loved Bibiji more than life itself,’ she says. ‘A love like that is fraught with danger, it can be very fragile . . . but you wouldn’t understand . . .’
‘He went with other women till she died of a broken heart.’
‘No . . . she was weakened by her breathing sickness,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘She was very weak, she couldn’t handle the strain of bearing a second child,’ she reiterates, trying to convince herself as much as Ram Singh. In her opinion it was misguided jealousy that killed Bibiji, not childbirth.
It was a cruel trick of providence that had placed Bibiji at the window the day Singh Sahib put his hands on the shoulders of a village woman waiting under the spreading mango tree. The woman, one of his numerous bachelor dalliances, had come to ask for money to go to the city. Singh Sahib had grabbed her shoulders to impress upon her never to come to his home again. The woman may have been no one to him, but for Bibiji she was her nemesis, sent by the gods to quell her laughter and teach her the one universal truth: Nothing is Permanent.
That day an alien loneliness, thus far held at bay by her husband’s love, rushed up and grabbed Bibiji by the throat. All her loneliness and desolation attacked her, and for the first time since she had arrived at the Big House she regretted her superior marriage that made her unfit to return home. After that, she lived in constant fear, her stomach balled up so tight that she was unable to eat. Day after day, the situation received sustenance from the placenta of her imagination. Her love became desperate. In his absence she found herself cleaning all her husband’s things in a frenzy, just to be close to him. She lay alert and unsleeping night after night thinking her self-cruelty would give her resilience, but it only intensified the pain. More and more, she spent long hours at her open window gazing into the fields, closing it only on the days when the maddened dust came to visit Gopalpur, accepting her situation, having nowhere to go and nothing to change. That’s when she’d started having the midnight attacks which left her breathless and half-conscious.
‘What do you know? You were only four when she died,’ says Asmara Didi. ‘Did you know your mother was a commoner, a mere village girl, but still he married her. He went against his whole family, this village, tradition, to bring her into this house. She didn’t have children for many years, and he could have taken another wife, but he didn’t.’
‘Maybe he should have taken another wife, then she might be alive today . . .’ Ram Singh misses his mother in that gruff way of tough men who can never acknowledge their feelings.
‘Your mother was – no, is, your father’s entire world. She was simply too suspicious of her good fortune, she couldn’t accept her destiny. She was so lovely, so delicate, so lonely, so weak . . . Everyone has a story, Ram Singh, mark my words; each of us has our own burden.’
‘Huh, each one of us, indeed, except my perfect brother, damn him, and that godawful mongoose of his.’
‘You used to keep mongoose pups too, you know. After your mother died you spent all your time beside a wooden crate hidden behind the cowshed which held four abandoned mongoose pups. Their eyes just barely open, you kept them alive on a rag dipped in milk.’
‘Do you really expect me to believe that?’ he says, his voice wavering. Of course he remembers. He remembers vividly. It was on one of those dank days when the clouds were distended over the fields, stretched big and fat with rain, that he thought he would make the world right for his grieving widowed father. He’d brought one of his pet mongoose pups into his father’s despondent room, walking heel to toe like a thief in a vaudeville act, and quickly placed the pup in his father’s hands before thought could change his mind. Then he’d run to the safety of the darkest corner in the room to hide behind the curtains, believing his father would be fooled into thinking the present came from the heavens if he hid well enough. He’d watched secretly as the pup arranged itself into a confident ball, so tiny that it was no more than a bony warm feeling in those massive palms. He had wanted to leap out from