It was enough. He couldn’t understand, and had been a fool to try. At the same time as the words drew him in with their rhythm, they barred his passage. Lath? Tartar? Without-book prologue? He should have stuck to the books of notes that everyone else used to pass. His eyes wandered outside, where the football was making a lovely long curve towards the goal at the mouth of the lane. The watchman grabbed the ball and waved the boys out of the way; Dr Gogate’s new car turned in.
Ashish bent his head down to the page.
The date is out of such prolixity:
His elbow leaned on the desk and his cheek found a resting place in the palm of his hand. He looked into the sun and wondered what had become of Sunder, but the question didn’t seem as urgent as a few days ago. For diversion, he went looking for the book that his uncle had picked up.
‘Aren’t there any family photos?’ he asked his aunt in the afternoon.
‘Photos? You mean of your mother’s childhood?’
‘Yeah, from the old house.’
She paused, and blew on her tea. ‘I’ll have to see, they’re probably in the chest here. You want to see them?’
‘Hm,’ Ashish nodded.
‘We’ll ask your uncle when he gets home.’
‘Okay.’
But a little later, he heard her calling to him from the living room and left Romeo and Juliet to wander out. She had removed the ornaments from the top of the tea chest and opened it; bits of newspaper, cloth, and a few albums lay on the low table. Her face was amused. ‘Come, see?’
He sat next to her on the floor, and they began turning the enormous pages, on which card-like black and white prints were affixed by decorative corners. Here was Mohan mama, about six years old, swinging on the gate of the house at Dadar: he looked small, skinny, and mischievous, but ultimately well behaved. Ashish’s mother was in another picture, a young child, pugnacious in a frilly frock with a large bow at the waist. His grandparents, looking young and self-conscious; his grandfather wore a suit, his grandmother wore a nine-yard sari and carried a baby, presumably Vivek mama, in her arms. Various other cousins, aunts and uncles; his aunt speculated about their identity.
They heard the door catch: Mohan was home.
‘What’s this?’ he asked. He took off his sandals and came to stand near them, tentative but eager.
‘He wanted to see some of the old photos,’ Lakshmi explained.
Mohan reached down and took the picture Ashish was holding. It had a white border and scalloped edges, and showed a formal group. A plant stood in one corner; on a sofa sat a woman in a sari, now the ubiquitous six-yard variety, holding a toddler on her lap. Two boys stood next to her; at the side was her husband, his hand on the elder boy’s shoulder.
‘That’s my grandparents with my mother, Vivek mama and you, isn’t it, Mohan mama?’ Ashish glanced up; his uncle’s face was inscrutable.
‘Yes, the three of us and our parents. Look at your mother’s face.’
‘Hm.’ Ashish reached up for the photo. The toddler, fatkneed, had the familiar aggressive expression. ‘So Vivek mama was about twelve. You must have been six or so? Everyone looks so different.’
Mohan snorted. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Ashish said. ‘You all seem more serious or something.’ The photographs were different, say, from those of him and his sister growing up. The figures here regarded the camera with greater intensity; they seemed more present than people in pictures today.
His uncle looked down at him. ‘Well, these photos were taken in a studio, we had to pose. Best clothes, a lot of waiting. Your mother used to get very bored and start shouting.’
‘I bet.’ Ashish looked back at the photo. The elder boy, Vivek, already looked pompous; he was sticking his small chest out, and his brilliantined hair showed the marks of a comb. Ashish’s grandfather seemed preoccupied; his grandmother was a definite entity, as though the photographer had drawn a thin black line around her. The middle child, his uncle, appeared to be elsewhere. His eyes were remote, and his smile engagingly goofy, as though he were gratified to have been included. Already, he looked like a person used to spending a lot of time on his own.
‘Can I have this?’
Mohan looked startled.
‘Can I keep it in my room?’ Ashish modified.
‘I suppose. There’s no frame.’
‘That doesn’t matter.’ He thought perhaps he should explain why he wanted it. ‘I don’t really have any old pictures of the family,’ he said. It would be a warning, he thought, feeling a kind of self-doubting impatience towards the boy in the photo. Wake up! he wanted to shout at him. Get on with it!
‘All right, take it.’ Mohan started to put the other photos in an ancient envelope that he slipped into the back of the album. He wrapped it in a piece of old sari that acted as its shroud, and replaced it carefully in the tea chest; he shut the lid. Aha, thought Ashish: only people who’ve had truly happy childhoods can afford to forget about them. He went to his room and stood the photo on his desk, against the window ledge.
After dinner he prowled around his uncle, who was sitting in the cane chair reading.
‘Mohan mama.’
‘Hm.’
Ashish circled the chair. The light glinted through his uncle’s steel-coloured hair and onto his scalp, which showed, oddly pale, at the crown.
‘Have you ever thought of writing something?’
‘Ha! Apart from letters and money order forms, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
No answer. Ashish continued to hover about the chair, dragging one rubber slipper along the tiles until it squeaked. His uncle lowered the book and looked at him.
Ashish grinned. ‘I was looking at that book, Become a Writer. You should try writing some stories, you know, short stories. You must know a lot of stories, from all the people you meet.’
Mohan’s eyebrows shot up. ‘That’s a very different thing. It’s difficult to be a writer, not everyone can do it,’ he muttered.
‘Yes, but you already write a lot anyway.’
‘That’s different.’
‘And also you read so much.’
His uncle regarded him for a moment, frowning. Then his face cleared. Unexpectedly, he laughed. ‘I was published once,’ he said. ‘Have I ever shown you?’
‘No!’
‘Hm, I wonder where it is now. It was in a magazine.’ His face had begun to gleam. ‘Come, I think it might be in your room.’
He bustled out of the living room and into the kitchen. Ashish had just begun to follow him when Mohan reappeared with the stepladder. He went into Ashish’s room and planted it between the bed and the window.
‘Do you want me to do that?’ Ashish mumbled, but he enjoyed the sight of his uncle hurrying up the pyramid-like stepladder, which creaked loudly under his weight. In the upper reaches of the shelves near the bed Mohan began to rummage in various piles of paper.
‘Chhi,’ he said perfunctorily. The dust here was thick and silky; it floated down to the floor in flakes. ‘Got it.’ He descended the ladder, his face triumphant, eyes bright, and a dirty smear on the bridge of his nose. Ashish, long-suffering, folded up the stepladder and carried it back to the kitchen. When he’d restored it to its dark corner he hurried to the living room. His uncle stood under the bare bulb; he had gingerly unfolded the ageing,