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She was polite to Shukumar without being friendly.
once, when he mentioned the baby’s death, she looked up from her knitting, and said, “But you weren’t even there.”
The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.
Only he didn’t want her to be pregnant again. He didn’t want to have to pretend to be happy.
“I only spoil children who are incapable of spoiling.”
“What is this thank-you? The lady at the bank thanks me, the cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me when I return an overdue book, the overseas operator thanks me as she tries to connect me to Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at my funeral.”
“And the purpose? It indicates what?” “You make a jack-o’-lantern,” I said, grinning ferociously. “Like this. To scare people away.” “I see,” Mr. Pirzada said, grinning back. “Very useful.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. It was the first time I had uttered those words to Mr. Pirzada, two simple words I had tried but failed to tell him for weeks, had said only in my prayers. It shamed me now that I had said them for my own sake.
Mr. and Mrs. Das behaved like an older brother and sister, not parents. It seemed that they were in charge of the children only for the day; it was hard to believe they were regularly responsible for anything other than themselves.
“It means loving someone you don’t know.”
“That’s what my father did,” Rohin continued. “He sat next to someone he didn’t know, someone sexy, and now he loves her instead of my mother.”
And now all of her curiosity centered around discovering the next treasure.
FOR THE GREATER NUMBER of her twenty-nine years, Bibi Haldar suffered from an ailment that baffled family, friends, priests, palmists, spinsters, gem therapists, prophets, and fools.
Like the rest of us, she wanted to serve suppers, and scold servants, and set aside money in her almari to have her eyebrows threaded every three weeks at the Chinese beauty parlor.
Her soliloquies mawkish, her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.
“Bibi possesses insufficient quantities of respect and self-control. She plays up her malady for the attention. The best thing is to keep her occupied, away from the trouble she invariably creates.”
But she was not our responsibility, and in our private moments we were thankful for it.
But there was no point carrying out an investigation. She was, to the best of our knowledge, cured.
I was only a boarder, a man who paid her a bit of money and passed in and out of her home for six weeks. Compared to a century, it was no time at all.
I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.
