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NOON (Chapter 1)Last Rites

(1989)

'We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally.'

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust

The dressing table was the first thing she had bought herself since Sahil. It had attracted her, with its tiny bulbs, gilt and mirrors, from the pages of a foreign magazine. She decided at length to take the magazine down to the colony market and have the dressing table copied. Rati Ram, the carpenter, inspected it, seemed to translate its charms into an Indian reality, then agreed to reproduce it for a few hundred rupees. When he returned a few days later with his replica, thickly coated in gold paint, and decorated with fat full-sized bulbs and crudely cut strips of mirror, its arrival caused tension in the little house with the gardenia tree.

'Phansy shmansy,' her mother sniffed, as the men brought it in.

'Give me a break, Mama. You know very well I haven't so much as bought myself a salwar since I moved here. And it's not as if you're paying for it.'

'Who's saying I am! But let me remind you, I pay for other things. And they cost me an arm and a leg. Not that I'm not happy to do it. But I won't have you getting on your high horse.'

'Would you like me to thank you for it again? "Thank you, Mama, for paying Rehan's fees; I am eternally grateful and so is he." Happy?'

'Don't take that tone with me. He's my grandson. I'll give him what I like. I don't need you to thank me.'

Rehan looked into the house from the veranda, where moments before he had been servicing his gods, cleaning the idols, putting fresh marigolds in their tray. When he heard the raised voices, he slipped behind the cooler. Through its grey slats, the two women appeared to him as mute shadows, their voices drowned out by the whirr of the cooler's fan and the slurping of its pipes. He saw his mother pace and bring her palms together in frustration. His grandmother, in reply, threw up her arms and rushed out of the room, leaving Udaya alone. Rehan's gaze was diverted by drops of water growing fat along the cooler's soaked matting. They swelled, their bellies striped by the blaze. Then they fell fast and soundless to the few inches of dark water below. The room now was empty and a batch of fresh drops sprouted on the matting. Rehan returned to his gods.

Udaya had brought him to her mother's house as a temporary step after Sahil.

It had been impossible, once that relationship ended, to stay on in London. Not without Sahil. Who, after moving them out of his flat on Flood Street, became difficult and unreachable. He had always travelled a lot, between La Mirage, Dubai and London, and in the end, like an airline reducing its flights to a destination, he had come to London less and less. It had always only been an 'arrangement' forged fast when she became pregnant with Rehan. She had hung on to the hope that it would deepen. But after a last holiday in Kathmandu, to which Sahil brought along two children he claimed were his nephew and niece, the calls and visits came to an end.

Love was one reason she hung on in London; pride another. After the scandal of her relationship, she found it difficult to face her mother with the news that it was over, not three years after it had begun. She found work as a freelance lawyer, but made only enough to pay the rent on the north London bedsit they had moved into.

Then, several years after her last conversation with Sahil, she ran into an uncle, visiting from Delhi. It was a bleak moment; she had been forced to sell some jewellery the day before; in her weakness, she confessed everything. He convinced her to let him prepare the ground with her mother and a few weeks later Udaya returned, with Rehan, to rebuild her life in the city she had left some years before, trusting completely to passion.

It had made sense at first to stay with her mother. But no sooner had she arrived than the fights began. And, as with those of her childhood, they seemed never to be about what they were ostensibly about. If then the issue of cutting her hair or smoking or marriage had become an expression of some deeper tension between them, so, now too, seemingly innocuous things, such as the cleanliness of the kitchen, the trouble in Punjab and Rehan's upbringing became laden with their old animus. The difference was that they were not alone. Rehan, every day more aware, was there among them; and she was determined to save him the scenes. It had been fight enough to convince her mother to let Rehan feed himself. Udaya had a secret terror that her mother, well-intentioned as it might be, would instil in him, through that special brand of Indian compassion that debilitates when it means to commiserate, a feeling of want or misfortune. Rehan had given no indication of ever being aware of Sahil's absence; and though she had given him his father's name and even an explanation of a kind - Sometimes, just as you fight with your friends, grown-ups fight too - he had never seemed interested in knowing more. It made her happy to think of him as unscathed by their separation.

No, if she was to protect Rehan, she must find her own place, and quickly. She had already begun making enquiries.

From where he lay on the bed, Rehan could see just his mother's back, her long straight hair and a few inches of flesh trapped between her petticoat and blouse. She sat before the new dressing table, opening her mouth wide for lipstick, smacking her lips closed on a tissue and reaching for tweezers to remove stray hairs.

'Where are you going for dinner?' Rehan asked.

'It's a work dinner, baba. A client...'

'What's his name?'

'Amit, Amit Sethia.'

'What does he do?'

'He's an industrialist.'

'What's an industrialist?'

'Someone with industries. Coal, steel etc....'

'Is he rich?'

'Yes, baba,' Udaya said, closing one eye over a silver stick lined with kohl.

'Ma,' Rehan said abruptly, 'why do you hate Nani?' His mother blinked rapidly, half-turning around. An expression of withheld amusement and a threat to come clean played on her face.

'Rehan! What have you heard?'

'Nothing, Ma, really. I swear. I was just curious.'

'Why are you suddenly asking me if I hate your grandmother?'

'You both fight a lot so I was just wondering.'

Turning back to the mirror, but watching him closely with one kohled eye, she said, 'Well, it's not that I hate Nani, it's just that there comes a point in everyone's life when they stop seeing their mother or father as just their mother and father but as people. And sometimes you like those people for who they are, and sometimes you find, well, that you don't have much in common with them. Nani and I, for instance, have never had much in common. She didn't understand me; I couldn't understand her. We were miles apart. She believed in God and couldn't believe she'd produced a daughter who didn't. I couldn't believe she believed in a God who cared how long your hair was. I mean was this God a hairdresser?'

Rehan laughed loudly. He didn't mind her insulting her own Sikh god as long as she didn't begin on the Hindu ones, for which he had acquired an unlikely obsession since his arrival in India.

'She read Mills and Boons,' his mother continued, 'I didn't. She was forever concerned about respectability; I couldn't care less. When your aunt got married, she told me, "Now, it's too late for you. I've told your father to put some money aside, and bas, try and best make do." I was twenty-five! No, she was horrible!' Udaya, now nearly fully made up, smiled as she spoke and it seemed to drain her words of ill feeling. Rehan adored his grandmother, and it was unsettling that his mother, whose voice was like the voice of truth, could feel differently. He hated to be at odds with her. But whenever he tried to bring her around to his way of thinking, she would irritate him by taking an agree-to-disagree tone.

'I love Nani!' he said provocatively. 'And when her ship comes in, she's going to buy me Castle Grayskull for my gods to live in.'

'So you must,' his mother replied, reflecting on whether Rehan had been told what his grandmother's ship coming in would mean. 'She's been wonderful to you.'

'Stop talking in that fake voice!' Rehan yelled.

His mother smiled and turned her full attention to putting on her sari. She chose a handbag and, carefully, the things that went in it - all of which angered Rehan so much that he stormed out.

Summer power cuts and fluctuations had begun and the light in the corridor was dim. The disc-shaped ceiling light, high above like a white Frisbee, grew fainter and fainter, till its milky glass barely sustained a glow. Then like a small angry sun burning away a thick bank of clouds, it flared, sending Rehan fleeing down the stairs that separated his grandmother's section of the house from his mother's. Below, where the surge had ended and the light was dull and dusty again, servants were setting the table, lighting the odd white candle. Rehan slipped past his grandmother's room in the hope of beginning his favourite mythical movie, The Marriage of Shiva and Parvati, before dinner.

He had only been watching a few minutes when he heard his grandmother call him.

'No, no, Nani, please. Not now, just come here and see where we are.'

She wandered in a second later, wearing a loose, faded salwar kameez. Her greying hair was in a thin plait and when she sat down next to Rehan, he could smell Nivea cream on her. Her skin was smooth and her eyes, though losing colour, still shone. There was something coquettish about her smile of clean-capped teeth, giving, even now, the impression of a once-beautiful woman. Rehan grabbed her soft stomach and squeezed it. She pretended at first to be indifferent to the drama coming from the old Japanese VCR, but Rehan knew she was riveted. The story had raced ahead and Parvati, witnessing her father dishonour her husband, a bellied and middle-aged Shiva, was about to commit herself to the sacrificial fire.

Rehan's grandmother watched through her large amber-rimmed spectacles, the glare exposing fingerprints on their lenses, as Parvati's anger built. She clutched an optician's artificial leather case in her hands, and muttered, 'OK then, why not! Arre, suno!' she yelled for a servant. 'Koi hai?'

Bihari arrived a moment later, a stained napkin draped over his shoulder.

'Bihari, go and get baba's food.' Then, she added, 'And listen, don't say anything to Udaya madam.'

'Nani, yes!' Rehan squealed.

'Your mother will kill us.'

'No, no, she'll be fine. She's going out to dinner at the house of a rich industrist.'

'Industrialist, baba.'

Parvati, burning with rage, was moments away from committing the first sati ever when dinner arrived on a steel and tinted glass trolley.

'Baba, come on now, eat your food.'

'Nani, please, just see where we are. Please feed me.'

'Your mother will throw a fit. She has told me time and time again not to feed you.'

'Come on, Nani, what difference does it make? Look, look, Shiva's being told about Parvati having jumped in the fire.'

Drum rolls had begun in Kailash, demons tittered and studio lightning flashed as Shiva was informed of Parvati's fate.

'He's going to dance the tandav,' Rehan's grandmother gasped, 'he is the Natraj after all.' And this simple comment on the drama, said in a voice fearful and resigned, as if his grandmother, too, was part of the world Shiva was to destroy, spread gooseflesh over Rehan's arms and back.

'Nani!' he breathed. She put a little packet of food, mutton and lentils in his mouth. He chewed tensely, as Shiva now bent over Parvati's ashes, fingered them gently as though searching for some small trinket. Rehan found this scene, of the most powerful god in the universe grieving, very affecting. Shiva's loneliness was so acute; it made Rehan wish that they were friends so that he could help lessen it in some way. At the same time the display of male emotion intrigued him.

'Nani, look how he's almost crying.'

'He's sad, no?' Rehan's grandmother said, putting another bite of food in his mouth. She tried another but Rehan turned his face away.

'But still strong, Nani?'

'Yes, baba. Eat. One for Nani...'

He accepted.

'One for Mama...'

'No, Nani, enough.'

'One for Shiva ji.'

'Nani!'

Then it occurred to Rehan to ask why Parvati had jumped into the fire in the first place. His grandmother smiled knowingly. 'Baba Re,' she said in a hushed voice, 'the supreme sacrifice.' And perhaps thinking the words too complicated for a child, she added, 'When a girl enters her husband's house, his honour becomes hers. Then everything else becomes secondary, even her own parents' house, which once she leaves it for her husband's, is no longer hers.'

Distracted by their conversation and the noise from the television, neither of them heard the clatter of Udaya's heels. His grandmother was still trying to shove in a last mouthful when Rehan saw her standing in the doorway in her mustard chiffon sari. Her long black hair was washed and dried, the evening bag hung from her arm and her dark skin was touched with rouge and brownish red lipstick. Taking in the scene before her, Udaya's smile fled.

'Mama!' she moaned. 'What are you doing?'

Rehan's grandmother pursed her lips; a martyred expression formed on her face; she looked directly ahead at the television, where Vishnu had now persuaded Shakti to stand between Shiva and the destruction of the world. 'The next step you take,' Shakti said, looking up with simpering resolve at the dancing Shiva, 'will be on my head.' Rehan stared at his mother as though she had jumped out of the screen.

'Mama, how many times am I to tell you he is too old to be fed! If at this age he can't feed himself, we may as well institutionalize him.'

His grandmother glanced sideways at Rehan. He spluttered, 'Ma, it was me. I asked Nani to feed me.'

She looked up at Udaya with satisfaction.

'Shut up, you're a child. You don't make these decisions. I, as your mother, am telling you that you will feed yourself.' Then, as if addressing her in another language, Udaya said to her mother: 'And, Mama, cut it out. I know what you're doing. I've made my decision but, in the meantime, I will not have you retard this child with your religious crap.'

Her anger spent, Udaya looked tenderly at Rehan.

'Anyway I'm off to dinner. Go to bed soon, baba.'

With this, she turned around and strode out of the house, leaving a trail of perfume to settle over the smell of food. Rehan jumped up, and putting a conciliatory hand on his grandmother's knee, trotted out after his mother.

He caught her at the end of the cement drive, where, in a small patch of lawn, with a thin grass cover, bare earth showing through in places, there were beds of dahlias with scraggly manes. It was here, almost magically, that amid the drabness of the house and the malnourished plants, a rare gardenia flourished. The tree had a knotted trunk with a slender curve that brought its canopy of fleshy leaves to the centre of the garden. Deep within each cluster, like shallow wells of moonlight, grew white scented flowers, as heavy as fruit.

The gardenia was another point of tension between mother and daughter. It had come with the house, but Rehan's grandmother hated the tree, accusing it of stealing light from the other plants. Udaya thought it beautiful and suspected that the real cause for her mother's antipathy was the tree's bewitching aspect, its poison and femininity. She had convinced Rehan that it was really a rakshasa, waiting to reveal its true form when the moment was right.

Rehan made out his mother standing near the Suzuki in the light of a single caged bulb.

'Ma, Ma, wait.'

'Baba, why are you barefoot?'

He looked down at his feet, felt he was losing critical amounts of goodwill, but pattered on regardless.

'Ma, sorry, I'll put some slippers on. I just have to tell you something,' he said, approaching quickly. He felt his mother much bigger in her heels, her head lost to some dark summit.

'Listen, Ma,' he said, taking the adult tone of voice she often adopted with him, 'I understood what you just said to Nani. I know what the "decision" is; but I don't think we should do it; I don't think we should move.'

Udaya came suddenly out of shadow and Rehan was struck by how beautiful and strong she seemed. She gave him the special look she used when they were having a private joke.

'Baba,' she said, 'I've seen a very nice flat and believe me, you'll love it. You'll have your own room. Your own bed. You can have your friends over whenever you want and Nani won't be far, but we must have our own place.'

The idea of the flat filled Rehan with unease. He hated the thought of being in some other part of town, separated from his grandmother. But in speaking of it to him as a secret undertaking, his mother won him over for the time being. He felt it important not to let her down. He waited till the Suzuki's red brake lights had disappeared down the still and silent street, then went back inside.

The next day, when the sun blazed and the white edges of the city's pavements throbbed, Udaya received an unexpected call from Rehan's school. She had been in her own thoughts all morning, recalling impressions from the night before. It had been a beautiful party; there had been many journalists and politicians, a handful of diplomats. The French ambassador, Servain, had expressed a special interest in the meaning of her name. 'Dawn?' he asked, holding her hand as he spoke. 'No,' she had replied, 'of the dawn, I believe.' 'Udaya, udaya,' he muttered softly to himself, 'not dawn, but of the dawn.' Udaya flushed with embarrassment.

They were interrupted by their host. 'Enough, you dirty old dip,' he had said, only half-jokingly, it seemed, 'keep to your own women. I invited this lovely lady so that I could speak to her.' Amit Sethia had a brash, clumsy style, Udaya had thought at the time, but she was flattered by the attention he paid her. After the upheavals of the past few years, there was something exciting about being out and about again, desirable to men. It felt like the return of normal life.

The voice on the other end of the phone was too frazzled to explain why she wanted Udaya to come in person to pick Rehan up from school; she couldn't say what the matter was. He was safe; 'there was no cause to worry'; but he outright refused to leave and was insisting that his mother come to fetch him. He had never done anything like this before, never even been homesick. And Udaya, sliding the Suzuki's keys off her glass-topped desk, had a feeling of dread.

The road in front of the British School was crowded when she arrived. The imported embassy cars made a barrier of sorts, their shapes smooth, their gleam hard. Her own car windows were thrown open as if in distress, and as she could find no place to park, she stopped in front of the school gate, trying to spot Rehan through gaps in the glittering wall of steel and tinted glass. At last, raising herself up on the car floor, she caught sight of him over the white caps of chauffeurs. Rehan ran out to her, his brown water bottle banging against his thighs. Bolting past the line of cars, he made her heart race. The next thing she knew he had jumped into the seat next to her, which he was not allowed to do.

It was Rehan's first time in the front and Udaya insisted that he wear a seat belt. Suzuki had been the first to introduce them in India, but they didn't seem very secure: the grey belt, clinging to a thin strip of exposed green metal, hung loosely around her son. The car felt light, too light; it felt tinny and destructible. Udaya had bought it in part from money lent her by her mother and in part through a system of monthly instalments, which she always brought up when Rehan asked for something expensive.

'Ma, can we turn the AC on?'

'No, baba, you know we can't. Don't you remember what happened the last time we did?'

'The engine started to cough?'

'Yes.'

He had told her to buy the model with in-built air conditioning, but she had felt it was too much. His grandmother had said to buy the cheaper car and install the air conditioner later. But the heavy machine that hung from the car's dashboard put too much strain on the engine. And so, the AC remained off, its blue and orange lights unlit, its wide black grill mute, the dark gaps, like cartoon teeth, grinning impotently.

The heat was terrible. The Suzuki's plastic seats softened, the short shadows of trees shrank from the day, Rehan pulled at his seat belt. Which after being violently extended, only partially returned to its original position.

'Don't, baba.'

'But it's hot!'

'I know, but if you do that, you'll have to sit in the back. Do you want to sit in the back?'

'No.'

'Then sit properly and don't pull off the seat belt. It's to keep you safe.'

'But what if the car is going to explode and I need to run away?'

'It's not going to explode...'

'If!'

'Then you open the belt and run away.'

'If I have to run away quickly?'

'Then you open the belt quickly and run away.'

Rehan, enjoying his mother's fluency, chuckled. 'But what if I need to jump out of the window?'

'Rehan!' And his name said in this tone, under these circumstances, contained a threat. Rehan gauged it well. He seemed to be about to speak, but then looking out on the day, itself an element of his fear, he became quiet.

'What, baba?' Udaya prodded him gently.

They passed a blue ice-cream cart on the side of the road. A man with an open shirt and a small, bird-like chest lay asleep on its cool aluminium surface.

'Ma, can I have a chocolate bonanza?'

'Baba, now? Really? The man's asleep.'

Rehan looked at her with a stern expression, as if appalled that she could mistake his genuine need for childish whim. She pulled over the car and honked her horn. The man rose drunkenly and came over to the window. Rehan waited patiently for the transparent plastic cup, through which it was possible to see a swirl of real chocolate coiled many times about itself. The cup had a lid that fitted neatly into its bottom, making a stand of sorts, and in Rehan's mind, spoke of a special imported elegance.

A spoon or two in, he began: 'The twins' grandmother is dead.' The twins were his best friends in school.

'O, baba! I'm so sorry,' Udaya said, though not quite sure why the death of this apparent stranger should have so unnerved her son.

Rehan, sensing something false in his mother's tone, added: 'She was murdered. In a flat!'

'Oh, God,' Udaya said, wanting to shield him from his own news.

Rehan began to describe the afternoon scene of the old woman asleep; the doorbell ringing; her rising to open the front door. Then he couldn't go on. Something too vivid, too jarring had seized him. Udaya, through his sobs, couldn't understand the rest of what he said - doorbells and door eyes, broken chains, men in leather jackets, money taken or not taken.

It was only later that evening when she reached home and called the twins' mother that she was able to learn more. The old lady had lived alone in a flat in south Delhi and had been murdered by a man wearing a leather jacket. They knew this because he had tied up the maid, but spared her life; and yes, it was strange that he took no money. But the twins' mother was less mystified than Rehan by this: she felt he might have got scared and in a panic killed her mother-in-law and fled the scene.

They were due to move in a few weeks, but Rehan now would not hear of it. His opposition became so violent Udaya couldn't even persuade him to see the place she had found. She decided at last to show it to him by subterfuge.

One Saturday morning, soon after the rains arrived, and Delhi's roads glistened and steamed, she offered to take him for a drive. On the way she said she wanted to stop at a friend's place.

'Why?'

'Just, to see what it's like and to pick something up.'

But Rehan was not so easily fooled.

'We're going to the flat, aren't we?'

'Yes.'

'OK,' he said, confirming his decision with a sigh. 'OK. Let's go.'

The barsati of 187 Golf Links overlooked a garden, now sodden with rainwater. A dim staircase, smelling of food and damp, served all the flats. Rehan and his mother climbed to the top and came to a white painted door.

Expecting to enter a closed space, Rehan let out a gasp when the door opened onto grey skies and a light monsoon breeze. At the centre of a vast terrace, there was a cottage of sorts bounded in with potted plants. Rehan's face lit up.

'See, baba! I told you that you'd like it.'

And he did. Walking through the room that would be his, shown a place where he would have his first bed - a bunk bed, his mother promised, where school friends could come and sleep over - Rehan reached for his mother's hand. They passed a recess in the wall and he could not resist trying it out for his gods. He let go of Udaya's hand and wandered up to the alcove, placing an action figure in it. And she, like an estate agent assured of her client's intentions, left his side for a moment and went to speak to the landlord.

For some seconds after she was gone, Rehan was fine, the magic of the place still working on him. Then looking around, he became aware of her absence. His gaze fastened on the judas in the front door, and he was conscious now of an awful daytime quiet, without the comforting din of Nani and her servants. Rehan decided to face his fear. He stood on his toes and peered through the door eye. At first he was cool as a man looking down the barrel of a shotgun, but when he saw the world become remote and threatening, through its cold lens, he began to lose his nerve.

There was something so unprotected about this flat. The limp chain between the door and frame that could so easily be axed away; the neighbours who could hear and be heard, and yet pretend not to have seen when it counted; and yes the judas planted in the door suggesting security, but through whose dwarfing lens murderers and tradesmen would appear alike.

When Udaya returned, she found Rehan transformed. Staring at her, he said, in a tone borrowed from his grandmother: 'But, Ma, aren't you worried what people will say about a woman living alone?'

Udaya laughed, making him angrier still. 'You've been spending too much time with your nani.'

'She's right, you know. People could say you're a keep.'

'A keep? A keep!'

She took hold of him by the wrist, as if to give him a tight slap, then without saying a word more, dragged him down the humid stairs.

When they arrived back at the house, Udaya, wishing to speak to her mother, was surprised to find her in a meeting. This was strange, not only because it was Saturday, but because she had never had any meetings before, especially not with men in suits, and trays laden with jalebis and samosas. Udaya recognized one of the visitors as Mr Cicada, the accountant. The other was an elderly gentleman with a stern moustache and a margin of fine white hair bordering the shiny expanse of his head.

'Kailash Nath ji,' Udaya's mother said piously, 'meet my daughter and grandson.'

The elderly man smiled into his moustache, bowing slightly.

Udaya, recognizing the name as that of a famous Delhi contractor, was forced to swallow her anger and return the greeting.

Her mother, in the meantime, smiled knowingly at Rehan and gestured to a large box wrapped in garish paper.

'Nani,' Rehan gasped.

'Yes, baba Re, it has come in. My ship has come in.'

Rehan tore open the parcel and was within seconds moving his pantheon of gods, which till then had sat on a ledge near the cooler, into the plastic ramparts of Castle Grayskull.

The subject of the flat was dropped for the moment.

The rains were the worst Delhi had seen in a decade. They sent children dancing through puddles, they brought out black umbrellas and bicycles, they flooded under-passes; the Suzuki was stranded; Rehan floated paper boats in protest outside the house and tortured earthworms. He had apologized to his mother, but he still refused to move to the flat.

He had also become obsessed with the newspaper's coverage of the twins' grandmother's murder. He could only read slowly; and, eventually, tiring of the story's text, he would focus on the grainy, black and white images of the apartment block the old lady had lived in. The Times of India printed the image of the narrow, four-storey building - not unlike the one Udaya had shown Rehan - over and over again. The sight of it in bright sunlight, its entrances and windows black, never failed to chill him. He began to have terrible dreams.

One night, his mother was a mad Medusa with floating hair riding in the back of a jeep with a strange man. In another she was the girlfriend of the man in the leather jacket, plotting the old woman's murder. Rehan would wake up in the bed next to her, crying and gasping, recounting his dream as quickly as possible so that she could defuse it.

Udaya, watching him in this state, caught between nightmares and fixations, became convinced that his fears had other depths. In Delhi, in those days, on the cusp of change, child psychiatry was a rare thing, and it carried a stigma. But the dreams became so violent, the obsessions so unrelenting, that she began asking around.

Rehan had gone to the birthday party of his friend Karim Javeri. The Javeris were a rich Muslim family with a large house in Malcha Marg. When Udaya drove up to pick him up, she was met at the gate by Mrs Javeri, dressed in an embroidered cream kurta. Rehan was still playing inside and Mrs Javeri asked Udaya if she might have a word in private.

'Mrs Tabassum, I hope you don't mind...'

'Just Udaya is fine.'

'Udaya, I hope you don't mind my talking to you about this. It's a very small thing, but I thought you should know.'

'Not at all. Please go ahead, Mrs Javeri.'

'Naseem is fine.'

'Naseem.'

'Well, the thing is that we were all sitting, us adults, my husband, Sahil, and a few of our friends, inside the drawing room a moment ago. The cake had been cut; the children had finished their games, passing the parcel and what not; some were taking rides on the eli, others opening return presents, when your boy, Rehan - a sweet boy; one of Karim's very dear friends - came up to where we were sitting. He didn't say anything, or do anything...' Here, Mrs Javeri became flustered. 'I mean, he wasn't rude. He just stood there for a few seconds, quietly, till one of us took notice of him. And then he said, straight out of the blue, to my husband: "You are not, by any chance..." These were his exact words - "Sahil, my father?"

'That was it. Nothing else. Nothing untoward. Just this. And when my husband, a little surprised naturally, said, "No, son, I'm not," he turned around and walked away. A small thing, Udaya, you know, but still, I felt if I was the mother, I should like to be informed. I hope you don't mind my...'

'No, no, Mrs Javeri, not at all. Thank you for telling me,' Udaya said, trying her best to appear calm. But, inside, she felt a kind of wonder at the changes taking place in her son, at the inscrutable logic of his fear.

On the way home, Udaya and Rehan hardly spoke. The light, after months of haze, had acquired sharpness and length. A cool, faintly scented wind was blowing. It was nearly Dussehra.

Gently Udaya mentioned what had occurred at the birthday party. 'You didn't really believe he was your father, did you?'

'No,' Rehan replied, and became quiet.

'Would you like to meet him, your father?' Udaya asked.

Rehan was silent for a moment, then said: 'Maybe, but not now.'

'I can write to him, you know. But, baba, I can't guarantee he will respond as you want him to.'

Rehan nodded.

'Baba, tell me: are you still scared?'

'No,' Rehan replied.

'What did you think, that just because she didn't have a man protecting her, something would happen to your mama?'

Rehan did not reply.

'I have you,' she said, 'and I'm a tough old thing myself. We'll be fine, believe me.'

They had crossed the flyover, and the Delhi that lay about them now was a city in which the fading afternoon, with colonial police stations and Muslim tombs in its fold, brought a kind of peace upon the passengers of the green Suzuki.

Rehan said, as if seeing a line of reason to its end, 'You think I'll ever meet him?'

'I'm sure you will,' his mother said, her strong and natural voice returning, 'and maybe you'll like him; or, as with Nani and me, maybe you'll want to meet him and move on. But whatever the case, give him a kick from your old mummy when you do.'

Rehan chuckled. 'Why, Ma?'

'Because,' she said, 'he was not very generous with either you or me.'

'He didn't give us anything? No car, no house?'

'Not a tissue to wipe my nose on.'

That was all that was said. It gave Rehan a great feeling of comfort, as if he had been made a partner in the life his mother had cobbled together for them. And though, in some important way, the fear of the last many months had already evaporated, what might have taken weeks or months to bear fruit was speeded to its conclusion by the scene they returned to that evening at the little house.

They arrived to find that a large blue and white board had gone up on its boundary wall. It read: Kailash Nath Sons and Associates. And just behind it, in the garden, a great commotion was underway. A gang of barefoot men in checked lungis and fraying vests tore up the lawn. The grass was gone; so were the flower beds and dahlias; all that remained standing, like a single tree over a fallow field, was the gardenia. Udaya and Rehan watched from inside the car as two men caught hold of its branches with a rope, pulling the canopy to the ground, while two others hacked away at the trunk, making white gashes. The tree seemed startled by the violence applied to it. The gashes multiplied and it fell within minutes, not with a crash but a swoon, still holding aloft its many flowers. And there it lay, on the garden's muddy floor, the curve of its trunk just a hump now; its destroyed beauty produced, even in the faces of its hired executioners, a kind of wonder.

Only Rehan's grandmother, looking, not at the tree, but at the light striking its fleshy stump, was triumphant.

'No rakshasa there, Nani!' Rehan cried out.

She gave him a bitter look. His mother pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, seeming to suppress tears.

Rehan glanced over at her and breathed out. 'OK, let's do it.'

'The flat? Really?' she asked, wiping her eyes, surprised at his adult timing.

He looked sadly at her, compacted his lips, and nodded.

Some days later, at the maidan, the effigies awaited their end. Udaya and Rehan, late in arriving, had to watch from the flyover. Here, too, the crowd grew large. Policemen in olive-green uniforms prodded them with canes but when they became too many, they gave up. Rehan, on one rung of the flyover's parapet where a sheet of hoarding, rusted and threatening, had been bent away, felt them press against his legs. He looked urgently down at his mother, already anxious.

'Come down, baba. It's not safe,' she said, feeling his dismay.

'I can't see anything.'

'Nothing has begun yet.'

But it was in snatches that Rehan saw white explosions riddle the first effigy - Ravana's son - and flames climb wildly up the hollow of his body. Then the gaps in the crowd closed. He knew from the roar that rose off the maidan that the burning was over. When he next glimpsed the skeletal frame alight and collapsing, limb by limb, he had to hide his great disappointment. Udaya saw this and felt terrible. It was their first Dussehra and Diwali alone, in the new flat, and everything was significant.

For the second burning she tried carrying him piggyback but couldn't keep him up. His weight slid down her back, his arms pulled against her neck and hair. At last it was Rehan who said, 'Don't worry, Ma, I can see.' And when the second roar came, he roared louder than the rest.

It was now Ravana's turn. Rehan was preparing to go through the motions again, when from nowhere two powerful arms gripped him by the legs and lifted him out of the crowd. His mother's hand steadied him, and when he looked down, he found himself sitting on the shoulders of a man he had never met before. Ahead, he had a clear view of the demon-king.

His mother's voice, carrying up from the thick crowd below, said: 'Baba, say thank you...Amit Uncle.'

'Just Amit is fine,' the man said.

Rehan, though he said a loud thank you, could not make out his face; just the greying hair and spectacles.

Night fell over the maidan. Moths and insects swarmed in the light of naked bulbs and flares. And over the tense and seething mass, bunches of pink balloons and candy-floss bobbed lightly by. Rehan Tabassum's face burned brightly with the fire of the dying Ravana.

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Noon : A Novel

0865478589

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