B006NZAQXW EBOK Read Free Page A

trees. Onions grew large beneath her feet; creepers burst from the floorboards; fish swam beneath the doors.
    In the next room was the sound of Mr Chawla pacing up and down. ‘What have we got ourselves into?’ The sound of Ammaji whispering: ‘Just wait a little, beta, wait and see.’ Outside, in the barren sky, the drone of the Red Cross planes.
    When there was almost no space left to draw on any more, when the walls, floor and ceiling were full, packed tight to the point of bursting, Sampath was born. And he was born in such remarkable circumstances, they were remembered for ever afterwards by the people of Shahkot.
    One day, as Kulfi was at the bedroom window looking at the street, prepared to sit through another seemingly endless stretch of time until Ammaji finally cooked and served her dinner, all of a sudden a shadow fell across the sun and magically, as quickly as a winter’s day tumbles into smoky evening and then night, the white-lit afternoon deepened into the colour of old parchment as the sky darkened. Curtains billowed white out of every window. Bits of newspaperand old plastic bags turned cartwheels in the indigo streets. The air thinned and stirred in a breeze that brought goose bumps out upon her arms. ‘Look!’ Kulfi shouted. ‘Here comes the rain!’
    She could hear the sound of cheering from the bazaar. And she watched the children in the streets leap like frogs, unable to keep still in their excitement. ‘It’s getting cold,’ they shouted, and pretended to shake. ‘It’s going to rain.’ They wrestled and tussled with each other in an exuberance of spirit, while the grown-ups hurried, in this shifting, shadowed light, to get to the market and back, to bring in washing, to carry in string cots. They raised their hands in greeting to each other: ‘At last! The monsoon!’ Who knew whether it came because of the giant fan, the wedding of frogs, the Pied Piper, because of mercurial powers or magician’s marvels? And in the end, who cared? The rain had come to Shahkot. The monsoon was in town. Kulfi watched with unbelieving elation as the approaching smell of rain spiked the air like a flower, as the clouds shifted in from the east, reached the trees at the town’s edge and moved in.
    In the Chawla household, Mr Chawla bustled about with plastic sheeting, while Ammaji placed buckets outside to catch the rainwater and brought out candles and kerosene lanterns in preparation for the inevitable breakdown of electricity. They paused, though, to test the growing strength of the wind against their cheeks; looked up to check the progress of the clouds. When they were finally prepared for the downpour, they watched from the windows like Kulfi and the rest of Shahkot’s residents, leaning from balconies and verandas, from beneath the flaps of scooter rickshaws; the entire town, with anxious, upturned eyes, until an especially strong gust sent the leaves flying like birds before gunshot and brought the first drops ofwater to sound loud against the parched earth.
    Kulfi watched the rain. It came down fast and then faster yet. It filled up every bit of sky. It was like no other sound on earth and nothing that was ever suggested by the thin trickles from Shahkot taps. It came down black with dust from the sky and dirt on the trees, and then clear. But always louder. She stretched out her hands to feel the weight of the drops on her flat palms and then put her face out too, holding it, luminous, pale, in this town enclosed within the dark heart of the monsoon.
    As she did so, she felt Sampath kick inside her stomach. Her heart jumped in rhythm. He kicked harder and harder. The jamun tree in the courtyard thrashed and creaked. The rain streamed down Kulfi’s hair and washed over her face. Her husband shouted: ‘Get away from the open window.’ She paid no attention. He wrapped her in a square of plastic, but she shrugged it off. The rain descended in great sweeping sheets.
    The neighbours withdrew in