English Lessons and Other Stories Read Free Page B

thinking of his parents when he wanders off to a quiet spot, takes off his shoes, sits cross-legged before the Granth Sahib and says the words of the Gurus, chanting low. I stand behind him keeping the flies away with his special silver-handled yak’s-hair tail, white and rough as my Dada’s beard might have been, and when he nods I turn the pages of the tome for him.
    â€œBeti.” I am absurdly happy when he looks up and his teeth flash white in the dark cloud of his beard.
    On television they begin in monotones to tell children how to take shelter in concrete pipes placed along the roadsides. Dad smells my fear and jokes that I am a silly little kukri, a hen instead of a Sikhni of our family of whom he can be proud.
    Inder tells me Gnat is a name for a baby fly and also a new Indian aeroplane that Pakistani General Yahya Khan won’t be able to get away from. But now a small bomb has fallen on the outskirts of Delhi and the streets are deserted at midday. Even the street vendor who spins white sugar clouds he calls Old Women’s Hair doesn’t ring his bicycle bell at our gate, although I am home because school is closed for the war. Only the sparrows in our eucalyptus tree are undaunted, so I give them crumbs of the bread that Mummy complains is so expensive.
    Nand Singh takes me to the market with him, opening the back seat door for me as though I were Mummy and shooing away the poor jhuggi boys with their oversized empty coolie baskets. Though he cannot read or write, he knows what the ration cards say and he has such a good memory he never forgets evenone item Mummy tells him to buy. We pick our way through shady gullies between the jute-bag-roofed shops of corrugated tin, and the disappointed cries of fishmongers follow us to the stall of the chicken-seller.
    The chicken-seller sits before a stack of metal cages and his brown belly spills over a blood-flecked once-white dhoti. He spits betelnut juice at a gutter at our feet and offers me a red-gummed smile. Nand Singh points to the hens, four to each tiny cage, and says graciously, “Which one would mem-sahib like?” He’s complimenting my judgement in advance, letting me know I have grown up enough to be trusted with some household decisions. The hens all look the same to me — brownish-white with frightened eyes, silly kukris just like me. I look at the closest cage and one steps forward. She holds her head high when she crows, thrusts her breast at the cage and seems unafraid to die, so I say, “That one.” A moment later, her head is severed and Nand Singh throws her in his shopping bag. Although Mummy’s frown at my plate warns that no one will marry a fatty, I eat the curried kukri that night, hoping her courage will nourish mine.
    When Inder says he wants to run away to join the jawans, Dad and Mummy don’t even notice. They’re fighting again over money. Always money. She says Dad should be like every other government employee — take a favour here, a perk there, a bribe here, have a little consideration for his family. Try to get a Delhi posting — she says it’s the only place a government servant can make better money. He says she should not want foreign-made goods; he is working hard so that Indians can make all the things she wants. She says he is making her do without the things he can well afford. I run back and forth with messages until Mummy tells me to tell Dad she agreed to marry him only to save Nana the price of a dowry because Dad had said he didn’t want one. I take that message outside and tell it to my sparrows instead. When I go into my father’s room, he looks at my frightened faceand says to tell her all right, she can buy us an air conditioner and pay Nancy and Pierre three thousand rupees.
    When I return, he pats the air with a cupped right hand, so I sink to the floor before him.
    â€œYou have a faint heart, beti, a faint heart that can bring dishonour to those