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togetherness.
    ‘Maybe, when the children come,’ said the husband, caressing the wife’s still-flat belly, ‘we can move upstairs. Or Pyare Lal can use it after he gets married. We can’t bring his wife to the dining room.’ For that is where the younger brother-in-law had been shifted after Yashpal’s marriage.
    ‘I don’t want to leave Baoji and Maji,’ said Sona, trained from an early age to love, serve, and obey her in-laws.
    Her husband looked at her with approval. ‘You are my everything,’ he murmured into her ear. His parents in the next room were sleeping, he could now lock his door, now undress his wife, still shy. With the lights off, he at last got what he had longed for all day.
    Yashpal’s love was so overwhelming that he was driven to demonstrate it endlessly. In the way his eyes kept seeking her face, in the small gifts he secretly gave, in the way he waited for her to finish eating before leaving the dining area, in the way he hung around the kitchen when she was cooking, in the way he demanded her presence even when he was talking to his mother.
    The mother’s eagle eye noted these variations in her son’s behaviour. Truly you never knew your boy till he married, she thought bitterly. All her years of silent suffering after fleeing Lahore, the years of sacrifice for her children, were now to be rewarded by the obvious preference for a wife. She had known nobody else would matter from the moment he fell in love. Her overwrought feelings made this knowledge public.
    Yashpal knew his mother was distressed; since childhood he had been attuned to her moods. He turned to his wife, giver of so much joy, and expected her to bring the same joy to his mother.
    ‘She can’t help herself, she spent nights and nights in camps wondering how we would survive, and then my father had to sell her jewellery when they came to Delhi, and when Pyare Lal was born there was no one to help her. She was all alone.’
    ‘So were thousands of others,’ pointed out Sona, possessor of the husband’s history, bound by love to try and make him feel better. ‘Besides, you supported her in every way. You cooked, you shopped, you cleaned, you looked after the baby.’
    ‘She feels things deeply,’ sighed the son.
    Even the eighteen-year-old Sona knew the difference between feeling things deeply and voicing them loudly, but she was in no position to destroy her husband’s illusions. ‘I want to be a daughter to her,’ she sighed, ‘but sometimes I feel Maji does not like me.’
    ‘Never mind,’ said Yashpal, pulling her close for the second time that night, ‘once we have children, she will melt. Sometimes she gets into moods.’
    By now Sona knew this. When the two of them were alone, she could see how her mother-in-law had to struggle to even talk to her. Every gesture suggested the daughter-in-law had no right to exist, and if she had to live, why was she doing it in their house? Only when the men came home at night was there the semblance of a caring family.
    So between day and night Sona seesawed between love and something more unnameable. Had it been outside the family it would have been called hatred.
    Sometimes she cried and told her husband she wanted to go home, nobody had asked him to marry her, her self-respect did not allow her to be subject to such treatment.
    ‘She’s not threatening or beating you,’ reasoned Yashpal.
    ‘No,’ sniffed Sona.
    ‘Then patience, my life, patience. Once we have children, you will see how she changes. Inside she is all love.’
    At this Sona allowed her tears to flow copiously, which drove her husband to take her for a little outing to cheer her up, without making sure it was convenient for everyone else to accompany them, thus adding to the black marks against his wife.
    Two years passed. Sona still wasn’t pregnant, though twenty and old enough. ‘Enjoying, enjoying,’ muttered the mother darkly, imagining the use of birth control. Sona said nothing. Her