Home Read Free Page A

husband’s steady love helped inure her to these taunts.
    By this time the younger brother’s marriage was arranged. One love match was all any family could sustain, and Pyare Lal had turned twenty-one when his father told him he was going to wed the daughter of one of the wholesale cloth dealers in Chandni Chowk.
    ‘Whatever my elders decide,’ said Pyare Lal, showing that model sons could not be judged by daily behaviour. His father was pleased with him. He had a head for figures, he managed the bank work and his separate bookkeeping for the number-one number-two money was meticulous.
    The girl was in her first year of college, but marriage provided enough reason to discontinue her education. She was reasonably pretty, reasonably fair – to be too extreme in the looks department could be deceptive, look at the eldest daughter-in-law, still without issue.
    Once the engagement was decided, the tenants upstairs were asked to move. A bride of this quality could not be asked to share a dining room. Silently Sona watched as Pyare Lal’s father-in-law gifted a scooter to his future son-in-law and furnished the four rooms of the second storey with a fully stocked kitchen, fridge, cooler, double bed, dining table, chairs, and an upholstered sofa set in red velvet. She realised as she had not realised three years ago, how poor in gifts her own marriage had been.
    The upstairs kitchen would not be used for regular cooking, just tea, snacks, and special meals should someone fall ill. Otherwise, everybody would take their meals downstairs, the new daughter-in-law sweating in the small, hot kitchen along with the older one. Listeners to these explanations nodded, yes, wisdom lay in this only. Separate kitchens led to a sense of mine and yours, dissatisfaction, emotional division, and an eventual parting of the ways.
    If families did not even eat together, what was the point of living as a unit? You might as well emigrate, pursuing your autonomy in lonely isolation.
    Meanwhile in Sona’s heart festered the bitter knowledge that had she had children she would have been the one upstairs, with or without a kitchen, while Sushila, Pyare Lal’s bride, would have been the one moving into their old bedroom, next to the parents-in-law.
    She indulged in one wild fantasy, maybe Sushila will not have children, then sadly got rid of it. Her sister’s condition led her to believe hers was the fault, but this knowledge was too frightening to contemplate, let alone discuss openly.
    Pyare Lal’s prospective sons lay upon her consciousness like a stone. How their mother would shine, how little by comparison would there be to recommend her in the family’s eyes! What had she given them? So far as wealth was concerned, they had chosen with their eyes open, it was not expected she provide gifts like Sushila. But no children? How could anyone justify that? To blame nature was a poor excuse, she did not even try. She trembled at her future, and lay awake for hours with her adoring husband snoring gently beside her.
    But how gaily she participated in the plans for the coming wedding, how completely she agreed with all who described the joy she would feel as a new sister entered the house, how pleasantly she acquiesced in the insinuation that the barren spell would be broken with babies to gladden the grandparents’ hearts.
    During the wedding, none looked happier than she, none more loving and tender to the bride, none more delighted about upstairs being done up so nicely, none more willing to show every curious visitor how much the bride’s family had given.
    And over the three-day festivities none so beautiful as she. She shone, she glowed, her husband looked at her and thought he would never wish to exchange places with his brother, despite all the obvious advantages of an arranged marriage. He was continually attracted to Sona, and though he knew Pyare Lal would fall in love within a few months, his own method of doing things was vindicated