River Town Chronicles Read Free Page B

double roti (sliced bread). I looked for eggs, but couldn’t find any in the bazaar. And meat was nowhere to be found. I filled a tin with kerosene and returned to the house with my meager bag of food and was immediately set upon by Mohan, who extracted each item from my bag. “Kitnaa paisa?” (How much?) he demanded, holding up a bunch of bananas with the seriousness of a homicide detective deep into a murder investigation. I told him they cost a couple of rupees. “Bahut ziyada” (way too much), he replied. Mohan proceeded to examine each item in the bag, inspecting it for quality and price. “You ought to return all of these items to the bazaar and demand your money back.” I was discovering that no detail was too small to escape the attention of Mohan. After all, his family were banias, members of a merchant caste and the merchants had traditionally been a powerful force in River Town. But at the moment, my real concern was that we were hungry and had to survive on the few things I had brought from the bazaar. I was not about to return any of them.
    As soon as Mohan had completed his investigation and returned to his house on the other side of the courtyard, Pat lit the kerosene stove and boiled the buffalo milk that bhabhi had brought over in a brass pot. She sliced up the bananas and poured the hot milk over them and gave each of us a slice of bread toasted over the kerosene burner. The children devoured the bananas and toast and disappeared into the courtyard to play with Mohan, Mena and Paphu. “What are we going to do for lunch and dinner?” Pat asked. “We can’t eat bananas and milk three times a day.”
    For lunch, we had bananas and milk. Brian began to cry and we tried to get him to take a nap on the charpoi, but that only made him cry more. Suddenly, bhabhi stuck her head in the doorway and, seeing Brian, rushed to his side. She picked him up in her arms and began to speak softly in his ear. Ram Swarup hurried in and announced, “It’s the bananas and milk. They shouldn’t be eaten together. It has made Brian (bu-rai-yan) sick.” Great, I thought. Now we will starve to death for sure. Brian looked over bhabhi’s shoulder at us and stopped crying. He looked perfectly happy in bhabhi’s arms. He had found a co-conspirator, an enabler, someone to take his side. Bhabhi carried Brian into her cooking area next door to the courtyard, and sat him down next to her. She continued to speak to him in Hindi while she began grinding spices and making preparations for the evening meal, still many hours away. Tim had wandered out front, where the mochi sat repairing shoes and Lori raced around the courtyard chasing Meena and Paphu. Pat and I sat down feeling our familiar ways slipping away from us. “Should we try bananas and milk for dinner?” I asked. “No. I’m making an Indian meal tonight. Chapattis and vegetables. It will be good,” Pat replied.
    That evening, she prepared vegetables and made chapatti dough from the flour I had bought in the bazaar. She lit the kerosene burner and cooked the vegetables, then rolled out the dough and began to slap it back and forth into the rough shape and thickness of a chapatti. Saroj and Madhu watched every move from the edge of the kitchen, as Pat struggled to make the chapatti puff up on the talwa (a shallow, saucer shaped iron pan). “Nahin, nahin, that’s not the way to do it.” Saroj rushed over and picked up a ball of dough and rolled it out, slapped it between her hands and placed it on the hot pan. She gently pressed it with her fingers and the flat bread puffed up in the middle and around the edges. She took it off the pan and rolled out another chapatti and repeated the process. “And those vegetables, you haven’t prepared them properly,” Madhu scolded. Pat looked crestfallen. She was a grown woman with a husband and three children being chastised by two