The Hope Factory Read Free Page A

handled it. Unlike with other vegetables, there was no real art to the purchase of an onion. For tomatoes in season, for instance, one might bide one’s time through the day—wait for the morning rush of customers to subside, for the remaining tomatoes to ripen further in the noonday sun, turning lush and red and plump with juice, until evening time, when the vendors were eager to get rid of them at any price; the tomatoes would not survive the damp of the night. That was the judicious time to buy. But onions were different; hardy, unromantic vegetables, their price did not change with the passage of the day but with seasonal supply. At times, a kilo of onions cost five rupees and, frugally husbanded,could last a week, but in the low season, the prices went up by so much that one usually did without.
    “Sister, are you going to purchase it or not? What is so special about that one onion?”
    Kamala started. “Forgive me, brother, I’ll take these,” she said and picked out two more, handing them to the onion seller for weighing.
    The paper-wrapped onions joined the other vegetables inside her woven plastic bag. In addition to onions, she had bought a quarter kilo of green beans, some potatoes, carrots, and two tomatoes. She would cook them into a rich kurma, she decided, the stew thickened with coconut and spices and oil, and serve it on steaming hot rice to her son for dinner.
    She walked homeward, passing the parked car on her way, and could not resist peeping in through the glass window, touching the metal door handle for good luck.
    THE GULLY SHE LIVED IN was off the main alley and narrow enough that she could span the gap between the houses by stretching out her hand. “Stop, stop,” she called to the young boys hitting at a cricket ball. “Rest your game a moment till I pass.” Until recently, her son would have been one of their number, playing cricket in the gully and getting scolded when the ball bounced and crashed against the walls of the houses that ran down each side, but, as he grew, he discovered new pursuits that took him farther afield. Right now, he was nowhere to be seen, but he would come home as soon as dinner was ready, as though summoned magically by the scent of fresh-cooked food.
    She entered a small, narrow courtyard with several singlestory dwellings clustered around it. The largest comprisedfour rooms and was the home of the landlord. The smallest, a single room, belonged to Kamala.
    She put her bag of vegetables down and went to the bathing area to wash her hands and feet. By the time Kamala was seated on the stoop outside her door, the pile of vegetables washed, a plate and a knife laid ready on the ground, the landlord’s mother had emerged from her own house, as she usually did, with some of her own dinner preparations in hand. The chopping of vegetables and the cleaning of rice gave them an opportunity to inspect each other’s menus, proffer suggestions, and enjoy a gentle gossip.
    “Oho!” the landlord’s mother said. “You are planning a feast of vegetables.”
    “I got a little greedy, yes, amma,” said Kamala. “It’s been a time since I prepared a nice vegetable kurma for my boy.”
    “Kamala-daughter, he is at the age when he could eat all the vegetables in the world and still be hungry for more,” said the landlord’s mother. “His schoolwork, it’s going well?”
    Kamala grimaced; a boy as clever as her son should not find it so difficult to sit quietly at his studies. “His studies would go well,” she said, “if he paid them a little more attention.”
    “He is very smart,” the landlord’s mother said placatingly. “He is sure to do well, do not worry. He is smart and full of ambition.”
    Kamala was unable to explain why it was her son’s sense of ambition that made her so uneasy.
    “And your good son, amma?” she asked. “He is well, and your daughter-in-law also?” This was a delicate question, since the landlord’s wife had recently quarreled