Here she was cut off by Aparna’s glare. ‘If another baby comes into this house,’ announced Aparna, ‘I will throw it straight into the waste-paper basket.’
‘Oh,’ said Meenakshi, more than a little startled. Aparna, living among so many opinionated personalities, had quite early developed a powerful vocabulary. But three-year-olds were not supposed to express themselves so lucidly, and in conditional sentences at that. Meenakshi looked at Aparna and sighed.
‘You are so scrumptious,’ she told Aparna. ‘Now have your milk.’ To the ayah she said, ‘Dudh lao. Ek dum!’ And Miriam creaked off to get a glass of milk for the little girl.
For some reason the ayah’s slow-moving back irritated Meenakshi and she thought: We really ought to replace the T.C. She’s quite needlessly senile. This was her and Arun’s private abbreviation for the ayah and Meenakshi laughed with pleasure as she remembered the occasion over the breakfast table when Arun had turned from the Statesman crossword to say, ‘Oh, do get the toothless crone out of the room. She quite puts me off my omelette.’ Miriam had been the T.C. ever since. Living with Arun was full of sudden delightful moments like that, thought Meenakshi. If only it could all be that way.
But the trouble was that she also had to run the house, and she hated it. The elder daughter of Mr Justice Chatterji had always had everything done for her—and she was now discovering how trying it could be to handle things on her own. Managing the staff (ayah, servant-cum-cook, part-time sweeper, part-time gardener; Arun supervised the driver, who was on the company payroll); doing the accounts; buying those items that one simply couldn’t trust the servant or the ayah to buy; and making sure that everything fitted within the budget. This last she found especially difficult. She had been brought up in some luxury, and though she had insisted (against her parents’ advice) on the romantic adventure of standing after marriage entirely on their own four feet, she had found it impossible to curb her taste for certain items (foreign soap, foreign butter and so on) that were intrinsic to the fabric of a civilized life. She was very conscious of the fact that Arun helped support everyone in his own family and often commented to him about the fact.
‘Well,’ Arun had said just recently, ‘now that Savita’s married, that’s one less, you’ll agree, darling.’ Meenakshi had sighed, replying in a couplet:
‘Marry one—and what’s my fate?
Every Mehra on my plate.’
Arun had frowned. He had been reminded once again of the fact that Meenakshi’s elder brother was a poet. It was from long familiarity—almost obsession—with rhyme that most of the younger Chatterjis had learned to improvise couplets, sometimes of surpassing puerility.
The ayah brought the milk and left. Meenakshi turned her lovely eyes back to Buddenbrooks while Aparna sat on the bed drinking her milk. With a sound of impatience Meenakshi threw Thomas Mann on to the bed and followed him there, closed her eyes and went off to sleep. She was awakened with a shock twenty minutes later by Aparna, who was pinching her breast.
‘Don’t be horrid, Aparna precious. Mummy’s trying to sleep,’ said Meenakshi.
‘Don’t sleep,’ said Aparna. ‘I want to play.’ Unlike other children of her age, Aparna never used her name in the Caesarean third person, though her mother did.
‘Darling sweetheart, Mummy is tired, she’s been reading a book and she doesn’t want to play. Not now, anyway. Later, when Daddy comes home, you can play with him. Or you can play with Uncle Varun when he returns from college. What have you done with your glass?’
‘When will Daddy come home?’
‘I’d say in about an hour,’ replied Meenakshi.
‘I’d say in about an hour,’ said Aparna speculatively, as if she liked the phrase. ‘I want a necklace too,’ she added, and tugged at her mother’s gold chain.
Meenakshi gave her daughter a hug. ‘And you shall have one,’ she said, and dismissed the subject. ‘Now go to Miriam.’
‘No.’
‘Then stay here if you want. But do be quiet, darling.’
Aparna was quiet for a while. She looked at Buddenbrooks, at her empty glass, at her sleeping mother, at the quilt, at the mirror, at the ceiling. Then she said, ‘Mummy?’ tentatively. There was no response.
‘Mummy?’ Aparna attempted a few notches louder.
‘Mmm?’
‘MUMMY!’ yelled Aparna at the top of her lungs.
Meenakshi sat bolt upright and shook Aparna. ‘Do you want me to spank you?’ she asked.
‘No,’ replied Aparna definitively.
‘Then what is it? Why are you shouting? What were you going to say?’
‘Have you had a hard day, darling?’ asked Aparna, hoping to arouse a response to her imitative charm.
‘Yes,’ said Meenakshi shortly. ‘Now darling, pick up that glass and go to Miriam at once.’
‘Shall I comb your hair?’
‘No.’
Aparna got down reluctantly from the bed and made her way to the door. She toyed with the idea of saying, ‘I’ll tell Daddy!’ though what she could have complained about was left unformulated. Her mother meanwhile was once again sleeping sweetly, her lips slightly parted, her long black hair spread across the pillow. It was so hot in the afternoon, and everything tilted her towards a long and languorous sleep. Her breasts rose and fell gently, and she dreamed about Arun, who was handsome and dashing and covenanted, and who would be coming home in an hour. And after a while she began to dream about Billy Irani, whom they would be meeting later that evening.
When Arun arrived, he left his briefcase in the drawing room, walked into the bedroom, and closed the door. Seeing Meenakshi asleep, he paced up and down for a while, then took off his coat and tie, and lay down beside her without disturbing her sleep. But after a while his hand moved to her forehead and then down her face to her breasts. Meenakshi opened her eyes and said, ‘Oh.’ She was momentarily bewildered. After a while she asked, ‘What’s the time?’
‘Five thirty. I came home early just as I promised—and I found you asleep.’
‘I couldn’t sleep earlier, darling. Aparna woke me up every few minutes.’
‘What’s the programme for the evening?’
‘Dinner and dancing with Billy and Shireen.’
‘Oh yes, of course.’ After a pause Arun continued: ‘To tell you the truth, darling, I’m rather tired. I wonder whether we shouldn’t simply call it off tonight?’
‘Oh, you’ll revive quickly enough after you’ve had a drink,’ said Meenakshi brightly. ‘And a glance or two from Shireen,’ she added.
‘I suppose you’re right, dear.’ Arun reached out for her. He had had a little trouble with his back a month ago, but had quite recovered.
‘Naughty boy,’ said Meenakshi, and pushed his hand away. After a while she added, ‘The T.C. has been cheating us on the Ostermilk.’
‘Ah? Has she?’ said Arun indifferently, then swerved off to a subject that interested him—‘I discovered today that we were being overcharged sixty thousand on the new paper project by one of our local businessmen. We’ve asked him to revise his estimates, of course, but it does rather shock one. . . . No sense of business ethics—or personal ethics either. He was in the office the other day, and he assured me that he was making us a special offer because of what he called our long-standing relationship. Now I find, after talking to Jock Mackay, that that’s the line he took with them as well—but charged them sixty thousand less than us.’
‘What will you do?’ Meenakshi asked dutifully. She had switched off a few sentences ago.
Arun talked on for five minutes or so, while Meenakshi’s mind wandered. When he stopped and looked at her questioningly, she said, yawning a little from residual sleepiness:
‘How has your boss reacted to all this?’
‘Difficult to say. With Basil Cox it’s difficult to say anything, even when he’s delighted. In this case I think he’s as annoyed by the possible delay as pleased by the definite saving.’ Arun unburdened himself for
another five minutes while Meenakshi began to buff her nails.
The bedroom door had been bolted against interruption, but when Aparna saw her father’s briefcase she knew that he had returned and insisted upon being admitted. Arun opened the door and gave her a hug, and for the next hour or so they did a jigsaw featuring a giraffe, which Aparna had seen in a toyshop a week after being taken to the Brahmpur Zoo. They had done the jigsaw several times before, but Aparna had not yet tired of it. Nor had Arun. He adored his daughter and occasionally felt it was a pity that he and Meenakshi went out almost every evening. But one simply couldn’t let one’s life come to a standstill because one had a child. What, after all, were ayahs for? What, for that matter, were younger brothers for?
‘Mummy has promised me a necklace,’ said Aparna.
‘Has she, darling?’ said Arun. ‘How does she imagine she’s going to buy it? We can’t afford it at the moment.’
Aparna looked so disappointed at this latest intelligence that Arun and Meenakshi turned to each other with transferred adoration.
‘But she will,’ said Aparna, quietly and determinedly. ‘Now I want to do a jigsaw.’
‘But we’ve just done one,’ protested Arun.
‘I want to do another.’
‘You handle her, Meenakshi,’ said Arun.
‘You handle her, darling,’ said Meenakshi. ‘I must get ready. And please clear the bedroom floor.’
So for a while Arun and Aparna, banished to the drawing room this time, lay on the carpet putting together a jigsaw of the Victoria Memorial while Meenakshi bathed and dressed and perfumed and ornamented herself.
Varun returned from college, slid past Arun into his tiny box of a room, and sat down with his books. But he seemed nervous, and could not settle down to studying. When Arun went to get ready, Aparna was transferred to him; and the rest of Varun’s evening was spent at home trying to keep her amused.
The long-necked Meenakshi turned numerous heads when their party of four entered Firpo’s for dinner. Arun told Shireen she was looking gorgeous and Billy looked with soulful languor at Meenakshi and said that she looked divine, and things went wonderfully well and were followed by some pleasantly titillating dancing at the 300 Club. Meenakshi and Arun were not really able to afford all this—Billy Irani had independent means—but it seemed intolerable that they, for whom this kind of life was so obviously intended, should be deprived of it by a mere lack of funds. Meenakshi could not help noticing, through dinner and beyond, the lovely little gold danglers that Shireen was wearing, and that hung so becomingly from her little velvety ears.
It was a warm evening. In the car on the way back home Arun said to Meenakshi, ‘Give me your hand, darling,’ and Meenakshi, placing one red nail-polished fingertip on the back of his hand, said, ‘Here!’ Arun thought that this was delightfully elegant and flirtatious. But Meenakshi had her mind on something else.
Later, when Arun had gone to bed, Meenakshi unlocked her jewellery case (the Chatterjis did not believe in giving their daughter great quantities of jewellery but she had been given quite enough for her likely requirements) and took out the two gold medals so precious to Mrs Rupa Mehra’s heart. She had given these to Meenakshi at the time of her wedding as a gift to the bride of her elder son. This she felt was the appropriate thing to do; she had nothing else to give, and she felt that her husband would have approved. On the back of the medals was engraved: ‘Thomasson Engineering College Roorkee. Raghubir Mehra. Civil Engg. First. 1916’ and ‘Physics. First. 1916’ respectively. Two lions crouched sternly on pedestals on each medal. Meenakshi looked at the medals, then balanced them in her hands, then held the cool and precious discs to her cheeks. She wondered how much they weighed. She thought of the gold chain she had promised Aparna and the gold drops she had virtually promised herself. She had examined them quite carefully as they hung from Shireen’s little ears. The danglers were shaped like tiny pears.
When Arun rather impatiently called her to bed, she murmured, ‘Just coming.’ But it was a minute or two before she joined him. ‘What are you thinking of, darling?’ he asked her. ‘You look dangerously preoccupied.’ But Meenakshi instinctively realized that to mention what had passed through her head—what she planned to do with those dowdy medals—would not be a good idea, and she avoided the subject by nibbling at the lobe of his left ear.
1.19
The next morning at ten o’clock Meenakshi phoned her younger sister Kakoli.
‘Kuku, a friend of mine from the Shady Ladies—my club, you know—wants to find out where she can get some gold melted down discreetly. Do you know of a good jeweller?’
‘Well, Satram Das or Lilaram, I suppose,’ yawned Kuku, barely awake.
‘No, I am not talking of Park Street jewellers—or any jewellers of that kind,’ said Meenakshi with a sigh. ‘I want to go somewhere where they don’t know me.’
‘You want to go somewhere?’
There was a short silence at the other end. ‘Well, you may as well know,’ said Meenakshi: ‘I’ve set my heart on a pair of earrings—they look adorable—just like tiny little pears—and I want to melt down those fat ugly medals that Arun’s mother gave me for my wedding.’
‘Oh, don’t do that,’ said Kakoli in a kind of alarmed warble.
‘Kuku, I want your advice about the place, not about the decision.’
‘Well, you could go to Sarkar’s. No—try Jauhri’s on Rashbehari Avenue. Does Arun know?’
‘The medals were given to me,’ said Meenakshi. ‘If Arun wants to melt his golf clubs down to make a back brace I won’t object.’
When she got to the jeweller’s, she was astonished to meet opposition there as well.
‘Madam,’ said Mr Jauhri in Bengali, looking at the medals won by her father-in-law, ‘these are beautiful medals.’ His fingers, blunt and dark, slightly incongruous for someone who held and supervised work of such fineness and beauty, touched the embossed lions lovingly, and circled around the smooth, unmilled edges.
Meenakshi stroked the side of her neck with the long, red-polished nail of the middle finger of her right hand.
‘Yes,’ she said indifferently.
‘Madam, if I might advise you, why not order these earrings and this chain and pay for them separately? There is really no need to melt down these medals.’ A well-dressed and evidently wealthy lady would presumably not find any difficulty in this suggestion.
Meenakshi looked at the jeweller with cool surprise. ‘Now that I know the approximate weight of the medals, I propose to melt down one, not both,’ she said. Somewhat annoyed by his impertinence—these shopkeepers sometimes got above themselves—she went on: ‘I came here to get a job done; I would normally have gone to my regular jewellers. How long do you think it will take?’
Mr Jauhri did not dispute the issue further. ‘It will take two weeks,’ he said.
‘That’s rather a long time.’
‘Well, you know how it is, Madam. Artisans of the requisite skill are scarce, and we have many orders.’
‘But it is March. The wedding season is virtually over.’
‘Nevertheless, Madam.’
‘Well, I suppose that will have to do,’ Meenakshi said. She picked up one medal—it happened to be the Physics one—and popped it back in her purse. The jeweller looked somewhat regretfully at the Engineering Medal lying on a small velvet square on his table. He had not dared to ask whose it was, but when Meenakshi took a receipt for the medal after it had been weighed exactly on his scales, he had deduced from her name that it must have been awarded to her father-in-law. He was not to know that Meenakshi had never known her father-in-law and felt no particular closeness to him.
As Meenakshi turned to leave, he said, ‘Madam, if you happen to change your mind . . .’
Meenakshi turned to him, and snapped: ‘Mr Jauhri, if I wish for your advice I will ask for it. I came to you specifically because you were recommended to me.’
‘Quite right, Madam, quite right. Of cou
rse it is entirely up to you. In two weeks then.’ Mr Jauhri frowned sadly at the medal before summoning his master artisan.
Two weeks later, Arun discovered through a casual conversational slip what Meenakshi had done. He was livid.
Meenakshi sighed. ‘It’s pointless talking to you when you are as cross as this,’ she said. ‘You behave quite heartlessly. Come, Aparna darling, Daddy’s angry with us, let’s go into the other room.’
A few days later Arun wrote—or, rather, scrawled—a letter to his mother:
Dear Ma,
Sorry not written to you earlier in response to your letter re Lata. Yes, by all means, will look for someone. But don’t be sanguine, the covenanted are almost twice-born and get dowry offers in the tens of thousands, even lakhs. Still, situation not entirely hopeless. Will try, but I suggest Lata come to Calcutta in the summer. Will effect introductions &c. But she must cooperate. Varun lackadaisical, studies hard only when I take a hand. Shows no interest in girls, only the fourfooted as usual, and dreadful songs. Aparna in fine fettle, asks after her Daadi continually so rest assured she misses you. Daddy’s Engg. Medal melted down for ear-drops and chain by M, but I’ve placed injunction on Physics, not to worry. All else well, back OK, Chatterjis much the same, will write at length when time.
Love and xxx from all,
Arun
This brief note, written in Arun’s illegible telegraphese (the upright lines of the letters tilting at angles of thirty degrees randomly to left or right), landed like a grenade in Brahmpur by the second post one afternoon. When Mrs Rupa Mehra read it, she burst into tears without even (as Arun might have been tempted to remark had he been there) the customary preliminary of a reddening nose. In fact, not to make cynical light of the matter, she was deeply upset, and for every obvious reason.
The horror of the melted medal, the callousness of her daughter-in-law, her disregard of every tender feeling as evidenced by this shallow act of vanity upset Mrs Rupa Mehra more than anything had in years, more even than Arun’s marriage to Meenakshi in the first place. She saw before her very eyes her husband’s golden name being physically melted away in a crucible. Mrs Rupa Mehra had loved and admired her husband almost to excess, and the thought that one of the few things that tied his presence to the earth was now maliciously—for what was such wounding indifference but a kind of malice—and irretrievably lost made her weep tears of bitterness, anger and frustration. He had been a brilliant student at the Roorkee College and his memories of his student days had been happy ones. He had hardly studied, yet had done extremely well. He had been liked by both his fellow-students and his teachers. The only subject he had been weak in had been Drawing. In that he had barely scraped through. Mrs Rupa Mehra remembered his little sketches in the children’s autograph books and felt that the examiners had been ignorant and unjust.