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The following years were among the sisters’ most fulfilling. They each had a child small enough for them to feel the centre of that child’s world. Since both children were Sona’s, Rupa knew more anxiety than her sister, but still, hers was a complete home and a happy heart. Her business continued to prosper, with Yashpal redoubling his efforts to help the relatives who were looking after his daughter.

As Nisha grew, Rupa bestowed careful love on her, mentally standing before the tribunal composed of her sister and brother-in-law, defending herself against neglect on the one hand and stealing the child’s heart on the other. The business that had occupied her attention so successfully seemed more meaningful when she saw Nisha peering into the pickle jars, or tasting the sweet and salty aam papar drying in the sun under an old muslin sari. She sometimes found herself fantasising about adopting the child. She had heard of such cases.

When she treated her husband to these thoughts, Prem Nath demanded irritably, ‘Why do you make yourself miserable thinking of the impossible?’

‘It is hard when she leaves every weekend.’

‘A child belongs to her mother.’

‘Don’t you like having her here?’

‘What does it matter what I like or do not like?’ asked the clerk fatalistically, settling down to his dinner in a Nisha-less household. ‘We have what God has given us. Nobody has everything.’

From time to time Nisha’s mother insisted her daughter come home to be groomed in the traditions of the Banwari Lal household.

The first time Nisha was told she had to fast for her future husband she protested. ‘Why should I? That’s for older women.’ She didn’t want to spend the day without food or water.

Sona rolled her eyes. Only ten and the girl was beginning to argue. She had never questioned anything her mother asked her to do.

‘How are you going to get married, madam, if you do not make sacrifices?’

‘In school nobody does it.’

‘They are not manglis.’

There could be no answer to this, but Nisha tried: ‘So?’

‘So? What do you mean, so? What kind of wife are you going to make if you can’t bear to fast one day a year for your husband?’

‘I don’t want to marry,’ mumbled Nisha.

‘Who will look after you if you don’t marry?’

‘Rupa Masi,’ declared the girl, to the aunt’s horror. Hastily she intervened: of course the child would come. To herself she thought that Sona was determined to make being a mangli a bigger deal than it was. Pay some pundit five thousand rupees and see if they didn’t find a way out. The girl would be married off to a tree, or a plant, or the sun, anything that would absorb the evil of the planets, and everything would be all right. It was just like Sona to worry even when there were well-known solutions.

So Nisha stayed home from school to learn how to be a good wife. The next morning she rose with the other women before dawn. It was late October and while she huddled under a shawl next to her grandmother, Asha prepared tea, Sona heated the halwa, and Sushila started frying puris. Nisha was not used to breakfast at four in the morning, and could not bring herself to eat.

‘Have, have, beti,’ cajoled Sushila.

‘No, Chachi, I don’t want.’

‘Arre, come, come, after this you can’t eat anything till the moon comes up.’

She wrapped a bit of puri around some halwa and, holding Nisha’s chin up, coaxed it in. ‘Good you are starting so young. It’s never too early to fast for your husband – there now, open your mouth, good girl, a little more, little more, a little …’ The puri finished, Nisha was allowed to rest her mouth.

Later in the morning Pyare Lal took the fasting females to Hanuman Mandir where they bought bangles and had mehndi traced on to their palms. Once home, they settled down to watch a rented video, palms outstretched, the dried, flaking mehndi smeared with a sugar-lemon mixture to darken the colour.

The boys went straight to the shop after school to have their lunch there. In the evening the men came home with kulchacholla, dahi bhalla, and rasmalai; their women must not labour over dinner.

Sona, Sushila, and Asha dressed in bridal colours, gathered to perform the puja and listen to a story underlining its significance:

The Karva Chauth Katha

There was once a fourteen-year-old girl, recently married. She was at her mother’s house for her first Karva Chauth. She fasted along with her sisters-in-law, but by the time it was evening she had become crazy with hunger. Her brothers, unable to see her plight, climbed the nearest tree and shone a torch through a sieve. The moon has risen, now eat, they said. And she did.

Her husband, far away in his own home, died immediately, killed by his wife’s unwillingness to examine the moon that was shown to her so ambiguously, through multiple layers of shadow and doubt, hunger and desire.

The girl returned home to a husband embalmed in a tub of oil. Now began her initiation into the true meaning of wifehood. She fasted for one whole year. She prayed to the Devi every chauth. On the fourth day of the waxing moon, she waited to see it climb the sky slowly, slowly, and when she did see it, she completed her puja slowly, slowly. Her mother-in-law watched her like a hawk. She took her pliable daughter-in-law through every ritual in the book, reminding her every second of the day of what she had done, and how near widowhood was upon her.

It was the last fast of that year. The girl’s tongue felt thick and swollen with thirst, but her mind was now trained to repress the demands of her body. That they were a source of trouble was as plain for all to see as that body blanketed by strong-smelling mustard oil, glistening through its deep yellow.

She was rewarded. Her husband came back to life. Great was the joy and firm was the girl’s resolve to follow for ever the path laid down by her elders.

The story concludes and the power of a wife lingers seductively before the listeners, inviting identification, so that the girl who was so foolish could be them, the woman who was so self-disciplined could be them.

But Nisha was young and protested. ‘It was not the girl’s fault, it is the brothers who should be punished. They made her a widow.’

‘It is nothing to do with the brothers,’ scolded the mother in turn. ‘That girl should have followed her elders and not eaten by herself. After all, no one else was eating, were they? She was trying to be independent, and you can see the consequences.’

Asha laughed ingratiatingly. ‘When you are older you will understand.’

Meanwhile at nine-fourteen Raju and Vijay announce the arrival of the moon, visible from the roof, and the women proceed there to offer water, grain, and fruit. Last of all, the daughters-in-law touch the feet of their mother-in-law. ‘Stay a wife for ever, be the mother of sons,’ she blesses them. Nisha’s unmarried years do not involve feet touching, there will be enough of that in her husband’s home.

Finally they eat with the waiting men.

The next day Nisha returned to her aunt’s house.

‘Why don’t you do Karva Chauth, masi?’ she wondered aloud while her aunt was making dinner.

Rupa dreaded explanations that might antagonise her sister, but neither did she like appearing in a bad light. She resorted to emphatic slicing of potatoes.

‘Huh, masi? Why don’t you do Karva Chauth?’ Nisha persevered.

‘You think the whole world fasts for their husbands?’ Really, that sister of hers needed her head examined. There was an age for everything, and when the child should be thinking of studies, she was forcing her to think of husbands.

‘But still,’ persisted Nisha, ‘Mummy does.’

‘Your mother has to follow the traditions of her family. Besides, your uncle does not believe in fasting. If I don’t eat, he won’t either.’

‘Oh,’ said Nisha.

‘Now finish your homework quickly. See, we are going to have potato fry for dinner.’

Nisha’s favourite. Her mouth started watering.

It turned out Nisha had a flair for studies. She was quick to memorise, her written work was neat, she had nothing to fear from the printed page. It always offered, never asked.

The aunt and uncle were determined their niece should perform brilliantly in school. Tests and exams were tests and exams for the whole family. Afterwards her uncle went over every question in detail, then calculated her marks. He was always right.

Sometimes Nisha writhed under this tyranny. ‘Raju doesn’t study so much,’ she complained, though with a touch of superiority. Her marks were always better than Raju’s.

‘Raju has the shop,’ replied her aunt.

‘So?’

‘You must be able to look after yourself,’ said the aunt delicately, not wanting to spell out the possibility of death and disaster to a child so young.

‘Do you look after yourself?’

‘You see that I do my business. Not that I need to, but with no children, one has to have a time pass,’ said Rupa, faltering in the quagmire of simultaneously rearing a modern and a traditional girl. ‘A lot depends on one’s in-laws,’ she added.

‘When did Mummy marry?’

‘After school.’

‘And you?’

‘After college.’

‘Why?’

‘Not so pretty,’ snorted her aunt into the dal she was stirring. ‘Or so fair.’

Silence.

Rupa glanced at the girl anxiously. Her niece was undeniably good looking, but her horoscope was also undeniably bad, and in the long run stars had greater staying power than beauty.

In the five years she had had her, Rupa had loved dressing her niece in satin, nylon, net, and sequins, loved putting lipstick, kaajal, and bindis on her, and making ringlets in her hair. Sometimes her husband got irritated – ‘She is just your plaything’ – but in another couple of years Nisha would begin to menstruate and her childhood would be over.

At Sona’s a woman could not cook, worship, or serve anybody food during her monthlies. But thankfully Nisha need not be acquainted with all this yet; besides, in her own house taboos were not so strict.

Sona had spent years exhibiting hysterical anger over Vicky’s education. Now, alas for her, those exercises in recrimination would serve as a practice run for Raju’s similar failings.

Raju was following in Vicky’s footsteps. Not that doing poorly in school particularly mattered in this shop-owning family, but between upstairs and downstairs there existed a rivalry that flourished or languished depending on the material it could feed upon. Unfortunately for Sona, during the children’s school-going years it peaked around report card time.

The misery Sona felt at Raju’s performance was exacerbated on parent-teacher day. Every year he did a little worse, belying his promises and her hopes and expectations. This perpetual disappointment drove her to violence.

Ineffectually she shook him by the ear, wrathfully reminding him of his primary obligations. ‘For this I gave birth to you? To bring such shame on me? To hear teachers complain that you are noisy, inattentive, and don’t study?’

‘Boys will be like that,’ remarked the grandmother complacently. ‘Leave him.’

What did the old woman know of fields of competition in contemporary family life? Sona knew her son was bright, sharp, and intelligent, it was obvious from his face, and it was galling to feel he had to appear small in front of the world.

‘These teachers don’t like me,’ whined Raju. ‘On purpose they give me less marks.’

‘Why don’t you make this excuse to your aunt when she comes downstairs to find out how you have done?’ said Sona bitterly. ‘See if she will believe you.’

Raju looked resentful. ‘It’s true. They are always comparing me to Ajay. Can I help it if I am not clever like him?’

‘I knew it was not a good idea putting him in the same school as his cousins,’ fumed Sona. ‘Now see how the poor boy has to suffer – but who listens to me in this house?’

‘Just because your son cannot work, you want to separate the children of this family?’ rebuked the grandmother.

Anger, resentment, and the struggle to keep silent drove Sona to the kitchen, where Asha’s sympathy was readily available.

That evening, Sushila came down to pry. ‘How did you do, beta?’ she asked, giving Raju a playful shove.

‘Arre, who can remember so many marks?’ declared Sona. ‘It is enough to remember Nisha’s: 89 in Maths, Science 82, Hindi 86, Social Studies 90, English 87, Sanskrit 88. But why attract the evil eye by boasting?’

‘I believe your brother-in-law gives a lot of attention to Nisha’s studies. A pity a girl should benefit and the boy be neglected, but each family has its kismet,’ sighed the solicitous aunt.

Two things occurred to Sona at this point. That the base nature of the woman upstairs made her rub chillies into the wounds of innocents, and that all Sushila’s uncharitable deeds, thoughts, and words would eventually add to her bad karma. Still, it was beneath her to retaliate by mentioning Ajay’s and Vijay’s weak points.

Sona communicated her lofty position to her sister, trembling with rage. Rupa listened silently. Sushila periodically got under her sister’s skin and this would work itself out without her intervention. But she had never thought of getting Raju the full benefit of her husband’s attention. She must rectify that now.

‘Send Raju to study with his uncle, Didi. In this house the poor boy, otherwise so smart, gets distracted.’

Instead of responding to this offer, Sona turned on her daughter. ‘What is the use of doing brilliantly if you cannot help your brother? You are older, you should teach him.’

‘How is it my fault if he doesn’t do well?’ demanded Nisha sullenly.

‘Didi, what are you saying? You know Nisha will do anything for her brother,’ interjected Rupa, wishing her husband hadn’t worked quite so hard with his niece; it was not having all the desired effects.

That evening, having dropped Nisha off at her mother’s, Rupa returned home, had her bath, and served her husband tea. ‘Having children in a joint family is not easy,’ she remarked.

Prem Nath looked at her. The days his wife visited her sister’s house, she would return either depressed and withdrawn, or with an air of tenderness that told him things were going badly with Sona. He now pulled her towards him and put his hands under her petticoat.