calmly.
‘I considered this. Maybe it is a cultural difference?’
‘Oh, stop!’ Mother moaned. ‘It’s a business. I married a businessman, remember?’
‘Balaji was always just a middling man—’
‘A middleman, not—’
A cry erupted from the playing girls. Mother glanced at the door and Naila curled behind it, her pulse thudding in her ears. She raised her eyebrows at her sisters, and an index finger to her lips. They quieted.
‘You hear them?’ Nonna said. ‘They are people. Not looms! Not things!’
‘But they are things,’ said Mother. ‘They are the only perfect things I have ever made.’
Nonna was silent. Something cool passed over Naila’s skin, raising goosebumps.
‘Naila?’ Mother called out.
Naila waited a beat before she stepped inside the dining room. ‘Yes, Mother?’
‘Come,’ Mother said coldly. ‘It’s time to put price tags on these packets. Your nonna can watch the girls. Tell the maid to bring her some tea. She needs something to calm her nerves.’
* * *
Sibilla sat in the sitting room with her granddaughters, obediently awaiting her tea. Contessa was performing a wobbly dance for Gabriella and Lilliana. These three had landed in the family as if all at once, a bundle of limbs and affection and need. Only Naila stood apart. Perhaps it was because she had come earlier than the others but her mother had also cultivated that separateness. Isabella seemed to resent her eldest, for being Daddiji’s favourite or for being less subject to her will. Once, coming across that ridiculous morning charade in the corridor – Isabella marching before her daughters like a matronly Mussolini, demanding ‘What are you made of?’ – Sibilla had caught Naila rolling her eyes and making shudder quotes with her fingers when she answered, ‘Hair.’
Chanda came in with a tea tray. Sibilla smiled at her. She hadn’t planned to bring all of her old servants with her to the Kamwala house like a lady with maids-in-waiting. But when Simon, the old gardener, had succumbed to TB, Sibilla had felt that she should take care of his daughter. Chanda had grown into a sweet, square-shouldered woman, who provided without complaint for both her fatherless son and her twin siblings. She knelt now before Sibilla and poured tea into a cup. She was wearing the uniform Isabella insisted on, a pink and white affair that made her look clownish under her magnificent headdress of long plaits – like a kudu in pantaloons.
‘Myook, Ba Madam?’ asked Chanda, holding the creamer aloft.
Sibilla nodded and turned back to her granddaughters. Lilliana was dancing now, like a robot it seemed – arms at right angles, neck stiff with concentration. If only they knew how much like robots they were, machines in their parents’ hair factory! Sibilla wondered, not for the first time, whether she was to blame for this. She had vowed to stay out of the war between Isa and Daddiji. But she hadn’t been able to help herself when it came to the Battle of the Price Tags. She knew she shouldn’t have tied that blank tag to Naila’s toe after the girls’ parents had sold everything in the house.
‘Chooga?’ asked Chanda.
Sibilla nodded and held up three fingers, then four. They both laughed. Chanda’s teeth glowed white. Her plaits danced as she handed the mug over. Sibilla sipped her tea. At the time, she’d thought it would be the ultimate rejoinder to Isa and Daddiji both: You cannot put a price on a human being. She’d reasoned that one of them would find it and blame it on the other and feel ashamed. Chastened. She had never considered the possibility that instead they would join forces and become allies, that they would end up collaborating on an operation that revolved entirely around putting prices on their children’s heads.
‘Contessa wins!’ Gabriella yelled. She had apparently been designated judge of the dance competition. Lilliana began to whimper. Chanda turned to look, and Sibilla noticed that the wig braided into her hair was bronze, not black, and less shiny than her granddaughters’ hair. So! The servants had boycotted Lovely Luxe Locks Ltd! Before Chanda could rush off to attend to the children, Sibilla reached out and grasped a bouquet of her plaits.
‘Oops!’ Chanda giggled and swerved back to accommodate the pull to her head.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Sorry, Ba Sibilla.’ Chanda looked down, thinking she was being chastised for disloyalty.
‘No, it’s fine,’ Sibilla smiled and released her grip. She raised her voice over her granddaughters wailing in the corner. ‘I just want to know. Who did this beautiful thing to your hair?’
‘Ba