bright-eyed, adoring devotee. When he came back from work, mine was the name he called from the door, and despite his bad right leg, he scooped me up and swung me in the air when I was little enough, saying, “Now tell me, my Princess, which giants have you killed today?” When I was a little older, I went with him on his rounds of our factories and once, when I was no more than seven years old, he pulled me out of the chalk grid of a hopscotch game and introduced me to some visiting grown-ups with a flourish: “Meet the Princess of Begumpet Pickles! One day she will become the first female industrial magnate of this country.” He spoke to me only in English because he considered it the language of success, even though this excluded my Telugu-speaking mother from our conversations. From infancy, I was made to understand I was the heir. Once when my mother protested, “She will be married, she won’t be your daughter any more, she’ll have her own life and she may want other things,” my father snapped at her. “She’ll live here and run the business, and I’ll arrange a husband for her who lives with us. Why am I earning all this money if not for my grandsons?”
He continued the practice of calling for me until well into my teenage years – his car would stop, I would hear his step on the staircase and then hear my name. I would put aside whatever I was doing and run to the front door to open it and hand him his glass of fresh coconut water. It was only during my senior school years, when extra classes began to keep me away from home, that this routine began to be disrupted. Finally it ceased altogether.
I can see now that my father sensed even then that he was losing me, and everything he did was an attempt somehow to corral me, to reclaim our lost days of easy happiness when I was a willing disciple and he my unquestioned master. He insisted that I spend hours with him on the factory’s accounts after school. Holidays were to be spent going to work with him and learning on the job. “Nothing like learning on the job,” he would repeat, tapping his silver-headed stick on the floor. “Get your head out of the clouds, Maya, life is not lived on a cloud.” Twice, when I was still a pig-tailed teenager, he made me sit behind his big shining work desk – I needed a cushion to reach the right commanding height – summon a wretched employee, and inform the man that he was being sacked. If I knew something of this kind was in the offing and tried to hide from him, he forced me out of the house and into his car. “You don’t become a businesswoman unless you learn to be tough, you have to be steel inside,” he would say. On the drive, he would lecture me all the way: “Business is all about decisions that are taken in the larger interest, with a long-term plan. That man you sacked was serving no purpose any more. His salary was a waste of our money. It had to be done. Do you think I like sacking people? See this as your management degree, Maya. This is teaching you more than any business academy.”
After these encounters, I would retreat to a corner of our orchard, where, under a chikoo tree, a stray dog twice had puppies. I brought food for the bitch, milk for the puppies, and sat with them for long hours, letting the puppies nip my hands, feeling myself restored limb by limb, muscle by muscle, by their bemused joy over a dead leaf or a mound of soft earth they could dig.
I despised myself for not having had the steel to stand up for Puran during the party when Mr Chauhan had threatened him. Ramesh had protested; why didn’t I, when Puran was part of my “family”? My two worlds had never intersected this way before and when for once they did, I had not measured up. With the men who had threatened Miss Wilson today, I wondered how brave I would be if I faced real, physical danger when just their suggestion of violence made me so afraid for myself.
That afternoon, I went to the tea shack by the Jhoola Devi temple. The temple was laden with thousands of tarnished