her rooster, which had wandered off that morning. Veer took my spectacles off and put them on a corner of the trunk next to the bed. He plucked out the long, tasselled wooden pin that held my hair in a knot and shook it loose. One of Charu’s cows mooed on the lawn just outside and its bell tinkled. I had unbuttoned Veer’s shirt, without thinking at all what I was doing. Somewhere I could hear the “whump-whump” sound of the madman at the nettles again. But it did not matter, Diwan Sahib could not rush out in the rain after him. Our clothes fell in a heap on the floor, next to Diwan Sahib’s empty bottles, dog-eared books, discarded ballpoint pens, and shrivelled orange pips. The window let in the scent of white roses from the climber that trailed over it. Veer’s hands were everywhere and his tongue was everywhere, we were on the bed, then off it on the wooden floor, and then back on the bed again. I kissed his deformed ear and the four fingers on his left hand, one by one. I closed my eyes. A bird fluttered its wings beneath the stretched curtain of my skin, trying to get out. My throat made sounds I could do nothing to stop. I heard Michael’s voice at my ear, saying, “You wouldn’t wait for me to die to find another man.”
Moments after we had prised ourselves apart, Veer got into his clothes and said, “You should go and get some sleep. You look as if you’ll fall asleep standing.” I left the room, but not the house, unwilling to lose sight of him so soon. I sat in the veranda, half-dozing, half listening to the rustling and thumping sounds that began inside after a while. When I heard something shatter, I jumped up to see what had happened, and found Veer sitting on the floor before Diwan Sahib’s open trunks, looking through them. His face was as impersonal as a stranger’s. “The doctors need his medical papers and I can’t find anything,” he said when he saw me. And then with a frown, “Didn’t you go? I thought you were going down to your own place? I need some time here. I’ll come to your place later.”
I must have looked startled because his expression softened. He got up in a swift uncoiling movement and pulled me to him and kissed me and murmured in my ear. He caressed me wherever he found bare skin. I was resting in his arms, my chin at his neck, soothed by his hands when, in another switch of mood he turned briskly efficient, disentangled himself and gave me a little push. “You’re distracting me,” he said. “Off you go. I have to look for that medical stuff. They have no idea about his history, they need to know the medicines he’s allergic to.”
That night I sat with the jam factory accounts, totting up all we had spent on bottles, labels, fruit, salaries, and what jam had been sold. I should have been light-hearted and happy; Veer was back. If he was preoccupied with Diwan Sahib’s medical papers that was hardly to be wondered at; surely I did not expect him to be a lovesick teenager who had eyes and mind for no-one else. Yet I was in a restless welter of confusion. I could not understand why I felt so disturbed about the changes in his moods that afternoon. I was used to it, not only in him, in his uncle as well. I had resented it sometimes, the burden of being the good-tempered one.
I tried to apply myself to the accounts, but my thoughts kept turning to what my uncle had found in my mother’s room after she died. He had been so perturbed he had written to ask me about it. For much of her later life, even before I left home, my mother had stopped sharing my father’s bed. She seldom allowed anyone else into her own bedroom, cleaning it herself and guarding it as an inviolable refuge, much as I did my own house now. It was only when she fell very ill that other members of the family got access to her room and uncovered all her little secrets: a tin of the chewing tobacco she had claimed to have given up, my letters to her, the album with my baby pictures that my father had wanted to destroy. My uncle said he had found