Kitabı oku: «Evening Is the Whole Day», sayfa 2

“Don’t say retarded,” Amma had scolded the first time Appa had used the word to describe Baldy. “He’s just a bit slow, that’s all.”

“To retard is to slow,” Appa had said. “Ecce signum: the inestimable OED.” He’d pulled the dictionary off the bookshelf in the sitting room and laid its dusty black cardboard cover on Amma’s breakfast plate.

“Okay, enough of it,” Amma’d said then, and pushed her chair back so vehemently to leave the table that her tea sloshed onto her saucer. But Uma and Appa had shared a triumphant, twinkling grin, and even Suresh and Aasha had got the joke.

No curtains are stirring at the Manickams’ window three doors down: the former Mrs. Manickam is lying in bed in Kampong Kepayang eating peeled and pitted longans from the hand of her new husband, who leaves the office early every day for this very purpose, and Mr. Manickam is at the office though it’s a Saturday, burying his sorrows in work as usual.

“Looklooklook,” says Mrs. Balakrishnan farther down the street, flicking her husband’s sleeve as he sits reading the newspaper. “Sure enough man, they’ve sent the girl off from the Big House. What for all this drama now? Now only they’ll sit and cry. As if it will bring the old lady back. When she was sitting in her corner the whole time they were complaining only. Cannot manage her it seems. Must get another servant it seems. Too grand to look after her themselves. That’s what too much money will get you in the end. Just troubles and tears.”

With one foot Appa sweeps a few dead leaves and stray pebbles out under the gate. Then he turns and makes his way back to the house, dragging his Japanese slippers on the gravel. For a few seconds he stands looking up at the tops of trees as if he were a visitor admiring the lush foliage, his umbrella turning like a Victorian lady’s parasol on his shoulder. Wah, wah, Mr. Raju, very nice, man, your garden! What kind of fertilizer you use? “Big-House Uncle!” shouts Baldy from the top of his tree next door. “Uncle, Uncle, Big-House Uncle! Uncle ah! Uncle where? Uncle why?” Appa looks right at Baldy but says nothing. Then, as if he’s suddenly remembered something important, he starts and strides briskly into the house.

“What are you two sitting there wasting time for?” he asks Suresh and Aasha as he enters the dining room. “As if the whole family must sit and bid a solemn farewell to the bloody girl like she’s the Queen of England on a state visit. Go and do your homework or read a book or do something useful, for heaven’s sake.”

The children’s heads turn towards Amma, and they sit holding their breath and biting their lips, waiting for her permission. To go and do their homework (although Aasha doesn’t really have any). To read a book. To do unnamed useful things. To scamper off and live children’s lives (or to discover that such a thing has become impossible for them, even after the morning’s promise of a new beginning) and leave Amma bereft at a crumb-scattered table, with no audience.

“What? What are you looking at me for?” says Amma. “As if I wanted you to sit here. Both of you sitting with your busybody backsides glued to your chairs as if this whole tamasha is a Saturday morning cartoon, and now looking at me as if I’m the one who wouldn’t let you go.”

A tiny gust of air escapes Appa’s nostrils. A laugh, a snip of surprise, a puff of fear. Good grief, Appa thinks, it’s true: she’s kept them here to witness her righteous fury at Chellam the Ingrate. And not just to witness it—to share it, to catch the whole rolling mass of rage with nowhere else to go, to parcel it out for future use. Lesson One: how some people turn against you even After Everything you’ve done for them.

He unfolds the two-color map of his wife in his head and adds to it another little landmark, a white dot before the border. Call it Shamelessness. Call it Stopping-at-Nothing, a triple-barreled name for a quaint English village. From the pit of his belly his own ravaging shamelessnesses threaten to rise in twos and threes and fours into his chest, waiting to accuse him in their discordant voices of calling the kettle black, waiting for him to acknowledge that the children have been caught between his old shamelessnesses and her new ones. He blinks and swallows, and thinks instead of the children’s pause for permission. That’s what has really jolted him, not this sudden change in his wife. That’s what has sent cold air spiraling out his nostrils in two swift exclamation points. She’s kept them here, he thinks, and they know it. For some reason he can’t put his finger on, this frightens him. His head swims a little, as if he’s just woken from a dream in which chickens talked and suns turned into moons.

He shakes his head and strides past them to calm his nerves with a cool shower in a bathroom humming with the ghost of his dead mother, before driving off the screen into an alternate universe in which he can forget the intransigent truths of this one.

In the kitchen Amma puts the dishes in the sink, and says, without turning around, “Next time why don’t you just go with your father on Lourdesmary’s days off? You want me to plan each Saturday night dinner one week in advance or what? Write out a full dinner menu with a fountain pen? Wear white gloves to serve you from silver trays?” Then she goes up to her room and stays there until Suresh and Aasha have made and eaten a dinner composed of Emergency Rations: golden syrup on Jacob’s Cream Crackers, Milo powder straight from the tin, raw Maggi noodles broken into pieces and sprinkled with their grey (chicken-flavored) seasoning powder. At eight o’clock, Amma comes downstairs to eat her own dinner while listening to the kitchen radio in the half-dark. The radio’s still set to the Tamil station to which Chellam used to listen while combing Paati’s hair in the mornings. The theme song for the ten o’clock film-music program would always come on just as she pulled Paati’s hair into a silky white knot barely big enough for two hairpins. Now, though, there’s only a man with a gravelly, black-mustachioed voice interviewing a young lady doctor about the health benefits of almonds.

Suresh ceremoniously lays out his books and pencils, then takes his HB pencil and ruler out of their metal tin and starts his mathematics homework. “Please can I have just —” Aasha begins, and Suresh tears her a sheet of foolscap from his scrap paper pad and gives her a blue rollerball pen with a fat nib. On this cadged piece of paper Aasha draws an elaborate picture indecipherable to everyone but herself, a picture of Chellam the ex–servant girl, once beloved (but hated) and hated (but beloved) by Suresh and Aasha, now in ex-ile in her faraway village of red earth and tin roofs.

Ex-ile is an island for people who aren’t what they used to be. On that lonely island in Aasha’s picture Chellam wanders, tripping on blunt rocks in barren valleys, scaling sharp, windblown slopes on her hands and knees, minding starved cows that graze on rubbish heaps as if they’re mounds of fresh clover. Blindly arranging and rearranging clouds of dust and dirt and bloodstained bathroom buckets with a ragged broom. Inside her head a dozen snakes lie coiled around one another in a heavy mass. Inside her belly stands a tiny matchstick figure, a smaller version of herself, pushing against the round walls of its dwelling with its tiny hands.

This matchstick representation of Chellam is accurate in at least one respect: there is indeed a terrible colubrine knot of bad memories and black questions inside Chellam’s head that will die with her, unhatched. Aasha outlines the snakes again and then colors and colors them till the ink spreads down into Chellam’s heavy-lobed, oversized ears.

“Tsk, Aasha,” grumbles Suresh, “wasting my good pen only. For nonsense like that can’t you use a pencil?”

Aasha caps the pen and rolls it across the table to Suresh with a pout. She climbs down from her chair and goes upstairs to sit in Uma’s empty room. Around her the night sings with crickets and cicadas, with creaky ceiling fans and the theme songs of all the television programs being watched all the way down Kingfisher Lane. Hawaii Five-O. B.J. and the Bear. Little House on the Prairie. Aasha’s quivering ears make out each one, separating them like threads on a loom, but downstairs she hears only silence. The silence, too, can be teased apart like threads: the silence of Amma staring out the kitchen window into the falling darkness. The silence of Appa’s empty study, from which there are no rustlings of papers or whistlings of tunes. The silence of Suresh doing his homework all alone, feeling guilty for grumbling about his wasted pen. The silence of Paati, whose weightless, see-through body bumps noiselessly into furniture and walls, looking for the unraveling rattan chair on which she once sat all day in her mosquito-thronged corner. Merciful flames have freed the chair’s spirit just as Paati’s cremation freed hers, but the chair hasn’t reappeared to sit transparently in its corner, and Paati is inconsolable. Her clear-glass joints creak silently as she settles onto the floor where her chair used to be.

A small voice outside the window says: “That’s how Paati knows she’s dead. Her chair isn’t there anymore.” Aasha turns to see her oldest (yet very young) ghost friend perched on the wide windowsill, tilting her head as she sometimes does. If Aasha were tall enough and strong enough to open this window on her own she would, though Mr. McDougall’s daughter’s not asking to be let in this time.

“You remember how I knew I was dead, don’t you?” She doesn’t look at Aasha as she asks the question, but off into the distance, so as to hide her great yearning for the correct answer.

“Yes,” says Aasha, “of course I do. But tell me again anyway.”

“When I couldn’t see the sunlight and the birds. Before that I was alive, the whole time my Ma and I were sinking down through the pond—there were no fish in it at all, it was silent and dark like a big empty church—but I could see the light far away at the top, above the water. When I couldn’t see it anymore, that’s when I was dead.”

Aasha lays her head on Uma’s pillow, curls up, and closes her eyes to meditate once more upon this familiar confidence.

The following afternoon Amma finds Aasha’s abandoned drawing of Chellam under the dining table. She squints briefly at the drawing, and then, deciding it must be a character from one of Aasha’s storybooks, makes her list for Mat Din on the back. Chocolate wafers, Nutella, star anise for mutton curry, tinned corn and peas to go with chicken chops.

2

BIG HOUSE BEGINNINGS

IN 1899, Appa’s grandfather sailed across the Bay of Bengal to seek his fortune under familiar masters in a strange land, leaving behind an emerald of a village on the east coast of India. Barely had he shuffled off the boat with the rest of that vast herd in Penang when a fellow offered him a job on the docks, and there he toiled, sleeping four or five hours a night in a miserable dormitory, sending the bulk of his wages home, wanting nothing more for himself than to be able to pay his passage back home someday.

What changed his dreams in twenty years? All Appa’s father, Tata, knew of it was that by the time he was old enough to stand before his father in knee-length khakis for morning inspections before school, his father was saying: “Study hard. Study hard and you won’t have to be a coolie like me.” Every single goddamn morning he said it, the milky coffee frothing in his mustache. Study hard and the world will be yours. You could be a rich man. With a bungalow and servants.

And so Tata studied hard enough to get himself a clerk’s position with the Cowan & Maugham Steamship Company when he left school at sixteen, and somewhere in all that hoping and studying and preparing, something else changed: India ceased to be home. Sometimes it glimmered green and gold in Tata’s father’s tales of riverbank games and ten-day weddings and unbreakable blood bonds. At other times it was a threat, a nightmare, a morass in which those who hadn’t been lucky enough to escape still flailed. But Tata had no pictures of his own to attach to his father’s word for India: Ur, the country. This, this flourishing, mixed-up, polyglot place to which they had found their way almost by accident, this was his country now. Malays Chinese Indians, motley countrymen they might be, but countrymen they were, for better or for worse. What was coming was coming to them all. It would be theirs to share.

This was what Tata, eyes shining in the dark, told his pretty wife. It’s our country, not the white man’s. And when she said, But they’ve only been good to us, he insisted: You don’t know. You don’t know their dirty hearts. But you’ll see what this country can become without them. You’ll see.

To his five children—Raju the good-for-everything, Balu the good-for-nothing, and their three inconsequential sisters—Tata regularly said: We’re lucky to live here. It’s the best place on earth, none of India’s problems. Peace and quiet and perfect weather. Just work hard and the world could belong to you here. Then he’d ruffle the hair on Raju’s attentive head and box distracted Balu’s ear.

By the time Tata retired, in 1956, he owned a shipping company that rivaled his old employer’s. A wry sun was setting with a vengeance on the British Empire. Tata decided to buy himself a house that would declare his family’s stake in the new country. A great house, a grand house, a dynastic seat. He would leave Penang and look for such a house in Ipoh, far away from the dockyards, hilly, verdant, the perfect place to retire.

The house of Tata’s dreams belonged to one Mr. McDougall, a dyspeptic Scotsman who had owned two of the scores of mines that had sprouted up in and around Ipoh in the 1850s to tap the Kinta Valley’s rich veins of tin. He had already sold the mines to a Chinese towkay; now he had only to get rid of his house.

Mr. McDougall had three teenage children who’d been born and bred among the Chinese miners’ offspring in Ipoh, running around in Japanese slippers and eating char siu pau for breakfast. He also had a mistress and a bastard child, whom he kept in relative luxury in a bungalow in Tambun. Mr. McDougall’s life had meandered pleasantly along its course for years—mornings visiting the mines, afternoons with the mistress, evenings at the club—when he decided to leave the country, for two reasons. The first was that Her Majesty’s government was preparing to withdraw. The second was that his mistress, sniffing Mr. McDougall’s own flight in the air, had begun to demand a bigger house, a chauffeured car, and a wedding ring. If you don’t leave your family, she told him, I’ll come and pull you away myself. I’ll drag you off with my hands and my teeth, and your wife can watch.

In response, Mr. McDougall had whisked his wife—Elizabeth Mc-Dougall, née Fitzwilliam, a colonel’s daughter and in her time a great beauty whose attentions all the British bachelors of Malaya had coveted—and their three children off to a home they’d never known in the Scottish Highlands. And the mistress? For attention, for revenge, or out of simple, untainted despair, she had drowned herself and her six-year-old daughter in a mining pond. If Mr. McDougall had learned of her demise, he had never given any sign of it.

“I’m not sure his legitimate children fared any better,” Appa would say whenever he told the story of the house. “Wonder what happened to them. The father simply uprooted them just like that and packed them all off lock stock and barrel.”

Lock, Stock and Barrel, three men in a tub.

One said roll over and another said rub.

It was Suresh who penned these two inspired lines on the inside cover of his science textbook. He was nine years old at the time, and he entertained the idea of sharing the couplet with Appa, who would surely roar with laughter and pat him on the shoulder (if they were standing up) or the knee (if they were sitting down), the way he laughed and patted Uma whenever she displayed a wit worthy of her genes. But in the days after Suresh composed the verse Appa was hardly ever at home, and when he was his mood was so uneven that after three weeks of waiting, Suresh scratched the lines out with a marker pen to avoid trouble in case of a spot check by the school prefects.

“Going home it seems,” Appa would snort, recalling Mr. McDougall’s final words to Tata. “That’s what McDougall told them. What nonsense! His home, maybe, not theirs. Their skin may have been white but they were Chinks through and through, let me tell you.” Chink was a small, sharp sound that made Amma suck her teeth and shake her head, but this only encouraged Appa. “Probably wandering the moors looking for pork-entrail porridge,” he’d go on. “Wiping their backsides with the Nanyang Siang Pau’s business pages. Shipped specially to them by courier service.”

Then Uma would giggle, and Suresh, watching her, would giggle with equal intensity, a number of giggles empirically guaranteed to flatter Appa without risking a mouthslap or a thighpinch from Amma. Only Aasha never joined in, for amusing as she found Appa’s portraits of the McDougall children, her heart was with the little drowned girl, who wore her hair in pigtails; who had eyes like longan seeds and lychee-colored cheeks; who sometimes, on close, moonless nights, begged to be let in at the dining room window. Please, she mouthed to Aasha, can’t I sit at the table in my father’s house?

Don’t talk rubbish, Appa and Amma and Uma and Suresh said when Aasha told them. And when once she opened that window, she got a slap on the wrist for letting in a cicada.

WHEN MR. MCDOUGALL fled to the Scottish Highlands, it had been nine years since King George VI had relinquished the cherished jewel of his crown. To be more precise: he’d dropped it as if it were a hot potato, towards the outstretched hands of a little brown man in a loincloth and granny glasses; a taller, hook-nosed chap in a still-unnamed jacket; and three hundred and fifty million anonymous Natives who’d fiercely stayed up until, by midnight, they’d been watery-eyed, delirious with exhaustion, and willing to see nearly anything as a precious gift from His Majesty. Down, down, down it had fallen, this crown jewel, this hot potato, this quivering, unhatched egg, none of them knowing what would emerge from it and yet most of them sure—oh blessed, blissful certainty!—that it was just what they wanted. Alas, the rest, too, is history: in their hand-clapping delight they’d dropped it, and it had broken in two, and out of the two halves had scurried not the propitious golden chick they’d imagined, but a thousand bloodthirsty monsters multiplying before their eyes, and scrabble as they might to unscramble the mess, it was too late, all too late even for them to make a last-minute omelet with their broken egg.

Now, in 1956, a slip of a nation just across the water prepared to lower the Union Jack forever, convinced (and correct, in a way) that here things would be different. This land awakened, shook out its hair, and readied itself for a decade of casting off and putting on names as if they were festive raiments. The Federation of Malay States. Malaya. Malaysia. Before another crowd of breathless, bright-eyed Natives, another Father of another Nation cleared his throat. Tunku Abdul Rahman, Oxbridge-educated, like so many new Fathers. Fond of his Yorkshire pudding and his steak and kidney pie with lashings of gravy. But bravely he cast these from his mind (or tried to), exchanged his morning coat for a baju melayu whose rich gold threads chafed his skin, and rose, adjusting his tengkolok on his head, to lead his people from their paddy fields, their family plantations, and their one-room school-huts to a new age of glory. They’d never had Yorkshire pudding or steak and kidney pie, but they trusted him: in his veins ran good Malay blood, and that, they believed, could not be diluted by any amount of bad English food.

Mr. McDougall knew the people of Malaya all too well; he’d helped to create them, after all, he and his fellow settlers. They’d brought the Chinese and the Indians out here on lurching boats for their brains and their brawn, for the raking in of taxable tin profits and the slaving under the midday sun. Like God, Mr. McDougall and his compatriots had watched their word take miraculous material form, Malay and Chinese and Indian stepping up unquestioningly to fill the roles invented for them. The Malay peasant sloshing about halfheartedly for a few hours a morning in the rice paddies of his divinely ordained destiny, content the rest of the day to squat in the shade under his hut-on-stilts. The Chinese coolie sniffing his diligent way to tin and opium. The indentured Indian, so high on betel juice that he could dig ditches for twelve hours, happy as a water buffalo in mud, burning his brown skin black under the sun and shuffling home at night to drink cheap toddy and beat his wife. For seventy years they’d all lived in harmony with the white men who ran the country, but for a few isolated incidents: a governor stabbed while he bathed, a ragtag protest. On the whole, things had gone according to plan.

Mr. McDougall couldn’t say with any certainty when it had all begun to change, but he’d taken notice when the Chosen Few had started to get too big for their boots. That’s what he and his chums at the miners’ club had called the boys His Majesty’s government had been specially grooming for the Malay Administrative Service and God only knew what else. Those scrubbed little weasels, schooled at the Malay College or the Victoria Institution or the Penang Free School and shipped off to Oxford and Cambridge to keep the Natives happy. For a while a pat on the head here and a promotion there had been enough to keep them going when they got home, but even then he had smelled trouble coming, seeing them return in their robes and powdered wigs. This Tunku chap was the worst of that lot. Before Mr. McDougall had time to say I told you so, the boys from the Malay College had begun to rouse the rabble. Them on one side, and on the other the bloody Chinese communists, wretched turncoats: the very weapons the British had given them to fight the Japanese were now being used to murder Briton and Native alike.

King George was gone. His daughter now wore his plucked crown: above her solid English face it sat, with a large hen’s egg of a hole smack above her forehead, a pair of smaller round holes to the left, and to the right a row of tiny emeralds and rubies, loose as a seven-year-old’s milk teeth, waiting to be knocked out.

It was precisely because Mr. McDougall knew the Tunku’s people so well that he saw what would hatch from this latest little jewel-egg: nothing but the same old kind of trouble that had swamped India and Burma and the Sudan. Shifting their weight from foot to worried foot, their eyes glittering like wolves’ in the dark, the Chinese and the Indians were already waiting on the sidelines. That was to say, those who hadn’t already joined the communists, whose “insurgency”—Mr. McDougall chuckled bitterly every time he heard this namby-pamby word—they’d be lucky to put down before they left. Oh yes, no doubt about it, this was going to be a circus, a zoo, and a Christmas pantomime all rolled into one.

What with his mistress raving and raging at his heels, threatening to bring the outside world’s insanity into his high-ceilinged house, Mr. McDougall wasn’t wasting any time. On the fifteenth of December 1956 he had his lawyer draw up the bill of sale for the house and its adjoining acres, coconut trees and all; on the eighteenth he broke camp and headed home to Scotland, resigned to the prospect of spending a puking Yuletide on the high seas. He’d sold the house at a loss, but he didn’t care, not even when he saw the self-satisfied glint in the eyes of the wog who bought it. This man was a walking symptom of the softening of the empire. When a dockyard coolie could send his son to Oxford, thought Mr. McDougall as he signed his half of the unevenly typewritten, smudgily cyclostyled contract, that’s when you knew it was time to cut your losses and flee. The Rise of the Middle Bloody Class all right. That’s all we need.

“So!” he said aloud to the fellow, looking at him from head to toe and back. He was all spiffed up, this chap, decked out in a spotless white shirt and a bow tie just to come and sign an agreement in the back room of the miners’ club. “Got yourself a deal, eh?”

“Yes, yes,” said Tata. “Thank you very much, and good luck on your return to Scotland, Mr. McDougall.” He held out his hand, and Mr. McDougall took it with distaste, unable to shake the feeling that the fellow was having the last laugh.

He was right, of course, that Tata was pleased with himself for one-upping a vellakaran, for making off so effortlessly with such a bargain. “This,” he said, holding the deed out to Paati where she stood peeling onions for the day’s chicken perital, “this is the beginning of a new age. For us and for Malaya.”

Paati, her hair still black, her hands still soft, nodded uncertainly. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe so. But when the British are really gone for good, we’ll miss them.” And under cover of her onion-peeling, real tears, earnest and round, ran down her face. She wept for the Englishmen who would be booted out unceremoniously for the supposed sins of their fathers, sins she had never known, for she had known nothing but a glorious, sturdy contentment in her childhood. She wept for old times, for her missionary schoolmistresses and her red-bound Royal Readers, for “God Save the Queen” and the King’s Christmas Message on the radio. She wept for old, lazy-eyed Mr. Maxwell, the overseer at the Cowan & Maugham Steamship Company; for Mr. Scotts-Hornby, the late manager whose position Tata had filled; for Lieutenant Colonel Phillips and his wife, who had rented the bungalow behind the house to which Tata had brought her when they were newly married. And she wept for one Englishman in particular, whose name she did not speak, even to herself.

“Tsk,” said Tata now. “How many times have I told you to peel the onions under water and wear your glasses while doing it? Aadiyappa, how you women let vanity rule your lives!”

Obediently Paati dropped each onion with a plop into a large ever-silver bowl of water, and no more was said of the British on that day.

BY THE TIME Mr. McDougall packed away his coconut-frond fans and his tropical-weather Wellingtons for good, Ipoh, never the cultural hub of British Malaya, had begun to split her thin colonial skin, and a new town peered out from under it, its pavements wet with phlegmy spittle. Bustling kopitiams sprouted around derelict whiskey bars like toadstools around rotting logs. Inside them flocks of old Chinamen squatted at marble-topped tables, dipping fluffy white bread in their morning coffee, slurping their midday bak kut teh. The Cold Storage, with its gleaming, chrome-stooled milk bar, closed forever on a quiet Saturday afternoon. In its place arose an establishment shifting uneasily between supermarket and wet market, alive with flies, slick with the sanguine juices of fish and fowl. The University Bookstore folded, and all over town, small, disreputable-looking bookstalls, with Chinese names and Indian film magazines strung across dark doorways, popped up. The raucous revelry of Chinese businessmen and Indian doctors expelled the last ghosts of Englishmen’s subdued scotch-and-cigar evenings from the richly paneled rooms of the Ipoh Club.

Having selected an auspicious moving day from their Tamil calendar, Tata and Paati packed up their house in Butterworth and drove to Ipoh with her rosewood trunk on the back seat and his wiry old bicycle strapped to the roof of their maroon Bentley. Tata’s pleated khaki trousers bulged with assets and liabilities: a hefty balance at Lloyd’s Bank, various and sundry investments in the industries of the inchoate nation (so that when he died the obituary writer at the Straits Times fanned out for his readers the entire pack of catchy double-barreled monikers Tata had amassed: Rubber Baron, Cement King, Duke of Durians, Tapioca Tycoon, Import-Export Godfather), a wife still fresh and dimpled at fifty-eight, and three unmarried daughters. His two sons were away: Raju had got a job with a law firm in Singapore after coming down from Oxford, and Balu, newly married, was winning ballroom-dancing competitions all over Europe.

“Useless bloody fool,” Appa was to growl years later, pointing out Uncle Ballroom to Uma and Suresh and Aasha in old family albums with moldering construction-paper pages. And, jabbing with an index finger the pictures of Uncle Ballroom’s doomed garden-party wedding: “Tangoing and foxtrotting his way to penury. Foxtrotting only he found his fox. Too bad she could trot faster than him. He was chachaing this side, she was choo-chooing that side. Bloody idiot got outfoxed by his own fox. Hah!” “And probably eating steek,” Suresh would whisper to Aasha when they were out of earshot, “with a knife and fork. And sleeping with no shirt on. Like J. R. Ewing only.”

But in 1956, Tata was untroubled by visions of his profligate son’s future. As the country charged towards birth and impetuous youth, he embraced his twilight years with a grateful sigh and a settling-in sense. Hiring servants only to cook and clean, he busied himself with his rose bushes and his vegetable garden. He harvested ripe chilies and twined tender tomato plants around stakes. He pruned, he weeded, he mowed twice a week. He planted trees: guava, mango, tamarind. He put up garden walls and trellises and came in for tea at ten past four, sweating but radiant, smiling around his kitchen at the rightness, the in-placeness of it all.