Sumi has been ruthless; anything that is of no possible use is discarded. But now, seeing her daughter’s face, she says, ‘Why not?’ And Charu smiles, as if Sumi’s response, as well as retaining the chess-board, has lifted some of the oppression off her.
Devaki gets them lunch a little later, from the restaurant round the corner.
‘Why are you eating this, Devi?’ Sumi asks, as if noticing her for the first time. ‘Cold idlis and watery chutney—this isn’t for you. And what about your work? You go on, we’ll manage.’
By evening, most of it is done. It has been a swift dismemberment. The furniture stands, stark and skeletal in the empty rooms, while bundles, trunks and cartons have been stacked in the front hall, ready to be carried out in the morning. When the door of the steel almirah is banged shut, the clang resounds with a hollow boom through the house and Aru’s heart throbs in a panic-filled response, as if she has received an ominous message: it’s over, it’s over.
The girls fall asleep on the bare mattresses on the floor, exhausted, but Sumi has reached the stage of extreme fatigue in which it seems impossible that she can ever sleep. She feels charged with a kind of energy that makes her think she could go on working all night; her hands itch to pull the mattresses from under the girls, to roll them up and pile them on the stuff in the hall. If the truck was here, she thinks, I would have carried out everything and loaded it myself. But there is nothing left for her to do, and lying down on the sagging sofa, eyes closed, she tries to sleep.
For the first time, the thought comes to her: this is my last night in our house, Gopal’s and mine. Sumi has never had the passionate attachment to her home that she has seen in other women, in Devaki and Premi. But now, in the silence of the night, listening to the infinitely pathetic crying of the new-born next door, the house rushes forward to claim her with memories. She has a strange sense of seeing all of them, even her own self, moving about the house, as if they have come together for one last time, reenacting scenes from the past for her benefit.
Gopal, coming out of the bathroom, vigorously towelling his head, shaking the water out of his hair, singing ‘Do naina’ ....
Aru, pinning down a cockroach with a piece of paper, and then, with an agonised face, stamping wildly on it. And Charu, looking on, screaming with laughter.
Gopal saying ‘Shaabash’ to Seema and Seema’s pleased smile ... Aru and Charu playing chess, and Charu’s comically astonished look as Aru triumphantly knocks Charu’s King off the board.
Though it is nearly dawn before she falls asleep, she is up before the girls. Seeing her mother’s face, hollow-eyed, hair dishevelled, Aru feels a pang; this is how she will look when she is old. But when Sumi comes out of the bathroom after her bath, smoothing down the pleats of her sari, she looks so reassuringly normal that Aru has a sudden lift of spirits. Perhaps things will work out, maybe we will be able to go on, even if we can’t go back.
When Shripati comes with Seema, Aru’s light-heartedness reaches out to her sisters and the three of them flit about the house calling out to one another, to their mother, exclaiming over things, laughing. The brief flare of gaiety evaporates with the arrival of the truck and in a moment the house is full of the loaders’ footsteps and their voices. A few neighbours come out to watch the operation. The grandmother next door balances the child she is carrying on the wall and stares at the proceedings with unblinking interest. Her curiosity finally makes her get hold of Sumi, and Aru, seeing them together, wonders what Sumi is telling her. The truth, she thinks, knowing Sumi as she does.
As for Aru herself, she avoids people’s eyes. To see their belongings in the open hurts her, they look so pathetic and vulnerable; the stares of the neighbours seem like a violation. Aru’s uneasiness extends to the landlord who joins them now. Surely there’s an air of familiarity about him that wasn’t there before? And why does he look at Sumi that way? Her hackles rise and she doggedly follows them while Sumi, cool and matter-of-fact, takes him round the house on an inventory.
‘Oh good,’ Sumi says when Devaki and Chitra join them. ‘That’s two cars, which means we can take everything away at once. And is Hrishi coming?’
‘Not much for a family of five, is it?’ she asks no one in particular when the truck is finally loaded. ‘It’s a good thing neither Gopal nor I were acquirers.’
Finally, the house is empty and everyone stands about awkwardly, unable to break away, as if waiting for something. And again it is Sumi who, businesslike, says, ‘Let’s go. What are we waiting for?’
It is like a caravan when they set off, Hrishi leading the truck on his motorbike, the two cars following and Aru on her moped trailing behind them. When she gets home, Aru does something that astonishes all of them, something that Charu is never to forget. One moment she is stepping over the threshold, parcels in hand, and the next moment she keels over. For an instant no one realizes what has happened, they imagine she has stumbled and fallen. When she continues to lie there in a heap, they rush to her.
‘Aru, what’s happened?’
‘Get some water.’
‘Aru, Aru ....’
‘I think she’s coming out of it.’
Aru sits up, water streaming down her face, her dazed look turning to shame as she realizes what has happened.
‘She hasn’t had any breakfast, I’m sure that’s it.’
‘And nothing last night, either.’
‘Sumi, how could you?’
‘Oh, God, don’t fuss, everyone. I’m all right, I’m perfectly all right.’
‘Kalyani-mavshi, get her some coffee—with lots of sugar.’
But Kalyani, standing in the doorway, looks petrified, she doesn’t move, she scarcely hears Devaki. It is Charu who gets the coffee, Devaki who sets out the breakfast for everyone, while Kalyani, silent and still, watches them eat.
‘She’s all right, Amma.’ Sumi sees her mother’s still trembling hand. ‘Don’t be so scared.’
But it isn’t Aru’s fainting that has got Kalyani into this state, it’s something else none of them has noticed: her rush towards Aru when she fell, her realization, an almost instinctive one, that she was next to Shripati, his abrupt walking away from her. Now she sits unusually silent, frozen into an immobility, unable to shake off the paralysis of fear. She takes no part in the unloading, and it is left to Sumi to instruct the men to distribute her things about the house.
All the extra furniture, except the girls’ beds, goes into the small room next to Sumi’s bedroom. This room becomes a place of refuge to the girls, a kind of re-creation of their home. Seema, when she is in one of her moods, lies long hours on the large bed, which is the repository of all the extra mattresses, oblivious to everyone, uncaring of anyone calling out for her.
The boxes and trunks are pushed into the storeroom where they settle down as if they belong, soon knitted into their new place by the cobwebs, sealed into it by the dust that settles down on them. Books and clothes find their way to their owners, but the rest of the things lie about for them to stumble on, until, in the mysterious way of all articles, they are absorbed by the house and become part of it.
The girls, too, no longer have the air of visitors living out of suitcases. Their clothes now flutter on the lines till evening, the underclothes stay on (‘in purdah’, as Charu says, since Kalyani conceals them by hanging towels on the next line) until they are pulled off before their baths the next day. The girls give the impression of having taken up the threads of their life. They are no longer living on the edge of crisis, they