All this time, Bablu never changed. Unlike Sachu, he hardly spoke to anyone but appeared so sunk in his own thoughts that one didn’t like to disturb him. As before, his face was very serious, and his expression altered only when he read the newspaper reports of the interviews that Sachu had given. Bablu eagerly waited for me to bring him these newspapers, and when he read them he smiled—that smile, with his little pointed teeth and betel-red gums, which always gave me a shock to see. It didn’t seem to belong on his face—any more than that other expression my wife had once described to me, when he had turned from the safe and raised his hand with the knife.
Since each of them was ready to plead guilty to save the other, their lawyers got together and tried to prove that they had never met the boy—that someone else had killed him and they had only stolen the roller skates. It was a very weak case, and no one believed it. In the end, both were found guilty, and both were hanged. The burden of what was done has remained with us who are living. My brother Sohan Lal and his family have emigrated to Canada, and at first I, too, intended to leave this place where our name is known. But in the end I stayed. We are still living in the same house, though at first I had intended to sell it. For a long time we kept the front room locked and lived only in the back—no one even went in there to clean—but slowly we have got used to going in there again. At first, only the children went, to look at TV if there was a good program on, but now my wife and I also sit there sometimes, and it is becoming like an ordinary room where nothing has happened.
After the final appeal was dismissed and there was only one week left, they allowed me to visit the prison every day. I always brought his food with me. All this time, I had been providing his meals at the jail. At first, I brought his food from a cooking stall and sent it to him in the little mud pots covered with a leaf that they give you in the bazaar. But after a time, and without anything being said, my wife cooked his food herself, and it was carried to him in dishes from our house. I was glad to be able to provide this home-cooked food, which he liked and was used to. But soon I discovered that he ate only a part of it, and had the rest taken away to Sachu, for whom no one sent anything, of course. When I mentioned this to my wife, she began to send more food, and after a time there were always two dishes of everything.
On the last day, when he asked me to see Sachu and say goodbye to him, I said I would but I didn’t do it. So it was that my last word to him was a lie. He asked, “Did you see him?” and I said, “Yes.” But next day I did something I hadn’t expected. When the hearse arrived to take Bablu, I told the prison officials that I would take the other one, too. They agreed and were glad to be relieved of this charge. So I took both of them to the electric crematorium, and there I performed for both the ceremonies and prayers due to a brother. Sohan Lal and the rest of my family blamed me for this and said I had polluted the last rites. They were all angry and refused to participate in the final ceremony, when the ashes are committed to the river. I didn’t care and prepared to do it on my own.
I bought two silver urns and returned to the crematorium to collect the ashes. I had determined to go to Allahabad, to the most holy and purifying place of all, where the three great rivers meet and mingle, but a lot of business came up during the next few days and I could not leave at once. I placed the two urns in the front room, and when I was ready to leave I packed them in a cardboard box I had brought from the warehouse for this purpose. The night before, I told my wife to wake me early so that I could be in time for the plane. She said, “I will come with you,” and in the morning she was ready in new white clothes. We drove to Delhi to go to the airport there. They allowed us to take the box on board with us. My wife had never been on a plane before and was very excited, though she pretended not to be. She kept looking out of the window to see the clouds and whatever else you see. Once, she turned to me and said, “Bablu has never been on a plane before.” I didn’t answer her but I thought, Yes, it is true; it is the first time for all three of them. The two others would have enjoyed it too and would have been as excited as she was. In Allahabad we took a boat, and a priest went with us, and there was a beautiful ceremony as the ashes were committed at the confluence of those very holy rivers—the Ganges, the Jumna, and the Saraswati.
Farid couldn’t believe what he heard about Farida. She was his wife, and he would have thought that no one had known her more deeply, in every way, than he had. But now, they said, she was a holy woman sitting under a tree in some holy place in the Himalayas, and people came from all over India to take blessings and good vibrations from her. Ludicrous, he thought. She might fool all the world, but she couldn’t fool him. Or could she? He hadn’t seen her for twenty years.
He still lived in London, in the flat they had rented long ago when they had first come to England as newlyweds. It was just one room, badly partitioned into two, with a makeshift kitchen and bathroom wedged in between, but the address was good, behind Harrods, so Farid hung on. The place was falling into decay. The landlord had been trying to get him out for years and refused to make any repairs. Farid couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. He had not got on and now never would, and no longer cared. He was in his fifties and slovenly, fat from drinking too much.
In his youth, in India, he had been exquisite, and so had Farida—both of them small-boned, elegant, and quick in mind and body. Much had been expected of them, and they were confident of living up to these expectations. Their families were not rich but were very old; the overgrown gardens of their decaying mansions in Delhi abutted on each other, and from their earliest childhood Farid and Farida had gone back and forth through a gap in the boundary wall. They grew up and of course fell in love; now they met not only among the flowering jasmine bushes of their own gardens but also at the university, with its stone-flagged corridors and courtyards. They graduated, they married, they went to live in London. They felt they needed a wider horizon for their talent, which lay mainly in their own personalities—in their intense Indianness, which at that time was regarded, in the self-deprecating countries of the West, as synonymous with every kind of natural and spiritual superiority.
Using their charm and their contacts, Farid and Farida had attempted to set up a business importing hand-loomed Indian textiles. It failed to prosper, and they became impresarios for visiting Indian musicians and dancers, and when these turned out to be unreliable and ungrateful they tried, in succession, ready-made Indian garments, hand-crafted Indian jewelry, Indian lampshades, Indian bedcovers, and Indian table linen—all those indigenous handicrafts by which others of their countrymen, far less gifted than Farid and Farida, made their fortunes in London, Paris, and New York. Ten years passed, then fifteen. They were still living in the temporary flat they had rented, and the landlord began trying to get them out. Farid was drinking. Farida stayed out late and went away for weekends; their erotic quarrels had turned into bitter fights. They had no money, they hated each other. One night, she packed up and returned to India. He stayed on, drank on—and survived, but only just.
After he had heard that she had become a holy woman, he kept muttering, “We’ll see about that.” He didn’t know what he meant; he was a person impelled by instinct rather than thought. This impelled him one day to go to Sunil’s elegant offices, where he had to wait in the outer reception area before finally being admitted, as a special favor to an old friend. Sunil sat behind his desk and looked at the watch on his hairy wrist and said, “Ten minutes, Farid.” Although he was without charm or contacts or aesthetic sensibility, Sunil had become rich from the very handlooms and handicrafts that had broken Farid’s back and spirit. When they had all been students together in Delhi, Farid and Farida had laughed at Sunil, who was ridiculously in love with Farida. At that time, when Farid was slim and beautiful, Sunil was fat and ungainly. He hadn’t changed, but now he had the best tailors and shirtmakers to help him, and he exuded confidence and eau de cologne. Farid still addressed him in the condescending tone that he and Farida had always used toward him. Sunil was too busy to notice. He got rid of Farid