Those Pricey Thakur Girls (5 page)

‘Because?’

But Dylan is just staring. Dabbu, leaning against the gate, breathing a little fast because of her dash across the lawn, stares back. Behind them the sun slips into the feathery embrace of the amaltas trees lining Hailey Road.

‘I’m Dylan,’ he manages to say. ‘I’m here to pick up my father. Brigadier Shekhawat?’

For a moment she looks at him like she’s going to accuse him of lying. Then she nods.

‘Wait here,’ she tells him grudgingly. Then she turns on her heel and reopens the gate. ‘Unbelievable! What a
sociopath
.’

‘I heard that –’ Dylan takes a step forward but she has already shut the gate in his face. He puts a hand to the latch, wanting her to know he isn’t really a rabid dog-kicker, but the sound of teeth gnashing from within stays his hand. Neither dog nor dog-protectress, he reflects wryly, will warm to him when he is so thoroughly doused in cat pee.

On Sunday morning, Mrs Mamta Thakur switches on the television at seven-thirty sharp. She sits before it, her hands busily shelling peas over a brass thaali on the table before her. A digital time clock fills the television screen for ten whole minutes and is then replaced by the revolving DeshDarpan logo which undulates on the screen for an agonizing five minutes to some incredibly depressing, keening theme music. It is
very
sad music. Children in houses across the country have been known to burst into tears on hearing the DD theme music play.

‘It’s horrible,’ Eshwari shudders as she ties her thick shiny hair into a high ponytail. ‘Like the ghost of a dead baby wailing for its phantom momma. And that logo – it’s like a massive unwinking eye – I think it’s a conspiracy to mass-hypnotize the whole country into mindless submission.’

Mrs Mamta looks up at her. ‘Going jogging, beta?’

‘She’s wearing a tracksuit,’ the Judge says crankily, ‘so she can’t exactly be going swimming.’

‘Stop it, BJ,’ Eshwari replies. ‘Bye, Ma.’

But the Judge has just remembered something. ‘Why,’ he asks her, ‘did everybody at that match call you Bihari?’

He has recently been to see Eshwari play at a Delhi State Basketball Zonal, and was taken aback by how aggressively she played. The other girls shied away from her, looking rather frightened. Her skin glowed, her eyes were blazing, her shiny black ponytail seemed to float on the wind like a victory pennant. And every time she scored a three-pointer from the centre of the court, raised both arms triumphantly and flashed a sweaty, exultant grin, a crowd of smitten boys cheered raucously from the sidelines: ‘Bihari-Bihari-Bihari, hai hai hai!’

‘Oh, that’s just them being silly, BJ,’ she replies. ‘You know I wear all those bright batik T-shirts? The ones I get from Janpath? I wore one with the Buddha on it for practice and they started calling me Bihari, because Buddha was a Bihari, get it?’

‘He was Nepali, actually,’ the Judge replies, still not ‘getting’ why his fifth daughter has a nickname that seems more suited to a Bombay underworld underling than a gently reared young lady.

‘Stop at Gambhir Stores and get me six eggs,’ is all Mrs Mamta says. ‘Here’s three rupees.’

‘Oh god, I hate jogging carrying stuff in my hands!’ Eshu groans. Seeing her mother’s expression, she sighs. ‘Okay,
fine
, Ma.’

She strides out of the house, skips over the sleeping laindis in the sand pile and starts her jog. It is a cool morning. Hailey Road lies damp and empty. Amaltas buds crunch below her sneakered feet, and above her the trees paint the scene a sunny yellow. At Gambhir Stores, old Mr Gambhir greets her with a wrinkly, conspiratorial smile.

‘So!’ he crows as Eshwari halts, not in the least out of breath. ‘Your sister read so well on TV! She was
too
good.’

Young Mr Gambhir, his anxious looking forty-year-old son, cuts in with an uneasy smile, ‘Er, what are you wanting?’

‘Six eggs, please,’ Eshwari says. ‘Ma said fresh.’ Then she smiles down at the stooped old man. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

Old Mr Gambhir beams. Always immaculately dressed in spotless white kurta pyjama, he has presided behind the cash counter at Gambhir Stores for as long as Eshwari can remember. He sits right below the picture of the First Guru, the tip of his white turban almost touching its frame of twinkling, multi-coloured series lights, inhaling huge amounts of agarbatti smoke and working up quite a high.

‘Poached egg for breakfast, hain?’ he asks jovially. ‘Judge saab’s favourite!’

‘Er, yes,’ Eshwari replies, rolling her eyes at her friend Satish Sridhar, who happens to be at the store too, rootling hopefully in the shelf of English movie video cassettes grandiosely titled ‘BEST-OF-HOLLYWOOD LENDING LIBRARY’.

Young Mr Gambhir comes back with an egg tray and places it on the counter. His father waves him away.

‘How nice to know that after your didi has read the news to the whole of the country, she will go home and eat…’ his hand hovers over the egg tray for a moment, then descends on the largest specimen and picks it up with a flourish, ‘
this
! This Gambhir Stores egg! How proud that makes me feel!’

Satish gives a little snort of laughter which he hastily turns into a cough. Old Mr Gambhir eyes him with stern, beady benevolence.

‘Got a cuff, beta Steesh? Here, let me give you two Vicks ki golis instead of one-rupee change.’

Eshwari gives Satish a quelling look and smiles at the old man. ‘Namaste.’

She continues her jog along her usual circuit, past the ruins of the Agrasen ki Baoli, all the way down to the T-point where Hailey Road hits the low red buildings and green grounds of Modern School, Barakhamba Road. She has to weave her way around several sand mounds heaped outside construction sites. The sand glitters silver in the sunshine. Eshwari can see tiny pink and brown conch shells in it. When she was younger, Debjani and she would pick out these shells and make necklaces with them. There have always been mounds of sand and stacks of bricks along Hailey Road, because so many of the old-style bungalows are in the process of being broken down and converted into apartments blocks under the family group housing scheme.

‘So Dubs’s got a real fan club going now, huh?’ Satish calls out from behind her, and suddenly there he is, grinning down at Eshwari.

‘Yes,’ she replies shortly.

‘So now you sisters will become even more snooty,’ he says as he starts to walk beside her. ‘That’s all we need.’

‘We’re not snooty!’

‘No?’ He grins. ‘All of you pricey Thakur sisters look down upon us dicey mohalla guys. Admit it!’

‘You’re mad,’ she says evasively.

Satish and Eshwari have been walking down to Modern School together all their lives. He has always had a certain good-humoured puppy-like quality, but in the last couple of years he’s shot up and become all deep and stubbly, so now, Eshwari thinks, looking at him from below her lashes, it’s a German Shepherd puppy-like quality. His grins have grown vaguely wolfish, there is a warm glint in his eye, and last year, he asked her to go out with him. ‘Be my chick’ were his exact words. She had shuddered and turned him down as nicely as she could, explaining that, after the whole fiasco with her sister Chandu, she wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend until she turned twenty-one.

He took it badly at first, but now, more than a year on, their relationship is back on its old ‘just-friends’ footing. For which Mrs Mamta Thakur, for one, is extremely thankful. She thinks the Sridhar boy is on drugs. He wears black T-shirts with snakes and roses on them, bangs on a drum set and gets his hair cut once a year. He is supposed to be highly intelligent and is studying to be an engineer, but to her he seems distinctly half-witted. Besides, the Sridhars are appallingly clannish. None but a pure Tamil-Brahmin girl will ever be good enough for their darling son. A romance between Satish and Eshwari can only end badly.

‘So how’re you gonna top Dabbu’s act, huh, Bihari? With basketball? India doesn’t even have a proper basketball team. You’ll have to run away to Bombay and join the movies.’

‘Excuse me, that’s a really sexist thing to say!’ Eshwari exclaims, pulling a face. ‘It implies that my options are purely bimboesque.’

‘Not true,’ he parries promptly. ‘You could become a director. A cinematographer. A producer. Don’t put your narrow little thoughts into my big broad mind.’

‘Jog in front of me and I’ll put my narrow little foot into your big broad behind,’ Eshwari invites him sweetly. ‘Stupid.’

Satish chuckles and ducks nimbly out of the way of her swinging foot.

‘You just wanna lech at my butt,’ he says coyly. ‘Not that I get that. I mean, why this obsession with guys’ backsides? Shouldn’t you be interested in their, um, frontsides?’

Eshwari turns on him. ‘I’m holding
eggs
,’ she tells him, starting to open the brown paper packet threateningly.

The ghost of Holis past makes Satish backtrack hastily.

‘Or you could top the school,’ he says. ‘To be better than Dabbu, I mean. Now
that’s
doable.’

Eshwari, whose studies aren’t her strong point, glares at him. ‘I am not competing with my sister,’ she says coldly. ‘Hence, I do not need to consider any of these stupid options. Directing movies, topping school, etc etc.’

‘Stupid people always say
hence
and
etcetera etcetera
when they wanna come across smart,’ says the incorrigible Satish and vanishes into the driveway of Number 8 before Eshwari can think of anything to say. She glares, shrugs and picks up her pace – he was slowing her down anyway.

But when she gets into the house, nobody seems hungry. Her parents are sitting at the kitchen table looking solemn, while Dabbu, still in her nightie, her hair scattered wildly about her, sits between them sobbing tragically.

‘What?’ Eshwari asks uneasily. ‘Did one of the laindi pie dogs get run over again?’

Debjani holds out the paper, her hands trembling, her eyes huge and tear-filled. ‘It’s the
India
Post
.’ She hiccups tragically. ‘Calling me
Dolly.
Saying I’m en-en-
enthusiastic
. And naïvely overwhelmed. Everybody must be laughing at me. DD’ll never call me back to read again! I’ve never been so hu-hu-humiliated in my life!’

And with that she puts her head down on the table and sobs like her heart will break.

‘What ruddy histrionics,’ the Judge mutters as he stirs his evening tea. ‘I live in a house full of Meena Kumaris. It’s just one person’s rant in one miserable publication. Will somebody tell that girl she’s overreacting?’

Mrs Mamta Thakur puts the teapot down with a sigh.

‘You know how shy she is, LN. She’s just started to step out of the shadow of her big sisters and bloom a little.’

Mrs Mamta is much given to nature metaphors. She often refers to her girls as birds, who confusingly (but poetically)
bloom
. Anjini was an early bloomer, Binni was a late bloomer. Chandu, she hopes, though she has no news of her, is finally in full bloom. Even in her fervent tête-à-têtes with the Almighty, when she beseeches Him to let her girls reach their full potential, she asks Him to let them ‘bloom’. The Judge, though an avid gardener, doesn’t like the word. It feels too wishy-washy to him, too fragile and suggestive of flowers. He’d rather his girls grew into something more substantial and well-buttressed – like a row of sturdy sheesham trees, say.

‘That Anjini is to blame for everything,’ he says now, promptly going off on a tangent. ‘Yesterday also, all she could do was criticize. Obviously her magic mirror has started whispering to her about Dabbu’s growing fame. Any day now she’ll show up dressed as an old crone and try and slip her a poisoned apple.’

‘Why are you always so mean about Anji?’ Mrs Mamta demands.

‘Because she always has to be the centre of attention,’ the Judge replies. ‘She pushes everybody else out. She always has.’

‘She doesn’t push everybody out, you always pull her in!’ Mrs Mamta flashes. ‘
I
was talking about Debjani.’

‘Well, if Debjani can’t handle criticism, she shouldn’t be in the public eye,’ says the Judge, shovelling devilled Maggi noodles into his face. ‘Simple.’