And then also, Shankar shouted his lessons in mathematics to his pupil. This brought him twenty or twenty-five rupees a month, and it made up his college fees and his bus or bicycle hire, and a coffee or milk came in by the way.
However, since Padma came into the house, everything was changed. Padma was Padma herself, a lotus-born, and such a gentle, civilized, sweet-voiced girl for this ‘barbarian Benares Brahmin’, he would say of himself. Since the day she came the aspect of the house changed, or so it would seem. His mother loved her first daughter-in-law, and Padma this, and Padma that, made the whole house sing. Sometimes sitting in his class of physics or mathematics, Shankar would suddenly think of Padma, and forget his electrodes before him or the notebook. For Shankar, who knew only how to shout, sometimes fell into compounded silences. At those moments he lost all consciousness of classroom, Benares or Shankar, and be in the real nowhere. Perhaps far away on some other star, or constellation, in some other universe, or just because of a mathematical formula — he felt silence within himself. And nothing moved. He loved these moments. He had them more and more often after Padma came. And when Padma fell at the feet of ‘this barbarian Benares Brahmin’ or the 3Bs as he called himself, he instinctively felt like falling at his wife’s feet in return. How can virtue fall at the feet of vice? So he’d rise and stand, and sometimes suddenly he entered into that august silence. There he saw no one, no, none. Nowadays, he did not even sit for his prayers. This silence could not come from any god, though he believed in God. ‘Aré,’ he would shout, ‘God is there, and whatever we do, he’s like that Moti Ram of the bicycle shop. He hires you his bicycle, even if you haven’t paid him for three months. “Take it and pay it when you like,” he says. God hires us his bicycles and we pay for it when we go to heaven. Here you enjoy, and there you pay,’ he would shout and become silent again.
But since Padma came God is no more a bicycle hirer. God has gone up because without telling anyone Shankar would come back with flowers behind his ears, and a sanctified coconut in his hands. Yes, he’d been to Vishwanathji’s temple. ‘Mother here is prasad. Hé Padma, I have been to Vishwanathji. What do you say to that? May you prosper.’ ‘Their2 prosperity,’ she says in her deep-set gentle voice, ‘is my riches.’ ‘Yes, yes. But I’m no millionaire. You were brought up on silks. Mother!’ and he suddenly shouts, ‘I am hungry,’ Thus day by day after Padma entered this household he became less and less of a 3B, and everybody wondered. You never smelt perfume any more on him or the sporting of a silk shirt, unless he took mother and Padma to a cinema. He smoked heavily. This he could not stop. How could he? How could he be less of a barbarian: Could the pockmarks change on his face? Could he be anything but a Brahmini bull of the Ganga ghat?
Sitting by the Ganges on an autumnal evening, sometimes with his wife and his mother, but often alone, and looking at the auspicious curve Mother Ganga takes down by Rajghat and temple lights which bring bounty to dusk, and while the drums are silenced by the sudden night, Shankar would think: Yes, he would become a businessman. Perhaps a business magnate. One day he would go overseas. (His father may vituperate against his firstborn. Pray, how could a Brahmin go across the dark waters? But even bad fathers like good luck for their sons. After all you could always drink some Ganges water, after your return, say a few mantras, and become Brahmin again.) He saw, did Shankar, a series of mills, cotton mills, ginning and weaving exquisite muslin cloth — you know, like snow, almost like those our weavers wove before the British came. Shankar would run the mill on modern economic methods. That is why he decided he’d a study economics for his MA. With mathematics, economics is an easy play. Economics is just simian sense plus hard numbers. Shankar had some rational sense, and knew a lot about numbers. Also he drew his own chart. Mercury was in the sixth house (and Venus in the seventh) while sun was in the tenth. The trigone makes for business, and even for big business. His knowledge of Gujarati, Tamil, and Hindi would help besides his smattering of Bengali might be of use in Calcutta. The British would one day go — they are preparing to quit anyway (though Shankar played safe, and wore no khadi, and was no Congress volunteer) — and all big business will fall into Indian hands. Prepare from now, and you will win.
Padma brought luck. There’s no doubt about it. She with her Monday fasts and her Friday evening worships, she brought light to this darksome house. And Shankar could not but be a big man, and one evening a clucking wall-lizard even confirmed these hopes.
‘Let’s go home,’ he shouted to his mother and wife. He’d forgotten his cinema. But the wife and mother were not there. After worshipping at the little shrine of Tribhuvana (just on the Harischandra Ghat, some yards down the steps, from their house) they had gone home to prepare the dinner. And a mere few nights later, as if to prove Padma would bring in prosperity, she whispered to him: ‘I think it’s there.’ ‘What’s there!’ shouted Shankar, sitting up, laying aside his glasses and textbooks. ‘Hé, what’s there, Padma? Speak!’—‘Oh may they be unperturbed. I thought this evening, that maybe something’s happening to me.’ ‘Happening to you, Padma, what? Are you ill? Have you the fevers, the coughs, or the furoncles, or what?’ ‘Oh, nothing, nothing at all,’ whispered Padma trying to pull her husband back to silence. ‘Oh just this,’ she said after a moment’s hesitancy. (Whenever Shankar wanted to think, even in darkness, he needed his thick glasses. So he lay his glasses on his nose again, thinking and thinking.) Finally his mind left her, and what she had said, and suddenly jumped on to some problem of University physics. That Schrödinger equation was all a mess of molasses, and he could not understand what was what. However, he would have to go to sleep now and wake early and study. Books are learnt better during early morning hours than in the midnight. Anyway when one has a dance head like Shankar has, Shankar said to himself, one has no hope except drive cattle to village pastures! Hé!
But suddenly remembering his wife had said something to him, he sat up and asked: ‘Padma, what’s the illness? Tell me. You know I can take you to Dr Pandurang (whose father knew my grandfather) or to the civil surgeon Dr Stake, mrcp, frcs, an eminent doctor, or even to Hakim Abdullah. We are well placed here for every form of medical treatment, Allopathic, Ayurvedic, Unani. And because of our family there will be no difficulty in getting anyone. Any bloke you want who carries those stethoscopes and pinch-me pinch-me-not witcheries of the syringe, a Pandit who gives you trichurations of pearl or a Hakim that makes you swallow dung-smelling confections. Anything you like!’ ‘No doctor is needed,’ remarked Padma, laughing. ‘Every woman’s her own doctor.’ ‘You mean you have menstrual troubles,’ he shouted like he would say: ‘I want my matchbox. Hé fetch it for me.’ ‘Oh no,’ she whispered. ‘I think we’re going to have a son.’ And Shankar jumped up, put on the light (they had electricity in the house) and for some reason slipped on his silk shirt, and wept. He never thought such good fortune would come to him. ‘What, to this 3B, a son?’ A son. A real puling little son. Beat the drum and proclaim. ‘Hé, ring the temple bells and proclaim Shankar Narayan Shastri Dravida is going to have a son. His wife has just conceived. Hé jump up. Leap up.’ And he said to his wife: ‘May I bring you a glass of milk?’ ‘No,’ said Padma, ‘it’s late in the night, let us go to sleep.’ ‘Asleep after what you have revealed to me. A butcher may go to sleep after a slaughter, a tax-collector after fleecing his client. But a Brahmin boy dances with joy when a son is conceived by his spouse. Are you all right?’ he asked, trying to pat her on the stomach. ‘All right, all right, I mean,’ he repeated—‘Why yes, no, it’s not a sickness. Why should I be sick?’ ‘I meant,’ shouted whisperingly Shankar, ‘you may need, something? Some halva, peda or something sweet to eat, milk to drink. You may have cravings and demands.’ ‘Oh, not yet,’ said Padma trying to get her husband back to bed. ‘Not yet. It’s perhaps only the second month.’ ‘Quick work you’ve done my wife,’ he shouted. The mother knocked at the door. ‘Is there anything wrong, Padma?’ ‘No, mother. You know how They are. They are just restless. May They go to sleep. All is all right.’