The bus driver had obligingly offered to drop off the family right at Sampath’s orchard. A bride-to-be should not have to walk and grow dusty and be shown to disadvantage, he said sympathetically. He himself had a daughter to marry. And: ‘Yes, yes, let’s take them directly to the boy,’ chorused the other passengers, pausing to make this decision before resuming their singing. They clapped their hands to keep the song moving along; their hair flew; they swayed from side to side, partly for the sake of rhythm, partly because of the way the bus leapt and shook through potholes and bumps. They closed their eyes and let their voices rise and flutter from the bus to the Chawlas waiting under Sampath’s tree. ‘Ten ways to cook rice,’ they sang, ‘seventeen flowering trees in the forest, twenty hermits at my table. But those who know say you take forms beyond number. O Lord, teach me the way of infinite marvel.’
The air rushed up through the cracks in the bus, up their saris and trousers, so that a pleasant breeze circulated around their legs. Everybody looked very puffed up, wobbling as if some large force inside them were trying to break free.
Despite the driver’s kindness and the attention she had received with the help of a handkerchief, a little spit and a large amount of talcum powder, the girl descended from the bus looking extremely dusty. The pilgrims, curious about what might happen during this unusual encounter between prospective marriage partners, tumbled out of the bus as well, in a messy and chaotic heap. They needed a break for lunch anyway, and a little private time behind some foliage. Holding the prospective bride before them like a gift, the group moved towards the guava tree. Sampath had always had a soft spot for the lady on the label of the coconut hair-oil bottle. He had spent rather a large amount of time in consideration of her mysterious smile upon the bathroom shelf. While squatting upon the mildewed wooden platform taking his bucket baths, he had conducted a series of imagined encounters with her, complete with imagined conversations and imagined quarrels and reconciliations. She would meet him wreathed in the scent of the oil, with a smile as white as the gleaming inside of a coconut. A braid of hair had travelled downwards from the top of the coconut lady’s head and followed the undulations of the bottle. Sampath looked down at the veiled woman standing underneath his tree and felt hot and horrified.
‘Please come down and be introduced. You have sat in the tree long enough,’ said Mr Chawla.
Sampath thought he might faint.
‘Climb up, daughter,’ the girl’s father urged her. ‘Climb up. Come on, one step. Just a step.’
The devotees raised the girl’s rigid, unwilling form into the tree. ‘Up,’ they urged, and slowly she began to climb. She was encased in layers of shiny material, like a large, expensive toffee. The cloth billowed about her, making her look absurdly stout. Her gold slippers slipped with every step. Her sari was pulled over her head and she held the edge of it between her teeth so as to keep as much of her face modestly covered as possible. It seemed an eternity before she neared Sampath. It was clear that this girl would not take well to life in a tree. She paused and looked back down for further directions. Nobody knew quite what to expect, or how she should proceed. Even Mr Chawla was at a loss as to what should happen next.
‘Touch his feet,’ someone finally shouted in a moment of inspiration.
‘Yes, touch his feet,’ the rest of the pilgrims cried, and, extending a single timid finger, like a snail peeping from its shell, she gingerly poked at Sampath’s toe. Her finger was as cold as ice and moist. Sampath leapt up in horror. In an equal state of distress, the girl let out a faint cry. Losing her balance and her gold slippers, she tumbled indecorously towards the ground, accompanied by the more robust cries of the pilgrims and her family, who rushed at her with arms outstretched. But they failed to catch her as she fell and she landed with a dull thump upon the ground.
The signs for marriage were not auspicious.
The devotees propped her up against a tree and fanned her with a leafy branch.
‘What am I to do with this boy?’ Mr Chawla threw his hands up in the air. ‘Tell me what I should do? The best education. A job. A wife. The world served to him on a platter, but, oh no, none of it is good enough for him. Mister here must run and sit in a tree. He is not in the least bit thankful for all that has been done for him.’
The girl began to sneeze in tiny mouse-like squeals.
‘Stop fanning her with that dirty branch,’ someone shouted. ‘All the dust must have gone up her nose.’
‘Dust or no dust, it is yet one more inauspicious sign,’ said another onlooker.
Pinky felt terribly scornful of this third-rate woman who had responded to this important moment by sneezing and whimpering. She gave her a good pinch from behind, hoping to see her jump, but the girl continued to squeak and sniffle. Ammaji ran up with a tin can full of water and emptied it over her just in case the sun had become too strong for her to take. The talcum powder ran in a milky river down her face.
‘What can I do?’ Mr Chawla repeated. ‘What am I to do with this boy?’ He was sweating despite the pleasant breeze that wafted about them, laden with the scent of earth and burgeoning vegetation.
He himself had been his son’s age when he was married. Kulfi had been even younger, so alarming her family with her weird ways, they were worried that if her marriage were delayed any longer, she would be left on their hands for ever, her sanity dissipating, the sense scattering from her like seeds from a poppy pod. They had spent night after sleepless night gathered at the window to watch as she wandered up and down in the garden, having taken suddenly, after her twentieth birthday, to sleepwalking.
Her father watched pale in his pyjamas; the aunties shook in their petticoats. The months had gone by with no sign of this behaviour abating. The moon grew big, then delicate — a hair’s strand, then once more to fullness. Kulfi walked serenely by the bottle-brush trees, barefoot, with the gait of a queen; asleep, but eating slices of melon, spitting out seeds that showered like raindrops among the bushes. In the mornings they discovered apple cores and walnut shells under her bed, sticky trails leading from the kitchen pots straight into her room. In her pockets they found bits of cinnamon and asafoetida. In her hair, little twigs and often a crushed night beetle. But she woke refreshed, with no recollection of her nightly rambles, her midnight feasting, insisting she had slept soundly when her family, grey and dizzy from lack of sleep, questioned her over the morning tea. In the garden watermelons grew in a tangle they hacked at in vain.
Clearly she was going mad. Yes, there it was — the eccentricity that had plagued her mother’s side of the family for generations bubbling up yet again, just when they hoped the culprit genes had finally run into some dead end and been laid to rest. Again and again it had surprised them, appearing haphazardly in the most stable of uncles, the newest of babies. There had been a grandfather who loved his chickens so passionately he insisted on sleeping in the coop at night; an aunt who announced she was the last Maharaja of Oudh just when it had been decided that the family seemed sane at last; a child that spoke only its own garbled language …
When it became apparent that Kulfi too had inherited this familial strain of lunacy, her father knew he had not a moment to lose. And before the news of her oddity was carried to the bazaar by the washerman or the bottle and jar man or any visitors who might happen to see or overhear anything suspicious, he learned that widowed Ammaji in the far-off town of Shahkot was looking for a match for her son; and even though they were from a family of a much lower class, he offered them a dowry they could not refuse.