She nudged Mr Gupta with her elbow. ‘Treat him with some respect,’ she said, surprising him with the new note of reverence in her voice. She was apparently awe-struck by what she saw. And even the paan-shop man, who had also come to visit, thinking that maybe he would sell a few paans while satisfying his curiosity, turned to give Mr Gupta a dirty look and said, ‘It seems you are unversed in spiritual matters.’
‘But it is only Sampath,’ protested Mr Gupta.
But clearly it was not only Sampath. It was Sampath of unfathomable wisdom, sitting in his tree abode.
The sweet-shop man joined them after work, then two college students skipping a lecture, the washerman on his bicycle and a pregnant lady who wished to know if her baby would be a boy or a girl. ‘Ah yes,’ she said with satisfaction to those standing about the tree with her, ‘he has the same expression as the Tajewala sage in samadhi. Perhaps you have seen the photographs?’
‘My son is keeping bad company,’ interrupted a distressed but spirited relative of Lakshmiji’s dressed in a canary-yellow sari. ‘What can I do?’
‘Add lemons to milk and it will grow sour,’ answered Sampath in an exceptionally sociable and happy temper, mimicking the old men of Shahkot, who liked to sit at their gates on winter afternoons, basking in their socks and hats, while they lectured passers-by. ‘But add some sugar, madam, and Wah! how good that milk will taste. These are things I do not have to tell you. You yourself know you behaved just like your son when you were young.’
He impressed himself by how many details he had stowed away while reading in the post office. Why, he could just pull them out of some secret compartment in his brain the way a magician pulls rabbits from a hat. How admiringly the people below the tree were looking at him! Never before had he felt the sweet and unique pleasure of giving advice that now suffused his being and shone about his face.
‘By this do you mean I should remove him from the presence of these undesirable characters?’ Lakshmiji’s relative asked.
‘If you put a chicken on the fire and leave it, in a little while it will no longer be a chicken, but ash and bones. Leave a kettle on the flames, the water will grow hot and then, if someone does not lift it off, it will all boil away until there is nothing left. If your child is playing with a dead smelly mouse, you will not debate: “Should I let him be, should I let him play?” No, you will throw away the mouse and take your child indoors to wash his hands.’
Mr Chawla and Pinky, who had just arrived from a trip to the market in time to hear this last sentence, looked at each other in disbelief when they saw how closely people listened to Sampath.
‘Did you hear?’ Mr Chawla asked Pinky.
‘Dead smelly mouse?’ said Pinky, incredulous.
‘If you do not weed,’ said Sampath, ‘your tomato plant will not flower.’
Ammaji and Kulfi, flushed with pride, were already part of the crowd. They listened to every word that was being uttered, leaning forward to hear a round-faced man ask: ‘I am being overtaken by spiritual matters. How can I keep my mind on my responsibilities?’
‘If you talk to a young girl as she stands before the mirror, it is like talking to a deaf person. And can you keep a moth from flying into the lantern by saying she should worry about her three children?’
‘But are you saying I should forgo my duties to my wife and children?’
‘Once my uncle had a rooster and an insect laid its eggs in the flesh of its rear end. It knew the young ones would have a warm place to live and plenty to eat before they were old enough to leave.’
‘Which is the better way to realize God? The way of devotion or the way of knowledge?’
The questions came fast and furious.
‘Some people can only digest fish cooked in a light curry. Others are of a sour disposition and should not eat pickled fish. In the south they enjoy fish cooked with coconut water. I myself have a preference for pomfret in a sauce of chilli and tamarind thickened with gram flour.’
‘Where can I begin my search? What is the starting point?’
Sampath smiled; then he yawned and pulled his hat over his eyes. He was growing tired and so, as quickly and easily as a child, he went to sleep.
A hushed silence overcame the visitors. Kulfi got up soundlessly and slipped away to begin cooking Sampath’s dinner. In Shahkot she had cooked only now and then when inspiration mounted somewhere out in the sea of her unconscious and rushed up to swallow her like a tidal wave.
But how could she possibly have reconciled her wild dreams with her tame life in Shahkot, with their tiny kitchen, their meals on the old plastic-covered table? Again and again, the dishes she produced could not match the visions inside her; she could not be satisfied with the ingredients that came bottled and packaged on store shelves or withered in bazaar baskets; the kitchen was too small for the scale of operation she desired; her cooking was constantly interrupted by neighbours investigating the smells that wafted into their houses from her stove. ‘Don’t mix fish with chicken,’ they advised her. ‘Fry the onions first and then add the garlic later. Keep the milk aside until the very end of cooking.’ The frustration inside her would grow into an enormous cloud that blocked off everything else and her eyesight and hearing would go blurry. Sampath would taste what she made, and smile and nod his admiration, but she would be inconsolable. It was all wrong, all wrong. It took her weeks to calm down, sitting with Sampath on the rooftop in complete silence. Months later, when the tidal wave of inspiration came again, the entire event would be repeated.
Mr Chawla had learned to shrug his shoulders at her. All his early attempts to teach her to interact normally with the world had made as much impression on her as rain on waterproofing and instead, as soon as Sampath was old enough, he had turned his attention to his son, for his greatest responsibility, he felt, was to pummel him into being at least minimally functional in the world. There had been one or two occasions, of course, when he had been made very worried, like the time when Kulfi tried to steal the experimental plants from the agricultural centre’s annual display, or when she had attempted to get into the cage of rare pheasants in the tiny Shahkot zoo so she could catch and cook one. Each time she had been caught by guards, who assumed she was just a straying visitor and one only as bothersome as all the rest of the boisterous crowd. And luckily these events had not often been repeated.
Ammaji too left Kulfi to herself, apart from a few muttered comments and laments that were her duty as a mother-in-law. She was secretly pleased by how her place in the household and in Mr Chawla’s life had not been altered at all when Kulfi had arrived. Some poor women suffered the fate of having their sons turn their backs on them and ignore them completely after marriage.
Here, in the orchard, the hold of other people on Kulfi and her awareness of them retreated even further and, like Sampath, she discovered the relief of space. Inspired by the forest, she had embarked upon a series of experiments, a fervent crusade to bring her fantastic imaginings into being. She cooked outdoors, in the sunshine, under the gigantic sky. She felt she was on the brink of something enormous. All around her was a landscape she understood profoundly, that she could comprehend without thought or analysis. She understood it like she understood her son, without conversation or the need to construct a connection or to maintain it. Pinky was a stranger to her, made her nervous and even scared sometimes; it was lucky she was so independent. But Sampath she knew. She knew why he was sitting in a tree. It was the right place for him to be; that is where he belonged.