Finally, he looked up and fixed his gaze on Sai. "Well, what is your name?" Sai.
"Sai?" he said crossly, as if angered by an impudence.
The dog sneezed. It had an elegant snout, a bump of nobility at the top of its head, ruffly pantaloons, elaborately fringed tail -
Sai had never seen such a good-looking dog.
"Your dog is like a film star," said Sai.
"Maybe an Audrey Hepburn," said the judge, trying not to show how pleased he was at this remark, "but certainly not one of those lurid apparitions on the bazaar posters."
He picked up his spoon. "Where is the soup?"
The cook had forgotten it in his excitement over the mashed-potato car.
The judge brought down his fist. The soup after the main course? The routine had been upset.
The electricity fell abruptly to a lower strength as if in accordance with the judge’s disapproval, and the bulb began to buzz like the beetle on its back skittering over the table, upset by this wishy-washy voltage that could not induce a kamikaze response. The cook had already turned off all other lamps in the house in order to gather the meager power into this one, and in this uneven lighting, they were four shadow puppets from a fairytale flickering on the lumpy plaster of the wall – a lizard man, a hunchbacked cook, a lush-lashed maiden, and a long-tailed wolf dog…
"Must write to that fool of a subdivisional officer," said the judge, "but what good will it do!" He overturned the beetle on the table with his knife, it stopped buzzing, and Mutt, who had been staring at it with shock, gazed at him like an adoring spouse.
The cook carried in two bowls of sour and peppery tomato soup, muttering, "No thanks to me for anything… See what I have to deal with and I’m not young and healthy anymore… Terrible to be a poverty-stricken man, terrible, terrible, terrible…"
The judge took a spoon from a bowl of cream and thwacked a white blob into the red.
"Well," he said to his granddaughter, "one must not disturb one another. One’s had to hire a tutor for you – a lady down the hill, can’t afford a convent school – why should one be in the business of fattening the church…? Too far, anyway, and one doesn’t have the luxury of transport anymore, does one? Can’t send you to a government school, I suppose… you’d come out speaking with the wrong accent and picking your nose.
The light diminished now, to a filament, tender as Edison’s first miracle held between delicate pincers of wire in the glass globe of the bulb. It glowed a last blue crescent, then failed. "Damn it!" said the judge.
In her bed later that evening, Sai lay under a tablecloth, for the last sheets had long worn out. She could sense the swollen presence of the forest, hear the hollow-knuckled knocking of the bamboo, the sound of the jhora that ran deep in the decollete of the mountain. Batted down by household sounds during the day, it rose at dusk, to sing pure-voiced into the windows. The structure of the house seemed fragile in the balance of this night – just a husk. The tin roof rattled in the wind. When Sai moved her foot, her toes went silently through the rotted fabric. She had a fearful feeling of having entered a space so big it reached both backward and forward. Suddenly, as if a secret door had opened in her hearing, she became aware of the sound of microscopic jaws slow-milling the house to sawdust, a sound hard to detect for being so closely knit unto the air, but once identified, it grew monumental. In this climate, she would learn, untreated wood could be chewed up in a season.
Eight
Across the hall from Sai’s room, the judge swallowed a Calmpose, for he found he was upset by his granddaughter’s arrival. He lay awake in bed, Mutt at his side. "Little pet," he clucked over her. "What long curly ears, hm? Look at all these curls." Each night Mutt slept with her head on his pillow, and on cold nights she was wrapped in a shawl of angora rabbit wool. She was asleep, but even so, one of her ears cocked as she listened to the judge while she continued snoring.
The judge picked up a book and tried to read, but he couldn’t. He realized, to his surprise, that he was thinking of his own journeys, of his own arrivals and departures, from places far in his past. He had first left home at the age of twenty, with a black tin trunk just like the one Sai had arrived with, on which white letters read "Mr. J. P. Patel, SS Strathnaver." The year was 1939. The town he had left was his ancestral home of Piphit. From there he had journeyed to the Bombay dock and then sailed to Liverpool, and from Liverpool he had gone to Cambridge.
Many years had passed, and yet the day returned to him vividly, cruelly.
The future judge, then called only Jemubhai – or Jemu – had been serenaded at his departure by two retired members of a military band hired by his father-in-law. They had stood on the platform between benches labeled "Indians Only" and "Europeans Only," dressed in stained red coats with dull metallic ricrac unraveling about the sleeves and collars. As the train left the station, they played "Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty," a tune they remembered was appropriate to the occasion of leaving.
The judge was accompanied by his father. At home, his mother was weeping because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of good-bye and the briefness of the last moment.
"Don’t let him go. Don’t let him go."
Her little son with his frail and comical mustache, with his love for her special choorva that he would never get in England and his hatred of cold that he would get too much of; with his sweater that she had knit in a pattern fanciful enough to express the extravagance of her affection; with his new Oxford English Dictionary and his decorated coconut to be tossed as an offering into the waves, so his journey might be blessed by the gods.
Father and son had rattled forth all through the morning and afternoon, the immensity of the landscape within which Jemu had unknowingly lived impressing itself upon him. The very fact that they were sitting in the train, the speed of it, rendered his world trivial, indicated through each window evidence of emptiness that stood eager to claim an unguarded heart. He felt a piercing fear, not for his future, but for his past, for the foolish faith with which he had lived in Piphit.
The malodor of Bombay duck drying on a scaffolding of sticks alongside the track snuffed his thoughts for a moment; passing into neutral air, his fears came up again.
He thought of his wife. He was a one-month-married man. He would return… many years from now… and then what…? It was all very strange. She was fourteen years old and he had yet to properly examine her face.
They crossed the saltwater creek into Bombay, arrived at the Victoria Terminus, where they turned down hotel touts to stay with an acquaintance of his father-in-law’s, and woke early to make their way to the Ballard Pier.
When Jemubhai had first learned that the ocean traveled around a globe, he had felt strengthened by this fact, but now when he stood on the confetti-strewn deck of the ship, looking out at the sea flexing its endless muscles, he felt this knowledge weaken him. Small waves subsided against the side of the ship in a parsimonious soda water fizz, over which the noise of the engine now exerted itself. As three siren blasts rent the air, Jemu’s father, searching the deck, located his son.