He made up the bed in an extra room, which was actually filled with rubbish but contained a bed placed in the very center, and he fixed pale virginal candles into saucers for Sai and Gyan to take to their rooms. "Your bed is ready for you, masterji," he said and sniffed:
Was there a strange atmosphere in the room?
But Sai and Gyan seemed immersed in the newspapers again, and he confused their sense of ripening anticipation with his own, because that morning, two letters from Biju had arrived in the post. They were lying under an empty tuna fish tin by his bed, saved for the end of the day, and all evening he’d been savoring the thought of them. He rolled up his pants and departed with an umbrella as it had begun to pour again.
In the drawing room, sitting with the newspapers, Sai and Gyan were left alone, quite alone, for the first time.
Kiki De Costa’s recipe column: marvels with potatoes. Tasty treat with meat. Noodles with doodles and doodles of sauce and oodles and oodles of cheese.
Fleur Hussein’s beauty tips.
The handsome baldy competition at the Calcutta Gymkhana Club had given out prizes to Mr. Sunshine, Mr. Moonshine, and Mr. Will Shine.
Their eyes read on industriously, but their thoughts didn’t cleave to such discipline, and finally Gyan, unable to bear this any longer, this tightrope tension between them, put down his paper with a crashing sound, turned abruptly toward her, and blurted:
"Do you put oil in your hair?"
"No," she said, startled. "I never do."
After a bit of silence, "Why?" she asked. Was there something wrong with her hair?
"I can’t hear you – the rain is so loud," he said, moving closer. "What?"
"Why?"
"It looks so shiny I thought you might."
"No."
"It looks very soft," he observed. "Do you wash it with shampoo?"
"Yes."
"What kind?"
"Sunsilk."
Oh, the unbearable intimacy of brand names, the boldness of the questions.
"What soap?" Lux.
"Beauty bar of the film stars?"
But they were too scared to laugh.
More silence.
"You?"
"Whatever is in the house. It doesn’t matter for boys."
He couldn’t admit that his mother bought the homemade brown soap that was sold in large rectangles in the market, blocks sliced off and sold cheap.
The questions grew worse: "Let me see your hands. They are so small."
"Are they?"
"Yes." He held his own out by hers. "See?"
Fingers. Nails.
"Hm. What long fingers. Little nails. But look, you bite them."
He weighed her hand.
"Light as a sparrow. The bones must be hollow."
These words that took direct aim at something elusive had the de-liberateness of previous consideration, she realized with a thud of joy.
Rainy season beetles flew by in many colors. From each hole in the floor came a mouse as if tailored for size, tiny mice from the tiny holes, big mice from big holes, and the termites came teeming forth from the furniture, so many of them that when you looked, the furniture, the floor, the ceiling, all seemed to be wobbling.
But Gyan did not see them. His gaze itself was a mouse; it disappeared into the belladonna sleeve of Sai’s kimono and spotted her elbow.
"A sharp point," he commented. "You could do some harm with that."
Arms they measured and legs. Catching sight of her foot – Let me see.
He took off his own shoe and then the threadbare sock of which he immediately felt ashamed and which he bundled into his pocket. They examined the nakedness side by side of those little tubers in the semidark.
Her eyes, he noted, were extraordinarily glamorous: huge, wet, full of theater, capturing all the light in the room.
But he couldn’t bring himself to mention them; it was easier to stick to what moved him less, to a more scientific approach.
With the palm of his hand, he cupped her head…
"Is it flat or is it curved?"
With an unsteady finger, he embarked on the arch of an eyebrow…
Oh, he could not believe his bravery; it drove him on and wouldn’t heed the fear that called him back; he was brave despite himself. His finger moved down her nose.
The sound of water came from every direction: fat upon the window, a popgun off the bananas and the tin roof, lighter and messier on the patio stones, a low-throated gurgle in the gutter that surrounded the house like a moat. There was the sound of the jhora rushing and of water drowning itself in this water, of drainpipes disgorging into the rain barrels, the rain barrels brimming over, little sipping sounds from the moss.
The growing impossibility of speech would make other intimacies easier.
As his finger was about to leap from the tip of Sai’s nose to her perfectly arched lips -
Up she jumped.
"Owwaaa," she shouted.
He thought it was a mouse.
It wasn’t. She was used to mice.
"Oooph," she said. She couldn’t stand a moment longer, that peppery feeling of being traced by another’s finger and all that green romance burgeoning forth. Wiping her face bluntly with her hands, she shook out her kimono, as if to rid the evening of this trembling delicacy.
"Well, good night," she said formally, taking Gyan by surprise. Placing her feet one before the other with the deliberateness of a drunk, she made her way toward the door, reached the rectangle of the doorway, and dove into the merciful dark with Gyan’s bereft eyes following her.
She didn’t return.
But the mice did. It was quite extraordinary how tenacious they were – you’d think their fragile hearts would shatter, but their timidity was misleading; their fear was without memory.
In his bed slung like a hammock on broken springs, leaks all around, the judge lay pinned by layers of fusty blankets. His underwear lay on top of the lamp to dry and his watch sat below so the mist under the dial might lift – a sad state for the civilized man. The air was spiked with pinpricks of moisture that made it feel as if it were raining indoors as well, yet this didn’t freshen it. It bore down thick enough to smother, an odiferous yeasty mix of spore and fungi, wood smoke and mice droppings, kerosene and chill. He got out of bed to search for a pair of socks and a woolen skull cap. As he was putting them on, he saw the unmistakable silhouette of a scorpion, bold against the dingy wall, and lurched at it with a fly swatter, but it sensed his presence, bristled, the tail went up, and it began to run. It vanished into the crack between the bottom of the wall and the floorboard. "Drat!" he said. His false teeth leered at him with a skeleton grin from a jar of water. He rummaged about for a Calmpose and swallowed it with a gulp of water from the top of the jar, so cold, always cold – the water in Kalimpong was directly from Himalayan snow – and it transformed his gums to pure pain. "Good night, my darling mutton chop," he said to Mutt when he could manipulate his tongue again. She was already dreaming, but oh the weakness of an aged man, even the pill could not chase the unpleasant thoughts unleashed at dinner back into their holes.
When the results of the viva voce had been posted, he found his performance had earned him one hundred out of three hundred, the lowest qualifying mark. The written portion of the test had brought up his score and he was listed at forty-eight, but only the top forty-two had been included for admission to the ICS. Shaking, almost fainting, he was about to stumble away when a man came out with a supplementary announcement: a new list had been conceived in accordance with attempts to Indianize the service. The crowd of students rushed forward, and in between the lurching, he caught sight of the name, Jemubhai Popatlal Patel, at the very bottom of the page.