The child was sleeping on the bed with her thumb in her mouth. Bishu squatted on the floor again and said:

“I thinks about bringing my brother Amal from the village. I was speaking to Mejda about it.” He looked at her defensively, expecting an outburst. But she went on stirring the pan; in the cup of one palm she collected some onion peelings and threw them out of a window on the right.

“Where will he stay?”

She had never seen any of Bishu’s family except Mejda. She and Bishu had married two years ago, in secret, after a brief courtship in this lane. She had been working in the big multi-storeyed building opposite, on the seventh floor. She had left the job one day and got married without telling didimoni, although didimoni had always been kind to her. But now she was back on good terms with her and visited her from time to time. She had been married once before, but her husband had already had a wife, and so she left the village and came to Calcutta. At the time of her marriage to Bishu, she was already pregnant, and she had had Priti a few months later.

“I asks dadababu,” said Bishu guiltily. “Maybe he gives Amal some work.”

“Wake the child,” said Uma. “She has to eat.”

*   *   *

THE NEXT NIGHT, it began to rain again. It was late July, the middle of the monsoons, but it had been so hot over the last four or five days that everyone had almost forgotten the rains; it felt like April. But now, at night, it began to rain again with the intensity it had had before, as if to remind people that the monsoons had not gone away. There were flashes of lightning that illuminated the small room on the first storey, Uma’s figure on the bed, sleeping in her sari, with the child, a smaller and darker shadow by her side, seeming even more deeply asleep, unilluminated by the lightning. When there were those vast unexpected rumbles of thunder, the room seemed to shake, and the sky seemed to be falling on it.

“Close that window,” said Uma, still no more than an outline.

“Always raining … always raining,” muttered Bishu.

He got up from the mattress on the floor and went to the window; a cool wind blew onto his face. He pulled the window; already the ledge was wet, and he saw that the rain had begun to blur the lamppost opposite. When he closed the window, the room became darker, but all night it continued to thunder and the sound of rain could be heard. Although Bishu feared the rains and the damage they could do, he was also glad, because it had become cooler and he slept more comfortably.