THEN A HOT SPELL BEGAN AGAIN, punctuated by infrequent showers. It was during hot days like these that Bishu had first met Uma two and a half years ago. Uma used to emerge from the gates of the building opposite, Southern Gardens Flats, and walk down the lane towards the main road, perhaps going to the market; on her way she would stop at the gate of the strange new, huge Marwari house, which looked like something between a castle and an aeroplane, and talk to the watchman, whom she seemed to know. Bishu, who was never really friendly with the servants in the house he worked in, loitered about a lot, and he had seen her a few times. She was not particularly pretty; she was thin (though not as thin as she was now), with protruding teeth; but, in her sari, she looked slim and small and had a certain grace.

Often she would come down the path that went past the outhouse with a pitcher against her waist. One day Bishu said to her:

“What’s the matter, don’t you getting water in your building?”

“Of course we do—why shouldn’t we?” said Uma. “It’s just that didimoni prefers tubewell water.”

Bishu noticed that there was vermilion in the parting of her hair: he realised she had a husband somewhere, in either her past or present; he was not unduly bothered. Thus their courtship began, fifteen or twenty minutes of conversation each day on the dusty path between the outhouse and the mansion that led to the tubewell, looked upon and ignored by the many windows and verandahs, the numerous eyes, of the multi-storeyed building. Sometimes she had a ponytail, sometimes a plait. Their differences—he an Oriya of the sweeper caste, she a once married Bengali—which should have kept them apart, only brought them together. In a couple of months, the conversations had led to the first physical intimacy in the room in the outhouse, hurried embraces; though everything was so quickly and secretively done that no one had an inkling, least of all didimoni. It was only after Uma had begun to retch and throw up and realised she was pregnant that she ran away from her job to marry Bishu.

*   *   *

AFTER A SHORT BURST of rain late in the morning, the sun came out and it became hot again. Priti, who either played with other children on the dusty path where her parents had once met, or wandered about at home, was now crawling about busily in the room, seeming to have found a playmate in the sun, which, though burning in the sky after the shower, appeared to be crawling about in the room as well. Her mother picked her up and put her on the bed, where she sat without protesting. A few minutes later, two shaliks came to the window.