“Paati!” said Priti, looking at them, for all birds were pakhi, or “bird,” to her. The birds took off immediately, and Priti seemed a little surprised that they were now here and now not. When her mother picked her up and took her to the window, she looked out at the lane contentedly, with its buildings and huge banyan and gulmohur trees casting shadows everywhere.

In the afternoon, Uma took the child in her arms and went to visit didimoni on the seventh floor of Southern Gardens Flats. She did this from time to time, because she was always welcome in didimoni’s flat and she liked to keep in touch with her.

“Oh—it’s Uma,” said Mrs. Sengupta, whom Uma called “didimoni.” “Come into the room! How are you?”

“I’m well, didimoni,” said Uma shyly, stepping inside the bedroom. She sat on the floor beside the bed, Priti in her arms.

“The child has become very sweet—pretty…,” said didimoni.

Uma smiled with pleasure; that was another reason she liked coming here—the child was always fussed over. Priti looked back at didimoni and around her in silence, as if puzzled by the flat.

“And is everything going well?” asked Mrs. Sengupta.

“What should I say, didimoni,” said Uma with a small smile, “sometimes I want to leave him and come back here with Priti to work—he bothers me at times!”

Didimoni laughed—but did not know what to say. For although she could have possibly given Uma a job, it would have been too much of a problem having a child in the house; she had tried it with another servant, and it hadn’t worked. Nor did she really take Uma’s complaint seriously. And yet her heart went out to her. She had become thinner than before, and darker, and her teeth seemed to protrude from her mouth more prominently.

“Never mind,” she said, thinking back to her own marriage. “There are always misunderstandings at first, and then they get smoothed out.” Uma nodded and smiled a little, while Priti, in her arms, looked this way and that. Uma remembered how, in the first days she had met Bishu, she used to think he was a driver, because he sometimes had the car keys in his hand; only later had she discovered he was a cleaner.

After half an hour, she got up and said goodbye to didimoni, promising to come again, and walked to the front door and then the lift, glimpsed by the cook and the other servant who had once been her companions in this flat. On her way out, the child in her arms looked in a leisurely way at the furniture in the house—it was difficult to tell if she was registering anything—as if content to be adrift in this frail maternal carriage, an avid, if powerless, observer of life.

*   *   *