15

Lucia is having nightmares. I found her twice this week, sitting on the floor of the corridor between our bedrooms, shouting. I run to her half asleep, saying, ‘What is it, Lucy? What happened?’ But she is unable to explain, frantically jabbing her hand in the air at the imagined terrors. The moon shines through the grilles of the windows, lighting the corridor as if it were a stage. I look at my sister and the puppy, Golly, who is unhelpfully licking her toes. ‘Let’s get you back to bed,’ I say. I settle her in and stroke her forehead, the way Ma used to when I needed consoling, but she is already shrugging away, reaching for her socks and hankies underneath the pillow, drawing them out one by one. ‘Go away,’ she says, turning her back to me.

The new puppies have arrived. Even though Mallika has given away all the male pups from Bahgeera’s litter to workers at various construction sites, we still have twenty-two dogs. And while most of them are still suckling, it will soon become impossible to feed them. When it was just Raja and Bagheera I used to cook rice and meat and feed them in separate bowls. Now I buy ten-kilo bags of dry dog food and scatter the pellets on the patio. Only Raja still gets his food in a bowl, but he doesn’t like this processed food; he crunches at it desultorily, and leaves the remains for the mothers to fight over.

He hates the puppies. They come at him like locusts, snapping at his penis, thinking there might be milk there. Lucy has named this batch after Bollywood stars – Preity, Kat, Bebo, Dimple … Their sister, Golly, is universally despised because she’s the house bitch. Her hind legs are better now, but she is still fat, still slow.

Ma’s lawyer, Mr Sriram, comes to the house to discuss the issue of the upcoming coal plant, on Vik’s recommendation.

‘How odd,’ I’d said to Vik. ‘I ask for the name of a lawyer, and you suggest the one I already know.’

Mr Sriram is a thin man with vitiligo. He lives in Madras, but I haven’t seen him since he brought me to look at the house after Ma died.

‘This must be strange for you,’ he’d said, as he drove through the front gate and the long scrubby driveway.

It was strange. To think of my mother buying a plot of land, imagining she’d live out here like a pioneer, keeping secrets. I saw a grove of bright green trees. Mr Sriram said they were cashew. All along the ground were sunburnt weeds. There was a well – white and gleaming – an anachronism. Who builds wells like this any more? I had a vision of Ma leaning over the concrete rim, dropping the bucket into the cool moss of water, hauling it up with a frayed coir rope. It was like re-entering a scene from childhood. Women with their pots lined up at the well. Women at the street tap. Women waiting for the metro water tanker. You could trace a line from the present all the way back to Mohenjo-daro and there would be women with pots in the curve of their hips, waiting to collect water.