Buta Singh left. Sabhrai turned to her brood with maternal aggressiveness. ‘Did you go to the Gurudwara or just carry on your buk buk nonsense?’ she asked her son.

Sher laughed. ‘There are so many to say prayers for me. You must have said one, Champak another.’

It gave Champak an opportunity to enter into the family discourse. ‘I had a very quiet day all alone. I washed my hair and listened to the hymns relayed from the temple by the radio. Then I said my evening prayers and put the Granth to rest. It was very peaceful.’

Chapter II

The last thing Shunno did every night before retiring was to fill a brass jug with water, put a keekar* twig in it, and leave it on a stool outside the kitchen. Every morning while it was still dark she came in, lit the fire, and put the tea kettle on the hearth. She put the keekar twig in her mouth, picked up the jug, and went out into the garden or the vacant plot across the road. She performed her morning functions behind a bush and washed her privates with the water she carried. She scooped up a little mud and used it as soap to rinse her hands. She chewed the twig till one end was reduced to a soggy, fibrous pulp and brushed her teeth with it. She tore off a strip of the bark and scraped her tongue with such vigour that it made her retch and spit. She returned to her quarters and bathed under the tap in the garden and went back to the house to get tea ready. All this she did before the earliest risers, the drongos, had started calling or even a suspicion of gray had appeared on the eastern horizon.

Shunno was a peasant woman and had not changed her way of living in the city. Her regular habits had helped to keep her in rude, rustic health. Although she was fat and nearly fifty, she could work fourteen hours a day without any sign of fatigue. She had never been known to be ill, she had not even known a cold or a headache. Her eyes were clear, with the white and black whiter and blacker than other people’s. She had an even row of teeth not one of which had ever given her trouble. She could crack almonds and walnuts as if her mouth had been fitted with a nut-cracker. Shunno was the despair of men servants employed as additional help. Since she could run the house single-handed, she soon reduced them from being fellow-servants to her own personal slaves. She bossed them till they couldn’t stand it any more. They were dismissed for the same reason: making improper advances to her. The compromise had been found in hiring the thirteen-year-old Mundoo whom she could not easily accuse of impropriety and who would submit to her bullying. On the night of the New Year’s Day she had kicked him several times.