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1 D

Now touching such an envelope, it brought to her mind all of the careful machinations of her life, how she had used them to construct a shell to survive the frightful years with her husband’s family, how she learned that no gesture to the outside world should not serve those ends.

She realised that as she had been remembering - she had broken the seal, opened the envelope and unfolded the letter within. She had, in fact, readied it to be read, and her eyes came back into the present, segueing from the false memory of the floor, to the very real sight of letters on a page. They were in the precise hand of her husband. It had his look to its sentences and but not his contours.

She could envision the scene, he sitting at the table, telling her what he was going to say, and she finding fault with it, in a smooth maternal voice, as if only concerned for his welfare - he offering revision, with an increasingly petulant air to his voice, and then revision after revision she would sculpt it to what she wanted to say. It would have saved great time and trouble to have her dictate it, but that would never happen, both out of custom, and because she wanted to have the substance seem to be his, while the shape was hers. We do not remember the grotto from which Michelangelo’s marble came either, only the shaping hand. The same was true in this case, everyone soon learned that there was nothing there, save what she had desired to remain.

She read the letter twice before speaking, she wanted it engraved on her memory.

“Obedient Wife

The news that brings pen to hand could not be worse. Your father has been striken in his prime, he collapsed, and was later found. He speaks badly, and cannot move one of his arms. While we have called in the finest doctor available, it appears he will never recover fully enough to command his own affairs. Therefore, I must insist that you return, I must personally attend to business matters which his condition leaves in disarray, and therefore your presence at my home is required.

It grieves me beyond words to write this, but I feel that I must say that the karmic balance attends to us all, and cannot help but feel that some of the attitudes and habits that your father aquired during these later years have contributed to his downfall.

I would wish you to show this letter to your mother’s father as soon as you have read it, so that he may make arrangements as well.

Peace be upon you

Your husband”

As with most letters that were carved by duplicitous hands, it needed to be translated:

“Yah Yah!

Your father can’t protect you any more, so I can treat you like my property. He’s had a stroke, and we found the best physician who would work for free, just to make sure his recovery is stunted. Now I have to go and siphon off as much money as possible from your family to mine, while my mother lords it about over you and our retainers flock in to drain what is here.

I am euphoric with joy over this turn of events, and am going to rub it in as much as I can. Your father has adopted to many European ideas and attitudes, and I intend to put a stop to that as fast as possible.

Now I’m also going to use my power for the first time, by telling the greedy old bastard now, so that he and his clan can dismember everything down south.”

Long practice had made it possible for her to accept this without a tremor on her face, but she knew that as soon as she showed this letter to Ravindran, the power in the negotiation would flow out like a tide, from her, towards him. There was nothing to do but retreat.

She passed the letter to Ox, and had him bear it over. Leaving before it could even be read. What had made matters worse was the date - it was from two months before, in early February as the English reckoned time, it now being early April just before Monsoon. She knew what had happened, it was family custom to insist that a messenger bearing such news walk, rather than ride or use a boat, lest he ill luck befall him. As a result, since her presence here had been a secret, it had taken him some time to find her and reach her.

It would be days before she could be back. The feeling that she had been played - clearly this news was in her Grandfather’s hands, and he had merely allowed her to rattle along, knowing that the power was in play, and that his schemes, rather than her dreams, were now in command of the direction of events. He knew himself to be better and more adept than her mother in law and husband, and so manuevering them out of their position was merely a matter of exertion without perspiration.

The one moment of thankfulness she had was when she crossed over the threshold and was out admist the huge human theatre that is the street life of any Indian city. She was quickly pressed by beggars, and had the usual handful of coins to toss over her left shoulder, as others toss salt after spilling some at the table. Their clearing away allowed her to gesture to her two guards who proceded to drive a wedge through the throng of carts, bodies, sweating animals and flying feathers. Their closeness was imprisoning, but also protective, each shove that penetrated their guard was like the scrape of sharkskin, a feeling of raw tearing, even if no blood is drawn. This is the street life - it scrapes at whatever veneer on has, with its moans and cries and shouts. With the sound of families quarrelling in half a dozen tongues, with the clink of coins being exchanged, and the calls of children running away from parents. And above all, the babble of conversations too diverse to record, until it became a blur heard in the west only in the largest of out door markets or theatres before the curtain. Only this market never closed, and the curtain had already wrung up on the tragi-comi-farci-romance that never ended. In Europe they could neatly divide stories, because they could divide themselves from each other, the public from the private, the children from the parents. Not so here.

Fetid, filled with the smells of living, death, dying and birth - it was somehow the antidote of real which she needed from the refined courtly intrigue that her life consisted of.

She corrected herself. Her old life. She was now about to begin a new one.