Vikram Chandra - Sacred Games

Her breathing was even, slow. From across the garden outside came that steady tapping, the small explosive spatter of water on stones.

The courtyard was washed every morning, and in it sat Prabhjot Kaur, scrubbing a karhai with ash under the hand-pump. She was the best and youngest daughter of three: Navneet, Maninder and Prabhjot. Or actually Navneet-bhenji, Mani and then Prabhjot, or Nikki, for her smallness. Prabhjot Kaur liked to help their Mata-ji, who always said, 'Look at her, this Nikki of a girl, this Prabhjot Kaur, only ten and helping more than the rest of you all put together,' which usually meant that Nikki had to watch out for a pinch from Mani, who loved to catch up the flesh on the inner side of her upper arm with fingers as unrelenting and iron as a chimta and twist and twist, whispering, 'Little rat, I'll show you, rattie.' Nikki wore her bruises with forbearance, and even compassion for Mani, who had big ears and looked like an awestruck dehati scarecrow, after three sudden inches gained in her fourteenth year. Mani wandered around, shrieky and awkward and full of rage, not too good at studies, stuck inextricably in the middle of three sisters, which meant that she was not special even by virtue of position or age, always not here and not quite there. Nikki, on the other hand, was coddled by her two brothers, Iqbal-veerji and Alok-veerji, who at eighteen and seventeen were younger than Navneet-bhenji but more remote than her because of their hulking maleness and their passion for cricket. Her father liked to look at Nikki's notebooks, which she covered with plain brown paper folded into sharp, precise corners and edges, which she adorned with her full, proper name in green ink, with the initial letters of 'Prabhjot' and 'Kaur' especially elaborated and curled. Her Punjabi and Urdu teachers admired her writing in either script and had hopes for her in the annual composition contest sponsored by Sir Syed Atallulah Khan. 'My house is new,' she wrote in flowing green letters, with not a mistake or a blotting because she would discard an entire page for one straggly aleph. She had the universal reputation of being a good girl, serious and obedient, and in her new house she liked to help in the kitchen.

'Are you finished, Nikki?' Mata-ji sang from inside the kitchen.

'Coming, Mata-ji,' Prabhjot Kaur called, and jumped up to pump water, leaning on the handle with all her weight. The water fell in happy gushes, sparking and bouncing in the sunlight. In the kitchen, Mata-ji slapped the paraunthas back and forth between her hands with a sprightliness that made a quick music, tossed them down on the hot tava, each with a final wristy flick. Prabhjot Kaur laid the karhai down carefully. Mata-ji patted at the beaded moisture on her cheeks with the corner of her dupatta, and Prabhjot Kaur watched intently her round red face, with the upturned nose they all teased her about.

'Take these in,' Mata-ji said, putting a perfect, glistening parauntha on a pile of four. 'Then you also sit down.' Prabhjot Kaur always ate second to last. Her two brothers ate mightily, putting away whole dozens of paraunthas, canisters of ghee. Mani was sitting next to them, one knee up under her chin, picking at a pile of bhindi, arranging it in a circle. She paid Prabhjot Kaur no attention, not even a beady stare, she was listening intently to Iqbal-veerji and Alok-veerji, who were talking cricket. Prabhjot Kaur squatted and served herself from the plates scattered on the chatai, and ate, quiet and intent on her food. It was a holiday morning, Sunday, and her father was away, gone to buy a last cartload of bricks. They had been living in the new house for almost a year, but the back was still unfinished. There was to be a store-room and a little separate house of one room and patio, for servants. It seemed like the house had been building for ever. For as long as Prabhjot Kaur could remember, it had been always the Adampur house, for which her father had disappeared on evenings after work, for which her brothers had spent weekends supervising construction, it was a home that had seemed always eternally distant. It had taken them three days to move in, and when they had finally spent their first night, all together in the courtyard on new charpais, none of them had slept until it was almost light. The next morning, through a warm white sheet and puffy, delicious dreams, Prabhjot Kaur had heard the laughter of her mother from the roof. There was a comfortable freedom in the sound, a lack of care so unusual that Prabhjot Kaur still remembered it. This laughter had lingered in their new house, brightened the corridors and mingled with the smell of fresh plaster. Mata-ji now sat down next to Prabhjot Kaur, with the little grunt she always made when she bent her knees, and she was tired from the morning's work, but still there was something different about her, a rotund contentment that had never been there when they had lived for years in the two rooms at the back of Narinder Dhanoa's house. She ate with concentration, bending low over the food, smacking her lips with every bite, and Mani stood up abruptly to her full towering length and went stalking away to the kitchen.

'So, Sethani-ji,' Alok-veerji said, with a hand on his mother's shoulder. 'When is your maid starting work?'

'I was thinking I can manage alone,' Mata-ji said. 'What will I do with my time?'

Alok-veerji collapsed on to Mata-ji's shoulder, laughing.

'We'll just tell her to start coming from tomorrow,' Iqbal-veerji said. 'Otherwise you'll keep doing this for another ten years.' As the oldest son he practised an indulgent authority with her, a smiling patience.

'Right, right,' Alok-veerji said. 'Otherwise our biggest-kanjoos-in-the-world won't let the maid near the house.'

'When you start earning,' Mata-ji said, shrugging his chin off her shoulder, 'then you'll know the price of your paraunthas.'

'When I start earning,' Alok-veerji said, 'I'll get you a motor car, with two flags on front.'

'A laat-saab you'll be straight away,' Mata-ji said. 'It took him twenty-one years to build this house.'

Twenty-one years and some bricks which are still coming, Prabhjot Kaur thought, but she could see that despite the toss of her head, Mata-ji was pleased by Alok-veerji as laat-saab in motor car. It made her smile that downward-looking quick quiver of a smile. That afternoon, when Prabhjot Kaur was settled on a corner of the chatai, her arm under her favourite gadda and head on it, falling densely into sleep, she heard the two veerjis still talking as they lay next to each other, going on about the mysterious maid, who must be found and made to come, who must work, who must sweep the house inside all its many many rooms and outside also, who must push the pocha until the tiled floors are glistering gleaming, who must thrash the laundry and hang it dewy and flapping on the lines in the back, who must winnow wheat, light lamps, clean shoes, gather books, get milk, buy vegetables, who must, who must, who must. Prabhjot Kaur thought that it would be a very strong woman who could do all that.

But three days later, when the maid came, she was a tiny woman named Ram Pari who wore a funny red salwar-kameez with a ragged dupatta and spoke a rough, blaring dialect that Prabhjot Kaur understood but found hilarious. Ram Pari called Mata-ji 'Bibi-ji' and squatted in the courtyard to haggle over wages. When she stood up, after agreeing to five rupees a week, Prabhjot Kaur went and stretched herself up next to her, and it was true, Ram Pari was barely a head taller than her, but standing that close, Prabhjot Kaur discovered a smell. She backed away quickly. It wasn't exactly a bad smell, but strong, it was like damp earth, or the back of a halwai's shop, where you got a little dizzy from all the old milky odours. Prabhjot Kaur reeled away from the richness and went and sat next to Navneet-bhenji in the baithak, where as usual Navneet-bhenji had her nose in a big book. Prabhjot Kaur leaned her head on the cottony comfort of Navneet-bhenji's shoulder, and spelt out the title on top of the page: 'Wordsworth'. Under the washed briskness of the soft salwar there was the sweet tinge of soap and warm skin. It was a flavour that Prabhjot Kaur had known all her life, and now she breathed it in, scrunching her nose into the cloth and making little snorting noises. 'What're you doing, jhalli?' Navneet-bhenji asked, and reached around with her other hand to pinch the burrowing nose. Prabhjot Kaur didn't feel crazy, not even close, but it was too difficult to explain why she needed it so, just then. She settled her face into the crook of Navneet-bhenji's arm and was still. Ram Pari was gone from the courtyard, and Mata-ji came across it, with a plate full of peas. She sat near and began to split the pods and rattle the peas into the plate with her thumb, shuck-shuck-shuck, so quickly that the sound was one long hum. Mata-ji was intent on the peas, and Navneet-bhenji kept the book high on her knees. They were quietly cordial with each other nowadays, but Prabhjot Kaur remembered a year ago when they had quarrelled mightily, after Navneet-bhenji had finished her FA and wanted to go to college for a BA. Mata-ji had told her to think of her brothers and sisters, who were being kept back from marriage and happiness by her selfishness, and when Navneet-bhenji had pointed out reasonably that her brothers and sisters were years and years away from any marriage, Mata-ji had screamed at her, something entirely strange about disgracing the family, and then had refused to eat for two days. Finally Papa-ji had put his large fatherly foot down. If Navneet wants to do her BA, he said, she will, and that is that. But Mata-ji had powers that moved in mysterious ways. She had retreated to her room, and Papa-ji had rolled his eyes and followed her in, and when he emerged the next morning, it had been settled that marriage could be delayed but not put off altogether. So now Navneet-bhenji was engaged, to Pritam Singh Hansra, who was a junior engineer in the PWD and stationed at Gujranwalla. After the engagement Papa-ji had gently stroked his beard, which had just some white in it, under his lower lip, and said, happiness follows from reasonable thinking. Mata-ji had kept quiet. And Prabhjot Kaur, awed by Papa-ji's way of commanding things out of the air – a boy for Navneet-bhenji, a house for them all – had nevertheless understood that that was never quite that.