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‘If you do not weed,’ said Sampath, ‘your tomato plant will not flower.’

Ammaji and Kulfi, flushed with pride, were already part of the crowd. They listened to every word that was being uttered, leaning forward to hear a round-faced man ask: ‘I am being overtaken by spiritual matters. How can I keep my mind on my responsibilities?’

‘If you talk to a young girl as she stands before the mirror, it is like talking to a deaf person. And can you keep a moth from flying into the lantern by saying she should worry about her three children?’

‘But are you saying I should forgo my duties to my wife and children?’

‘Once my uncle had a rooster and an insect laid its eggs in the flesh of its rear end. It knew the young ones would have a warm place to live and plenty to eat before they were old enough to leave.’

‘Which is the better way to realize God? The way of devotion or the way of knowledge?’

The questions came fast and furious.

‘Some people can only digest fish cooked in a light curry. Others are of a sour disposition and should not eat pickled fish. In the south they enjoy fish cooked with coconut water. I myself have a preference for pomfret in a sauce of chilli and tamarind thickened with gram flour.’

‘Where can I begin my search? What is the starting point?’

Sampath smiled; then he yawned and pulled his hat over his eyes. He was growing tired and so, as quickly and easily as a child, he went to sleep.

A hushed silence overcame the visitors. Kulfi got up soundlessly and slipped away to begin cooking Sampath’s dinner. In Shahkot she had cooked only now and then when inspiration mounted somewhere out in the sea of her unconscious and rushed up to swallow her like a tidal wave.

But how could she possibly have reconciled her wild dreams with her tame life in Shahkot, with their tiny kitchen, their meals on the old plastic-covered table? Again and again, the dishes she produced could not match the
visions inside her; she could not be satisfied with the ingredients that came bottled and packaged on store shelves or withered in bazaar baskets; the kitchen was too small for the scale of operation she desired; her cooking was constantly interrupted by neighbours investigating the smells that wafted into their houses from her stove. ‘Don’t mix fish with chicken,’ they advised her. ‘Fry the onions first and then add the garlic later. Keep the milk aside until the very end of cooking.’ The frustration inside her would grow into an enormous cloud that blocked off everything else and her eyesight and hearing would go blurry. Sampath would taste what she made, and smile and nod his admiration, but she would be inconsolable. It was all wrong, all wrong. It took her weeks to calm down, sitting with Sampath on the rooftop in complete silence. Months later, when the tidal wave of inspiration came again, the entire event would be repeated.

Mr Chawla had learned to shrug his shoulders at her. All his early attempts to teach her to interact normally with the world had made as much impression on her as rain on waterproofing and instead, as soon as Sampath was old enough, he had turned his attention to his son, for his greatest responsibility, he felt, was to pummel him into being at least minimally functional in the world. There had been one or two occasions, of course, when he had been made very worried, like the time when Kulfi tried to steal the experimental plants from the agricultural centre’s annual display, or when she had attempted to get into the cage of rare pheasants in the tiny Shahkot zoo so she could catch and cook one. Each time she had been caught by guards, who assumed she was just a straying visitor and one only as bothersome as all the rest of the boisterous crowd. And luckily these events had not often been repeated.

Ammaji too left Kulfi to herself, apart from a few muttered comments and laments that were her duty as a mother-in-law. She was secretly pleased by how her place in the household and in Mr Chawla’s life had not been altered at all when Kulfi had arrived. Some poor women suffered the fate of having their sons turn their backs on them and ignore them completely after marriage.

Here, in the orchard, the hold of other people on Kulfi and her awareness of them retreated even further and, like Sampath, she discovered the relief of space. Inspired by the forest, she had embarked upon a series of experiments, a fervent crusade to bring her fantastic imaginings into being. She cooked outdoors, in the sunshine, under the gigantic sky. She felt she was on the brink of something enormous. All around her was a landscape she understood profoundly, that she could comprehend without thought or analysis. She understood it like she understood her son, without conversation or the need to construct a connection or to maintain it. Pinky was a stranger to her, made her nervous and even scared sometimes; it was lucky she was so independent. But Sampath she
knew.
She knew why he was sitting in a tree. It was the right place for him to be; that is where he belonged.

Whenever she saw him upon his cot, saw his face peeking from between the leaves, she was reminded of the day when he was born, his birth mingling in her memory with the wildest storm she had ever witnessed, with the arrival of famine relief and the silver miracle of rain. There, in the midst of the chaos, her son’s face had contained an exquisite peace, an absorption in a world other than the one he had been born into.

She cooked only for Sampath, leaving Ammaji to cater to the rest of the family, for his was the only judgement Kulfi trusted.

Almost all day she worked, trying this and that, producing, even in these early days of apprenticeship to her imagination, meals of such flavour and rarity that others could merely guess at what they were missing by the smells that rose from her pots, so intoxicating them by evening’s end that they had barely any recollection of what had passed when they departed from their audience with Sampath. They felt filled, though, with a sense of magic and wellbeing. By the look of Sampath, he too was permeated with a similar feeling, but to a much greater degree. His cheeks grew slowly plumper day by day; his tense, worried expression melted into one of contentment; the soft movement of the days and nights rising and falling about him were gently reflected in his face, and his eyes mirrored the quiet of the distant hills.

‘What about my typing course?’ Pinky asked her father one morning not long after The Sermon in the Guava Tree, when it had become apparent, she thought, that no one cared that the life of Pinky Chawla in Shahkot had been rudely interrupted by Sampath’s move up the hillside. A week or two was all very well, but she had come to the conclusion that it did not appeal to her as a permanent arrangement.

But Mr Chawla had his mind on other matters. He had been given extended compassionate leave from work, and that meant he would have enough time to see if his secret plans for Sampath – and indeed, for their entire family could work. Absent-mindedly, he said to his daughter: ‘Of what use is that? Really, it is silly to take a class for a such a simple matter.’

This was most unfair of him, for he himself had been the one to lecture her not so very long ago: ‘It is very important for young girls to know something useful, not just sit at home and get married. This is the modern India. You should take a typing course.’

Pinky was not interested in typing, and she certainly did not wish to do anything useful in modern India, but she was well aware of the necessity of putting in an appearance in the bazaar every day. If you did not do so, your place in the hierarchy of things, indeed your very identity in the
social sphere, would be totally obliterated. Now, condemned to a once-a-week trip undertaken to collect supplies, visit the bank, the post office and other such places for which it was necessary to go into town, she realized she would have to make the most of her meagre opportunities, and these trips became the high point of her existence in the orchard.

‘Shall I wear this?’ she would mutter to herself beforehand. ‘No, no, I’ll wear that. No, the colour is wrong. It is too dark for a young girl. Oh, the colour is wrong.’ The entire week before each day in town was spent deciding what to wear and she started on the apparel for the next trip as soon as she got home from the bus stop, fussing with needle and thread, washing soap and starch. She knew she was at a disadvantage with a mother who was incapable of going shopping for clothes, who could not discuss which ensemble should be worn to which event and what trinket matched what pair of slippers. Ammaji’s tastes were a century behind the times and her father and Sampath were of no help either. She was all alone in this attempt to maintain her position in bazaar society. The outfits of choice were washed and hung to dry over lantana bushes, then placed beneath the tin trunks overnight to smooth out as many wrinkles as possible. When she appeared in the glory of her efforts, she looked as if she were about to enter a fashion show. Her dupattas fluttered behind her in diaphanous waves against the landscape and large quantities of costume jewellery shone and glinted about her face, which was powdered pink and white. Really, it was quite inappropriate for a trip to the market. Furthermore, she had developed the peculiar habit of insisting she was being followed. Someone need only brush past her or glance at her as she walked in the street and Pinky would announce when she
got back: ‘All the way home a man followed me, staring with big goggly eyes.’

Mr Chawla worried that she was growing a bit soft in the head, living so far out of Shahkot. No doubt if someone put such an effort into matters of clothing and appearance, she would expect a dramatic response, which she might have to invent if it did not happen of its own accord. This was a very dangerous thing and should be nipped in the bud immediately, he felt. ‘First you dress up as if you are going to enter the Miss India,’ he told her, ‘and then you complain that people are staring at you. Of course people will stare if you make such a spectacle of yourself. But as for following you, it is all in your head. Dressing up like that and feeling so self-conscious! If somebody happens to cough, you are sure he has spent all morning following you.’ He insisted Pinky make all future trips to the bazaar dressed in simple cotton devoid of gold trims and gaudy flowers, with a face as scrubbed and clean – which meant, of course, as plain and ugly – as it could be.

‘You are over-reacting,’ said Pinky. How on earth could she be seen in public looking so drab? How dare he curb her taste in fashion? It was enough to throw her into hysterics, but she controlled herself. ‘Maybe,’ she said, retrenching in a last effort to be allowed her dignity, ‘maybe, after all, nobody has been following me.’

But, deciding she needed to be taught moderation and good sense, her father reiterated his insistence that she dress soberly. In initiation of this new look, she should, he pronounced, accompany her grandmother to buy a new pair of dentures in town, for recently Ammaji had decided her life was incomplete without them.

‘Look at that old Shantiji,’ she would say. ‘She has no difficulty eating. Her family takes good care of her. Every year
they buy her a new pair of dentures. As I said, they take good care of her. Did you see the way she cracked that bone and gobbled down the marrow? Of course, I didn’t have any … Well, lucky for her that her family takes such good care of her.’

If she hinted in this fashion, thought Ammaji, no doubt she would finally get what she wanted. A hint should be indirect, it was true, but it should also be clear or it would go unnoticed and be a useless sort of hint.

‘If you want dentures, then you can have dentures,’ said Mr Chawla in order to keep his mother quiet. Would his family ever leave him alone so he might plot and plan their future in peace? If it were up to them, the new possibilities of Sampath’s fame would remain forever untapped and unexploited. However, of course it was true that he wished all improvements for his family. ‘There is no need for old people to suffer any more,’ he said grandly, as if this substitute for teeth had been his idea in the first place.

Feeling so dowdy she could have cried, Pinky stomped after her grandmother to the bus stop. Unlike her granddaughter, Ammaji was in fine temper. The air outside the town was cool and clean, and reminded her of her childhood. Her grandson was proving to be a great success, just as she had always thought he would be. And she was going to get some dentures.

‘After we get the dentures,’ she said generously to Pinky, ‘we can go and see
Love Story
‘85.’ Surely a good movie would improve Pinky’s spirits. It had been hard to sit in the bus with someone so sour and unwilling to talk. Really, she reflected, Pinky was too headstrong. If she did not get her own way, she sulked and tried to make everybody else feel bad as well. And the trouble with those who did this was
that, in the end, unable to stand their sulking, people gave way to them and they got all sorts of presents and treats. It was the good-natured people who suffered in this world. Nobody paid any attention to them. For example, look at the way she had been ignored about the dentures. Months and months, no, indeed years, had gone by in discomfort and deprivation. However, of course, she was not one to sulk and complain.

Praying she would not be seen by any of her acquaintances or the other girls from the polytechnic, Pinky dragged Ammaji through a dark maze of filthy side streets, insisting on taking the back road into the main bazaar area so she would be seen by as few people as possible, her nerves taut, her eyes on the look-out for potential incidents where she might be shamed before some fancy fashion plate of an acquaintance who didn’t deserve the pleasure of witnessing Pinky’s humiliation.

The denture lady had a whole array of dentures spread out before her on a mat in the corner of the bazaar, between the fish lady and the woman with the plastic buckets. Undeterred by the smell of fish, Ammaji squatted down on the mat and tried them all on. One too big, others too small … Finally there was one that seemed somewhat to fit.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the denture woman, ‘it will be fine. It is better that they are a little loose than a little tight.’

Ammaji donned the new gadget, moving and distorting her lips over the unfamiliar expanse of plastic, smacking her two new rows of teeth against each other appreciatively.