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She must not be lame. She must walk a few steps, delicately, feet small beneath her sari. She must not stride or kick up her legs like a horse. She must sit quietly, with knees together. She should talk just a little to show she can, but she should not talk too much. She should say just one word, or maybe two after she has been coaxed and begged several times: ‘Just a few sentences. Just one sentence.’ Her mother should urge: ‘Eat something. Eat a laddoo. My daughter made these with her own hands.’ And these laddoos must not be recognizable as coming from the sweetmeat shop down the road. The embroidery on the cushion covers the prospective in-laws lean against, and the paintings on the walls opposite, should also be the work of her own hands. They should be colour-coordinated, with designs of fruit and flowers.

She should not be fat. She should be pleasantly plump, with large hips and breasts but a small waist. Though generous and good-tempered, this girl should be frugal and not the sort who would squander the family’s wealth. A girl who, though quiet, would be able to shout down the prices of vegetables and haggle with the shopkeepers and spot all their dirty tricks and expose them. Talk of husband and children should so overcome her with shyness and embarrassment that she should hide her face, pink as a rosebud in the fold of her sari.

Then, if she has fulfilled all the requirements for a sound character and impressive accomplishments, if her parents have agreed to meet all the necessary financial contributions, if the fortune tellers have decided the stars are lucky and the planets are compatible, everyone can laugh with relief and tilt her face up by the chin and say she is exactly what they have been looking for, that she will be a daughter to their household. This, after all, is the boy’s family. They’re entitled to their sense of pride.

But the family could find only one prospective daughter-in-law. She was scrawny and dark. ‘Like a crow,’ said Kulfi and Ammaji indignantly when the first photograph was shown to them by Lakshmiji, who was acting as marriage broker. ‘You are trying to marry poor Sampath to a crow.’

‘He is lucky to find anyone at all,’ said Mr Chawla, who had given up all hope of motor scooters and wedding parties at the Hans Raj Hotel.

The girl arrived along with her family on the public bus. Apart from her family, the bus was full of singing ladies and gentlemen, pilgrims returning from a trip to the Krishna temple in a neighbouring town. The Chawlas watched as the bus veered off the road like a crazy beetle and moved towards them in a cloud of dust.

The bus driver had obligingly offered to drop off the family right at Sampath’s orchard. A bride-to-be should not have to walk and grow dusty and be shown to disadvantage, he said sympathetically. He himself had a daughter to marry. And: ‘Yes, yes, let’s take them directly to the boy,’ chorused the other passengers, pausing to make this decision before resuming their singing. They clapped their hands to keep the song moving along; their hair flew; they swayed from side to side, partly for the sake of rhythm,
partly because of the way the bus leapt and shook through potholes and bumps. They closed their eyes and let their voices rise and flutter from the bus to the Chawlas waiting under Sampath’s tree. ‘Ten ways to cook rice,’ they sang, ‘seventeen flowering trees in the forest, twenty hermits at my table. But those who know say you take forms beyond number. O Lord, teach me the way of infinite marvel.’

The air rushed up through the cracks in the bus, up their saris and trousers, so that a pleasant breeze circulated around their legs. Everybody looked very puffed up, wobbling as if some large force inside them were trying to break free.

Despite the driver’s kindness and the attention she had received with the help of a handkerchief, a little spit and a large amount of talcum powder, the girl descended from the bus looking extremely dusty. The pilgrims, curious about what might happen during this unusual encounter between prospective marriage partners, tumbled out of the bus as well, in a messy and chaotic heap. They needed a break for lunch anyway, and a little private time behind some foliage. Holding the prospective bride before them like a gift, the group moved towards the guava tree. Sampath had always had a soft spot for the lady on the label of the coconut hair-oil bottle. He had spent rather a large amount of time in consideration of her mysterious smile upon the bathroom shelf. While squatting upon the mildewed wooden platform taking his bucket baths, he had conducted a series of imagined encounters with her, complete with imagined conversations and imagined quarrels and reconciliations. She would meet him wreathed in the scent of the oil, with a smile as white as the gleaming inside of a coconut. A braid of hair had travelled downwards from the top of the coconut lady’s head and followed
the undulations of the bottle. Sampath looked down at the veiled woman standing underneath his tree and felt hot and horrified.

‘Please come down and be introduced. You have sat in the tree long enough,’ said Mr Chawla.

Sampath thought he might faint.

‘Climb up, daughter,’ the girl’s father urged her. ‘Climb up. Come on, one step. Just a step.’

The devotees raised the girl’s rigid, unwilling form into the tree. ‘Up,’ they urged, and slowly she began to climb. She was encased in layers of shiny material, like a large, expensive toffee. The cloth billowed about her, making her look absurdly stout. Her gold slippers slipped with every step. Her sari was pulled over her head and she held the edge of it between her teeth so as to keep as much of her face modestly covered as possible. It seemed an eternity before she neared Sampath. It was clear that this girl would not take well to life in a tree. She paused and looked back down for further directions. Nobody knew quite what to expect, or how she should proceed. Even Mr Chawla was at a loss as to what should happen next.

‘Touch his feet,’ someone finally shouted in a moment of inspiration.

‘Yes, touch his feet,’ the rest of the pilgrims cried, and, extending a single timid finger, like a snail peeping from its shell, she gingerly poked at Sampath’s toe. Her finger was as cold as ice and moist. Sampath leapt up in horror. In an equal state of distress, the girl let out a faint cry. Losing her balance and her gold slippers, she tumbled indecorously towards the ground, accompanied by the more robust cries of the pilgrims and her family, who rushed at her with arms outstretched. But they failed to catch her as she fell and she landed with a dull thump upon the ground.

The signs for marriage were not auspicious.

The devotees propped her up against a tree and fanned her with a leafy branch.

‘What am I to do with this boy?’ Mr Chawla threw his hands up in the air. ‘Tell me what I should do? The best education. A job. A wife. The world served to him on a platter, but, oh no, none of it is good enough for him. Mister here must run and sit in a tree. He is not in the least bit thankful for all that has been done for him.’

The girl began to sneeze in tiny mouse-like squeals.

‘Stop fanning her with that dirty branch,’ someone shouted. ‘All the dust must have gone up her nose.’

‘Dust or no dust, it is yet one more inauspicious sign,’ said another onlooker.

Pinky felt terribly scornful of this third-rate woman who had responded to this important moment by sneezing and whimpering. She gave her a good pinch from behind, hoping to see her jump, but the girl continued to squeak and sniffle. Ammaji ran up with a tin can full of water and emptied it over her just in case the sun had become too strong for her to take. The talcum powder ran in a milky river down her face.

‘What can I do?’ Mr Chawla repeated. ‘What am I to do with this boy?’ He was sweating despite the pleasant breeze that wafted about them, laden with the scent of earth and burgeoning vegetation.

He himself had been his son’s age when he was married. Kulfi had been even younger, so alarming her family with her weird ways, they were worried that if her marriage were delayed any longer, she would be left on their hands for ever, her sanity dissipating, the sense scattering from her like seeds from a poppy pod. They had spent night after
sleepless night gathered at the window to watch as she wandered up and down in the garden, having taken suddenly, after her twentieth birthday, to sleepwalking.

Her father watched pale in his pyjamas; the aunties shook in their petticoats. The months had gone by with no sign of this behaviour abating. The moon grew big, then delicate – a hair’s strand, then once more to fullness. Kulfi walked serenely by the bottle-brush trees, barefoot, with the gait of a queen; asleep, but eating slices of melon, spitting out seeds that showered like raindrops among the bushes. In the mornings they discovered apple cores and walnut shells under her bed, sticky trails leading from the kitchen pots straight into her room. In her pockets they found bits of cinnamon and asafoetida. In her hair, little twigs and often a crushed night beetle. But she woke refreshed, with no recollection of her nightly rambles, her midnight feasting, insisting she had slept soundly when her family, grey and dizzy from lack of sleep, questioned her over the morning tea. In the garden watermelons grew in a tangle they hacked at in vain.

Clearly she was going mad. Yes, there it was – the eccentricity that had plagued her mother’s side of the family for generations bubbling up yet again, just when they hoped the culprit genes had finally run into some dead end and been laid to rest. Again and again it had surprised them, appearing haphazardly in the most stable of uncles, the newest of babies. There had been a grandfather who loved his chickens so passionately he insisted on sleeping in the coop at night; an aunt who announced she was the last Maharaja of Oudh just when it had been decided that the family seemed sane at last; a child that spoke only its own garbled language …

When it became apparent that Kulfi too had inherited
this familial strain of lunacy, her father knew he had not a moment to lose. And before the news of her oddity was carried to the bazaar by the washerman or the bottle and jar man or any visitors who might happen to see or overhear anything suspicious, he learned that widowed Ammaji in the far-off town of Shahkot was looking for a match for her son; and even though they were from a family of a much lower class, he offered them a dowry they could not refuse.

But even so!

‘That crazy family!’ Mr Chawla had exclaimed. ‘Oh no. Absolutely not. I am not going to get married to their daughter. I am staying well away from that sort of thing, thank you very much.’

But Ammaji clucked her tongue. For some reason she had taken a liking to the girl, and who on earth would turn down a big sum of money like the one they had been offered? It would allow them to clear all their generation’s debts and buy a refrigerator. ‘Don’t be so unreasonable,’ she said. ‘She appears normal, even if she is a little bit shy.’

‘With these things, there is no knowing,’ said Mr Chawla. ‘In fact, it is the quiet ones you have to watch out for.’

But although he did not admit it out loud, he too had been smitten by Kulfi’s flower beauty, her slender frame, her impossible delicacy so different from the robustness of the neighbourhood girls with their loud laughter, their round hips, their sly nudging and winking. And in a few months’ time Kulfi moved from her ancestral home, which was big and rambling, even if the roofs leaked and the paint had peeled away, to the Chawlas’ tiny rooms in the tumbledown streets of Shahkot. And over time Mr Chawla had developed a sort of exasperated affection for his wife, even when it became apparent that she was not the normal
daughter of a crazy family as Ammaji had conjectured, but the crazy daughter of a crazy family as he himself had surmised. He was almost always right. With a wife like this, and two children to look after and manage, Mr Chawla grew more and more firmly established in his role as head of the family, and as this fitted his own idea of the way he ought to live, it gave him secret satisfaction despite all his complaining.

He was the head of a family and he liked it that way.

But oh! What good was it to be the head of a family when you had a son who ran and sat in a tree? Who slipped from beneath your fingers and shamed you?

‘What am I do?’ he demanded of the devotees still milling about, to show them it was not for lack of effort and concern on his behalf that Sampath had ended up in such a pitiful state. He hit his forehead with the flat of his palm, for drama has a way of overriding the embarrassment of a situation that should be privately experienced.

The ladies and gentlemen from the bus felt a little sorry for him. ‘Yes, yes, how shameful,’ they muttered. ‘And coming from a decent family and all. Clearly the boy has been derailed.’

They focused on Sampath, watching to see how his father’s distress would affect him. Surely any son, even this one, would respond to such a moving show of emotion.

Sensitive to the atmosphere of expectation beneath him, Sampath looked into the upturned eyes of the devotees. He thought of his old school and the post office and entire roomfuls of people awaiting the answer to questions he had often not even heard. He wondered how it could be that he had never felt comfortable among people. Here he was alone, caught up in the enigmatic rituals of another
species. ‘Go on with your own lives,’ he wanted to shout. ‘Go on, go on. Leave me to mine.’

But, of course, he could not say any such thing. In desperation he looked around him. Among the crowd of faces down below, he recognized that of Mr Singh, the brother-in-law of a neighbour in Shahkot. Mr Singh, whose letters he had sometimes read in idle moments in the post office. As if in a frantic plea for help, he shouted: ‘Mr Singhji.’

He remembered one particular letter sent by him to his father.

‘Is your jewellery still safely buried beneath the tulsi plant?’

Mr Singh turned pale. ‘How do you know about my circumstances?’ he asked.

Sampath then caught sight of Mrs Chopra. ‘How is that lump in your throat that travels up and down your windpipe, whispering threats and almost bursting right out of your chest?’

‘Hai,’ she gasped. ‘Who told you?’

Encouraged now by his success, Sampath’s face was brightening a little. He jabbed his finger at a bald-headed man in the crowd and said: ‘And you, sir, that secret oil you got from the doctor in Side Gully. Clearly it is not working. Try a good massage with mustard oil and your hair will sprout as thick and as plentiful as grass in the Cherrapunjee rain.’