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By Root 19179 0

to the house, and these visits gave the sisters a sweet revenge. They treated Shekhar with the respect due to him, but they made their contempt for Dorothy plain. ‘I am sorry,’ Chinta said to her one Sunday. ‘I cannot understand you. I only speak Spanish.’ Dorothy had not spoken Spanish since Owad’s arrival and the sisters felt that they were at last making her boil down. But their behaviour had an unexpected result. For Owad, taking his cue from the sisters, spoke rallyingly to Dorothy; she responded with rough good humour and soon a familiarity grew up between them; and one Sunday, to the dismay of the sisters, Dorothy came with her cousin, a handsome young woman who had graduated from McGill University and had all the elegance of the Indian girl from South Trinidad. When they had gone Owad calmed the sisters’ fears by deriding the girl’s Canadian degree, her slight Canadian accent and her musical skills. ‘She went all the way to Canada to learn to play the violin,’ he said. ‘I hope she doesn’t want to play to me. I’ll break the bow on her parents’ heads. People starving, not getting enough to eat in Trinidad, and she playing the violin in Canada!’

And though he spent more and more time with his friends and colleagues and often went south to Shekhar’s, and though when his friends called the house had to be silent and the sisters and the readers and learners hidden, the sisters continued to feel safe. For after every journey, every meeting, Owad related his adventures to them. His appetite for talk was insatiable, his dramatic gifts never failed, and the comments he made on the people he had met were invariably scathing.

The sisters now sought audience with him singly or in small groups. They came to the house, waited up for him, and when he returned they fell to talking, under the house, so as not to disturb Mrs Tulsi’s sleep. In time each sister felt she had a special hold on him; and having received his confidences, offered hers. At first the sisters spoke of their financial difficulties. But Owad was unwilling to anticipate the revolution. Then the sisters complained. They complained about the teachers who were keeping their children back at school; they complained about Dorothy, about Shekhar, about their husbands; they complained about absent sisters. Every scandal was gone over, every petty dispute, every resentment. And Owad listened. The children listened as well, kept awake by the sisters’ bumbling and their frequent hawking and spitting (a sign of intimacy: the warmer the feeling, the noisier the hawk, the longer the period of speaking through the spittle). In the morning the sisters who had talked late into the night were brisk and exceptionally friendly towards the people they had criticized, exceptionally proprietary towards Owad.

The house was always full of sisters on Sunday, when there was communal cooking. Sometimes Shekhar came by himself and then before lunch there were discussions between the brothers and Mrs Tulsi. The sisters did not feel threatened by these discussions as they had done when Shekhar and Dorothy and Mrs Tulsi talked. They did not feel excluded. For, with Owad there, these discussions were like the old Hanuman House family councils. So the sisters cooked below the house and sang and were gay. They were even anxious to exaggerate the difference between their brothers and themselves. It was as if by doing so they paid their brothers a correct reverence, a reverence which comforted and protected the sisters by assigning them a place again. They spoke no Hindi, used the grossest English dialect and the coarsest expressions and vied with one another in doing menial jobs and getting themselves dirty. In this way they sealed the family bond for the day.

It was the custom on these Sunday mornings, after the discussions and before lunch, which came before the trip to the sea, for the men to play bridge.

And on this morning Shekhar, despite Anand’s pleas for sophistication, showed his disrelish of Owad’s talk about the extermination of capitalists