Free Those Pricey Thakur Girls by Anuja Chauhan Page A

days saying somebody had died and she had to attend the funeral. And you know what she did there?’
    Mrs Mamta doesn’t want to know. ‘What?’ she asks in her most discouraging voice.
    Chachiji leans in, her eyes glinting. ‘She sat in the front row when they were burning the dead body. She cried loudly and beat her breast – all dikhawa, of course! And then, when nobody was watching, she put her hand into the embers and scooped up a handful of the dead woman’s ashes.’
    ‘Why?’ Mrs Mamta asks, intrigued in spite of herself.
    ‘She put them into an empty Postman-oil-ka-tin and brought them to Delhi, mixed them with the dalia I take every morning, and made me eat them.’
    ‘ Why? ’ Mrs Mamta asks, truly mystified now.
    ‘Arrey, to turn me into a cannibal! Because the spirits of dead people can enter cannibals, na. Everybody knows that. She’s trying to drive me mad.’
    Mrs Mamta puts down the pretty cross-stitch pansies she is embroidering and looks at her sister-in-law in fascination.
    ‘ How do you know she’s doing this, Bhudevi?’
    Chachiji’s voice drops to an impressive whisper. ‘Because our mother-in-law told me. Today only.’
    There is a small problem with this statement. Mrs Mamta articulates it.
    ‘But our mother-in-law is dead.’
    Chachiji shoots a distinctly irate look at her sister-in-law. ‘Didn’t you hear a word I said? I’ve been turned into a cannibal against my will and now my dead mother-in-law gets into my body and talks to me.’
    ‘But,’ Mrs Mamta perseveres, trying to stay calm and reasonable, ‘why would the Hot Dulari do that? What would she get out of turning you into an, uh, medium?’
    ‘She’s trying to drive me crazy,’ Chachiji replies simply. ‘That’s her plan. She wants me packed off to an asylum so she can live in sin, khullam-khulla, sabke samne, in Number 13 with AN.’
    Mrs Mamta cannot for the life of her imagine why anybody would want to live with her smiley, slimy brother-in-law. But AN has never lacked admirers. Chachiji, for all her pugnacity, is pathetically smitten with him. And so, clearly, is the Hot Dulari.
    ‘It’s the sleazy Thakur charm,’ the Judge assures Mrs Mamta whenever she brings up this puzzling point. ‘I missed out on it but AN has it in spadefuls – he’s the spitting image of our father.’
    Mrs Mamta sniffs. She does not particularly approve of her late father-in-law. Pushkar Narayan Thakur had been a handsome, profligate hellraiser, descended from a long line of horny Hailey Road Thakurs. The family had at one time owned almost half the houses on Hailey Road, built on barren land bequeathed to them by the later Mughals for what was vaguely termed ‘services to the empire’. Nobody talks about what exactly these ‘services’ were, but Mrs Mamta suspects they involved gambling, extortion, contract killings and some high-level pimping. Old Pushkar Narayan was certainly guilty of all these vices – he had inherited five houses on Hailey Road and shrunk them down to two over fifty years of debauchery and sloth. He left one to each of his boys and proceeded to die noisily and painfully of liver cirrhosis, three months after his long-suffering wife tumbled to her death while gathering clothes from the terrace of Number 13 during a sudden hailstorm.
    ‘But where will she live in sin with AN?’ Mrs Mamta asks Chachiji now. ‘Number 13 has just been sold!’
    This is true enough. Ashok Narayan has run through his inheritance at a rate that would have warmed the cockles of his dissolute father’s heart and the house has had to be sold in order to pay off the debts. All Ashok will retain is one ground-floor flat in the block of residential flats that is to come up in its stead.
    ‘That all I don’t know,’ Chachiji says crossly. ‘I just know what the Pushkarni told me when she ghussoed in my body. I was just looking at that photu of hers, you know the one where she is smiling, holding AN in her arms, when phuttt !