Free The Temple-goers by Aatish Taseer Page A

terrace, I noticed that the potted frangipani had died.

7
    When I came back to Jorbagh, Sanyogita was in the drawing room. She wore her faded T-shirt and tattered tracksuit bottoms. Her legs were up on the sofa and the room was filled with pools of lamplight. They reached to the far corners of the high ceilings and emphasized the evening darkness. Sanyogita’s small, squat toes gnawed the edge of the sofa. She had her computer in her lap and was tapping away thoughtfully.
    ‘Baby!’ she said when I came in. She observed me carefully and seemed to sense something strange in my manner, smelt something perhaps, but said nothing directly. ‘Where have you been? I must have tried you half a dozen times.’
    ‘I’m sorry, I ran into my grandmother. I must have left the phone upstairs. What are you doing?’
    ‘Oh, nothing.’ She smiled. ‘ Vanity Fair has an annual world bazaar issue and I know this girl who’s doing it. She wants me to handle India. I may get a byline.’
    ‘That’s great. Do you want to have a bath?’
    ‘Yes! It’s just what they need,’ she said, wiggling her toes.
    ‘They?’
    ‘Baby, them!’ She gestured to her toes; they wiggled happily.
    We had an ongoing joke where we ascribed human characteristics to her toes.
    ‘Oh, them!’
    ‘Yes, they would hate to be left out!’ They fanned from side to side as if they were about to get up and follow me into the bathroom.
    ‘OK, but come quickly.’
    ‘Baby, don’t make it too hot.’
    I walked towards Sanyogita’s room, past my study with its red carpet and the garden terrace with its dahlias. There was no moon and the night filled the little terrace. I was about to enter Sanyogita’s room when, from the light of a naked bulb, I made out the shape of a potted frangipani. From where I stood, its leaves seemed to droop and its trunk and branches had an unhealthy, pulpy texture. I pushed open the door to the terrace to take a better look.
    Even before my eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness I could see that the tree was dead. Its trunk and branches had begun to soften and their ends were shrivelled. The large broad leaves hung on like the open eyes of a corpse. We hadn’t planted the garden ourselves; we had inherited it. And the death of the slim-limbed frangipani only weeks before it was meant to flower gave me a terrible intimation of the whole garden dying on our watch.
    In the time between leaving the terrace and opening the bath taps, I came to blame Sanyogita for the tree’s death. It was not because she was in charge of the garden – I was – but because I had noticed and I knew she never would have. I worked myself into thinking that her not noticing was an aspect of a deeper complacency: how almost two years after finishing college she had no more idea of what she wanted to do than when she graduated; how she preferred cities like London and New York, with their cinemas, restaurants and Sunday papers, to all that India had to offer; how she was always late for everything; and how she now sat in her drawing room, wasting her time doing someone else’s work.
    I got into the bath, full of irrational rage. I knew that Sanyogita, in her mulish way, would carry on doing her work till the bath went cold. But I didn’t want to call her because I enjoyed letting my anger grow. The water was hot and burned my skin. I sat there until it became tepid and seemed to cling to me. I felt a sick excitement when Sanyogita came in at last. I said nothing about the bath’s temperature. I just lay there looking up at the saucer-shaped ceiling light.
    When Sanyogita took off her clothes, I watched her. I saw her pale skin, her big bones, the caterpillar scar that ran across her hip from the skiing accident and her low-slung breasts. She saw me looking at them and became shy about the way her nipples had expanded. She dipped her hand into the bath so that she could harden them. It was then that her frank smile turned to confusion. Why was I lying