Free THE IMMIGRANT by Manju Kapur Page B

nature of hopes that refused to die Mr Batra came out and sat next to her.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘Read it.’
    The mother quickly grabbed the sheet that hung from Nina’s hand. The neat, blue, evenly spaced handwriting met with her approval. Respectability and decency shone through every careful statement about his life in Canada. Her instinct after the sister’s visit was vindicated.
    ‘It’s a nice letter, no?’ she asked her daughter, whose standards were not her own.
    ‘I suppose.’
    ‘Then?’
    ‘Why is he looking to India for a wife?’
    ‘He probably wants one of his own kind. That’s not hard to understand. Many do it.’
    ‘True.’
    ‘So why criticise him?’
    ‘I am not criticising him. I am just wondering.’
    ‘When do you think you will write back?’
    ‘I’ll see.’
    ‘Marriage is a question of luck.’
    If luck determined relationships so far she had not been lucky. Not with that creep who could talk of books so well, who was witty, who loved the same songs she did and who had made her pay for every moment of happiness with a bucket of tears. No, she had definitely not been lucky with him.
    Nina stared at the cars that streamed across the skyline. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I will reply. My life does not have so many opportunities that I should ignore this one.’
    Now it was the mother’s turn to stare mournfully at the auto studded horizon.
    The letter was taken to college the next day. It lay among the pages of Paradise Lost Book I all morning. Nina’s intention had been to show it to Zenobia, but when the moment came she hesitated. Nothing might come of the correspondence she temporised uneasily, knowing this was no reason to withhold confidences. Instead, she dismissed her tutorial early, came back to an empty department room, took the letter out and examined it. The flowers, the handwriting, the even lines. Wasn’t the fact of the letter more significant than its actual contents? She might have thought this yesterday, if her mother had not darted in with her plucking hands and fearful heart. She who had been so scarred by the death of her father was now looking at the letter of a man who had been doubly traumatised. Her thoughts began to flow and she started a reply in her head. Dear Ananda, I was so pleased to get your letter. I am sitting in the department room of my college. It is hot and the electricity has gone. Do you remember such times? etc, etc. Tomorrow she would bring her nice letter pad to college. It was not easy to think at home.
    Ananda responded immediately. His answer included details of Gary and Sue, his paying guest arrangement, the money he was engaged in saving. Flatteringly he wanted to know more about her. His sister used to tell them so much about Miranda House—was all of it true?
    How should she tell him, thought Nina, what living in India was like? Even in academia the effects of the present regime were felt. A peon of their college had recently been killed. Such murders were no longer isolated. For the past few months the staff had heard rumours, based on accounts by eyewitnesses, of the way in which selected bastis were being razed to make a Delhi Beautiful.
    The poor are so stubborn. They do not want to be compensated by land miles away in outlying areas, do not want relocation that would mean hours and hours, rupees and rupees spent in commuting to their sources of livelihood, their pavement shops, their menial transient jobs. They do not want to leave neighbourhoods replete with memories of fathers and grandfathers.
    So they have to be taught by force. Police firing and bulldozers, some deaths, some arrests, some curfews and terror, all this do the job.
    The peon’s extended family came to college begging for help, they were poor people, they wanted relief, some redress of wrongs, their voices heard, their woes considered; the tears of the poor, never ceasing, always flowing.
    Though the staff felt bad, they could do nothing. A year ago they would