Free B006NZAQXW EBOK by Kiran Desai Page B

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 aftersleepless 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