Free Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? by Anita Rau Badami

Bibi-ji?” Menon laughed. He shared with Balu a tendency to rotate his head when he spoke, in that same indeterminate movement, which led Bibi-ji to believe that he too was a South Indian, a breed as foreign to her as the goras, or Mrs. Wu, or Majid the barber. “Then how about free chai and samosas today?” Menon grinned, his moustache moving upwards and touching the tips of his flaring nostrils.
    “Why not?” Bibi-ji said, surprising herself by her sudden generosity. Later, when she went over the conversation, she would add this impulsive act to the list of Good Deeds that were earning her a golden star from the Ooper-Wallah, or the Upper-Wallah, as Pa-ji preferred to call him. The One Up There, God, Allah, Krishna, whoever, would be pleased with her. “Now about our house, Bhat-ji. Are you interested?”
    “I would like to see it first,” Balu said. “I am definitely looking for a place, but my wife, Leela, can be a little fussy, you know. She and the children are arriving in a month, so I don’t have much time to look around. Not that she wants a palace, nothing like that, but still itshould be a comfortable size. At a reasonable rent, of course. But before I say anything, what I mean is—”
    “I understand,” Bibi-ji interrupted. “I will call Pa-ji, and you can go and see the house after you have had your chai and samosas.”
    By the time Balu was done with tea, Pa-ji had arrived at the café to help with the rush of customers. So it was Bibi-ji who took Balu to see the home in which he would live for the next several years. After some haggling over the rent, which Bibi-ji reduced just a bit more (yet another brownie point from God), Balu signed the lease for the two-bedroom house with the oversized couches and bright floral curtains. He would move in the following Saturday, a few weeks before Leela and their children, Preethi and Arjun, arrived.
    For years after, Bibi-ji would thank her stars that she had followed her more generous instincts. She would look back to the moment when she had offered the house to Balu Bhat, and she would find herself grateful to The One Up There. But that was before events in distant India poisoned her life, before bitter anger wiped out the gratitude and her friends became her enemies.
    “Your wife will be happy with your choice, I hope, Bhat-ji,” she said as she handed Balu the keys. She wondered what kind of woman Leela Bhat was. Pretty? Gentle? Bossy and opinionated, like Dr. Majumdar’s wife, whom she had only met twice and disliked thoroughly?
    “Yes, I hope so too,” Balu replied. He smiled and held up his hand with fingers crossed. “I very much hope so.”

P ART T WO

L EELA

FIVE
H ALF-AND -H ALF

Bangalore
1946
    T here were those who called Leela Bhat a snob, a difficult woman, with a too great sense of her worth in the world. Her cousins Narayana and Vishnu and their spouses were among the people who portrayed her thus. It could be argued that their animosity had deep roots, extending to the time when they were children growing up together in their ancestral home in Balepur, which had now been gobbled up by and assimilated into the super-high-tech city of Bangalore. It could also be argued, as Leela did, that people who said she was difficult and a snob were just plain envious.
    To be fair to Leela, it must be acknowledged that her cousins, in particular, could not help feeling peevedwhenever they saw her sharp, wheat-complexioned face, with its peppering of dark freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks, her grey eyes and her small, bustling person always dressed so well—whether in starched cotton saris, light printed silk ones or the Canjeevarams heavy with gold embroidery, as the occasion demanded—ordering, bossing, arguing, correcting and generally queening it around as Mrs. Bhat, the wife of Balachandra Bhat, daughter-in-law (the only one) of the famous Gundoor Bhats. They found it difficult to forget that she had once been Leela Shastri,