Free Afternoon Raag by Amit Chaudhuri Page A

husband loved and cared for like their own children. And they forever remained children, even when they had become old, scuffling underneath the dining-table and barking their hearts out at the wall-lizard. In other ways they were shockingly dog-like; for the mother pekinese and her son, Chitrakaki once related lovingly, had become husband and wife, and then had had puppies. Each time, during those thirty years, when a bitch had puppies, Chitrakaki witnessed their blind, recumbent birth, and then gave them away.
    She loved my mother’s cooking. Whistling (she had learnt how to whistle in England, where both she and her husband had met my father as a penniless student), she would loiter carelessly in the kitchen, looking askance as my mother gave the cook instructions, vainly, and stealthily, trying to sniff out the recipe. When she tried it at home, however, it was never, never right. She was convinced my mother had cruelly held back something, a seemingly unimportant but crucial ingredient she had quite premeditatedly forgottento tell her. My mother made things from peelings, fish-heads, dried fish. It was East Bengali cuisine, with its origins in villages on drought- and flood-hit riversides, a poor man’s diet, perfected by people who could not afford to throw away even the skin of a white-gourd or the head of a fish, transformed into food by adding oil and garlic and chilli paste and poppy seed and common salt.
    The people who really belonged to our lane were those who were on its margins—servants, sweepers, watchmen, hawkers of vegetable and fish who sent their cries out to the balconies and went with their baskets from door to door, even the beggars who, like the tradesmen, worked on a repeated route within a definite area. There was a Christian woman who, wearing the same tattered white dress, stood outside the building gates every week and sang a tuneless song in disjointed English. English was spoken quite naturally here by the poor, many of whom were Christians, and said their prayers in the language.
    Gradually, the area changed. New buildings, like ours, came up where the oldest cottages usedto be, concrete structures with sequences of black holes that would become flats in which people and children would live, the rooms, kitchens, and bathrooms still unrecognizable, each building looking at this stage like a huge bird-house. The labourers sat and chipped away at the large rocks with their chisels, while their women-folk, with saris tucked around their knees, bent down and scooped tiny black stones into a metal plate; some of them sat apart, nursing babies, the breast hidden by the child’s head, one end of the sari pulled forward, held aloft, and used as a kind of curtain to an imaginary room. The stray dogs of the lane were friendly with the children, who would pummel them fearlessly with tiny fists, or race them down the lane, while the dogs took such pestering wisely and accommodatingly. This floating community, infants and all, disappeared every year, and then they, or another very like them, reappeared on another site. Often, they would live in improvised shelters they had built themselves. From the rear-balcony of our flat, one could see a building coming up in an adjoining space, where our compoundhad ended with a wall. On this side of our house, clothes were left to dry on the balcony, and there were garages downstairs in which tenants’ cars were kept. The atmosphere here was in contrast to that of the front side, where cars and people kept coming in.
    At different points of time in those three years, a maidservant and a cook who worked in our flat began to visit the rear-balcony in the afternoons with an aimless look in their eyes. Both had made a long-distance, incommunicado relationship of looks and gestures with someone on the building site. There was some doubt about this at first, but on one definitive occasion, my parents were told by an informer—perhaps the