Free The Smoke is Rising by Mahesh Rao Page A

mother weighed heavily on the rooms in the small house.The garlanded photograph in the sitting room showed a skeletal woman who looked like she had just sat on a pin. Her love for frogs was apparent in the cabinet, which also contained spindly trophies from some forgotten sports day, an enigmatic award from the Indian Red Cross, a few pairs of castanets and a soapstone elephant with one eye. In the spare room a wheelchair she had once used now housed a couple of badminton rackets and a vase filled with plastic flowers. Her sewing machine still glowered in the master bedroom, her name painted across the base in a five-year-old’s wobbly hand.
    Mother-in-law or no mother-in-law, this was Mala’s home now, although late at night a wave of bewilderment would still occasionally wash over her. What peculiar devices of hazard had led to her ending up in this house, with its low, streaky ceilings, married to a man twelve years older than her, dusting the ceramic frogs of a woman who had drowned a decade ago in the Alaknanda River?
    Mala shut the cabinet doors, folded the duster into a tiny square and buried it in her lap as she sat down on the sofa. She turned the television on and had to sit through the last few minutes of a quiz show before the melancholy strains of the theme tune to her favourite soap came drifting out. The show was set in a mansion in Delhi, inhabited by a prominent family of industrialists. The patriarch of the family was in a contemplative stage of his life. The money had been made; now the legacy had to be moulded. His wife, the third in an imperious progression, had recently come under the influence of a shady
swami
, a god-man with a penchant for travel by private jet. The state of her rapidly unravelling psyche formed one of the soap’s more prominent subplots.
    The patriarch’s three sons all lived in the same mansion, along with their glamorous wives. The eldest son was a ruthless workaholic who managed to carve out a little time to conduct a rather obvious affair with his secretary. His wife symbolised the soul ofthe programme and was often shown in heart-rending close-ups, trying to make sense of the turbulent world around her. Her devotion to her family was matched only by her apparent inability to recognise infidelity in her husband, a man addicted to surreptitious text messaging and returning home freshly showered in the middle of the night.
    The second son had not been endowed with a personality and was therefore reduced to looking craven and forlorn in various quarters of the large garden. His wife, on the other hand, tended to fizz and pop with storylines. The daughter of a powerful politician, she ran a major fashion house – primarily, it seemed, by making her senior employees sob in public. Her adroit manoeuvring had seen a rival designer arrested on terrorism charges weeks before the launch of the summer ready-to-wear collections. Now she found herself faking a pregnancy in order to achieve some as yet unrevealed ambition.
    The third son ran a modelling agency, which allowed him to troop through the mansion with a string of coltish nymphs in full view of his epileptic wife. The actor who played this character seemed to have been cast mainly on account of his lustrous hair and the programme makers endeavoured to show it always in the best possible light. This son’s best friend was an art gallery owner who spent much of his time appraising paintings in Paris and New York. There were strong indications that he was developing an unhealthy interest in the wife of the eldest son. As the soul of the programme, it was beyond dispute that she would not be permitted to engage in any unprincipled frolicking. There were, however, signs that she was responding in her own way to some amorous stirrings, and her struggle to contain her restiveness would no doubt take the show through the summer months and into the rainy season.

CHAPTER THREE
    Weight loss was big business in Mysore and not simply as a