Free Happy Birthday!: And Other Stories by Meghna Pant Page B

management college and will be back after dinner. I take in this information with surprise, since Dipti has made no effort to contact her old friends during her previous visits, citing lack of time as a problem even as she wilted away at home, fanning herself during the daily electric outages. She leaves Choti with me. After my initial hesitation, I’m glad, since this is the first time that I have been alone with my granddaughter.
    Choti tells me that this time her mother has let her bring all her toys and games from America. She is at that wonderful age where she can amuse and be amused, adding colour to the games of Uno, Snakes & Ladders, and Monopoly that we play together. I let myself relax in her imaginary world. The maid loiters around, giggles at Choti’s broken Hindi, goads Choti with tips for winning, takes her to the bathroom, insists on being called Kaki—older sister. I’ve never had to manage a maid before, so I don’t know whether I’m being lax or strict with her, but each of us is laughing as though we’ve never laughed before and it isn’t fair to splinter such rare perfection. I think of telling the maid—whose name it’s too late to ask but whom I also begin to call Kaki—to make dinner, but she’s teaching Choti some Hindi words. So I cook khichdi for the three of us, and though Choti titters that it looks like puke, she eats it anyway. Her day’s energy spent, Choti leans against me as we watch a cartoon about a yellow sponge that wears pants, which she says is her favourite.
    Dipti comes back an hour later with the city’s grime and pollution settled over her skin. She flings her purse on the dining table as she used to while growing up, and Choti runs up to her—the way in which Sheila often did—as if she hasn’t seen Dipti in weeks, as if the time that the two of us spent together was a mirage.
    Dipti sits down and pulls Choti into her lap. Choti buries her face in Dipti’s neck, while Dipti rocks her gently, cooing some language that only these two understand. I ask my daughter if she’s eaten and she says ‘Too much,’ like it’s an inside joke. Then she takes Choti to their room and doesn’t come back outside. I put Choti’s things aside and retire to my room.
    In the darkness I realize that Dipti hadn’t mentioned facing trouble finding her way around Mumbai, a city whose daily transformations leave me confused. From an early age there’s been no hesitation in Dipti, only a forthright boldness, an unnerving confidence. Every time I sent her out into the world—to the elite school with her privileged friends she never invited home, to the grocery store from where she returned with free milk sachets—she came back with the same body but a new soul, morphed by forces she didn’t reveal to me, as if I was undeserving of it. By the time she became a teenager, she couldn’t curtail her raw distaste of me, so I tried—as parents do—to inculcate in her my sense of self, forged in the rows of unkempt brown files at my income-tax office in Churchgate and my home with its dilapidated walls. But Dipti shrugged me aside. Ultimately it was Sheila, armed with the unending empathy and unyielding patience of a mother, who broke through Dipti’s guileless ego and made herself privy to Dipti’s world, which we otherwise could not have imagined.
    How will I do this without Sheila?
    ~
    The first week passes with Dipti gone the entire day, and coming back after Choti has fallen asleep. I don’t protest, adapting my old ways to suit her new ones. I often think of her presence as a favour she bestows on me, when there is no need for her—with her rich glowing skin, her body thickening with the sight and sound of that foreign land, her hairdryer whose voltage never matches—to come back.
    That Sunday Udit calls. He skips over the obligatory question about my health and asks