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By Root 7514 0

came to the house, waited up for him, and when he returned they fell to talking, under the house, so as not to disturb Mrs Tulsi’s sleep. In time each sister felt she had a special hold on him; and having received his confidences, offered hers. At first the sisters spoke of their financial difficulties. But Owad was unwilling to anticipate the revolution. Then the sisters complained. They complained about the teachers who were keeping their children back at school; they complained about Dorothy, about Shekhar, about their husbands; they complained about absent sisters. Every scandal was gone over, every petty dispute, every resentment. And Owad listened. The children listened as well, kept awake by the sisters’ bumbling and their frequent hawking and spitting (a sign of intimacy: the warmer the feeling, the noisier the hawk, the longer the period of speaking through the spittle). In the morning the sisters who had talked late into the night were brisk and exceptionally friendly towards the people they had criticized, exceptionally proprietary towards Owad.

The house was always full of sisters on Sunday, when there was communal cooking. Sometimes Shekhar came by himself and then before lunch there were discussions between the brothers and Mrs Tulsi. The sisters did not feel threatened by these discussions as they had done when Shekhar and Dorothy and Mrs Tulsi talked. They did not feel excluded. For, with Owad there, these discussions were like the old Hanuman House family councils. So the sisters cooked below the house and sang and were gay. They were even anxious to exaggerate the difference between their brothers and themselves. It was as if by doing so they paid their brothers a correct reverence, a reverence which comforted and protected the sisters by assigning them a place again. They spoke no Hindi, used the grossest English dialect and the coarsest expressions and vied with one another in doing menial jobs and getting themselves dirty. In this way they sealed the family bond for the day.

It was the custom on these Sunday mornings, after the discussions and before lunch, which came before the trip to the sea, for the men to play bridge.

And on this morning Shekhar, despite Anand’s pleas for sophistication, showed his disrelish of Owad’s talk about the extermination of capitalists and what the Russians had done to the Czar, and tried to turn the conversation. It turned, oddly, to modern art.

‘I can’t make head or tail of this Picasso,’ Shekhar said.

‘Picasso is a man I loathe,’ Owad said.

‘But isn’t he a comrade?’ Anand said.

Owad frowned. ‘And as for Chagall and Rouault and Braque —’

‘What do you think of Matisse?’ Shekhar asked, using a name he had got from Life and putting a stop to the flow of names he didn’t know.

‘He’s all right,’ Owad said. ‘Delicious colour.’

This was unfamiliar language to Shekhar. He said, ‘That was a nice picture they made. Didn’t do too well, though. The Moon and Sixpence. With George Sanders.’

Owad, concentrating on his cards, didn’t reply.

‘These artists are funny fellers,’ Shekhar said.

They were playing for matches. Anand scattered his heap and said, ‘Portrait by Picasso.’

Everyone laughed, except Owad.

‘Is a long time now I want to read the book,’ Shekhar said. ‘Isn’t it by Somerset Morgue-hum?’ Anand scattered his matches again.

Owad said, ‘Why don’t you look in the mirror if you want to see a portrait by Picasso?’

This was clearly one of Owad’s scathing comments. Shekhar smiled and grunted. The watching sisters and their children roared with laughter. Owad acknowledged their approval by smiling at his cards.

Anand felt betrayed. He had adopted all of Owad’s political and artistic views; he had announced himself as a communist at school, he had stated that Eliot was a man he loathed. It was his turn to deal. In his confusion he dealt to himself first. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said, looking down and trying to inject a laugh into his voice.

‘There is no need to apologize for that,’ Owad said sternly. ‘It is simply a sign of your conceited selfishness and egocentricity.