Page 53 of The Henna Artist

Radha eyed me from the corner of her eye. In a small voice, she said, “Maybe she remembers that I tried to throw rocks at her once.”

Kanta looked to me for confirmation.

I shook my head. “It was just silly nonsense. No one was hurt.”

“It’s jolly well no one was hurt! Young women shouldn’t be throwing rocks at one another,” Kanta said.

“My head.” Radha pressed her forehead with her free hand.

Kanta’ssaasglared at Baju, who was hovering by the door. “Why are you still here, you fool? Go get aspirin and water.”

Baju’s mustache twitched as it did when he was offended as he left the room.

“Well, there’s an easy fix to this.” Kanta turned to the table beside the sofa and picked up the phone. Before I could stop her, she was chatting with her tailor, informing him that she would bring Radha the next afternoon to get measured for English dresses. Then she called her hairdresser and made an appointment to have Radha’s hair cut in a smart pageboy.

When she put the phone down, she was smiling. She looked at Radha, then at me. “Now, don’t scold me, Lakshmi. It’s important for a modern girl to look, well, modern.”

Radha jumped up and threw her arms around Kanta’s neck.

I turned away. Kanta always knew just what to say and do to make my sister happy when I seemed to have no clue.

ELEVEN

April 20, 1956

I wasn’t keen on having a move-in ceremony for my new house. But Malik kept asking, and I finally relented. Malik’s fondness for rituals like the HinduGriha Praveshwasn’t surprising. Many Muslims, the majority of whom had lived in India for centuries and decided to stay after Partition, observed Hindu customs as well as their own. After all, celebrations were happy occasions and no one was excluded.

At the entrance of my new Rajnagar house, Malik erected two bamboo poles and strung a garland of mango leaves between them. They were fertility symbols, per custom, but since I was a woman who didn’t see children in my future given my circumstances, they made me slightly uneasy. Still, Iwasexcited about finally being able to call this house my home. Perhaps that’s what Malik, who knew me almost as well as I knew myself, wanted to help me celebrate. The walls belonged to me. The windows, the mosaic floor, the dirt in the courtyard. I even felt entitled to the stars above my roof.

Malik had also lobbied for apanditto purify the house for theGriha Praveshceremony. Unless we transferred all our belongings on the auspicious date chosen by the priest (which, as it turned out, was to be April 20), we’d be inviting bad luck.

“I’ll find apanditfor us, cheap-cheap, Auntie-Boss,” he promised.

“And I’ll cook the food,” Radha added. She was eager for us to leave Mrs. Iyengar’s house. Six months ago, when she first arrived in Jaipur, she’d been happy to sleep on the stone floor of my room, but the more time she spent at Kanta’s and the Maharani School, the less enchanted she became with our humble lodgings.

Radha and Malik packed our belongings into two metal trunks and a great number of vinyl and cloth bags. They scrubbed the windows of our new house with newspapers, dusted the built-in shelves, polished the terrazzo floor until it gleamed and swept the courtyard. Over the packed dirt in the courtyard, they laid sheets and blankets for our guests to sit on. No one was allowed to enter the house now until it had been purified.

True to his word, Malik found a twenty-rupee priest, a tiny man with a bald head whose scrawny arms and legs protruded from his saffron robes like shoots on a potato. He wore eyeglasses as thick as the bottles of colored water sold at street stalls. (Did all priests look like Gandhi-ji, I wondered, or was it Gandhi-jiwho started to resemble allpandits?) Because I still couldn’t afford shutters on the windows (a requirement forGriha Pravesh), thepanditwas uncomfortable agreeing to the ceremony until Malik sweetened the pot with another five rupees.

The priest’s assistants began unloading their supplies for the ceremony: a statuette of Ganesh, several silver plates, three silver bowls, sandalwood incense, freshly cut flowers (red, of course, for good luck, and picked, I was sure, from a park along the way, as many women did on their way to temple in the mornings), leaves of the camphor laurel tree, a red candle, red cotton thread, sesame seeds, whole wheat grain, a clay pot of red vermillion and water paste, a silver pot ofghee, bells and a wooden rosary tied with red thread.

Malik added the fresh sweets he’d bought this morning from the corner shop.

First, thepanditbuilt an altar to Lord Ganesh. From time to time, he consulted a well-thumbed book of incantations, although he seemed to know the words by heart. “‘The tusk he holds represents service; the goad prods us along our path; the noose reminds us of that which binds us; to his favored he grants all boons.’”

Guests began arriving. Since it was tradition to invite every neighbor to ceremonies with a box of sweets (whether you knew them or not), Malik had dropped off boxes at everyone’s doorstep. They were the first to arrive, curious to meet us and to get a firsthand glimpse of the new house on the street.

Radha and I were both delighted to welcome Mr. and Mrs. Pandey from our former lodgings at Mrs. Iyengar’s. I suspected that, like me, Radha had a small crush on Sheela Sharma’s handsome music teacher.

Mr. and Mrs. Iyengar came, too. My former landlady made a show of examining the premises and wrinkled her snub nose. “The courtyard certainly makes such a small house more tolerable.”

I smiled at the rebuke. Nothing was going to spoil my mood today.

I had not mentioned this celebration to my ladies. It would not have been fitting for me to invite them to my home—so much more humble than theirs. But Radha must have let it slip to Kanta because I saw my sister leap up to greet Kanta and Manu and usher them into the courtyard. With a stab of envy, I thought Radha never showed such enthusiasm when I came into a room. It reminded me that the gap between us had widened since she started attending the Maharani School a few months ago.

Kanta appeared cheerful even though the hollows under her eyes were dark. Manu helped ease her onto a blanket. I asked Kanta how she was feeling as it had been several weeks since I had seen her. She hadn’t felt well enough to keep our appointments.

“Except for reading and riding in moving vehicles, both of which I like to do very, very fast, all’s well. Oh, and also sleeping and eating are an issue!” she cackled.

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