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Pushpa accused TC, ‘You’re starving the poor girl.’ Then she added, ‘I know what it is – you don’t want her to become fat like me.’ She loved to call herself the girl he dumped: ‘You think I’m only good enough for someone like Bobby who is as fat and ugly as I am!’ Everyone, including Bobby, laughed heartily.
    But there was also serious talk – relations with Pakistan, proposals for a new dam – and here too the wives joined in. Diana mostly remained silent. She didn’t feel she had the right to enter into their discussions, and especially not into their perennial jokes about politics and corruption. Whereas they could say anything they wanted, she as a foreigner would have caused offence.
    The one person Diana liked to visit in New Delhi was her friend Margaret, an Englishwoman in charge of a lay mission devoted to charitable work in India. It was far away from their official residence, and Diana drove herself there in TC’s car (neither of them would ever have taken his official driver or any other member of their staff for their personal use). When he was small, Diana would take Romesh with her on these visits, but he soon revolted. He disliked the sombre old mission house with its high ceilings and stone floors impregnated by the smell of disinfectant and stale curries. It was made worse for him by Margaret herself, a large-boned woman with a loud voice who ruled over a bevy of silent humble helpers, most of them girls whom she had rescued from orphanages or bad homes. When he grew up, his antipathy became even stronger. It puzzled Diana; she asked him, ‘But why, darling? Give me one reason.’ He was never good at explaining his feelings, but at last he came up with, ‘If you must know, I can’t stand all that holiness and prayer, it gives me the creeps. Thank God you don’t go in for all that stuff.’ It was true, Diana had laid aside her Christian prayers, as well as the gold cross inset with rubies, a gift from her godmother on her twelfth birthday.
    Margaret never spoke to Diana about religion. Instead they liked to remind each other of favourite poems or long-ago Latin lessons, gaily correcting each other’s syntax. Although both of them had spent most of their adult lives in India, their original accents had not only remained but had become even more precise and English. Margaret always wore Punjabi dress, including the modesty veil, though she only used it to wipe away the perspiration caused by her long hours of trudging the streets and slums of the inner city. She was mostly cheerful and undaunted, whether it was a day of triumph when she had procured an artificial leg for a client, or a setback with a convert relapsing into alcoholism and wife-beating. Diana never could understand why Romesh said, ‘Let her go and do good somewhere else.’ But quite often he wrote a cheque for her, always for a substantial amount, which Margaret received with the measured gratitude of one used to accepting whatever was given, fully aware that it would never be enough.
     
    Neither of his parents understood much about Romesh’s business activities. ‘Something to do with export,’ Diana explained to herself and anyone who asked. ‘Import-export.’ She couldn’t really appreciate her son’s lavish lifestyle – the big car he drove around in, his constant trips abroad – but she felt proud of his enterprise. He had never for a moment considered following his father into the civil service. ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ he said. ‘You don’t catch me spending my life trapped in a job with a measly salary and ending up with a piddly provident fund.’
    Although TC’s only answer was a wry ‘Good luck to you’, Diana knew he was hurt. ‘It’s just that he’s a different personality,’ she assured him about their son. ‘He really respects you enormously.’ She knew this to be true for she had heard Romesh boast on the telephone: ‘Do you have any idea who my dad is?’
    TC had a new