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perfection was beautiful because it sprang from a source of goodness deep in her heart. I admired her greatly for it, and envied her a little too. But later I would wish it had not been that way. If she had fought with Bijoy, if she had wept and sulked and threatened and charmed, like ordinary women do with the men they love, perhaps he would still be alive.
    “Deep within himself Bijoy must have known Gouri was right, that the fortunes of the Chatterjee family were like a moon spinning toward eclipse. I think that is why he agreed with your father about the ruby cave.
    “But first came the pregnancies.
    “We were all pleased when Gouri and Nalini became pregnant within weeks of each other, but Bijoy was overjoyed. He had been wishing for a child ever since he was married, seven years ago, and he took the double pregnancy as a miracle of sorts, further proof of the good luck Gopal brought to the house. He showered the two women with gifts—of equal value, that’s the kind of man he was—and made sure the baidya cameeach month to check on their progress. Special food was prepared for them, whatever their hearts desired. When your mother, who had not been doing too well, took a fancy for mangoes in the winter, Bijoy sent all the way to Hogg’s market, where the sahebs shopped, to get a dozen of them at an exorbitant price. He wanted her to be happy.”
    But my mother was not happy, and she no longer attempted, as she had done early in her marriage, to hide it. Nor did she care that an unhappy mother is said to pass on her sorrow to the baby in her womb. For with the onset of her pregnancy, a strange desperation had come over her. As her waist thickened and her feet grew swollen, as her only treasure, her beauty, disappeared within the bloated sack she saw her body turning into, she felt that her one chance at life was over. Things would only get worse now. She was doomed to grow old and die in the borrowed room she had lived in for the last three years. And thus her tirades grew worse. Are you a man or a ground-crawling insect? she would shout at my father. How long are you going to beg your daily food from your cousin-brother, just because he is kind? Running after no-good schemes like a dog chasing his shadow. Why can’t you get a job in an office like all the other men? Chee chee, don’t you see how even the servants look at us, with no respect in their eyes, how they whisper about us in the kitchens? And finally , If the baby knew what kind of father he had, he too would be ashamed. He would rather die than be born to you .
    For a while my father would have tried to ignore her. She didn’t really mean it. Everyone knew how pregnant women were. Water spouted from their eyes for no reason, and flame from their tongues. He would sit on the terrace after dinner and play on his flute while Bijoy listened, and the darkness would be cool against his skin, cool and calm and deep, the water of a black lake that extended out forever, and the high notes of the flute would be perfect ripples on its satin surface.
    But the part about the baby—ah, that stung, as though someone had wound him around and around in poisonous bichutivines. So that one morning he left, very early, before even the servants were awake, and was gone for three days. And just when a frantic Bijoy was about to inform the inspector saheb at the police station that his brother was missing, he returned. With the ruby.
    “The sun was setting when he flung open the gate and hurried up the gravel driveway,” says Pishi, “and its last rays caught his disheveled hair in a brown halo. A two-day stubble covered his face, and his clothes—the same he had worn when he left the house—were crumpled and muddy. But his eyes—they glittered in his face with such intensity—like he was a prophet, or maybe a madman. He was laughing as he shouted for us all to come and see what he had with him.”
    Rolled across his palm the ruby must have sparkled like fire and ice