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this time, there’s no more than a month left for the babies to come . Only later did I realize that Nalini hadn’t said a word.
    “ ‘Please, Didi, Gouri, calm yourselves,’ Bijoy had said, and when I heard his voice I knew his mind was made up. Gouri must have heard it too, for she left the room then, weeping, though she’d never been one for tears, and took to her bed and did not come down for the night meal. But Nalini’s eyes shone as they hadn’t in a long while, and she ate well, and while she ate she asked many questions.
    “News of all this spread like flames in wind—with servants, it’s never any other way. In the telling the ruby grew to be big as a pigeon egg, the cave became a treasure house of the jinns, and the stranger was a magician, a jadukar who’d mesmerized the two brothers, surely, for although Gopal Babu had always been crazy, Bijoy Babu had too much sense to believe such things. And yet, and yet—the eyes of the tellers would take on a faraway look at this point—what if there were such a cave, what if the brothers did bring back those rubies—and anyone could see that they wished they were going too.”
    I think I understand how my father felt, and my uncle. Andeven my mother with her sudden-sparkling eyes (though always it is her I know the least, less even than the two men whom I have never seen). For each of them, in a different way, it was a last opportunity.
    The cave of rubies would allow my father to redeem himself with his wife and his brother—yes, he too thought of Bijoy this way, he was surprised to discover, and not merely as the rich cousin to whom he was beholden. Ah, when did this change, which he had never intended, occur? When had he begun to love them both, to want them to look on him with admiring eyes?
    For my uncle, the only son of the Chatterjees, trapped since birth in the cage of propriety, it was the one chance at a life of adventure. At a life which had seemed to him until now as remote and impossible, as holy—yes, that was the word—as that of fairy tale princes on a magic quest. How could he let it pass? His hand was steady as he signed the papers pawning the family lands—even their country mansion—to raise the needed money. When Gouri Ma protested, reminding him that the house had been owned by the Chatterjees for more generations than anyone remembered, he held her hands tightly and assured her he would get it back before the year was out. The hunger in his eyes stopped her from saying anything more. She knew what he was thinking ahead to: The way he would sit, years from now, in the purple Calcutta twilight, speaking of it all to his sons—and their sons as well. The look of wonder on the young faces, adoration such as he had never hoped for.
    And my mother? Perhaps she longed for my father to succeed in something , so that she could see him once more as she had done, briefly, on that first evening by the glittering river. Perhaps a part of her longed to love him—for surely all women long to love their husbands—even while another part condemned him as unworthy of her love. Perhaps she wanted the father of her unborn son to be a hero. Perhaps this victory—so long awaited—over the fate which had doomed them to dependence would make it finally right, that decision she made early one morning, stealingfrom bed, leaving the shelter of her parents’ home for the sky that yawed and pitched above a creaking riverboat.
    But maybe I am wrong. Perhaps she was thinking only of the rubies. Strings of rubies at her neck and ears, bangles studded with them, rubies encircling her slender ankles like the fire’s laughter, causing all the neighbor women to murmur their envy as she walked by.
    “They left a week later,” says Pishi, “dressed in the clothing of adventure: khaki pants, thick leather boots like neither had ever worn in his life, round safari hats which Gopal must have seen in a movie. They took a taxi to Howrah station, not the house car,