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tantalized on the days of the man’s truancy; he is finally impeded, one day – ‘Shall I tell your father that you don’t know what to do with your hands?’ – at which, in bafflement and funk, Jamun strafes him with a squirt of the newly learnt bawdry that is a feature of growing up. Bewildered, distressed, that evening, he is revealed to his mother. ‘You’d better watch your second son.’ Urmila is too shut in and fatigued for the stricture actually to register before Jamun is quaveringly confuting it. ‘But, Ma, he broke two of our eggs, right before my eyes, and crammed them raw into his mouth – I only called him, bastard – his hands were all gooey with the yolk, and he wanted to fondle my face with that glueyness – so I called him sonofabitch. And he said, if you asked about the eggs, I should say
I
boiled and ate them.’
    Urmila cautions neither; presumably, she just wishes the unpleasantness away. Jamun and Garam Gandu backslide into familiarity, into the itch, the irksome incontinence, the secondrate frottage, the limp menace of disclosure, till divergent yearnings tug the mellowing boy away.
    Afterwards, Jamun, once in a way, broods on how much his mother had distressed herself over the affair of Garam Gandu, whether and how often she remembers the matter, and how marvellous she is to tend her son’s secrets, for certainly she couldn’t’ve divulged his proclivity to any soul. Or could she? At these moments, he vows to requite her caring, and for a time strives to be heedful of her numberless, paltry, annoying wants. Of course, he falters in honouring his vow; with him, as with many others, the allures and undertakings of the fleeting worldbid fair to prevent duty (or contrition, if you prefer).
    Mrs Raizada is still chinwagging when the plane begins its descent. Her eyes are glazed and infinite like the crushed dog’s on the day of the telegram. Those eyes had ricocheted on to the rich, almost chewable, pages of the Bodley Head Robert Payne, and beyond the book on to the gossamer hexagons of the mosquito net, and the albumen-white of the ceiling, unmarked yet by spider and lizard. Mucus eyes; they had far transcended this life. For a moment or two, Jamun had watched the dog’s head in the fading rain, slackly attached to some wads and dollops of flesh, and the blood slowly and without end poisoning the water.
    Jamun considers (an idiosyncrasy of his, to sport with the features of his kin) whether he would’ve preferred his mother to look like Mrs Raizada. Like-his mother, she also appears equably vain about the inwrought comeliness, underneath the powder and crannies, of her face. Urmila is placidly certain that no matter what she wears, no one can doubt her ingrained gentility. Yet one afternoon, decades in the past, Kuki’s mother, out of the evanescent rancour that one neighbour feels for another, had flabbergasted her by mistaking her for their communal sweeperess.
    The sweeperess has decamped the day before with one of Aya’s male friends, a scraggy, peevish wolf called Kishori. The fuss over their moonlight flit impedes Aya from even thinking of the stodginess of housework. She, on the rooftop with her remaining chums, is in a huddle over the misadventure. Urmila screeches and yelps for her for some time. She will never be forceful enough to compel a toughie like Aya. Then Shyamanand begins to carp about the racket. Temples turgid at their insouciance, Urmila totes the garbage bin out.
    ‘Oho, Laxmi,’ miaows Kuki’s mother to Urmila’s back, ‘the refuse of other houses is much more important than mine, is it – oh, it’s you, Mrs – from the back I thought – with the rubbish pail –’
    From the verandah, Jamun spots in the ice-blue of the roadtubelights his mother stumping arduously away. He glides out after her, past Burfi at this desk practically swooning over the newborn incubus of logarithms. Stalking Ma is initially more diverting than Hindi homework – easier too;