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Mama,” he says.
    She reads the words from his lips. Reads what she wants to read, but she cannot hear the threat that vibrates in the promise. Her breath comes faster. “It will be nice to have company. I have felt so alone since your father left us.”
    She doesn’t mention Timcu’s rights; Timcu’s not the son sitting before her, taking far more than he was given. White shreds of chapati grow to a pile before Aman. The handles of a silver salver Damini holds out to him feel as if they will burn through her serving cloth. She comes level with his eyes. They are the grey-white of peeled lychees, with beetle-back brown stones at their core.
    Damini returns the salver to the sideboard with a clatter. She will just forget to serve Aman the rasgullahs. She will give them to Khansama’s children instead.

    The next morning, Timcu calls from Canada and asks in halting Hindi about Mem-saab. Damini tells him Mem-saab is well and not to worry, though Mem-saab breathed heavily through the night.
    That evening, Sardar and Sardarni Gulab Singh come to the gates and find them locked, though Damini has made Mem-saab beautiful and she is waiting upstairs. Damini hears Khansama tell them that Mem-saab went to tea at the Delhi Golf Club with Aman. She starts down the stairs to correct him.
    “Looking after his mother. Such a fine son.” Sardar Gulab Singh’s voice travels down the driveway. Damini opens her mouth to yell, but already his scooter is putt-putting away, with Sardarni Gulab Singh seated erect and sidesaddle behind.
    Khansama wears a half-smile as he turns from the gate. He glances at a new watch on his wrist. Aman does not like poor relations.
    “What a misunderstanding,” Mem-saab says, when Damini tells her what happened. “I’ll tell Aman he must phone them and apologize for Khansama’s mistake.” And when Damini tells her about Khansama’s new watch she says, “Aman has always been a generous boy.” She turns her eyes away. “Put on the TV, Amma—tell me what other mothers and their sons are doing.”
    On TV you can see past, present, future, upper, middle and lower worlds at once, as Lord Arjun could, but you can’t smell or feel them. Damini places the marigold blossoms from the Ganesh temple at its base. She presses the right buttons. An actor’s deep voice booms as the
Ramayan
begins, guiding her back to the time of Lord Ram and Sita Mata, and Lord Hanuman. When Lord Ram and Sita Mata were married, two great energies collided. Purush the masculine,shakti the feminine, the same that create the world. The Aryans of the day make sacrifices and get attacked by dark demons …
    Today on TV, Lord Ram and Sita Mata have been banished for fourteen years to save Ram’s father’s honour, and have arrived at Chitrakoot. There is Lord Ram, placing a clod of earth wrapped in saffron cloth on a mantelpiece very much like the one in Mem-saab’s drawing-room. And he prays to that clod of earth, to the earth of his birthplace, saying its presence has purified his camp.
    “See,” says Mem-saab, who doesn’t need Damini to explain or tell her this story, “he’s forgetting his mother and thanking a clod of earth for his life. And he’s forgetting Sita Mata, the incarnation of Earth. Ha! He should be praying to her, begging forgiveness for bringing her into the jungle! Where is she?”
    You can’t stop a TV story to ask the storyteller such a question; his tale is shaped long before it is shown. Sita Mata must be praying and doing puja somewhere—she’s so good.
    The story moves on when it moves on, and then it stops.
    Each god and goddess’s face is being shown up close, with a short sharp trumpet blast.
    Damini turns to Mem-saab. “Why is Ram’s birthplace more important than any other place?” she mouths, “The whole world is Lord Ram’s to take birth in anywhere he wants, isn’t it?” The question has bothered her since her glimpse of Suresh on TV.
    The gods and goddesses are all having similar