Those Pricey Thakur Girls (National Bestseller)

1

On a still evening in early April, when bees buzz torpidly amidst black-eyed sunflowers and the scent of mango blossom is in the air, one finds Justice Laxmi Narayan Thakur (retd), clad only in his vest and pyjamas, squatting in the grass, busily administering the death sentence to the upstart weeds that have dared thrust their cheeky, encroaching heads in his fragrant dog flowerbeds.

Judge saab is inordinately proud of his house. A pillared creamy-white bungalow sporting dreadlocks of maroon bougainvillea, it is built on a 4,800 gaj plot along leafy Hailey Road, with the ruins of a fourteenth-century stepwell to the left and New Delhi’s poshest commercial district Connaught Place to the right. A seven-feet-high boundary wall circles the garden, topped off with vicious bits of broken glass that gleam in the sun like salt upon the rim of a margarita glass. This precaution is less to discourage thieves (the Judge admits that by the time he finished renovating the original structure, there wasn’t much left inside to steal, anyway) and more to daunt the many amorous males spilling out of nearby Modern School, Barakhamba Road, eager for a sighting of Judge saab’s true treasure – five delectable daughters, each one more beautiful than the other.

Surveying his garden in the evening, inhaling the scent of wet earth and desi gulab, secure in the knowledge that wife and girls are safe within, the Judge is often heard to observe that the word ‘paradise’ evolves from the Persian pairi-diza which, simply put, means ‘walled garden’.

Next door stands the house of Justice Laxmi Narayan’s younger brother, identical in every respect, but somewhat shabbier. But then, Ashok Narayan Thakur has only one son and no daughters to lavish their attentions on either house or garden.

Three of these paragons are now ‘settled’ and only twenty-three-year-old Debjani and seventeen-year-old Eshwari remain at home. The three marriages, truth be told, have depleted the Judge’s purse even more than the renovation of the house has, but that is something he doesn’t like brought up.

‘A, B and C may feel guilty,’ he cautions, ‘and D and E will definitely feel short-changed. But really, Mamtaji, I have no idea how we will give this younger brigade a decent send-off.’

At which Mrs Mamta Thakur pats his bony shoulder and directs his attention to how thickly the kamini is blossoming along the boundary wall.

A lifetime spent with meticulously organized legal files and court libraries has moved the Judge to name his daughters Anjini, Binodini, Chandralekha, Debjani and Eshwari – a decision that has earned him a reputation of eccentricity he doesn’t quite deserve. It has also caused his daughters to harbour a mild (but lingering) grouse against him.

‘Naming us alphabetically, in order of appearance, like we were housing blocks in Chittaranjan Park! It’s so dehumanizing. D’you know, BJ, that that’s how Mr Bumble named the orphans in Oliver Twist?’

At five o’clock every evening, the Judge puts away his gardening tools and retreats to his quarters for a leisurely shower. When he emerges, exuding happy anticipation and Brut 33, a table fan whirs gently in the garden and a green baize table has been set up with a pack of plastic-coated playing cards. The Judge sits down, samples the tea and snacks that have been laid out, and awaits the arrival of his kot-piece cronies. These worthies usually roll in around six. Until then, Judge saab shuffles the cards hopefully and attempts to solicit his busy family to a game of seven-eights, rather in the manner (says his wife) of a street vendor selling dirty postcards. She occasionally plays two hands with him, never more, because – as she always remarks when she rises majestically from the table – some people may be retired but she still has work to do.

But today there is to be no kot-piece. A major event has occurred in the Thakur family, one that has upset all natural order and routine. And it is because of this that, as the Judge unbends from his beloved flowerbeds and straightens out the kinks in his back, Mrs Mamta Thakur hurries out of the house, all silken rustle and important bustle, and tells him to get a move on.

‘Hurry up, LN, you’re still mooning over those flowers! This is such a big day for Dabbu – and it’s happening exactly the way Shastriji predicted it would, remember?’

Shastriji is the family astrologer, and relations between the Judge and him have been fraught ever since the Judge chose to name his daughters so arbitrarily. The Fates are greater than ABC, Shastriji had rebuked the Judge, who had unrepentantly asked why, if the Fates were so great, Shashtriji didn’t become a full-time astrologer and give up selling Sumeet mixer-grinders on the side? Shastriji had responded by predicting the Judge’s imminent demise by a painful, not-very-polite disease, and departed in a huff.

‘That pompous pigtail,’ the Judge snorts now. ‘We should never have told her what he said. The wretched thing has become a self-fulfilling prophecy…’

According to Shastriji, whom Mrs Mamta had consulted after Debjani accidently sat down on a steaming hot pressure cooker when she was five and drove a needle through her own nostril in sewing class when she was ten, Debjani’s stars were in a sleep state known as supta vastha. This was what was causing her to walk into walls, forget to dilute her bucket full of hot water with cold before pouring it over her body, and sink her nose luxuriously into roses seething with teething bumblebees. Her stars would remain in supta vastha until she turned twenty-three, and then – he had snapped his fingers, his eyes glowing behind his rather spiffy, cherry-red spectacles – she would awaken to fortune, fertility and fame.

The Judge tried to discourage this theory from taking hold, concerned that it would give Debjani an excuse to be a slacker in school and pile up too much expectation of her later, but it caught the imagination of her older sisters. Debjani was teased every time she gazed dreamily out of the window (which was often) and many parallels were drawn with the tale of the sleeping beauty who was awakened by true love’s first kiss.

And now, just a few weeks after her twenty-third birthday, Shastriji seems to have proved himself to be amazingly accurate. Because Debjani has achieved the near impossible. She has cleared three rounds of countrywide auditions, conducted over a period of two whole years, to emerge triumphant as an English newsreader on DeshDarpan – India’s one and only television channel. Tonight is her first broadcast on DD’s national programme, which beams out live from Delhi for all of India to hear and see. While the rest of the world is managing to greet this event with equanimity, Hailey Road is all a flutter.

‘Do hurry up, LN, they said she has to report for make-up three hours before the newscast!’

‘Mamtaji, I’m the fastest dresser in this house,’ asserts the Judge, throwing down his muddy khurpee and struggling out of his vest right there in the garden. ‘Heaven forbid anything go wrong with Dabbu-ka-debut! But are the princesses ready?’

They are almost ready. In the little dressing room attached to the airy bedroom that Debjani likes to keep scrupulously neat and Eshwari is always messing up, Debjani stands in front of the full-length mirror, while Eshu kneels at her feet, making final adjustments to the pleats of her sister’s stiff silk sari.

They make a charming picture. Eshwari is slim-waisted but otherwise full-figured, with buttery skin and straight black hair that falls into her sparkling black eyes in a spiky fringe. She takes after her mother, as do her sisters Binni and Chandu. At home, she is mostly to be found sprawled across various sofas, with the general air of a hibernating creature conserving its energy for the really important things in life. But when she walks the crowded corridors of Modern School, Barakhamba Road, there is a swing to her short blue skirt, a bounce in her thick ponytail, and a sassy smile perpetually curves her generous mouth.

Debjani, on the other hand, looks best at home, hair released from its tight plait and falling in loose curls around her oval face, her lanky limbs relaxed in denim cut-offs and baggy T-shirt, the slight, defensive hunch she adopts when out of the house eased away. She is widely held to be a paler photocopy of the family beauty, her eldest sister Anjini. Both girls get their looks from their father – all oval and honey, with hair that has the lustrous colour and curves of shelled walnuts. But the auntyjis along Hailey Road have long pronounced Anjini’s features to be the finer, her limbs fuller, her manner more vivacious. And they don’t like their rulings challenged.

‘Is it okay now, Dabbu?’ Eshu asks patiently.

But Debjani is too busy glowering at the Mole.

This much despised feature is a black spot, the size and heft of a tiny mosquito bite, bang in the middle of her chin. It is so perfectly symmetrically placed that people often think it’s fake and that she’s drawn it deliberately, in the manner of a simpering Hindi movie heroine. Debjani is mortified by the ‘beauty spot’; she finds it appallingly vapid. Besides, she lives in daily terror of it going rogue on her, turning into a witch’s wart and sprouting hairs.

Eshwari bounces to her feet and points out for the hundredth time that things could’ve been worse. ‘It could’ve been right below your nostril, hanging like a bit of dried snot,’ she says as Debjani peers into the mirror, frowning at the thing. ‘Better that people think you’re into sixties’ style make-up, frankly.’

‘Oh, it’s fine for you to talk,’ Debjani says darkly. ‘You don’t have a small doggie tick curled up right in the middle of your chin. At HTA, people were always sniggering at it.’

‘Well, today all those HTA types will see you on TV and regret ever asking you to quit,’ Eshwari tells her. ‘Losers.’

‘They didn’t ask me to quit,’ Debjani clarifies immediately. ‘I decided advertising wasn’t the profession for me. And it wasn’t.’

Still, she has to admit the Hindustan Thompson Advertising executives had looked super relieved when she told them she’d decided to leave. Her fat Bengali boss had wiped his brow and said ‘oh fuck’ again and again with increasing insincerity. And that ethnic, oxidized silver-studded aunty with the wriggly, sperm-like bindi hadn’t asked her to reconsider even once. Instead, she told Debjani that with her ‘dreaminess’, her ‘self-absorption’ and her ‘lack of initiative’ it was probably a good thing she had decided against a career in advertising. Dabbu had ended up feeling quite demoralized.

If you lived out your entire life as a sort of a cut-price Anji didi – she had wanted to tell the sperm-bindi aunty – you would have lacked initiative too.

All in all, if the telegram from DeshDarpan hadn’t arrived three weeks after she stopped working, telling Debjani she had cleared the last round of tests conducted almost six months ago, she would have hit quite a low.

‘Can’t you leave your hair open?’ Eshwari asks as Debjani starts to plait it tightly. ‘It’s your prettiest thing.’

Debjani shakes her head. ‘It’ll come into my eyes and blind me,’ she says sensibly. ‘I won’t be able to read. This is fine.’

‘Okay,’ Eshu says a little doubtfully. ‘I hope I’ve been helpful, Dubz. I wish Anji didi was here. She’s so good at tarting people up.’

‘Oh, please.’ Debjani rolls her eyes. ‘She hums Hey There Georgy Girl every single time she gets me ready. It’s like a law or something. Especially the bit about why do all the boys just pass you by? Is it because you just don’t try or is it the clothes you wear? I’d rather be dressed by you any day,’ she finishes.

Eshu stands back and hands her a maroon rubber band. ‘Okay, you look lovely. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! I’m so excited!’

‘Perestroika,’ Debjani mutters, taking short mincing steps in her sari, her narrow face intense. ‘Dhimmitude. Hu Yaobang. Thiruvananthapuram.’

In the driveway, the Judge’s bulbous black Ambassador is spewing smoke. Husky young Gulab Thakur, the girls’ good-natured cousin, is working at it with a cranking handle, his bouffant hair bouncing up prettily with every whirl, while the Judge hunches behind the wheel, haranguing him.

‘Arrey, give it a good hard whirl, Gulgul! What’s the use of all that bodybuilding if you can’t even fix a little starting trouble? Fool! Learn how to heat up a cold engine – it’s good practice for married life!’

The engine sputters to life and Gulgul springs away, flushed and beaming. Mrs Mamta and the girls get into the car, Debjani very careful of her sari pleats. The doors slam shut and the Ambassador rolls out importantly through the old green gate onto Hailey Road, where a toli of mangy, khujli-infested street dogs sleeping on a sand pile immediately give it a rousing send-off. The entire family of the dhobi who has ironed Debjani’s sari for this momentous occasion jumps to their feet and waves. Frail old Mr Gambhir who runs the kirana across the road raises both palms in blessing and the driver of a packed DTC bus, his hair standing on end at the Judge’s sudden and supreme arrival onto the middle of the road, slams down his brakes and curses roundly.

‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ Mrs Mamta says happily. ‘Debjani, you’ve got your gate pass, na?’

Debjani has her passes safe, the gate pass and the studio pass, both of which declare her to be a bona fide staff artiste at DeshDarpan Studios. She is feeling anything but artistic, though. As the Ambassador circles Connaught Place, turns into Parliament Street and approaches Broadcasting House, panic wraps its hairy hand around her belly and squeezes. Hard.

‘I’ll be fine, Ma,’ she says as the Judge pulls up the car at the gate. ‘Where will you guys watch me from?’

‘Home.’ Mrs Mamta smiles. ‘Everyone is coming. And afterwards, we’ll come and pick you up and go for chaat, okay?’

Debjani smiles, a slightly lopsided, street-urchin grin that sits oddly upon her angelic face. ‘We’re here,’ she says breathlessly. ‘I’m going in. Wish me luck!’

‘Aap traffic block kar rahe hain,’ growls the truculent guard at the gate. The Thakurs ignore him.

‘Best of luck, Dabbu!’ Eshu hugs her sister.

‘All the best, beta,’ Mrs Mamta Thakur says, sniffing. ‘Your first words – you said them jumping up and down, trying to get your father to put down your sisters and pick you up and swing you instead – were my tunn my tunn. And today your turn has finally come!’

‘My first words were Eshu eat.’ Eshwari grins. ‘Anji didi’s were I sabse pritty. And Binni didi’s were –’

‘Never mind all that,’ her mother remonstrates. ‘Today is Dabbu’s day.’

‘Dabbu-ka-debut!’ the Judge beams, praying fervently that this newsreading stint works out better than the job in advertising did.

‘Traffic is being block,’ the guard tries again.

‘So, um, bye, you guys,’ Dabbu says, turning down the chrome handle and grabbing hold of her sari pleats.

But her family isn’t done yet.

‘I remember,’ says the Judge as he kills the engine and rests comfortably against the steering wheel, ‘when we all went to see The Magik of the Vunderful Vladimir. In Lucknow, you know. I wrangled VIP passes through that IAS whose son I defended for drunk and disorderly conduct. Vladimir – huge intimidating chap with bloodshot, kajal-rimmed eyes – asked for a volunteer and I raised my hand. He called me up, made me wear a dam’ foolish looking satin bathrobe and then shut me in a box. Dabbu started to cry – she was only three years old. When he started to stick swords into the box, she started shouting. I could hear her through the box, although its walls were six inches thick. And when he produced a shiny saw to cut the box into two pieces –’

‘She leapt off her seat and charged up to the stage, pulled out a sword from the box and attempted to impale the Vunderful Vladimir,’ Mrs Mamta Thakur finishes, her eyes moist with sentimental tears. ‘Right through the crotch. The sword was too heavy, though – she dropped it on her own foot. The doctors had to put six stitches.’

‘Gutsy,’ the Judge says gruffly.

‘Bloodthirsty little beast.’ Eshwari grins.

‘No, no.’ Mrs Mamta shakes her head. ‘So gentle. You used to hit her all the time but she never once raised a hand on you, Eshu.’

‘Traffic,’ the guard implores. ‘Move kijiye. Please.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the Judge huffs as Dabbu finally alights. ‘We are moving. Oho… ahhh… hrmmph! Left the cranking handle at home. You! Guard babu! Can you give our car a push?’

Okay, that was the most embarrassing moment of my life, Dabbu thinks, mortified, as she walks down the pillared corridor towards the green room with small cautious steps, holding on for dear life to the pleats of her sari. How could BJ do that to me? And what was the need to give Ma the wheel and get out and push the car himself, thus revealing his pyjama naada and bathroom chappals for all the sniggering guards to see? I bet everybody out there is laughing at me. And then he made it even worse by shouting ‘Best of luck, Dabbu’.

Dabbu! But I won’t be intimidated, I won’t. I’ll be coom and caal. I mean, cool and calm. I can do this. I’ve wanted to be a newsreader since I was three. And now I am. I maxed the auditions. I cleared the GK test, the voice test and the camera test. This is not advertising, where I have to be witty every single second. Here I just need to look neat and not hunch, and read from a prepared script. I’ve got this.

She walks into the green room, her hands clammy but her head held high, and suddenly finds herself navel deep in children dressed in red-and-black striped towels, with knitting needles sticking out of their hair. All of them, regardless of gender, have three little dots painted upon their chins like a ‘therefore’ sign.

‘Er, hello.’ Debjani peers through the sea of red and black. ‘I’m here for my make-up.’

The sea parts to reveal a bald man with a belligerent air and a hearing aid, sweating profusely in spite of the air-conditioning. He jerks his head at her questioningly. ‘Adivasi dance?’

‘Um, no,’ Debjani says. ‘Newsreader. For the English news.’ His expression turns to one of disbelief. ‘So early? Nine o’clock news?’

‘They told me to be here three hours early.’

The make-up man smirks, not unkindly. ‘Come back after one hour.’ And he goes back to painting large red circles on the cheeks of the children milling around his knees.

Dabbu, her own cheeks red, goes out and stands in the corridor. I must look like such an over-enthu idiot, she thinks, showing up so early, all trussed up in a sari. Of course the professionals drift in late. And they probably don’t even wear a sari – they just drape the pallu over their jeans or whatever. Why didn’t I think of that?

People walk past without giving her a second glance – a short, bearded man with a clipboard, some scruffy technicians, an important looking bearer loaded down with a tray full of steaming teacups that Debjani doesn’t dare help herself to, even though she’s dying for a cup of tea.

I’ll never fit in, she tells herself miserably. What was I thinking? That I could waltz in here and read the primetime news live on DD? I’m going to be a disaster. Just like I was in HTA. My voice is drying up. Maybe I should sneak off and do some voice modulation exercises in the loo? But where is it?

She turns around – and is hit by a strong scent of imported aftershave. A face she knows as well as her own is bobbing before her eyes. Smoothly handsome, ruddily fair and ending in a neatly clipped beard. A voice like growling honey trickles into her ears. Growling honey with exquisite diction.

‘Well, hello there. Are you the newbie?’

Debjani nods, overwhelmed. It’s Amitabh Bose, she thinks, stunned. The Amitabh Bose. The It is with great sorrow that I tell you that our Prime Minister has been assassinated Amitabh Bose. The Today Rakesh Sharma became the first Indian in space Amitabh Bose. And sure, BJ claims he wears a beard to hide a weak chin and Eshu says she can’t shake off the feeling that he farts, sneakily and soundlessly, even as he reads so fluently and flawlessly – but still, he is famous. And he is talking to her.

‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘I’m Debjani.’

‘Babejani.’ He smiles. ‘How nice. We’ll be reading together tonight. They told me to look out for you. Do you want me to show you the ropes?’

She stares up at him, still a little stunned. The ‘Babejani’ comment is strictly cheesy but this is Amitabh Bose – dare she take offence?

He assumes she is taking him up on his generous offer, turns around and starts walking, and just like that, the spell is broken. He has a large wobbly bottom, the kind (according to Eshwari, the butt aficionado among the sisters) that jiggles about and actually talks to people, so that even when the bum-owner’s got his back to you, you don’t feel socially neglected.

‘Are you familiar with the set-up here?’ he asks.

Debjani shakes her head. ‘I just got the telegram,’ she explains breathlessly. ‘Saying I was selected.’

‘Ah.’ Amitabh Bose winks conspiratorially. ‘The famous DD telegram! Have you seen the newsroom at least?’

Debjani nods. Frankly, the newsroom had disappointed her. It was a dusty, dingy space, smelling of stale beedi, housed in some squalid barracks behind Akashvani Bhavan. There were towers of dusty cassettes piled all higgledy-piggledy on the floor, and she had found it hard to believe that the news India heard every night, read out with such grace and elan, was put together there.

‘This is Studio Number 2 to your right,’ Amitabh Bose is saying, ‘where all the big shoots happen. There’s an Assamese dance going on there today. And that’s Number 3, from where we do the news broadcasts. Take a look.’

Debjani peers into Studio Number 3. It’s not very big, the set is blue, with a rotating globe, a gleaming tabletop and two high chairs. One of those is for me, she thinks, oscillating madly between panic and pride.

‘And that’s the autocue,’ Amitabh points. ‘You’ve had some practice?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m not very good with it, though.’

He laughs. ‘You’ll be fine. Ah, here’s young-Uday with our scripts. Go through them, check for grammatical errors, there are usually plenty.’ He mock-frowns at young-Uday, who looks dutifully sheepish. ‘And see if you have any questions.’

She takes her sheets from pimply young-Uday, who look even more nervous than her, and scans them quickly. Her lines are marked ‘Newsreader 2’. I’m Newsreader 2, she thinks happily. This is easy, actually, lemme see, President’s visit to an engineering college in Tirunamalli… Foreign Minister’s speech at the SAARC summit… Okay, all good… nothing here I can’t pronounce.

Back in the green room, the make-up men attack her hair and face, powdering, dusting, spraying. Their hands smell of Charmis cold cream and onion. She demurs a little at how thick they are laying it on, but they assure her that she’ll need it under the strong studio lights. There is an awkward moment when one of them picks gently at her mole. ‘It’s real,’ she says apologetically and he smiles in a friendly way. And then young-Uday – who appears to be the floor manager – leads them back to Studio Number 3 and they sit, and he tells her where to look, and the DD News theme music starts to play and Amitabh flashes her an encouraging smile and young-Uday counts down to one and the cameras whir to life and Amitabh says easily in his famous baritone: ‘Good evening and welcome to the Friday Night News at Nine. I’m Amitabh Bose…’

Dabbu takes a deep breath, smiles and says, not at all like someone whose heart has clawed its way up to her esophagus and is about to leap out of her mouth, ‘And I’m Debjani Thakur.’

‘Dabbbuuu! I’m so proud of you!’

The Thakurs are at Bengali Market, eating chaat. Well, they’re holding it and talking excitedly around it but not much is going into anybody’s mouth. The chaat-wallah, a thin bronze personage with a grey handlebar moustache, looks at them indulgently and doles out the golguppas extra slowly.

‘How was I?’ Debjani asks for the fourteenth time since they picked her up.

‘I told youuuuuuuuu! Perrrrrfect!’

‘I had tears in my eyes,’ Mrs Mamta Thakur confesses. ‘You were every bit as good as that Bose, and he’s been reading for twenty years!’

‘Shhush, Ma, somebody’ll hear you.’

‘The princesses are eating very slowly,’ the Judge says to the golguppa man. ‘I apologize on their behalf.’

But that mustachioed worthy shakes his head. ‘No problem,’ he says, nodding towards Debjani with an avuncular smile. ‘I saw baby on TV. Read very well. Eat slowly slowly. Golguppe free hain.’

The girls squeal in excitement. The rest of Bengali Market turns and stares.

‘Thank you ji.’ Mrs Mamta smiles at him graciously. Then, in a lower voice, ‘Keep it down, girls. Always be ladylike. All this shrieking isn’t good for Debjani’s image.’

‘I have an image.’ Dabbu gulps, her eyes widening, and promptly chokes on a golguppa.

‘Ey, bring one Campa!’ the golguppa man shouts.

Eshwari immediately starts coughing too.

‘Bring two Campas.’

‘Do you think,’ breathes Debjani after a tingly swig, ‘that the Prime Minister saw my broadcast?’

‘Hmm?’ The Judge looks up from his aloo tikki. ‘Of course, of course. What else is there to see on TV?’

‘Behave, LN,’ Mrs Mamta starts to say but right then a group of boys emerges noisily from Nathu Sweets. A general air of repletion and loosened naada strings hangs about them, they are picking at their gums with toothpicks and eyeing the kulfi stand in anticipation. Then they spot Debjani sipping her Campa Cola and do a double take. Furious whispering ensues.

‘Same sari.’

‘Mole on chin.’

‘You aks.’

‘No, you aks!’

Finally a large hairy one approaches the Thakurs bashfully. Dabbu pretends to look unconcerned (because what if he just wants to ask the time or something?).

‘Excuse me, you are…?’

Dabbu fiddles with her bottle of Campa Cola.

‘Yes,’ says the Judge a little testily. ‘She is.’

A huge grin spreads across the boy’s hairy face.

‘Arrey wah! You are my first famous person! That I have met personally, I mean. Matlab ki, I saw a two-foot bona with three legs in a mela once, but that’s not really the same thing, is it?’

‘No,’ Debjani agrees, ‘it isn’t. Ma, can we go home now?’

They load up in the Ambassador which, perhaps aware that there is now a celebrity on board, starts up with minimum fuss.

‘I’m so happy,’ Mrs Mamta Thakur says complacently, biting into her kulfi. ‘See the rishtas that will pour in for you now! All the best boys from the best communities – Rajputs, Khatris, Brahmins!’

‘Rishtas would have poured in anyway,’ says the Judge grandly. He has none of the proper subservience that befits a man with three daughters married and two more to go. At every rishta negotiation, his attitude has always been one of condescension – like he is doing the boys’ side a huge favour by bestowing upon them the undeserved jewel that is a Thakur daughter.

Mrs Mamta sniffs. ‘LN, we can’t act like that whole kaand with Chandu didn’t happen,’ she murmurs. ‘That would be foolish.’

The Judge doesn’t reply. The fact that Chandralekha, their third born, threw aside the nice Rajput second lieutenant with the sword-of-honour-from NDA her parents had found for her, and eloped with a shady American-Estonian a night before her wedding, still rankles.

Hacked my nose off in front of the whole biradari, he broods. That too without the anaesthesia that saving on the expenses would have provided! The tent-wallah refused to return the advance, so did that thug of a caterer even though he didn’t have to fry even one paneer pakoda.

‘If she had mentioned only once that she wanted to marry that lalloo Lippik, I would have relented,’ he sighs. ‘But she never let on, never even hinted. Am I so scary?’

Everybody ignores this plaintive query.

‘How do rishtas matter anyway?’ Eshwari asks. ‘We all know Dabbu is going to marry Moti-the-mongrel and they’re going to live happily ever after!’

‘That’s not funny, Eshu.’ Mrs Mamta Thakur frowns. ‘She’s twenty-three – we have to start looking.’

‘Ma, my world’s just opening up and you want to shut it down again!’ Dabbu looks upset.

‘Arrey aise kaise?’ her mother says soothingly. ‘We’ll find you someone nice, beta, like we did for your sisters.’

Debjani and Eshwari greet this statement with a strangled silence.

‘Unless,’ Mrs Mamta gives Debjani a sly look, ‘you have somebody in mind already?’

‘I don’t,’ Debjani groans.

‘Dabbu turns down everybody,’ Eshwari complains. ‘For the weirdest reasons – she doesn’t like boys who have too much money or boys who have too much muscle. She doesn’t like boys who want you to laugh at their jokes. She doesn’t like boys who flick their hair back, like this.’ She tosses her head. ‘She doesn’t like boys who wear acid-washed jeans, or boys who breakdance. She doesn’t like NRIs – too obnoxious; or IFS officers – too pompous. She doesn’t like boys who say twunty instead of twenty. She doesn’t like any boys at all.’

‘Clearly, Moti’s our man,’ the Judge says, not entirely unhappily. Dabbu is his favourite and he is in no hurry to see her wed.

‘Shut up, Eshu, I can speak for myself!’ Debjani says crossly. ‘Ma, I don’t like oversmart, flirty guys who think they’re god’s gift to women. And I don’t like freaks. Is that too fussy of me?’

‘Have you ever had a crush?’ Eshwari demands.

‘Have you ever not had a crush?’ Dabbu shoots right back. ‘Right now you’re crushing on the guy who doles out the tokens at our Mother Dairy, aren’t you?’

‘Hai, not that pahadi!’ Mrs Mamta exclaims, horrified.

‘Chinkies are cute, Ma,’ Eshwari says dreamily. ‘All the cutest basketball players are Manipuri, you know.’

‘Why couldn’t I have had five fine sons?’ the Judge wonders randomly in the front seat. ‘Instead of five demented daughters?’

‘Ma!’ Eshu appeals. ‘See what BJ’s saying!’

‘My girls aren’t mad,’ Mrs Mamta bristles. ‘You don’t kn –’

‘They’re making us fight,’ the Judge warns her. ‘Watch out, Mamtaji!’

‘I hate show-offs and flirts,’ Dabbu says, rather intensely.

‘Duly noted.’ The Judge nods at her in the rearview mirror.

‘I think it’s better to have lots of crushes than none at all,’ Eshwari asserts. ‘It shows that you don’t take yourself too seriously.’

‘But I don’t!’ Dabbu insists.

‘Well, I think it’s a self-esteem problem,’ Eshwari declares. ‘You think people may not like you, so you quickly say they aren’t good enough first. That way you’re safe.’

‘And you think, just because you’ve taken psychology in class eleven, you know everything,’ Debjani flashes, her cheeks very red as she realizes that her parents’ silence probably means they agree with her sister.