The Rat-Miner Son-in-law

Chapter Ten: The Thekedar

The watchman opened the gate before Ishani reached it. He was the same man who had stood beside her suitcases a week ago, staring at his feet, and he did not look at her now either. He only pulled the iron gate wide and stepped back, as if he had known she would come.

Kabir walked beside her up the drive with the old register wrapped in plastic under his arm. Neither of them had slept. Sometime before dawn, sitting on the cot in Dharavi with the book open between them, Kabir had finally read the line with his father's name on it. He read it once, without a word, and closed the book.

The house looked exactly as it always had. The fountain still played in the forecourt. The marble steps still gleamed. The brass bell still hung beside the front door, the one Ishani used to ring as a little girl just to hear it echo through the halls. A servant opened the door, saw who was standing there and hurried away into the back of the house without a word.

Ishani did not need to ask where her mother was. It was dusk, and at dusk Kusum Malhotra was always in the prayer room. They walked through the long hall and past the dining room, where the sideboard stood against the far wall with its brass handles polished bright. Ishani knew exactly which drawer held the account books. She did not look at it. She kept walking, because if she stopped now she was not sure she would be able to start again.

Every evening of Ishani's life, at the hour the sun touched the sea, her mother had knelt before the little silver shrine and arranged fresh marigolds around the gods, one by one, in the same careful pattern. When Ishani was small, she used to sit cross-legged in the doorway and hand her the flowers. Her mother would take each one without looking, and place it exactly where it belonged.

The door stood open. The lamp was lit, and a thread of incense curled up toward the ceiling. Kusum knelt in a white and gold sari with a basket of orange marigolds beside her, her back straight, her hands moving steadily. She did not turn around when they came in.

"Take off your shoes," she said. "Both of you."

They did. Ishani crossed the cool marble floor and knelt beside her mother. Then she unwrapped the old register, opened it to the last page and laid it on the floor, close enough to touch the marigold basket.

She did not point to the line. She did not need to.

Kusum's hands paused above the flowers. She looked down at the page, and her eyes travelled along it, past Bhuvan Rawat's name and the two dates beside it, to the small neat letter in the last column. She studied it for a long time without a word. The incense smoke drifted between them.

Then she picked up the last marigold and placed it at the feet of the goddess, exactly where it belonged.

"Tell me it isn't yours," Ishani said. Her voice broke on the last word.

"Why would I tell you something that isn't true?"

Kusum turned around at last. She settled back on her heels with her hands folded in her lap and spoke the way she spoke to the cook about the week's menus, plainly and without hurry.

She did not deny any of it. Before she married Rajendra, she said, she had been a labour contractor's daughter. Her father brought men down from the hills and the villages by the truckload and put them on building sites, and he took his cut of every rupee they earned. When she married into the Malhotras, they were a small firm with two cranes and a great many debts.

"This house was built on my father's men," Kusum said. "The ones nobody counted." She said it without shame, the way she might have mentioned the price of marble. "They came to us with nothing. No land, no papers, no one in the city who knew their names. My father gave them work when no one else would. If the ground sometimes took a few of them, the ground took men on registered sites too."

When her father died, she took over his books. She had been running them ever since, quietly, from the household desk, between the grocery lists and the staff wages. Rajendra built the tunnels. Kusum decided who went into them. For thirty years, every Malhotra site had run on her men.

Ishani looked past her mother at the gods in their silver shrine, at the marigolds laid out so perfectly around their feet, and felt the room tilt. She had prayed in this room before every exam she ever sat. She had prayed here the night before her wedding. She thought of the leather account books in the dining room sideboard, the neat K at the bottom of every page. She thought of twelve names on a printed register and twenty-eight men who had stopped existing on every channel in the country. She thought of Varun standing white with dust at the second lamp, saying the words he had not meant to say.

"Does Papa know?" she whispered.

Kusum almost smiled. "You think your father runs this family," she said. "Your father signs things."

Ishani remembered a hundred breakfasts at the long dining table. Her father signing papers between mouthfuls of toast without reading a line, and her mother pouring his tea and sliding the next page under his pen.

Then, for the first time since he had married her daughter, Kusum Malhotra turned her head and looked properly at the ghar jamai.

Kabir was standing just inside the doorway, barefoot on the marble, his hands at his sides. For a year she had looked through him. She had set his plate down last and called him Chooha in front of the servants, and never once let her eyes rest on his face. She looked at him now as if she were measuring him, the way a buyer looks at a horse, or a contractor looks at a man stepping off a truck from the hills. Her gaze moved over his shoulders, his face, and then down, slowly, to his scarred hands.

"I knew your father, Kabir," she said. "Bhuvan Rawat. He was the best digger I ever sent underground."

She brushed a fallen petal from the folds of her sari.

"You have his hands."