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‘I hope she won’t mind the buses,’ she said more to herself. ‘Exactly.’ He took up his newspaper again. ‘Already worrying about what she might mind, how she will judge…’ This time she ignored her husband and looked around the garden, checking that the trees and the flowers looked as beautiful as they could. Some of the servants were squatting in the shadows of the banana trees like mosquitoes waiting to feed, and the others - where were they? She couldn’t keep track of them all. They had far too many, all wanting feeding and sleeping, staff for the Rani, police staff for her husband, everyone wanting to outwit the other camp. And she guessed that they had collectively been quite cruel to Manju, who still hadn’t got the hang of all their names, probably because they had kept changing them to confuse her. |
And Ani had probably – probably, because half the time she didn’t want to know – turned out spoiled andunfaithful and it was only Ani’s wife that she considered her luckiest stroke in the last few years. In fact, it couldn’t have turned out better. They had even thought they might never get Ani married and she could see him turning thirty-three with no wife and not much more discipline than when he was fourteen. And then Manju had celebrated her nineteenth birthday, just about the right age for marriage in Rajput society and though she had heard that Manju was trying hard to make plans to go to Delhi and study medicine (and against her parents wishes), they had made a proposal to her family anyway. Thanks to the Rani, their own standing was still so good in Jaipur that the family would have been mad to turn it down. Probably Manju’s parents were relieved, it had given them a good excuse to suggest this as an alternative… career path. Pavna had kept her ear to the vine, but she never had heard if there had been an argument or if Manju had tried to act against it. Both families had met and Ani himself had met her six times |