The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha Page B

down a bit of it opens out, continues to fall, veering just a few inches from its path because of a light wind.
    It comes to rest on the body, on his leg, inches above the knee and my sister walks down, free at last. There’s a taxi waiting and she tells the driver to take her to what was once her home, in the neighbourhood where the pigeons lie sleeping in their cage.

 
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    ‘You should have seen their faces,’ she says.
    ‘What about their faces?’ I ask.
    She begins to laugh.
    It’s an April afternoon, so hot that it’s not yet four, and from the balcony I have already seen two people whose slippers stuck to the tar on the street making them trip.
    The nor’westers are late. The rain must have lost its way in the hills, deliberately, she says. The winds must have got bored stiff travelling the same route, the same sky, the same sea, year after year, and that’s why this time they have decided to take a break.
    We have closed the windows, she has wet two towels, draped one on each of the curtains. The ceiling fan is on, we have also set up a table fan which keeps moving from right to left, from left to right.
    ‘Why do you need two fans?’ I ask.
    ‘Water evaporates, you idiot,’ she says. ‘It makes the room cool.’
    She laughs, she laughs so hard that her eyes close, I can see her chest rise and fall, she throws back her head, I can see her neck, her hair, her teeth. The laugh crinkles her face, makes her cheeks almost touch her eyes. If I shut off the sound, it would seem she’s crying, because I can even see the water collecting in her eyes.
    I have never seen her laugh like this before, she now bends over, from the waist, holding on to the armrests of the cane chair, her hair falling over her face, I can see her eyes again, through the black strands, closed.
    ‘You should have seen their faces,’ she says.
    ‘Stop laughing and tell me the story,’ I say, mock angry, mock irritated.
    And she purses her lips, makes a face, gets up from the chair and says she needs to take a break. She walks out of the room.
    ‘Where are you going?’ I ask.
    She doesn’t answer, just flings the drapes aside. I can hear her cough in the next room.
    ‘Are you OK?’ I ask, a bit worried at the sudden silence of her laughter.
    And at that moment, she walks in. ‘I have wiped the laugh off my face,’ she says and she smiles. ‘Now I can tell you the story.’
    ‘How did you do that?’ I ask.
    ‘I remembered,’ she says. ‘But first, let me tell you what I told them.’ And she begins.
    * * *
     
    There are four of us at the office. One, Two, Three, and myself, all pregnant, and every day, from Monday to Saturday, at one thirty in the afternoon, we sit down in the lunch room, at the same table, unpack our steel tiffin boxes, have lunch, and tell stories of our mothers-in-law. All of us, except me. I keep quiet. Because I have no problems with my mother-in-law. They want to know the secret but I evade the question.
    One says her mother-in-law sleeps until 10 a.m. while she has to get up at five in the morning, do the dishes from the previous night, boil the water, make tea, knead the flour, make chapattis for her husband’s tiffin, his father’s breakfast, then serve bed tea, take her bath, wash her husband’s dirty socks, iron his office clothes, supervise the maid as she sweeps and scrubs the floors, ensure that the scrubwater has a few drops of Dettol, then dress up, run downstairs so that she can get the chartered bus to the office. And the moment One enters home at around 5.30 p.m., it starts again: cooking dinner, washing up, serving the food, wiping the dining table while the mother-in-law watches TV, father-in-law belches trying to read the day’s newspaper, husband is asleep or with friends from office at some club, drunk, while she throws up at night, the baby moving inside. It better be a son, says One’s mother-in-law.
    Two says her mother-in-law isn’t a slob, she cooks too, she