Custody by Manju Kapur

nights that she would ask her mother to come and spend with the children. Only a few hours, she would be back early in the morning. No matter how disapproving, she knew her mother could not refuse her.
    Raman returned with his own resolutions. This marriage was going to work or he would die in the attempt. He ignored the lack of interest about the meeting at the district level in Chandigarh, he ignored her absent-minded appreciation of the shawl he had bought her in Jullunder.
    But what was harder for him to disregard was the rejection he faced in bed that night. You need two hands to clap, as his mother was fond of saying, two hands, and in this marriage he increasingly felt there was only one hand making its lone gestures.
    Once in office he looked up the number of a private detective agency in the yellow pages. He had reached the point where not knowing was worse than any certainty.
    VIII
    Unaware of the trauma that her son was going through, Mrs Kaushik, on the other side of the river, was involving herself in the lives of her neighbours as usual.
    Chief among them was Mrs Rajora, a librarian at the Arts Faculty of Delhi University. She lived three floors above Mrs Kaushik in Tower B-2. Mrs Rajora’s working hours meant that she could not go to kitty parties, play tambola, or sing devotional songs in groups that met in the morning, all favoured activities among the society’s non-professional women. The friends met instead in the evening, during walks around the building and for arti at the temple. On Wednesdays they took a rickshaw together to the market at Mandavili.
    Occasionally they visited the elder Mrs Kaushik in the A-block flats, but the elder Mrs Kaushik was so absorbed by her grandchildren that she seemed to have little time for anything else.
    The Rajoras had one child, a daughter, Ishita.
    Ishita’s early history had been marked by illness. Both parents worked and they had found it hard to manage even with this one child, dividing her care with a parttime maid and a neighbourhood woman who ran a crèche to supplement her income. Perhaps a mistake, because Ishita was diagnosed with TB when only four. A low-class disease, thought the panic-stricken mother, as in a fit of anger she fired the help – these people – you never knew with these people. They were the carriers, the ones who coughed all over your dishes while washing them, over the vegetables while cutting them, who never rested until their germs were plastered over every house they visited. It was the revenge of the downtrodden.
    For nine months the child was on TB drugs. They sapped her strength, and made her vulnerable to the waves of cough, cold and fever that swept the city each year. Doctor after doctor, hakims, vaids, homeopaths, nature cure advocates, the parents went to anybody they thought might restore their daughter’s health.
    Eventually the caring paid off and Ishita grew stronger. Fortune further turned her face in their direction, for Shashtri College, Mr Rajora’s workplace, acquired a tower in a building co-operative across the Jamuna, and teachers could pay for the yet unbuilt flats in three instalments. Collecting, borrowing from bank and family, withdrawing from their provident funds, they managed to produce the required lakhs.
    When Ishita was twenty-two they moved from Panjabi Bagh, and within weeks Mrs Rajora had met Mrs Kaushik.
    By this time Raman was married and a father and Mrs Rajora could spend a lot of time soothing the hurt that Raman’s behaviour (that of blatantly preferring his wife to his mother) caused Mrs Kaushik, and Mrs Kaushik in her turn was careful to praise Ishita whenever she could.
    The child was a beauty, she said, and so sweet-tempered, her future home would rejoice. This pleased Mrs Rajora, even though she knew that Ishita was sweet rather than pretty, and that without a dowry her qualities, both outer and inner, had to be the sole attraction.
    Marriage was far from Ishita’s thoughts. She knew