Shining Hero by Sara Banerji Page B

dismay because his wife had given birth to a female child. And then there were the widows. There were fourteen of them. ‘Perhaps you can find some work for us, Shivarani Memsahib,’ they said. ‘For these days we hardly get enough to eat for even if the families of our husbands wanted to, they would be unable to spare enough for us after the children have eaten.’
    ‘The wife of the misti wallah has a trouble and needs your help,’ someone told her. Shivarani followed him.
    The misti wallah’s wife was sitting on bolsters in the room at the back of the shop, pressing shandesh into little wooden moulds in the shape of fishes. The room smelled of sugar and buzzed heavily with bees and flies and the misti wallah’s back was visible through the bamboo curtain, as he sat cross-legged behind his piles of sweets.
    ‘I want my eldest sons, Rahul and Ravi, to go to school, but instead they are thieving around the village and their father does nothing to stop them,’ said the woman. ‘Ravi is the leader, and Rahul, though the eldest, follows him. I want the best for our children and my husband says he does too, but it costs money and the attention of the father to bring up children properly.’
    The misti wallah’s back flinched as though he heard or guessed what his wife was saying about him. He worked very hard, getting up before sunrise to separate the curds and set the dahis. For hours, even on the hottest days he would be toiling over a vat of hot oil, dribbling in the batter to make jellabies, then dropping the hot crisp squirls into simmering sugar syrup. After his stall opened he would be sitting there all day long, serving customers with rosogullas, Lady Kennies, gulab jamans, shandesh. Spooning almond-spiked paishes and rose-flavoured kheers into terracotta pots. Packing jellabies into banana leaf and tying the bundle with thread. Even after the stall was closed his work would still not be finished. He would still have to seal the jars of warm curd with muslin and waxed paper beforecarrying them to the river to cool all night in the shallows there. The evenings in the drink shop were his relaxation. He looked forward all day to the hour when he would be able to sit in silence in the little concrete room of the arrak shop and down a few tumblers of arrak. Then, fully drunk, his worries about his out-of-control sons and his wife’s complaints forgotten, he would stagger home and sleep.
    The misti wallah, on his way to the arrak shop, would sometimes pass the bullock cart on which his wife and children were squashed among the other villagers, on their way to see the film at Dattapukur. His wife, like the other women, wearing her brightest sari and with jasmine in her hair, his sons wearing oversized shorts, with their hair greased down and behaving properly for once, crammed among little girls in frocks embroidered with glittering thread and men in starched pyjamas. ‘Why don’t you come with us instead of getting drunk,’ his wife would cry as he squeezed onto the verge to let the cart rumble by. ‘The cinema will not give a headache and tonight is one very good film.’
    Later, at the arrak shop, the misti wallah would settle onto the cool cement seat, glass in hand, and hear the shrill excited laughter and the creaking of the axle receding, as the cart made its way out of the village, and feel grateful for the silence that followed the departure of his family.
    ‘My children are getting a bad example,’ said the wife as she began to shake the shandesh fishes from their moulds and decorate them with silver leaf. ‘That must be the reason for their bad behaviour but I am hoping that, since you are college returned and therefore of a great cleverness, you will speak with my husband and ask him to desist from the drinking of arrak, and come instead to the cinema with us.’
    The zamindar’s son, Pandu, had taken Koonty all down the long gallery, telling her about the family portraits. And now they sat on the