# 6. The Resurrection, Part 3: Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be.

With small Colaba flat and cheap Japanese car, Jeet tried slinging stones at one hundred years of profiteering from Jhunjhunu to Rohtas, Karachi to Chettinad. I mean, honestly, what a dork!

Thisbe, by John William Waterhouse, 1909.

PART 3.

Anyway, it’s four years later, and Malini is dead. Malini, who said studying literature was stupid because we have our whole lives to read silly stories. Malini, who sneered when I read her the I-kissed-thee-ere-I-killed-thee-to-die-upon-a-kiss bit from Othello. For all her lack of poetry though, Malini managed to fall in love. Which was strange, given that in her family, marriages were business alliances. For the icing, she fell in love - to her parents’ horror - with my poor, penniless, beleaguered big brother. 

Jeet, the village idiot, tried to win her hand the traditional way. He made an appointment with Monsieur Mansukh at his fat factory, professed undying love, and laid before him, his hard-earned nest egg. With small Colaba flat and cheap Japanese car, Jeet tried slinging stones at one hundred years of profiteering from Jhunjhunu to Rohtas, Karachi to Chettinad. I mean, honestly, what a dork! The ghosts of Malini’s ancestors must have shaken the windows because her father understood immediately that his daughter had outwitted him. He showed Jeet the door and packed Malini off the next morning to visit the four suitable men that his wife had already shortlisted. Men who would be kind enough to consider marrying their ‘mature’, for lack of a better word, daughter. Malini was given a very simple directive: pick one. 

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Sangeeta, Malini’s maid, told Meena, Sara’s maid, that on the night she died, Malini wore a turquoise blue diamanté top. Her white slippers were smothered with glittering sequins and in her ears, three-carat pear-cut diamonds glistened like chubby teardrops. At Malini’s funeral, I was looking at her mother’s hands. They were very well-manicured hands with that dark brown nail polish that Aunties love so much. On the ring finger of her left hand was an emerald the size of a small chickpea. Her right hand sat in her lap, balled up into a fist, clutching a small purple-edged hanky so tight it made her veins pop. She looked at me with such madness and bewilderment that I had to bite my lip till it bled to keep from laughing out loud. I don’t think I managed because everyone began to stare at us as if we were the ones who were dead!

At first, Sara and I had tried to do the right thing. We took off our shoes, Sara ate an entire tube of mints to get rid of her cigarette breath and we chanted the prayers with the priest guy. We’d just been to the beach and were in orange and pink, sarong and skirt, respectively. We hoped no one would be offended, but I guess they were! The Aunties were in all-white, snotty-nosed, and puffy-eyed, as if they had played no part in any of this! Maya, Malini’s nine-year-old daughter was running about collecting marigolds in the folds of her lemon-yellow kurta. I had an inexplicable urge to go over and smack her in the face. 

Malini had picked the stupidest of the four pre-selected men to marry, the one who came from the smallest town, narrow-shouldered, and large-hipped. Abhijeet sat across from me now at his wife’s funeral, staring into space, mouth open. He must have been enamored enough by her South Bombay accent and New York stories to overlook the fact that among his wife’s friends, was always her lover. Malini had thrown herself so enthusiastically into the expected things - gold, jewels, sarees, flowers, gifts - that no one could have guessed she was planning a Great Escape. No one other than her father, that is. Or so I inferred from Jeet’s ‘novel’: 

Wile E. Coyote, descended from generations of money lenders, traders, and industrialists, could smell a deal gone sour. He had his people intercept Leela at Berlin Airport, a week before the wedding, and Leela was smart enough to know when to give up. She didn’t stop seeing Shiv though, and together they turned their Pyramus and Thisbe into a dirty, rotten thing. Shiv sank further into the abyss, Leela became pregnant, Ila was born. Biology has a way of bringing even the most clever women to their knees…

At the funeral, tears streamed down Malini’s mother’s cheeks, mingling with the colourless snot collecting on her upper lip. It was all quite gross. Good thing Malini wasn’t around to see it! Okay, now you’re probably thinking I’m some sort of heartless bitch psychopath, or worse, a heartless bitch sociopath, but really, I’m not. Even the tigress at Byculla Zoo didn’t look after her cubs if you know what I mean. It was like she figured, evolutionarily speaking, there was no point. Her cubs were pointless. 

Maya sat in her grandmother’s lap ‘smoking’ agarbattis. She placed the fuming end of the incense stick into her mouth, closed her lips around it, collected the smoke, and blew it out again with a toss of her head, fingers flicking ash. But what I saw was Malini’s pink rubber glove. The one she wore on her right hand to smoke Classic Milds on Jeet’s balcony because her father would sniff her fingers when she got home. Who was going to tell Maya about the glove? Or tell her what the inheritance was? Obviously, it had to be me.

PART 4.

At this point, I began to enjoy the funeral. It was quite nice there: the incense, the chanting, the fresh white sheets stretched across the floor. Sort of heavenly. Sara and I sat cross-legged, toes touching. In a room full of people, we always touch toes, or knees, or something. We had braced ourselves for the boohooing but we really didn’t expect Sister Tracy to walk in. God, she looked old!

Inside me something was brewing. I guess you could call it a plan. I looked straight at Sister Tracy and when she looked back, I gave her the Hell Eyes….

© Tara Sahgal

The Resurrection - Part 4, the rest of, Coming Soon! You could read Parts 1 and 2 in the archives if you like. Do like, share, comment, opine… I’d love to hear from you!