Maan took it greatly amiss. He suffered from acute jealousy and thwarted desire, and wondered what he had done wrong. Even if he could have seen Saeeda Bai every evening, his days would merely have trickled by drop by drop. Now not only the days but the nights as well stretched interminably ahead of him, black and empty.

He practised a bit of polo with Firoz, but Firoz was busy during the days and sometimes even during the evenings with law or other work. Unlike the young Bespectacled Bannerji, Firoz did not treat time spent playing polo or deciding on a proper walking-stick as wasted; he considered these activities proper to the son of a Nawab. cornpared to Maan, however, Firoz was an addict to his profession.

Maan tried to follow suit - to do a bit of purchasing and to seek a few orders for the cloth business in Banaras - but found it too irksome to pursue. He paid a visit or two to his brother Pran and his sister Veena, but the very domesticity and purposefulness of their lives was a rebuke to his own. Veena told him off roundly, asking him what kind of an example he thought he was setting for young Bhaskar, and old Mrs Tandon looked at him even more suspiciously and disapprovingly than before. Kedarnath, however, patted Maan on the shoulder, as if to compensate for his mother's coldness.

Having exhausted all his other possibilities, Maan began to hang around the Rajkumar of Marh's set and (though he did not visit Tarbuz ka Bazaar again) drank and gam-

4?ibled away much of the money that had been reserved for the business. The gambling - usually flush, but sometimes even poker, for which there was a recent craze among the more self-consciously dissolute students in Brahmpur took place mainly in the students' rooms, but sometimes in informal gambling dens in private houses here and there in the city. Their drink was invariably Scotch. Maan thought of Saeeda Bai all the time, and declined a visit even to the beautiful Rupvati. For this he was chaffed by all his new companions, who told him that he might lose his abilities permanently for lack of exercise.

One day Maan, separated from his companions, was walking up and down Nabiganj in a lovesick haze when he bumped into an old flame of his. She was now married, but retained a great affection for Maan. Maan too continued to like her a great deal. Her husband - who had the unlikely nickname of Pigeon - asked Maan if he would join them for coffee at the Red Fox. But Maan, who would normally have accepted the invitation with alacrity, looked away unhappily and said that he had to be going.

'Why is your old admirer behaving so strangely?' said her husband to her with a smile.

'I don't know,' she said, mystified.

'Surely he's not fallen out of love with you.'

'That's possible - but unlikely. Maan Kapoor doesn't fall out of love with anyone as a rule.'

They let it go at that, and went into the Red Fox.

6.21

MAAN was not the only target of old Mrs Tandon's suspicions. Of late, the old lady, who kept tabs on everything, began to notice that Veena had not been wearing certain items of her jewellery: that though she continued to wear her in-laws' pieces, she had ceased to wear those that came from her parents. One day she reported this matter to her son.

472-Kedarnath paid no attention.

His mother kept at him, until eventually he agreed to ask Veena to put on her navratan.

Veena flushed. 'I've lent it to Priya, who wants to copy the design,' she said. 'She saw me wear it at Fran's wedding and liked it.'

But Veena looked so unhappy with her lie that the truth soon came out. Kedarnath discovered that running the household cost far more than she had told him it did ; he, domestically impractical and often absent, had simply not noticed. She had hoped that by asking him for less household money she would reduce the financial pressure on his business. But now he realized that she had taken steps to pawn or sell her jewellery.

Kedarnath also learned that Bhaskar's school fees and books were already being supplied out of MrsMahesh Kapoor's monthly household money, some of which she diverted to her daughter.

'We can't have that,' said Kedarnath. 'Your father helped us enough three years ago.'

'Why not?' demanded Veena. 'Bhaskar's Nani is surely allowed to give him those, why not? It's not as if she's supplying us our rations.'

'There's something out of tune with my Veena today,' said Kedarnath, smiling a bit sadly.

Veena was not mollified.

'You never tell me anything,' she burst out, 'and then I find you with your head in your hands, and your eyes closed for minutes on end. What am I to think ? And you are always away. Sometimes when you're away I cry to myself all night long; it would have been better to have a drunkard as a husband, as long as he slept here every night.'

'Now calm down. Where are these jewels ?'

'Priya has them. She said she'd get me an estimate.'

'They haven't yet been sold then ?'

'No.'

'Go and get them back.'

'No.'

473'Go and get them back, Veena. How can you gamble with your mother's navratan ?'

'How can you play chaupar with Bhaskar's future ?'

Kedarnath closed his eyes for a few seconds.

'You understand nothing about business,' he said.

'I understand enough to know that you can't keep "over-extending" yourself.'

'Over-extension is just over-extension. All great fortunes are based on debt.'

'Well we, I know, will never be greatly fortunate again,' burst out Veena passionately. 'This isn't Lahore. Why can't we guard what little we have ?'

Kedarnath was silent for a while. Then he said :

'Get the jewellery back. It's all right, it really is. Haresh's arrangement with the brogues is about to come through any day, and our long term problems will be solved.'

Veena looked at her husband very dubiously.

'Everything good is always about to happen, and everything bad always happens.'

'Now that's not true. At least in the short term something good has happened to me. The shops in Bombay have paid up at last. I promise you that that is true. I know I'm a bad liar, so I don't even attempt it. Now get the navratan back.'

'Show me the money fast'.'

Kedarnath burst out laughing. Veena burst into tears.

'Where's Bhaskar ?' he asked, after she had sobbed for a bit and subsided into silence.

'At Dr Durrani's.'

'Good. I hope he stays there a couple of hours more. Let's play a game of chaupar, you and I.'

Veena dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

'It's too hot on the roof. Your mother won't want her beloved son to turn black as ink.'

'Well, we'll play in this room, then,' said Kedarnath with decision.

Veena got the jewellery back late that afternoon. Priya was

474not able to give her an estimate; with the witch hanging around the gossipy jeweller every minute of his previous visit, she had decided to subjugate urgency to discretion.