Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa Read Free Book Online

sari border to her hair. The women shoo us from the benches and sit down to peel and cut the fruit.
    Mother stands talking to Colonel Bharucha. She is tense, alert, anxious to please. Electric-aunt joins them, also tense. Her quick, intelligent eyes scan the room. I know she is looking for me. Godmother releases me and I run up to them.
    â€œWhat is this?” says Colonel Bharucha. Copying and exaggerating my limp he lurches halfway across the room like a tipsy giraffe. “Put your heel down! You must remember to.”
    Mother purses her shapely mouth and looks at me sternly.
Electric-aunt frowns, her thin lips a tight, anxious line beneath her sharp nose.
    Colonel Bharucha stoops and pushing down on the contracted tendon presses my heel to the floor. “Massage the back of her leg down: like this,” he says, kneading and stretching my stubborn tendon.
    He straightens, pats my back and dismisses me. I know they are beaming behind my back, pleased with my progress since the operation. Cousin is waiting for me to be free of the grown-ups.
    â€œI want to show you something,” he says, drawing me to a window in the wings. He reaches into the pockets of his shorts and pulls out scraps of cardboard. He lifts off one layer and reveals a pressed butterfly, its colors turned to powder, its wings awry.
    â€œHold out your hand,” he commands. I withhold my hand. There are certain things I’ll hold and certain things I won’t. Cousin gropes for my hand and, “No,” I say. “Don’t!”
    â€œBut it’s for you,” says Cousin.
    â€œI don’t want it!”
    Cousin is, for once, confounded.
    There is a drift now towards the inner sanctum. Electric-aunt beckons Cousin and Mother signals me. We step into the inner room and I can see through two barred windows and an open archway the main fire altar. It is like a gigantic silver eggcup and the flames are dancing above a bed of white ashes.
    I kneel before the altar and touch my forehead to the cool marble step beyond which I cannot go. Except for the priests who tend the fire and see that it never goes out, no one can enter the inner sanctum. Mother kneels beside me. I ask God to bless our family and Godmother and all our servants and Masseur and Ice-candy-man ... until Mother says, “That’s enough! The meeting’s about to start. Hurry!”
    And Adi hisses, “Don’t hog God!”
    Â 
    We enter the main hall. The chairs have been rearranged. Colonel Bharucha is standing before the mike, testing it with practiced snaps of his fingers. “Hello hello,” he says, and knocks on it
with his knuckles. He struggles with both hands to stretch the rod. Mr. Bankwalla, an officer at the Central Bank of India, his slight body crisp and dependable in sweatless white shirt and white trousers, rushes up obligingly. Between them they adjust the mike to suit the colonel’s height.
    The banker moves back, fleet and unobtrusive beneath his maroon skullcap, to his seat in the aisle next to his jolly wife. (His wife is so indefatigably jolly that it is said after the initial burst of grief she even wisecracked at her son’s funeral. Later I heard she cracked jokes on her deathbed and prepared to meet Ahura Mazda with jests, and sly winks at the mourners, whose appreciative laughter turned to inconsolable grief when the will was read. She left everything to the Tower of Silence in Karachi.)
    By the time Colonel Bharucha clears his throat, and it is an impressive throat-clearing, we are all settled in our chairs.
    Colonel Bharucha tells us: “We are gathered here, etc., etc. To thank God Almighty, etc., etc.”
    The mike has transformed him from a plain-speaking doctor into a resounding orator. But his rhetoric has a cadence that makes my mind wander.
    Suddenly I hear him declare: “Gandhi says, we must stop buying salt. We should only eat salt manufactured from the Indian Ocean!”
    The colonel