Those Pricey Thakur Girls by Anuja Chauhan Read Free Book Online Page A

Eshwari halts, not in the least out of breath. ‘Your sister read so well on TV! She was too good.’
    Young Mr Gambhir, his anxious looking forty-year-old son, cuts in with an uneasy smile, ‘Er, what are you wanting?’
    ‘Six eggs, please,’ Eshwari says. ‘Ma said fresh.’ Then she smiles down at the stooped old man. ‘Thank you,’ she says.
    Old Mr Gambhir beams. Always immaculately dressed in spotless white kurta pyjama, he has presided behind the cash counter at Gambhir Stores for as long as Eshwari can remember. He sits right below the picture of the First Guru, the tip of his white turban almost touching its frame of twinkling, multi-coloured series lights, inhaling huge amounts of agarbatti smoke and working up quite a high.
    ‘Poached egg for breakfast, hain?’ he asks jovially. ‘Judge saab’s favourite!’
    ‘Er, yes,’ Eshwari replies, rolling her eyes at her friend Satish Sridhar, who happens to be at the store too, rootling hopefully in the shelf of English movie video cassettes grandiosely titled ‘BEST-OF-HOLLYWOOD LENDING LIBRARY’.
    Young Mr Gambhir comes back with an egg tray and places it on the counter. His father waves him away.
    ‘How nice to know that after your didi has read the news to the whole of the country, she will go home and eat…’ his hand hovers over the egg tray for a moment, then descends on the largest specimen and picks it up with a flourish, ‘ this ! This Gambhir Stores egg! How proud that makes me feel!’
    Satish gives a little snort of laughter which he hastily turns into a cough. Old Mr Gambhir eyes him with stern, beady benevolence.
    ‘Got a cuff, beta Steesh? Here, let me give you two Vicks ki golis instead of one-rupee change.’
    Eshwari gives Satish a quelling look and smiles at the old man. ‘Namaste.’
    She continues her jog along her usual circuit, past the ruins of the Agrasen ki Baoli, all the way down to the T-point where Hailey Road hits the low red buildings and green grounds of Modern School, Barakhamba Road. She has to weave her way around several sand mounds heaped outside construction sites. The sand glitters silver in the sunshine. Eshwari can see tiny pink and brown conch shells in it. When she was younger, Debjani and she would pick out these shells and make necklaces with them. There have always been mounds of sand and stacks of bricks along Hailey Road, because so many of the old-style bungalows are in the process of being broken down and converted into apartments blocks under the family group housing scheme.
    ‘So Dubs’s got a real fan club going now, huh?’ Satish calls out from behind her, and suddenly there he is, grinning down at Eshwari.
    ‘Yes,’ she replies shortly.
    ‘So now you sisters will become even more snooty,’ he says as he starts to walk beside her. ‘That’s all we need.’
    ‘We’re not snooty!’
    ‘No?’ He grins. ‘All of you pricey Thakur sisters look down upon us dicey mohalla guys. Admit it!’
    ‘You’re mad,’ she says evasively.
    Satish and Eshwari have been walking down to Modern School together all their lives. He has always had a certain good-humoured puppy-like quality, but in the last couple of years he’s shot up and become all deep and stubbly, so now, Eshwari thinks, looking at him from below her lashes, it’s a German Shepherd puppy-like quality. His grins have grown vaguely wolfish, there is a warm glint in his eye, and last year, he asked her to go out with him. ‘Be my chick’ were his exact words. She had shuddered and turned him down as nicely as she could, explaining that, after the whole fiasco with her sister Chandu, she wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend until she turned twenty-one.
    He took it badly at first, but now, more than a year on, their relationship is back on its old ‘just-friends’ footing. For which Mrs Mamta Thakur, for one, is extremely thankful. She thinks the Sridhar boy is on drugs. He wears black T-shirts with snakes and roses on them, bangs on