Tikkipala by Sara Banerji Read Free Book Online

don’t fall off.’
    Half an hour later they returned to the palace, the little boy astride his pony, smiling as though he had just conquered the world.
    â€˜How did it go?’ Sangita asked her husband. ‘Was the pony good? Did Anwar ride well?’
    â€˜Tell your mother that the pony behaved properly,’ said the Raja without looking at Sangita. He only communicated with her through other people. He never spoke to her directly. At the dining table, he would tell the bearer, ‘Inform the Ranee that we will be leaving at six o’clock this evening,’ or say to the ayah, ‘Tell the Ranee to return my son to my office immediately.’
    Sangita did not know how much longer she could bear it. She was too afraid of losing her child again to say anything, though. This time he might send her away, and never let her come back.
    After finding her in the car with Paul, he had driven her straight to her parents’ house. When they reached it, the driver went round and opened the door for her, while the Raja sat looking straight ahead through the windscreen. He was panting a little, Sangita noticed, as though he was still breathless from so much shouting.
    As she got out, he told the driver, ‘Tell the Ranee that I will have her things sent here.’
    That was when she had understood what might be going to happen. That was when she had rushed back to the car, and tearing open the door on the Raja’s side, ignoring the fact that the driver was there and listening, began to beg and weep.
    That was when he had said, ‘I will let you know when I have made up my mind.’ Then he had told the driver to drive on, and she had stood there, watching as her husband’s car vanished from sight along the road.
    She turned back to the house, feeling so filled with despair and shame that she would have liked to die.
    Her parents watched from an upper window.
    â€˜Tomorrow they are going to put her saddle and bridle on and let me ride her properly,’ Anwar told his mother.
    â€˜How lovely,’ said Sangita and shook her head so as to shake away the memory of those miserable moments, which had turned into two painful years.
    At first she had stayed in her parents’ house, silent and waiting, enduring their scorn because she felt sure that her husband would only leave her here for a short time. That her punishment would be brief. She imagined her baby crying for her, screaming till the Raja could no longer stand it.
    Every hour, Sangita thought he would come back, saying, ‘After all you can come home because your baby needs you, and I understand that the whole thing was not your fault so you are forgiven.’ But no one came.
    After a week she had called her father’s driver and instructed him to take her to the palace.
    Her father was in bed again, in a darkened room, with pains in his chest that might have been a heart attack, and did not know that she was going, otherwise he would have stopped her.
    The palace watchmen rose from their stools and looked anxiously from one to another, as Sangita drove in. For a moment it seemed as though they were about to shut the gates on her. But because they were unsure of their orders and she was the Ranee, they could not bring themselves to do it.
    She found the Raja in the garden supervising the cracking open of his new found geodes. He stood by a brazier accompanied by a servant, waiting for one of the irons in it to grow hot enough to plunge into the water bucket of the stones and burst the geodes open. In a cradle in the grass beside the Raja lay the baby Anwar.
    Although the Raja must have seen her coming he gave no sign of it, but continued ordering the servant, ‘No, that iron is not sufficiently heated for the immersion. Try this one. No, wait a little longer.’ This method of opening the stones was his own invention and could only be done with the odd shaped local geodes.
    â€˜I have come to see my child,’