Cracking India Read Online Free PDF

room? Particularly if you’ve just dashed from the bathroom over a bare brick floor? And you’re five years old? And free to go over the excitements and evaluate the experience of the day and weave them into daydreams that drift into sleep? That is, provided the zoo lion does not roar. If he roars—which at night is rare—my daydreams turn into quaking daymares: and these to nightmares in which the hungry lion, cutting across Lawrence Road to Birdwood Road, prowls from the rear of the house to the bedroom door, and in one bare-fanged leap crashes through to sink his fangs into my stomach. My stomach sinks all the way to the bottom of hell.
    Whether he roars at night or not, I awake every morning to the lion’s roar. He sets about it at the crack of dawn, blighting my dreams. By the time I dispel the fears of the jungle and peep out of my quilt, Adi is already out of bed. A great chunk of his life is lived apart: he goes to a regular school.

    Spring flowers, birds and butterflies scent and color the air. It is the end of March, and already it is hot in the sun. Cousin and I come indoors and see my brother, embedded in the sag of a charpoy, fast asleep. We gently turn him on his back and propped on elbows scrutinize his face.

    â€œHe’s put on lipstick,” Cousin says.
    â€œYes,” I agree.
    His face has the irresistible bloom of spring flowers. Turn by turn Cousin and I softly brush our lips and cheeks against his velvet face, we pry back a sleek lick of dark brown hair and kiss his forehead and the cushioned cleft in his chin. His vulnerability is breathtaking, and we ravish it with scrutiny and our childish kisses. Carried away by our ardor we become rough. Adi wakes up and opens indulgent, jewel-et eyes. They are trusting and kind as a saint’s.
    â€œYou’ve put on lipstick?” I ask, inviting confidence.
    â€œNo,” he says mildly.
    â€œOf course he has!” says Cousin.
    â€œNo, I’ve not,” says Adi.
    â€œCan I rub some tissue and find out?” I ask courteously.
    â€œOkay,” he says.
    I stroke the Kleenex across his lips and look at it. It is unblemished. I moisten it with my tongue and rub harder. Cousin is armed with his own tissue. Adi withstands our vigorous scouring with the patience of the blameless. I notice blood on the Kleenex. The natural red in his lips has camouflaged the bleeding. Astonished, we finally believe him.
    â€œHe should have been a girl,” says Cousin.
    By now Adi is fully awake. I watch helplessly as mercurial preoccupation veils his eyes. He becomes remote. His vulnerability vanishes. He kicks out, pushing back our hands with the tissues. He is in control.
    Passing by, Ayah swoops down on him and picks him up. After hugging him and nuzzling his face she abruptly puts him down again, saying: “He is my little English baba!”
    Last evening Ayah took us for a walk in Simla-pahari and a passerby, no doubt impelled by her spherical agitation into spouting small talk, inquired: “Is he an English’s son?”
    â€œOf course not!” said Ayah imperiously. However, vanity softening her contempt, she added: “Can any dough-faced English’s son match his spice? Their looks lack salt!”

    Ayah is so proud of Adi’s paucity of pigment. Sometimes she takes us to Lawrence Gardens and encourages him to run across the space separating native babies and English babies. The ayahs of the English babies hug him and fuss over him and permit him to romp with their privileged charges. Adi undoes the bows of little girls with blue eyes in scratchy organdy dresses and wrestles with tallow-haired boys in the grass. Ayah beams.

    On bitterly cold days when ice sales plummet, Ice-candy-man transforms himself into a birdman. Burdened with enormous cages stuffed with sparrows and common green parrots he parades the paths behind the Lahore Gymkhana lawns and outside the Punjab Club. At strategic moments he