Difficult Daughters Read Online Free PDF Page A

she needed, on a daily basis. The city with its open drains and dampness was an unhealthy place. He himself lived at the mill house in Tarsikka, and he always felt better there. Though his grandchildren and his daughter-in-law often came to visit, it was clearly not enough. He must talk to his sons. Moving such a large household would mean considerable work and expense. Then the thought of leaving the house that the family had lived in for so many years was painful.
    *
     
    Lajwanti had foreseen trouble of this kind years ago, with a heart that became tight and constricted in Kasturi’s presence. Ever since her young brother-in-law, Suraj Prakash, had brought his bride home, she had watched how her in-laws danced attendance on her, fussing over her health, duped by that sweet face, when really she was no better than a dog or a cat in season. No better.
    Before Kasturi’s arrival she had been the only young woman in the house, and everything had been managed peacefully. But within one year of Suraj Prakash’s marriage the first child had come, and after that there was no stopping the woman. She remembered, with a bitterness still fresh and sullen, how delighted her father-in-law had been at Kasturi’s disgusting breeding. ‘Raunaq in the house at last‚’ he exclaimed, completely ignoring the existence of her two children.
    She had tried complaining to him, ‘Baoji, the noise. From morning to night I have a headache. Somnath has been forced to go to the storeroom on the kotha to study, and as for Shaku, how is it possible for her to concentrate on her books with all their hoo-hoo, haa-haa, hee-hee?’
    ‘She should play more with her cousins‚’ commented the grandfather. ‘She is too pale.’
    ‘She is very delicate, Baoji, how can she stand it when I can’t? Poor Shaku has to walk up and down my back and across my head to relieve the pain‚’ whispered the girl’s mother, pressing her temples.
    ‘I will allow no one to be sick in my house‚’ replied the father-in-law. ‘From tomorrow the tonga will drive both of you every morning to the Company Bagh. One hour of brisk walking in the fresh air will benefit you greatly.’
    But how could Lajwanti go? If she were to leave the house every morning, who knew what mischief those children would be up to. They respected nothing, and that woman had no shame. If she wasn’t always on the alert they would slip in to pee in her angan, in her rooms, even shit in the gutter outside her kitchen. She had to be there to shout for Kasturi, carefully inspecting while the latter performed an inadequate swabbing job. They even had the nerve to wet her quilt, and though she forced Kasturi to wash the heavy thing there and then, that woman was incapable of cleanliness. She had to be vigilant not only in her own quarters, but upstairs where the latrines were, as well. Her family used to do their morning business before the sweeper came to carry the night soil away. After that, the toilets remained clean for the rest of the day. Now these children would hop across the terrace to her side and mess up the three cubicles, even the cement blocks, so that no one could decently use the place. It was because of their dirt and filth that she had had to demand a separate kitchen from her father-in-law.
    At first he hadn’t taken her seriously, but when she left the house and refused to return he realized she meant her threats. Gradually she had had to supervise the building of a wall across the angan and then across the common drawing-room in order to protect her space. As for money, that woman was such a bloodsucker, it was but inevitable that her own family would suffer.
    Only her husband had begun to see things in their proper perspective. God had helped her to achieve that.
    ‘I’ve never seen such a thing‚’ he would hear when he came home, tired from sitting in the shop all day. ‘How hard you have to work! And for whom? Those children! Ha!’ A stream of red betel juice