Monsoon Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

it?” Meaning the midwifery training. “Why do you hate it so much?”
    â€œBecause . . .” Her hand was on the steaming carcass, water streaming from its bottom. “Most men hate that sort of thing, they find it squelchy.” In another, better mood, I might have laughed. However infuriating she could be, I loved my mother’s odd turns of phrase: “she’s gone all bendy,” for a friend who was trying to be feminine and seductive; “I’m forky today,” for when she was cross. Today, I wanted to crown her.
    â€œAnd I’m just so happy,” my mother went on in her crooning-mummy voice, stirring and sniffing, “to see my lovely daughter looking healthier. That’s all. I was terribly worried about youbefore. God knows what would have happened if the matron hadn’t phoned.”
    I chopped the chicken and tried to smile. My night sweats, the insomnia, the bouts of weeping I’d tried to pass off as the after­effects of the flu that had swept through our dormitory, but Matron Smythe, my no-nonsense superior at Saint Andrew’s, had described my inability to get out of bed one morning as “a perfectly ordinary case of nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork and the war.” Fourteen-hour shifts and sleepless nights had clobbered quite a few of her girls, she said.
    A dash of rain fell against the window. Ma’s dark eyes filled with tears. “Please, darling,” she said, “let’s not talk about this anymore, it only makes us both unhappy. Soak the rice, and we’ll sit down with a cup of tea, and I’ll try and think what on earth we’re going to do next. We can’t stay here indefinitely, and honestly,” in a fresh spurt of indignation, “is it really such a crime to want to see you settled and happy?”
    We drank the tea, and when she was breathing normally again she pulled a copy of Horse and Hound from her knitting bag and began the obsessive routine I remembered from childhood. The varnished nail skidded over the results for jumping competitions and advertisements for country homes, which, she observed with relish, no one could afford to heat now, stopping at the classified sections at the back that were her employment exchange.
    â€œHampshire landowner needs housekeeper to run home and do errands, walk dogs, et cetera,” she read aloud.
    â€œNo good,” I said. “Woofers.” She had a deep conviction that dogs were filthy and full of disease. She was frightened of them too, even ones she knew.
    â€œElderly widower, Derbyshire, desperately seeks all-round factotum to help run house and do accounts for small farm, and help with entertaining. No pets, small self-contained flat. Time wasters need not apply.”
    She made a small mark with her pencil. In her glory days, she’d worked as the assistant to some big cheese in Indian royalty, the nabob of somewhere or other. And oh! the balls, the polo, the fun.
    Poor Mummy. My bad mood collapsed at the sight of her hunched over her magazine, her expression both hopeful and cynical. She was circling a couple of advertisements when Ci Ci’s face appeared around the door, her expression stagily dramatic.
    â€œOh, the bliss of curry.” She closed her eyes. “It does takes one back.”
    â€œKeep the dog out,” my mother said curtly. “Nosy bloody woman,” she added when the door closed. My spirits sank. Nothing seemed to work anymore, not cooking curry, not being with me, and it felt in that bleak moment that we were trapped in a duet that had once been sweet but now played nothing but duff notes. The spice tin went back in her handbag; I cleaned the countertops. So, no magic wand and maybe she was thinking the same thing. When I looked up, her mouth was struggling.
    â€œDon’t say anything,” she said fiercely.
    â€œIs it the onions?”
    â€œYes, it’s the onions.”
    She