My Nine Lives Read Online Free PDF

bus arrived, and when that happens, there is no time to waste (more than once, unable to move fast enough, I’ve been knocked down in the rush to get on). I just managed to shout my address to her, and she came to see me the very next day. It was a holiday and she didn’t have to work. Yes, she had a job—not a good one, underpaid, in a travel agency run by a greedyand tyrannical woman; but the hours were good, so that she only needed part-time help at home. Fortunately, her children were bigger now—sixteen and seventeen—and her husband, thank heavens, no longer lived with her but was drinking himself to death in Bombay.
    She came often; she said she loved to be with me and talk about the past. But it was mostly the present we talked of, her stressful present, which included a bad relationship with her brothers and sisters, all of whom had made conventional arranged marriages and felt themselves entitled to look down on her. (At that she proudly tossed her hair, still short, the way she used to.) She also loved, she said, to be with me in my cozy, comfortable little place—here her eyes roved around, in the slightly calculating way of women who have for years had to look out for themselves. I was surprised: “cozy and comfortable” were not words truly applicable to my little whitewashed room, at least not for anyone but me. I had a string bed with a mat beside it on which I slept more often than on the bed. The room was on the roof, so there was a lot of light—also heat, but I possessed a big black table fan that I had bought from my landlords when they installed their airconditioner. Priti said she felt more peaceful here than anywhere else. At home, the children brought back friends and played loud music, which was disturbing to her when she returned from work, often with a headache brought on by the stressful situation with her employer. How she would love to come and relax in a place like mine—although of course she didn’t want to disturb me in any way. I suggested that, if I gave her my key, she could just come and rest here for an hour or two when I was out. Well, I was always out at dusk when I went down to the river or, on Thursdays, to Nizamuddin. This worked out perfectly because those were the same hours that Priti was finishedfor the day, and it was a great relief to her to have my quiet place to come to.
    I began to suspect that she did not come there alone, but I didn’t mind. I even liked the idea of Priti bringing a friend. I knew she had had a bad marriage—she told me details that I didn’t want to hear—and I also knew that she was, like my mother, a person who thirsted for love. This too she often told me, and in any case, didn’t I remember her as a young girl defying her whole family and all her caste and traditions, for the sake of love? I began to stay out later than usual so as not to disturb her time together with her friend. By the time I arrived home she had gone, with everything as I had left it, except sometimes for a lingering smell of liquor and tobacco smoke.
    But one night she was still there. She had locked up my place and was on the stairs, and so was my landlady. Their voices could be heard down the street, and some neighbors had also come out to listen. Fights were not uncommon in the neighborhood—if they were between men, they could turn violent and not long before there had been a murder, a brother mortally stabbing his sister’s alleged seducer. But women tended to confine themselves to deadly invective shouted out loud for everyone to hear. By the time I was walking up the stairs toward them, I had already understood what the fight was about. I realized that my landlady had misinterpreted the situation, and I tried to calm her by explaining that Priti was only using my room to entertain a personal friend. “ One friend!” screamed my landlady. Then she turned on me—how I had fooled everyone,