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Cousins-one to four-gathering in the doorway through which the dark lady has passed, drawn like moths to the candle of her screech… watching her quietly as she advanced, guided by Lifafa Das, towards the unlikely sooth-sayer, were bone-setter cobra-wallah and monkey-man. Whispers of encouragement now (and were there also giggles behind rough hands?): 'O such a too fine fortune he will tell, Sahiba!' and, 'Come, cousinji, lady is waiting!'… But what was this Ramram? A huckster, a two-chip palmist, a giver of cute forecasts to silly women-or the genuine article, the holder of the keys? And Lifafa Das: did he see, in my mother, a woman who could be satisfied by a two-rupee fake, or did he see deeper, into the underground heart of her weakness?-And when the prophecy came, were cousins astonished too?-And the frothing at the mouth? What of that? And was it true that my mother, under the dislocating influence of that hysterical evening, relinquished her hold on her habitual self-which she had felt slipping away from her into the absorbing sponge of the lightless air in the stairwell-and entered a state of mind in which anything might happen and be believed? And there is another, more horrible possibility, too; but before I voice my suspicion, I must describe, as nearly as possible in spite of this filmy curtain of ambiguities, what actually happened: I must describe my mother, her palm slanted outwards towards the advancing palmist, her eyes wide and unblinking as a pomfret's-and the cousins (giggling?), 'What a reading you are coming to get, Sahiba!' and, 'Tell, cousinji, tell!'-but the curtain descends again, so I ca
Silent cousins-monkeys on leashes, ceasing their chatter-cobras coiled in baskets-and the circling fortune-teller, finding history speaking through his lips. (Was that how?) Begi
Is that how it was? Is that when Ramram Seth, a
And finally the cobra-wallah-or monkey-man, or bone-setter, or even Lifafa Das of the peepshow on wheels-saying, 'Too much prophecy, man. Our Ramram made too much damn prophecy tonight.'
Many years later, at the time of her premature dotage, when all k'nds of ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes, my mother saw once again the peepshow man whom she saved by a
Like my grandfather at the begi
But now, because there are yet more questions and ambiguities, I am obliged to voice certain suspicions. Suspicion, too, is a monster with too many heads; why, then, can't I stop myself unleashing it at my own mother?… What, I ask, would be a fair description of the seer's mach? And memory-my new, all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father grandfather grandmother and everyone else-answers: soft; squashy as cornflour pudding. Again, reluctantly, I ask: What was the condition of his lips? And the inevitable response: full; overfleshed; poetic. A third time I interrogate this memory of mine: what of Ms hair? The reply: thi
Yes-a doubt lingers. The monster asks, 'Why did she fail, somehow or other, to tell her husband about her visit?' Reply of the accused (voiced by our Padma in my mother's absence): 'But think how angry he'd've got, my God! Even if there hadn't been all that firebug business to worry him! Strange men; a woman on her own; he'd've gone wild! Wild, completely!'
Unworthy suspicions… I must dismiss them; must save my strictures for later, when, in the absence of ambiguity, without the clouding curtain, she gave me hard, clear, irrefutable proofs.