Oh, Grandfather more lizard than human.
Dog more human than dog.
Sai's face upside down in her soup spoon.
To welcome her, the cook had modeled the mashed potatoes into a motorcar, recollecting a long-forgotten skill from another age, when, using the same pleasant medium, he had fashioned celebratory castles decorated with paper flags, fish with bangle nose rings, porcupines with celery spines, chickens with real eggs placed behind for comic effect.
This motorcar had tomato slice wheels and decorations rolled out of ancient bits of tinfoil that the cook treated as a precious metal, washing, drying, using, and reusing them until they crumbled into tinselly scraps that he still couldn't bear to throw away.
The car sat in the middle of the table, along with paddle-shaped mutton cutlets, water-logged green beans, and a head of cauliflower under cheese sauce that looked like a shrouded brain. All the dishes were spinning steam furiously, and warm, food-scented clouds condensed on Sai's face. When the steam cleared a little, she had another look at her grandfather at the far end of the table and the dog on another chair by his side. Mutt was smiling—head inclined, thump thump went her tail against the seat—but the judge seemed not to have noticed Sai's arrival. He was a shriveled figure in a white shirt and black trousers with a buckle to the side. The clothes were frayed but clean, ironed by the cook, who still ironed everything—pajamas, towels, socks, underwear, and handkerchiefs. His face seemed distanced by what looked like white powder over dark skin—or was it just the vapor? And from him came a faint antibiotic whiff of cologne, a little too far from perfume, a little too close to a preserving liquid. There was more than a hint of reptile in the slope of his face, the wide hairless forehead, the introverted nose, the introverted chin, his lack of movement, his lack of lips, his fixed gaze. Like other elderly people, he seemed not to have traveled forward in time but far back. Harking to the prehistoric, in attendance upon infinity, he resembled a creature of the Galápagos staring over the ocean.
Finally, he looked up and fixed his gaze on Sai. "Well, what is your name?"
"Sai."
"Sai?" he said crossly, as if angered by an impudence.
The dog sneezed. It had an elegant snout, a bump of nobility at the top of its head, ruffly pantaloons, elaborately fringed tail—
Sai had never seen such a good-looking dog.
"Your dog is like a film star," said Sai.
"Maybe an Audrey Hepburn," said the judge, trying not to show how pleased he was at this remark, "but certainly not one of those lurid apparitions on the bazaar posters."
He picked up his spoon. "Where is the soup?"
The cook had forgotten it in his excitement over the mashed-potato car.
The judge brought down his fist. The soup after the main course? The routine had been upset.
The electricity fell abruptly to a lower strength as if in accordance with the judge's disapproval, and the bulb began to buzz like the beetle on its back skittering over the table, upset by this wishy-washy voltage that could not induce a kamikaze response. The cook had already turned off all other lamps in the house in order to gather the meager power into this one, and in this uneven lighting, they were four shadow puppets from a fairytale flickering on the lumpy plaster of the wall—a lizard man, a hunchbacked cook, a lush-lashed maiden, and a long-tailed wolf dog… .
"Must write to that fool of a subdivisional officer," said the judge, "but what good will it do!" He overturned the beetle on the table with his knife, it stopped buzzing, and Mutt, who had been staring at it with shock, gazed at him like an adoring spouse.
The cook carried in two bowls of sour and peppery tomato soup, muttering, "No thanks to me for anything… . See what I have to deal with and I'm not young and healthy anymore… . Terrible to be a poverty-stricken man, terrible, terrible, terrible… ."
The judge took a spoon from a bowl of cream and thwacked a white blob into the red.
"Well," he said to his granddaughter, "one must not disturb one another. One's had to hire a tutor for you—a lady down the hill, can't afford a convent school—why should one be in the business of fattening the church … ? Too far, anyway, and one doesn't have the luxury of transport anymore, does one? Can't send you to a government school, I suppose … you'd come out speaking with the wrong accent and picking your nose… ."
The light diminished now, to a filament, tender as Edison's first miracle held between delicate pincers of wire in the glass globe of the bulb. It glowed a last blue crescent, then failed.
"Damn it!" said the judge.
In her bed later that evening, Sai lay under a tablecloth, for the last sheets had long worn out. She could sense the swollen presence of the forest, hear the hollow-knuckled knocking of the bamboo, the sound of the jhora that ran deep in the décolleté of the mountain. Batted down by household sounds during the day, it rose at dusk, to sing pure-voiced into the windows. The structure of the house seemed fragile in the balance of this night—just a husk. The tin roof rattled in the wind. When Sai moved her foot, her toes went silently through the rotted fabric. She had a fearful feeling of having entered a space so big it reached both backward and forward.
Suddenly, as if a secret door had opened in her hearing, she became aware of the sound of microscopic jaws slow-milling the house to sawdust, a sound hard to detect for being so closely knit unto the air, but once identified, it grew monumental. In this climate, she would learn, untreated wood could be chewed up in a season.
