She did not like the idea of going up to the man’s house. If he had been there when Shalu had given that instruction about the fennel seeds, it would have been a different matter. Now she would be obliged to go up to his home and tell him that she was here on an errand for which she had no proof. There had been something disapproving about him, as if he did not like her. A vibe. She found him brusque, and brusque people put her off. Besides, she didn’t like barging into people’s houses. Not to ask for fennel seeds, or – worse – to pound them.
She had no wish to face him, but she would have to, for Shalu’s sake, and Munnu’s. She heaved a sigh of resignation and lifted the latch on the gate.
When he opened the door in response to her knocking, it was to stare at her in bewilderment. That changed, in the next instant – as he recognised her, she thought – to worry. “What happened?” he asked, speaking in Hindi, as before. “Is the baby all right now? He’s quiet, isn’t he?” He stopped, as if to listen, and nodded. “He is. He must be fine.”
“He’s quiet because he’s drinking his milk,” Nandini said impatiently. Then, because she knew she would next be asking this man for a favour, she summoned up as friendly a smile as she could. “Shalu told me to ask if you have any fennel seeds.”
“Fennel?” He looked taken aback. “What on earth for?”
“I suppose it’s for Munnu. Fennel is good for the digestion. If he’s got colic, it might help.”
“Oh,” the man said. “I – let me see. Wait here.” He was turning to go back into the house, closing the door behind him, when Nandini added, “She said, if you have some, could I pound a little and take it with me?”
That stopped him short. “Pound it? Pound it with what?”
“Do you have a mortar and pestle?” Nandini said patiently.
“A what?” She had been speaking in Hindi, of course, and had used the Hindi word for the implement: imam-dasta. Would he perhaps know the English word instead?
No; she doubted it. Nandini sighed. “Can you just see if you have the fennel seeds? If you don’t, then we needn’t bother about all of this right now.”
He had stepped over the threshold, holding the mesh door open for her with one arm. “What do you mean you needn’t bother? That baby is in pain.” There was a tone of censure, of horror in his voice.
“He may be just hungry,” Nandini said. “And anyway, if you don’t have fennel seeds, there’s nothing you can do, is there?”
The man gave her a look filled with – what was it? Contempt? Disbelief? The irritation she had been feeling ever since she had met this man surged, growing into something close to annoyance. Who did he think he was, to be glaring at her in this insulting fashion? Was it just out of pure and simple cussedness?
But she would be gone in another five minutes, at the most – that was, if he did have the fennel seeds. And she need never see him again. He could sit here in this fine cottage of his and stew…she looked around, now that he had vanished somewhere into the recesses of the house.
Through the window looking out onto the valley, sunlight flooded in, lighting up the red-tiled floor, picking out patterns in the well-worn sofa, its upholstery faded and shiny in places. The sun washed over the books that sat in two neat piles on the coffee table. It revealed, in its unashamed boldness, the place where the back of a chair had been mended clumsily together with a few sturdy turns of duct tape. It showed up a chipped edge on the glass top of the table, and a threadbare section on the thin carpet beneath.
The neglect was obvious, but if there was one thing that was not neglected, it was the books. They were carefully covered in clear plastic, each and every one of them. She could see no dog-eared pages, no books lying face down, pages spread wide without a thought for the havoc that would wreak on the spines.
From what she presumed was the kitchen came sounds of cabinets being opened and closed. She let her gaze wander around, towards the bookshelves that lined two walls of the room. Closed bookcases, she saw. The better to keep out the dust. Bookcases, too, that were positioned in such a way that the sunlight did not fall on the books. And the books – involuntarily, Nandini stepped closer to see them – oh, what books. There were many of her favourite authors here: Gerald Durrell and James Herriot, and closer home, another man who loved animals in his own way, the inimitable “Carpet Sahib”, Jim Corbett. There was Wodehouse, almost two dozen of his books. Richard Armour – ah, that was unusual; she had never come across anybody else who had even heard of Armour, let alone possessed five books of his.
Nandini was startled out of her scrutiny of the books by a sharp clearing of a throat. She whirled about, and there he was, standing at the door through which he had disappeared a few minutes earlier. In one hand he held a jam jar, one of the most common sights in Indian kitchens: washed, dried, and reused to store spices. At this distance, Nandini could not see what was in the jam jar. What she could see was the expression on his face, and it was not pleasant. He looked…annoyed. As if she was intruding, doing something she shouldn’t have been doing.
“Well? See anything you like? Anything you want to borrow?” he asked. The words, in themselves, were polite enough. The tone imparted a completely different flavour to them: it was snide, it was sarcastic. It assumed, she realized, that she could not possibly even know what these books were all about. Nandini frowned. She would have thought a man who read Wodehouse would have been more amenable to spreading sweetness and light; this one was positively grouchy. Did he hate lending his books? Had some long-ago experience scarred him for life, making him vow to not lend a single book to anyone who didn’t undertake to handle it with kid gloves?
“No,” Nandini said. He had come up to her by now, and still held the jam jar clutched in his fist, so firmly that his knuckles shone white.
“Did you find it, then?” Nandini asked, indicating the jar with a tilt of her chin.
He held it out wordlessly. It was fennel, thank heavens. She had been worried he would have got something completely different, like cumin or coriander.
“Mortar and pestle?” she asked, and remembered, too late, that he did not know what those were. “Anything I can use to crush these? Something heavy? A rolling pin?”
He was looking not just annoyed, but confused now, and impatient. She realised that she was probably holding up whatever work he had been doing. In fact, ever since she and Shalu had stopped on the hillside nearby, with Munnu howling his guts out, this man had not been allowed to work. And, from all that she had come to know of how orchards were managed, he probably had a lot of work to do. Especially if he was new to all of this.
Suddenly, she was looking at him through slightly different eyes. This was a man who lived by himself, who was trying to get used to a new place and a new profession. Other than the people who worked in the orchard – pruning, weeding, doing whatever was needed to keep it healthy and productive, besides the extra labour that would be hired at harvest time – he had nobody. Nobody to guide him, to tell him what should be done. The workers may know their work, but they knew nothing of the macro-level decisions: the dynamics with the buyers, the logistics of getting the fruit to them, and so on. Setting up and running the Mukteshwar Women’s Co-operative had made her realize just how much work there was in small enterprises, when there was just one person to do all the paperwork, take all the big decisions, reach out to all the buyers, draw up the bills, find the supplies…she could understand why his expression was so harried.
Excerpted with permission from For The Love of Apricots: A Novel, Madhulika Liddle, Speaking Tiger Books.
