The Crow Eaters Read Online Free Page A

Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Parsi ladies exhorted Putli to stand up to her tyrannical husband and take better care of her own mother. Freddy sensed that his good name and standing were being criticised publicly and he was resentful, but the more harried he became the less he was able to cope.
    Not satisfied with commandeering the household, Jerbanoo extended her sway to the store. Whenever Freddy was away, riding roughshod over the salesman’s scruples, Jerbanoo appropriated huge quantities of chocolate, biscuits, perfume and wines. These were used by her and her friends at their leisure; or magnanimously bequeathed. Harilal the clerk and the two salesmen were constantly popping in and out of the store on errands. While they carried coyly decorated trays bearing gifts, invitations, and messages back and forth, Freddy found himself handling the store alone.
    One particular evening, after a day spent in attending to customers, indenting ledgers and unloading a cart-load of biscuit cases single-handed, he trudged up wearily and told Putli: ‘This Olympic relay race has got to stop.’
    ‘What relay race?’ she asked, surprised.
    ‘This running to and fro of my staff. I have to cope with the work of three men single-handed. Harilal returns and thesalesman is off – the salesman barely shows his face when Krishan Chand is off – carrying my chocolates, my peanuts, my potato-crisps, and my biscuits to her friends! What is she up to anyway?’
    ‘Oh, come now, you don’t grudge her a little social life of her own, do you?’ chided his matter-of-fact spouse. ‘After all, you can’t expect her to go up and down running errands herself.’
    Faredoon felt a dangerous pulse throb in his temple. Of late he had the depressing feeling that his wife had ganged up with her mother.
    Later that night, rearing up weakly in bed, he startled Putli by suddenly shouting:
    ‘And while I’m at it, let me warn you … This looting of my store has got to stop! I tell you, I’ll have no stocks left. Who does she think she is, some goddamn princess?’ he demanded, close on tears.
    ‘Whatever has come over you these days?’ remonstrated his wife, getting out of bed to light an oil lamp. ‘I’ve never seen you so mean and petty. What if she takes a little something now and then to entertain her friends? After all, don’t forget, we have uprooted her …’
    ‘A little something?’ shouted Freddy interrupting her. ‘You call that a little something? Why, she eats like a horse at meals, and then swallows enough sweet chutneys, candied fruit and liqueurs to give an elephant diarrhoea – or haven’t you noticed her bloated dimensions of late?’ he spluttered sarcastically.
    ‘Not bloated,’ amended Putli, ‘puffed up. She is just puffed up with sorrow.’
    ‘What!’ exclaimed Freddy incredulously.
    ‘It’s been known to happen,’ she countered defiantly. ‘People have been known to puff up with sorrow – and God alone knows she has enough cause the way you treat her.’
    ‘That robust ox has puffed up with sorrow?’ repeated Freddy, at his wits’ end.
    ‘And,’ corrected his spouse, ‘she is not as robust as shelooks – for all her size she’s as weak as a twig. She is quite unwell, really.’
    ‘I suppose all that muscle on show is just a puff of air,’ mumbled Freddy faintly, feeling the bottom falling from his world.
    And in fact Jerbanoo was really ailing. All in their turn the kidneys, the liver, the gall bladder and her joints upped and temporarily ceased the unequal struggle against layers of fat. A few years later even her uterus, under the strain of merry-making, over-eating and boisterous exertions, turned over. She was subject to a pain that none but an ‘English doctor’ could rectify.
    ‘Get an English doctor. Oh, I’m dying. Get an English doctor,’ she howled for an hour, waving aside all other suggestions. Freddy, faint at the thought of the enormous fee he would have to disgorge, was compelled