Two Short Novels Read Online Free

son? May I be your sacrifice!’ she soothed with pouting lips.
    ‘Nothing, grandmother, nothing is the matter,’ he said gasping for breath as if he had lost a heartbeat. ‘I am all right, I am all right. You go and rest.’
    ‘Do have some of the tea I have made for you, my son,’ she said, ‘do have a sip . . . I will open the windows — the sun is shining outside.’ But as he had closed his eyes and paled for a moment, she opened her mouth, frightened and looked at him dazedly.
    ‘ Achha, achha ,’ he sighed impatiently lest she should fuss. ‘But don’t open the windows. You go and rest.’
    She hobbled by the side of the bed and relaxed. Then with indifferent fingers she pulled the quilt, which he had thrown away on one side during the night, over his legs. Glancing around to see whether everything was in order she scanned his face casually, as if she had come to accept the deathlessness of his sick body, and she lingered by the bedside.
    He felt oppressed by her presence as if she had disturbed him and brought on his spasm of coughing.
    ‘It isn’t that I am a child anymore, grandma,’ he said. ‘I will be all right, you go and rest.’
    ‘You are still a child to me, my son,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you will be all right? There is your tea. I have put it on the shelf. Now are you sure? I will see to the meal then. I will go.’ And looking around and under the bed, she lifted the chamber and said again: ‘ Achha , I will go. But call me if you need anything . . . ’
    As the image of her hobbling, bent form receded, he pitied and hated her. She was his father’s mother. And always he had pitied and hated her. The pride of his love for his dead mother had never overcome the barrier of the wrong she had done him in allowing his father to marry again. And since she had aged too he had never been able to overcome her ugliness; and the weight of her doting affection had only increased the barrier.
    In the prolonged weariness of five bedridden months the ebb and flow of his hope in life had infused in him a strange tenderness for everyone and he had loved her for her devotion. She was old and stupid and stumbling, but there was something so pitiable about her that he had let her take the place of his mother. And yet the bitterness of her calm acceptance of his father’s brutality persisted, the bitterness of those howls which he had uttered when his father beat him and the tears he had shed, tears of shame and chagrin when he had been made to accept the humiliation of orders from his stepmother, of the suffering they had all tried to extract from him.
    ‘They all tried to oppress me, they have broken and crushed me and left me destroyed, and now they make a fuss of me and fetch me medicines and run here and there trying to save my life, the hypocrites!’ he muttered under his breath, and looked away at the books that lay by the bottles of medicine on the narrow shelf, crowded by the odds and ends of his stepmother, her looking glass, and her assortment of glass bangles.
    As he turned over he felt the weakness of his lungs go silently to his head, and he lay still in a sleepy inertia through which the bundles of dirty clothes that hung like festoons from the coloured pegs on the walls, the stacks of cheaply painted trunks and the sacks of sugar over which the rats had pissed in stinking green patterns, seemed to become unbearably depressing. The whitewashed walls blackened by the soot of slow hearthfires in the gulley seemed to be crowding in on him and the feeling that he could never get up and escape from the sordid reality of his home into the world of tall mirrors and gilded chairs and mahogany tables depicted at the Mahna Singh Theatre, made him hopeless.
    A fresh twitching of the lungs frightened him. He closed his eyes and tried not to move even the fraction of an inch, obsessed by the superstitious awe which the Doctor’s orders not to excite himself in anyway had spread over him.
    And, for