The pandal went up on the maidan at the end of the lane exactly nine days before the goddess herself was due to arrive, and for those nine days the whole para operated on a kind of holy chaos that nobody, least of all the four children of the two houses, had any interest in resisting.
Debabrata Basu, at fifteen, considered himself far too old to be excited about a bamboo structure being hammered together by four sweating labourers under his own supervision — a supervision nobody had asked for and nobody could persuade him to abandon.
He stood with his hands on his hips at the edge of the maidan each afternoon after his tutoring was done, watching the frame of the pandal rise strut by strut, and delivered opinions on its construction with the gravity of a man twice his age.
“That post is not straight,” he informed the head labourer, for the third day running.
“It is straight, Debabrata-babu.”
“It is straight to you.
Try standing where I am standing.”
Kamala, sitting cross-legged on an overturned basket a few feet away with a book open on her knees that she was not, in fact, reading, watched this exchange with the particular fondness of an almost-sister who had long ago stopped expecting Debabrata to notice when he was being ridiculous.
She was twelve, and had reached the age where she had begun to prefer watching people to being watched by them — a quality her mother despaired of and her father, privately, thought rather wise.
“He’s going to make them take the whole thing down and start again,” she said, to no one in particular, though she knew Uma was close enough to hear.
“He did that last year too,” said Uma, from somewhere above Kamala’s head.
Kamala looked up.
Uma Basu, eight years old and entirely unbothered by the fact that she had climbed the tamarind tree at the edge of the maidan in her second-best frock, was surveying the pandal construction from a branch some ten feet off the ground with the satisfied air of a general reviewing troops.
“Uma.
Get down before Ma sees you.”
“Ma is inside arguing with the priest about the timing of the sandhi puja.
She won’t see anything for at least an hour.” Uma said this with the flat, practical confidence of a child who had made a careful study of exactly how long her mother’s arguments tended to run, and had built an entire private life around the gaps.
“Besides, I can see everything from here.
Arun’s under the sweet-seller’s stall and he’s been there since the labourers arrived.”
This last piece of information turned out, upon Kamala craning her neck to look, to be entirely accurate.
Arun Sengupta, ten years old, was indeed crouched beneath the wooden trestle of the sandesh-seller’s stall at the maidan’s edge, engaged in a transaction that appeared to involve no money whatsoever and a great deal of pleading.
“I am not giving you a free sandesh, khoka,” the sweet-seller was saying, without much conviction, “your father is a respected man in this lane and would be ashamed.”
“My father,” said Arun, with the serene confidence of a child who had tested this line before and found it effective, “says generosity during Puja brings a full ten years of good fortune to the giver.
He told me this himself, this very morning.”
“Your father told you no such thing.”
“He might have.”
The sweet-seller, who had four children of his own and no defences left against this particular species of small determined liar, sighed and handed over a single sandesh wrapped in a sal leaf, muttering something about how the whole lane would be bankrupt by the time this one turned fifteen.
Arun took it with the triumphant dignity of a general accepting a surrendered city, and turned to find Kamala watching him from across the maidan with an expression that managed to be both disapproving and deeply unsurprised.
“You’ll get caught one day,” she called over.
“I have never once been caught,” Arun called back, which was not, strictly speaking, true, but he had found that saying things with sufficient confidence often made them retroactively feel true, a philosophy that would serve him rather less well in later life than it did at the age of ten.
By evening, when the labourers had gone home and the half-finished pandal stood skeletal and hopeful against the darkening sky, the four of them had assembled, as they did most evenings, on the low wall that ran along the edge of the tank behind the two houses — a wall that had, over years of identical use, acquired four distinct smooth patches worn into its brick by four distinct pairs of sitting bones, though none of them had ever noticed this and would have been faintly embarrassed to be told.
“Ma says,” Debabrata announced, in the tone of someone delivering important news, “that this year Kamala-di and I are old enough to help carry the offerings during sandhi puja.
Actual offerings.
Not just standing at the back.”
“I’ve carried offerings before,” Kamala said.
“You carried a flower.
Once.
When you were seven.”
“A flower is an offering.”
“It is not the same—”
“Will I ever be old enough to carry offerings,” Uma interrupted, from her position lying flat along the top of the wall with her chin propped on her hands, addressing the question to the sky in general rather than to either sibling in particular, “or will I always be the youngest and always be told to stand at the back?”
There was a small, telling silence.
Uma had a way of asking questions that sounded idle and were not, and all three of the older children had learned, through some trial and considerable error, that the idle tone was the one time you most needed to pay attention.
“You’ll be old enough eventually,” Debabrata said, more gently than he’d spoken all evening.
“Everyone starts at the back.
I started at the back.”
“I don’t want to start at the back.
I want to start wherever I actually am.”
“That isn’t how it works, Uma.”
“It’s a stupid way for it to work, then.”
Arun, who had been quiet for the length of this exchange — quiet, for Arun, being a relative and rarely sustained condition — shifted along the wall until he was sitting beside Uma’s propped-up head, close enough that when he spoke it was almost only for her.
“When I carry the offerings,” he said, “I’ll let you hold one corner of the tray.
Nobody will be able to tell whether it was me or you doing it, and by the time they work it out, you’ll already have done it enough times that nobody will think to stop you.”
Uma considered this with the seriousness she brought to everything, sat up, and looked at him for a long moment in the fading light — an eight-year-old’s look, direct and entirely without the social softening that older people learn to apply to such looks, so that anyone watching might almost have mistaken it, for just a second, for something it was not yet, and would not be for years, and would then, eventually, become entirely.
“All right,” she said.
“One corner.
But the good corner.
Not the one that just holds the incense.”
“The good corner,” Arun agreed, with the solemnity of a treaty being signed.
Kamala, watching this exchange from a few feet away, caught Debabrata’s eye across the width of the wall.
Something passed between the older two siblings — an amused, faintly knowing look, the particular look of people four and seven years senior who have already half-guessed at a thing the two younger children have not yet begun to guess at themselves.
“They’ll be insufferable when they’re older,” Debabrata said quietly, so only Kamala could hear.
“They’re insufferable now,” Kamala said.
“I don’t see how age will improve it.”
“No,” Debabrata agreed, watching his little sister argue with Arun over what precisely counted as the good corner of an offering tray they had not yet been given permission to carry.
“I don’t suppose it will.”
The night the goddess arrived, both houses emptied entirely into the maidan.
Bidhu Ma had dressed Uma in a new red-bordered sari for the occasion — a genuine sari this time, not the child’s version she’d worn the year before, tied and pinned with the particular fussing insistence of a mother determined that her daughter would, for at least one evening, look like the young lady she was rapidly and alarmingly becoming.
Uma bore this with visible impatience, tugging at the pleats every few minutes until Bidhu Ma swatted her hand away for the fourth time and told her, not for the first time, that vanity was a poor substitute for patience.
“I’m not vain,” Uma said.
“I just can’t breathe.”
“You can breathe perfectly well.
You simply want to run, and the sari won’t let you.”
This was, Uma privately conceded, entirely accurate, and she said nothing further on the subject.
Across the maidan, lit by hundreds of small clay lamps and the enormous blazing pressure lanterns the puja committee had rented for the occasion, the dhaakis had begun to play — the great two-headed drums slung across their shoulders, the rhythm building slowly and then all at once into the driving, ecstatic pattern that every child in the lane had known in their bones since before they could walk.
Debabrata, standing at the front with the other young men of the para who had been given the honour of assisting the priests, caught Kamala’s eye across the crowd and grinned — an unguarded, delighted grin that had none of his daytime gravity left in it at all.
Bipin Babu and Satyen Babu stood together near the back, as they always did, letting the younger men have the front of the crowd, watching their children with the particular contentment of men who had built, brick by brick and argument by argument, exactly the kind of life they had once hoped to build.
“Look at them,” Satyen Babu said, nodding toward the four children — Debabrata solemn with responsibility near the priests, Kamala watching him with quiet pride, Arun attempting, with limited success, to teach Uma the proper rhythm for the dhunuchi dance that the older boys were performing, Uma refusing to be taught and doing it her own way regardless, badly, joyfully, entirely without embarrassment.
“I am looking,” Bipin Babu said.
“Nineteen years ago I did not know you.
Now I cannot imagine an evening like this one without you standing beside me to see it.”
It was, for Satyen Babu, an unusually unguarded thing to say, and Bipin Babu — a man who dealt daily in careful words, weighed and measured for a courtroom — found himself without an immediate reply.
He settled, instead, for reaching over and gripping his friend’s shoulder once, briefly, the two of them standing together at the edge of the light and the drumming and the smoke of a hundred small lamps, watching four children who did not yet belong to two households so much as they belonged, entirely and without qualification, to one.
Neither man said, because neither man needed to, that this — precisely this, the drums and the lamp-smoke and the four children tangled together in the firelight, indistinguishable at a glance as to which belonged to which house — was the entire reason either of them had ever wanted anything at all.