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your Nana is dead you are playing a trick on me."
I said, "Then stop harassing the whole family, otherwise I am coming with you." She agreed that she wouldn't go to the funeral, she would live for me.
She stayed in my father's town, but she was a very independent woman: she did not like the big joint family; my father's brothers, their wives, their children -- it was a huge caravan. She said, "This is not the place for me. I have lived my whole life with my husband, in silence. Only for seven years were you there, otherwise there has not been much conversation either, because there was nothing to say. We had talked about all those things before, so there was nothing to say -- we just sat silently."
And it was a beautiful place where they lived, facing a very big lake, so they would sit looking at the lake and the water birds flying, coming in thousands in certain seasons. She said, "I would like to live alone." So a house was found for her near the river where she would find some similarity; in this town we had no lake but we had a beautiful river.
The whole day I was in school or roaming around the town or doing a thousand and one things, and at night I always stayed with my Nani. Many times she said, "Your parents may feel bad. We took you from them for seven years, for which they cannot forgive us. We thought that we should return you as clean as we had got you, not trying to impose anything on you. But they are angry; they don't say so but I can feel it and I hear from other people that we spoiled you. And now you don't go to sleep with your father and mother and your family; you come here every night. They will think that the spoiling is continuing -- the old man is gone but the old woman is still here."
I said to her, "But if I don't come can you really sleep? For whom do you prepare the second bed every night before I come? -- because I do not tell you that tomorrow I will be coming. About tomorrow, from the very beginning I have been uncertain because who knows what will happen tomorrow? Why do you prepare the second bed? And not only the second bed...."
I had a long habit which Devaraj somehow had to manage to finish;
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