MARRIAGE

 "Why do you send out these dimly-lit photographs?" he asked. He felt like picking a quarrel, if only to agitate the serenity on Aloka's face. "What happened to the ones taken by that professional studio?"

"Uff, Glamour Studio," Aloka spoke, with a mock shudder. "Their beautician did such a poor job with Molly's make-up, a family from Calcutta wrote back saying they did not want their son to marry a birthday cake."

"The make-up. It got layered," she explained after a pause, noticing her husband's uncomprehending face. 

"We have to stop approaching these folks in Calcutta," Proloy Kundu muttered to himself. "Their attitude, as if everyone has just got a Nobel Prize. Empty vessels. All of them."

"You want last Sunday's papers?" Aloka asked after a while.

"Nah, gone through them twice. Even circus clowns want college graduates."

The building in which the Kundus lived was at the northern tip of the housing society, skirted by a low-grey boundary wall. Low, dun-coloured warehouses lay irregularly scattered beyond the wall. A coil of cumulus cloud gamboled around a late winter sun, its shadow occasionally rippling over the dappled fields in the distance. Proloy Kundu and his wife sat for a while, gazing out of the window, talking of people and places that were no more.

A dull chorus of voices emerged from the drawing room, interrupting their conversation. In the absence of a second bedroom, the entire brood slept there through the year. The twin boys, nestled on the sofa-cum-bed under a single quilt, were awake and kicking each other's shins. Their unrest had made the mosquito netting collapse on the three girls, who slept on layers of thin mattresses piled up on the floor. Everyone was complaining in bitter, drowsy tones.

"Hide the mail, quick," Aloka said, getting up to arrange for fresh cups of tea and glasses of milk. "They'll be here any moment now."

She had barely finished before they all walked in, still grumbling like troops on the retreat. The girls had shawls swaddled tight over their nighties. Joy and Bubu, the boys, wore pullovers that grazed their knees. Those had once belonged to Proloy. He rose to make space and conceal the envelopes.

"Am I wrong to assume it's a holiday? That no one has anywhere to go?" Aloka said. She placed a large, wide-mouthed jar on the table, filled with biscuits that looked like survivors of some violent upheaval. 

"No school today," Joy spoke up. "Who broke our biscuits?"

"Of course it's not a holiday," Rinku, one of the twin girls, replied. "I have three hours of continuous practical classes in the morning. And then I signed up with that private laboratory, remember? Because their equipment was better? Well, that's Saturday afternoon for you. I hope my legs don't fall off by end of day."

"Don't expect me before five in the evening," Rimpa, the other of the twins, volunteered. She sat pouting, her thin, pale fingers rotating a broken fragment of a biscuit. "Seriously, what is with the biscuits? Every brand and variety seems to have been smashed in here. Has Palash stopped coming?"

"I bought those from Sharma's grocery. Some of the stuff gets damaged during unloading. You get a heavy discount on those," Aloka said.

Rinku and Rimpa widened their eyes and drew their breath, in horror, as if they had been practicing it together for a long time. 

'Wait till you have your own families," Aloka said, departing for the kitchen.