Episode 2 — The Big Order

They were building the great red house at the edge of town, and it needed feeding.

Everyone called it the Forest House. It was going to be the largest brick building anyone had seen, a place where the English would study the trees, and it had hundreds of arches and hundreds of workers, and every one of those workers grew hungry at four in the afternoon.

The contractor came to the shop in good shoes and spoke quickly.

“Batisa,” he said. “And a hard laddoo that keeps. For the whole labour. Every day. For as long as the building takes — which, God knows, could be five years.” He spread his hands as if pouring gold on the counter. “Do you understand what I am putting in your lap? Other halwais would fall at my feet.”

Satnaam was forty-three now, grey in his beard. His daughter Champa, thirteen, kept the counter and could weigh a sweet to the exact tola without the scale. His son Mohan, nine, had stopped sweeping to listen.

“How many a day?” Satnaam asked.

“A thousand. To start.”

“I can make two hundred. Good. The same as I make one.”

The contractor’s quick face went still. “I said a thousand.”

“And I said two hundred. You may have either the number or the quality. You cannot have both from one stove and one pair of hands.” Satnaam shrugged. “For a thousand you need four halwais. Or one who is willing to lie to you.”

“Nobody is asking you to lie.” The contractor leaned in, patient now, the way clever men are patient with slow ones. “I am asking you to be sensible. A little less ghee. A firmer flour, cheaper, holds together nicely. These are labourers, sir. They want something sweet and heavy at four o’clock. They are not nawabs. They will not know.”

“They will not know,” Satnaam repeated, as if turning a coin to see the other side.

“That is my whole point.”

“That is my whole problem.” Satnaam wiped the counter. “Those men are carrying bricks in the sun. All day their bodies give everything to that red house. When they eat my sweet at four o’clock, that is the one honest thing that will happen to them the whole day. You want me to make even that a lie? Then they will have nothing true from morning to night.” He shook his head. “No. Give it to a man who can sleep after.”

The contractor took his good shoes two lanes over, to a younger halwai named Rattan, who said yes to everything.

Rattan got the order. Rattan stretched his ghee and firmed his flour and fed a thousand men a day for five years, and by the time the great red house opened with all its arches, Rattan had bought the building beside his shop, and a horse.

Mohan, fourteen by then, watched the horse go by one evening and could not keep quiet.

“He is richer than us now. Rattan.”

“Yes,” said Satnaam.

“The workers ate his sweets five years. Nobody died. Nobody even complained.”

“Nobody complained.”

“Then how was it wrong?” The boy was not being rude. He truly wanted the answer, the way a boy wants to know why a door is locked. “You keep saying wrong. But no one was hurt. And we are poorer, and he has a horse.”

Satnaam set down his cloth and thought a while.

“It was not wrong like a knife is wrong,” he said. “No one bled. It was wrong like a small crack in a wall. The wall still stands. It stands for years. Then one day it does not, and everyone says — but it was standing yesterday. And nobody remembers the crack.”

Mohan turned this over. “So we should be poor. Because of a crack no one can see, in a wall that has not fallen.”

“We should be poor,” said Satnaam, “because I want to eat my own sweet. A man should be able to eat what he sells. That is the whole of it.”

He put his hand on the boy’s head, and left it there, and said nothing more — which was rare for him, and the boy would remember the quiet longer than any of the words.

But Satnaam saw that Mohan had kept the other part — nobody died, nobody complained — folded it small, and put it away somewhere safe, like a coin he might need.

Across the road, on the flat plot where the tent had stood, men were laying a real foundation now.

“What are they building?” Champa called from the counter.

“A picture house,” the contractor had said on his way out. “A real one, with a roof and a name. So the moving pictures can stay in Dehra instead of folding up and leaving.”

“Good,” said Satnaam. “Let something stay.”

He went out at dawn for the water, two brass pots, slower on the road than he had once been. But he still came first.

He always came first.

Twelve decades. One sweet shop. The water goes bad so slowly that no one can say which year it happened.