Episode 4 — The First Lie

The war took the sugar first, and then it took the ghee.

It was a war on the other side of the world, but it reached into the Doon and emptied the shelves. Sugar came by card, in small grey amounts. Ghee went to the army, they said — to the camps, to the front — and what was left cost four times what it had, when it could be found at all.

Satnaam was sixty-three and mostly at home, his eyes gone milky. He sat in the back on a string cot near the old well and listened to the shop by its sounds. Mohan was thirty-three and had a wife, Sheela, and the whole shop on his shoulders alone.

And the shop was dying.

“There is nothing to sell,” Sheela said one night, counting the day’s coins twice because she did not believe them the first time. “You cannot make batisa out of a ration card.”

“I know.”

“The milkman wants paying. The landlord wants paying. Your father wants his medicine.” She pushed the small heap toward him. “That is everything. That is the whole day. It does not reach the milkman alone, let alone the rest.”

Mohan said nothing.

“There is the tin,” Sheela said quietly. She had known about the shelf for years. A wife knows every shelf. “You have walked past it every day for six years, telling yourself you are a good man for not touching it. A good man.” She was not cruel; she was tired. “Meanwhile your father goes without medicine so that a shut tin can sit in the dark and keep your conscience company. Which is the better son — the one who feeds his father, or the one who keeps a clean shelf?”

He held out a long time. Longer than he would later admit.

Then one grey morning, with the sugar card spent and the ghee jar scraped to the brass, he climbed to the high shelf and took the tin down. The lid was stiff. It gave with a small sound. The fat inside was still white, still smooth, still smelling of nothing at all.

The salesman had been right. It had waited.

He made the batisa with it. His hands knew every other step, so every other step was true — the flour browned to the colour of an old coin, the cardamom, the patience, no hurrying. Only the fat was a lie, and it was a lie no tongue alive could find. The sweet came out pale and passable. He sold it at the old price. That evening, for the first time in a year, there was enough to pay the milkman and the landlord both.

He carried a piece home to his father, the way he always did.

Satnaam took it in his blind fingers, turned it over, feeling the flake. He put it in his mouth and chewed slowly, the way the very old chew.

“It is not the same,” he said.

Mohan had the sentence ready. He had built it in advance, the way you build a wall before a flood.

“It is the war, father. Everything is a little less now. The sugar is grey, the milk is watered, the flour has grit. Everyone is eating less than they think. It will come right when the war ends.”

It was such a good sentence. Every word of it was a fact.

Satnaam was quiet a moment. Then: “When I was a boy, my father told me you can hear a lie better with your eyes shut. I did not know what he meant.” He set the half-eaten piece down on the cot beside him. “Now I have shut eyes, and I can hear it. Not the fat, son. The fat I could forgive; the war is real, a man must feed his house. It is the sentence. It is too smooth. An honest man never needs so many true words to explain why a thing is fine.”

Mohan stood very still.

“Sit,” his father said, and patted the cot. “Eat the rest with me. We will not speak of it again, you and I. But sit.”

Mohan sat. He did not eat. Neither of them ever spoke of it again — and that silence, not the fat, was the first lie. The fat was cheap. The silence would turn out to be the most expensive thing the family ever bought.

That was also the year the strangers came.

The line drawn far away had been drawn through India too now, and to the north whole cities emptied and poured east. Some of the flood reached Dehra — people with bundles and children and the particular quiet of those who have left graves behind. One of them set up across the road, against the wall of the Kohinoor: a big Sikh from Peshawar named Pritam Singh, who fried a bread Dehra had never seen. Flat rounds of white flour, layered with fat, dropped in hot oil until they came up crisp and flaking, served with spiced chickpeas and a spoon of halwa.

“Katlamba,” he said, the first evening, holding one out to Mohan across the road. “Peshawar. You will not have eaten it.”

Mohan ate it. It was flaky, and it lived or died on the fat between the layers, exactly as batisa did. “It is good,” he said. “What is the fat?”

Pritam Singh gave a short laugh, the laugh of a man who has stopped expecting the truth to help him. “Whatever the times leave me,” he said. “Today, this white tin fat. In Peshawar it was pure ghee, and my father’s father made it, and the whole street knew our name.” He looked across at Mohan’s shop, at the fading sign over the door. “Pure ghee only,” he read aloud, slowly. “You still keep the promise?”

Mohan looked at the sign, then at the man who had lost a country.

“I keep the sign,” he said.

Pritam Singh nodded, as if that were an answer he understood completely, and did not ask anything further. After that they took their evening tea together on the step, the halwai and the refugee, and did not talk much, and did not need to. One had lost a country. One had lost his father’s honesty. Both of them, every morning, were frying the best they could in whatever fat the times had left them.

Satnaam died two winters later, on the string cot by the well, in the hour before dawn. Mohan was out getting the water when it happened. He had started going himself, in the dark, with the two brass pots — not because he made the sweet the old way any more, but because it was the one part of his father he could still perform.

He came home with the pots full and found the cot still and the house awake. And he understood that for the first time in thirty-seven years, no one in Dehra had come first that morning.

His father had gone before him.

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