He felt the need to go back to the world, to embrace it, to win it over, to enjoy it – the old desire and restlessness returned. But it was preempted by his family’s optimism and impatience; almost as soon as they sensed Shyamji was recovering, they began to make plans for the future. The discontinuity and disjunction Shyamji’s illness represented was already a thing of the past. Some of his students were emigrants. Mainly women, they’d lived for years in England; every winter, sometimes earlier, they’d come back, vaguely doubtful about returning, and at the same time questing, eager with expectation, to Bombay, their husbands following them like mascots. And here, for a month, for two months, they’d fold their cardigans and put them aside in a drawer; they’d stop wearing socks beneath their saris. They should have had a sophisticated and superior air, but they didn’t; living in suburban London and its environs made them feel provincial in the whirl of Bombay. Tooting, Clapham, and Surrey were where they lived; one or two lived in Hampstead; in their dowdy saris, they bore no signs of Englishness except an apologetic tentativeness.
