Family Matters: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Roxana and Yezad go to Jal and Coomy’s apartment and say they’ve come for Nariman’s walking stick. The apartment is still filled with plaster that fell from the ceiling. Yezad asks why the repairs are taking so long, and Coomy says they’re waiting on a second opinion from another contractor because the first contractor wanted to charge them too much. Roxana then says that Nariman’s pension doesn’t even cover the cost of his medications. Coomy says she knows because she’s been covering Nariman’s expenses for years. Yezad expresses skepticism, and Coomy and Yezad then argue. Eventually, Coomy says that Nariman isn’t going to return to their apartment until they want him to. To Yezad and Roxana, it seems like Coomy is kicking Nariman out of his own house. Jal speaks up and says that they’ll welcome Nariman back once the ceiling is fixed.

Yezad is livid. When he and Roxana return home, he asks Nariman about his finances, but Nariman seems confused and can’t get his figures straight. That confusion is a side effect of one of his medications. Yezad says they have no choice but to send Nariman back to Jal and Coomy and see if they take him in. Roxana says that if Yezad kicks Nariman out, then she will leave Yezad. The family then eats dinner. The dinner portions have gotten smaller and smaller as the family has had to pay for more of Nariman’s expenses. Yezad can see that his children are hungry. After dinner, he sneaks over to his neighbor Villie’s apartment. Villie is known for her tips about Matka gambling (a kind of gambling that involves the price of cotton), which come to her in dreams. Yezad tells Villie that he wants to place a wager.

That night, Jehangir can’t sleep. He doesn’t understand why his parents have been fighting more and why there has been so much resentment in the apartment recently. He thinks that if he and Murad could perhaps earn some money from doing odd jobs for the neighbors, maybe that would help ease his parents’ stress. He then falls asleep but has a disturbing dream. When he wakes up because of that dream, Nariman holds his hand to comfort him until Jehangir falls back to sleep.

The next morning, Yezad leaves the apartment and heads for work. On the way, Villie stops him in the hallway. She then tells him that through his bet on the Matka, he’s turned his original 10 rupees into 810. She then hands him the money. Yezad is amazed. He plans to give the money to Roxana gradually to avoid arousing suspicion. That day, Yezad goes to an Iranian restaurant for lunch with Vilas, the bookstore clerk who works nearby. When they arrive, the restaurant owner tells them about a man who was a college graduate who recently came in, drank tea, then said he couldn’t pay. They all agree that unemployment is common, even among college graduates.

At lunch, Yezad tells Vilas about his luck with the Matka. A journalist at a nearby table speaks up and says that the Matka is a criminal enterprise that operates at the intersection of politics and organized crime. He says the Shiv Sena (a conservative, Hindu nationalist political party) is involved. He adds that he wrote an article about it a week or so ago, and members of the Shiv Sena then beat him up.

Vilas then talks about a letter he read to a client that morning. The letter said that the client’s brother had been hanged after he was caught with a woman of a higher caste. The woman had been hanged, too. Vilas says he would have liked to have softened the news for the client, but that would have been a betrayal of the implicit contract of reading a letter for someone who cannot read themselves. That contract calls for Vilas to read the words exactly as written. Vilas then asks Yezad if he plans to play the Matka again, and Yezad says he would like to avoid the Matka in the future if possible.