by Alka Joshi
“When I refused to help Radha get to Jaipur, she showed me your letter, saying you had written that you wanted to see me again. It made me so happy.”
My eyebrows shot up, both at the absurdity of the claim and at Radha’s impudence. She must have tricked Hari into a scheme to find me. She gambled on the odds that Hari was illiterate.
“She finally found an angle that got me to do her bidding.” He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe he’d been duped by a young girl. “In any event, once I got to know the Pleasure District here, I found women who needed help—Maa’s kind of help. My kind of help now. I’ve used your money to do what I can. But I need more—real medicine. For injuries that herbs can no longer heal.” He sounded earnest now. “Some have been hurt by the men they...service. Broken bones. Some have recurring infections in their...private regions.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I tried. But you wouldn’t believe me, and...” He looked down at the floor. “I didn’t blame you. I—” He rubbed his hands together. “I understand many things now I didn’t before.”
My chest felt tight. Hari was trying. He was righting his wrongs. He was carrying on his mother’s work in a way I had failed to. She would have approved. I could not forgive the younger Hari, the one who had felt he owned me, who left me with lasting scars. I had changed, grown stronger. Was it so hard to believe Hari had changed, too, and grown softer? Couldn’t I could begin to make peace with this Hari, the one his mother would have blessed? I thought of the little girl with the gash in her leg and how I’d wanted Hari to make her go away. Saasuji would have been far less proud of me for that.
“The little girl—how is her leg?” I asked him now.
“Good. They stitched her at the hospital.”
I nodded.
I put my palms against the wall to brace myself and stood. My bones felt tender, as if I’d been walking for days or even weeks.
Hari watched as I tucked my hair behind my ears. He smiled.
“I had my eye on you long before we were married.”
I stared at him.
“I’d walk miles to the river from my village to watch the women washing clothes, listening to their gossip. My father was long dead and my Maa was busy tending to her women. I’d see you sometimes, on the opposite bank, headed to the village oven to roast peas. You always looked as if you’d been entrusted with an important mission. So young. So serious.” He smiled. “I told my mother, when it was time, I would have only you. She went with me to the river once. We watched you from a distance. Eventually, she took my hand and patted it. ‘Yes, bheta, yes,’ she said.”
Too little, I thought, shaking my head. Too late.
“I mean to keep my promise, Lakshmi. The one I made to Maa. I’m doing good here. If only...” He started to pace. “We need medicine for the children’s fevers. And several of the younger nautch women will deliver soon.”
What he was telling me was true—I’d seen it with my own eyes. But my purse was not bottomless. I, too, had debts to pay.
The door opened. Malik came into the room. His ear was red from being pressed against the door.
“Auntie-Boss,” he said, “I know a way to help him.”
* * *
The streetlight was shining inside my Rajnagar house. I saw Radha’s body curled on the cot, our metal trunks, a jumble of carriers, filled with odds and ends. I fumbled in the dark, not caring how much noise I made, rummaging through our belongings, wishing I’d had the money to put in electricity.
“Jiji?”
“Matches. Where did you put them?”
I upended a sack, spilling its contents. Herbs wrapped in newspaper packets, spoons, toothpicks. The Tales of Krishna that Radha had brought with her.
Radha raised her body on one elbow. “What time is it?”
“Matches! Did I forget to put them on Malik’s list last week?”
She pushed herself off the cot and reached inside the vinyl bag by the door. “Here.” She yawned.
I grabbed the matchbox from her hand. My fingers were shaking as I lit a match. I emptied the contents of another carrier on the ground, examining the labels on the bottles and packets.
“Now what are you looking for?” She rubbed her eyes.
I broke off my search to glare at her.
She blinked, awake now.
My bun had come loose. My tangled hair fell across my face. My sari was damp, and smelled of vomit; I’d retched a half dozen times on the way home.
My finger began to sting. I shook the match to put out the flame. “I’ve seen Hari.”
In the dark, the white orbs of Radha’s eyes shone brighter. “Why?”
“Radha, I didn’t know—”
I was afraid I might cry again. I’d been crouching on the floor. Now, I stood up and reached for her hands. She flinched, retreating in the dark.
“Sit down.” I indicated the cot. “Please.”
She settled on the edge of the charpoy, gingerly. Her hands fidgeted in her lap. I knelt on the floor in front of her.
“Radha, whoever did this to you, you’re not at fault! If I’d known—that Maa had another child after me, that I had a sister, that you were alone—I wouldn’t have left. I would have...”
I wasn’t sure what I would have done.
Her brows knitted.
“To think that you offered yourself to Hari—it’s appalling. It’s my fault. Please forgive me.”
I sat down next to her.
She shifted, away from me, afraid.
“I was supposed to protect you. I didn’t. I let it happen. He—”
“Jiji, you’re scaring me.” She looked as if she was about to cry. “What are you talking about?”
My eyes dropped to her stomach. She followed my gaze down the length of her wrinkled dress, frowning, and looked up again. She didn’t know? Of course she didn’t! She was a child!
“Your breasts are tender?”
Her eyebrows rose.
“You’re making water all the time? You’re nauseous?”
Her mouth went slack.
“How long since your last menses?”
She looked past me, at the floor, breathing through her mouth. She glanced at her stomach. Then her eyes softened, as if recalling a memory, a pleasant one.
“Leave it to me, Radha. If you’re no more than four months along, it’s safe. Help me look for the cotton root bark.” I gathered my hair and wound it into a knot at my neck, getting up off the floor. “Remember Mrs. Harris? She drank my tea?”
She made a face.
“But she’s fine now! You will be, too. Whoever did this—tell me it wasn’t Mr. Pandey?”
She shook her head and flattened the rumpled chiffon over her thighs.
I couldn’t read her face; she must be in shock.
“Try to remember where we put the cotton root bark.”
“Jiji.”
“Maybe the plaid carryall?” I hurried to the bag and emptied it on the cluttered floor.
“Jiji.”
I needed more light. Where had the matches gone now? I dropped to all fours searching through the mess. I pushed aside a bundle of books. A spool of thread clattered to the floor.
“What if I keep the baby?”
I stared at the thread unraveling across the terrazzo. What did she just say?
I don’t know how much time passed before I could move again. Slowly, I turned to look at her.
She was biting her lip, avoiding my eyes.
“You don’t have to keep it,” I said. “Haven’t you learned anything from me?”
She lowered her chin, looked down at her lap. I could feel the slippery edges of her guilt. She had been willing. She had let a man touch her, there, perhaps more than once. She had wanted it. While I worked. While s
he lived in my house. What a fool I’d been!
I had felt sympathy for her. Told myself she needed time to forgive me. She’d come around. She would appreciate what I was making possible: a home, enough chapatti so she’d never go hungry, the Maharani School and the possibility of a life better than either of us could have imagined.
I stood up, reached for her. Without thinking, I grabbed the skirt of her dress. She ducked, tried to run. I snatched her bun and clawed at her hair. She screamed. I slapped her. She stumbled and fell.
My heart thudded against my ribs. I watched her cough and sputter. She lay sprawled on the floor amid the contents of the carriers, her legs tucked to one side. Her lip was bleeding, her face contorted in pain.
I towered over her. “What did he do, this Devdas of yours? Promise to love you forever?”
“Stop!”
“Give you gifts?”
“It wasn’t like that!”
“Or did you offer yourself in return for something—like you did with Hari?”
Red splotches appeared on her cheeks. “What choice did I have? I had to get to you and I couldn’t do it alone. So what if I used him to get to Jaipur? You chose one way to escape and I chose another! I haven’t blamed you, so why blame me?”
“Whatever your boyfriend said to you, it isn’t true. And if you think he’ll claim it—”
“He will!”
“Oh, how could you be so stupid? Listen to me, Radha. This child has no future!”
“He does!”
“I know the world, Radha. You don’t. If you think the father will marry you, you’re dreaming!”
She lowered her head. She was crying now. “He loves me.”
I wiped my hands on my sari and walked to the Primus stove where a pan filled with water lay ready for tomorrow’s tea. Looking around, I spied a stray match on the floor. I picked it up and struck the tip against the stone countertop, then held it to the burner. The blue flame lit up the room.
“Come help me, Radha,” I coaxed, forcing my voice to be gentle, as I had done a thousand times to put my ladies in good humor. I gripped the handle of the pot with both hands so she couldn’t see how badly I was shaking. “Tomorrow, everything can be the way it was. Back to normal.” My jittery voice belied my words.
“You worry what your ladies will think.”
I stiffened.
“Your respectable MemSahibs who don’t know what you do outside their drawing rooms,” she sneered. “How you make babies disappear.” She sounded so different, this Radha, whose words had a dagger’s edge.
I turned to face her.
“What would they say if they knew you had gotten rid of your own babies?”
She must have seen the stricken look on my face. “Hari told me. Then, after Joyce Harris, I figured it out. What you’d done to stop from having your own.”
I was finding it hard to breathe. “This isn’t about me! This—this is about you. You’re thirteen! A girl with a chance to do more, be more—”
“You’re talking about yourself, not me! I’m not you.”
I pressed a hand against my chest. “No, we’re talking about you—a girl with a child and no husband,” I wheezed.
She thrust her chin. “We’ll get married.”
She was overwrought. Delusional. I gripped the edges of the countertop to keep myself upright. “By this time tomorrow, Radha, you won’t even remember you drank the tea. You’ll be whole again, and clean. Tomorrow, we’ll start over.”
“You’re not listening. You never do! I’ll tell the father, and we’ll marry. We’ll keep the baby.”
“And what if he refuses, Radha? Then what will you do? Think about it. Who will dress your child and give him dal to eat when you go back to school?”
Her eyes grew huge in her face, Maa’s face. Even now, incredibly, she hadn’t thought of this. “I won’t go back to school. I’ll work. Like you.”
I shook my head. “You think it’s that easy? This house took thirteen years of hard work and Yes, Ji and No, Ji and Whatever you say, Ji. You’ll never have to do that if you go to that school. You have many years in which to have a child, after you’ve finished school. Listen to me, Radha. Please. The Maharani School is a prize—few get in—and you go there for free. You can be something better than a henna artist. Better than me. You can have a meaningful life.” The water was almost boiling. “Just—please help me find the cotton root bark.”
Her voice trembled. “He said I was just another cheap pair of hands to you. Your business only took off after I arrived. You told me yourself you book more appointments now because of my henna. If that’s true, then why can’t you trust me to think for myself?”
She moved to stand in front of me, her face inches from mine. The blood on her lip was glistening. “You didn’t trust me at the holiday party and you don’t trust me now,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how hard I work, how much I do. You’ll never have faith in me!”
More than her words, the tone of her voice, its bitterness, was worse than any insult I’d ever endured from my ladies. What had I ever done for this girl but house her, feed her, clothe her! My heart closed in on itself, curled into a ball.
I pointed a finger at her chest. “You’re going to drink every drop of this before dawn arrives.”
“I won’t. I’ll prove you wrong!”
She took flight as swiftly as a hummingbird. As she ran past me, her chiffon skirt brushed the hair on my arm. I tried to grab her, but I felt as if I were moving through water, and I only managed to rip the delicate fabric off her dress. I heard the slap of her bare feet in the courtyard and then she was gone.
I watched the flicker of blue on the Primus stove, heard the water boiling. I wouldn’t need it now. I turned the burner off.
I crossed the room and fell onto the charpoy. It must have been after three o’clock in the morning.
This was a day that should have ended in celebration, full of hope for the future. Instead, I felt a void as wide and as deep as the river Ganga.
Without my parents to witness the long road I had traveled to get here, the struggle to build my house seemed pointless. In their place, I’d been sent Radha to look after, and I’d ruined her future, as well.
Where would she go at this time of night? Not to her lover surely? Who was he? If not the milkman, Mr. Iyengar or Mr. Pandey, who?
The teachers at the Maharani School were women. It couldn’t have been the toothless old gateman? Impossible!
With a start, I thought: Samir? He had admired her beauty. But...no. Radha didn’t fit his pattern; she wasn’t a widow, and she was far too young, wasn’t she?
Wherever Radha was going, she would have to walk. Everyone, including the tonga-wallas and the rickshaw-wallas, was in bed. Radha had no money to take a train or even a bus. Would she sleep in the street as she and Hari had done when they first came to Jaipur? She couldn’t be going to Hari, surely?
Kanta would know. I should phone her. But how? At my lodgings I had used Mrs. Iyengar’s telephone with her permission, but I couldn’t afford a phone line here. The post office, where I sometimes paid a princely sum to use the phone, was closed.
If Radha didn’t return by morning, I would send Malik to Kanta’s with a note. I sighed. Another embarrassment. Girls from good families didn’t run away from home. Which is probably what the gossip-eaters had said about me thirteen years ago.
* * *
The next morning, there was still no sign of Radha. I hadn’t slept all night. I kept picturing her out in the streets, alone. I saw myself at Radha’s age, too shy to look at boys or men, much less talk to them. Maa had made sure of it: Men will eat even unripe fruit if it’s placed in front of them. When had my sister stopped heeding such warnings? Or had Maa been too dispirited by my desertion to teach Radha the same things she taught me? She might have felt that since her
advice hadn’t kept me dutiful, it wouldn’t work on my sister, either.
I tried to imagine a past where I stayed with Hari, allowed myself to have children, watched Radha grow up with them. Would it really have been so bad? Radha would have been safe. She wouldn’t have ended up in this unfamiliar city, lecherous men at every corner.
When Malik showed up at dawn to work, I sent him immediately to Kanta’s. I kept myself busy, packing the tiffins we’d need for the day. In less than an hour, I heard a car outside. I ran to the window. A large gray sedan had stopped in front of my house. Baju was at the wheel. He got out and opened the back door. Malik stepped out and turned to help Kanta out of the car.
Within seconds, I was out my door and through my gate. When she saw me, Kanta cried, “Lakshmi!” Her face was ashen.
My heart hammered in my chest. Oh, Bhagwan, let Radha be safe! Don’t let anything happen to her!
“She’s at my house. She’s fine. But I’m the worst kind of auntie! How could I not have known or at least—”
As soon as I heard her say fine, my body relaxed. Radha was all right.
Kanta was speaking loudly enough to draw the attention of my neighbor, who had come out of her house and was pretending to water a scrawny lemon sapling in her yard.
“Kanta!” I said sharply. “Come inside for tea.”
Chastened, Kanta shut her mouth and allowed Malik and me to usher her inside. Baju returned to the car.
No sooner had I closed the door behind us than Kanta started to wail, her arms hugging her belly. “If I’d only known what it was doing to her! But I thought exposing her to Western ways would prepare her better—you know, for modern life, womanhood. I thought of it as an education! I was so impressed with my own forward thinking! Thought you’d be pleased, too. I never—I didn’t realize—”
I lit the kerosene lamp with shaky fingers. “What did Radha tell you?”
“Everything.” Kanta started to breathe in ragged gasps, as if the air had suddenly become too thin. “It’s terrible.”
I saw now she had been crying for some time. The skin around her eyes was swollen. Her skin was sallow. Guiding her by the shoulders, I eased her onto the charpoy and sat next to her.