Nimita's Place

  After his brows unknit, his mouth starts smiling, and his fingers have slowly undone her braid. After he brushes her hair, stroking free the primly bound ringlets that in the dimness turn red and gold.

  After their bodies have cooled in the breeze from the fan above. Soon it will be too hot to sleep indoors and the family will escape to the rooftop and lie on chaste mattresses under the stars. Nimita has always loved that part of the summer, thrilled to watch the stars and name the constellations with Daddy and Mummy. But this year it will be agony to be separated, at most hands touching while the eyes are fixed on the sky. Thinking of this, a needle of sadness pierces her heart and she draws Karan’s fingers between hers, pulls them up to her lips and then down to rest against her heart.

  He strokes her hair. “What are you thinking about?” he says in the darkness, too hot now for the lamp she prefers.

  His body is shadows, his breath warm against her ear and for a moment Nimita feels like she can tell him anything. But there is a growing shyness at the thought of breaking the intimacy of this moment. Instead, she asks him: “What are you thinking about? You look very tired today.”

  “Hmm.” Karan settles onto his back, one arm crooked over his forehead, the other hand stroking away strands of sweat-damp hair from his wife’s face. Nothing more is said.

  “Is everything all right?” Nimita tries again.

  “The usual. The factory, the workers.” Karan stops, unsure of what he should say, what would be appropriate to share between man and wife.

  How did Mummyji do this for years? Only now does he know the toll it must have taken on her, to be mistress of so many workers in the factory and manage a home where Papaji and Dilip-Praji gasped for breath. How did she decide how much to spin and weave and which orders to fulfil even though the credit note was late, when to raise the wages of the workers, how to stand firm against their attempts to unionise and demand even more.

  “We’re not doing charity,” Mummyji told him the day he came home full of Karl Marx and Fabianism and grand ideas of starting night classes for the workers. “We are not big industrialists like the Birlas, and even the Birlas know their limits. We pay for doctors and hospital in case of accidents. We tell them to send their children to the Ram Charitra free school. If we increase everybody’s wages at the factory, what will we tell Shukla-Bibi and Radheshyam and Ramu? Where will the money come for your school fees, for your wedding, for Roshna’s?”

  “I am not a charity,” he told the middleman who came to him today with three men who spoke strange, thick Punjabi, and had come from villages beyond Jullunder in search of work. They fell at his feet and wouldn’t let go and he was going to call the guard to take them away when he realised to his horror that his socks were getting wet with their tears. We will do anything, the men said, and how is he to tell Mummyji that he gave in, that he told them to go to the canteen and have a meal and then found them seats by the mechanised looms?

  And now because he has seen Jayashankar Jobber, he has Akbar Jobber coming and saying: “I also know men who need work. If I had known sahib was hiring.”

  The workers are not happy.

  Wheat and sugar and oil are still ten times the price they were four years ago, before the Angrez war which India did not even want to join. There is no outlet for the anger except at home, on the bodies of their women or against those of another caste or religion or city. There are fights every week in the mill, Hindu and Muslim and Sikh employees resorting to blows over the smallest things, such as who used the hand-pump first. The machines make things even worse. Fewer hands are needed now, even though demand for cloth is great. It’s the topsy-turvy economics of war: cloth is needed but prices are artificially low, government-controlled—twice the price of the last five years but still so much lower than what is needed to pay the wages, repair the machines, make a profit.

  Sachdev Textiles is not Birla Mills or Dalmia Mills, those huge factory complexes that can produce twice the length of fabric in a third of the time. Birla and Dalmia not only feed their men and pay for medical, they have schools and worker quarters and employ entire villages. Sachdev Cotton & Textiles is a much, much smaller company, one mill started only to make use of the cotton from Paramjit Sachdev’s fields. What will the hiring of more men do at a time when the existing employees are complaining that their wages are not enough, when Dr Iqbal at Mayo Hospital has said there is a surgery that might help Dilip-Praji but he is not confident, he would rather Karan take his brother to a British specialist in Delhi or Bombay?

  How much of this could he tell his wife? His wife, who is after all a girl, four years younger than he is, a fierce champion on the tennis court, a sunburst of joy in his home and bed, but so precious as a result that he never wants her to worry. He never wants her to stay awake all night in concentrated fear for her family the way Mummyji spent so many years.

  Karan covers his eyes in the darkness, not realising that he has stopped stroking Nimita’s hair.

  Nimita raises herself on one elbow, leans over and begins to trace the lines of her husband’s face. Surprising how in just four months a person can become attuned to the needs of another, know exactly how to smooth a frown line or tease a stranger’s lips into a smile. Karan’s arm moves off his eyes and the other reaches out to capture Nimita’s hand. She nestles into his side.

  “What are you thinking of?” he asks, his voice sounding oddly thick.

  “School,” she says.

  “School?” He laughs. “I was thinking of school too.”

  “Really? What were you thinking?”

  He threads his fingers through hers. “I was wishing I had become a lawyer.”

  This is news to Nimita. “You were studying law? I thought you did BA.”

  “I was going to study law. Just like your Daddyji. In Oxford.”

  She rises on one elbow. “Really? Then what happened?”

  “What happened. Mummyji was doing all the work in the factory. That wasn’t fair, na?”

  Nimita turns onto her back. No, no, it wasn’t fair. A little pain blooms in her chest. “I also wanted to study overseas.”

  “You?” The naked astonishment in Karan’s voice makes Nimita sit up.

  “Yes, me. Why is that so surprising?”

  “No, not surprising, just. What would you have done in Oxford?”

  Nimita tosses her head. “I wanted to go to Edinburgh and study medicine.”

  Medicine. This is news to Karan. He sits up too. “You wanted to be a doctor?”

  “I thought I could be a doctor. But my teacher thought I should study engineering. Maybe she was right.”

  Matters are moving too fast for Karan. He runs his hands through his hair. “You wanted to be a doctor. And an engineer.”

  “Yes.”

  He’s about to open his mouth and say that girls don’t do this kind of thing, but wisely he shuts it.

  “Say something.” Nimita prods his side.

  “I can see you as an engineer,” he says slowly.

  Women operate the telephone switchboards and telegraph apparatuses. They speak on All India Radio and there are mad women journalists on the BBC who go all the way into Swat and talk to the fighting tribes there. Maybe women can build switchboards and telegraphs and radios too. His wife repaired their RCA Victor after all.

  Women protested in the streets of Lahore during the Quit India movement; women fought in the Azad Hind Fauj; there have been women doctors and artists and even a queen, Victoria in England, and that woman in Jhansi.

  But those are all “other” women. You do not expect your own wife to take up a sword.

  “Really?” Nimita’s voice rises in excitement. “You know, there are colleges in India that take women engineers. I was reading in the paper that more will be set up.”

  For a moment Karan thinks the room has started spinning. “You want to study engineering?”

  “Yes, I just told you.”

  It’s on the tip of his tongue to say, no you
can’t, but a lifetime of being his mother’s son intervenes. “We can talk to Mummyji about it,” he says.

  Nimita lies back on the bed, thrilled and scared. She never thought it would be this easy.

  After a while Karan lies back down with her, scared out of his wits. Sleep will not come easily tonight. He is wide awake when his wife speaks again. “My principal came today, from Kinnaird. Mrs Dalhousie.”

  So that’s who is to blame. He knows now. “She came to tell you to study engineering?”

  Nimita laughs. “No. She came to chat. To ask for my help.”

  “What help?”

  “Little things. She asked if you—if we—can donate some cloth. She is doing some relief project for poor women.”

  “Where?”

  “In Kinnaird only.” Now that she says it, it does seem strange. Temples, mosques, charity groups do relief work. When the girls of Kinnaird teach in the charity school established by Saint Joseph’s Church and the Catholic Women’s Group, they go off-campus in groups to a small room by the side of the church. No one comes inside the walls of Kinnaird to them.

  “So your Mrs Dalhousie wants us to donate some cloth. How much?”

  Nimita calculates. “About four hundred yards.”

  Again, the first impulse is to say no. To sit up and shake this wife of his until she stops talking madness and gets some sense into her head. What would Mummyji say? Four hundred yards of cloth? Are we running a charity? At a time when he has just signed on three men, who, if they stay on, are at least another eighty rupees in wages paid out every month?

  Karan turns on his side to say all this, but his eyes have adjusted to the darkness and he can now make out the look of appeal on Nimita’s face. His anger disappears and he reaches out to trace her face instead.

  This wife of his. Who has never asked him for anything except tonight. True, everything she is asking for is impossible—engineering college? Four hundred yards of cloth?—but isn’t he himself the mad one for having wished in his heart that she would ask him for things so he can grant her desires and see her smile, just for him? He thought she would ask for the moon or jewellery, both tasks easily achieved, but perhaps they can start with four hundred yards of cloth.

  “Will two hundred do for a start?” he asks cautiously and is rewarded with a smile.

  “For a start,” she says, shifting closer.

  It eases his heart, the smile. For he has noticed in the last month or so how this wife of his, so free and energetic the first time he saw her, has dwindled somehow in his home and life. She is happiest when she is doing something—and for others, he realises, whether it is settling their clothes or repairing a radio. Otherwise she is quieter somehow, polite and present in body, but not really in mind.

  Of late he has worried she might one day give up on this life he can offer her, give up and go back to her parents’ home. Women don’t leave their married homes, he knows this, but sometimes he is afraid of what this wife of his might do.

  “Thank you,” Nimita says, uncomfortable with the silence.

  “You’re welcome,” Karan says, but he lies on his back late into the night and worries.

  It is harder in the daylight, over the breakfast table. By common consent they wait until Dilip-Praji is set up in the living room and occupied with the old issues of Radio & Telegraph Ghanshyam brought over from Model Town yesterday.

  Urmila-Mummyji hears Nimita’s plea and Karan’s second in silence. Then she says: “I know nothing of these things”—a lie—“but two hundred yards is no small amount to give away. We are not running a charity.”

  “Mummyji,” Nimita starts, but is overridden by Karan. “Mummyji. I was not thinking whole bolts of cloth. There will be material left over that we can’t sell in wholesale. That sort of thing.”

  Urmila-Mummyji swells. “To just give it away?”

  “Mummyji, as it is those things we use for making the servants’ clothes.”

  She is quiet, thinking it over. It is true that there must be a spare five yards here and there, but to give it all away?

  “I was also thinking of the time the Young Women’s Christian Association raised all that money for the drought in Bengal. It was in the paper,” Karan says.

  Not a bad thing for the Sachdev name to get into the papers. “Well, if that cloth is just lying waste then we can put it to a good cause.” Urmila-Mummyji looks at Karan fondly and tells his wife: “Nimmy beta, you must be careful with this man. He is too big-hearted, just like his father. You children learn in school, na, that you must share and care, but he really does it. Share and care.”

  Urmila-Mummyji had no objection to Nimita going to Kinnaird in a tonga with the houseboy Ramu in tow. Karan has promised to send the rest of the cloth from the factory but Nimita brings with her some old, torn sheets that may be of some use to start with.

  The college looks as it always has during the holidays. A few girls playing on the hockey field, others probably making use of the tennis courts. The buildings are empty of teachers and the sound of running feet. She climbs the stairs to Mrs Dalhousie’s office, Ramu carrying the cloth bundle.

  There is no one in the office so she asks the sweeper. “Outside, near the servants’ quarters.” The woman looks like she would like to say something else, but doesn’t.

  “Leave the bag,” Nimita tells Ramu and they walk down and out and around the building.

  The servants’ quarters. Nimita knows little of such places. Of course, servants must sleep somewhere. In Model Town and Temple Road, there are two rooms at the back of the house that are for the servants’ use. Only the Bibis sleep there, sometimes the sweeper woman if she stays late. Or the woman who comes to wash the heavy utensils, sometimes she quietly comes and stays and no one says anything about her bruises.

  The gate guards have their post and stool to sit on all night, though sometimes they spread a blanket on the back verandah and lie there, with Ramu. Ramu is like the Khoslas’ Chandu or the Qureshis’ Ameen, a young and often unwanted boy every household takes in to run small errands and groom into a proper house servant.

  Walking past the main buildings, to the smaller, longer quarters at the back, Nimita begins to realise that servants are more than beings who respond to orders and run around the house. She has seen the Bibis cook, she has seen Ghanshyam and Radheshyam eat. All that food has to go somewhere, she realises, as the wind catches the smell of the outhouse and makes her stumble.

  The servants’ quarters might be occupied, but the space in front of them, small as two tennis courts, is absolutely overflowing. There are babies squalling, smoke from fires, women sitting in the shade of tattered sheets hung over poles of wood or metal sheeting.

  Nimita’s only exposure to poverty before this, the charity school at Saint Joseph’s Church, is nothing like the scene before her. There the children are clothed. They giggle but sit in rows with slate and chalk. There is none of this toilet smell, this smoke, this—this chaos. She is about to turn and run when a familiar shape comes out of the servants’ quarters, down the steps and towards her.

  “You came? Very good,” says Mrs Dalhousie, composed and smiling. She manoeuvres around a crying child, picking it up, patting it and handing it to some woman on her way towards Nimita.

  “Let me show you around,” she tells her former student.

  Under that knowing, grey gaze, Nimita can only nod and comply.

  Angry eyes in wrinkled skin stare at her over the heads of babies, some crying, some silent, the quiet somehow more fearsome than the yells would have been. There are more women bending over open fires at the back of the quarters. How many? It seems like a hundred but if she were to count heads, there are maybe twenty. Most are sitting, three women are stirring large pots, kneading dough. Feeding the hungry obviously. They look well-fed themselves and are clearly better off than the women Nimita saw first.

  “We’ve been lucky,” says Mrs Dalhousie. “The YWCA has kindly donated some food and helping hands. I’m ho
ping to hear from some other welfare groups as well.”

  Nimita can hardly see through the smoke of the fires. Turning her face to avoid the haze, she sees a woman in one corner trying to manage a pot-bellied naked boy with one hand, and pat a bundle of rags with the other. Mrs Dalhousie sees her stare.

  “That’s Najma, the one I told you about, who came from Ambala. Go talk to her,” she says. “I’ll just talk to the lady here” and she walks towards one of the women kneading dough.

  Wait, I’ll come too, Nimita wants to scream, but Mrs Dalhousie’s back is towards her and the schoolday habit of obedience has yet to leave her bones. Without wanting to, she moves to the woman in the corner. At closer sight, her skin is as wrinkled as Urmila-Mummyji’s might be without the nightly application of Pond’s Cold Cream.

  Nimita stops, then feels foolish for standing. But to sit on the ground before her?

  The naked boy makes a dash for freedom and Najma pulls him to her side. She begins to feed him quickly, balls of paratha with a little salt and the smallest dollop of dal Nimita has ever seen. No onion or pickle, let alone sabji. This is their meal, Nimita realises with dim shock when the bundle of rags next to the woman emits a thin cry. Najma’s eyes go to her second child but she is clearly unable to move.

  What Nimita does then shocks them both. “Shall I take him?” she asks, sitting down and opening her arms.

  After a few seconds, Najma wordlessly hands the boy over. She reaches down to the bundle and unwraps it, no gori-chitti Punjabi baby here but a dark, dark face with eyes too big for it, a face even more wrinkled than its mother’s, can that be right?