Secret Daughter

by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

  “I’ll take these too,” Meena says, grabbing a bag of Times-branded trinkets—notepads, pens, canvas bags. “In case anyone needs a little enticing.”

  AS IT TURNS OUT, THREE OUTSIDERS ARE ALL THAT’S NECESSARY to attract a crowd, and Asha quickly has to decide whom to speak with first. She is drawn immediately to a little girl with penetrating eyes, and points her out. Meena turns on the camera and Parag approaches her. The girl looks to be about two years old, wears a plain beige cotton dress and a string around her neck. She is barefoot, and her hair is only a quarter-inch long all over her head. She holds the hand of an older girl in braids, whose dull gold nose ring sits in contrast to her dark skin.

  “This is Bina, and her younger sister Yashoda.” Parag begins translating to Asha, who smiles at the girls and crouches down to their level. “Bina is twelve years old, and Yashoda is three.”

  “How long have they been here, where did they come from?” Asha holds out her hand to the little girl. Parag translates, and Bina answers back promptly in a bold high-pitched voice.

  “She says they arrived here just before the last monsoon season, so that would be about eight or nine months ago. They traveled for two nights to get here from their village,” Parag says.

  Yashoda is now playing with the rings on Asha’s finger, twisting them around and around. “Ask her about their family. What do her parents do?” Asha says.

  “Their mother is a house servant, their father works at a clothing factory. They have three brothers—the oldest works with his father, and the younger two are at school.”

  Asha looks up from her notebook. “Why isn’t she at school too? Bina?” Parag stares at Asha in silence. “Ask her. Ask her why she isn’t in school.” Asha sees Parag hesitate another moment, then glance at Meena before finally turning to Bina. When he asks the question, Bina glances at Asha, and then down at her feet. She answers briefly and Parag translates, “She needs to take care of her sister, to prepare food and wash clothes.” Asha is hardly satisfied with this answer but senses from the look shared by Parag and Bina she won’t get much more.

  “Ask her why her sister’s hair is so short,” Asha strokes the little girl’s head.

  “It’s probably—” Parag begins.

  “I want you to ask her. I want to hear her answer.”

  He turns to Bina, speaks, listens, and then turns back to Asha. “She says it was a problem with bugs,” Parag says quietly. Bina is looking down at her feet again, kicking the dirt. Asha swallows hard. Yashoda is still watching Asha with sweet eyes and swinging one of her hands.

  “Here,” Asha says, crouching down and trying to remove one of the rings from her fingers that are now swollen with heat. Finally, she manages to get one loose from her pinky, a thin silver band with a small purple stone, which she holds out to Yashoda. The little girl looks first to her sister, then back to Asha. She snatches it with delight and throws her arms around Asha’s neck.

  “Thank you for talking to us,” Asha says to Bina, standing up. Parag translates this, and Bina nods at her with a shy smile. Asha finally lets go of Yashoda’s small hand.

  Asha gestures to Parag and Meena, and they walk on down the settlement. A weary-looking woman, standing in front of a hut and yelling loudly, draws their attention.

  “What’s she saying?” Asha says.

  “She’s calling someone—telling her to hurry up,” Parag says.

  Just then, the woman turns and notices the camera, and walks over to greet them. She and Parag have a polite interchange, and he turns to Asha. “She’s taking her child to school. The girl is always running late.”

  “Oh, cool. Can she talk to us for a minute? How old is her daughter?”

  “She has four kids, only two still live here with her…one’s left for school already this morning, he’s thirteen. The one inside, her daughter, is ten.”

  “Her ten-year-old daughter goes to school? That’s great.”

  “Yes, she says school is very important,” Parag translates. “She takes her daughter both ways every day. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to go.”

  “What does her husband do?” Asha says.

  The woman answers in a single word, which Parag then translates. “He’s dead.”

  Asha jots this in her notebook, uncertain what question could be appropriate after this. In that moment, she sees Meena shift attention behind her, and Asha turns to look. At first glance, Asha thinks she sees a child crawling out of the hut, but in the next horrible second, she realizes the girl is crippled. Both her legs are stumps, and she is propelling herself along the ground on her arms, swinging her torso between them. Asha draws her breath in sharply, and turns her head away from the grotesque sight. When she looks up, Meena is staring at her, nodding for her to continue. Asha turns back to her interview subject just in time to see the woman crouch down and her legless daughter somehow climb onto her back. Parag speaks before Asha can ask another question. “She must leave now, or she’ll be late. School is two kilometers away.” Parag thanks the woman by putting his palms together, and Asha repeats his gesture. They watch as the woman with the child on her back disappears into the crowd.

  Asha feels her head spinning. Is it the heat? She tries to breathe deeply, but her nostrils fill with the oppressive stench of sewage and human waste. She shakes her head and turns to Meena. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She dashes across the street to a newsstand, thankful to get away for a moment. She didn’t expect to be so affected by what she saw here today, she thought she was prepared. But all the photos she saw had edges, the film clips were framed by the screen. Here, in Dharavi, the misery goes on and on, pouring out in every direction as far as she can see. The cumulative effect of the putrid smells, oppressive living conditions, and despair in these children’s lives has conjured up a deep sense of pity inside her. Asha buys a Limca, the lemon-lime soda for which she has developed a taste. After wiping the mouth of the bottle, she drinks half the soda in a single gulp. A double-decker bus passes before her eyes, and she sees Meena and Parag standing across the street, looking impatient. She needs to pull it together. After draining the bottle, she dashes back to join the others.

  “Okay, just had to cool off a bit. I’m ready. Let’s go,” she says, trying to sound confident. They walk together until Asha stops in front of a shack where a woman stands in a dull green sari. She holds a baby on her hip, and two other young children cling to her legs. Her left arm, between the edge of her sari blouse and her elbow, is covered in charcoal bruises. The woman is intermittently stirring something on the fire and feeding rice to her baby with her fingers. “Will she talk to us?” Asha asks Parag. She watches as they speak, and the woman makes a gesture with her hands and mouth.

  “She wants to know, will you give her something…some money for food?” Parag says. Asha pulls a fifty-rupee note from her pocket and holds it out. The woman tucks it into the folds of her sari. She flashes a crooked smile, displaying two missing teeth.

  Asha takes a deep breath. “Ask her when she came here, and where she came from.” Parag and the woman carry on a lengthy conversation, during which she gestures with her one free arm to the shack behind her, and then someplace in the distance.

  “She has been here, in this house, since she got married two years ago. She used to live over there”—Parag points to someplace deep within the slum—“with her parents.”

  “Here, in Dharavi? How long did she live here with her parents?” Asha didn’t think this was a place people lived for generations. The government officials made it sound like a temporary stopping ground.

  “Since she was a child, as long as she can remember,” Parag relays. “She says this house is better than her parents’. Here, it’s just her husband and kids. There, it was eight or ten people.” Parag communicates this information as if he’s reporting on the weather, as if there’s nothing shocking about its content. Asha considers if he might be doing it intentionally, to irritate her.

  “Does she like…is she ha
ppy living here?” Asha asks. She knows it’s an absurd question for a woman who’s spent her whole life in the slums, but she can’t think of a better one.

  “She says it’s fine. She would like to live in a proper home one day, but now there is not enough money.”

  Asha thinks of the fifty-rupee note now tucked into the woman’s sari, and the dozen more still in her own pocket, a grand total of ten American dollars. “What does her husband do?”

  “He worked as a rickshaw driver,” Parag says, then pauses to hear the rest of the woman’s answer and continues. “He used to share driving shifts with another man, but he lost his job two months ago because he was getting drunk and showing up late.”

  “What do they do for money, then?”

  When Parag translates the question, the woman looks down at the pot on the fire. She puts the baby down on the ground, who promptly runs off with the other children. Her tone is muted when she answers. “She goes to the brothel in the evening,” Parag says. “There’s one just down the road. She can make a hundred rupees a night, for a few hours’ work, then she comes home. She says she won’t take her children, she leaves them with a neighbor. She doesn’t want them to see that place, to see what goes on. She doesn’t want them to know.”

  Asha swallows hard as she takes this in. “Is that enough? A hundred rupees? I mean—”

  “She says it’s enough to feed her family. If her husband gets a job, she won’t have to go there anymore.”

  Asha feels dizzy again, unsure what to ask now and not convinced she can handle any more. She looks at Meena, who nods her on. She scans the list of questions in her notebook and blinks hard, trying to focus. “How old is she?” she says, stalling. He turns to the woman, whose children are back and pulling on her sari. The woman leans down to pick up the baby.

  “Twenty,” comes the answer. Asha shudders involuntarily as she looks at this woman who lives in squalor, prostituting herself to survive. She has spent her entire life in this place. She has three young children, a drunkard husband, and little hope of a different future.

  She and Asha are the same age.

  THEY SIT IN SILENCE ON THE DRIVE BACK TO THE OFFICE. ASHA’S mind is reeling with images of the faces she’s just seen, the inconceivable stories she has heard. She can feel Meena’s eyes on her.

  “How do you feel about that?” Meena says. The question is gentler than Asha expected.

  Can she say she’s horrified people live like that in this country? That some little girls never even get the chance to go to school because they’re doing housework at the age of three? That everyone else seems to think a child missing both legs is not uncommon? “I think it was a good start,” Asha says. “What did you think?”

  “I think you did well, all told. We found some good stories, very typical of life in Dharavi. Anything you missed, that you’d like to get next time?” Meena says.

  “We didn’t talk to any boys. Or men. I didn’t really see any.” Asha looks out the window at the full sidewalks. “Why is it that whenever I walk outside, the streets seem to be full of men, but at Dharavi today, all we saw were women?”

  “Asha,” Meena says, “just as there are two Indias for the rich and the poor, there are two Indias for men and women. A woman’s domain is of the home—she takes care of the family, manages the servants. A man’s domain is of the world—working, eating at restaurants. That is why, when you walk on the streets as a woman here, you can feel like a minority. It’s the men who are out and about. And sometimes they like to taunt those of us who dare to venture out.”

  Asha thinks of the catcalls and leering men she sometimes encounters on the streets that make her want to use the self-defense moves she learned in her dorm workshop.

  “Also, it’s not just perception, it is also a fact. We are a minority in this country. You know the birth rates are all bungled up in India, don’t you? We have something like nine hundred fifty girls born for every one thousand boys.” Meena stares straight ahead. “Mother India does not love all her children equally, it seems.”

  42

  ONLY ONE REGRET

  Mumbai, India—2004

  JASU

  JASU WAKES IN THE MORNING, EXHAUSTED BEFORE HIS DAY HAS even begun. Last night again, he awoke in a panic, bolting straight upright in bed, his arms reaching out to grab the elusive shovel that always disappears when he opens his eyes. He woke up panting, his heart racing, with his face and chest drenched in sweat. Kavita put a cold cloth on his forehead and tried to soothe him back to sleep. Nothing she does or he tries to tell himself is ever enough. He will have to make a visit to the temple today before going to the factory.

  He runs and hops on the train just as it’s beginning to move. This morning, he feels his age and for a moment fears he might slip off the bottom step of the train. It is hard to believe he has been riding this train nearly every day since coming to Mumbai fourteen years ago. He shrinks from the memory of how little he knew then about the ways of this city and the hardships he would face. Sometimes he sees himself in the faces of the newly arrived: the men dressed in village garments who show up at the textile factory every day asking for a job. As the foreman, he is now the one who must turn away so many of them, knowing his decision means their families may not eat that night. When he looks into the eyes of these men, Jasu recognizes the pressures they face and the fears they suffer. They have all come here, as he did, with the expectation this city would bring riches and abundance, but they have found something else entirely.

  Last week, one young man came to the back door wearing a ragged shirt and nothing on his feet. Standing behind him were his four children and pregnant wife. They had no place to stay, he told Jasu. He nearly broke down when Jasu told him there were no jobs at the factory. “Please, Sahib, please,” he begged, speaking to Jasu in a quiet voice so his family would not hear his desperation. “I will do anything you need, anything. Sweep floors? Clean toilets?” He held his palms together in front of his face, as if in prayer. Jasu would have given him a job if he could, but even as foreman, he had little leeway in these matters. He gave the man a fifty-rupee note and told him to come back in a month. He feels badly when he sees these men, but even more so, he feels fortunate to have avoided their fate. Nearly fifteen years after leaving his home and coming to this strange city, he has a good job, a steady income, a decent home. It hasn’t been without hard work, but in the end, he knows much of it has been due to fortune.

  There were so many times along the way things might have gone wrong. The injury he sustained years ago could have been much worse. He might have lost a hand or foot like so many others and been forced to beg on the street with the other cripples. That one time he couldn’t work, he almost lost himself to drink. He would have frittered away his family’s money and his own life were it not for Kavita. Over the years, it has become increasingly clear to him that most of their fortune is really due to her—her strength, her love, her confidence in him. If they’d had more children, he might have ended up like that man in the ragged shirt, desperate to do anything for a few rupees. Of course, if they’d had more children, perhaps he would not have invested all his hopes in Vijay, now destined to lead the life of a criminal. He thinks of all the choices they’ve made since Vijay’s birth, most of them for their son’s benefit, and cannot think of a single one he would have made differently. He did everything he thought he should as a father, and still Vijay turned out to be a disappointment. He always thought he knew what was best for his family, but age and experience have humbled him.

  Jasu gets off the train at Vikhroli Station and walks in the direction of the small temple a couple of blocks away. He is often drawn here after the nightmares; lately, he has been coming every few days. It is a modest temple—from the outside, it looks like any other building in the neighborhood. He leaves his slippers outside the door and walks past the white marble fountain at the entrance. When he kneels down on the floor and closes his eyes, his mind returns to the one decision he does
regret: that horrible night Kavita gave birth to their first baby. It was only a few moments, a split-second decision, but twenty years later, he is still haunted by it. He remembers holding the squirming child in his hands and hearing Kavita’s shrieks as he walked away. He handed the baby to his cousin who, it was understood, would dispose of her as quickly as possible. Jasu sat on his haunches outside the hut, smoking a beedi, waiting.

  When he saw his cousin return from the woods with a shovel in his hand, he knew it was over. Their eyes met for just a moment and shared a horrible understanding. Jasu never learned where the baby was buried. He knew his cousin didn’t tell him because he thought Jasu didn’t care. The truth was Jasu didn’t ask because he couldn’t bear to know. He did what was expected of him, what his other cousins had done and his brothers would do. He had barely thought about it as a choice at all until he saw his cousin walking back with that shovel, and then it hit him.

  He would not admit to himself for many years that what he had done was wrong, but it was a very long time before he could look into Kavita’s wounded eyes again. Only God spared him from committing the same sin again with the second child. When the midwife told him the baby died in her sleep, too weak to survive the first night, he was relieved. Even that mercy didn’t lessen the depth of Kavita’s mourning. Still, he didn’t have the strength to defend her against his family’s continued criticism. Two daughters means she has committed a sin in her past life, his parents said. They wanted him to throw her out, get a new wife. They forced him to get the ultrasound with the third pregnancy and gave him the money for an abortion on the spot if it was necessary. He knew then, one day they would move out of his parents’ house, even if it meant leaving Dahanu, no matter the risks involved. He never wanted to choose between loyalty to his parents and protecting his wife, but they left him no option. Though they came around after the birth of Vijay, Jasu never saw them in the same way again. Even now, when they go back to the village to visit, he cannot look at his cousin without seeing the vision of him walking with that shovel in hand.