Haunting Bombay

by Shilpa Agarwal

  But instead of pouncing upon him, Savita spat out Pinky’s name.

  She’s a thief ! she screeched into his ear as the alcohol drummed in his temples and weighed down his eyelids.

  Jaginder wanted nothing more than to fall into a pleasant, buzzing sleep. Oh, how nice it would be just to drift away.

  She was in my bindi box just now! She found the photo—

  Jaginder’s eyes shot open. A dread filled his chest like smoke from a smoldering fire.

  She knows?

  I told her she was here because of our misfortune, our tragedy!

  Jaginder groaned. They had agreed never to tell the children, except for Nimish who, though only four back then, understood that he was forbidden to speak of his dead sister. Now, now it was all in the open again. All these years of careful concealment, of trying to forget.

  Why did you tell her it was our daughter? he yelled. Why didn’t you make up something?

  Because I can’t take it anymore! Savita shouted back. Pinky has a father. Why doesn’t he raise her? Why haven’t you done anything to send her back? Why do I have to live with this child, this girl, who is not my own?

  You have to let it go, Jaginder said. Your anger’s consuming you.

  My anger? Savita yelled. And what about you? Disappearing every night. Not touching me anymore as if I’m a leper.

  She began to weep.

  Jaginder closed his eyes again and, turning his back to her, forced himself to sleep.

  FAMINE AMIDST SUDS

  Parvati and Kuntal squatted across from each other, their knees splayed like wings, saris hitched up in between, darkly draping the topic of that morning’s conversation.

  “Humph! Thinks he’s satisfying me with that bone-thin thing of his. No bigger than an okra!”

  Parvati brought her index fingers to within three inches of each other.

  Kuntal giggled.

  “Expects me to slide around—Oh Kanj! Kanj!—like some sort of sabzi he’s frying up!” Parvati picked up the paddle and began beating a desperate-looking shirt with vigor.

  “That’s not what you used to say.”

  “Humph. He was bigger back then. Everything shrinks with age nah!”

  Parvati had married Cook Kanj soon after she and Kuntal joined Maji’s household in the winter of 1943, four years prior to Pinky’s arrival. Parvati had been fourteen, Kuntal a year younger; both had come all the way from the rural districts of Bengal in North India as refugees from a famine that wiped out three million people. Most of the dead were agricultural laborers like their parents. Neither Parvati nor Kuntal understood the decisions made by the English colonial government that led to famine conditions when there was enough grain harvest that year to feed all the people of Bengal. But it was a wartime economy and the British, already sensing their demise in India, firmly entrenched themselves by confiscating grain from the rural districts and destroying additional supplies that might fall into enemy Japanese hands. Provisions were transported to Calcutta, the capital of Bengal and a critical port for the imperial government, then out of India to other British colonies.

  While Calcutta was buffered with grain and the city workers insulated from the inflationary impact of World War II, Indians in the outlying districts—the ones who had grown the rice—slowly starved to death. Parvati and Kuntal’s parents heard rumors of food and relief kitchens in Calcutta and left their village in weather so hot that the air was sharp with the rot of freshly dead bodies. Entrusted to a neighbor, the girls had no choice but to wait and slowly starve. What little food was allotted to them slowly dwindled away as provisions were hoarded for family members. Parvati spent her days scavenging for edibles, collecting seeds and killing insects for nourishment. Whatever she found or could steal, she would share with Kuntal who had grown so weak that she could no longer stand. In this way, Parvati kept them alive. While Kuntal wasted away, Parvati’s body stubbornly held onto its muscles and small deposits of fat on her chest and hips. She refused to let thoughts of death touch her. She would have escaped to Calcutta herself, following her parents, if only Kuntal had been stronger.

  And then a contingent of village elders, three of them blind and the rest illiterate, appeared one day with a tattered copy of a British-owned newspaper, The Statesman, pointing to a grainy photo of emaciated bodies.

  See dere, they cried out from mouths emptied of their teeth, dey dead!

  And then they gave the girls, now orphans, leering looks that made Parvati realize that they must escape immediately. If not to Calcutta, then Bombay, Parvati decided, the other major colonial port. The City of Gold.

  That night, after their neighbor had the opportunity to study the newspaper over a bottle of country brew, he yanked Parvati to his room.

  You have no one else, he drunkenly reasoned, so you’re mine now.

  Through it all, Parvati clung to the thought of Bombay as her salvation and did not give up hope. Instead, as he lay asleep, she grabbed the small dagger that lay on top of his discarded lungi and plunged it into his heart as his eyes opened in shock. And then for good measure, she cut off his shrunken penis and tossed it out the window where it was speedily devoured by a fleet of rabid dogs.

  As the night deepened into stillness, Parvati crawled out of his room and stole his remaining assets which included money, a gunny sack of rice, and a rusted bicycle. She barely noticed her bleeding wound as she cycled, with Kuntal strapped to the handlebars, to the station where she bartered her rice for two tickets to Bombay. On the train ride and in the weeks of homelessness that followed in Bombay, Parvati slowly nursed Kuntal to reasonable health. She made inquiries. She used the last of her money to buy fresh clothes for them. And then she knocked on bungalow doors.

  Need maid? Need maid?

  Door after door was slammed.

  Cook Kanj, already in his midthirties, had answered Parvati’s insistent knocking upon Maji’s gate and—though annoyed at being awakened from his nap—was immediately taken by the look in her eyes. For despite the hunger that had wracked her body for months, Parvati’s eyes glistened with conviction. He sat the girls down outside on the front verandah and, against his nature, gave them some food. When Maji woke up and saw Parvati energetically sweeping the driveway, she knew that she had found the help she had been praying for the last couple weeks ever since her previous housemaid had gotten married and left. Though they had no references, Maji was perceptive enough to sense that the girls had come from a good home and that, like Gulu many years before, all they needed was the possibility of a second life. Two weeks, she told them and crisply went about arranging their sleeping quarters.

  The bungalow’s two one-car garages sat like mouse ears in the rear. The first was occupied by Gulu and Cook Kanj. Maji briefly considered installing Parvati and Kuntal in the second garage, alongside the black Mercedes that took up most of the space, before settling on the back living room, the one which went unused except for formal company. Though she trusted Gulu and Kanj, they were men after all, and Maji did not want any scandals to erupt amongst the servants while she slept.

  In his thirties, Cook Kanj had been quite handsome with his wavy hair and starched white shirts tucked into a lungi or, on a rare day, his one pair of trousers. He had kept his eye on the sisters from the moment they arrived, as if they were his personal wards. Parvati was brash and sharp. Kuntal shy and round. He lavished attention on them both, putting extra sugar into a tray of cashew burfi, offering mango lassis and lime sherbets on the sly, fattening them up a bit. And then, unexpectedly, Parvati’s face began appearing to him at night, refusing to let him sleep. During the day, he surreptitously glanced at her, falling more and more in love. Soon, his treats were only for her. Why not? he asked himself eventually.

  Why not? Parvati thought when Cook Kanj suggested marriage, although the residue of her neighbor’s crime involuntarily caused her to stiffen. Even so, she reasoned, Kanj had taken her in when others had slammed doors and cared for her with a protective tendern
ess reminiscent of her vanished father. He was like fried paneer cheese, gruff and crisp on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside. Upon learning of their impending nuptials, Maji gave her blessings and generously converted the second garage into their sleeping quarters.

  “Good thing you never married. It’s more work,” Parvati now said to Kuntal, pushing a strand of loose hair away with the back of a sudsy hand. “At the end of the day, instead of letting me rest, he’s grabbing this and that. I barely walk in and already he’s loosening his lungi. Wanting me to touch his little okra. As if my hands have not been busy all day. Just wait, one day I’ll go in with the clothes paddle, see what he does!”

  “He loves you, nah di!”

  Kuntal was right. The years had not diminished Kanj’s affection for his wife. And Parvati, for all her complaining, continued to throw flirtatious looks at him whenever she passed by the kitchen, even though he had begun to dry up like a lime left out in the torpid Bombay sun. She took great pleasure in inciting him, teasing him into desperation, and then taking her time to return to the garage at the end of the day.

  “What love?” Parvati said dismissively. “I’m telling you, you’re lucky.”

  Though they were sisters, Parvati was more of a mother to Kuntal. Having lost their parents, Parvati never had any intention of letting her sister disappear into marriage especially since she considered her an easy target for an unscrupulous man. Parvati’s future with Cook Kanj was fixed in Maji’s bungalow. But Kuntal, if she were to marry, might have to leave the household. Despite her own happy situation, Parvati continuously emphasized the dangers of men and the drudgery of marriage at every opportunity.

  “The old fool can cook Moguli eggplant, rasmalai, the most extravagant dishes but can’t even plant a proper seed in my womb,” Parvati grumbled for effect.

  Pinky’s face appeared around the doorframe.

  “Hai-hai, look who’s been listening,” Parvati said, her paddling unabated as she nodded with her chin in Pinky’s direction.

  “Need something Pinky-di?” Kuntal asked, rinsing off her hands.

  Pinky shook her head as she walked into the bathroom and sat down on the wooden stool. “Can I take my bath?”

  “You want us to leave now, right in the middle of laundry?” Parvati asked irritatedly.

  “No, no, no!” Pinky said, “just that I can wash while you’re here.”

  Parvati and Kuntal exchanged looks and shrugged.

  Pinky began to undress. “Do you love Cook Kanj?”

  “Hai-hai, what kind of a question is that?” Parvati readjusted her sari with her elbow. “I don’t have to love him, he’s my husband.”

  “Of course she loves him, Pinky-di,” Kuntal said, clicking her tongue. “She’s just saying that for my benefit.”

  “And why are you up so early?” Parvati asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Couldn’t sleep?” Kuntal asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Maji doesn’t believe me!” Pinky blurted out, tears already sprouting in her eyes.

  “Doesn’t believe you? About what?”

  “A ghost! There’s a ghost in here, in this bathroom!”

  “Ghost?” Parvati put her paddle down and threw her sister a warning look. “Oh ho, that just means it’s that time.”

  “Yes,” Kuntal agreed. “You’re thirteen after all.”

  “Any day now you will bleed from your soo-soo,” Parvati pronounced matter-of-factly. “You’ll have terrible pains in your belly. And you will smell and be banned from the kitchen. And the puja room too.”

  “My MCs?” Pinky asked. She had heard about monthly cycles from Lovely.

  “It’s not so bad, Pinky-di. All girls go through it.”

  “It is bad,” Parvati interjected pointing an insinuating finger at Pinky.

  “It just means you can have a baby.”

  “If your husband wields something more substantial than mine.”

  “But what does it have to do with ghosts?” Pinky asked.

  “My cycles started just after we arrived in Bombay,” Parvati continued. “I had terrible nightmares. I thought I saw my Baba but it was only a dream. Oh ho! What an attitude! He was displeased we’d left Bengal. But they were the ones who left us! They had no right to be angry with me!”

  “That was long-ago Pinky-di,” Kuntal said, soothingly.

  “What happened to them?” Pinky asked.

  Parvati slapped the paddle down and with a sigh, walked away.

  Kuntal went back to the washing in silence.

  Almost undetectably, the air grew chilled.

  Pinky rinsed herself off, goose bumps rising on her body.

  “Are you cold too?” she asked Kuntal.

  Kuntal shook her head, reaching over to touch Pinky’s forehead. “It’s natural to feel a little chilled during your cycles, losing all that heat from your body, nah?” she said. “Quickly finish your bath now.”

  Pinky splashed her face with water and opened her eyes. She thought she saw a flash inside the bucket, a vibrant flash of black that strangely dazzled. Then, as she blinked there was a pulse of red and silver, two tinted milliseconds.

  “Did you see that!” Pinky yelled.

  Kuntal looked up. “See what?”

  “Flashes inside the bucket!”

  Kuntal squinted, peering inside, then shook her head apologetically.

  Pinky began to dress herself, face downcast. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Your cycles must be arriving any day,” Kuntal said kindly. “The first time it feels so strange . . .”

  Parvati returned with a slim parcel wrapped in an old sari. She sat down on the wooden stool and slowly, almost reverently, unwrapped the yellow and red bandhani cloth.

  “Oh di,” Kuntal moaned when she realized what it was, “Pinky’s too young, please.”

  “She wants to know what happened, so I’m going to show her.”

  The newspaper, The Statesman, was dated August 22, 1943. Inside its yellowed and blood-splattered cover was a full page of photos, mostly of emaciated women and children dying on city streets.

  “See this photo?” Parvati pointed. In the coarse blacks and whites, a line of women stretched out, ribs protruding, faces pulled away. There was one shadowy man crouching against a cart in the corner. “Those are our parents on the end. There was a famine in our village so they went to Calcutta for food.”

  Pinky could not tear her eyes away from the blurry images, especially the one of their mother cloaked in a torn polka-dot sari.

  “Did they find it?”

  “What do you think?” Parvati asked, touching the snapshot. “It was all lies. There wasn’t enough food in the city. They died right there on the street.”

  Kuntal began to softly weep, “Oh di, why did you keep that?”

  “To remind me,” Parvati said, carefully wrapping the newspaper back into the cloth. “To survive at all costs.”

  HUSBAND, HUSBAND-EATER

  The statues in the puja room gleamed. Maji and Pinky took pinches of white rice powder in their fingers and drew mandalas upon the black marble altar. They placed a fresh flower garland upon the framed painting of Saraswati.

  Maji began chanting a mantra: “Yaa Kundendu tushaara haarad-havalaa. May Goddess Saraswati, who is fair like the jasmine-colored moon . . . remove my ignorance.”

  After they had finished with the prayers, Maji sat back and sighed. “When I was young,” she said, “there was a young Brahmin girl who came to live next door. She was thirteen, maybe fourteen, and was married to the neighbor’s son.”

  She remembered that the girl loved eating alarmingly bright concoctions of crushed ice and fruit syrup that turned her tongue guava green and jackfruit yellow.

  “A year later her husband died. I watched from the rooftop as two barber-caste women pulled her into the courtyard. This young girl was now a widow. They stripped off her jewelry and clothes. They wiped her forehead of vermillion and dr
ew instead a vertical smear of funeral ash from the tip of her nose to her hairline. They shaved the hair from her head. They washed her body with cold water and wrapped it in a rough white sari. She was crouching the whole time, crying, crying. She looked up and saw me on the rooftop next door. I wanted to reach down and save her . . .”

  Maji paused, pressing her eyes with her fingers as if to force impending tears back inside.

  “Did you?” Pinky asked.

  Maji gave a little laugh. “I was just a child myself. I ran to my parents but their grim faces told me not to interfere, that the Laws of Manu had dictated these rites. The poor child was given only one crude meal a day and she slowly grew emaciated. Her mother-in-law blamed her for the death, calling her khasma nu khaniye, husband-eater. She was not even referred to as a ‘she’ but an ‘it,’ as if she no longer possessed a gender. I passed fruit to her from a rope attached to my rooftop and she devoured it. But one day she was caught and sent away.”

  One tear now broke through and slid down Maji’s cheeks.

  Something hard and tight clenched in Pinky’s chest. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know, beti, I don’t know. Perhaps she was sent to the ashrams in Vrindavan or Varanasi to beg for her subsistence. After I was married, I asked your grandfather to take me there on pilgrimage. I searched every vacant face but I never saw her. Gandhiji made things a little better for widows but there is still no place for them in society. All those rituals they forced upon her—the funeral ash, the cutting of her hair—were to make her dead.”

  Maji dabbed at her eyes.

  “I vowed then I would never allow that to happen to me. I would fight first, take my life even—”

  “Maji!” Pinky was shocked.

  “Forgive me, beti, I was young then and foolish to think such things. I wish my parents had had the courage to take that child into our home but they were afraid that her inauspicious shadow would fall upon me. I dreamt of that poor child last night. After all these years, I dreamt of her. How I wish I could remember her name.”