The girl nodded her head in glee as her milk teeth pounded away on the food animatedly.
‘Yeees! I hit the bad man on his head. Boom!’ the man confirmed.
The girl squealed in delight at her father’s heroic escapades at fighting bad people. The father was familiar with the pattern—the little girl always chewed a bit faster when she was excited. ‘We might even wind up dinner under thirty minutes today,’ he hoped.
Sadly, however, barely fifteen minutes into the feeding exercise, the child cringed visibly as she felt cramps in her lower stomach. The bad bacteria from the spoiled yoghurt had succeeded in disturbing the peace inside her tummy, leading to a sudden swish of poop to blast through her intestines and eject from her body. Tears welled up in the child’s eyes since her stomach hurt—and as her bodily extract soiled her undergarment, the pretty frock that she was wearing, and the grey bed sheet. The stench took over the room, banishing whatever little pleasant smells there was of the bhaaji that was being consumed. The father hurriedly put away the half-empty plate to attend to the immediate problem at hand.
‘Oh, my dear child…’ he exclaimed as he picked up his daughter and ran with her in his arms to the bathroom-cum-toilet next to the kitchen. ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry!’ he reassured the girl as she started to sob loudly.
There was a bucket of water about half full, all the water they had until fresh supply resumed at 5 AM the next morning. The father propped the girl up on the western commode that he had got installed in the shanty flat at his own expense a year ago. Almost half an hour later, once the girl had reassured him that she was ‘done’, the father cleaned her up, put on fresh clothes and laid her on the newly-made bed. The drained child complained that she didn’t feel well, so he lay next to her, reassuringly stroking her sweaty forehead and wiping her twinkle-dotted eyelashes. He started to narrate a new fictional story from his workplace that made him sound like a superhero. The girl smiled feebly, trying to look as brave as possible.
Unfortunately, the bad stomach episode repeated three more times that night. Twice by way of vomiting, and one was a repeat of the original act. The father remained on his toes all night.
Somewhere between fatigue and hunger he must have dozed off, for when he abruptly jolted awake it was already 7:30 AM. The first thing he noticed was the child—she was sleeping peacefully. The next thing he checked was his wristwatch lying near the bed. He shot off the bed as quietly as possible, lunged to the bathroom and turned on the tap. It was dry.
‘Maader…! Gone!’
He proceeded to wash himself with the two mugfuls of water still left in the bucket, and then he made himself a tomato omelette, his first meal in nearly sixteen hours. By the time Padma Tai showed up at his doorstep at 8 AM, he had already been ready in his khaki uniform for some ten minutes.
Babu Ram Manjrekar had been a cop with Mumbai Police for the past eight years, ever since he finished his police training at the age of twenty-four. He had been assigned to Dadar Police Station, where he had started as a Sub-Inspector. His specialty, so to speak, was violent crimes—mostly murders—and he was usually the first on call when one occurred in their area. Progress-wise, Manjrekar’s career graph could only be described as choppy. In the early years, things had mostly been good. He had been known for his diligence and dogged tenacity on whichever case he was assigned. He was always creative in his macro approach to a problem, but, at the same time, meticulously procedural in examining the details at a micro level. That, really, was the best way to solve crime—think everything and examine everything. Consequently, Manjrekar had enjoyed an enviable success ratio in disposing of cases, which in turn had garnered him several police accolades and promotions. By twenty-eight, he was an Inspector.
However, those heady days of yore were now just that—the days of yore. For the past few years, Manjrekar had been no more than a shadow of his old self. Once upon a time, he had been sprightly and nimble. Now he just seemed sluggish and bogged down. He seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to finish the work he was tasked with. Unsolved cases began to pile up, their files overflowing on tables and cabinets. Though Manjrekar’s ability to make the most unobvious deductions at a crime scene was still intact, everything else appeared to get impeded by his painstaking process. His excruciating due diligence could make even his most patient colleagues tear their hair out. ‘His brain is faster than a plane, his actions slower than a maal-gaadi,’ was how one of his seniors described the present-day Manjrekar. Times were changing, yes, even for the police, and no one had patience for people who took forever to achieve very little.
In short, Manjrekar’s professional future was now largely doomed. Everyone around him knew it with varying degrees of certainty. Yet, his bosses and peers still felt obliged to give him all the space he needed. One, because he was a good man, and two, because of his tragic personal story.
Manjrekar’s had been the kind of life no one would wish on their worst enemy.
‘Tea, Sir?’ enquired Constable Suresh Joglekar, the loyal sidekick for many years. When Manjrekar assented, the man ran off to get some.
‘How is Baby doing today?’ Suresh asked as he placed the sweet brown tea on Manjrekar’s table. He had asked his boss the same exact question every morning for two years now.
‘Not so good,’ Manjrekar said, and summarised the events since the night before.
‘Sir, you leave for home whenever you want. I will take care of things here.’
‘I will, around lunch time. I don’t want to trouble Padma Tai too much today,’ Manjrekar said, as he looked at the rising pile of files at his desk. Each day, the mountain seemed to rise just an inch higher.
Manjrekar’s parents hailed from a small village near Kolhapur. They believed that the most notable accomplishment of their simple lives was to get their son married to the prettiest girl in the community some five years ago. It was obvious that Manjrekar’s job in the police force had swung his marriage prospects in their favour, for Manjrekar was a man of meagre ancestral prosperity and even more meagre looks. He was 5 feet 10 inches tall, lanky though fit, with a wheatish complexion and a face that bore remnants of a severe bout of childhood chickenpox. For the past couple of years or so, the hair at the front of his head had started to thin, but that wasn’t noticeable unless you looked really hard. All in all, a good way to describe Manjrekar’s looks could be to call him extraordinarily ordinary-looking.
The name of the prettiest girl in the community was Archana. She was 21 years old and had completed her graduation in Library Sciences from Pune University. No one in the village knew what that degree meant, except of course, that it made her ‘highly educated’. When Archana’s repeated pleas to seek a job in Mumbai made no dent on her father’s traditional values about women in the workforce, she resigned herself to her fate and assumed a village life of being gainfully unemployed. Luckily for her, the Manjrekar family proposal came along within months, bringing with it the opportunity to move to the Big City. Archana couldn’t be happier. Manjrekar seemed like a decent guy but, to her, his biggest appeal was that he had had the resolve to leave the village and pursue a professional career elsewhere. Archana wanted to do the exact same thing.
The wedding was simple and the entire village attended the ceremonies. Six days later, the married couple left their teary-eyed families at the village bus stop, made their five-hour journey, and arrived at Manjrekar’s dingy quarters near Tulsi Pipe Road in Dadar.
Within days, however, the newly-weds had realised that they had absolutely nothing in common with each other. Except, perhaps, a passionate habit of mostly keeping to themselves. Soon, life was all about breakfast and dinner over little more than the silent sounds of chewing food, some sex, eight hours of relaxed sleep, and the remainder spent by each minding their own business—he at the police station, and she searching the ‘Situation Vacant’ columns in newspapers.
‘There was an opening for a Library Assistant at Kantaben School. I had left m
y bio-data there three days ago. Rupees 9,500 per month,” Archana announced to Manjrekar during a quiet dinner about a month into their marriage.
‘Kantaben Memorial Trust for Girls?’
‘Yes, that’s the full name of the school. The building looks nice. Clean.’
‘OK.’
‘I will join duty on Monday.’
‘OK.’
No drama.
Soon, as happens to even the most placid of Indian couples, Archana got pregnant. It was about four months into their marriage. And nine months after that, their first child was born. It was a girl. The mother named her Roshni when the father couldn’t come up with any suggestions himself.
The baby girl was the loveliest creature either of them had ever seen in their lives. She seemed to have her father’s complexion and her mother’s features (at least that is what everyone claimed). Archana took three months off from her job to take care of the newborn. Since Manjrekar worked close to home, he would drop by several times a day too. Roshni even proved ‘lucky’ for Manjrekar professionally—he got promoted to Inspector two weeks after she was born. ‘Saale, HO has promoted you only because you fathered a baby who looks better than you!’ his peers at the station joked.
When Archana went back to work, the two grandmothers chipped in. Manjrekar’s father usually kept unwell, so while one Aaji could visit only occasionally, the other one made sure that home and baby were well taken care of while the baby’s parents toiled at work. Manjrekar liked his mother-in-law. She was quiet and sensible, just like her daughter. Neither woman believed in frivolous small talk, nor were they tiringly emotional or sentimental. One time, when the almost year-old Roshni had developed some kind of a skin rash, the neighbourhood women had trooped into the flat virtually like a constant stream of medical experts, advising the child’s caretakers of all kinds of home remedies.
‘Mix some haldi with curd. Leave it overnight. Next morning, mix it with rose water and apply that all over her skin.’
‘Have you tried cow’s urine? It works the best! I use it on my face every day. Here, feel the skin and see for yourself!’
As soon as the tiresome ladies left, the no-nonsense elder had advised, ‘We have already waited two days. If these marks don’t go away on their own by tomorrow, take Roshni to a doctor.’
No drama.
By her eighteenth month, the little child was duck-walking all around the house. By the thirty-sixth, she was chatting every minute she was awake. The three adults in the house would watch the bossy little one’s antics all day long and not once get tired of it.
Manjrekar’s ailing father was widely expected to leave for his heavenly abode much sooner than his wife. So when the opposite happened instead, it shocked everybody. One minute Aai was cooking pohe on her stove, the next, she was prostrate on the kitchen floor, very dead. Her own mother had passed on the same way some decades ago. She had been making sooji halwa, though.
As soon as they got the news, the Mumbai gang—Manjrekar, Archana, Roshni and Aaji—were on their way to the village on the first available Kolhapur-bound Maharashtra Roadways bus. Roshni was excited by the drama of bus travel and was perturbed as to why her three co-passengers weren’t showing the same kind of enthusiasm. She would keep drawing their attention to stray objects outside the dusty bus window in her innocent attempts at kindling joy, but the adults stayed unmoved and steely. Eventually, the tired child gave up and fell asleep on her mother’s lap.
Sadly, the family never did reach the village as expected. Only twenty kilometres from the village, about fifty from Kolhapur town, the bus was hit by a truant Maruti 800. The hapless bus swerved left and right like an inexperienced skater, and then flew off the road, landing onto the soggy trench on the right about fifty feet from the tarmac. The impact was so horrendous that it not only broke the bus into two, but also, many, many human bones inside it. By the time helpful village folks, police and ambulance services arrived, thirty seven people had parted with functioning limbs and other body parts. Seven others had parted with their lives altogether. One of them was Aaji.
Roshni’s parents had a few broken bones too, but none so important that it was going to keep them in disability for very long. Which was a glad happenstance, because neither could have afforded that luxury given the cruel fate that had befallen their precious little daughter. The poor child had been flung from her mother’s lap when the impact happened. Her tiny body had first slammed the ceiling of the bus, and just seconds later, its floor with even greater force, instantly snapping her spinal cord at the neck.
Six months of relentless hospital visits later—but for the scars on Roshni’s face, head, arms, legs, torso and back—one could hardly tell that she had been through a near-death accident. That, and the fact that she couldn’t move any part of her body except her facial muscles anymore. The medical term for Roshni’s condition was Tetraplegia—total loss of sensation and motor skills of the body neck down.
‘What can humans do except hope for the best? Have faith in Him,’ said the kindly doctor at Breach Candy Hospital in South Mumbai. After doing the rounds at government-run hospitals where treatment was fair and free—but ultimately without favourable outcome—Roshni’s increasingly desperate parents had tried to tap Manjrekar’s police network to seek advice from the best in Neurosurgery, Ortho and Plastics at the best hospitals in the city. The appointment with the doctor at Breach Candy had been most difficult to come by, but even this one had pointed his finger upwards at the sky instead of an Operation Theatre.
And so, after months of treatment, ‘Keep your faith!’ were the parting words that the medical community had for Roshni’s parents. Three words that extinguish even the last ounce of hope for the sick. In Roshni’s case, it was like some twisted karmic justice to a life that had barely begun.
The familiar-comfort reality of the Manjrekar–Archana marriage started to fray immediately after the bus tragedy. It was to be expected given the pressures—their own painful injuries, a paralysed child in Mumbai, and the aged and bereaved fathers who needed tending back in the village. Archana had no option but to leave her job at the school and shift to the village, visiting Mumbai only occasionally. Her extended absence from home meant that Manjrekar had to spend a lot of time away from work tending to their disabled daughter. With his almost absolute focus on the child’s care, it took no time for his professional life to land into a ditch too—just like that godforsaken Roadways bus. His cases soon began to languish inside crumbling files in dank file cabinets.
As days became weeks and weeks became months, Archana began to grow more unhappy about the circumstances that compelled her to stay away from her own child. Husband–wife spoke on the phone daily—she itching to return to Mumbai to be with her daughter, and he never agreeing that it was the right time to ditch the old men just yet—especially his father, who had been permanently bed-ridden since his wife’s death.
‘He is your father!’ she would say quietly on the phone, emphasising on the pronoun. ‘How long do you want me to stay away from my child and tend to him instead?’
‘How can I leave duty and go there? Can you think of a better arrangement than what we have now?’ he would respond, just as calmly.
She couldn’t, obviously. There was no better arrangement.
One day however, some eight months after the accident, the dam of Archana’s patience finally burst. She went to the village bus stop with an overnight bag, boarded the Mumbai-bound bus, and landed at the doorstep of her Dadar home. Manjrekar was speechless at his wife’s sudden arrival.
And when the surprise had passed, he was livid. Archana had never seen the man angry before, let alone incensed.
‘I had no idea I was married to such a selfish woman!’ he exclaimed, after enough angry words had been exchanged between the two. It was probably the quietest fight any married couple had ever had in their building compound. Neither had wanted to create a scene by yelling at the other. The tragedy of their lives already had
enough emotional drama to make a long-running TV soap, the last thing either wanted was an audience outside their door and windows too.
‘After all that I have done for everyone, all I am asking for is to be able to cry some tears holding my broken daughter. Is that too much to ask?’ Archana sobbed.
Despite her belief that her decision to land up in Mumbai was the correct one, it took only twelve hours for Archana to realise, to her utter dismay, how far behind she had fallen in her training to tend to a quadriplegic child. Every single thing she did with Roshni was wrong.
‘Don’t hold her that way! That makes her arms go blue.’
‘Stop! Do you want her to choke on that milk?’
‘She hates that frock now!’
‘If she twitches her eyebrows like that, it means she has to be taken to the toilet immediately.’
By stark contrast, everything her husband did was right. Just twelve hours cooped up in the tiny flat and Archana could see that Manjrekar was like an expert around the child. He was so… comfortable managing Roshni. But, even more importantly, Roshni was just as comfortable around him. As much as Archana hated seeing it, the message to her was as clear as the bright new sun shining outside the next morning—Roshni didn’t need her mother any more. She only needed her father.
Still, there was one last-ditch attempt Archana was going to make at finding a consensual solution to the impasse.
‘What if we bring Baba here?’ Archana offered.
‘How will we care for two full-time invalids in this place?’ Manjrekar had whispered in response, not wanting his daughter to hear his words, his eyes rotating in their sockets sizing up their matchbox-sized tenement.
‘I will. I can do it all!’ Archana spoke a bit too excitedly, perhaps articulating her own suspicions on the plan.
‘Moreover,’ Manjrekar said, ignoring his wife’s misplaced enthusiasm, ‘Baba will die if he has to live away from the house he spent all his life in.’
Pretty Vile Girl Page 14