‘What do you mean?’ Riz’s muffled voice was now alert. He rolled away from me and propped himself up with his right arm under his ear. The wind snapped a shutter open and a square of sunlight appeared on the bed, lighting up the dust mites around Riz’s head like soda bubbles.
‘Nothing, really. It was something she said.’
He didn’t say anything, staring with a strained smile, arm bent into a neat scalene, thoughts racing behind his eyes.
‘Baby, don’t misunderstand,’ I said. ‘She was just being protective. I’m her only daughter. She’s bound to be worried.’
Again no movement but the same tight tone. ‘What did she say?’
‘We opened a bottle of wine because it was my last night in the house. She’s all alone now. But you know how much she likes you, right? She’d never say anything like that.’
‘What was she worried about?’
‘Oof. She just asked if I was sure I knew what I was doing. It was more like a joke. She poured us our second glass. Then she pushed her specs up her nose and said’ – I tried to copy my mother’s nervous delivery, hoping it would ease the tension – ‘“Riz is … he’s such a nice boy. You know how much I like him. He was so helpful when your Papa passed away. And I know he’s been there for you. I’ll tell you, the biggest relief is that he’s so different. He’s not … typically Muslim, you know. Only thing is, sometimes they become very religious later. There is a tendency. Happened to one of my friends. Her husband became a fanatic late in life. Remember Leena Auntie? Daughters had to wear that hijab. The sons only allowed to marry Muslim girls. Imagine. Though their mother was a Hindu! I felt so bad.”’
Riz seemed unoffended, amused even. I pulled him back to my breast. ‘I’ve heard that before,’ he said. ‘Not from your mum of course. We must explain to her what a fanatic is. Was that it, then?’
‘Yeah, pretty much.’ I ran my fingers through his hair. ‘She was worried you might suddenly decide to marry again. And again. “They can have four wives. Then what will you do?”’
‘My poor baby. The night before you got married? What a mindfuck.’
‘I told her I’d make you so miserable you’d never think of marrying again. And I will!’
His parents insisted we spend the night in the old house but while the family napped after lunch we took one of the drivers back to the city. Our school friends were waiting at a suite Riz had taken at the Claridges. We didn’t have the typical drawn-out celebration because it was already complicated, our getting married. It wasn’t against the law, but they made you feel like you’d done something terrible. Our photographs had to be displayed on a bulletin board at the police station for a month before our wedding. Reams of paperwork. Signed permission from both sets of parents on all kinds of forms. We filed photocopies of Papa’s death certificate with seven different authorities. We had to declare a domicile. The rules were so strict that it was impossible now to live in his sector or mine in any kind of peace.
That was how we came to the East End.
WATER
I
We moved to the East End on a cloudy July morning. Riz’s father refused to come down. He sat cross-legged on his bed, playing game after game of Patience. I stayed at the doorway when Riz went in. Abbu stared intently at his game, knitted brow, scowling. Riz stood at the foot of the high poster bed as his father refused to look up, neither saying anything. Movie songs on the transistor radio, the steady snap of plastic cards proficiently placed, gathered, shuffled. Finally Riz turned around and walked out. He looked like his father, the sullen furrowed forehead, an expression of irritated anger, of injustice. When we were in the hall, the bedroom door closed, I took Riz in my arms. He was trembling.
As the mover’s truck was pulling out of the driveway his mother emerged, watching us from their grey kota porch. Riz got out of the car and went back to her. He held her by the shoulders, speaking quietly. When he waved a hand – Naz drumming on the steering wheel, eager to get going – I climbed out of the back seat and went over. The narrow folds of skin on Ammi’s face and neck were wet with tears. I bent my head to her shoulder and she pulled me close, whispering in her broken English, ‘Since he was a child Riz did what he wanted. He doesn’t listen. Don’t blame yourself.’
‘We’ll be back all the time, Ammi. It’s very close. You know how much he loves you both.’
But his father didn’t want us to come to the house any more. After all the shouting of the past weeks, now he was determined to silently seethe.
His wedding gift to us was the plot of land adjacent to the family home. Naz was to get the plot on the other side. Riz sold his without telling any of them. He bought a four-bedroom apartment in the East End. I’d never heard Naz speak angrily to his older brother before.
‘Can’t you see what you’re doing to them?’ Naz was driving fast, braking suddenly, darting into gaps in the traffic.
‘What’s the big deal?’ Riz asked. ‘It’s not like we’re leaving town.’
‘It’s the East End, man. Why are you going to that place? You know what it’s like.’
‘What is it like?’
‘Everyone knows. Drugs. Women. It’s godless, that place. Is that what you want? And what about us – the family? What are you doing? Tell me, is it her? Is Shalini making you do it?’
A hot flush of shame. I’d been uncomfortable in my short time in Nizam’s Abode. The gentle fretting about my clothes, deemed ‘too much for the area’. The strange, cloying smells. Teenaged servants fresh from the village, shy but staring. The tethered goats I’d seen all over the place in the weeks leading to Bakri-Eid, slow-blinking, oblivious, then suddenly all gone. Next day a crimson wash in the gutters. But I felt anger at Naz’s question too. Maybe Riz had done this for me, but I hadn’t asked for it.
‘Are you insane, Naz?’ Riz shouted. ‘Don’t piss me off. Just drive.’
We went past the high wall of another sector in silence, all three edgy, hackles up. Now the walls were everywhere. In ten years they’d appeared like a malignancy all over the city, as if the water pipes bubbled with this septic lymph. When we were approaching the East End gates, his voice calmer, Riz said, ‘It’s all these new rules, Naz. I can’t live like that and neither should Shal. No booze, no pork. Old men with nothing to do but count how many times a week you go to the mosque. They want to send her to Koran classes! Can you imagine? It’s a joke.’
‘But everyone is doing it. Live with your own. Follow your own rules.’
I loved the East End. People liked to say all sorts of things, but in reality it was quiet and green, with a serene, unruffled air, as if nothing here had ever changed. There were parks, a mini-market, a health centre in the windows of which, driving past at night, you’d see a glowing double rank of Lycra-clad runners. Each bungalow had a front lawn, the narrow roads belted by the canopy of peepals, mango trees, flame of the forest. Regular speed bumps so the children could cycle. The residents had long ago decided against putting up a sector wall, everyone could come and go. It was strange to see a boundary wall like this now. It looked abbreviated, or rather undone, reminding me, in an unnerving way, of a desolation I’d seen upon a hillside as a child, an ascendance of blackened half-trunks, a forest of felled trees.
Naz was the first to mention it, as he pulled up at the East End gate. ‘It looks so weird, doesn’t it? Not having a wall there? Like they started but suddenly lost interest. You’re so exposed.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Riz said, but he had a curious expression, almost guilty.
‘You can see the tops of the houses,’ I told Naz. ‘The first and second floors. It took us a bit of time too. You get used to it. And just see what beautiful trees grow here.’
The guards at the gate waved us through with only a cursory look.
‘They took the decision as a group, all the neighbours together,’ Riz explained, as Naz got moving again. ‘That’s what I like about this place. Everyone gets to decide. Not some old fuckers hid
ing behind Purity One.’
‘Bhai, what was that poem they used to make us recite in school?’ Naz asked. He put on a deep voice, and taking one hand off the steering wheel, began to stroke an imaginary beard. ‘Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.’ He started laughing.
We all smiled at the memory, morning assembly, bleary-eyed in the central courtyard just as the sun was coming to strength, cantillating the great man’s verse without a thought to its meaning.
‘So you found it finally? This is your heaven? Haven, maybe.’ He laughed again, turning to me. ‘Like you Punjabis pronounce. Haven of freedom.’
‘Well, it’s better than anywhere else,’ Riz said, smiling. ‘We just want to live our lives in peace.’
But Naz wasn’t done. ‘And in this haven of freedom, can I ask, what need for those guards? Why do you need those gates?’
‘Tch. That is completely different,’ Riz said. ‘And you know it. It’s always been like that.’
‘What’s different about it? Why did the guards let us in just now? Imagine if we had come walking. They’d be so happy to see us? Imagine if we were dark, disgusting from spending our lives on these rotting roads. You think they’d let us in?’ Perhaps Naz sensed the drop in mood inside the car. I could not see Riz’s face from the back seat, maybe Riz looked annoyed. ‘Look, do whatever makes you happy. Who am I to say? I’m only sad that you’re leaving the house. You both.’
Our apartment reminded me of my home on the Hill. Big bedrooms, the cold marble floor, a large picture window in the living room that looked out over a park. I read a lot by that window. I began contributing lifestyle pieces to a newspaper’s weekly supplement. Leila was born our second summer. Riz would leave work earlier to spend time with us. Mummy came often, always with a matte silver box of kaju barfi.
I remember the morning Sapna, Leila’s ayah, entered our home. Leila was three months old. We’d had a torrid time with servants. The night nurse was competent, expensive. We figured a month would be adequate. But since then had come one trial after another. One girl left in the middle of the night after some nippy remark I made. Household in instant disarray. Then came a middle-aged Bengali both Riz and I liked. She made our lives easier almost at once, we began sleeping full nights again. One afternoon she told me she wouldn’t work for us any more. She wanted to go home to her village to spend time with her own growing children. Later I found out she was ensconced in a nearby sector. We had gushed about her to many people in our circle, the relief obvious, and she was poached by the friend of a friend.
Sapna was brought to the house by the cook of a couple we knew. They were relatively new friends, a gallerist and his wife. The wife did some work with poor women, I believe, helping them make and market saris. The food at their house was spectacular, even the foreign stuff, asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, things like that, and our friends were very proud of this cook, who was a dark, bigeyed, confident young thing. One morning they sent the cook to our door with Sapna.
By the time I got there they’d already been let in by the servant who answered the doorbell. I wondered for a moment how that was – neither this cook nor Sapna knew the people who worked at my house. But there is some code they have between themselves, and an understanding of circumstances, both ours and their own; the cook might’ve explained that Sapna had been brought here to fill a gap in the household, and the servant would’ve known then not to make them wait outside, that the first meeting went better inside the home, granting a dignity that standing supplicant at the door did not.
They waited in the kitchen. Sapna was looking at the ground, shoulders hunched, one hand resting on the granite counter and the other tucked behind her. The morning light from the big window framed her with a static-shimmer; golden rays seemed to be jumping from her skin in little volcanic bursts. As I walked into the kitchen Sapna seemed to shrink. Her shoulders hunkered further, she went lower, taking three or four quick little steps back until she was behind the woman who’d brought her here.
‘She is from my Slum, didi,’ said the cook. ‘She’s a very good girl. Aren’t you?’ she asked Sapna, turning to her.
Sapna remained silent. The top of her head and bent neck were clearly visible, but she seemed to think, as a cat does, that obscuring her own eyes would leave me unable to see her.
I let out a small laugh. ‘There’s no need for that here,’ I said. ‘Come out now. There’s really nothing to be afraid of.’
‘She doesn’t say much, didi,’ the cook told me.
‘I can’t have a mute. I need someone who can speak.’
‘Come out from there!’ my friend’s cook said, impatient suddenly, yanking Sapna by the forearm so she seemed to roll out to view. ‘Please give her a chance. She had a very tough time before this.’
The gallerist alluded to this when we spoke. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
Still Sapna did not say a word. She was frail, cocoa-skinned, with a high, gleaming forehead, her oiled hair pulled back tight. ‘The madam at the old house, where she used to work, she was very bad.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Her husband was in Railways. They promised Sapna’s parents they would get her a job, but she had to work for them one year without salary. Government job is best, didi. You get lifelong salary, pension, room to stay. Her parents sent Sapna to the couple. Just thirteen years old. For three years they did not let Sapna leave the house. They did not give her salary. She had to take care of two children. One was only a baby. They made her do everything, cleaning the house, cooking.’ She grabbed her by the wrist. ‘See how thin she is. They hardly gave her food. The madam used to beat her with things, jhadoo, stick.’
I felt a deep anger then, at these people who take advantage of the poor, who make it so difficult for the rest of us, who would never do such things.
‘Come here, Sapna,’ I ordered. She looked so young. When she was in front of me I put my hand to her cheek. “There is nothing to be frightened of, okay? You don’t have to worry about anything like that here. Do you know how to take care of children?’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said. Her first words, so low they were barely audible.
‘My daughter Leila is a baby. Only three months old. You know how to take care of a girl that young?’
‘Yes, didi. I have done it before.’ The sound of her own voice seemed to give confidence. ‘Whatever you tell me I will do.’
‘Yes. She’s a very quick learner,’ the cook chimed in. ‘This I’ve seen myself.’
‘No one will hit you here. And you will always be paid. Every month you will get your salary on the third. All our servants get paid on that day.’
She looked up at me, eyes grateful, somewhat baffled, her expression retaining a fragility and dependence that disarmed me entirely. In the time to come Sapna grew gradually more assured around the house, around me. Yet in the first months especially, when I came upon her doing something unusual, laughing at a joke Riz made, chatting too long with the milk-delivery boy, dusting her face in cheap foundation to look fairer, I could feel within this small rush of irritation, as if the gentle erosion of her dependence made me somehow less.
Every year the temperatures rose and the water problem worsened. Our fifth summer in the East End – Leila closing on three – the air was so dry you could hardly sweat. The newspapers led with panicked articles about the record-breaking heatwave. Snot clung to the wings of my nose and was painful to pinch out, breaking free in lumps like little stones. Leila began to get dizzy spells. She seemed tired all the time, pale. Her doctor said it was sun exhaustion. We had to be careful, make sure she got lots of water. We all felt it, an intense warmth like an infection, heat and anger rising inside you hand-in-hand, at street markets, trade grounds, sweet shops, liquor stores, anywhere people were forced to be outside, irruptions of white-hot rage. I suffered too. Sometimes Sapna would get it, sometimes one of the other servants. You couldn’t help but explode.
The taps wor
ked in spurts. Two hours in the morning, two at night, if you could call that water. They sputtered brown spots around the sink, leaving it like the toilet bowl at a highway stop. If the stream ever spiralled up to full strength it was half-clear and half-gravel-brown. The water scalded. Riz would joke to his friends that the bidet showers we’d installed were the first things to become useless. I bought extra plastic buckets and the servants filled them every morning, five or six in each bathroom, so the water could cool before we used it. Our society paid a bribe each month for even this limited supply. Every home had to contribute. We had to or we’d get nothing.
One afternoon that summer I’d taken a few minutes for myself. Riz was with buyers. I’d just come back from Leila’s preschool. My head was throbbing. I asked for a nimbu pani, stretching out with a sudoku on the planter’s chair in the living room, my feet up, the glazed picture window gelding the dark orange orb creeping west. When we moved here the trees from the park were all we could see but it was as if green had been drained from our view. Everything looked brown and yellow, lamps, parked cars, electricity poles, the road itself coated in fine dust.
It was hotter that summer than it’d been for a hundred years. Why do they tell us things like this? Trees sagged like broken men. Still no one followed the rules: the construction boom and the factories took the groundwater almost to zero. On TV they’d show clips of wailing Slum women, banging brass pots, dragging reporters by the wrist to the insides of dark huts. Children leaned dazed against the walls, their lips near transparent in the glare of the camera LED. They breathed in jerky, rapid gulps and cried without tears. A thin, dry smack after every word they could push out. The old folk looked even stranger, so pale they were tinged blue. The young men interviewed didn’t talk to the reporter. Instead they shouted directly at the camera. Eyes flashing, cracked lips, chests out, they stared through the screen right at you and spat their words with choked anger, asking why their families had been ignored so long.
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