The Hope Factory

by Lavanya Sankaran

  “What am I,” Kamala said straightaway, “your maid-servant?”

  The young woman seemed surprised, as she did every time Kamala scolded her. “Why are you shouting again, old woman?” she said, taking outrageous liberties with Kamala’s age. “Who asked you to be anything?”

  “Do you expect me to clean up after you?”

  “It is just a bit of dirt. I am cleaning it up. I will do it.”

  “Do it now,” said Kamala, knowing it would not happen. She locked her room, placing the key at the bottom of her woven plastic bag. “How many times am I to ask. Do it now.”

  The bride yawned at Kamala, the garbage already forgotten. “Tell your friend Thangam that I have the money ready.”

  “Tell her yourself,” said Kamala, walking away crossly.

  Despite the occasional irritation of infelicitous neighbors, her home was ideal for her needs. The little room was painted a lime green, and if the color had faded with time and was stained in places, it nevertheless remained cheerful. Her possessions were stacked neatly against the wall: two bedrolls, the kerosene stove, aluminum cooking utensils, a few shelves for their clothes. Years before, Kamala had covered the tiny window with a sheet of plastic; this occasionally left the room filled with cooking smoke but blocked out the discomfiting stares of passing strangers on the gully outside, which was more important for her peace of mind.

  A tap in the courtyard supplied water; there was also a common bath and toilet. It worked well, as long as one coordinated one’s bathroom habits with everyone else in the courtyard and with the flow of water from the tap, officially rationed to one hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, but which sometimes ran for less on governmental whimsy. Of course, it was a matter of unwritten protocol that the landlord’s family got first use of the facilities, but they were good people, sensible of the silent, impatient queue that waited around the courtyard concealed imperfectly behind closed doors, and so did not linger unnecessarily.

  Her place of work was little more than a short brisk walk from her home, beyond this village that existed inexplicably in the middle of the burgeoning city. A decade ago, the village had been surrounded by fields; now it lay engulfed by suburbia, small industry, and the noise of highway construction. Swallowed whole, it had changed from quiet rural hamlet to urban slum, infested by workers who serviced the houses and industries around. The end of the dirt road widened astonishingly into tarred splendor. The transition from grime to rich suburban grace was marked and sudden, divided by a gutter and little else. Here, chaos. There, her employer’s neighborhood: lavish bungalows neatly planned, fronted by tiled pavements, enclosed by walls and gardens and security guards; houses so large, they reversed traditional slum proportions: instead of one room for four people, they appeared to have four rooms per inhabitant.

  “Namaste, sister,” the watchman said, as she neared the gate. “You are late this morning, are you not?”

  “No, am I?” she said, worriedly. She did not possess a watch, and time was always a slippery affair, expanding and contracting, sliding this way and that, so her judgment never seemed to match reality.

  “No,” said the watchman, with a passing kindness, “perhaps not. Do not worry.”

  She slipped down the narrow side path that led to the back kitchen entrance and placed her rubber chappals on the shelf provided for the purpose.

  Her eyes first went to the wall clock; no, habba, she was fine.

  “Ah, sister, there you are!” Thangam sat cross-legged on the mosaic kitchen floor, an ever-present accounts book open on her lap. “Come and listen!”

  “What is it?”

  “Hush! Listen! That fool has gone upstairs to ask for money, with the usual results …”

  Sure enough, the sounds of raised voices bounced down the stairs: argument, and counterargument; anger, pleading counterpoint.

  Thangam seemed to relish the drama playing out abovestairs between their employer and Shanta the cook as though it were being staged for her own entertainment. “Shanta expects success where she has failed before; she will never learn,” she said. Indeed, their employer’s querulous speech had morphed from the importance of fiscal prudence to the ingratitude of servants who kept wanting more. “How foolish! She will not get the money and we shall be forced to suffer Vidya-ma’s bad temper for the rest of the day.”

  This was precisely what Kamala feared. She herself had a request to make of Vidya-ma and she did not want it jeopardized. Thangam pulled out a small mirror from her purse, inspecting her face and wiping an infinitesimal speck of kajal from the corner of one eye.

  “Are you coming upstairs?” Kamala asked.

  “In a few moments,” said Thangam. “I just want to finish these chit fund entries.”

  Kamala knew it was useless to argue; Thangam’s aversion to her cleaning duties was in direct proportion to her interest in matters of financial import and personal grooming. Kamala collected the brooms and bucket and mopping cloth. “Oh, and that girl in my courtyard—impertinent thing!—said she had the money ready for you …”

  “About time,” said Thangam. “She is already late on her payments. I’ll collect it this evening.”

  “Vidya-ma will give you permission to visit?”

  “Sister, don’t be silly.” Thangam’s attention was back on her accounts book. “I will not be telling her.”

  Shanta’s heavy tread came down the stairs, her round, doughy face with its forever open mouth like an uddin-vada, hiding the harsh bite of chiles and peppercorns. She pushed past Kamala, vanishing into the servants’ bathroom in the back.

  “Ey!” Kamala swelled up with an annoyance that was quickly deflated by Vidya-ma’s echoing voice. “Kamala!”

  “Aanh, barthini, coming, ma!” Kamala ran up, impeded by the brooms and plastic bucket slapping against her legs. Thangam might walk out when she liked, but Kamala lacked that blithe courage. She herself would ask for permission.

  Vidya-ma was in her night pajamas, her hair knotted on her head, her face bearing traces of anger from her conversation with Shanta and smeared with fairness cream. “At least you are not late. Good. I am tired of people taking advantage of my kindness. Kamala, you will do the housecleaning today, for Thangam is not free; she will help me turn out the children’s clothes cupboards, they are utterly messy.”

  Kamala knew that she had not picked the winning ticket in the day’s work lottery. She and Thangam were responsible for cleaning the house and ideally they would be allowed to do so, working their way from top to bottom, sweeping, swabbing, dusting, and tidying. But Vidya-ma had the habit of intruding on their work with ideas of her own, of mixing them up, asking each to do this and that and something else again, so sometimes the day was half over before their regular cleaning could even begin. Occasionally, on a day like this, one was asked to do the work of two.

  Kamala risked her request. “Amma, if it is not a trouble, may I leave work for one hour before lunch? I have something to attend to.”

  She saw the shadow pass over Vidya-ma’s face and felt her anxiety rise. But her employer nodded reluctantly. “Very well, but do not delay. I will not be taken advantage of.”

  Kamala planned her work, quickly finishing the master bedroom and Pingu’s room. She glanced at the clock on the wall; she was right on schedule. In Valmika’s room, it was just as she suspected, the bed covered with piles of clothing; Thangam stood bored and idle while Vidya-ma finished some telephone call in the next room. From tiresome past experience, Kamala knew such telephone calls could lead to other plans in which Vidya-ma might decide to go out, the turning-out job either abandoned with the clothes bundled back into the cupboard in greater disorder than when they had emerged or, worse, resumed hours later, involving everybody now, all the maids, the children, the watchman, the neighbor’s cat, headaches, grumbles, and dragging on well past Kamala’s usual end-of-job timings into the late hours of the evening. In compensation for such extra toil Vidya-ma might say, “Eat your dinner b
efore you go,” but who could sit in the kitchen stuffing food into her belly when there was a child waiting hungrily at home?

  Thangam’s eyes widened appreciatively when she saw Kamala work hurriedly through the room, for this was cleaning in a style she understood. “Come and help,” said Kamala, crossly, “at least the beds.”

  “Very well,” said Thangam, “but why do you act like a pregnant woman whose water is about to break?”

  “I have permission to take a leave of one hour,” said Kamala, low-voiced, “but do not tell anybody just yet, all right?” By which she meant Shanta.

  “Aiyo, no fears,” said Thangam, with immediate understanding. “I am not speaking to her today. She is in an awful temper … as though I did not warn her! And besides, such a shouting she gave me last night, just because my head hurt and I could not help her wash the dishes. She is a serpent, that woman.”

  But Kamala would not be distracted by such enjoyable gossip, not today. She did not even stop for her usual eleven o’clock cup of tea and slice of bread in the kitchen. In a frenzy she worked, finishing the bedrooms and the study, bearing from room to room the brooms and bucket and other tools of her trade; rolling up the carpets after sweeping them with the hard coconut broom; using the softer broom on the floor; dipping and squeezing her mop cloth in the water before squatting on her haunches like a crab and wiping the floor clean.

  She went briskly to the kitchen; it was already half past eleven; she had no time to waste. Her tea had been made earlier and stood waiting in a steel tumbler upon the table, cold to the touch and wearing an ugly skin of cream on top. The bread balanced on top of the tumbler had turned a little dry. Shanta pointedly ignored her; Kamala rinsed out her tea tumbler without drinking from it and slipped out of the back door to put on her slippers.

  “And where might you be going?” Shanta demanded, rendered suspicious by this untimely activity.

  “Vidya-ma has given me permission,” said Kamala, a certain smugness in her voice. “I will return in an hour.”

  “Some of us,” said the cook, “do All The Work in this house, while others seem to expect All The Service.”

  “True,” said Kamala. “And she who expects the service, sister, is not Me.”

  And on this triumphant note, she went to the servants’ bathroom to wash her hands, splash water on her face, smooth her hair, and adjust the folds of her saree.

  AT THE MAIN INTERSECTION, the air was loud with horns, the traffic barely controlled by the lights, straining at the leash as though even a moment’s delay would bring the commerce of the entire great city to a halt. One ineffectual policeman reigned over the tumult. Kamala squatted at a corner with a clear view of the flow and halt of the traffic through the four junctions.

  The magazine boys were a mixed jumble, barely distinguishable through the fumes and noise. At last she was able to spot him—sporting a jaunty red cap like the others, holding a stack of magazines in his hand, and moving briskly from car to scooter to jeep to minivan. He was managing to sell a few, she could see that right away.

  The light turned green, the traffic began to move and along with it her heart, not settling down to an even pace until she saw him emerge on the far side of the road, unscathed. He did not pause but ran swiftly to the next intersection where the traffic was halted. Not all the other boys did so; some of them stuck to one light, resting at the times when the traffic moved. They would surely sell less than her son.

  His sales technique went beyond his tirelessness. Where had he learned it? Where had he learned to approach irritable drivers with a confident, cheerful smile and engage them in a nonverbal interaction conducted with difficulty through the tinted windows of their cars, until, sooner or later, the car window slid open, a hand emerged with money and vanished with a magazine?

  This astonishing being, so different, from another world surely, her son.

  At the end of an hour, she stood up and walked away. Narayan had not spotted her and he hadn’t stopped to rest in all the time she had watched him. She walked back to her job, a small, proud smile playing on her lips, her mind already planning his night meal.

  And, she determined, she would very soon plan a visit to the bright pink apartment building where lived the engineer’s parents, happy in their new prosperity. She would take some apples. They would be expensive, but a worthy exchange for invaluable advice on how to secure a child’s future. She thought of her meager savings. Or would bananas possibly suffice?

  five

  IT SEEMED INTRINSIC TO HIS RESTLESS nature to never be able to sleep comfortably through the night. For more aggressive cases of insomnia Anand liked to pace the study listening to a motley collection of seventies rock, a musical habit that dated from college. He had recently come across an old Doobie Brothers CD while browsing at a music store on Brigade Road, and pacing to it usually relaxed him to the point where he could pick up The Economist. This was a magazine he subscribed to because it seemed appropriate; he dutifully labored his way through the editorial pages and an occasional article on politics or business. He rarely bothered to read the rest of the magazine unless he found himself awake at night. Then, the arts and books section was the perfect curative: subjects he had little interest in, instantly sedating; he could get drowsy within the first paragraph. There was one in particular, on the recovery of presumed-destroyed Babylonian artwork, that was his favorite in this regard. So sleep-inducing, even the very words Bab-y-lon-ian-art-work repeated slowly heralded visions of happy insensibility. “Babble,” he liked to say, “babble-onion, art-wuk.” And such repetition had borne strange fruit one day when someone was boring on at a dinner about the importance of preserving art against the tides of time and human agency, and bang on cue, Anand’s mouth had opened, he’d said, “Babbleonion art-wuk,” and had his wife not choked on her wine, it would undoubtedly have been a bit of a feather in his cap.

  But this was a night when neither The Economist nor the Doobie Brothers worked. He fiddled with his presentation for the following day, finally going to bed only to fight awkwardly with his pillow, plagued by specters of success and failure and fantastical what-ifs.

  His body came awake before his mind did. He felt it, a high-tension humming in his blood, an electric glow, a moment of untrammeled, endless possibility—and then his mind snapped to alertness, propelling him out of bed, instantly reengaging with plans, schemes, and to-do lists. The warm shower waters rinsed away the vestiges of the night. Vidya lay undisturbed, swathed and blanketed in the icy freeze of the air-conditioned bedroom as he stole past and ran downstairs to his car.

  In the early morning cool of an awakening world, through traffic as yet muted and desultory, the small sedan maneuvered its way toward the distant city outskirts. Forty-five minutes later, he appraised the approaching factory with a stern, clinical eye: the dust and distressed road yielding to a manicured strip of green grass; the glossy factory wall, freshly repainted the previous day, the large manufacturing sheds beyond.

  RIGHT ON THE APPOINTED hour, two cars pulled into the compound. Six people emerged; at quick scan, they seemed to cover all the races: two Japanese, two Europeans, a man from England of African parentage.

  Anand felt the usual awkwardness well up within him. He wished he could be at ease with foreigners; they were sometimes intimidating and frequently incomprehensible; he did not have the means within him to easily cross vast cultural divides. His management team stood behind him: Mrs. Padmavati’s oiled hair and silk saree glistening in the morning light; the HR man wearing a startlingly strong checked jacket for the occasion; Ananthamurthy’s tie looking narrow and uncomfortable, but all of them with smiles rich with expectation and nervous excitement. Anand dried his palms on a handkerchief, thankful that the gray jacket he wore covered the sweat that had soaked instantly through his shirt, and hastened forward to meet the visitors, pinning a warm smile of welcome to his face.

  THE DAY PASSED SURPRISINGLY SMOOTHLY. The visitors toured the factory and seemed inte
rested and impressed. Mrs. Padmavati had had the foresight to make copies of Anand’s presentation; he was gratified to see the visitors scratching notes as he talked. The projector did not fail; the computer’s hard drive did not die halfway through. Ananthamurthy did not bring up his antediluvian notions on caste, worship, and vegetarianism but instead led the tour through the plant with the calm competence that came from knowing the location of every nut and bolt on the manufacturing floor and answered all the questions posed to him thoughtfully and capably. The lunch had been organized from a five-star hotel; the visitors appeared to enjoy the food, though Anand was too nervous to eat.

  In the late afternoon, the entire team collapsed in Anand’s office. They congratulated themselves. Everything had gone well, they agreed. They could not have planned anything better. They reviewed the questions that had been asked, trying to discern in them a measure of approval. As they talked, rehashing the various conversations of the day, Anand received an email from the liaison who had set up this visit.

  Alas, the excitement it generated was soon laid to rest; it was just a routine email of thanks for the visit. Any real indication on whether Cauvery Auto had passed muster would have to wait while the visitors toured other factories in the country and then returned to their own home offices and talked things through. The discussions, negotiations, and due diligence might take days, weeks to resolve.

  Ananthamurthy said he would redouble his prayers. Anand smiled automatically in response, already feeling the excitements of the day recede from his being, immediately replaced by everyday operational concerns.