The Hope Factory

by Lavanya Sankaran

  Kamala joined construction work. Not, of course, on those large city sites that grew quickly into tall buildings of steel and glass—those were built by men in hard yellow hats using large, fantastical pieces of machinery—but on the smaller constructions: houses, small offices, which were built, brick by brick, entirely on the muscular strength of workers, male and female, just like her.

  The supervising building contractor looked her up and down, and signed her up on the spot. She learned quickly, training herself to walk upon the narrow planks of wood that bridged one half-built wall to another with rounded trays of cement and stones and bricks balanced upon her head; surefooted, so she would not slip and fall into the open foundations below and break her head. She learned to form part of the winding lines of workers who lifted, carried, passed, and dropped mechanically, as they were instructed, in work that used the skills of a monkey and the brains of a child and the strength of every muscle in her body for ten hours a day.

  For her work she was paid only half what the menfolk earned. This was natural, she was told; it was a job that relied on muscle power, and the men had much more of that to offer. The money she earned was not enough to feed, clothe, and house her in any respectable manner, but the job had one saving grace: she could take her baby with her to the job site and fashion a sling for him on the branch of a tree, and let him sleep there while she worked. And, if he should wake hungry, nobody minded if he cried loudly until his mother could attend to him. In the clang and clamor of a building construction site, a baby’s voice disturbed no one.

  She lived with an acquaintance she met on the very first day, someone who swayed under a loaded head on the narrow plank bridge before her and whom Kamala instinctively steadied with her free hand. The white-haired woman thanked her in a voice rich with the stink of alcohol. She was fifty years old and as gnarled and dried as an old piece of firewood; she dealt with the circumstances of her life in the simplest of ways: each evening, she converted the day’s wages into arrack and drank herself to sleep.

  Their home was a makeshift tent constructed from debris rescued from job sites. There were a whole row of these slum tents along the edge of a road, close enough for the residents to walk to their jobs on the construction sites nearby, then dismantle them and move on in a year or two, when they were chased away by municipal authorities or when the jobs ran dry. Like the other tents, hers was waist-high, with a triangular frame of low, crossed wooden poles covered with old rags and bits of asbestos sheeting, and draped over with a blue plastic sheet held down by stones placed along the edges. Inside, another sheet of blue plastic was spread on the floor, sufficient for the summer but none of it very effective against the wet of the monsoon, which sank, dense and cold, through all the layers—the plastic, the asbestos, everything—to embrace them to its poisonous bosom. At those times, Kamala would let the baby sleep on top of her, the chill and damp of the ground below rising through her body and making her tremble, but the blood flowing within her strong enough to keep her child warm, especially if she covered them both with rags and more plastic.

  As payment for the use of her tent and stove, Old Gowriamma asked for nothing more than a mouthful of the food that Kamala cooked at the entrance to the tent. Kamala fed her baby on her breast, supplemented with a thin gruel of boiled rice kanji. She fed herself and the old woman on the same kanji, adding to it, for their adult delectation, a bit of salt and a few red chiles. Water they kept in a small pot at the rear of the tent. Once a week, Kamala queued up with her neighbors at the roadside tap and attempted to wash off the accumulated dirt on her body while the others shouted at her to hurry up, for god’s sake, for the tap was government-supplied and whimsical, running dry often and without notice. Under their gaze and shouts, she washed her arms and feet and face as best she could, wiping off the rest with a wet cloth, doing the same hurriedly for her child, and after a while, just letting much of it be. It was too much bother for a life that, every single day, led her straight back into the dirt.

  HER PEERS ON THE construction sites were as hard as the concrete blocks they worked with: the harsh nature of life never allowed them to be otherwise. They handled their work without complaint and expressed their opinions with a forthright ease in voices strong enough to generate a headache and be heard three roads away and with endurance enough to maintain a point of view for hours. In such an environment, Kamala, with her head-tossing pride and sharp-edged tongue, might have been held by those who had known her well to be a candidate for a fight within the first week. But bewilderment had rendered her mute and, for the first time in her life, without argument.

  Her companions formed their own notions of her character: she was a quiet one, keeping to the shadows of the world in a watchful way, never staring at others or challenging their gaze with her own, no matter what the provocation; volunteering no facts about herself, so tightfisted with her words, it was annoying for those who liked to enliven their work with casual conversation. In mitigation, however, it was also acknowledged that she worked hard; she learned quickly; she picked arguments with no one and gave no trouble; she raised her head from her work only, it seemed, to listen intently to the sound of her baby’s cry.

  After a few attempts to draw her out, most of the women left her alone in some sort of acceptance. Of the Kamala who had left her brother’s home in anger and eagerness for the excitement of a new life, they knew nothing. And Kamala’s silence grew and grew, blanketing her mind, her skin, thickening her sense of taste and the sensitivity of her fingertips, rendering them, like the rest of her, hard and dead.

  The months slowly turned into one year, and then two, and then moved into a third. It looked very much as though this state of affairs might continue endlessly, until her hair whitened and her teeth fell out and she learned to take comfort like her tent mate in a bottle every evening. Except, of course, the gods had made her of a certain temperament and finally decided, one fine day, to put it to some use.

  THE DAY STARTED OUT MUCH like any other. The house they were working on had been in progress for six months now, and Kamala had seen it change from a weed- and wild-bush-encrusted plot of land that had taken them a week to clear to a three-story edifice, the layered slabs of concrete rooted deep into the earth with steel-spined cement pillars. This morning, she formed part of a line of women who passed heavy concrete bricks along, hand to hand, from the pile on the roadside where the supplying lorry had deposited them, up two temporary wooden ramps to the second floor, where they were stacked once more, this time behind the stonemason, the maisthri, who was layering them with cement into the wall that when completed would face the road.

  Kamala did the job automatically, her body well used to the mechanics of hefting and passing. She stood second in the line, next to the woman who hoisted the bricks from the roadside pile, and from her position she had an unobstructed view of the construction site, the bricks that left her hand reappearing eventually in the hand of the maisthri perched like a large squatting frog, two floors above.

  Her wandering eyes came to rest on her son. He was two and a half years old. Small, dark, and dust-covered, he played, as he did every day, with the young children of other on-site mothers, in the heaped piles of sand and chipped granite stones that fronted the site and spilled onto the road. His legs and arms were sturdy, his belly was round—and that thin protective layer of flesh was, for Kamala, her single greatest achievement. She still breast-fed him at night, just before he slept. Was it milk that flowed into his eager suckling lips, or her blood itself? Whatever it was, it drained her as it filled him, taking with it the last vestiges of her youth and leaving her body scrawny and roped with muscles, but that precious nighttime feed had filled and coated his body, shielding him and keeping him alive and strong.

  He, her baby, had grown up on the construction sites; this was his natural world. He had learned to walk among the heaped mounds of sand and stones, staggering on little bare feet past rusty nails and sawed-off, treacherous pieces of wo
od, their shards reaching out greedily for his soft baby flesh. Kamala had fed him his first foods in such surroundings, had watched him holding unsteadily on to the sweet biscuit she might buy him for a treat from the corner bakery shop, watched him drop it in the sand and stuff it back into his mouth before anyone could run to him and stop him.

  He never lacked for peers; there were always at least two or three other young children playing around. They appeared at work, on the hips and heels of their mothers, to the loudly exclaimed irritation of the contractor. What, was he running a nursery school or a badly paying construction site? But the contractor’s irritation became the pearl in the shell of Kamala’s life.

  Even now, her son was following the leader of the pack, a little girl of six, who supervised the other children with an air of authority undiminished by her ragged, dusty locks and oversize dress, which slipped off one shoulder and hung forlornly to her ankles. She bounced a large baby on her hip and scolded the other toddlers if they dared to act obdurate, smacking them if they strayed past the area demarcated for their on-site existence—a great comfort to the mothers, for the road to the east was frequented by fast-moving cars, and the sand piles to the west guarded their children from the deep foundation pits and the risk of a careless slide into great injury.

  Sometimes, when the work was going smoothly and the money flowed in without argument, or perhaps simply when his wife and his mother had between them allowed him a good night’s sleep, the contractor would watch the little girl commanding her brood and joke, “Perhaps, little one, you should supervise the full site for me, uh? Work will happen superfast then, no?” and give her a one-rupee coin, being careful not to let his fingers touch hers, for she was filthy and he was a fastidious man.

  But this was not destined to be one of those days.

  There was a tension in the air this day, but the workers kept unusually quiet since the site was being toured by the property owner and the architect. The contractor, who treated the workers either with civility (if things were going well) or (if things were not) with high cursing and shouting, now assumed a third, coy aspect: nervous as the owner and the architect inspected the house, ingratiating and seeking, as soon as possible, to plead for more money. In this mission, he was hampered by his own actions: he had not planned for the sudden rise in cement costs and for the delay in raw materials caused by the overwhelming building demand in the city. In such a climate, when voices had been raised, dissatisfactions expressed, and the money had not been forthcoming in satisfying quantities, the late and drunken arrival of the mason had been the thunder that presaged the storm.

  The maisthri was a man whom Kamala had never liked, for he partnered his undoubted skill in masonry with a roving eye and foul mouth and a manner that implied that the women who worked on the site without the protective eyes of their menfolk were there for his personal delectation. Today he arrived two hours after everyone else, right when the owner was making his tour of inspection. The contractor opened his mouth to shout and then, realizing his audience, subsided until the owner should leave. The maisthri sullenly fell to work; the women were organized into a line to feed him the bricks he needed.

  As quiet as she appeared, Kamala was not indifferent to the atmosphere on the construction site. It was rich with anger and tempers held in check. The voices kept suppressed while the owner toured the property emerged rested, refreshed, and stronger as soon as he left. And in the beating of the voices around her—the maisthri surly, demanding; the contractor angry in turn; the spreading excitement of angry comments rippling through the rest of the workers—Kamala could feel, in soothing counterpoint, the rhythm of her breath within her, the strong pull of air in her nostrils fueling her labors; the weight of the stone placed in her hands; the strength and play in her muscles as she hefted it from one side of her to the other; the welcome give in her body when she released the weight into the hands of the woman next in line.

  You drunken, misbegotten rascal, she heard the contractor shout from his position next to the sand heaps where the children played, his rage magnified by the two floors that separated him from the mason. You come to work late, drunk, and then you ask me for more money? You rascal.

  What, sir? said the maisthri, putting his tools down and staring at the contractor in a manner most disrespectful. You want good work, but you are not willing to pay. Why should I work for you? Other sites pay much better.

  A few of the workers, sensing opportunity, agreed in loud mutters. Others, like Kamala, did not want disruption in their lives and kept quiet. She kept her eyes lowered, not wanting, even by accident, to offer anyone the direct gaze of confrontation. The bricks continued to pass through her hands, from left to right.

  “You rascal,” said the contractor. Who will hire you? Only a trusting fool like myself. Go from here, you little rascals. Almost causing me to trip! Go that side!

  Kamala looked up hastily; the last few phrases were addressed to the clot of little children. Her eyes searched urgently for the little six-year-old girl—she would surely lead the children smartly out of the way of adult noise and trouble. But the girl had stepped away, busily escorting a smaller child to the corner tap for a drink of water. The four other children, toddlers all, moved uncertainly in her absence.

  “Did you not hear what I said?” the contractor shouted, his choler welling further at their lack of comprehension. He cast a look of dislike at the women working in the line, the sins of their babies visited upon their heads. “Go that side! Cluttering up my site!”

  After some hesitation, the children began to move away. All, Kamala noted, except her son.

  He sat halfway up a sand pile, scooping the fine grain with his hands and letting it trickle through his fingers atop a growing miniature hillock. He was absorbed and pleased with the results, oblivious to the adult cacophony around. Kamala felt her breath speeding up and breaking time with the rhythm of her muscles. Was there a way for her to run to her child and move him out of wrath’s path, without bringing the entire brick-passing line to a halt?

  But the contractor’s attention had already shifted away from the children, and her anxiety receded. The contractor now worked to restore his dominance, turning his furious attention to the other workers.

  “Why are you all standing around? Is this a street dance, being played out for your entertainment? Get back to work!” Sullenly, everyone, including the maisthri, did.

  Perhaps the contractor should have left it there. He had achieved obedience. He controlled the purse strings. The sullenness, if given a day to fade, would be replaced by industry. Everyone present knew that the contractor, in fact, did the best he could. He was far from being as bad as some others in his position, and if he had difficulty in managing rising costs, well, then, he was not alone in that.

  But the contractor, today, would not let himself be soothed. A semblance of peace returning to the site was broken once more by his voice, loud, embittered, querulous, weighed down by the injustices he labored under.

  “Why I need to be burdened with you,” he said, “the gods only know.” His words were addressed generally but directed, everyone knew, at the maisthri. “What have I done,” the contractor said, “to deserve it?”

  The maisthri perched above them all and continued to layer the concrete blocks, his work slowing down as his own voice began to rise, once again, in audible counterpoint to the contractor’s. That this was heading toward a bigger fight was in no doubt.

  The tension began to infect Kamala. The maisthri was aggressive by nature; it was not likely that he would be content with words. Kamala kept her body poised and her eyes on her son. In a few moments, she was sure, the maisthri would abandon his bricklaying and storm down. And when that happened, she herself would swoop out and pick up her baby, still sitting peacefully with his hands in the sand, not one foot away from the contractor.

  The bricks were not the usual red-brown ones made out of kiln-baked mud; these were of gray concrete, with a rough, grainy tex
ture that could sear the flesh off your knuckles if you were careless. They were hollow, which rendered them, oddly enough, all the stronger. They were much bigger than the traditional mud bricks—and much heavier as well. Old Gowriamma had gotten careless one day and dropped one on the edge of her toenail—within a day, it had blackened and died. Their weight was sufficient that they had to be passed one at a time, hand to steady hand, instead of being loaded onto trays and balanced up the steps on the heads of the women. The maisthri too was careful with them; he had worked with them for years, his movements in his job as precise and restrained as his mouth was not.

  So did the hollow concrete brick tumble out of the second floor by accident, the mason’s hands getting careless as his temper rose, or did he engineer its fall on purpose? In all fairness, his cry of warning indicated the former, a shout that caught everyone’s attention and echoed through the spectators in gasps and cries. The block tumbled heavily downward, striking a protruding steel rod on its descent, and getting gently deflected on a path that arced, with horrifying accuracy, toward the contractor and the little two-year-old playing in the sand at his feet.

  The contractor saw the brick descend and hit the steel rod; he shied in fright and glanced at the child. There was just time for him to pick up or push the child out of the way—if he was the type to move quickly and in a well-coordinated manner. Perhaps he was not that type, or perhaps, with the child so dirty, he could not bring himself to touch him with his hands. Some would later remember him making a weak, ineffective motion, as though to push the toddler out of harm’s way with his foot.

  And then the brick landed safely upon the sand.

  The maisthri, shocked out of his own temper, came hurrying down. The contractor, shocked in turn, could only stare blindly at him, searching within himself for words to deal with the situation. The silence was broken by neither of them. “You dog,” she said. “You street-filth-eating dog.”