by Bajwa, Rupa
‘Yes, just one,’ Ramchand replied firmly. The vendor gave him a lemon with a disgusted look on his wrinkled face.
Ramchand put it in his pocket carefully and paid for it. The landlord’s wife, Sudha, read Sarita and Grihashobha often, and sometimes Ramchand would ask Manoj, her eldest son, to see if his mother could lend him some old copies. He remembered once reading in one thus obtained issue of Grihashobha that rubbing lemon on the skin took away bad odour. He decided to try it now.
With all the purchases safely in a big paper bag under his arm, he went to the barber and asked for a haircut. The barber hummed and hawed and said he was about to close shop for the day. Ramchand wheedled and whined and requested, till the barber agreed. Ramchand got himself a neat haircut and then went back home.
He went to bed feeling excited about the next day. It was December, almost the end of the year, yet tomorrow would be the first day of the year when his routine would vary from the usual.
The last thing he felt at night was a quiet excitement in his heart, and a prickly feeling on the back of his neck, because he hadn’t taken a bath after his haircut and sharp little bits of cut hair clung to the skin. When he woke up in the morning, he got out of bed groggily and remembered that today was the day. He wouldn’t be spending the day in the shop. He was going to dress up, he was going to cycle through the city and go to the Kapoor House. He felt adventure looming in the day ahead.
He climbed out of bed, stretched and walked straight to the table. He seized the lemon, cut it in half and started rubbing his feet vigorously with one half of it. He’d make sure his feet didn’t smell today, at least. A seed from the lemon clung to the space between his big toe and the next one.
Then, with his feet covered in lemon juice, Ramchand went into the tiny bathroom.
By the time he came out, his hemmed-in excitement had spilt over. He moved quickly, picking up this, dropping that, smiling broadly.
All the other shop assistants took leave sometimes. Ramchand was the only exception. Mahajan was quite stingy about giving anyone time off, but there were times when he had to. They all had to go off sometimes – they had places to go to, in their lives they had people and occasions that required their presence. Relatives died, there was a wedding in the family, wives had to be escorted to their parents’ places in some other town, children fell ill.
With no relatives, no family, nowhere to go to, Ramchand could never ask for leave.
Ramchand had never even been seriously ill. Only once, when he had sprained his ankle badly the year before, Mahajan had sent him home. He had examined Ramchand’s ankle and told him, ‘It should be fine in three days. Come back then.’ And Ramchand had.
He couldn’t even feign illness because Mahajan knew where each of the shop assistants lived, and had a nasty habit of sending someone to check up on them when any of them took the day off claiming to be ill.
And anyway, Ramchand had often thought gloomily, even if he did manage to get leave, what would he do? Where would he go?
So he went to the shop, day after day after day. But today would be different. Ramchand felt like dancing. He couldn’t control himself any longer and burst into song. It was just a hum first, then his voice broke out clearly, and soon he was trilling at the top of his voice:
Yeh dil na hota bechara
Kadam na hote awara
Jo khubsoorat koi apna
Humsafar hota
His voice reached a crescendo as he danced around in his room in his old white vest and pyjamas, immune to the cold.
The landlord yelled from the courtyard, ‘Ramchand, be quiet!’
Ramchand pretended not to hear. He started again, his voice shriller and higher than ever. ‘Yeh dil na hotaaaa…’
‘Ramchand!’ screamed the landlord.
‘Kadam na hote awara…’
Ramchand ran across the room and jumped over the low stool in exuberance. He landed with a thud on the other side.
‘He will break the roof,’ wailed Sudha, the landlord’s wife.
‘Raaaamchand!’ the landlord bellowed, his thin frame shaking in anger.
Ramchand quietened down. He switched songs. He bowed charmingly at his reflection in the flecky mirror, tilted his head to one side and sang softly.
‘Tum bin jaoon kahan,’ he hummed softly to his own reflection.
And then a new madness seized Ramchand while he was shaving. He suddenly, and with great resolve in his eyes, lathered his upper lip.
And then he shaved off his moustache!
Thin and wispy, but a moustache nevertheless!
He splashed water over his face and looked into the mirror. He looked so different! Very few Bombay film stars had moustaches. Well, Anil Kapoor did, but then, he was Anil Kapoor. Ramchand studied his new face in the mirror. It wasn’t bad, he thought, but his clean-shaven look would have suited him better if his name had been Vishaal or Amit or Rahul, instead of Ramchand. But despite this, he secretly felt very pleased.
Then Ramchand took a bath with the red Lifebuoy bar, scrubbing himself thoroughly and washing the lemon juice off his feet. Then he towelled his thin body dry, put on fresh underwear and a washed vest, and got dressed in his new clothes. He proudly tucked his new white shirt into the waistband of his black trousers. Usually, he either wore a kurta over his trousers or old shirts that he never tucked in. He put on an old but clean sweater, combed his hair neatly and peered into the mirror. He was looking neat and tidy, and his face somehow seemed more resolute without his moustache, and, like it or not, clothes did make a difference.
He wasn’t looking shabby at all. He was looking quite respectable. He did not remember ever looking so good.
5
‘There you are,’ Gokul said, packing the last sari into a huge bundle. ‘Take good care of them. They are very expensive. And be very polite to the Kapoors.’
Ramchand nodded.
Hari came up behind him and put an arm affectionately around his shoulder, ‘You could pass off as the hero of a superhit film. Waah, what a change.’
Ramchand blushed. Then he hoisted the bundle of saris on his shoulder and went down to where Gokul’s bicycle was parked. He put the bundle on the carrier of the bicycle and secured it firmly with rope. He threw a leg over the bicycle, settled himself on the seat, and pedalled off exuberantly, freedom breathing through each Lifebuoy-scrubbed pore of his body.
The sun shone down gently on him, with pleasant warmth. Ramchand meandered through a crowd of bicycles, vegetable carts and pedestrians, and made his way out of the old city. Just at the edge of the bazaar, he stopped at the noisy Anand Juice Shop. He parked the bicycle, but did not move away from it. A small boy came out and asked what he wanted. Ramchand ordered a glass of mossambi juice, with one hand placed protectively on the bundle of saris on the carrier. The boy brought him a glassful. Ramchand sipped at it.
The orange liquid slid down his throat smoothly.
He threw his head back and drained the last drop into his mouth.
Grey pigeons flew overhead.
A single drop clung to the corner of his mouth, caught the sun’s rays and glinted quietly. Ramchand wiped it away, paid up and cycled off again, feeling more free and happy than he had in years.
After half an hour of serene cycling, Ramchand reached Green Avenue where Ravinder Kapoor lived. Gokul had told him exactly how to get to Green Avenue. Now Ramchand took out the piece of paper on which Gokul had scribbled further instructions clearly. He had to turn left when he saw a phone booth. Ramchand spotted a shiny new-looking glass booth with the letters ‘P.C.O.’ written on the smooth glass in bright red, and turned.
He was in a broad lane shaded with leafy trees and a proper pavement. On his right side there was a row of big houses with high boundary walls, on his left there was a big park, a large open space that Ramchand would never have imagined existed in Amritsar.
‘The third house on the right,’ he murmured to himself, wobbling a little. He passed two big houses and stopped at the gat
e of the third.
The high iron gates were of an intricate pattern, with brass knobs shining here and there. The top of the gate was spiked, so were the walls. A large granite nameplate had two words engraved on it. Ramchand stared at them, murmuring the letters that formed the words. Then he found, to his delight, that he had managed to read them. The words said ‘Kapoor House’. The granite nameplate looked very impressive.
Through the grille of the gate, Ramchand could see a driveway lined with potted plants, a chauffeur polishing a long blue car, and a well-kept lawn. A gardener wearing a blue kurta was bending over some flowerbeds.
Ramchand rang the bell nervously. The chauffeur came and opened the gate. He was a hefty man. He had his sweater sleeves rolled back and Ramchand could see his muscular forearms.
‘Yes?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘I have brought them,’ Ramchand said nervously.
‘Brought what?’
‘Saris.’
‘Which saris?’
‘For memsahib’s wedding. From Sevak Sari House.’
‘Oh.’ The chauffeur looked Ramchand up and down appraisingly and then moved to one side. ‘Come in,’ he said.
Ramchand wheeled his bicycle up the broad driveway. He was asked to wait in the porch. A big wooden ‘Om’ hung above the main door. He waited, cracking his knuckles swiftly, one after the other. He could see now that there was a red car behind the blue one and the garage door was closed, maybe there was another car inside the garage. The driveway was wide enough for any of the cars behind to be taken out without having to move the blue car.
After a minute or two, a surly looking maid in a mauve sari opened the door and ushered Ramchand into a big room with grand-looking sofas lining the walls and a glass-topped table in the middle. A thick blue carpet covered the entire floor space. There were paintings and brass antiques hanging on the walls. Ramchand nervously sat on the edge of one of the soft sofas with his huge bundle of saris sitting beside him, feeling like a fish out of water. There was complete silence, except for the loud ticking of a very fancy looking clock on the wall. He waited for fifteen minutes. Then a boy appeared through the door with a glass of chilled cola on a tray. He was blushing. Ramchand also blushed.
He took the glass self-consciously, and tried to look as if he sat in plush rooms every day receiving glasses of expensive soft drinks from domestic help. When he picked up the glass, he noticed that the tray was made of frosted glass with a pattern of dancing peacocks engraved on it. It reminded him of the embroidered peacocks on the blue sari that Mrs Gupta had bought for her daughter-in-law.
Ramchand stared at the tray.
The boy stood there uncertainly, shifting from one foot to the other. Ramchand suddenly asked him, ‘Are you new here?’
The boy stared at him dumbly. Ramchand switched from Punjabi to Hindi and asked again, ‘Are you new here?’
This time the boy nodded. ‘From Himachal?’ Ramchand asked.
‘Yes,’ the boy said, his eyes lighting up. ‘From Lachkandi village, near Simla. Are you from the hills too?’ he asked excitedly, in a voice that was surprisingly clear and beautiful.
Ramchand shook his head.
The boy’s face fell. He looked at Ramchand uncertainly for a moment, then he suddenly turned and walked out of the room. Ramchand waited another fifteen minutes. Finally, a middle-aged woman dressed in a blue silk salwaar kameez and an expensive-looking shawl walked in. Gold and diamonds glittered on her ears and her wrists.
Ramchand stood up politely. ‘Ji namaste,’ he said with folded hands.
‘Rinaaaa!’ she shouted, startling him. ‘The sari-wala is here.’
When she shouted, you could see the red inside of her mouth and her large, even teeth. Then she said, ‘Namaste,’ and sat down opposite him.
A young woman with permed hair walked in, the high heels of her shoes sinking into the soft carpet. She wore blue jeans, a slinky blouse with a purple and blue floral pattern and a black woollen cardigan. Silver bangles jangled at her wrists.
‘Yes, mama.’
‘Sit, let’s take a look at these saris.’
Ramchand looked at both of them. So these two women were Ravinder Kapoor’s wife and daughter. He had heard that the wife had once, at one go, bought pashmeena shawls worth ten lakhs. He looked at her curiously.
‘What are you waiting for? Show us the saris,’ she suddenly said to him, her voice imperious and harsh.
‘Mama, let’s have one of the servants here,’ said Rina. She had a husky, languid voice.
‘Okay,’ replied her mother. ‘Raghuuuuu!’ she yelled, the red, cavernous opening of her mouth yawning wide again.
The door opened once more and Raghu, a tall young man, came in. He stood deferentially by the sofa watching the proceedings.
Ramchand, still sitting on the sofa, bent down and opened the knot that tied the bundle. But he was feeling uncomfortable, and his fingers fumbled awkwardly at the knot. Finally he excused himself, walked to the edge of the carpet, stepped off it, took off his shoes and came back. Then he hitched up his new black trousers and sat down on the carpet cross-legged, feeling back in his element. Rina caught her mother’s eye and sniggered, but he ignored it.
Now, he swiftly undid the bundle and confidently began to take the saris out one by one, but what followed was completely outside of all his previous experience.
Ramchand had been working at Sevak Sari House for eleven years now. He had watched innumerable women choose saris. Though women were otherwise strange, alien creatures to him, there was one part of them that he knew intimately – the way they chose saris.
He had learnt to read their expressions and their moods very accurately. He could guess when they were definitely going to buy a particular sari. He could tell when they were in two minds and had to be pushed into buying one. He could immediately sense when they had made up their minds not to buy anything and were just pretending to be interested.
He well knew the look on a young girl’s face when she came to the shop with mothers and aunts and sisters to buy saris for her wedding trousseau. There was the glow on her face, the light in her eyes, the quiet nervous excitement. She would drape a pallu of a sari over her shoulder and look into the mirror intently. While the women accompanying her critically assessed how the sari suited her, she looked at herself with the eyes of her would-be-husband-and lover. Her moist lips would quiver and part in a virginal excitement. She would smile, and in the end she would be quite incapable of making up her mind. She would blush and nod when the women accompanying her asked whether she wanted this sari or that, creating a lot of confusion. On certain occasions, Ramchand had also seen such girls look into the mirror with melancholic eyes, as if the sari was quite all right, it was the idea of this particular marriage that wasn’t so happy. This happened rarely, but when it did, it would tug terribly at Ramchand’s heart, though he would later tell himself that it must have been his imagination.
He had seen vanity, he had seen envy, he had seen despair. He knew well the bitterness of a plain woman, who could see in the mirror that a sari could, after all, do only so much, and he could recognize the quiet, wordless triumph of the beautiful ones.
Ramchand had also noticed that women rarely, almost never, bought saris alone. They had to be in twos and threes to be able to decide, and to derive the maximum pleasure from the process of purchasing a sari. Buying a sari wasn’t just buying a sari – it was entertainment, it was pleasure, an aesthetic experience. They would always come at least in pairs, if not in groups. Then they would talk about the sari, discuss its merits and demerits. They would make faces if they didn’t like a sari, and shake their heads ruefully at each other, quickly saying that the sari would have been all right, had it not sorely lacked a good pallu, or a better designed border, or a slightly different shade of colour.
Ramchand had learnt to be patient while women talked and pored over a sari endlessly. They would peer at it closely, running their fingers lightly ov
er the fabric, scrutinizing the pattern, as if trying to decipher faded handwriting on an old parchment.
He had also come to recognize the covetous expression, followed by a resolute look on a woman’s face once she had decided that she must have a particular sari, no matter what happened.
If the women were from the same family, family hierarchies would come into play sometimes. The eldest, usually a grandmother or a mother-in-law, would finally decide things, especially if the shopping was being done for a wedding in the family. She would make sure that nobody got saddled with the cheapest sari, lest the sari wars carry themselves dangerously into kitchens. But on the whole, women from the same families were also pretty amiable and happy while buying saris together. They would ask each other anxiously, do you remember, do I have another sari of the same colour, are you sure? They would drape saris over their shoulders, sometimes even cover their head with the pallus, and ask each other how it looked on them. It was perhaps the one time when women were at their most honest, open and sincere towards each other.
And in every case, there would be the bargaining – the gentle bargaining that regular customers did, knowing they’d get their way eventually; the loud haggling that aggressive women did out of sheer habit, the sort that ended with headaches on both sides; the coaxing, cajoling kind of bargaining that inexperienced customers indulged in hopefully; and the aristocratic requests that women from rich families made (please price it reasonably, they would command with an imperious wave of their hand). It happened in different forms. But it always happened.
But today, in the drawing room of the Kapoor House, there was no bargaining and very few questions were asked. In fact, they did not even bother to ask the prices, even when he unpacked the most expensive lehngas that were available at Sevak Sari House.
They exchanged very few words with each other, both women absorbed in picking out what they wanted. They ignored Ramchand completely. They chose expensive saris and went through the few lehngas he had brought with him without batting an eyelid and kept them aside, and carelessly tossed the ones they did not like into another pile.