by Bajwa, Rupa
This was the moment. Ramchand’s pulse quickened, his breath became shallow, but this time, he wasn’t going to run away. He was going to do something.
‘Madam, I want to talk to you about something.’ His voice sounded unnatural and strained even to his own ears.
She looked startled.
‘About something very serious,’ Ramchand said.
‘What is it?’ she asked suspiciously.
‘Can you see that man at the opposite end,’ he said, pointing towards Chander.
‘I see no man there,’ she said.
‘The shop assistant, madam, the tall one.’
‘Oh, him,’ she said, nodding. ‘Yes, what about him?’
‘His name is Chander. I want to talk to you about his wife,’ said Ramchand.
Mrs Sachdeva looked at him as if he were mad.
Then, faltering a little sometimes, stumbling here and there, but keeping his head clear, Ramchand, with his ears redder than ever, but also with more courage in his heart than ever, told Mrs Sachdeva the whole ugly, sordid story, putting together the pieces as well as he could, completing it like a jigsaw puzzle.
Mrs Sachdeva stared at him speechless.
Then, as his words sank in, the lines on her face were disturbed. They seemed to move a little, the way ripples move in still water after a stone has been thrown in. She tried to interrupt him, but he held up his hand, trying to be firm and strong, and said, ‘Please, let me finish.’
And he did, while Mrs Sachdeva got more and more agitated. Ramchand could see unshed tears in her eyes.
In the end, Ramchand felt drained. He wasn’t surprised to see Mrs Sachdeva look agitated. He would have been too, if such a story had been sprung on him.
But Ramchand was completely unprepared for the fury that now burst forth from each pore of Mrs Sachdeva’s red face.
She glared at him. ‘How dare you?’ she said in a low, angry hiss, her voice trembling. ‘How dare you, a mere shop assistant, bring me here to this corner and tell me filthy stories about the kind of women you seem to know.’
He was about to speak but she didn’t let him. ‘The Guptas are respectable people. They happen to be friends of the Kapoors. Do you know what you are saying? And do you have any proof of all this? And why are you telling me? What have I got to do with all this dirty business?’
Her indignation was making her stutter. Her voice sounded tearful even through the anger.
‘Memsahib, please listen. Maybe the Guptas didn’t know this would happen, but they did get her arrested. And the policemen did…’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said, speaking through clenched teeth in a low voice. She was anxious that no one in the shop should overhear this conversation. ‘I don’t want to listen to all that vulgar rubbish again, that too in Hindi. Why are you bothering me about all this? It is no concern of mine.’
Ramchand answered with despair in his voice. ‘Because you are a respected woman, and your friend Mrs Bhandari’s husband is the…’
‘Oh, so that is it. There have been some horrible, filthy things going on, and now respectable people are to be dragged into it? Let me just tell you one thing, you try this once more, and I’ll speak to the shop manager about this. This just might cost you your job, do you understand?’
With this, she gathered her jewellery carefully into the little velvet pouch, pushed away the green saris on her lap and walked out of the shop on trembling legs.
*
Two more months went by. July came but Amritsar remained dry and dusty. The monsoons were late. One hot, dizzy day, when Ramchand climbed up the familiar wooden stairs of the shop for the umpteenth time, pushed the big glass door open and went in, he saw everyone sombrely standing in small groups, talking in low voices. Shyam was looking pensive, Rajesh was nodding to something that Mahajan had just said to him, Gokul was silent, Hari was whispering something urgently into Gokul’s ears. Nobody had opened the windows yet, and the shop was stiflingly hot and still.
The next thing Ramchand noticed was that Chander was absent, and panic surged through him. Chander hasn’t turned up again and they would send him to his house again to fetch him, Ramchand thought. He would refuse, he thought in blind terror. No matter what happened, he wouldn’t go there again. He would feign a headache… he would say he felt ill… he wanted to go home…
But nobody said anything to him. They continued to stand around, talking in hushed voices.
Gokul caught Ramchand’s eye and beckoned to him. Ramchand went up to him slowly, a feeling of dread in his heart.
‘What happened?’ he asked Gokul. ‘Why is Mahajan looking so solemn? Where is Chander? Has he been sacked? Why are…?
‘Sssh,’ said Gokul, his dark eyes solemn. ‘Nothing is wrong with Chander. But Chander’s wife, you know, Kamla? I told you about her.’
Ramchand waited.
‘Well… she has been killed,’ Mahajan said. ‘It happened last evening. So Chander won’t be coming to work today.’
‘What?’ Ramchand whispered.
His world spun around him.
‘Killed? But who…?’
Gokul turned to Hari again, who was asking him something, still in a whisper.
Ramchand couldn’t make sense of anything. He tugged at Gokul’s shirt sleeve.
‘Yes?’ Gokul asked him.
‘Did Chander… I mean… who killed her?’ It sounded absurd to his ears, talking about something like this logically, sanely, in broad daylight, standing in the middle of the shop, in view of everyone.
‘No, Chander didn’t kill her. You wait. I’ll tell you everything later,’ Gokul said mysteriously, his hair looking even thinner and greyer today.
At that moment, a plump woman came in with her plump daughter-in-law asking to see printed cotton saris. Each shop assistant moved back effortlessly to his place. Gokul dealt with the woman even more politely and efficiently that he usually did. Mahajan caught his eye, gave him an approving nod and went downstairs.
It wasn’t until later in the morning, when there was a brief lull in the stream of customers, that Gokul told Ramchand everything.
According to Gokul, Kamla had tried her tricks once too often. She had got disgracefully drunk. Then she had gone to the Kapoor House, no less.
And there she had stood outside the gate, shouting at the top of her voice. When the Kapoors sent out their chauffeur, gardener and servants to restrain her, she let out a stream of abuse at them, and then went on to abuse the whole of the Kapoor family. Passers-by stopped to listen. Finally, seeing no other way out of this embarrassment, Ravinder Kapoor himself came out.
At the sight of him, Kamla picked up a stone and hurled it at him. It catapulted through the air in a defiant semi-circle, and struck his forehead. The sharp edge of the stone made a deep gash. Blood seeped through the gash and then dripped down to Ravinder Kapoor’s white silk kurta. He stood there with a look of shocked disbelief on his face.
Kamla’s fate was sealed at that very moment. Ravinder Kapoor couldn’t help it. It was a matter of his prestige in the city. He could not let a common woman go scot-free after that.
Yes, it was a matter of his prestige, a matter of honour.
This had happened the morning before. At seven in the evening, four men broke into Chander’s house. Kamla was alone at home then. One of the men held Kamla while the other three proceeded to break every single thing in the house, down to the earthen water pitcher. They threw out all the utensils in the house. They emptied jars of rice and daal into the garbage heap outside, they even broke the fragile wooden door. They smashed the old, smoky glass of the window. They broke the bulb and emptied the kerosene stove. By this time, a crowd had gathered outside and the four men made sure everyone saw what they were doing. No one dared protest.
All this they did mechanically, without any anger or pleasure on their faces. In ten minutes, the already shabby, unhappy house was completely and efficiently destroyed.
Then the men beat Kamla up.
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br /> They systematically broke her collarbone, they kicked her till two of her ribs broke. The back of her head split open when they threw her against the wall. Her blood left a bell-shaped mark on the discoloured wall.
Then they dragged her outside and paraded her in the neighbourhood with her hands tied behind her back so everyone could see what happened to those who stepped beyond their limits.
She could barely walk, she had to be dragged and pushed into moving. Finally, they pushed her back into her home, locked the door, sprinkled the small house liberally with kerosene and set it on fire.
Chander had gone home from the shop last night to find the charred remains of his house and his wife.
It was a brief story. Very like a scene from a Bombay masala film. Just a brief story, told in very few words. But the words washed over Ramchand again and again, like unforgiving waves of an ocean returning again and again to crash on the shore.
The shop stood still. Ash trembled at the tip of an incense stick. A fly tried to fly out through the glass of the closed window. People turned into statues. Saris were suspended in time. And the lane below that he could see out of the window was a picture, a snapshot caught in the wooden frame of the window. It wasn’t real. Like the picture of the thatched cottage that had hung in his room ever since he had moved into it. Only, the text had changed. Instead of the line … Home is where the heart is, now the words said…
… With her hands tied back… they tied the hands of my sons behind them with their own turbans… she tried her tricks once too often… the charred remains… it is with considerable regret that I say… Kamla’s fate was sealed at that very moment…
He went about in a shocked daze for the next half an hour, just repeating the story to himself, and mixing it up with other things in his head. He was vaguely aware that everyone was still talking about it in low voices.
And then Ramchand saw Hari’s face break into a sly smile. Then Hari said, ‘You know, I am not sure, but I heard from somebody in that area that they paraded her naked before doing It.’
And then… then Hari threw his head back and laughed.
His even teeth gleamed; the inside of his mouth was very pink.
A fraction of a moment after Hari laughed, everyone was surprised to hear Ramchand – for no apparent reason – making a sound like a half-gasp, half-scream, and then turn towards the door, and rush out of the shop. They heard him crashing down the last few steps of the wooden staircase and then the clatter of his running feet. Then there was silence.
Hari laughed.
Hari laughed, Ramchand thought in shocked disbelief.
Cheerful, carefree Hari laughed.
His friend, Hari, laughed. Ramchand blindly stumbled out of Sevak Sari House with only one coherent thought in his mind. He was never returning here. He was now standing under the signboard, out in the street. Here too, there were people. More and more people, milling around in the streets, strangers with impassive faces. You could not know what lurked beneath the placid normal exteriors.
Ramchand could barely breathe, but he didn’t slow down. He pushed and elbowed his way through the crowds. So that was her name – Kamla, he thought. He hadn’t known her name until today. Ramchand was drenched in sweat by the time he had left the lane where the shop stood. He wanted to get away, get away for ever from the claustrophobia of the shop and the laughing, bizarre Hari.
He slowed down when he got out of the lane. Now that he was away from the shop, he didn’t know what to do. He felt too full of emotion to go back to his room straightaway.
It was a new emotion – a strong emotion, a mix of irrational fear and an unfamiliar anger.
It filled his heart and mind.
It furred his tongue.
It replaced the confusion and the detachment that he felt most of the time towards his life and towards the world around him. It was potent, but also pungent. There was a metallic taste in his mouth.
He wandered through the bazaar aimlessly, looking for a chance to give vent to this emotion. For the first time in his life, he felt like picking a fight with someone. At the same time, he felt tender and protective towards all defenceless things. He felt strong.
A stray, mangy dog that lay with its head on its front paws looked at him understandingly. The streets seemed littered with droppings from vegetable carts.
Ramchand tried hard to stop himself from crying. He hated to cry in front of anyone.
An hour elapsed. Ramchand continued to roam the streets with suppressed energy in each cell of his body. He was unable to control his feet – they went where they pleased, they took him to the same streets, the same temples, the same shops over and over again.
And then Ramchand’s eyes fell on the familiar sight of Lakhan’s dhaba as he passed it. The busy entrance, people arriving and leaving quickly, the mingled smells of pakoras, baking rotis in the tandoor and tea, warm and comforting and inviting. The only people who didn’t seem to feel comforted ever in Lakhan Singh’s dhaba were the man himself and his wife. A strong, physical wave of sympathy rose in Ramchand’s confused heart for the tall sardaar and his melancholic wife.
He stepped into the dhaba impulsively, still panting slightly, his brain threatening to burst out of his skull.
He looked around for Lakhan but couldn’t see him anywhere. Two men were chewing on rotis dipped in daal. There were mounds of sabzi on their plates. A young man, one of Lakhan’s new helpers, was serving them. There was nobody else around, except a boy washing glasses in a corner, whistling tunelessly to himself. Ramchand went up to the boy and asked him where Lakhan was. The boy waved his soapsud-covered arm vaguely. He told Ramchand that Lakhan was in his house behind the dhaba.
Without pausing to ask anyone for permission, Ramchand bravely walked through the back door of the dhaba that led to Lakhan’s living quarters.
He found himself in a small room where Lakhan’s wife, a slight, swarthy woman with grey hair at the temples sat on a chatai, counting the day’s earnings. She wore a cream-coloured salwaar kameez, with a pattern of tiny, almost invisible green leaves on it. She had her head covered with a grey chunni that did not match her clothes. In her ears she wore big, round, plain gold rings. They were the sort that every woman of her age and background wore. In fact, she had worn them for so long that now the pierced holes in her ears had become vertical slits.
She was a very efficient woman. Into a life in which chaos and pain had been thrown so haphazardly and suddenly, she tried to bring order by counting money, by buying same-sized onions at the wholesale vegetable market, and by keeping the quiet, laughterless house spick and span. Yes, she liked everything to be in order. At times, Lakhan got very tired of her relentless efficiency.
Lakhan sat on a low, wooden stool nearby, writing up accounts in a thick ledger. The room was sparsely furnished. A table, a few low stools and a divan covered with an embroidered blue bedspread. There was a picture of a benign looking, white-bearded Guru Nanak on one wall. On the opposite wall were two blown-up colour photographs of two young men, little more than teenagers. One smiled full into the camera, neatly dressed in a navy-blue turban and a blue-and-white check shirt. He was leaning against a tree, his body looked lean and lanky.
The other looked younger. He had a sullen face and his turban was a little askew as if he had just recently learnt to tie it. Both the pictures were framed and garlanded with fresh marigold flowers.
The old couple was surprised and a little angry to see Ramchand burst in on them. But before they could say anything, Ramchand spoke in a rush. ‘I have come to say that I am sorry about your sons. It shouldn’t have happened,’ he said abruptly, without any preamble.
A stunned silence followed his words.
The elderly couple stared at him bewildered, and he stared back at them, looking a little mad. Perspiration had made his hair stick together in damp little bunches and his eyes were full of tears. He should have been feeling ridiculous, but he felt strangely relieved.
&nbs
p; The silence was broken by what was first only a whimper and then rose into a full-throated wail. Lakhan’s wife had started to cry. Lakhan put his arm around her and tried to calm her down. Ramchand looked at the pictures again and rage welled up in him. He cringed. What constant injustice! What a warped way of living! How wrong it all was! He felt reckless, strong enough to do anything, fight anyone for justice, for truth.
‘I didn’t come here to upset you,’ he said, with a note of urgency in his voice that they did not understand. ‘Just don’t worry, I will do something. These things can’t just go on happening. Everything will change one day.’ And his voice sounded convincing to his ears. ‘I will do something,’ he said again. Lakhan’s wife calmed down a little, though she continued to cry quietly for the remaining part of Ramchand’s visit. Lakhan and his wife did not say much. They looked at him sadly, with tired eyes. Lakhan’s wife got up after a while, drying her eyes with one end of her chunni and came back with a glass of milk for Ramchand. Meanwhile, Lakhan Singh and Ramchand sat together in silence. Ramchand finished the glass of milk, and then left after a while, still in the same wild-eyed state in which he had arrived.
Lakhan and his wife sat in a perplexed silence for a while after he left. Then, Lakhan sighed and started working at his accounts again. But his wife couldn’t go back to counting the money. She sat still for the rest of the evening, with her hands folded in her lap, doing nothing.
*
When a badly shaken Chander had managed to salvage some of his things from the burnt down house, he found Kamla’s tin trunk intact. He opened it to find, among other things, two little frocks, one pink, one red and blue check, a string of cheap red glass beads that were wrapped carefully in a Chinese silk scarf, and an imported safety pin. Chander was very surprised. He had never known that Kamla had possessed any of these things. They seemed useless, he wondered why she had kept them.
8
The nightmare wouldn’t go away. It was here to stay. It was the same old him, going back to the same old room with the peeling walls, the same lanes, the same people. Yet, suddenly, everything had turned profoundly menacing. The familiar people looked malevolent. They would throw their heads back and laugh at anything. He alone was normal. Or was he? Was it he who was mad?