‘I’ll open the door and run up the stairs. You follow me. These people will forget everything and come after us . . .’
‘And then?’ he asked.
‘This will give your, what’s her name, a chance to escape. No one will bother her in this tunic.’
Trilochan quickly explained the situation to Kirpal Kaur.
Mozel raised a frightening scream, threw open the door and rushed out, tripping over the men outside who had no time to react and made way for her. She righted herself and ran up the stairs, with Trilochan close on her heels.
Mozel was climbing the stairs blindly, still in her clogs. The men who’d been trying to break down the door ran after the two of them. Suddenly her foot slipped and she tumbled down the stairs all the way to the stone landing, her body knocking against the steps and the wrought-iron balustrade.
Trilochan rushed down the stairs only to find her lying there, blood oozing out of her nose, mouth, even her ears. The men who had stormed the door quickly gathered around. Someone asked what happened. They were looking silently at her fair-skinned, naked body covered with bruises.
Trilochan shook her arm and called out, ‘Mozel! Mozel!’
She opened her large Jewish eyes, now blood red, and smiled.
Trilochan quickly removed his turban, undid it, and spread it out over her naked body. She smiled again and winked at him. Spewing tiny red bubbles from her mouth, she said, ‘Go . . . see whether my underwear is still there . . . I mean . . .’
Trilochan got her drift, but he didn’t want to leave her. Which angered her. ‘Damn it, you’re a Sikh after all. Go and see.’
He rose and went to Kirpal Kaur’s flat. Through her dimmed eyes Mozel looked at the men gathered around her and said, ‘He’s a miyan bhai . . . so crazy that I always call him a Sikh . . .’
Meanwhile, Trilochan returned. He let her know with his eyes that Kirpal Kaur had made her escape. She sighed in relief, but more blood bubbled out of her mouth from the effort. ‘Damn it,’ she said, wiping it on her arm. Then she said to Trilochan, ‘All right, darling, bye-bye!’
He wanted to say something, but choked on his words.
Mozel pushed his turban cloth off her body. ‘Take this with you . . . this scrap of your religion,’ she said, as her arm fell limp over her plump, round breasts.
The Black Shalwar
Before moving to Delhi she had lived in Ambala Cantonment where she’d had several goras among her clients. Through them she had learned to speak a smattering of English, which she didn’t use in ordinary conversation. When her business failed to pick up in Delhi, she said to her neighbour Tamancha Jan one day, ‘This lef—very bad.’ Meaning, this is a bad life, you can’t even earn enough to make ends meet.
She’d done quite well for herself in Ambala. The cantonment goras came to her drunk. She would be done with eight or ten of them in three or four hours and make twenty to thirty rupees. They treated her much better than her own countrymen did. True, they spoke in a language Sultana couldn’t understand, but this ignorance only worked to her advantage. If they tried to bargain for a lower rate, she just shook her head uncomprehendingly and said, ‘Sahib, I don’t understand what you’re saying.’ And if they tried to get fresh with her, she broke into a round of profanities in her own language. When they gawked at her nonplussed, she’d say to them, ‘Sahib, you’re a bloody fool, a bastard . . . understand?’ She didn’t utter these words brusquely, but in a tone full of affection and geniality. The goras would laugh, and when they laughed they did look like bloody fools to her.
Here in Delhi, though, not a single gora had visited her since her arrival. She had now been here for three months, in this city of Hindustan where, she had heard, the Big Lord Sahib lived, who customarily spent his summers in Simla. So far only six people had visited her, only six—that is, two a month—and she could swear by God she had made a total of eighteen and a half rupees from them. None of them wanted to pay more than three rupees. Sultana had quoted her rate as ten rupees to five of them but, strangely, every one of them said, ‘Not more than three.’ God knows why they thought she was worth only three rupees. So when the sixth one came along, she herself said, ‘Look, I charge three rupees for each taim. I won’t accept anything less. Stay or leave.’ There was no haggling; he stayed. When they went into the other room and he started taking off his coat, Sultana said, ‘And a rupee for milk.’ He didn’t give her one rupee though; instead, he took out a shiny eight anna bit with the head of the new king from his pocket and offered it to her. She took it quietly, thinking, ‘At least it’s better than nothing.’
Eighteen and a half rupees in three months! Just the rent for her kotha, which her landlord referred to by the English word ‘flat’, was twenty a month. This flat had a toilet with an overhead chain. When the chain was pulled, water gushed out noisily and carried all the waste to an underground drain. Initially, the noise of the torrential water had scared the daylights out of her. On her first day in the flat when she had gone to the toilet, her back was hurting badly. As she was getting up from the toilet seat she grabbed the chain for support. The sight of the chain had made her think that since the flats were built especially for important people, the chains were provided for their convenience. But the instant she grabbed the chain to rise, she heard a clanking sound and suddenly water was released with such force that she shrieked, frightened out of her wits.
Khuda Bakhsh was in the other room busy with his photographic material and pouring hydroquinone into a bottle. When he heard Sultana scream, he stepped out of the room and asked her, ‘What’s the matter? Was that you screaming?’
‘Is this a toilet or what?’ she replied, her heart pounding with fright. ‘What’s this chain hanging down like the ones in a train carriage? My back was aching, so I took hold of it for support. The instant I grabbed it there was this horrible explosion . . .’
Khuda Bakhsh laughed uproariously. He explained, ‘It’s a new-style toilet. When you pull the chain, it sends the filth to an underground sewer.’
How Khuda Bakhsh and Sultana got hitched together is a long story. He hailed from Rawalpindi. After passing his Intermediate he learned to drive lorries. For four years he ran a lorry between Rawalpindi and Kashmir. In Kashmir he had an affair with a woman, whom he persuaded to abscond with him. They went to Lahore where, since he couldn’t find work, he set her up as a prostitute. This went on for two or three years until the woman ran away with another man. When Khuda Bakhsh found out that she was in Ambala, he went looking for her. There he met Sultana, who liked him, and so they decided to band together.
Her business picked up after Khuda Bakhsh got together with her. A superstitious woman, she attributed her success to Khuda Bakhsh’s presence. She took him to be someone blessed by God. This faith jacked up his stature in her eyes.
Khuda Bakhsh was a hard-working man who didn’t like to lie around and while away his time. He struck up a friendship with a photographer who took photos with a Mint camera outside the railway station. He learned photography from him and, later, took sixty rupees from Sultana and bought his own camera. Gradually he acquired a background screen, bought two chairs and equipment for developing film and set up his own business. The business boomed. Shortly thereafter he established himself in Ambala Cantonment where he photographed goras and, within a month, came to know several of them rather well. So he moved Sultana to the cantonment area too and many goras became her regular clients through him.
Sultana bought herself a pair of earrings, had eight gold bangles made, each weighing five and a half tolas, and also collected an assortment of some fifteen fine saris. The house also got some furniture.
In short, she was quite well off in Ambala Cantonment. Then, suddenly, God knows how, Khuda Bakhsh got it into his head to move to Delhi. How could she refuse? After all he was a godsend, her lucky break. She gladly agreed to go with him. In fact, she even thought her business would prosper further in such a large city where the Big Lord Sahib liv
ed and which a friend of hers had praised to high heaven. Besides, the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, for which she felt a special reverence, was also in Delhi. She quickly sold her heavier household goods and came to the city with Khuda Bakhsh, who rented this place for twenty rupees a month and both settled in.
It was a row of newly built lookalike units running along the road. The municipal committee had assigned this area of the city to prostitutes to stop them from setting up businesses all over the city. The ground floor had two shops and the upper, a pair of flats. Because all units looked alike, at first Sultana had a lot of difficulty finding her flat. This became easier when the laundry shop on the lower level put up a sign ‘Clothes Washed Here’ which she used as a landmark. And this was only one of the signs that worked as a marker for her. There were others. For instance, her friend Hira Bai, who sometimes sang on the radio, lived above the place where ‘Coal-Shop’ was inscribed in large letters. The shop announcing ‘Excellent Food for Gentlemen’ was right below Mukhtar’s flat and Anwari, another friend, lived above the small factory that made broad tapes for bed meshing. She was in the employ of its owner who needed to keep an eye on the work at night and stayed with her.
During the first month, in which she remained idle, Sultana consoled herself with the thought that a newly launched business usually didn’t pull in customers right away. But anxiety swept over her when not a single customer turned up in two months. She asked Khuda Bakhsh, ‘What do you think, Khuda Bakhsh? We’ve been here for two whole months and no one has come along. I know business is slow these days, but it can’t be so slow that no one will come our way at all.’
The matter had been weighing no less heavily on Khuda Bakhsh, but he’d kept quiet. But now that Sultana had brought it up he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it myself for some time now. The only thing that comes to mind is that people are so preoccupied with other things because of the war that they can hardly think of anything else. Or perhaps—’
His sentence was interrupted by the sound of someone coming up the stairs and their attention became fixed entirely on the sound of approaching feet. Shortly, there was a knock on the door. Khuda Bakhsh darted to open it. A man entered. This was her first customer and they settled for three rupees. Later, she had five more, that is, six in all in a month and a total of eighteen and a half rupees.
Every month, twenty alone went for the flat’s rent. Utilities were extra. Add to it all the other household expenses: food, drink, clothes, medicines. And no income. Eighteen and a half rupees in three months could hardly be called any kind of income. Sultana really became distraught with worry. The eight bangles she’d had made in Ambala were all eaten up one by one. When it was time to sell the last one she said to Khuda Bakhsh, ‘Listen to me, let’s go back to Ambala. This place is a bummer. Maybe it has something, but not for us. It hasn’t been kind to us. You were doing quite well there. Come on, let’s go back. We’ll consider our losses a sacrifice. Go, sell this bangle; meanwhile, I’ll start packing and getting everything ready. We’ll leave by the evening train.’
He took the bangle and said, ‘No, my darling, we’re not going anywhere. We’ll stay right here and make it work. You’ll see, all these bangles will come flying back to you. Have faith in God. He knows how to help. He will find a way for us!’
Sultana said nothing. The last bangle too was sold. The sight of her bare wrists saddened her. But what could she do? They had to fill their stomachs somehow.
When five months went by and her earnings remained less than even a quarter of their expenses, her anxiety mounted. Meanwhile, Khuda Bakhsh had also started to stay away from home the whole day, which was yet another source of her grief. It was true that a few of her friends lived in the neighbourhood and she could while away the time with them, but she didn’t feel comfortable hanging out with them for hours every day. Gradually she stopped visiting with them altogether. She stayed in her empty house all day long, crushing betel nut or mending her old clothes. Sometimes she went out on to the balcony, stood against the railing, and watched the moving and stationary engines in the railway yard across the street for hours.
A warehouse stretched from one corner to the other on that side of the street. To the right, huge bales and piles of different goods lay under a metal roof. To the left was an open space with innumerable intersecting railway tracks. Whenever the iron tracks flashed in the sun, Sultana’s eyes fell on her hands where the protruding blue veins looked very much like those tracks. Engines and carriages were moving all the time in the open space, this way and that, creating a veritable din with their chug-chug and clatter. On the days when Sultana woke up early in the morning and went out to the balcony, a strange sight greeted her: engines in the misty dawn spewing out thick smoke that climbed slowly towards the murky sky like plump, beefy men. Clouds of steam rose noisily from the tracks and quickly dissolved in the air. Now and then the sight of a shunted carriage left to run on its own along a track reminded her of herself: She too had been pushed out to run on her own along the track of her life. Others simply changed the switches and she kept moving forward—to God knew where; one day, when the momentum had slowly spent itself, she would come to a halt, at some place unknown to her.
She would peer for hours at the criss-crossing tracks and the engines standing or gliding along them, her mind ceaselessly assaulted by all kinds of thoughts. In Ambala Cantonment, too, her house had been close to the railway station, but she had never looked at these things in such a way there. It was different now. This network of tracks, the steam and smoke rising from them here and there—all this seemed to her like an immense brothel; a profusion of trains being pulled this way or that by big, fat engines. Sometimes the engines looked like those seths who’d visited her in Ambala from time to time. And sometimes when she saw a solitary engine passing slowly by a row of carriages, her mind conjured up the image of a man looking up at the balconies as he passed through the prostitutes’ quarters.
Sultana was sure that such thoughts would drive her mad some day, so when they started to assault her mind regularly she stopped going to the balcony.
She pleaded with Khuda Bakhsh repeatedly, ‘For God’s sake have some pity on me. Stay at home. I languish here all day like a sick person.’ But each time Khuda Bakhsh calmed her down, saying, ‘My love, I go out to earn something. God willing, our hard days will soon come to an end.’
A full five months passed but neither Sultana’s nor Khuda Bakhsh’s hard days came to an end. The month of Muharram was fast approaching. Sultana had no money to buy herself the customary black outfit. Mukhtar had a snazzy Lady Hamilton shirt with black georgette sleeves made for herself and, to go with it, she already had a black satin shalwar which glistened like kajal. Anwari had bought a fine georgette sari. She’d told Sultana that she would wear it over a white bosky petticoat because this was all the rage. She had also bought dainty sandals of black velvet to match her sari. When Sultana saw all this finery the thought that she had no means to buy such clothes to celebrate Muharram deeply saddened her.
She returned home feeling despondent. It was as though a tumour had sprouted inside her. The house was empty. Khuda Bakhsh was out as usual. She stretched out on the dhurrie and put a bolster under her head. She lay there for quite a while, until her neck began to feel stiff because of the height of the bolster. She got up and went out on to the balcony to expel her agonizing thoughts.
She saw several carriages standing on the tracks but not a single engine. It was evening. The street had been hosed down to keep the dust from rising. Men who furtively glanced at the balconies and then quietly headed home had begun to appear in the bazaar. One of them looked up at Sultana. She smiled at him but quickly forgot about him because an engine had suddenly materialized on the tracks across from her. She looked at it intently and the idea that the engine too was wearing black slowly formed in her mind. To rid herself of this strange thought she turned her gaze to the street and saw the same man who had stared at her lu
stily standing by an oxcart. She beckoned to him. He looked around him and then, with a subtle gesture, asked her the way to her flat. She let him know. The man waited a little as if thinking and then briskly came up the stairs.
Sultana seated him on the dhurrie. To start the conversation she asked, ‘Why were you afraid to come up?’
‘What makes you think I was afraid?’ he said, smiling. ‘What was there to be afraid of?’
‘Because you hesitated, took some time to think before coming up.’
The man smiled again and said, ‘You’re mistaken. Actually, I was looking at the flat above yours. A woman there was sticking her tongue out at a man. I found it amusing. When the balcony lit up with a green light, I stayed on a bit longer. I like green light. It’s very soothing to the eyes.’ He let his gaze wander all over the room and then got up.
‘You’re leaving?’ Sultana asked.
‘No. I want to look at your house. Come on, show me all the rooms.’
One by one she showed him the three rooms. He checked them out without saying a word. When they returned to the room where they had been sitting earlier, he said, ‘My name is Shankar.’
For the first time she looked at the man closely. He was of medium height and had rather ordinary features, except for unusually bright, clear eyes that occasionally gleamed with a strange brilliance. His body was firm and compact, and his hair was greying around the temples. He had on grey woollen pants and a white shirt with an upturned collar.
Shankar sat on the dhurrie as though Sultana, not he, was the client. This annoyed her a bit, so she asked, ‘Yes . . . what can I do for you?’
Now he lay down and said, ‘What can you do for me? Rather, what can I do for you? After all you’re the one who summoned me.’
When Sultana didn’t reply, he sat up again. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘All right, now listen to me. Whatever it is that you were thinking is wrong. I’m not one of those who come up here, pay and leave. I have my fee too, like doctors. Whenever I’m sent for, I expect to be paid.’
My Name Is Radha Page 12