by Baby Halder
But she did not do as I suggested and just went away, cursing and screaming at me. Sahib then took me in and explained my tasks to me. I worked hard and everyone in the house was surprised at my work. One day the sahib asked me how I managed to squeeze in so much work in such little time and to do it so well. “Where did you learn?” he asked. So I told him that I have no problem doing domestic work because that’s what I had done since I was a child—with no mother at home, I was forced to take on all the household tasks.
So this became my routine. I would go in the morning, finish all my work by the afternoon, and come back home. One day the sahib asked me about my children and whether they went to school or not. I told him that I wanted them to study and was constantly on the lookout for something, but so much depended on having the money to send them to school. I hadn’t given up hope, though, and I hoped that I would be able to do so. Then one day he called me and said he wanted me to bring my son and daughter to him. “There’s a small school nearby, I’ll see what I can do there,” he said, “Bring the children with you in the morning, when you come, and leave them in the school. Then they can go back with you when you go.” So I began to do this, and the children started to go to school. I’d leave them there, come and work in the house, and in the afternoon, when they came back to the house, the sahib always gave them something to eat.
Now I began to think about getting some extra work because the money I was earning was not enough for all three of us. So I asked sahib if he could help me, and he said he would look out for work for me but that I should not go out looking for it myself. But in any case, I needed a new place to live, and with this in mind, I went to the neighborhood where my brother lived to see if there were any places to rent there. I managed to find a place where the rent was only five hundred rupees—the only trouble was that there was no toilet in the house. But I thought, If others can live like that, why can’t I? As usual, people had a lot of questions about me, and several of them tried to find out why I was alone, where I had come from, all the same things. Some of them were good to me, but many others said all kinds of things about me. Anyway, none of this concerned me and basically I kept myself a bit apart, waking in the morning and getting the children ready for school, after which I would lock up the house and go to work. Many people gossiped about how I would manage with only one house to work in, and to be honest, I was a bit concerned about this, too. Every day I would ask sahib if he had any news about possible work and he would say something or the other. I got the impression that he did not want me to work elsewhere. Perhaps he thought I would not be able to manage to do more than one job and if I did, my children would be neglected. Perhaps that was why one day he asked me, quite out of the blue, “Baby, how much do you spend in a month?” I was so embarrassed I did not say anything and he did not ask me again.
My routine was that I would wake in the morning and go more or less straight to work. There was no time to eat anything. At sahib’s house, I would finish all the work and then go home to cook and clean. Sahib did not say anything, but I felt that he had compassion in his heart for me and sometimes in the morning when I went to his house he would be washing the dishes or sweeping the floor. I really liked working there. They appreciated my work, and no one ever scolded me or checked up on me. In the mornings, sahib always seemed happy to see me, and although he never said anything, I always felt that he was thinking: “What has this poor woman done that she had to leave her home and live alone like this?” He was concerned that I did not suffer anymore, and I felt sometimes that he wanted to say that to me, but that he hesitated to.
One day suddenly he asked me, “Accha, Baby, tell me what you do when you go home from here.”
I said, “I cook for the children. Then I feed them and put them to sleep. In the evening, I take them out for a while and then when we come back I make them study and do their homework. Then they have to be fed again and put to bed, and then I get to sleep. In the morning, I get up and come here. That’s my daily routine.”
“So then how will you find time to do the other work you are looking for?”
“I’ll have to manage it somehow, because without doing extra work I can’t really survive.”
“Well, what if I help you out, and you don’t work anywhere else?”
I was very touched by his concern for me. I was thinking about this when he said, “What’s the matter? You have not answered my question. What are you thinking about?”
I was silent: I just could not say anything.
He said, “Look, Baby: think of me as your father, brother, mother, friend, anything. Don’t think you don’t have anyone in the world. You can tell me anything you like.” Then, after a moment, he added, “My children call me Tatush. You can also call me by that name.” So I began to call him Tatush and he was very happy. He would say, “You’re like my daughter, and you are now the daughter of this house. Don’t ever think that you don’t belong here.” And indeed, everyone treated me like I was one of the family.
TATUSH HAD THREE CHILDREN, ALL YOUNG MEN, AND I had met only one of them, the youngest. If I was working in the kitchen and he wanted tea, he would come in and make his own and never ask me to do it for him. He spoke very little—not only with me, but with everyone. One day Tatush told me that his elder son was coming: “My elder son,” he said, “meaning your older brother.” I was really happy to hear this.
A few days later I was busy at work when Tatush called out to me. “Baby?” he said, “have you moved house yet?” I said yes. “But why did you not tell me? This is not right: you should have told me.” And I thought: He’s right. I don’t know how or why I forgot, but I did. I realized that he was upset, but I could not understand how he had come to know that I had moved. Then he told me that Sunil had told him. And I was wondering how Sunil would have gotten to know, when Tatush said, “Sunil went to your old home to see you and found out that you had moved.” He had met Sunil on his way to buy milk in the morning, which is how he had heard. “If Sunil had not told me, I would not have gotten to know,” Tatush said. I felt really terrible. Then, a little later, Tatush asked: “When I called you just now, what were you doing?”
“I was dusting upstairs,” I said.
“So go and finish your work.”
I went back upstairs. In the upstairs room there were three cupboards full of books. Every time I saw them I wondered who read them. There were several books in Bengali, too, and I would sometimes dip into them. One day I was dusting in that room when Tatush came in. He saw that I was looking at a Bangla book, but he did not say anything then. The next day in the morning when I came to work and went in to give him his tea, he asked if I knew how to read and write. My heart sank and I did not know what to say so I mumbled something, pretended to laugh, and started to move away. He asked me again, “Can you read at all?”
“I won’t lie,” I said, “but what I know is like knowing nothing.”
“But have you studied at all? Up to which class?”
“Till about the sixth or seventh.” He seemed to fall into thought then and did not say anything more.
Next day when I came to work, he was smiling. Most of the time, he had a sort of half-smile on his face, and I often felt that he had no anger in his heart. He spoke slowly and gently, and always seemed to me to be like Sri Ramkrishna. Sometimes we would begin talking and would go on talking and he would tell me many things. I was standing there thinking these thoughts when he asked me, without any preamble, “So, Baby, do you remember the names of any writers you like?”
I looked at him and laughed. “Yes, there are some, like Rabindranath Tagore, Kazi Nasrul Islam, Sharatchandra, Satyendra Nath Dutt, Sukumar Rai….” I don’t know why I said these names, but Tatush put his hand on my head and looked at me in amazement. He looked as if he could not believe what he was hearing. Then he asked, “Do you like to read and write?”
I said, “Yes, I like it, but what’s the point? There’s no reading and writing for me now.”
“But why not?” he said. “Look at me, I still read. Don’t you know why all those books are there? If I can read, why can’t you?” Then he said, “Come upstairs with me for a moment.”
Upstairs he pulled a book out of the cupboard and said, “Tell me, what is this book called?”
I looked at the book and thought to myself: I can read this. But then I hesitated: What if I make a mistake and say the wrong thing? And then I told myself, So what? I’ll then say I don’t know how to read.
Tatush was watching me as these thoughts passed through my mind. “Go on,” he urged me. “Read, read something at least.” So I blurted out, “Amar Meyebela, Taslima Nasrin.” And Tatush said, “You were worried you’d make a mistake, weren’t you?”
I laughed.
He said, “Here. Take this book home and read it if you like.”
So I did. I would read a page or two every day. The people around—my neighbors—were very surprised and began to comment on my reading, but I did not really care. Every time I began to read, I found it a little difficult, but as I went on it became easier. One day Tatush asked me if I was managing to read the book I had taken. I said yes, and so he said, “I’m going to give you something that I want you to make use of. Just imagine that this is my work as well.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He pulled out a notebook and pen from his writing table and said, “Here. Write something in this notebook. If you want, you can write your life story in this. Whatever has happened in your life ever since you can remember and you became aware of yourself. Whatever you remember up to now, write it down. Try to write a little bit every day.”
I took the pen and notebook in my hand and as I began to think about what I would write, my thoughts ran away with me. Tatush said, “Why, what’s wrong? What are you thinking about?” I started. I was so absorbed in my thoughts…and then I said, “I’m wondering if I will be able to write or not.”
“Of course you will be able to write,” he said, “whyever not? Go ahead: write.” Pen and notebook in hand, I went home. I wrote two pages that day. I would write, then I would read Taslima Nasrin’s book. In the morning when I went to work, Tatush asked me if I had written anything or not, and was really happy to hear that I had. “Excellent!” he said. “Write every day: you must do that.”
Some days I would be so absorbed in my reading and writing that by the time I looked up from my books, everyone around was well into their second sleep. Sometimes they would wake to find me still at work. And in the morning someone or the other would ask me, “So, what is it that keeps you awake? Why do you read so much?” I tried to fob them off: their questions made me unhappy. I was not comfortable in my house and wanted to leave it. All the time I was hoping to be able to find another place that was better than this one. It was very inconvenient to have to share a bathroom with four other families. In the morning you had to queue up to use it. And we were not allowed to use it to shit, we had to go out into the fields where there were pigs and other animals, so it was not very easy. Boys and girls, the young and old, we all had to carry our bottles of water and go off into the fields.
Tatush had once asked me if the place I stayed in had a bathroom. He had suggested I use the bathroom upstairs in his home. So then I began to use it, and I would bathe there before going home. Sometimes when I got home late my landlady would demand to know why I was so late, and that made me very angry. I thought, What business is it of hers? I am not tied to her and she has no control over my life. I pay my rent and that is all they should be concerned about. Why then are these people so interested in what I do? After all, I so rarely went out anywhere. The moment I got home I would finish my chores and settle down to my reading and writing. The only thing I did was to occasionally go and visit a friend of mine, Savita. She was my friend from the old house I had worked in and there were times when I was late coming back from her place. This was hardly a crime, but my landlady was so nosy and interfering that even when I went to buy vegetables and provisions she would want to know where I had been. “Where do you go every day?” she would ask. “You should not go out so much.”
Would it have made a difference if my husband had been with me, I wondered? When we were together there were still questions, and being with him was no different from my being alone. And if people talked then, when he was with me, how could I hope to shut them up if I was alone with just my children? People talked about my being alone, living in a rented house, and having just the children with me. And because of this, many thought I was fair game and I faced quite a bit of harassment. Some men would make the excuse that they wanted water to drink and would push their way into my home. Or if I went somewhere with the children, they’d follow me and try to force me to talk to them. But once I got to Tatush’s home and began talking to him, I would forget all this. Tatush had some friends in Kolkata and Delhi and he had told them about my reading and writing. They took a real interest and that made me very happy.
One day when I was at home with the children, the landlord’s elder son came by. I asked him to come in and sit down and he just parked himself there, without making any move to go. He began to talk and didn’t seem to want to stop. The things he said were very embarrassing and I could not even bring myself to reply to them. Nor could I ask him to go, or even leave myself. He had sat himself down by the front door so that if I wanted to get out, I would have to brush past him. I understood very well what it was he wanted, although I had to pretend innocence. It was clear from what he said that if I wanted peace of mind, I would have to find myself another place to live. If I wanted to stay on in this house, I’d have to make sure he was happy, and I knew what that meant. I felt a tremendous sense of resignation and despair—if there was no man in the house, did that mean I would have to listen to anyone who decided he had a right over my life? I thought I would find a new home the very next day, and began to hunt again.
ONE DAY, AS I WAS COMING BACK FROM WORK, MY CHILDREN came up to me crying. They told me that our house had been broken down. I screamed, “How could this be? Who has done this?” When we got home, I saw that they had thrown everything out on the street. I sat down there with my head in my hands. What was I to do now? Where were we to go? How would I find a new place so soon, at this time of the day? The children and I sat down there and wept.
It wasn’t only my house that had been broken down. Many houses in the neighbourhood had suffered the same fate, but in each of them there was a man—a father, a husband, a brother. I had nobody. That’s why my things were still scattered all around while the other occupants had at least collected and put their things in one place, and someone or the other had headed off to look for a new place to live. There were a few people who had stayed behind—a handful of them who cared for my children and were sorry to see us in such a state. I could not stop crying, and seeing me cry, my children also began to weep. I really felt at the time that I had no one in the world to call my own, no one who could come to my help. I had two brothers who lived just across the road. They knew where I was, they also knew that all the houses in that area had been broken down—that kind of news spreads quickly. But there was not a sign of them. I thought about my mother. Had she been there, perhaps there would have been someone to care for me. How much more sorrow would I have to bear?
There was no hunting for a new house that day. We sat there until the evening, when a neighbor, Bhola-da, came. He was a Muslim and belonged to the same area as us. He knew my father and my brothers and he was very fond of my children. “How will you stay here all night alone?” he asked, sitting down next to us. We spent the night in that open, dirty place, wet with the dew falling on us, and somehow night turned into day. No one slept that night.
In the morning Bhola-da said to me, “Why don’t you talk to the sahib in the house you are working in?” He is right, I thought, Tatush had said he could give me a place to stay. But then I said to Bhola-da, “Please, why don’t you come and talk to him? I will not h
ave the courage to do so.” Bhola-da agreed: “All right. Let’s go.”
When we got to the house, he waited outside while I went in. Tatush was reading the papers. He took one look at me and said, “What is it, Baby? Why are you looking so pale and drawn? You don’t look like this normally.” I told him everything: how the bulldozers had destroyed all our homes, how the children and I had had to spend the night outside in the damp. “There’s a man I know who has come with us,” I said. “He’s waiting outside and wants to talk to you.” Tatush went outside and talked to Bhola-da.
When he came back in he asked me, “Why on earth did you not come here last night? Why did you wait till the morning? And why spend the night outside with the children? You should have come straightaway. Anyway, now tell me, when are you coming?”
“Whenever you say.”
“Right now,” Tatush said.
I agreed, and went back and brought my things in a rickshaw. I was thinking how Tatush had not hesitated even a moment to ask me to come.
When I returned, Tatush had emptied out a room on the roof of his house for me. I put my things there and went down to cook his lunch. He came up to look and then came to me and said, “You needn’t cook today if you don’t want to, there’s plenty of food downstairs.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “Your son and the others can eat that later.
“Do you think you will be able to make some hot rotis at night?” Tatush asked. “Up until now there’s been no one to cook the evening meal. I normally eat the same thing at night that you cook in the morning. But now that you are here, do you think you can give me hot food at night as well?”