“Bhima,” Dinaz says, a sternness in her voice that makes the older woman pay attention. “Do you know how much you have in savings with Mummy?”
Bhima shakes her head. “Serabai always kept track,” she says. “I never asked.”
Dinaz gives a short laugh. “That’s how blindly you trusted her, huh? The woman whose home you won’t step foot in, now?”
Bhima’s heart breaks at the bitterness she hears in Dinaz’s voice. But again, she wills herself to remain silent, unable to explain, unable to console. It is better this way, she thinks. Let Dinaz walk away from here blaming me instead of Serabai. Let blood remain blood.
“In any case,” Dinaz continues briskly, “it was thirty thousand rupees. Quite a good sum.”
“Ae, Bhagwan,” Bhima and Maya breathe in unison.
Dinaz pulls out a pen and a checkbook. “Mummy was fretting yesterday about how she was going to get the money to you. She was wondering if she could trust our peon to deliver it. But she didn’t want to send such a large sum over in cash. And . . . you don’t have a bank account?”
Bhima’s thoughts are churning, but Dinaz’s last question penetrates, and the old shame rises again. “No, baby,” she says quietly. “As you know, I don’t read or write. My money was always safe with your mother.”
“But I do,” Maya interjects. Her voice is loud, with a note that Bhima doesn’t recognize—Pride? Defiance? Belligerence?
Dinaz doesn’t seem to notice. “That’s right,” she smiles. She bends down and scribbles in her checkbook, then looks directly at Maya. “Here’s what I advise,” she says. “Go to the bank and open an account. You do not want to cash this check and keep so much money at home.”
She rises from her chair and sits on her haunches in front of Bhima, surprisingly nimble given her pregnancy. She lays the check at Bhima’s feet. “I’ve made this out for forty thousand rupees, Bhima,” she says.
“But it’s only thirty . . .”
“I know. The rest is from me. To . . . thank you for . . .” But here, Dinaz stops, blinking back the tears and then roughly wiping away the errant ones rolling down her cheeks.
Flooded with a dangerous tenderness for Dinaz, Bhima is angry that Maya is here to witness this, is annoyed at the watchful way in which Maya is taking in the scene before her. Go, she wants to yell at her granddaughter. Take your morose face and leave us in peace for a moment. I have known this child sitting in front of me longer than I’ve known you. I have fed her, washed her clothes, loved her, protected her from her father’s temper and her parents’ quarrels. But Maya sits there, impassive as a mountain, and Bhima has no choice but to whisper, “Just one minute, Dinaz baby,” and scramble to her feet. She crosses the room and goes to the old trunk that houses all the important artifacts of her past. She finds what she’s looking for almost immediately, grabs it, and walks swiftly past Maya, half-afraid that her granddaughter will protest. She opens Dinaz’s hand in hers and puts the silver rattle in it, ignoring her startled, “Bhima, no. I can’t accept this.”
“Dinaz baby,” she says. “Forgive me. It is but a small gift. My husband bought this silver rattle for my firstborn. Both my children played with it. Maya, too. And now, I want your child to have it.”
“Are you sure, Bhima?” Dinaz asks.
“Hundred percent sure. I was planning on gifting it to you the day he was born.”
“But you should keep it. For when Maya . . .” Her voice trails away, as she remembers the events of the past year. Behind her, Maya glowers at both of them, but Bhima ignores her.
Dinaz’s hand closes around the rattle. “Thank you,” she whispers. “I will treasure it.”
At the door, Dinaz lingers. “If you two ever need anything . . .”
But now, Bhima is spent, and a cold, dark feeling is spreading within her. Now, she only wishes for Dinaz to be gone. She folds her hands, a gesture at once supplicatory and dismissive. “Thank you,” she says.
She pushes open the door for Dinaz, and they step outside. Bhima ignores the curious stares that the neighbors cast at the light-skinned, well-dressed woman beside her, a woman who looks as alien as an astronaut in their part of the city, who lifts the hem of her pants as she walks gingerly down the narrow, rutted streets. The older woman stands outside her hut watching Dinaz’s receding back, her eyes stinging from unshed tears, her mouth dry from unspoken words. She waits until Dinaz turns the corner, waves, and disappears from her life.
Maya turns on her as soon as she reenters the hut. “Why didn’t you tell her?” she asks immediately.
Bhima pretends to not understand the question. “Tell her what?”
“About her badmash husband. About what he did to me.”
The unexpressed anger spikes in her. “And what about what you have done to her?” she spits. “Behaving like a tramp with some poor girl’s husband?”
Maya’s jaw goes slack, as if her grandmother has punched her in the face. Then, her eyes get narrow and mean. “You are an ignorant woman,” she says. “Not even understanding why she came here.” She bends down, scoops up the check, and waves it in Bhima’s face. “They are not wanting you back, Ma-ma,” she says. “She just came here to do her acting-facting. The real reason she came? To give you this money. To buy your silence. Your sweet Dinaz baby? She’s very clever. She is knowing everything.”
“Shut your mouth,” Bhima says savagely. “And lower your voice. Any one of these drunkards around us will come in chup-chap at night and slit our throats if they know we’ve come into money.”
“It’s not the people in this basti you have to be afraid of, Ma-ma. It’s people like Dinaz and Serabai who have slit your throat.”
Bhima closes her eyes, afraid to let her granddaughter know how much her words have hurt her. But Maya is not yet done. “They treat you like a dog, no, worse than a dog. They treat you like an old newspaper, something they read and then throw in the trash box. And still you run after them, Ma-ma. Still you protect their lies and secrets, as if those secrets belong to you. And still you—” here, Maya’s voice cracks, “still you give her something that belonged to my mother, and therefore belonged to me, as if it was yours to give, as if she is yours to give to. Why, Ma-ma? Why, after all this time are they your family and not me?”
Bhima stands still, eyes closed and afraid to breathe. Maya’s words tear at her because she does not know the answer to her granddaughter’s questions. The truth is, she had not considered that the rattle belonged to Maya. She is embarrassed and is about to apologize when something strikes her and her eyes fly open. “You are not my family?” she cries. “You stupid, insolent girl. Why do you think I work in their home? To fatten my belly? You think I want to live one extra day on this wretched earth for my sake? You wicked girl. You dare say such a shameless thing to me? Everything I do, every drop of sweat I sweat is for you. So that you can go to college. So that my misfortune ends with me. And what do you do instead these past months? Sit at home like a maharani.”
Maya opens her mouth to say something, but Bhima raises her hand threateningly. “Chup,” she says. “Nothing more for you to say. That rattle I gave away? You don’t need it. Because you are not a child anymore, Maya. The only thing you need is an education.”
They stand glaring at each other, and then Bhima comes to a swift resolution, her earlier listlessness now dissipated. She reaches out and plucks the check out of the younger woman’s hand. “Go get dressed,” she commands.
Maya snickers. “Why? You taking me to the Taj Mahal hotel?”
Bhima resists the urge to smack the smugness from Maya’s face. “We are going to the bank,” she says. “You are going to help your old grandmother open a bank account. I will work ten jobs if I have to. But we are not touching this money. This money is for you to go back to college. And for your future.”
2
Her name is Parvati.
Although she doesn’t always know it.
Sometimes, in the time it takes to hiccup, t
he world goes blank and she forgets what she is called and where she is and her place in the world. It is comfortable living in that white space and not having to carry the burden of knowing her name or her history. Then, as she absently fingers the growth on her neck, the world comes into focus again and she knows—she is Parvati, the daughter of a man who sold her for the price of a cow. And in doing so, taught her what she was worth. How long ago this was she no longer remembers, and it isn’t because she can’t count, because she was one of the few women at the Old Place who could read and write. She simply chooses not to remember. At her age, time has stopped flowing in a linear fashion; rather, it ebbs and swirls, creating a whirlpool at its center that on most days swallows her whole. Her yesterdays have lost their bite; it is her todays that come bearing down with fangs and claws that she has to watch out for.
This morning, Parvati sits cross-legged in the open-air market, her daily supply of six shriveled heads of cauliflower displayed like skulls on the dirty cotton sheet in front of her. She knows that at some point during the day the same handful of customers, almost as impoverished as her, will stop and buy her inventory. Every morning she trudges to her spot on the pavement, carrying the vegetables in a filthy cloth bag that hasn’t been washed in two years. She squints at the ferocious sun, which she considers to be her own personal nemesis, spreads out the tablecloth on the sidewalk, then empties the bag so that the round heads of the cauliflowers roll onto it. She had learned many years ago to kill the envy she once felt at the sight of the beautiful produce displayed by her competitors, the gleaming tomatoes, the pearly garlic, the radiant grapefruit and oranges. She has never had the money to increase her inventory so has stopped trying. The twenty rupees a day she earns as profit—and that too, because the man who sells her the cauliflowers charges her a pittance for the produce he would otherwise throw away—covers her fee to sleep on two sheets of cardboard on the landing outside her nephew’s apartment and leaves her with a few extra notes.
If she had the energy to examine her life, Parvati would see how thin and nebulous it is—patched together with lies and pity, as if she were one of those cheap kites, built from paper and glue, and falling apart at the slightest gust of wind. The “nephew,” for instance, is not a relation at all, but the son of a woman at the Old Place, who, against all odds, still remembers Parvati’s kindness toward him when he was a boy. In exchange for fifteen rupees a day and a promise to never reveal his dead mother’s past to his wife, he rents her the space. The vegetable wholesaler, too, is a man from the old days, and lets her have the cauliflowers for cheap out of some combination of sympathy and disgust. Every day, one vendor or another feeds the old woman lunch—a banana, maybe, or a small loaf of bread—or sends a leftover piece of fruit home with her. Sometimes, if there is any money left over at the end of the month, she will treat herself to a cup of tea. And on the way to her nephew’s home each evening, she stops at a ramshackle restaurant, whose owner empties leftovers from his customers’ plates onto a newspaper and hands it to her. If she is twenty minutes late, he sets the scraps down on the sidewalk for the stray dog that lurks outside the restaurant.
This morning, even the sun cannot hold Parvati’s attention. There is a new lump growing on her body, this time at the base of her spine, a painful and inconvenient spot, and one she cannot stroke as absentmindedly as she does the one on her throat. It irritates her, the unfairness of the location. Not once in all these years, has she complained about the growth on her neck, which started as the size of a pomegranate seed decades ago, and then grew to the size of an orange. So much it took away from her—her beauty, her livelihood, even her voice, which is now raspy and harsh, giving her a perpetual sore throat from where it presses on her vocal cords. She has seen its effect on the world around her—the curl of the lip, the averting of the eyes, the occasional gag reflex when someone sees her for the first time. But she has not minded it, has even been thankful, because it was the growth that led her out from the Old Place decades ago. And here, among the querulous vegetable and fruit sellers and fishmongers, it has acted as a talisman of sorts, imbuing her with a dark power that no one wants to cross. It has protected her strip of the pavement, a much-coveted spot at the corner of two streets. Without the deformity, who would she be? An old woman, thin as a stick, with no police protection and few remaining connections in the underworld. But they steer clear of her, even the young goondas who walk around with batons, demanding payments from the other vendors in exchange for their “protection.”
“Ae, mausi,” a voice says, and she looks up reluctantly, not wanting to waste so much as a breath making idle chitchat on such a hot day. It is Rajeev, the tall, lanky man with the handlebar mustache who delivers groceries to the houses of the rich. Multiple times a day, Rajeev lets a customer fill his large wicker basket with purple brinjals and green lady’s fingers and bags of potatoes and onions, balances the basket on his head, and trots beside the shoppers as they make their way home. Parvati has heard Rajeev complain about the flights of stairs he must climb all day long, but even when he complains there’s a smile in his voice. She has always distrusted him for that reason, because a man who smiles even as he admits to the harshness of his life is foolish and not someone to respect. Also, he is one of the few people in the market who acknowledges her presence. Always, she wants to shoo him away, like a fly sitting atop her vegetables; always, he somehow gets her to exchange a few words with him.
“Hot day, mausi,” he now exclaims. He sets his basket down and then squats in front of her. “Will you take a chai?”
She eyes him suspiciously, unsure if this is a ruse to make her buy him a cup of tea. “It’s okay,” she says noncommittally.
He looks puzzled for a moment and then smiles broadly. “Arre, mausi, I’m asking if I can buy you tea.”
She turns away in embarrassment, knowing that he has read her mind. Finally, she looks at him sharply and says, “Why?”
Rajeev bows his head. When he looks up, his eyes are puzzled. There is something else in his eyes also—a flash of understanding, perhaps pity—and Parvati feels her hackles rise. Shameless man, to feel pity for her poverty. If only he knew. What gifts she has had showered upon her, what luxury she had once known. She has eaten at fancy restaurants where he would not be allowed to enter.
Before she can respond, Rajeev gets up with a grunt and walks away, leaving his basket in front of her. She starts to call out to him but sees that he’s only headed to the tea shop a few meters away. In a minute he returns with two steaming glasses of tea. Silently, he sets a glass against one of the cauliflowers. “Drink,” he says, gesturing with his hand. And when she doesn’t, he smiles cajolingly. “Arre, drink, na, mausi. It’s tea, not blood.”
While she gulps down the sugary beverage, Parvati wonders what Rajeev wants. Maybe it’s this spot. People have approached her over the years, even offered to pay her a few hundred rupees for it. But she will never yield it. It’s all she has. Without this spot, where would she spend her days? The landing where she sleeps must be vacated by six in the morning, before the other residents begin to leave for work and school. No loitering, her nephew has told her. If I get one complaint from a neighbor, bas, you will have to leave. To appease these neighbors, she sweeps the entire common area in front of their doors each morning. In exchange, they occasionally hand her a used sari, or once, a half-empty bottle of talcum powder.
Rajeev is staring at her with those big, dark eyes. He must’ve been an owl in a previous birth, Parvati thinks. She flushes, wishing he would look away. She is about to ask him what he wants from her when he speaks. “What’s wrong, mausi?” he says. “Your back is paining?”
“What’s it to you?” she snaps. She sets down the glass heavily on the stone pavement. “What is it? Business is so slow today that you’re squatting flies and watching me?”
Rajeev swallows. “Don’t take offense, mausi. I suffer from back pain, too. This job, with all the heavy lifting, is very bad on the
body. But I have a good ointment at home. I am only inquiring so I can bring some for you tomorrow.”
It occurs to Parvati that if she had had a son, he would be around Rajeev’s age. The thought is so unexpected that her eyes fill with tears. But still, suspicion lingers, fighting with the gratitude that seeps into her heart. She bites down on her lip, unsure of what to say to this man who is examining her closely, as if she is some bird from a country he is unfamiliar with.
“Your wife won’t care if you share the ointment?” she says, as much to find out if he’s married without having to ask.
Rajeev smiles appreciatively, as if he can see through her deviousness. “My wife, mausi? My wife would give her last breath to someone in need. She so kind.” He stops, looking at her worriedly. “I don’t mean to insult . . .”
She shakes her head. “No. No insult. I understand. You are lucky.”
“Mausi. You don’t know.” He lowers his voice, in order to protect his words from Reshma, the woman vendor sitting next to them who is openly eavesdropping on their conversation. “I used to be a drunkard. Bad drinking problem, mausi. But you believe or not believe, since the day my Radha come into my house, I haven’t taken one sip. Not one sip. Just like that, I gave up the moonshine.”
Despite herself, Parvati smiles. “That speaks well of you, beta,” she says, noticing with a start that she has called him son.
Rajeev doesn’t appear to have noticed. “No, mausi. Not of me. Of Radha. We are poor people. But we are having one son. And we are both working hard to make sure he finishes his schooling.” He points to the basket. “I climb hundreds of stairs a day, mausi, so that someday my son can ride in a car.”
Suddenly, she remembers something. “Have you heard of the poet Aziz?” And when he shakes his head no, Parvati recites:
The Secrets Between Us Page 2