by Dipika Rai
Out of the gate, Mamta realises she has nowhere to go to wait for five o’clock to arrive. It’s still early, but the city is quickly adjusting to morning. The garbage dump opposite the three-storey flats is as busy as an anthill. First the humans arrive. Children all, sent out to pick through the decomposing remains of the previous day. The rubbish tip is a larder to them. The boys comb the stinking top layer, quickly eating anything they can digest, while the girls save their pickings to take home, tucking pieces of rotting vegetables and dirty paper into their chunnis. Then come the old rag pickers. They dig a little deeper, choosing their treasure from the discard of the younger masters of the heap. Sometimes there is a fight between the young and old. The young always win. They snatch the loot from weaker hands, running away much too fast for the old to catch up. After that, it’s the cows, then the goats, the dogs, the rats and finally, by the evening, when the sentient beings are done, it will be the turn of the cockroaches.
Mamta looks at the rubbish tip. Will this become her sustenance too? No, she has lived like an animal for so long, she won’t do it again. She walks back towards the khaki-dressed man. ‘This address?’
Without thinking, he scrawls something on a piece of paper, handing it to her carefully enough not to touch her lower-caste hand. She stares at the precious address, firm writing and confident slant of the letters topped by a flat line sturdy as a roof.
What is she going to do with a written address? ‘What name?’ she traces the letters with her finger.
‘Himalaya House,’ he says, without making the connection that she cannot read. There are many types in the city, the most unlikely ones can read, he has stopped wasting time on unnecessary judgements.
She is afraid to stray far, seeking and finding again the women in the morning’s waterline. Their tin and cardboard homes built on the pavement crawl with children of all ages. The smell and the sound emerging from the slum are both equally vulgar. The houses all lean to one side, tilted by the last monsoon wind. Several will collapse this monsoon season. She notices with a sense of satisfaction that the slum houses are more fragile than her hut back in the village. She enters the tiny lane which meanders senselessly through the higgledy-piggledy mess.
She cranes her neck and looks into one of the houses through a hole in a rotting wall. It isn’t just curiosity that drives her to look inside, but a belief that she belongs with these people, this strata of society that has nothing, this homogenous mass of destitution that calls the pavement home. But of course they won’t let her belong. No slum accepts intruders easily. Over-population, not disaster, is what ruins a slum. This particular one has survived seven conflagrations and twelve evictions, each time returning to life within hours. It is a tribe that is willing to cull its extras by killing them, or by sending them out to forage a living in other slums. For people like Mamta, the slum is a dangerous place to dally.
The slum dwellers may not be house proud on the outside, but on the inside their homes are filled with treasures: plastic buckets, cupboards, shelves, lights, transistors and the most coveted prize of all: televisions. She tunes in to one particular transistor going full blast. A woman’s golden voice sings to her:
‘The lamps are dying,
My eyes are tiring,
Softly, softly, take me, my love
Come to me, come to me . . .’
Softly, softly, take me, my love. The music conjures up an imaginary stage, hands grasping her shoulders. Her head resting on a yielding chest. Distracted, she admires rows of tiny cowry shells cleanly and cleverly plastered over the opening that serves as the doorway. She recognises the impulse immediately. She herself did the same, didn’t she? And her husband’s unhappy, sinister home looked the better for her decoration. Softly, softly, take me, my love.
It is such a small thing, the flick of a warning hand, but the stranger’s shooing strangles her dream. Her gullet starts to fill with tears. She is worse than dirt, more lowly than an animal. The slum dwellers would tolerate any one of the million stray city cows in their midst before they would tolerate her.
A stream of slum dwellers, marching off to work, part precisely round her like ants. She feels filthy against their spurious cleanliness. They have washed with ditch water and now appear clean and oiled, hair slicked back, and more perfumed than any bona fide shower-taker. She follows them out. The slum is not her place.
Mamta’s city education has begun.
As the morning heats up, the babies fall silent, while the young children wander off in gangs to conquer the city as beggars, newspaper sellers, petty thieves and prostitutes. She sees the little girls flirting with men almost twice their age using practised gestures learned by rote. Today might be the day they will cease to be children and finally cross over into the knowing, earning land of adults. Every once in a while they forget what they are to become and revert to their childish ways, teasing, running, and playing invented games.
The mothers and older girls load the babies on their hips to go beg at the thickening traffic jam. ‘I beg for my baby,’ they imply, ‘not for myself.’ They wear their filthiness like armour, extending their stick arms to the sky, coaxing an elusive coin from strangers’ hearts. On a good day one person in ten rolls down his car window to throw some money at them. The women dive after the coins, their drugged babies lolling to one side like dying flowers on long stems. They pick up the money and toss Mamta a stare over their shoulders. With no baby dangling off her arm, they do not consider her a genuine threat.
The smell of the city is overwhelming. It is the first thing that hits a newcomer like Mamta. It is the stale smell of unwashed humanity, the acrid smell of gasses emitted by rot and refuse, the noxious smell of poisons let loose indiscriminately to fly on the wind, but most of all, it is the smell of industry. It is this intoxicating smell of industry that keeps more people coming to the city every day, every hour, every minute, every second.
The morning is quickly going stale. All along the ditch, children, some bald and some hairy, sit in straight rows with piles of shit dropping into the drain below in full view of passers-by. Most of their parents completed their ablutions in the dark pre-dawn, before the city was fully awake, but there are always a few latecomers. Mamta doesn’t look at them, she too lifts her sari and squats, alongside the rejects of humanity. There is no room for shame in her action. Like the others, she too washes herself clean with water from the ditch, and rises, equally purposefully.
She thinks of Mrs D’Souza and her dog Baby and Kalu her benefactor. This evening will be better. Thank you, Devi, she prays for her life. Jai ho Devi, Devi jai ho.
The city is acquisitive, grabbing her bit by bit. It sneaks in through her pores, dragging her ever closer with each passing moment. There is so much food for sale at every turn: vegetables piled high enough on handcarts to obscure the seller; mounds of fruit – apples, oranges, grapes – spread out on sheets, enough to feed a whole army; sweet dough sizzling in hot oil, sugar-infused, making its way straight from the frying pan into a hungry mouth; fiery curries with dollops of wobbly yogurt dripping off the side of leaf plates; sweet frothy spiced tea scenting the air. Things she’s never seen before, things she’s never tasted, all for those who can afford to buy from the hawkers. Her saliva flows freely, and suddenly she realises she hasn’t eaten a bite since the puri bhaji.
She stands back and waits for a city person to make a purchase, looking carefully at the money offered. She buys some jalebis and stuffs them into her mouth, hardly tasting the first bites. In the village she had to eat hidden, first from her father, then from her brother, later from her husband, and finally from her stepson. Here, she has spent her own money and she can eat openly, flashing her food in anyone’s face. Her anonymity makes her bold. This is her chance to recreate herself.
For the first time in her life, her fear leaves her. Surrounded by strangers, she knows she is safer here than she could ever be at home. A few stare at her birthmark and leave her alone, but most don’t n
otice her. It is better this way, not to be noticed.
Smiling politicians, painted by the movie poster makers, line the roadside. One painter swings high in his rope basket in the nostrils of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, while another paints in his companion’s eyebrows one hair at a time.
It is the face of Lokend!
Begumpet loves Lokend Bhai and is keen on making him one of its own. Lokend looks down on the traffic, and into Mamta’s eyes. He watches her. She smiles into herself. He is still her private saint, her unintentional benefactor. She subdues her feelings with rationalisation, the most powerful one being that it is in Sahibji’s nature to help the downtrodden. That’s all. His tenderness towards her was effortless enough to have been something less than extraordinary. What impact could she have hoped to have on him, someone so outside his sphere?
Mamta lounges near a sweetshop to listen to the radio. It secretes music as delicious as the sweets glistening in the window. She eyes the barfi, precise squares of sweet milkcake, covered in layers of silver leaf and pistachios.
‘Kanakji, a kilo of laddoo and half a kilo of gulab jamun.’
Kanakji, the owner, manager, cook and salesman sits cross-legged on top of a kind of sofa throne a whole foot above her head with his wares spread out neatly in a glass case at waist level. He works fast. His arms flash over the rows and rows of sweetmeats, deftly packing rich laddoos into red boxes here, handing out gulab jamuns in leaf plates – two to a plate – there, simultaneously shouting at his little assistant with the bare feet and dirty toenails to deliver the thick sweet tea faster.
‘Kanakji, here, one plate laddoo.’
‘Two plates samosa.’
Kanakji doesn’t miss a beat, his arms are in constant motion over his round belly barely concealed under a sleeveless vest that has rolled up just under his pectoral muscles like a woman’s brassiere.
Food flies across Mamta’s line of vision and she follows it with her eyes like one of the city’s stray dogs. None of the customers seem to mind the presence of this filthy, bedraggled, obviously starving woman. To them she is invisible, nothing but a karmic blip. The radio sings on . . .
‘Oh queen of my dreams,
When will I see you?
You exhilarating creature,
When will I see you?
My life is ticking away,
When will I see you?’
As if in answer to the song, a horde of intoxicating, passionate girls fills up a bench in the sweet shop. These fascinating creatures are dressed in skivvies, with satchels on their shoulders and bindis on their foreheads, the curves of their breasts as distinct as mangoes. A short while later they are joined by boys who settle into another long bench. The girls look and sound so smart, matching the boys answer for answer, and laughing, a lilting free laugh, loud enough to be heard. How can it be that there are these types of girls, much younger than her? Their aura announces them as definitely not scaredy types, but makers of their own destinies. These girls would have made Paramjit Kaur, her bus companion, proud. Right then and there Mamta decides that she too will be mistress of her own destiny one day.
Kanakji leans over the glass counter which threatens to cut his belly into two, and throws a chapatti into the cupped hands of his assistant. ‘For the cow,’ he says.
Mamta feels a wet muzzle against her arm. Animals have always been attracted to her. She runs her fingers along its forehead. The boy looks at her and shakes his head. ‘Shoo, shoo,’ he says to the cow, simultaneously stuffing the chapatti into its mouth and smacking it on the rump. Having dispatched the cow to another part of the city, he immediately returns to his task of handing out endless cups of tea.
Bent over the counter, Kanakji sees Mamta. ‘Go on, shoo. Don’t you have anything better to do?’ The same impulse that makes Kanakji give the stray cow the chapatti drives him to chase Mamta away. A holy cow fed on chapattis will improve Kanakji’s karmic balance of payments, but meddling in some unfortunate human being’s karma could damage it equally.
This time, the shooing brings no tears. Not because Mamta is getting used to it, but because she is making a secret friend of belligerence. In time she will learn to attack adversity head-on, just like the slum dwellers.
If she wants to be mistress of her own destiny, then she must engage with the world. She gulps. ‘Time?’ she asks one of the girls whose wrist supports a large watch with a floral dial.
‘Two thirty,’ the girl replies, ice tinkling in her glass of sugarcane juice, without looking at Mamta.
Mamta holds out her hands like the beggar women at the lights. The girl shrugs her yellow-sheathed shoulders, and hands her glass to Mamta. There is an inch of juice still left in it. Mamta gulps the juice. She is startled; the ice is violently cold, it rolls inside her mouth like a tamarind sweet, but without taste. It is glorious, the most wonderful untasting thing she’s ever eaten.
The assistant elbows her out of the store, snatching the glass out of her hands. ‘Not allowed,’ he says to the girl with the mango breasts, ‘not allowed to give glass to beggars, they are Sudra, dirty,’ he says, lobbing it on to the road to shatter. ‘You must pay for the glass,’ he says, looking from Mamta to the girl.
Mamta runs, swallowing the lump of ice. The bits of broken glass poke their way into her husband’s rubber slippers.
She lingers outside Himalaya House, presenting herself to the khaki-clad watchman at precisely five o’clock. ‘Third floor. And mind you don’t touch the handrail,’ he says without looking at her.
She enters the stairwell, keeping her hands stiffly by her side to avoid polluting both the wall and handrail.
‘Ah! Shy and Honest Mamta, so you came.’ Mrs D’Souza tiptoes ahead of Mamta clad only in a towel. The blue lines of her mistress’s varicose veins show up and down her legs. Mamta can see Mrs D’Souza’s knees quite clearly, dimpled in three places, knocking together with every step. She averts her eyes, she has never seen ample knees before.
‘I would ask you about your previous employment, except that thief from this morning had worked in six houses before mine. All good homes, mind you. No, I have decided that I will keep an eye on you myself.’ Mrs D’Souza raises her arm to adjust the towel and place a hanky against her nose, so she can’t smell her new sweeper’s body odour. Mamta can see the swelling top of Mrs D’Souza’s right breast. She tries to concentrate on her mistress’s instructions.
‘Now listen carefully, for I will only say this once. Your job is to wash the floors. You first sweep the floors, then wipe them with the wet mop from under the kitchen sink. The floors have to be washed with phenol once a week. Then the toilets . . .’ She leads Mamta round to one bathroom and then the other, all the time holding her towel up with one hand tucked between her pendulous breasts. ‘Don’t you dare mix the toilet rags with the floor mop. You will then wash out Baby’s dish. Downstairs.’ Baby instantly recognises its name and comes bounding into the room. ‘Oh, Baby, Baby, come, come, Baby, come,’ says Mrs D’Souza, patting the surging expanse of her upper thighs, beckoning the small fluffy white dog into her arms. The towel and the hanky fall, while the dog makes no attempt to jump into its mistress’s inviting cradle. Mamta rushes to pick up the towel, she can just see a shiny green nylon triangle peeking through Mrs D’Souza’s gelatinous thighs.
The village allowed no reason for nudity. She can’t remember a time when she saw her mother naked. Breasts, yes, they were naked all the time feeding children, but thighs and knees . . . The only time you saw a woman naked was in childbirth when she was both most and least womanlike. But the men, they were born flashers, she’d seen the male apparatus often, mostly on men other than her husband. Her husband had made her shut her eyes or turn around, and that Ramu, why he’d begun stroking himself in her presence even before her marriage was fixed.
‘Turn around,’ Mrs D’Souza barks, unabashed by her accidental ninety per cent disclosure in front of Mamta, her servant, a non-person. She ties her towel back on and bend
s to pick up her yapping pet. ‘I’m glad someone still loves me,’ she says. The dog’s hair cascades over its glistening eyes. ‘Wash Baby’s dish, bathe Baby once a week and brush her hair. I will put the food in her dish. You just take her for her walk. See that she does her big business outside before bringing her back. Three hundred rupees. Okay?’ Mrs D’Souza isn’t asking for corroboration of the pay offered, but rather wants to know if Mamta has understood all of her brisk instructions.
The truth is that Mamta does not understand her new mistress’s words entirely. But she will learn, not just to understand her mistress’s language, but also to anticipate her will. Offered this opportunity of a lifetime, she’s not going to spoil it simply because of a language issue. The working class must learn quickly if they are to survive. If she stays long enough, she’ll learn English just from hearing it spoken by Mrs D’Souza on the telephone.
Mamta looks at Baby’s incredibly sharp teeth barely showing along the sides of her mouth. It’s as if the dog is surreptitiously threatening her with a not quite so concealed weapon. ‘Yes, memsahib.’
‘Then get to work. Don’t forget the order: first the floors, then bathrooms, then Baby’s food and walkies. Yesh, that’s right, Baby, you are going for a walk. You love that, don’t you? Yesh, you do, I know you do.’ Forgetting about Mamta, Mrs D’Souza’s focus is completely on her dog. Mamta stares; in the village, this much attention wasn’t even lavished on a child. Things are very different in the city!
‘Now get to work.’
It is the most beautiful house Mamta has ever seen. Mrs D’Souza fills her life and space with family photographs and fake flowers. Everywhere she looks, she sees flowers in every imaginable hue standing in perfect bloom, even more glorious than Nature herself could conjure. Sprigs of cherry blossoms in impossible blue caress a photo frame, while a bouquet of alpine spring flowers lounges insolently on the dining table. Mrs D’Souza’s collections of a lifetime are wreathed in cobwebs and streaked with old dirt, but Mamta doesn’t notice the cobwebs or the dirt. She sees only the abject beauty in each delicate bud that seems to know it will never attain maturity, and the carefully scalloped edge of every perfect bloom. Her hand, awed by such irresistible perfection, has the terrible urge to touch, darting in and out of her clothes like a snake’s tongue. It has to be reprimanded several times before it will stay still by her side. Mesmerised by the flowers, it is a while before she notices the family photos.