by Dipika Rai
‘No, no, you don’t pay, it’s free.’
‘Huh.’ Nothing is free.
He makes her stay hidden behind a red postbox till he manages to get them a motor rickshaw; the driver wouldn’t have stopped for a bleeding woman. They jump in.
‘No, no, out. I’m not taking her.’
Kalu hands him an extra five-rupee note. The motor rickshaw driver quickly grabs it. Committed, he says, ‘Don’t make a mess. Here, take this –’ and he hands Kalu a piece of newspaper. Mamta’s teeth chatter as she bounces on the newspaper, clutching the piping round the edge of the plastic seat cover, refusing to lean back for comfort. Her hands, supported by arms straight as poplars, tucked between her thighs, have wrung her pallav into so many creases that the cloth has left welts on her bleeding knuckles. This is her first time in a motor rickshaw.
The driver weaves through traffic guiding the contraption with the horn as much as with the steering wheel. She closes her eyes as her motor rickshaw takes a public bus head-on, unaware that it is a game, and that both vehicles know the rules. The lumbering mechanical behemoth has right of way, regardless of signalling policeman or colour of traffic light, but equally, the motor rickshaw has every right to flex its muscle, moving out of harm’s way at the last possible second.
Kalu drops her at the dispensary, in a line of women, studded with a few screaming babies and fewer token men. The babies surprise her. In Gopalpur there was no time or medicine to get the babies well. She can see the neat rows of bandages and a cupboard full of awe-inspiring medicine bottles behind the far counter.
Kalu nods and backs out of the dispensary. He doesn’t have the time to sit and wait with her. Her number will come up after three hours.
‘Hello, Kumari, you’re back again! So which piece of furniture did you walk into today?’
‘Furniture no. I fell off the cycle.’
‘Fell off the cycle today. Why, that’s a new one. When did you get a cycle? We have to stop giving you medicines, that’s when you will learn. What is it with you lot? You work. You give him your money. He drinks it away. He beats you. You turn up here with bruises. The day you don’t show up, I’ll know you are dead.’ Kumari swallows the woman’s words.
‘Put your money in the Post Office Saving Plan while you still can. Take one of those forms.’
The forms hang, poked through by a thread, nailed to the wall. Mamta notices that the woman doesn’t lean forward to pull one away.
‘We should put a police case on the husbands of the lot of you. But what would that serve? Huh! Tell me, what end would that serve? You’d still go back to them and produce your babies.’
‘What can we do? My husband is a Sudra, he exhumes cemeteries for a living. We make a living from the dead, and that too from corpses of Muslim people. He has to work at night. They beat him if they catch him. We are worse than scum.’
‘So how many children has this scum given you?’
‘Eight.’
‘And another one in your belly. What will you have to feed them? They aren’t goats or camels, able to suck nectar out of a dry stick, they will eventually need food and jobs.’
‘They are God’s gift. Who will burn our bodies when we die? Who will look after us in our old age? We Hindus have to have male children.’
Why male children? A distant memory of caring words lifts its comely head: it may be a man’s country, Lata Bai, but you will get joy only from the girls. Should she tell them?
The tin bench is so comfortable that Mamta falls into a deep sleep.
‘Next!’
Someone pokes her in an aching rib.
She knows to wake immediately. Stands right to attention, instantly alert, and runs to the counter.
‘Name? Father’s name? Date of Birth? Village? Don’t know. That’s okay. Half of you don’t know where you’ve come from, let alone where you’re going. And who hit you? Don’t know. Where does it hurt? Don’t know.’ The woman answers her own rapid-fire questions with equally speedy answers learned over years of interviewing the battered. She adjusts the spectacles on her nose. Her eyebrows join together in the middle of her forehead in one straight line. Mamta has the urge to reach out and touch the stationary caterpillar.
‘So did you also fall off a cycle?’ asks Eyebrows.
‘Huh?’
‘Fall off a cycle. Did you also?’
‘No.’
‘No? What was it then?’
‘No, I don’t mean no, I mean yes. Yes.’ Suddenly she doesn’t have the will or energy to recount her story. She just wants her treatment and then to get out.
‘Yes, you fell off a cycle. Very good.’ She immediately adds, ‘I’m telling you, leave him before it’s too late. In the back. I will bandage you and give you something for the swelling.’
Mamta stays fixed to the counter, holding on with the tips of her swollen fingers.
‘New, right? Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay. Here, we don’t charge. Come to the back,’ the woman repeats without a trace of softness or sentimentality. Her voice wraps round Mamta like a scratchy blanket of the worst kind of wool. Uncomfortable but welcome, it pushes her further into the dispensary. The woman’s conversation pursues her like a snapping dog. ‘They think I was born yesterday. “We can’t do this. We can’t do that. This is impossible. That is impossible.” Anything is possible, I tell you, anything! I too came from the village, you hear? Anything is possible if you want to change,’ says Eyebrows with the arrogance of someone who knows how the world works.
Her screed doesn’t sound at all awful to Mamta. Wife beatings, who can escape them? At least in the city women work for money and they have the Post Office Saving Plan. In Gopalpur, they carry water from four miles away and there is only the Big House that lends money for their dowries.
‘She sounds bad, but she isn’t. Come, let me bandage you,’ says a woman in a silk sari with an oversized bindi on her forehead and a mangalsutra, the black beads of marriage, round her neck. ‘Don’t be afraid. I am a volunteer, I work Monday mornings.’
The volunteer, Mrs Seth, cleans her wound. The disinfectant is astringent and smarts like the bites of fire ants. The wound reveals itself, a straight clean slice that requires stitches. The volunteer runs to the front: only Eyebrows can stitch wounds. Mamta passes from Mrs Seth’s hands into Eyebrows’, who puts in three stitches on her forehead, then passes her back to Mrs Seth again. Mrs Seth bandages her forehead and finally places a single plaster across her eyelid.
Eyebrows confronts Mamta again. ‘Take these. One every four hours. Don’t miss a single dose. I give medicines here every day, that’s only one half of the story, the other half is the taking part. Some of these women are so stupid, they feed their medicines to sick relatives or their babies. These pills are for you and you alone. They will make someone else sick. Every four hours, do you hear? Children?’
Mamta nods from side to side, the definite nod of the No.
‘Good. Now don’t become one of them. Producing child after child and old at thirty,’ she says as Mamta turns to leave.
Minutes out of the dispensary, she takes off her bandage and rolls it carefully into a ball: she’ll keep it for tying her bedroll. Pulling her hair over her stitches she then attacks the plaster, ripping it off, taking a few eyelashes with it and making her cut bleed again. The sticky bit isn’t sticky enough to be useful any more. She throws it into the gutter, and looks at the bus number that the volunteer inked into her hand. She has learned to climb into any bus, fast or slow, crowded or overcrowded.
Her bus arrives carrying its own message: a family of four is painted on its side, an advertisement for family planning. Instead of stopping, it speeds up at the bus stop, taking its model-sized family with it. She leaps on to the next bus, desperately throwing herself towards the stairs as a champion swimmer might launch himself off the starting block into water. This is the only way to get on a bus that would be overcrowded even if three-quarters of the people were taken off it. No on
e takes any notice of her, with her swollen eye and droplets of blood strung down her blouse. She wraps her sari round her tightly, even then, she can feel her neighbour’s thighs seeking the sensual warmth of her hips. She looks up to see an oily face filled with acne, a stiff hairdo and loose limbs. He smiles showing her his broken teeth. She shows him her bloodstains in return. It is only then that he starts to avoid her rigorously, gyrating through the thick crowd friskily enough to make breathing difficult, moving closer to the next woman, who shouts at him, ‘Keep your distance!’ and elbows him in the ribs.
She won’t give up washing the sheets and towels. She will just find another place to do it. She’s paid off those who beat her that morning. They won’t return.
Mamta lets herself in with the house key. Slowly turning it in the lock till she hears the familiar and satisfying click. Mrs D’Souza had to give it to her months ago, when she was feeling so unwell that she couldn’t get out of bed. She hadn’t taken the key back when she got better, instead she’d kept an eye on Mamta for months, testing her, hiding behind the curtain watching every move she made after she entered the house. So months later, passing each and every one of Mrs D’Souza’s tests, Mamta still has the key. Unknown to her, Mrs D’Souza still conducts surprise checks, hiding behind the curtain, sometimes tempted to shout boo at her servant, but instead she watches Mamta silently as she diligently cleans and cleans, only coming out of hiding when she hears the door click behind her sweeper.
Carefree laughter, light as a smell, propels giggle-driven air her way, loud enough to enter the neighbours’ flats uninvited, un requited. She advances with caution. Then she sees them, lounging in Cynthia’s plastic-infested room. Entwined. Privy to something so illicit, her energies are immediately distracted by useless things. She sees the mesmerising rhinestone heart dangling on Cynthia’s favourite stuffed dog, so realistic with hair falling into its eyes. She sees the crack clearly, running up Cynthia’s wall, and then down, down, down, diving behind a boy. A boy who has stayed too long. The teenagers cling to each other.
Mamta says nothing. Then the bell rings, the tweet of some untameable bird. Irony of ironies, the servant has the key, but the mistress doesn’t. ‘Cynthiaji,’ she hisses.
Needing to rescue Love, Cynthia pushes him behind the curtain. The same one Mrs D’Souza has used as her hideaway innumerable times. The teenagers squeeze their entwined fingers once again tightly enough for residual pain, quickly securing their unfinished business for a generous serving in a safer setting, and then the boy disappears out of sight.
The bell rings again. This time Mamta answers the door.
‘Hello, Ma.’ Cynthia hugs her mother, whose eyebrows shoot up into her hairline with surprise.
‘My, my, hello, my precious daughter,’ says Mrs D’Souza, with grateful surprise. ‘Here’s a hundred rupees, go get your jeans.’
‘That’s okay, Ma.’
‘Mrs Nath from downstairs wanted you to look in when you returned.’ Cynthia looks at Mamta, impressed by how easily the lie slides off her untouchable tongue.
‘Mrs Nath?’ Mrs D’Souza is incredulous. Mrs Nath is the one who throws her garbage out on the street from her back window, and yet maintains the most airs and graces in the building: drinking tea with her little finger crowned with a bright pink nail extended to the sky, and pruning the solitary rose bush on her balcony from under the lacy shade of her embroidered parasol. Mamta has seen her little black servant boy tip a bucket of kitchen slime over the sill to tumble down in a nauseating cascade. No one mentions the muck, but people are fed up with having to skirt garbage all day and afraid that one day it will land on their heads. Mrs Nath got her comeuppance last week when her late husband’s family came to visit from Haryana. They played cards all day and never flushed the toilet, and were probably the biggest contributors to the stair-well’s filth. The stink that travelled right up the staircase into Mrs D’Souza’s flat was unbearable.
‘Oh, stop jabbering away to glory, Mrs Nath said it was urgent. Must be about the garbage,’ says Cynthia eagerly.
‘No time for a cup of tea before I go?’ ‘No, definitely not,’ daughter and sweeper say together, leaving no room for argument.
‘What happened to you? Did you get hurt?’ Mrs D’Souza finally notices Mamta’s swollen eye.
‘She said it was urgent,’ Cynthia reminds her mother, thankfully freeing Mamta from explaining her wounds.
Mrs D’Souza goes to the floor below to find Mrs Nath’s door locked. The boy manages to escape upstairs and when he hears mother and daughter talking again, he leaps down the stairs three at a time, still savouring the taste of Cynthia.
‘Promise you won’t tell Mummy!’ Having witnessed their intimacy, Mamta has an illusory upper-hand over her employer’s daughter. ‘Promise me!’
Had she been just any sweeper, Cynthia would have threatened her with dismissal, instead she cajoles her like a family member.
Mamta has become indispensable since Mrs D’Souza firmly relinquished certain aspects of the household to her. ‘Promise me!’ Cynthia is about to shake her into submission and physically extract the promise she wants. Mamta stands her ground. Somehow she knows this is the turning point in their relationship. ‘Go on! Promise me!’
Mamta will never know why she said what she said next. ‘Okay, but I want you to do something for me then. I want to send money to my mother, and a letter too. Every payday I will send a letter, but ever other payday I will send money. You must write this letter for me.’ How else can she do it in this city where no one looks into your eyes?
‘Is that all? And then you won’t tell Ma about Vikram?’ ‘Yes, that’s all and I won’t tell Memsahib.’ Mamta is well aware that her bargain would not receive her employer’s approval. ‘But, you two cannot do anything bad. Promise me you won’t do anything bad.’
‘We won’t do anything bad, I promise, nothing bad.’
‘Okay then, once a week.’
‘No, twice a week. I’ll die if I don’t see him twice a week.’
‘Once a week, and you’ll sign your name on the letter.’
‘You mean send the letter as if it’s from me.’
‘Yes, exactly.’ It is a spontaneous act. She will have to pick her explanations carefully. He must not find her. The template of cruelty jumps into her vision again. This time she is not frightened, just determined. Yes, she will send money to her mother, she won’t abandon them the way Jivkant did. She knows it will be dangerous, she will have to weave truth with lies, fantasy with reality to fabricate a life in which she is not a runaway, but one of those industrious village wives who has come to the city to fend for herself and her family with the consent of her husband. There are a few of those in every village, and they are both pitied and envied, pitied because everyone knows they are not ‘true’ wives, their husbands satisfying their carnal pleasures elsewhere, and envied because they are free.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll make Amma understand it’s from me.’ Mamta isn’t sure how much she can tell this soft city girl. She is afraid to shock Cynthia, to jar her warm innocence with the cruel reality of her disastrous marriage, her operation and running away. ‘You must write it in Hindi. In Gopalpur people only understand Hindi.’ Cynthia studies in a Catholic school where Hindi is the second language.
‘Hindi? My Hindi is so bad.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘What about the money order?’
‘That will be from you also.’ It is time to tell the girl something about her past life. She knows her lie will meet with Cynthia’s envy and approval. ‘See, Cynthiaji, I came to the city to earn my own living against everyone’s wishes. Actually, if you want to know the truth, I ran away . . .’ Secure enough now in her job to let this secret go.
‘You ran away?’ She hears the predicted envy in Cynthia’s gasp. ‘Yes, I ran away. My amma had a hard time finding someone for me to marry because of my age,’ says Mamta, mixing some truth in with the lies.
; ‘Well, I won’t be married till I am good and ready, and I will make sure he won’t want me wearing saris all day. He’s going to accept me as I am. I’ll tell you this much, I am going to work in an advertising agency straight after school. Daddy’s brother has an agency and he will give me a job.’ The conversation moves to Cynthia, as it always does, but Mamta doesn’t mind. The girl’s life fascinates her. She is almost the same age as Mamta and still such a child in so many ways. Cynthia asks, ‘So why are you sending money home?’
How can she explain the reason? Mamta’s eyes shine with emotion, and it is Cynthia who looks away. ‘I want my amma to know that I am happy and safe here in the city. I don’t want her to worry about me any more.’
And thus Cynthia agrees to write Mamta’s letters for her in return for the boy being allowed in once a week, but no clothes-off business. They both agree that the door to Cynthia’s room will be left wide open. Still the lovers manage to get in enough grinding and feeling without detection.
All her letters will be about the city. But the first one, the hardest to write, will let her mother know that she is safe, living decently and earning, without telling her anything more about her life.
My Beloved Lata Bai, Namaste,
I am writing to you from Begumpet city. I have sent you one hundred and fifty rupees by money order. I will send you more whenever I can. I hope Shanti is well. I still have the lock of hair we cut from her head together. I hope Sneha is well and so are Prem and Mohit. What news of Ragini? I have a good job and a good memsahib . . .
By reading this much her mother will surely know that the letter is from her.
This place recognises no seasons and there is a lot of food to eat. It may be getting to summer, but you can still buy peas and spinach, squash and cauliflower in the shops. I am still eating apples and oranges in summer, can you imagine?
‘You are writing this to your mother?’ Cynthia chews the end of her pen.
‘Yes, she won’t believe it!’ Mamta giggles. ‘The trees over there are only producing mangoes. But here, your amma never changes her menu. Rain, cold or heat, she eats what she wants. In Gopalpur, it was spinach for months, wild mangoes for a whole season, or cauliflower all three meals.’