by Dipika Rai
‘Poisonous smoke?’ ‘Of course. You just see the drains tomorrow, filled with bodies of chickens, dogs and cats all dead from cracker-smoke asphyxiation. Wait and see, Mamta: Begumpet will go mad tonight. There will be so much smoke from the firecrackers that you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face.’
‘Can we go watch?’ ‘Yes, of course we can, and let’s ask Prem to join us too.’ ‘I wish Amma was here.’ ‘Amma, Amma, Amma, is that all you can think of? So why does she shun you? Because you have rejected the mores of society, poked a finger in the eye of her tradition. For that alone you should be lauded,’ says Eyebrows, a consummate anarchist at heart.
Mamta’s eyes fill with tears. ‘You have no idea what she did for me, Didi. She may not accept me now, but it was different . . . we were different when I was small.’
‘Mamta, there will be a time for reconciliation. Don’t beat against the tide. Your love is a flowing river and, just as determined, it will reach its ocean,’ Lokend says and puts an arm around her shoulders. More than anything, his affection confounds her; she has never been at the receiving end of unnecessary human contact. Mamta squirms, physical displays of affection in someone else’s presence always leave her feeling giddy-headed, and very, very embarrassed.
‘I am going to write to her anyway,’ she says, her face beetroot red.
Lata Bai has received the sweets, and resolved not to eat even one. But she has. She has tasted a tiny corner of milkcake and found it excruciatingly delicious. It is the same dilemma with her daughter. How she wishes to enfold Mamta in her arms, but she knows she must stay true to her word with an equal strength.
Tonight she will hear the revelry, but she will do nothing. She will sit and contemplate the night in internal silence while the whole world celebrates round her with prayers and crackers in noisy delight.
‘We’ll be back by eight for the pooja,’ shouts Mamta over her shoulder as she navigates through the gift boxes. ‘You sure you don’t want to come with us?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. Someone has to stay to tend the stupidly wounded,’ Eyebrows laughs. ‘And there will be lots of those tonight.’
Mamta and Lokend are off to the bazaar. For the first time in his life, Lokend has use for the small amount of money he kept from his inheritance. ‘It’s going to be so exciting,’ she says, clinging to his arm through the gathering throngs. The city is already shuddering with the sounds of exploding crackers even though it is still light. ‘In Gopalpur we never lit anything till after sunset.’ She has got used to the crowds and doesn’t comment on them any longer, but Lokend tightens his grip on her hand. He too is from the village, the place of open spaces, long bicycle rides and plodding bullock carts.
They sidestep on to the curb to escape the sweeping current of the crowd. There in the nook of a tree is a vendor selling bathashas and kheel, treats only available during Diwali. Lokend purchases some for her. The bathashas, fragile white discs of pure sugar, melt on her tongue, she quickly follows with a chaser of kheel, crisp puffed rice. ‘It’s all for you,’ he says, delighted by her attempts to speak through mouthfuls of food.
‘It’s so good. Kamla Masi used to make this for us, but I never had nearly so much before. Let’s take some back for Didi and Prem.’
‘Don’t forget Sneha.’ ‘Yes, and Sneha, poor thing, she won’t even get the day off from Mrs D’Souza’s.’
The crowd thins, moving towards the city square. Each street is lined with little stalls. The buying is furious. This is the last night of the Diwali mela, the shops will be gone tomorrow, whisked away as conclusively as a clean-up by a jinn.
The bhajans play on, the whole street bows to the devotional music, designed specifically to stir the conscience and alternatively settle and unsettle the soul. It is a night of ritual. The prayers are eternal, tributes to various gods and goddesses. Mamta and Lokend recognise many of the singers – beggars on other days and regulars at the dispensary.
They walk through the north street, dedicated to feminine adornment: bindis, bangles, parandis, henna patterns, saris, kohl sticks, incense, pooja paraphernalia. She buys a turquoise blue parandi. She will thread it into her plait tomorrow, so that it comes right down to her hips, and when she sits it will be as if she is sitting on her own hair.
‘Let’s go,’ she says, leading him by the arm to the outskirts, ‘let’s enjoy the crackers from here.’ And so the evening offers itself for exploration. Mamta’s little-girl energies are rekindled with the gusto that only familiar scenes from the past can achieve. Without her knowing it, her frame of reference has shifted, gone back in time. And in this incarnation, her past is a happy one.
What is life if not a series of experiences? Lokend has given Mamta a second life, because he has made it possible for her to experience her life and understand her past in a new way. It is all a matter of perspective, even something as paradigmatic as the earth looks like something else seen from a long distance away.
The singers have dived deeper into the mêlée. There will be much pick-pocketing tonight.
Oh innocent heart, oh innocent heart,
What is your desire, What is your destiny?
In this material world,
You are a lost soul,
Oh ignorant heart, oh ignorant heart,
What is your desire, what is your destiny?
‘He loved that song. Manmohan loved that song.’ For the first time since he left Gopalpur he thinks of the bandit. ‘He was a man caught in the caprice of destiny, and he made the mistake of thinking he couldn’t do anything about it . . . He was a good friend to my father.’
‘The Big House. I never dreamed . . .’ This is the first time since their union that Mamta realises just how close she is to the Big House. Suddenly she thinks she needs to be formal with him. She takes a step back into his shadow, the exploding crackers continue their cacophony.
‘No, no –’ he takes her hand and smiles ‘– the Big House is all but gone. Are you still scared of it? We aren’t in Gopalpur, you know. You are with me. What can’t you do, there are no limits . . .’
‘. . . except the ones I impose on myself,’ she completes his sentence.
‘Yes.’ He laughs out loud, enfolding her in his arms, digging his chin into her back to make her giggle.
‘So tell me about your Daku,’ she says, playful again.
‘Yes, I must. I will tell you everything.’
She rests her head on his shoulder for a brief second, looking up into the sky, spark-spangled from exploding rockets and lanterns. The sparkle is reflected in her eyes. Lokend breathes in, he knows he doesn’t have many Diwali celebrations ahead of him. He wants the woman beside him to stand on her own, to find her own life. He takes a sideways step, placing an arm’s length of distance between them. The sparkle remains in her eyes, her head stays tilted to the sky, her face catches the light, turning pink. She is supremely alive and strong.
Mamta can feel the start of a dream deep inside her – a dream of being a mother soon. Her body is bursting with fertility. But she hasn’t dared to share her news. Eyebrows abhors talk of children. She doesn’t approve of new souls being added to the burgeoning population by people who have much too little to live on themselves. But now, Mamta has run out of time, after all, how long can she conceal the pregnancy?
‘Why? Why would you want to bring a child into this world?’ Eyebrows has seen too much, her cautioning isn’t merely cynicism, but genuine concern.
‘Oh, Didi, I want it. With this man, I want it. I want to see something of him spring out of my body. When I was married, I never thought about children, perhaps because I was a child myself, but now, oh now . . .’ Eyebrows looks at Mamta, intimacy overpowering the smell of disinfectant. She looks away.
‘Think carefully, what can you give a child? Look at the times we live in.’ The women don’t have to look far. It is after hours, but there is woman knocking on the glass door with her elbow, a leper, whose bandages need retying. Uncharacte
ristically, Eyebrows shoos her away.
‘Look at that. Needs her bandages tied neatly so she can beg tomorrow. She says the do-gooders turn away from open wounds, but give generously to bandaged hands. What is the meaning in that?’
‘Didi, you ask too many questions. Just learn to leave things alone.’
‘If we all left things alone, then what . . .?’ The knocking won’t stop, the leper has started banging a stone against the pane.
‘For God’s sake,’ says Eyebrows loudly into the room, half rising from her stool, throwing her body behind her words in a single action that says: Go Away. ‘Shoo. Off with you. Tomorrow, come back tomorrow!’
‘Look at that woman, no hands, no hope, and look at me . . . filled with . . . with what? I don’t know how to describe it. It is what I used to feel when I prayed with Amma at the ruins. Oh, how I wish Amma could see me now. She would be so happy for me. So proud. I love him so much.’ Mamta’s eyes fill with tears.
‘That’s a sentimental heart if ever I saw one. Lovesick silly girl. Oh, go on, have your baby then, who am I to stop you? But don’t bring your amma into it. The way your own mother has shunned you, why, I wouldn’t treat a dog like that,’ says Eyebrows, realising too late that she should have bitten her tongue.
Mamta physically shakes the hurt off her face. ‘What shall I tell him? I hope he will be happy. I am going to have a child. I can’t believe it Didi, I am going to be a mother soon.’ In spite of all her cautioning, Eyebrows feels the beat of her own heart in sympathy with her friend’s. She hugs Mamta, who says, ‘I’m months along. I didn’t tell you, but the smell of that red medicine makes me want to throw up. Did you notice? I used to leave all the bandaging to him.’
‘What am I going to do without you two?’
‘Nothing, you won’t have to do without us. We’re not going anywhere.’ Just then, they hear the key turn in the lock and Lokend walks in holding soiled bandages. He puts them in the to-be-burned garbage pile.
‘So she managed to convince you to change her bandages?’
‘Yes, luckily I’d bought these for the dispensary –’ He holds up a bag. ‘She said she had no way . . .’
‘. . . to earn a living without clean bandages. Yes, I’ve heard it all before. She is going out begging tomorrow.’
‘We all have to find our own ways to live, right, Mamta?’ News of Lokend’s healing touch has spread throughout Begumpet. More and more come to the dispensary, not for bottled medicines, but for Lokend, the prince who gave up his kingdom to come here to help the destitute, sick and dying. Even so, Eyebrows now has a second line of defence – boiled water and vaccinations.
‘Mamta has news, has she told you?’
Without warning, Mamta becomes infinitely shy. A trickle of sweat starts to wind its way down the nape of her neck.
‘Go on, tell him.’ Eyebrows walks to the front to put away the medicines and bandages and give them privacy.
‘How are you?’ Useless talk. Wonderful useless everyday talk between husbands and wives.
‘I am well today. But tell me your news.’ He pats a space beside him. She sits. Gingerly. He pulls her close, her head rests on his chest. Her hair tickles his nose.
‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she says at last, lifting her head to look in his eyes. ‘I am going to be a mother.’ He drags her to him, holding her tight, allowing time for many thoughts to pass. She is forced to shift in his arms just to breathe. ‘You are happy, no?’
He is of this world! Oh, how he is of this world. She is glad for the ripples she has caused in him, this still pool of a man from which people have got used to slaking their thirst. ‘Tell me you are happy,’ she says urgently.
‘Yes, yes, yes! Enormously happy,’ he says, tangled in the shadows of her hair.
‘I want to go home after the birth,’ she says spontaneously. ‘To Gopalpur?’ ‘Yes, to Gopalpur. I want to tell Amma everything. I want my child to have a grandmother. I want Amma to know you . . . To meet you.’
‘Where should we stay?’ She doesn’t dare say the Big House. She’d just assumed that’s where they would go. ‘Not the Big House. It’s my brother’s, we can’t go there. We must make a life of our own,’ he explains, as if reading her mind.
‘Like the woman with the bandages.’ ‘Yes, just like that woman with no hands. Look at us – between us we have four, we will be all right.’
Her face has relaxed into gentle plumpness with the new weight of pregnancy, pushing her birthmark into her hairline.
As Mamta’s belly grows, so do the hopes and well-being of the patients at the clinic. The entire community of raggle-taggle sick women and children, who come to the dispensary more for solace than a cure, is bearing this child with her. The women find her bump irresistible, and they refuse to leave her alone, filling her ears with advice that her mother might have given her in other circumstances. ‘Wash your hair under the tap with cold water when you feel the pains. Your baby will pop right out like a mango pit,’ says a mother of twelve. ‘Drink a tender coconut every day, your baby will be white as the full moon,’ says the South Indian with bruised midnight skin. ‘Sleep on your right side, it will be a boy.’ ‘Be consistent with its inoculations. Starting within the first three days of its birth,’ says Eyebrows. After the burn victims, the battered women are the ones most delighted with her pregnancy.
Sometimes she is peeved by their consistency and their dogged faithfulness, but for the most part she is grateful for her extended family, women who come to the dispensary for medicines and bandages, but instead give generously of themselves.
Weeks before her time, Eyebrows insists she stop caring for the sick. Instead, Lokend cares for her, pressing her dimpled heavy feet and rubbing the small of her back with hot oil. She never remembered her mother being off her feet for one second before the births of any of her brothers and sisters.
Why wasn’t her mother allowed any rest? The guilt makes her grab Lokend’s hand. ‘Just relax. This is your time. Enjoy it. When the baby comes, you can get busy again,’ he says.
She cries so easily now, her tears just gush for want of reason. Pregnancy makes you soft, says Eyebrows, changes your body from sinew to weak quivering flesh, and turns all your bodily fluids into tears. That may be so in the city; in the village when did a mother have time to hope for her unborn child, let alone cry for it?
She is not afraid of the birth. There is no forewarning, no talk about this being the night, no distress or anxiety. She is in safe hands. Once her waters break she knows it’ll be soon, not because of what she’s been told, but because of what she has experienced with other births, both animal and human. Her confidence is born of participation, not learning.
The baby is born at night. A boy. Eyebrows cuts the cord, cleans the baby and wraps him in a bundle, handing him to his father. Lokend cries seeing the baby, who is no more than the size of a packet of Brooke Bond tea. Eyebrows also cries, but because she knows Mamta and her family will leave soon.
‘Manmohan, Manmohan,’ Lokend whispers, naming their son in memory of his friend. At that moment, Mamta acknowledges to herself that, ceremony aside, she is truly Lokend’s wife, and he, simply Manmohan’s father.
‘Yes, it’s a good name,’ she says. ‘Manmohan.’ Manmohan, beloved of the heart, another love word.
He pulls her up the step, his hand in hers. Manmohan sleeps happily in the crook of her arm. They settle into the back seat of the bus. She wants to see her sister and brother before she leaves Begumpet. She gets off at the stop she knows well, Lokend is accompanying her only because this is the first time she is travelling as a mother. She runs to the building, pulling her pallav over her eyes.
‘Chacha!’
The man turns, his hair considerably more grey. With great reason the corners of his mouth turn up. ‘Mamta!’ He is pleased to see her. ‘That yours?’
She nods. ‘Where is Memsahib?’ ‘It’s early yet, she must still be upstairs.’
She knows not to
talk much. ‘May I?’ She points towards the building with her thumb.
‘Of course, go on. It’s practically your house. That sister of yours is doing a good job,’ says Chacha the Taciturn, foisting more words on her than he ever has before.
She skips up the steps, a lot less agile than a year ago; the new weight has made her clumsy, she holds on to the wall, realising it is clean, and free of graffiti.
The door to the kitchen is open. Mrs D’Souza’s hand is doing the familiar twist motion alongside her right ear as she makes tea on the stove. Hindi music is filling the corridor. Mrs D’Souza is mouthing the words along with the radio’s song.
‘Memsahib.’ The music is too loud. ‘Memsahib!’
Mrs D’Souza turns her bulky frame, her buttocks moving independently of one another. The glassy film visibly vanishes from across her eyes. ‘Mamta?’ She closes the gap between her and her former servant, but stops short of taking her in her arms.
‘Didi?’ Her sister’s voice greets her from inside the house. Sneha squats on the floor, mop in hand. Her hands are too dirty to give her sister a hug. It’s Baby who makes things comfortable. Older and slower, she comes out from beneath the table, jostling a spray of blue flowers, shuffles up to Mamta and starts licking her, proceeding to Manmohan’s face.
‘See, she hasn’t forgotten you.’ The women laugh. Mamta shows off Manmohan like a prize, holding him under the arms. Baby quickly grabs Mamta’s empty lap.
‘Lovely child. Oh, Mamta, I finally had to get a new dhobi.’ The subversive complaint about Sneha’s work isn’t lost on Mamta. ‘I suppose now I must give up my dreams of having you come back to work.’
‘Where is Cynthiaji?’ ‘At work. Would you believe it? She’s taken a job in an advertising agency. She’s a changed girl. You remember how she used to talk back all the time? None of that now. No skivvies, hardly any lipstick, and she even cooks now and then.’