Ma made a face but didn’t counter this. Instead, she said, ‘This is what we have to put up with, these moods. At first I thought: you put up with the kicks of the cow that gives you milk; but recently things seem to have worsened.’
Something clicked inside my head. ‘She saw Milly here today, when she came in to drop off the vegetables,’ I said.
‘Aha. That must have set her off,’ Ma said.
‘But I don’t understand why,’ I said, genuinely baffled. ‘You say it’s jealousy, but jealousy about what?’ While feeling nervous about edging close to this fraught subject, I was inwardly preparing myself to stare my father out on this one; I was too curious to let it pass.
‘I can’t quite tell the reason,’ Ma said. ‘Maybe something happened we don’t know about – they both live in the same slum, after all. Or it could be that Milly has a husband, two children … I can see how that would eat into Renu.’
‘Doesn’t she have children?’ I asked.
‘I think she has a daughter but doesn’t have much to do with her.’
‘What do you mean you “think”? You either know or you don’t.’
‘I dimly remember her saying something to me a while ago. I don’t remember her exact words but I got the impression that she was married off early, she had a daughter, the husband perhaps used to beat her, which is why she left. I don’t remember if she abandoned the daughter too when she left.’
‘This was in Medinipur?’ I was fascinated.
‘Yes. I don’t know which village.’
‘Do you think I could ask her?’
Ma looked panicked. ‘No, no, no need to do that. No need to upset her further.’
Baba said, ‘Here we go again’ and got up from the table.
‘Please, don’t go asking things to her,’ Ma said again. ‘No need to raise her to our heads, she’ll take even more liberties with her behaviour and think we’re giving her some kind of licence. Best not to become informal with servants, one must always maintain a distance with them.’
Rocks ahoy, I thought, and willed myself not to react; she did not mean it to be a bait.
The next morning Renu was back and I decided not to engage her in conversation. Usually I would compliment her on the previous night’s cooking – she never responded, but I felt that she was secretly pleased to be praised – but today I withheld any such comment. Instead, I went out to have my first look at the slum.
I crossed the road and walked down the three steps to the paved area that marked one end of the promenade. Where the paving ended, the black rocks and sea began. There was a narrow path along one end, clinging to the last of the tyre shops and tea-sellers and snack stores, on what I only now noticed was a raised wall against which the sea lapped. The path curved around behind what I saw from my parents’ living-room window as shops, trees, a tiny playing field, all bordered by this wall, which obstructed the view of the path running along it. I was on it now. It was so narrow that if two people could walk abreast on it, the one nearer the sea would be in constant danger of falling in. The water was barely inches below the lip of the wall. The path was muddy, with footprint-shaped puddles here and there. Was it submerged during high tide? I had a view of the slum spread out in front of me, on my left. It looked like the back of a huge black beast in camouflage, huddling low, perhaps dormant, lying pressed against the sea at two ends, its surface feathered with plastic on the roofs, mostly black, with an occasional flash of blue. When the breeze lifted, it seemed the beast’s feathers were being ruffled. I pressed myself flat against what I assumed were back walls of houses to allow people behind me to pass. I followed them, with some misgiving, self-conscious about how I clearly stood out as an outsider. To my great relief, people noticed me but not in any egregious way; they didn’t stare, or make comments, or even look curious or interested.
I realised that this outer path ringed around the sea-side perimeter of the slum and that even narrower alleys led off it into the interior. I took one of them. There were rooms packed on either side. I felt that if I stretched out both my arms, wingspan-style, the tips of my fingers could just about touch their exterior. Room after room after room, then another alley, easily missed because of its narrowness and the density of the living quarters. In fact you had to look hard to distinguish any passage at all threading through the houses, since it was often a practice rather than a physical thing; people made their way through the narrowest of spaces along the front, sides, backs of houses; a path was whatever people decided to tread. There were people walking, sitting, standing, doing nothing in particular, moving in and out of rooms. The interiors were so dark that I could barely make out anything, maybe a corner of a pallet, or just an expanse of floor, a section of a plastic chair. A woman was fanning a burning oven outside her front door in an effort to get the wood to catch. A small group of children ran around aimlessly; maybe they were playing a game. There was a motorbike parked outside one of the houses. How did they ever get it in here? People were now looking at me. My discomfort escalated and it was not only because of the stares. Edicts from a middle-class upbringing on looking into other people’s lives through their open doors and windows combined with a liberal sensitivity, acquired later in life, about treating the poor as anthropological fieldwork or a tourist attraction, to produce a mixture of dread, guilt and self-loathing. I turned tail.
The question that most occupied me afterwards was whether each of those rooms was the entire house and home of one family.
Of course, I didn’t tell cooking-aunty that I had seen the slum where she lived. I felt mildly depressed for the rest of the morning and when she came out of the kitchen to ask what we were planning to have for dinner, I gave a straight answer – chicken stir-fried with basil and nam pla, dry green beans with pork mince, garlic, nam pla and chillies – instead of the ‘Why, I thought you needed to be told, just once, and just before you started!’, which I could have delivered with a big grin to normalise the situation, at least to myself. I asked her if she was familiar with nam pla – she called it ‘nampa’ – and she gave a surprising answer: ‘Yes, I cook with it in that house all the time. They eat a lot of this kind of food.’
‘What house?’ I asked.
‘Oh, one of the houses I cook for over there.’ She lifted her hand above her head and pointed behind her in a vague gesture that also managed to be typically dismissive.
That evening, I took her through the process, brief and very simple, of cooking the two dishes. Half an hour later, she slid the kitchen door open, peered out and said, ‘I can’t find the nampa.’
‘Have you looked carefully?’ Ma asked. ‘It’s in that cupboard to the right of where the glasses are kept. You know it.’
‘Yes, I put it there myself. It arrived two days ago, I remember. You showed it to me.’
‘Do you remember what it looks like?’
‘Oi to, a small bottle, black cap.’
‘Are you sure it’s not there? Let me have a look.’
Ma got up and went to the kitchen. She came out after a few minutes. ‘I can’t find it. I looked everywhere it could be.’
‘It can’t have gone running away,’ I said. ‘Let me have a look.’
In the kitchen, I opened every drawer, every cupboard, looked in the overcrowded fridge, taking out every prehistoric jar of mustard, olives, kasundi, oyster sauce, marmalade, pickle from the door. It seemed that the Law of the Fridge was universal across cultures and continents: things went there to die slowly and be forgotten. But no; no nam pla in the fridge, although an unopened bottle wouldn’t have been put there in the first place. I asked the usual questions – who put away the shopping that day, was there a sort of unspoken rule about which things went where (of course there was) – and got predictable answers. I looked inside the cupboards below the worktop, the spaces where flour and potatoes and onions were stored, and in the space for the blender, spice-grinder and rolling pin, even in the cupboard for plastic bags and the drawers for Tupperware.
Nothing.
All four of us were now caught up in the search. Even Baba gave suggestions – have you looked here, or there, or what about that spot … For half an hour we were entirely consumed by finding a bottle of fish sauce; absurd and bathetic.
We gave up. I was left alone in the kitchen with cooking-aunty. I could see that everything for cooking the dishes had been prepared – the chicken diced, the garlic and chillies finely chopped, the beans cut into short lengths, the pork mince defrosted. I was contemplating whether to take an auto, go to the shop next to Mehbooob Studios and get a new bottle, when Renu said, ‘That person took it, I know.’
‘Who?’ I had no idea what she was talking about.
‘Oi je, the one who comes to clean.’ The words were accompanied by that indicating-dismissing gesture of her hands that I was beginning to get familiar with.
It took a few beats to sink in. ‘Milly? But why on earth would she do that?’ I was genuinely nonplussed.
‘I’m telling you,’ she insisted.
‘But why?’
‘Because she’s like that.’
‘Like what?’ I was annoyed. I wasn’t going to let this go.
‘I’m telling you,’ she repeated.
‘And I’m asking you what use she would have with it? Do you know if she’s going to use it to cook? Why take something like that?’
‘No, not to cook. She took it just like that. She’ll look at it, show it to people. She’s like that, I’m telling you.’
I said, ‘I don’t think so’, trying not to let my anger inflect my words, tone or expression in any way. ‘This does not sound convincing to me.’
‘I’m telling you—’ she began again, but I cut her short.
‘Use soya sauce instead,’ I said curtly and left the kitchen.
In the living room my mother asked if we had found it. I said no, put a firm lid on what was bothering me and proceeded with the usual chit-chat and drinking. I didn’t want to talk about it in front of my father at all, so I waited until we had finished eating and he had gone to bed, then asked Ma to come to my room.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘Renu thinks Milly stole the nam pla. I was a bit flabbergasted. I don’t believe her at all but I can’t work out what’s going on.’
Ma was baffled too. ‘She said that to you? Did you ask her why she thought so? I mean, what an odd thing to steal.’
‘Or: what an odd thing to accuse someone of stealing.’
‘Yes, yes, that’s what I meant.’
‘What’s going on, do you think?’ I asked.
‘I have no idea. Unless she dislikes Milly so much that she’s trying to sow seeds of suspicion …’
‘So it could be possible that Renu hid the nam pla in order to blame Milly?’
Ma was nodding her head slowly as she fit the pieces together. ‘My god, how low of her. She was accused of stealing in an earlier job, so she is using that now against someone else … It’s all beginning to make sense.’
‘What do you mean: stealing in an earlier job? What job? Stealing what? Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘Again, this is something I heard, I don’t remember from whom. Or I pieced it together. Or maybe when Renu told me that she used to cook for the ONGC homes near Reclamation – you’ve seen those ugly buildings many, many times, I’m sure – and that they fired her, I made up the bit about false charges of stealing.’
‘What false charges of stealing? Did you just pluck it out of the air?’ My confusion was increasing rapidly.
‘I think she was accused of stealing and was thrown out of one of those homes where she used to cook. But she’s very trustworthy. I have left money and jewellery unlocked in the house several times while she has been here on her own. She has even had the keys to the flat, when we were out of the city. I would trust her with everything. I’m certain that those charges of stealing were trumped-up … You know how it is here: anything goes missing, the first person the blame falls on is the servant, who may well be innocent.’
Oh yes, I knew all about that. I remember watching, when I was a child in Calcutta, one such servant, accused of stealing money and jewellery from the family for whom he worked, being beaten in public as a way of extracting a confession. I had run to join the watching throng. It wasn’t only the men of the accusing family who had a go at him; neighbours, residents of the street, distant friends, even strangers joined in. News that a thief had been caught and was being beaten brought a huge crowd to watch the entertainment; the punishments got more extreme, more cruel. At one point I remember someone lifting him by his ankles and swinging him around in a circle, his head so close, during each revolution, to a pile of jagged, broken bricks that it repeatedly hit that mound, tearing open his forehead and the back of his head. He shrieked every time the collision happened, and I saw blood on his face.
I could no longer recall what I felt as a child witnessing this: thrill? Sympathy? Pity? Outrage? The man was howling, ‘Babu, I didn’t steal anything, I swear on my children’s lives, I haven’t touched a thing, please let me go, I beg you, please.’ What I did remember very clearly was my mother turning up and saying to the family in question that she had come to protest against their barbaric behaviour. And I remembered the reaction: the woman leading the accusation and chivvying on the beating and the cheerleading had rounded on Ma, jeered at her and said, ‘If you had had your own stuff stolen, would you have come here to preach? Keep your high-mindedness to yourself.’ Then she had turned round and tried to do some rabble-rousing against my mother. Ma had caught hold of my hand and dragged me away. I could still hear the vulgar Bengali equivalents of the taunts ‘Goody-two-shoes’, ‘Holier-than-thou’, which were thrown at our retreating backs.
I briefly toyed with the idea of first finding out in which flats in the ONGC buildings cooking-aunty had worked, then enquiring about the episode at each of them, but gave up on the idea as a foolish one.
The following evening, halfway through her cooking, Renu poked her head out of the kitchen and announced, ‘The nampa bottle is back.’
My mother looked at the floor; I got up to go to the kitchen, largely to avoid meeting Ma’s eyes.
Renu pounced the moment I entered: ‘See, I told you, she’s brought it back, I told you, she took it, did her thing with it and now she’s returned it. I told you.’
That high-pitched voice, grating my nerves raw; I felt the pop of an ache beginning behind my right eye. I didn’t know what to say. The bottle stood on the counter. It was unopened.
I forced myself to ask, ‘Where did you find it?’
‘In the cupboard, where it was supposed to be. She brought it back this morning, when she came to clean, and slipped it in there. I know how she works.’
I had had no reason to open that particular cupboard all day, so I couldn’t disprove her. Besides, my embarrassment was so acute that I made some kind of non-committal sound and left the kitchen.
The food at dinner that evening was perfect.
In my remaining couple of weeks in Bombay, I increasingly engaged Renu in conversation; in the mornings, especially, because often my parents would be out, but also in the interstices of giving her instructions in the evenings.
‘Find a job for me in your country,’ she would say, only half-joking.
I would say, ‘There are no private cooks where I live. Only restaurants have cooks.’
‘How do you eat, if you don’t have someone to cook?’
‘We make our own food.’
‘Huh, how is that possible?’
‘We learn how to cook. Everyone there knows how to cook at least a few things. Then there are shops where you can buy ready-made meals. You bring them home and heat them up.’
That silenced her. Then she came back with a shy question: ‘They are as good as aunt’s’ – referring to herself, of course – ‘cooking?’
I didn’t answer this point. Instead I said, ‘Besides, where will you live?’
‘Why, don’t you have ro
om in your place?’
The thought of explaining immigration, labour, living, houses, wages, class occurred to me for an instant; I felt defeated almost immediately.
She got in through that tiny gap: ‘I can sleep in the kitchen.’
Before I could find a white lie in lieu of an explanation, something emollient, I burst out with ‘That’s not possible.’ Ashamed, I retreated to the living room, worrying that I had hurt her feelings.
Another time: ‘Will you take a dal tonight?’
I said, ‘No, no need, there’s a lot of food already, I don’t want to upset my stomach.’
‘I am your aunt, this aunt’s food will never cause an upset stomach.’
Over those weeks, she told me she came from Medinipur, from a family of rice farmers. They owned the land they cultivated, so they were not poor, or certainly not the kind of poor one associated with the term ‘Indian farmer’.
‘You go visit my village one day?’ she asked.
I made polite noises. She told me about her brothers and widowed mother, how the land had been divided among the three children after their father died. Her brothers cultivated it now.
‘Did you not get your share of the land?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I did, but I sold it to my brothers. How could I cultivate it myself?’
‘You didn’t marry?’
Her face shut down. ‘Oh, a long time ago.’ The dismissive gesture again, without any of its usual complements. ‘I’ve kept a bit of land to build my house after I stop working and leave Bombay.’
‘Great. You know when? And you’ll go back to your village? Why not stay in the city?’
‘Naaaah, this is not our country. I’ll go back when I have saved enough money to build a house. My own house.’
So she had savings. I didn’t know why it surprised – and gladdened – me. I had no idea what her outgoings were, but if she worked in six homes, earning anything between four to six thousand rupees a month at each, her income wasn’t insubstantial. Was that why she lived in a slum, so that she was saved from the lion’s share of her earnings being devoured in Bombay rent, one of the steepest in the world? I found myself strangely invested in this aspect of her life, willing her to work longer, in more homes, to live frugally, so that she could save more, to the extent that I caught myself clenching my fists and my jaws, imagining a speeding up of her efforts and a commensurate escalation of the figure in her bank account. And I thought about what it must be for her to experience the kind of working life that she had, every day the same, yet each slightly different, all her actions repetitive, yet sometimes with a minuscule possibility of uniqueness.
A State of Freedom Page 6