Milly countered meekly, ‘No, it was nothing like that … We haven’t seen each other for so long, she was asking me about my life, and telling me about hers.’
‘Did she say anything about police informers?’
‘What?’
‘If you were seen chatting to her in the forests today, the police would be after you very soon and they would keep harassing you.’
‘How would the police see? Soni said that they are so afraid of the Party that they dare not step out of their new buildings.’
‘No, not the police, but someone from the village might have seen the two of you and informed them.’
Milly was confused. ‘But … but the villagers are on the side of the Party people, I thought. You told me so. So did Soni.’
‘It’s too complicated. The villagers are caught between the police and the Party. They play both. It’s a risky game but they – we – have to survive too, na? If we are seen to be permanently for one side, without any change, then we’ll suffer when the other side has all the power. Do you see?’
Milly felt dizzy.
‘Don’t think about it,’ he added, as if in consolation. ‘It’s good that you’re getting out soon. Good for you and good for us. Bad times are coming.’
Something in his voice discouraged Milly from prying. In less than a week’s time she left for a new world and a new life in Mumbai.
8: Imprisoned
Milly’s first train journey. To get to Ranchi, from where she would catch the Hatia Nagpur Special to Mumbai, there was a series of bus journeys: anything between an hour to two hours from her village to Manika, then over an hour’s wait for another bus, which took three and a half hours to get to Hatia station in Ranchi. She had a send-off party of one: Budhuwa. They were joined by Sabina and the two girls. They had all set out at five in the morning to join the crowd for the unreserved general compartment early.
It seemed to Milly that uncountable numbers of people were waiting to board. She had a ticket but how was she ever going to find a place? Yet it was not this particular anxiety, or the seethe of people, that was at the forefront of her mind. It was the sight of Budhuwa trying to jostle, and bring tea, holding three hot glasses in one hand, needing to go back for more, that broke her anew. She had to hide her face, but not before Sabina had taken note of the welling eyes and the quivering mouth hastily covered with the dupatta.
‘No need to be afraid,’ she said. ‘You’re going to a better life. You’ll be able to send money back home regularly, quite a lot of money.’
Budhuwa’s face was intense with effort. He sweated easily now, Milly noticed. Was it because small things were more laborious for him to execute? At the same time his face had become more and more impassive, withdrawn, she felt, as if in some kind of protective measure against the contempt or pity instantly visible on the face of the world when it encountered a man with a missing limb.
The face got tighter and tighter as her departure time approached; some mechanism inside him, connected to the skin of his face, was being screwed slowly and surely. The chaos and density of people on the platform and even inside the narrow corridor of the compartment were smothering; and dangerous, she was sure – any minute now someone could be crushed, or trampled underfoot, or dragged by the more able, the stronger, and hurled away and dashed against something like a thin clay pot. But the fears were not for herself, they were for Budhuwa – how would he, with only one hand, be able to secure a firm standing point at her window, watching her as the train pulled out? Would he get pushed on to the tracks? How would he be able to withstand the wave of people and prevent himself from being swept away, pushed under the wheels?
In the end it was she who couldn’t get to the window because so many of the passengers were pressed against the metal rods, saying goodbye to the people who had come to see them off, that you could hardly tell they were windows – the blocking out of any chink of outside light was total.
The train started to move with a giant judder and a high-pitched creak; an enormous sleeping beast waking up. Was Budhuwa running on the platform, trying to keep pace with her moving window in the hope of catching a glimpse of her face? Was he going to collide with someone and fall as he ran with dozens, scores of others? She was seized with such a desire to run out and throw herself on to the platform from the slowly inching-forward train that she put her hand to her mouth and bit the fleshy bit at the base on the inside as hard as she could bear, and then a little bit more. A woman sitting opposite her was unknotting a bundle which, it was revealed, contained stacks of rotis. Later, Milly thought it was just as well that she hadn’t caught a glimpse of her brother’s face on the platform – how would she ever have coped with the sight of that tense impassivity, that skin wet with sweat, that mouth slightly open with a mild breathlessness?
In the foetid general compartment for women, with people packed in like puffed rice in a sack, and some staking out their sliver of sleeping space on the floor – the bunks had long been taken – by stretching themselves out or spreading a bit of cloth, Milly was forced into companionship with the two other girls and with Sabina. After the first six or eight hours, it didn’t feel strenuous, instead companionable, even welcome. How would she have survived this long journey, pressed on all sides by strangers, without the help of Sabina? Sabina was doughty, street-smart, a seasoned traveller – she knew at which stations the train stopped for half an hour; she knew to get out of the train and buy tea and poori-aloo and samosa; she led the girls to the ladies’ toilet in the station. Without her, Milly would have been lost; or worse, if it was discovered that a young woman was travelling alone.
When she got her turn at the window, she saw, speeding past on the other side of the iron bars, a brick factory with piles of bright red-brown bricks stacked around it like unfinished walls and tall, thin chimneys spewing out blue-white plumes of smoke; scrub; endless stretches of fields and dry earth; a tin shed in the middle of immense empty land; deserted temples, some, it seemed, no bigger than a doll’s house; a scarecrow, arms akimbo, its figure tilted to one side, the rags covering it flapping in the hot breeze … there was too much place in the world and it made her afraid.
At one major station one of the girls asked, ‘Where have we stopped?’
Milly looked out of the window, peered a bit and said, ‘Bilaspur Junction.’
‘How do you know?’
‘The name of the station is written on that yellow board.’
The girl turned to her with a changed expression. ‘You know how to read?’
Milly looked down and didn’t answer.
The girl persisted. ‘How come you’re coming with us to work as a servant if you can read?’
Within minutes, the other girl knew this amazing piece of information. Milly refrained from telling them that she could read the names of the stations not only in Hindi but also in English.
Huddled on the floor at night, pressed tight between the bodies of two girls, she was lulled into a kind of hypnosis by the regular jhikki-jhikki-jhik-jhikki-jhik racket of the wheels, right under the floor. Right under her! Soon, she thought they were saying something, a mantra, unvaryingly repeated. They caught a half-line from a snatch of song inside her head and fished it out, set it to their relentless music and made it their own. Now the wheels only chanted those truncated song lyrics until she fell asleep. Or maybe it was the gentle rock-and-sway motion of the carriage that brought on sleep, for she kept waking up whenever the train halted at a station for any length of time.
There was the spontaneous camaraderie of their fellow travellers: the Bihari woman sharing her last littis with strangers; the elderly Vaishnav woman who occasionally broke into Krishna-bhajans; a middle-aged woman, on her way to visit her son in Mumbai, chattering away, spouting stories about everything and anything – a big temple, shaped like a chariot, in Puri; the crush at Gangasagar Mela on Sankranti; her little grandson’s amusing mangling of words he was beginning to learn; miracles at some shrine in Ga
ya; people she said she knew who had been affected by consuming adulterated palm oil sold in a ration shop in Rourkela … The whole world was fitted by magic into the tiny confinement of the train carriage, so that when they got off at Lokmanya Tilak Terminus in Kurla, Milly could at least give a name to the sensation that swallowed her. It was drowning.
The Vachanis lived on the first floor of a high-rise apartment block on Ganpatrao Kadam Marg in Lower Parel. Milly, who had never seen large, multi-storeyed apartment blocks, not even in Jamshedpur, certainly not in this density, felt awe and fear. The building had a name: ‘Sukh Niwas’. It had a cage-like machine that carried you upstairs and downstairs. Milly was to learn later the name of this machine that made the staircase unnecessary – ‘lift’.
The flat was laid out in a way not dissimilar to the one in Jamshedpur. There were two bedrooms, each with a bathroom attached to it, a big room which was used as a sitting room at one end and had a dining table and four chairs to the side nearer the kitchen. The kitchen was narrow, a standard size. It doubled as Milly’s bedroom at night. For her food, she had the use of two plates, both identical melamine ones, white with a green rim and green circles all over the surface, the white background of which had discoloured with time and the turmeric in the food. She had a plastic beaker for her water and an old, chipped mug for her tea. As in Jamshedpur, she had to keep her things separate from the family’s, although here she was allowed to stack her dishes, after washing up, right at the end of the hanging draining rack above the sink, but, crucially, leaving a gap of anything between three to six ‘slots’ between their plates and hers.
Her toilet and bathroom were on the ground floor, which had no flats but served as a car park for the residents of the building. The guards sat in the pillared open space next to the entrance hallway housing the letter boxes, staircase and lift. The bathroom and toilet cubicles were at the far end of the car park, at the back of the building, away from the entrance and the guards’ gathering place. Milly learned, very early on, on her second or third day, how to avoid the guards’ gaze as she went to use the public conveniences meant for the servants, drivers and security guards who worked in the building. The experience of going downstairs to use the facilities was a mixed one for her – on one hand, there was the ever-present anxiety that she would be seen by one of the guards; on the other hand, there was the undiminishing joy of using the lift to go down and come up, even if it was for the elevation of only two flights of stairs.
Jayant and Hemali Vachani appeared elderly to Milly’s eyes – she learnt soon that they had two grown-up daughters and a brood of little grandchildren – although she could not have put an approximate age to them. Her division of people’s ages was broadly descriptive: very young, young, a middle stage of neither young nor old, then old.
The outlines of Milly’s tasks were explained to her over the course of days. Besides the usual duties of cleaning, sweeping, dusting, doing the laundry, the washing-up, it emerged that she was also expected to cook. She would be trained by Hemali Vachani to cook Sindhi food – sai bhaji, elaichi gosht, sata bhajyun, toori chanadal.
Although her salary in Mumbai was nearly five times what she got in Jamshedpur, she discovered later that she was being paid only one salary, the live-in housemaid’s, when she should have been given twice that sum, since she was saving them the wages they would have had to pay a cook. There was no way she herself could bring up the matter of a double salary. She called Sabina’s mobile to see if it couldn’t be sorted out.
‘They’re giving you a place to stay and food to eat, saving you rent and food money,’ Sabina said. ‘Stop complaining. Who has been putting such ideas in your head? You’ve been here for three months, four months, and you’ve already started to get so greedy?’
Milly felt chastised. The Vachanis had set up a bank account for her. They had helped her to negotiate how to send, every month, most of her salary back home. How could she ask them to pay her more money? Where would she go if they took umbrage and fired her? Where would she live?
But over the four months that she had been in ‘Sukh Niwas’, something more worrying emerged: she wasn’t allowed to leave the building. Her only forays outside the flat were to the bathroom downstairs. The stricture hadn’t been announced to her from the very outset, but was rather something that she came to understand in slow degrees. It didn’t strike her as odd, at first, that rather than sending her out for a small item that had been forgotten, or run out of – say, milk – they would go without milk in their tea. An entire dish at dinner would be foregone if an ingredient, one that required a small walk to a corner shop, was missing; Milly wouldn’t be sent out to fetch it.
Without noticing that this was the deliberate order of things, Milly said one day, ‘I can go out and get laundry soap. Just tell me where to go and what brand of soap you want.’
Hemali gave her a look and said curtly, ‘No need. We’ll send the driver out tomorrow morning.’
Milly, who was at once curious about and frightened of the world outside the gated compound of ‘Sukh Niwas’ but had not seen anything of it, except the large segment of road on which the building stood, felt an increasing impatience to venture out. She lingered over the dusting and cleaning of the windows facing the street and, when she realised that an excuse was no longer necessary, she simply stood gazing out. Two big trees framed the view; she didn’t know their names. People passed by, and cars, autos, Tempos, cycles, taxis. A clutch of vendors set up their makeshift stalls on the far side – they sold snacks, cucumber, vada pao and pao bhaji, starfruit, peanuts, and Milly wanted to run out and taste all of them and feel the traffic fumes and the warm, humid outside air on her skin. The whole world was caught up in movement; only she was still and rooted to one spot. She began to identify a few people who regularly, and at more or less set hours, passed up or down the road. There was the woman with stainless-steel utensils balanced in a wide basket on her head who came every Sunday morning. She had a long, thin, unintelligible cry to announce her presence. There was the ironing man, who collected clothes from people in the apartment blocks, and carried off a huge bundle tied in a large bed sheet on the back of his bicycle. He visited the Vacanis to take in their ironing too, four times a week. There were the snack vendors, of course, but they were too far away for her to make out their faces. There was a young man who walked towards the right at five o’clock every afternoon. She knew this because he had looked up at her once and their eyes had met for the briefest of moments before she had looked away. She wouldn’t have given it another thought, or even remembered it, had the same thing not happened a week or ten days later, then again on the consecutive day. Three times amounted to meaning. Every time he looked up, Milly turned her gaze away almost instantaneously, although she allowed herself – and perhaps him, too – the luxury of what could only be called waiting, waiting for him to walk past and look up when he was exactly opposite her window.
The first indication Milly had that she was strictly forbidden to step outside the two heavy iron gates of ‘Sukh Niwas’ was when she decided that she would go for a little walk to see what lay beyond the margins of her view from the window. The Vachanis were away and there was no one to stop her. She walked to the iron gate and started opening it – it was heavy and she first had to slide the bolt out of its socket. Before she had even begun, one of the guards came running.
‘What are you doing, what are you doing?’ he barked. ‘Get away from the gate, you can’t go out.’
Already daunted by having a man, and a stranger at that, speak to her in such an aggressive way, Milly was even more cowed by the spectacle of his companions, a loose gaggle of guards and some of the drivers who were on duty, all standing up and watching the spectacle that was unfolding. She felt naked.
She asked weakly, all prepared to flee upstairs, ‘But why?’
‘Your masters’ – he used the words ‘malik’ and ‘malkin’ – ‘have given us orders: no maidservants can leave the building
.’
Disbelief silenced her. A dozen questions struggled to come out, but the weight of the words ‘masters’ and ‘orders’ were too powerful. Besides, the awareness that all these men were gulping her in with their eyes, enjoying watching her get into trouble, was even more powerful. She turned tail and walked up to the lift, feeling the air behind her back turning to something hot and crackling.
Most likely the guards were bullying her, she thought; how could it be possible that she wasn’t allowed to go out for even a few minutes?
After the Vachanis returned, she asked Didi, ‘The guard downstairs wouldn’t allow me to go out.’
‘You wanted to go out?’ Hemali asked.
‘Yes, just to walk and see what’s outside, I haven’t been out once since I came here.’
Hemali’s face hardened. In a voice that could cut stone she said, ‘There’s no call for you to go outside. Young girls going outside on their own – it only leads to trouble. And others have to pick up the pieces afterwards. You stay where you are.’
The tone of her voice denied any possibility of a rejoinder from Milly. Besides, she was a servant, she couldn’t question or argue or oppose. When she found a sliver of time away from Didi – not an easy thing to do; it took days – she called Sabina to complain, and also to ask for an explanation, a reason for the existence of this strange rule. Sabina could shed no light on the matter but she added, ‘They’re just being cautious. You’ve come from a village far away, and Mumbai is a very big city. They’re afraid you’ll get lost, or … or something worse. I’m sure they’ll let you go out soon.’
Milly wasn’t convinced but she tried to draw hope from Sabina’s words. But something tenacious and easy-growing had lodged inside her head and it let its presence be known, only occasionally at the beginning, then with such increasing frequency that it became everything.
A State of Freedom Page 22