First, she noticed the collapsible iron gates on all the windows, including the ones at the back of the flat, but this was not unusual in any city – she had seen such security in Jamshedpur, too. What was unusual perhaps was that they were kept locked all the time. She had never seen a key, or seen the gates ever opened, even by Dada or Didi. Then the business of not being sent on errands took on a different meaning. As did several other seemingly innocuous things: the fact that the front door to the flat was padlocked from the inside every night; that the kitchen windows had nets on them (although she knew well that this was to prevent birds and insects from flying in); that she was never told, or never discovered for herself, where the key to the night padlock was …
Slowly, she became unable to think about anything else. It was not that she needed to go out – where would, could, she go, in this endless city, without knowing anyone? – but something so fundamental denied is that thing made disproportionately enormous, consuming, and she began to think of herself as a caged bird, defined by the fact of nothing except its imprisonment. The Vachanis didn’t treat her badly – they didn’t hit her, or deny her food and clothing, or shout at her, at least not too much or too regularly (there was, of course, the usual chiding when Milly got something wrong, accidentally broke a glass or a plate, or when Didi, in a magnification of her persistently nagging mode, found fault in everything Milly did, but these instances, while upsetting her temporarily, she had learned to accept as part of her job). But there were times when she thought that she would happily put up with crueller behaviour if this one overarching cruelty could be removed. What was a slap or two, angry shouting, compared with this?
She experienced a new feeling, at night, of the kitchen walls inching forward slowly from all four sides to crush her, lying in the middle. Their hut in the village had been tiny and eight of them had to sleep together, huddled, but she had never thought of that as small. Besides, there was always the great open outside – fields, forests, groves, river bank. The idea of space as something small or big, something that could be reduced, had never occurred to her, not even on the train, in the general compartment so dense with people that the air had sometimes felt too thick to breathe, not even in that battery-cage had the thought ever crossed her mind that ‘this is too small’. Now, in a Mumbai flat bigger than any house she had ever known, she felt trapped and squeezed. She called up Sabina again to complain tearfully. And everything that Sabina had to say in response – ‘You are getting things wrong, how can they lock you in? You are not telling me something; you don’t know the full story yourself; they may have their reasons’ – Milly felt was worse than unsupportive: Sabina was defending the Vachanis.
Things continued in this vein for a while. During one of Milly’s plaintive phone calls, Sabina said with considerable irritation, ‘Whinge, whinge, whinge! Do you know how good you have it out there? Thank Jesus that you weren’t the ten-year-old boy working for this Marwari woman in Kolkata. Do you know what happened to him? She picked him up and threw him down the hole through which the lift goes up and down. You know what a lift is? And you know how high up she lived in the building? Eight floors. The boy was thrown down eight storeys. You think not being allowed to go out to walk and look at the people and the shops or whatever is comparable? You should be grateful for what you have – things are far worse out there.’
Milly knew then that she wasn’t going to get any help from this particular quarter, but before this understanding had settled inside her head she had blurted out the words, ‘What happened to the boy?’
‘Oh, he survived. He went to hospital with many broken bones. The woman and her husband are rich and powerful people – the police came but nothing happened. She said he fell down because he was playing with the lift and didn’t know how to work it, when he should open the door to get in. It was their word against the boy’s. Who would believe an illiterate boy from nowhere over a city-woman dripping with jewels? You think anyone would believe you if you whined about not being let out?’
Milly’s blood froze when she heard the story, but later she wondered about how exercised Sabina had got in the telling of it, practically screaming, as if the boy’s situation had caused her great anger and pain. So why was she so unsympathetic to her, Milly, and on the side of the Vachanis? A feeling of intense loneliness swept through her – she felt she was going to be blown away by it. She realised that she could not rely on the only person she knew in this city, the only link between her new life here and the old life back in the village. She had been untethered, set free, when all she wanted was the security of being fixed to one place, the safety and comfort of not being alone.
The sense of desolation broke her. It was as if the feeling made the fact of her imprisonment final and irreversible, whereas before her last phone call with Sabina, Milly had hopes that it was a mistake, or temporary, or some simple thing she was failing to understand. Her reaction to this hopelessness spanned a whole spectrum. She cried in private a lot, and sometimes in front of Dada and Didi, unable to escape that weighed-down feeling even for the short duration when it was required of her to put on a public face. The constant crying annoyed Hemali so much that her manner towards Milly changed from one of cool and indifferent lordliness, the hauteur of a mistress towards her maidservant, to one of active, angry dislike. She shouted at her a few times, ‘Stop snivelling! Someone’s died or what, that you’re like Water Supply Corporation all the time, eh? You think I’m the kind who yields to tears?’ When this seemed to have no effect, she lost all restraint one evening and slapped Milly across the face. Milly dropped the teapot she was holding. It shattered into fragments of all sizes; the tea splashed all over the floor and caught a large corner of the rug. Hemali lashed out with her fists and hands with abandon. Shocked, and busy with cowering to avoid the blows, Milly forgot to cry.
That night, in the dark kitchen, with the whispery rustle of cockroaches emerging from their daytime hiding places, Milly felt the cold, metallic taste of fear and it froze her tears. From now on, all her thoughts and energies were concentrated on one thing only – an escape plan. But surely they must know that she, or anyone in her position, sooner or later into their stay here, would plot to run away and, consequently, had put in place all kinds of measures to prevent such a thing? Where, where could she find a crack, an opening? How could she slip out? She checked, and checked again, the solidity of the doors and windows of the flat. When no one was watching, she tried to slip an arm or a leg through the collapsible iron shutters on the windows to see how much of herself she could get through. She got stuck one day when she managed to get one leg out up to the thigh – there was no way she could fit in both, or her hip – but then couldn’t pull it back in. She tore her shalwar to get the few extra millimetres or two of leverage, but her leg was held fast. A pincer movement of panic began to crush her: what if her masters walked in right now, and what if someone outside, a neighbour at a window, someone passing in the car park downstairs or, worse, one of the guards, saw her like this? She peed with fear and anxiety and felt even more ashamed; much better to yank the leg out of its socket than risk being seen like this. She pulled and stretched and twisted; the skin on her thighs broke; the pain was irrelevant, she wanted to make it far worse if it could have been the price for freedom. Her mind whirled – if only she could reach for some soap or oil, if only there was the thigh equivalent for sucking in one’s stomach, if only she could summon someone reliable and trustworthy for help, if only she had a knife to slice off bits of her flesh … and, then, suddenly, with another pull, and not a ferocious one, she was free. She toppled over and fell awkwardly on the floor, hitting her head on the corner of the bed.
Desperation gnawed away at her until she felt she was losing her mind. She woke up at two or three in the morning and looked for cracks and fissures in the corners of the kitchen she could use as the point to begin digging a hole secretly. The thought of digging would then send her looking for suitable implements. Would the
biggest knife do? What about the smaller ones, with sharper points? She tried one on a small area next to the fridge where there was an indentation on the floor, close to the wall where the electrical switchboard was, and broke the blade in one clean snap. Did Didi count the number of knives she possessed? Would Milly have to pretend to break it while cutting something tomorrow? Would she be slapped for it? She looked at the huge rake of tines the collapsible window had left on her thigh and thought how pain could be ignored. Every time an action defeated her, such as digging a hole through the wall – either through the sheer impossibility of executing it, or being brought up short by the immovable barrier that was the iron gate of ‘Sukh Niwas’ and its guards – she inflicted some damage on herself out of frustration, knowing that the lash of pain would allow her mind to get away, if only for a moment, from battling the thing that was eating it. She bit her arms, sinking her teeth in; cut her fingers under a cold running tap; tore out clumps of her hair … and had the idea that if she could maim herself, or catch an illness so severe that it would necessitate a visit to the hospital, she could make a run for it. For a while she would soar on the wings of this fantasy, until one question brought her down crashing: where would she go? From that one question a maze in hell emerged: could she go to the railway station and buy a ticket to return to her village? All on her own? She would first need to go to the bank to withdraw money, but her passbook was with Didi. How would she ever retrieve it? Even if she could, how would she negotiate all the bank business? How long would it take between running away from the hospital and getting herself to the railway station? And again: all this on her own? She didn’t have any money with her … She felt she was drowning; the whole world was empty and it was just herself on an endless stretch of water and she knew that it was going to swallow her.
Prodded not so much by guilt as pity, the kind that made people throw one-rupee coins to beggars from the hastily rolled-down windows of their air-conditioned cars, Hemali Vachani had not only allowed Milly to watch whatever television she desired, but had also taught her how to turn it on and operate the remote control. The television was a lifeline, especially when Dada and Didi were away and she could forget the great burden of her imprisonment for a few hours, watching the joys and sorrows of other people’s lives; her own felt thin, colourless, flat.
Nearly a year passed until Milly, now resigned and fatalistic, had another idea – what if she performed her duties so badly that they had to let her go? She began subtly, then escalated in gradual steps. First, oversalting the food, burning the rice and rotis, putting salt in tea and heaped tablespoonfuls of sugar in the savoury food at lunch and dinner. Hemali complained about the first couple of instances, then scolded severely, finally resorting to hitting Milly, who seemed to have become inured to corporal punishment. This fanned the flames of Hemali’s rage. She forced Milly to eat all the ruined food in one sitting, shoving her fist full of food into Milly’s mouth when she could no longer ingest anything.
‘I’ll punish you so badly that you will be screaming for help,’ Hemali shouted, ‘and there won’t be a soul on earth who will lift a finger to help you. Next time you think of such tricks, remember, I’ll brand your face with a hot iron, you’ll be marked for life. How would that feel?’
Flat 10, ‘Sukh Niwas’, Lower Parel, had become a circus.
Then one day, a real possibility of walking out of the building and never returning presented itself. Sabina called to tell Milly that her father had died. Before she felt the loss, she was lifted up with hope and joy – they must let her go to her village now, they must, how could they not?
‘Will you call them and ask them to let me go?’ she said to Sabina.
‘You ask them first, see what they say.’
‘She’ll say no, I’m sure of that. If you speak to them, they may agree.’
‘Ask first, na.’
So Milly did, reluctantly, unhopefully, and it was while uttering the words ‘My father has died’ that she was overthrown. The tears that welled out were simple tears, uncomplicated, pure in origin, out of an altogether different source from her tears over the last year.
Hemali grimaced and said, ‘You’re lying. It’s a ruse you’ve cooked up.’
‘No, I’m not lying. Ask Sabina. She called me to give the news.’
‘Then the two of you are in cahoots.’
Milly fell on her knees and pleaded. Stone idols were more responsive.
For the first time in who knows how long, Milly’s mind moved away from its usual obsession. She felt she was being lashed by a different kind of anguish now. Under the greasy mosquito net, a sleepless Milly thought of one of the earliest memories she had of her father: herself trying to run away, giddy with delight, as her father, pretending to be a tiger, chased her, but kept toppling over every time he stood up, something that sent her into gales of squealing laughter. She had understood years later that the instability on his feet had not been part of his attempt to entertain her but because he was drunk. She felt something being wrung inside her and she howled noiselessly, her fist in her mouth. She would never see his crumpled face again. They were certain to have cremated him by the time Sabina had called. Milly didn’t know how long they would keep his bones until they were buried under the sasandiri at the jangtopa. Had she been back home, the church people would probably have forbidden her from going to the ceremony, but they were not rigid in enforcing their rules and were easily dealt with. She wouldn’t even have the luxury of rebelling against Father Joseph because she would be stuck here.
Would she ever be able to leave ‘Sukh Niwas’ any time before Dada and Didi died? Would she be passed on to one of their daughters after their deaths and continue imprisoned in another house until she herself became old and died? Wasn’t that what happened to birds in cages? Did that shambling, drunken man, who beat his wife, and was useless at any job, did that man ever think that his daughter would be in a situation like this? Would he be as helpless at rescuing her as he had been when his son’s hand was chopped off? The thought of her father’s habitual feebleness rinsed her insides again with pity. She wanted to protect him but he was gone beyond all that now.
In the end, Milly wasn’t allowed to go back home, not even for the jangtopa. Hemali Vachani told Sabina on the phone that, if she didn’t like the current state of affairs, she was welcome to go to the police. This provoked Sabina to come over to Milly’s side; no doubt, Milly reasoned, because Sabina was afraid of the damage it would do to her reputation back home, if people found out what kind of life some of the girls from the villages had entered in the big cities with her help.
Two days after she was rebuffed, Sabina called to say, ‘I’m trying to find a place somewhere else in Mumbai where they could take you in.’
The conversation went aimlessly in eddies, and Milly had no energy to sustain chatter that consisted of Sabina’s suggestions and ideas for escape, which Milly had already been over hundreds of times. And then, in all that well-ploughed soil, an unexpected gem – Sabina said, ‘Be careful not to give them your mobile if they ask for it.’
Milly became alert. ‘How come?’ she asked. It was a rhetorical question: neither she nor the Vachanis had considered her phone as something that could be used as a tool of escape. She didn’t know how yet, but here was something to think about. It was just as well that Sabina had taken care of topping up her pre-paid Air Tel account.
Was it quite by chance that she spotted him again or had he been walking past every day, looking up faithfully, sometimes seeing her, distracted, unhappy, not noticing him, and at other times glancing up but not spotting her at the window at the usual hour? A weak memory of distant familiarity – no, not even that, just a whisper of recognition – stirred in her mind; it was a different life, perhaps one that had still held the promise, or hope, of freedom. She did not remember. This time, however, she fell into the routine of looking out for him, waiting for the moment in the day when their eyes would lock and she would turn her
face away in shyness. She began to take longer to avert her eyes, until one day she forgot to do it. He smiled; a shy, tentative smile. And one day she returned his smile.
Shortly after this he was emboldened to ask her to come down. She shook her head and moved back into the darkness of the interior. She watched him from the shadows, unseen herself, as he waited for a long time for her to re-emerge. This delicate equilibrium, of looks exchanged, followed by watching in hiding on her part and waiting on his, lasted a good while until he took his courage in his hands and mimed the urgency of her necessity to come down and talk to him. The gestures were all extemporised, so she took some time to read them correctly, but she signalled back, with a heightened version of a stricken look on her face, that she wasn’t allowed to go out ever. Again, this short act of the silent drama was repeated over several days until she showed him her phone, then provided her number, one numeral at a time, with the correct number of fingers held up and displayed. He called her while she was still at the window, holding her phone, but the moment she answered, she looked out at him, staring at her and smiling, and disappeared into the inner gloom while continuing with the call.
Shyness affected both sides. Milly didn’t utter a word after her first ‘haan’ unless she was asked a direct question.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked. She noted that he had used the politest form of ‘you’ to address her.
She could barely bring herself to reply and, when she did, he had to ask her to repeat the name several times before it was audible. A long pause descended. She was clearly not going to ask his name.
‘Binay,’ he said. ‘My name is Binay.’
She offered nothing but her silence.
‘Did you hear? My name is Binay.’
A State of Freedom Page 23