My hunger had woken up just like the city. A cup of morning tea would be a good start. I knew a tea seller on Vivekananda Road who was sometimes friendly. It was a bit of a walk, but I always had time.
The day was warming up quickly. The Metropole Hotel blanket was getting heavy on my shoulders. It was easy to find a family of pavement dwellers who needed a good blanket. Behind a dumpster, next to the wall outside St. James’ Church, a woman was trying to keep her toddlers close by. She was nursing a baby and only had one free arm to keep her other kids in line. I didn’t see a man. He was probably off looking for work.
I folded the blanket into a tidy square and put it on the ground in front of the mother. She was almost too busy to notice. The children noticed, though. They reached out and patted the blanket with their tiny hands, then snatched their hands back, as if they weren’t sure they should. They giggled, then patted it again.
I moved on.
A bicycle came by pulling a cart piled high with bales of rags. I felt like taking a ride so I hopped on the back. I rode in style all the way to Baithakkhana Bazaar before the bicycle man realized he was pulling more weight than he needed to.
“Off! Off! Off!”
I jumped off, smiled and made the namaste. So he had to make the namaste back, and we parted on good terms.
I walked up a few more streets, through the tight markets under the highway flyover, then finally I hit Vivekananda Road.
The tea seller who was sometimes friendly had a stall just outside a cake shop. I liked seeing the little cakes and sweets, so pretty with their colors and decorations. They looked like flowers or treasures from a jewelry store. If I ever got the chance to taste one, I would feel like queen.
The tea seller had just brewed a fresh pot of tea. The steam rose as he poured it from one pot to the other, mixing the milk and tea and sugar.
I could almost taste the hot tea going down my throat. It would give me a warm happy start to the day. I wouldn’t feel so hungry with a bit of tea in me.
I stood right beside the tea stall, ready to ask for a blessing, when I hit the first bit of bad luck for the day.
The tea seller’s older brother arrived in a rickshaw.
The brother owned the tea stall. He was always in a bad mood.
The brother saw me and started yelling at the tea seller.
“Look how these urchins approach you! Totally without fear. No wonder I am not making enough money. You give away all my profits. You are a thief! Show me you are not a thief, or I will take this stall away from you. I don’t care if you are my brother.”
The tea seller looked at me. I knew he was about to yell at me even though he didn’t want to.
I shrugged a tiny shrug to let him know that it was okay, so he started to yell at me to get away and never come back. Then, in a way his brother couldn’t see, he gave me a bit of a hand movement that told me, “Go and wait nearby. This bullock of a brother is leaving soon.”
So I backed away and went to sit in a nearby doorway. I watched the metal workers hammer and solder long pieces of metal into railings and bed frames and kept an eye on the older brother, who was waving his arms around and spewing out all sorts of angry words.
Finally the brother called over the rickshaw puller who had been waiting patiently (and who certainly wouldn’t get paid for all the time he had wasted waiting). He got back into the seat and the rickshaw puller heaved the rickshaw into a run. They disappeared among the cars and carts.
I went back over to the tea seller’s stall.
“I can’t give you any tea,” he said in a sad way, not mean. “I have to account for all the cups. The number of cups and the money in the box must balance. My brother will check.”
That seemed like a small problem.
The cups were small and made of clay. When someone was finished drinking, they threw their cup to the ground. Someone else had the job of going through the streets and collecting the broken cups so they could be taken back to the potter. The potter turned them back into clay, then back into cups again. There were dozens of broken cups lying around on the ground.
I found a cup that was not broken, picked it up out of the gutter and presented it to the tea seller.
“Your brother does not measure tea, does he?”
“That cup is dirty.”
It was. I rubbed it with the sleeve of my kurta, the same one given to me when I first got to the city. The kurta was dirty, too.
“Kolkata dirt,” I said, holding the cup out again. “It’s on me and in me.”
He gave up. A stream of hot tea flowed from the kettle into the cup in my hand.
“Drink it quickly,” he said. “My brother could come back.”
The tea was too hot, so I took it away and sat among the roots of a banyan tree. The tree had come up through the sidewalk, pushing the slabs of cement to the side as it grew.
I sipped my tea next to the clay statues of two gods that had been left there during the Durga-puja. The statues were crumbling a bit. The fingers on one had turned to dust, and part of the nose on the other had disappeared. Their painted-on clothes had once been bright blue and yellow, but the colors were now hidden under a layer of grime.
Still, the gods were smiling and friendly looking. I sipped my tea, held the cup up to their lips in case they were thirsty and asked them if they had enjoyed the festival.
They didn’t say anything, but they kept smiling. I smiled with them, and we sat in the sun and enjoyed our tea.
For a few short moments, I didn’t feel lonely.
For a few short moments, I almost had friends.
7
The River
I COULD MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.
Just by staring and concentrating hard, I could sometimes make things and people do what I wanted.
It was not a gift I used very often. Only when I needed to.
After I left the tea seller, I needed to.
I was hungry.
By the middle of the day, the full belly feeling of the tea had worn off. It felt like my luck was taking a holiday.
I went down to the river to try to get it back.
In Kolkata they call it the Hooghly. North of Kolkata it’s called the Ganges. South of Kolkata it empties into the Bay of Bengal.
I know this because I saw it on a map in a bookstore before the owner threw me out.
I went down to the river and went into the water. People threw coins into the river to be blessed by Mother Ganges. My plan was to pick up some of those coins and use them to buy something to eat.
I had done it many times. Many.
But today I had no luck. I kept diving and feeling around in the mud. I kept coming up with nothing.
I climbed up on an old cement pier to take a rest. When I don’t eat for a long time, I can’t move as fast or for as long. I get tired faster.
While I was sitting there, I decided to try to use my powers on a little girl who was also sitting on the pier a short distance from me.
She had been lucky. She had a little pile of coins beside her, and she was playing with them, clinking them together over and over and driving me quite crazy.
“Dirvala, come and eat!” A woman waved to the girl from the steps.
“In a minute,” the little girl answered.
“Not in a minute. Come now.”
The little girl turned her head, pretending not to hear.
The woman went back to arranging food on a cloth. There were a few other people around helping — an older woman, a man, a few more children. They all looked happy and relaxed.
The bathing ghat was busy. The sun was shining and the day was a little warmer than recent days had been. The broad stone steps down into the water were full of people having picnics, doing yoga or soaping themselves before diving into the water. Others scooped up mud from the river bed, smeared it on their bodies and let it dry in the sun. A couple getting married were performing a ceremony on shore. People were saying prayers and giving offerings of fruit
, flowers and incense. A lot of children were diving for coins.
Turn your head, I silently ordered the little girl. Leave your coins alone and turn away. Just for a moment.
I kept concentrating.
The girl’s mother called again for her to hurry up. It was time to eat. The girl kept ignoring her.
Then the girl’s granny got into the act. One shout from the old lady, the girl dropped her coins and turned her head.
And I pounced.
I had the coins in my hand and was under the water before the girl knew what had happened.
I swam as far as I could, came up for a quick breath of air, then went back down again.
Above me, I heard shouting and yelling when the girl realized her coins were gone. I stayed below the surface of the water for as long as I could at one time. I spat out a mouthful of river, then popped the coins into my mouth so that my hands would be free to move me through the water.
I moved farther out from the shore and let the current take me away. I left the bathing ghat behind and became part of the river, like the boats and the fish.
By bending low and walking on the riverbed, churning up mud with each step, I made my way downriver to the next ghat.
It was a burning ghat, a place for cremating dead bodies. Smoke rose from the wood that helped the dead people burn. Mourners and religious men brought the ashes down the steps to return the dead ones to the river.
There were no other children in the water here. Maybe they didn’t like being so close to death. But coins got tossed from burning ghats as well as bathing ghats. People were always hoping for blessings.
I dove, feeling along the riverbed with my hands. I scooped up handfuls of mud and watched it drip through my fingers. Now and then I found a coin. I rinsed the mud off in the river and popped the coin into my mouth with the others.
After a while there were more coins in my mouth than I could hold. I spat them into my palm and headed to shore.
The current was a bit strong and I had to take it slow, stopping to rest now and then.
The burning ghat was not busy. There were just a few people saying prayers, sending off little paper boats with fruit and flower petals and floating garlands of marigolds in the water.
It was peaceful. I heard the sound of chanted prayers. The walls of the temple held back the city noises.
I was almost at the shore when I spotted a woman standing alone by a smoking pyre. Women didn’t often come to this ghat. And she was reading a book.
I knotted my coins into a corner of my kurta so she couldn’t see that I already had money. Then I moved in to see what she was reading. If she could afford a book, maybe she could afford to give me a few rupees.
She was reading a Bible. An English Bible.
It was perfect.
I knew a few Bible verses. They were useful when I went begging outside the fancier churches on Sundays.
I kept my eyes on her as I moved closer. I didn’t want her to run away.
And then I was right next to her.
“‘Jesus wept,’” I said.
She was startled, and she looked up from her reading.
“Yes, he did,” she said. “Do you know why?”
It seemed like a foolish question, but as I stood there I realized there were all kinds of reasons someone might cry. Maybe Jesus hit his thumb with a hammer. I had seen carpenters in the street do that, and one of them had cried. Maybe he was lonely. Maybe he was thirsty and the tea seller wouldn’t give him any tea. Maybe he was lost in a strange city. Or maybe he had heard a great joke and was laughing so hard he started to cry.
The woman was waiting for an answer.
“He was sad?” I said.
“Do you know what made him sad?”
How would I know that?
“He was hungry?” I suggested. “I cry when I’m hungry.” I held out my empty hand, hoping she would take the hint. I hoped I wouldn’t have to pretend to cry to get my point across.
She glanced at my hand, then looked into my eyes. That made me feel funny.
I lowered my hand. She went back to her Bible.
“My name is Valli,” I said. “Are you reading about Jesus being sad?”
I had a feeling that this woman could be good for quite a few rupees — maybe as many as ten — so I hung in.
“No,” she said. “I’m reading something happier.”
“Are you happy that your family is dead?”
“This man was not my family,” she said. “I don’t know who he was.”
I let her read in peace for a moment while I thought about that.
“Do you come here every day?” I asked. Maybe she just liked to read the Bible at the burning ghat. People did all sorts of strange things. I knew of a park where people gathered every morning just to laugh.
The woman didn’t answer right away. I looked up and saw that she was praying so I let her finish. She seemed like a serious woman who would want others to also be serious.
I meant to stand quietly so she would think I was a good child and worth giving rupees to, but a bee started buzzing around my head.
I waved it away. It returned. I thought it might be going to land on my back, so I spun around to shoo it and I lost my balance a little. I didn’t fall over, but I worried that the woman might think I was just a child who was playing around, and not a serious child who could discuss why Jesus was crying a lot better if she had a few dosas in her stomach.
“This man died outside the hospital where I work,” she said. “No family claimed him. No one knew him, so I — you’re standing in hot coals!”
She took my arm and pulled me away.
In trying to escape the bee, I had stepped into the cremation pit where the unknown man was now coal and ashes, ready for the Ganges.
“There was a bee,” I started to say. “I didn’t mean to disrespect …”
The woman dropped to the ground and looked at my feet. I had to lean against her while she lifted up one then the other.
“You’re burned. And you’re cut.”
The old pier had a lot of sharp bits of rusty metal on it. I must have scraped my foot on one of them. There was blood on it.
“It’s all right,” I said, pulling my foot away. “Tell me more about the happy part of the Bible.”
I wanted to get her thoughts away from my feet and onto the number of rupees she would give me.
“Who do you live with?” she asked. “Who looks after you?”
“I look after myself,” I said. I was starting to feel uneasy. I was used to people asking me questions when I asked them for money, but this woman acted like she really cared about the answers. She wasn’t just asking to make herself feel good.
I had enough money to get some food. I started to walk away.
She came after me and took hold of my arm. I knew what was coming next. She wouldn’t be the first person to hit me when I tried to get money from them.
I raised my hand to protect my face from the beating.
The knot in my kurta came loose. The coins I had collected clattered to the ground, mixing with the sand and mud that covered the old stone steps.
“Just hold on,” she said. She didn’t let go of my arm while she crouched down and picked up all the coins. I kept squirming and trying to pull away.
“Let me go!” I cried out. “Keep the money. Just let me go!”
I was sure a beating was coming.
She gave all the coins back to me. She had me sit beside her on the step until I was able to calm down.
She touched a white patch of skin near my elbow.
“Do you have any more of these?” she asked.
I didn’t answer her. I took some mud from the step and rubbed it over the white patch to make it look more like the rest of my skin.
“Your feet are in bad shape,” she said. “Tell me, do you feel the burns and the cuts?”
The last time I said I felt no pain, people screamed at me and threw me out of their house.
“Yes,” I said. “My feet hurt. A lot.”
She kept looking at me.
I shook my head. I felt as though I was doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what.
“I have magic feet,” I whispered.
“I’d like you to come with me. My name is Indra,” she said. “I’m a doctor and I can fix your feet.”
“My feet are fine.”
“Do you have a home? Yes or no.”
I thought of what the old man said on my first day in Kolkata.
“The earth, the sky, the air,” I said.
“Where did you sleep last night?”
“The Englishmen’s cemetery. But I wanted to sleep there.”
“Then maybe you will come with me because you want to,” she said. “You’ll get a meal and a checkup, and no one will make you stay if you really want to leave.”
She let go of my arm. I was free to run away.
She waved the ghat workers over to us. It was their job to put the bodies in the shallow troughs shaped into the cement platform. They built up the fires with small then big sticks of wood. Then they raked the ashes into a container to be carried to the river.
Dr. Indra took some money out of her purse and gave it to them. I knew she had already paid for the cremation. I had spent enough time around the ghats to know how it worked. People had to pay up front because wood was expensive.
She was giving them extra money. She didn’t have to. She just did it.
“Thank you,” she told them.
And then she held out her hand for them to shake.
I watched the three men hesitate. No one ever wanted to touch the burning ghat workers. They handled dead bodies. They were unclean.
But the doctor kept her hand held out. One by one, the men shook her hand.
She turned back to me.
“Well?”
I decided to take a chance.
She smiled and led the way.
We left the river and the troughs of smoking fires. We went out through the pavilion where people were getting oil rubdowns, buying incense and flowers for offerings or being shaved by one of the barbers. We went out into the street that was crowded with tea shops and flower peddlers.
No Ordinary Day Page 5