by Anosh Irani
“You want tea?” Sumdi asks.
“Will you stop feeding him and make him do some work?” shouts Guddi.
Chamdi looks inside the kholi and is surprised to find Amma there. She is mumbling to herself again, but she is not still like she was last night. She moves her body back and forth with the child in her lap. The child’s belly is swollen.
“What’s she doing here?” asks Chamdi.
“Why is that bothering you?” asks Guddi.
“I did not mean it badly,” says Chamdi.
But he does not explain that he is surprised to see Amma in the kholi because it seemed as though Sumdi did not care much about her last night.
“Where can I go?” asks Chamdi instead. He directs his question at Sumdi and does not meet Guddi’s eyes.
“For what?”
“You know,” he says, awkwardly.
“But all you had last night was a slice of bread,” says Guddi. She seems to have picked up Chamdi’s meaning faster than her brother. “So were you lying to us about being hungry?”
“Pick your spot,” says Sumdi. “Do it anywhere you want.”
“What if someone sees me?”
“Ask them not to take a photo,” says Guddi.
Sumdi and Guddi laugh. “And you expect us to believe that you have lived on the streets,” says Sumdi.
“No, it’s just that …”
“Come with me,” says Sumdi.
He leads Chamdi about fifty feet away to three broken steps. One pillar stands in a corner with rusty iron rods sticking out of it. Slabs of stone are strewn all over the ground.
“This building got burnt,” says Sumdi. “Only these three steps remain. And we got a bathroom out of that. Now crouch on these steps and let it land.”
Sumdi limps away, and as Chamdi lowers his shorts, Sumdi turns and looks at him.
“Be careful of your jewels,” he shouts. “The rats might steal them.” He slaps himself on the thigh and limps away.
Chamdi tries to finish quickly. Not that he believes Sumdi about the rats, but he is uncomfortable. He thinks of Mrs. Sadiq. If she were to see him in this position, she would be shocked. If the Koyba Boys were to see him relieving himself on the street, they would tell the world. He thinks of the toilets in the orphanage, and an afternoon two years ago when Mrs. Sadiq went to the market and Raman passed out in the toilet. When Chamdi bent down to wake him up, he could not believe how powerful the smell of alcohol was. He threw water on Raman’s face and Raman got up suddenly and flailed his arms about and screamed. Chamdi ran out of there.
As Chamdi finishes, he does not know how he will wash himself. Still on his haunches, he looks around. If he were at the orphanage, he might have used a leaf. But the only tree in sight is the one sheltering the kholi, and the tree’s leaves are too high anyway.
A round stone saves him. He spots it only a foot away, so he stretches his arm towards it. As he wipes himself with the stone, he thinks of the Koyba Boys again. Maybe they should play koyba with this stone.
He pulls his shorts up and walks back to the tree. Sumdi and Guddi are already sipping their tea. They share the same glass, pass it back and forth.
“Did you empty your tank?” asks Sumdi.
“Yes,” says Chamdi.
“Have some tea then.”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Maybe our tea is not good enough for the raja,” says Guddi.
“It’s not that. I can see there’s not enough because you two are sharing.”
“We’re sharing the glass,” says Sumdi. “We have enough tea, but only one glass. So you also have.”
He offers the glass to Chamdi. Chamdi hesitates.
“Are you shy?” asks Sumdi. “Are you feeling shy that her lips have touched the glass and if your lips also touch the glass then …”
Guddi hits Sumdi on the wrist and mutters, “Early in the morning …”
“Don’t mind her,” says Sumdi.
Chamdi watches as Guddi pours some milk from an open vessel into the round cap of a bottle. It looks like the cap of the liquor bottle Raman used to drink from. She then moves towards the baby, which is in Amma’s lap, and pours a little milk into its mouth.
“What’s she doing?” asks Chamdi.
“Feeding the baby.”
“Why is Amma not feeding it herself?”
“Amma is sick.”
“Oh …”
“She does not have any milk in her. Now stop asking questions.”
Chamdi takes one more sip of tea and passes the glass to Sumdi, who pours some more tea from the bowl into the glass. Amma begins to moan again, and although she looks directly at her child, it seems that she is seeing right through it. Chamdi glances at Sumdi.
“She’s our mother,” says Sumdi abruptly, as he stares at the steaming bowl. “She wanders off with the child all the time. Now we are tired of worrying. She can hardly understand what we say to her. She just sits in a corner and tears her own hair off her head. I hate it when she does that.”
“Where’s your father?” asks Chamdi.
“Dead.”
Chamdi wants to hit himself on the head for asking that question.
“You see that Irani bakery over there?” asks Sumdi.
Chamdi looks at the bakery opposite them. There is an advertisement for Pepsi above a board that says Rostamion Bakery and Stores. Below the board, a man with a large moustache dusts the glass display case in which the bread is stored. The first few buttons of his shirt are open to reveal a dense layer of black chest hair. Next to the bakery is Café Gustad, where a young boy sweeps the floor, stopping occasionally to wipe the sleep from his eyes. Black chairs are stacked on top of each other, and tables with marble tops and wooden legs are randomly placed throughout the café.
“A car crushed our father three years ago,” continues Sumdi. “Just outside that Irani bakery.”
If the father died three years ago, how can that be Amma’s child? But Chamdi does not ask this question aloud. “I’m sorry” is all he says.
“What to do? There’s nothing we can do,” says Sumdi. “Our mother went mad after he died. And we have to look after her now. What to do?”
Chamdi feels awkward. Is he supposed to come up with an answer to Sumdi’s question?
“You can help us,” says Sumdi at last.
“Me?”
“We have a plan,” says Sumdi.
“What plan?”
“To steal.”
The thought of stealing appalls Chamdi. He has never stolen in his life. Not once. Even though he knew where Mrs. Sadiq kept the special cream biscuits at the orphanage, he did not take any except when they were offered to him.
“I’m not going to steal.”
“Coward,” says Guddi.
“Don’t worry,” says Sumdi. “It’s a clever plan. Listen. Amma is very sick. If we don’t take her to a doctor she will be finished. If something happens to her, who will look after the child?”
“Nothing will happen to her,” says Guddi fiercely. “I will not let anything happen to Amma.”
“You understand?” asks Sumdi. “We want to steal money to take her to the doctor and then we want to get out of this place.”
“Forever,” says Guddi.
“Where will you go?” asks Chamdi.
“To our village,” says Guddi. “We have a village. So will you help us or no?”
She looks at Chamdi with her big brown eyes, and he is reminded of the kindness that he saw in them last night. But that kindness was so brief, he is confused.
“Why are you silent?” asks Sumdi. “If I could run, I would not ask for your help. Look at me, how can I run? If I run they will catch me and beat me till my skin peels off.”
“But I can’t run fast,” says Chamdi.
“All this time you kept boasting that you could run fast,” says Guddi. “So either you are a liar or you can run fast.”
Chamdi knows he can run fast. When he was little, he heard a
story from Chandamama about a boy who screamed so hard that he lost his voice, and then a djinn appeared and told the boy that if he ran fast enough he might be able to catch the voice. So Chamdi used to try doing this in the courtyard of the orphanage until he realized that it was impossible. But at least the story had made him fast on his feet.
“Please help us,” begs Sumdi.
Guddi is about to speak, but at that moment the child in Amma’s arms begins to cry. Amma moves back and forth, speaking—loudly this time—but she emits only strange painful sounds. The child’s cries mixed with the mother’s slow wails make Chamdi uncomfortable. Sumdi rubs his temples as if a pain has developed there, and Guddi tries her best to calm the baby.
Chamdi cannot stop himself from staring at Amma. Her eyes roll upwards as though she is trying to look at the sky without raising her head. He believes that Amma hates the sound of car horns because it was a car that killed her husband. Maybe each time she hears a car horn, she feels something terrible is going to happen and it frightens her. He wishes Amma would say a word or two that might make her sound human, but all she does is howl.
Chamdi tells himself that he does not care if his father is poor, if he cleans toilets like Raman at the orphanage. All he wants is for his father to be in one piece. But there is one more thing. His father must remember that he has a son, unlike Amma, who has forgotten hers.
The sun has come out now and Chamdi stares at Amma’s scalp. The parts where the hair has fallen out, or has been pulled out, are pink. He imagines her hands pulling out strands in clumps, doing all this work that her brain is not even aware of. He grimaces at the thought of this, then feels Guddi’s gaze upon him. In the distance, he sees Sumdi perched on the three steps of the burnt building. He wonders if Sumdi also uses a stone to clean himself.
“So will you help us?” asks Guddi.
Chamdi knows that if he tells her he will not steal, she will call him a coward again, so he keeps quiet.
“We will steal puja money from the mandir. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” says Chamdi. “The one around the corner?”
“Hah, that one. Ahead of it there’s a doctor’s dispensary.”
“Why is there money in that mandir? It’s so small.”
“In two days they will do a puja for Lord Ganesha. There is a politician, Namdeo Girhe his name is. The story is that when his mother was carrying him, she was very poor. She had no place to stay. She used to sleep outside the door of the temple. People saw that she was going to have a child so they gave her money. She gave birth just outside the temple and the young priest in the temple told her that because her child was a son of the temple, blessed by Ganesha, her son would one day be a big man. And it’s come true. So lots of people believe in this temple. Every year, on his birthday, Namdeo Girhe comes here to pray and places money near Ganesha’s feet to make him happy. The money is collected in a plastic box and the priest lets the money remain there until night to show everyone how much Namdeo Girhe cares about God, and what a magical temple it is. That way more and more people come to the temple all year round and the priest gets fat.”
“I can’t steal God’s money.”
“We are his children. He won’t mind.”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“I’m fatter than you.”
“So?”
“Look,” she says. “You know why I spoke to you? You’re as thin as a stick.”
“So what?”
“You’ll have to slip in through the bars of the temple window.”
“What?”
“Do you think the door is going to be open for you? We’ll put oil all over your body so that you can slip in through the bars of the window. If you get caught, no one will be able to hold on to you because you’ll be so slippery.”
“Have you done this many times?”
“Never.”
“Then how do you know all this?”
“My father … my father used to steal. He would talk with Amma and we would hear. It was his idea to rob the temple. But he died on the day of the puja only.”
“I’m sorry,” says Chamdi. “I cannot steal.”
“Why not?”
“It’s wrong.”
“It’s wrong? What about my father dying? And what about Amma going mad and not having any milk in her body to feed her own child? That’s also wrong, no?”
“Yes …”
“Then it’s right to steal. We just want to get out of here. We are doing nothing wrong. If my brother could run, we would not be asking you.”
Guddi looks into Chamdi’s eyes. A strange feeling wells up inside Chamdi, as though he has known her before. He tries to look away but he cannot. Guddi rubs her nose and the orange bangles she wears catch the morning sun. Everything seems perfect.
Except that she is asking him to steal. Mrs. Sadiq always warned all the children: Remember, once a thief, always a thief. She used to wave her hand back and forth as she said this and Chamdi is shocked to see Mrs. Sadiq’s hand in front of him right now.
But he quickly realizes that it is Amma’s hand and she is bringing something to her mouth. Guddi lets out a small “oh,” and she reaches out to prevent Amma from eating, because Amma has found a clump of her own hair on the ground and has mistaken it for food.
Rather than look at Amma, Chamdi gazes up at the tree he slept under. It is as though this tree is afraid to reach far out into the sky, or perhaps its branches do not know the way to heaven. If only he could climb this tree, he might be able to catch a glimpse of the orphanage and talk to Jesus. He would ask if it is okay to steal to help someone.
“What are you looking up for?” asks Sumdi. “Waiting for food to fall from the sky?”
Chamdi smiles. It is strange being with this brother-sister. Even though he met them only last night, he feels as though he knows them better than most of the children at the orphanage. Apart from Pushpa, he did not feel close to any of the children. He wonders how Pushpa is. He feels guilty that he promised to read her the story of the Hunger Princess but he ran away instead. He hopes Mrs. Sadiq explains to Pushpa why he had to leave.
“Come with me,” says Sumdi.
Chamdi follows Sumdi down the road. He spots a cow lazing on the footpath. A man walks past the cow carrying an air conditioner in his hand. The cow is in this man’s way and he tries to shoo it away, but it does not budge.
“Where are we going?” asks Chamdi.
“To beg.”
“To beg?”
“Maharaj, don’t be so surprised. You are a man of the streets, no? So why is begging bad? It’s the family business.”
“I … but what do we do?”
“First, you tell me the truth.”
“About what?”
“About where you are from. Otherwise I will beat you on the head with my polio leg.”
Chamdi knows that there is no point in carrying on with his act. He needs Sumdi’s help in a city like this. If they become friends, he can tell Sumdi about his plans to find his father. But what if they both laugh at him—especially her? But if a car had not crushed her father, if he was lost but living, she too would hope the way he does.
“Do I have to beg you to tell me?” asks Sumdi. “We must not beg from each other. The enemy is out there, sitting in taxis.”
“I’m from an orphanage.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t know what an orphanage is?”
“Hah yaar, I don’t know.”
“An orphanage is where they keep children without parents.”
“There’s another name for such a place.”
“What?”
“Bombay,” says Sumdi. “You’re smiling, but it’s true. This city is our home and it looks after us. Very badly. Bombay is a whore.”
Chamdi has never enjoyed strong language like this. The Koyba Boys spoke like that and he never found it helpful.
“What’s the matter?” asks Sumdi. “You don’t like me abusing Bo
mbay?”
“No, I just …”
“Or you don’t like swearing?”
“That.”
“Few more days with me and you’ll be shouting gaalis like ’Pimp!’ and ’Son of a Pimp!’ from the rooftops. Anyway, at least you admitted that you’re not from the road.”
“How did you know?”
“So many clues. Just look at your teeth. All clean, in one line, so well mannered. That means you brush them.”
“Yes.”
“See my teeth.”
Sumdi opens his mouth wide and Chamdi can see that his teeth are chipped and jagged, and they seem to grow on top of one another as if they are fighting for space. Chamdi turns away because Sumdi’s breath is so strong.
“Not a single day I have brushed my teeth. But don’t be fooled. They might be yellow and eaten up but I could snap your forearm into two if I wanted. Not that I would bite your forearm, but I would crack it if you challenged me.”
“No, I believe you …”
“But more than your teeth, your style gave you away.”
“My style of what?”
“You act like a prince. You think and then you speak. When I speak, the words just come out … like vomit.”
As they walk and talk, a juicewala’s cart catches Chamdi’s eye. A plastic mixer containing orange juice rests on a glass case in which the oranges and mosambis are stored. Some of the oranges are arranged on top of the glass case. Chamdi marvels at the manner in which these oranges stay balanced in the shape of a pyramid, as if the juicewala is some sort of juggler or circus man. Chamdi would love to see the juicewala’s cart at night. Surely the oranges and mosambis would shine brilliantly when the bulb in the glass case is switched on.
“Hope for a solid traffic jam,” Sumdi tells Chamdi.
“Why a jam?”
“So that cars are stuck and we have more time at the signals. Do I have to explain everything to you? Can’t you think for yourself?”