A Fine Balance (14 page)

Laughing, yawning, stretching, they smoked away the time, temporary kings of the broken sofa, masters of the tiny flat, when their illicit leisure was invaded by a battering at the front door.

“I know you are in there!” shouted the visitor. “This padlock on the door does not fool me!”

The tailors froze. The pounding continued. “Paying the rent means nothing! We know what goes on behind the padlock! You and your illegal business will be thrown out on the street!”

The tailors understood – it had to do with the landlord. But what was this about a padlock? The banging at the door ceased. “Quick, on the floor!” whispered Ishvar, in case the door-banger decided to look through the window.

Something fell through the mail slot, then there was silence. They waited a few moments before venturing to the door. A large envelope addressed to Mrs. Rustom Dalai lay on the floor. Ishvar turned the latch. The door moved half an inch and hit the outside hasp, confirming the padlock’s presence.

“She locked us in,” fumed Omprakash. “That woman. What does she think?”

“Must be a reason for it. Don’t get upset.”

“Let’s open her letter.”

Ishvar snatched it from his hand and put it aside. They tried to get comfortable again on the cushions, lighting up new beedis, but the intrusion had soured the pleasure. The sofa’s sagging comforts hardened into lumps of discontent. Stray threads clinging to their clothes reminded them of the work waiting in the back room. The clock displayed its baleful warning: she would soon be home. Soon, all of this prohibited behaviour would have to cease.

“She cheats us,” grumbled Omprakash. “We should sew directly for the export company. Why does she have to be in the middle?” His lips made small, careful movements that became words, his smouldering beedi hanging in uneasy equilibrium at one corner of his mouth.

Ishvar smiled indulgently. The insolence of the dangling beedi was aimed, lethal as a toy gun, at Dina Dalai. “Soon as it’s time for her to come, your face looks like you ate a sour lime.”

He continued, his tone more serious, “She is in the middle because we have no shop. She lets us sew here, she brings the clothes, she gets the orders from the company. And besides, with piecework we have more independence –”

“Leave it, yaar. She treats us like slaves, and you talk of independence. Making money from our sweat without a single stitch from her fingers. Look at her house. With electricity, water, everything. And what do we have? A stinking shack in the slum. We’ll never collect enough to go back to our village.”

“Giving up already? That’s no way to win in life. Fight and struggle, Om, even if life knocks you around.” He held his beedi between ring and little finger and made a loose fist, raising it to his lips.

“I’ll find out where she goes, you watch,” said Omprakash with a defiant toss of his head.

“Your puff moves beautifully when you do that.”

“Just wait, I’ll get the address of the company.”

“How? You think she will tell you?”

Omprakash went to the back room and returned with a pair of large pointed scissors. He clutched it with both hands and thrust theatrically into thin air. “Hold this at her throat and she will tell us whatever we want to know.”

His uncle whacked him on the head. “What would your father say if he heard you? Stupid words pour from your mouth like stitches from your machine. And just as carelessly.”

Omprakash sheepishly put back the scissors. “One of these days I’m going to cut her out of the middle – I’ll follow her to the company.”

“I didn’t know you could walk through padlocked doors like the Great Goghia Pasha. Or is it Omprakash Pasha?” He paused to draw, then whiffed smoke through his nostrils and smiled at the scowling face. “Listen, my nephew, this is the way the world works. Some people are in the middle, some are on the border. Patience is needed for dreams to grow and give fruit.”

“Patience is good when you want to grow a beard. For what she pays, we couldn’t afford the ghee and wood for our funeral pyre.” He gave his hair a ferocious scratching. “And why do you always talk to her in that silly tone, as though you were an ignorant fellow from the countryside?”

“Isn’t that what I am?” said Ishvar. “People like to feel superior. If my tone helps Dinabai to feel good, what’s wrong in that?” Savouring the final delights of his shrinking beedi, he repeated, “Patience, Om. Some things cannot be changed, you just have to accept them.”

“You want it both ways? First you said struggle, don’t give up. Now you are saying just accept it. Swaying from side to side, like a pot without an arse.”

“Your grandmother Roopa used to say that,” laughed Ishvar.

“Make up your mind, yaar, choose one thing.”

“How can I? I’m just a human being,” he replied, laughing again. Halfway, it changed to coughing, shaking him harshly in its racking embrace. He went to the window, moved the curtain aside and spat. Were he close enough to examine it, he would have seen the usual spot of blood.

A taxi approached as he was withdrawing his head from the window. “Quick, she’s back!” he whispered hoarsely.

They began eliminating the traces of their bad behaviour: plumping the cushions, repositioning the teapoy, pocketing the matchsticks and ashes. A spark flew from the beedi in Omprakash’s mouth, as though to mock his earlier fire-breathing rage. He fanned it away from the upholstery. Drawing one last time at the beedis while running to the back room, they extinguished the stubs and chucked them out the rear window.

Dina paid the taxi and felt inside her handbag for the key ring. The brass padlock, tarnished, hung grim and ponderous. She turned the key with a twinge of guilt, no jailer at heart.

Omprakash stretched out his arms and relieved her of the package. “I heard you arrive.”

“There are lots more,” she said, indicating the bundles of fabric piled outside the door. He looked them over, trying to spot the company name or address.

When everything had been brought inside, Ishvar gave her the envelope. “Someone came banging on the door, saying the padlock did not fool him. He left this for you.”

“Must be the rent-collector.” She put the letter aside without opening it. “Did he see you?”

“No, we stayed hidden.”

“Good.” She went to put away her purse and exchange her shoes for slippers.

“Did you lock us in when you left?” asked Ishvar.

“Didn’t you know? Yes, I had to.”

“Why?” pounced Omprakash. “You think we are thieves or something? We are going to take your possessions and run away?”

“Don’t be silly. What big possessions do I have to worry about? The landlord is the reason. He could barge in while I am gone and throw you out on the street. But if there is a lock, he won’t dare. To break a padlock is to break the law.”

“Very true,” said Ishvar. He was eager to see the design for the new dresses. While his nephew glowered, the tablecloth was whipped off the dining table to make way for the paper patterns.

“How much per dress this time?” interrupted Omprakash, fingering the new poplin.

She ignored him while Ishvar moved the sections around. Like a child with a jigsaw puzzle, he was soon absorbed in its complexities. Omprakash tried again, “Very difficult pattern. Look at all the godets to be inserted for flaring the skirt. We will have to charge more this time, for sure.”

“Stop doing your kutt-kutt,” she scolded. “Let your elders work. Respect your uncle at least if you cannot respect me.”

Ishvar matched the sections against the sample dress, talking to himself. “The sleeve, yes. And the back, with a seam in the middle – yes, it’s easy.” His nephew frowned at him for that admission.

“Yes, extremely easy,” said Dina. “Simpler than the ones you just finished. And the good news is, they are still paying five rupees each.”

“Not possible for five rupees,” said Omprakash. “You said you would bring expensive dresses. This is not worth our time.”

“I have to bring what the company gives. Or they will cancel us from their list.”

“We will do it,” said Ishvar. “To kick at wages is sinful.”

“You do it, then – I cannot do it for five rupees,” said Omprakash, but Ishvar nodded reassuringly at Dina.

She went to the kitchen to make the tea she had promised. The dissension in their midst was good; the uncle would curb the nephew’s rebellion. She squinted at the cups and saucers, at their rose borders. Pink or red? Pink ones for the tailors, she decided, to be set aside with the segregated water glass. Red for myself.

While waiting for the kettle, she checked the chicken wire over the broken windowpanes and found a breach. Those nuisance cats again, she fumed. Sneaking in, prowling for food, or to get out of the rain. And who knew what germs they brought with them from the gutters.

She reinforced the piece, twisting the corners around a nail. The kettle blurted its readiness with a healthy spout of steam. She held back for a vigorous boil, enjoying the thickening haze and the water’s steady babble: the illusions of chatter, friendship, bustling life.

Reluctantly she turned down the flame, and the white cloud dissipated in desultory wisps. She filled three cups and carried in the two with pink roses.

“Ah,” sighed Ishvar, taking the tea gratefully. Omprakash continued to sew without looking up, still sulking. She put it down beside him.

“I don’t want any,” he muttered. Dina returned wordlessly to the kitchen for her own cup.

“Delicious,” said Ishvar when she was back. He slurped noisily, making sounds to tempt his nephew. “Much better than Vishram Vegetarian Hotel.”

“They must be letting it boil-all day,” said Dina. “That spoils it. Nothing like fresh tea when you are tired.”

“Very true.” He took another sip and sighed invitingly again. Omprakash reached for his cup. The other two pretended not to notice. He gulped down the tea thirstily without displacing his angry pout.

Two hours of sewing were left in the day, and he filled them with crooked seams and grumbling. Ishvar was grateful to the clock when it indicated six. Keeping the peace between his nephew and Dinabai was becoming difficult.

Morning was striding towards noon as Ibrahim, the rent-collector, plodding slowly down the pavement, prepared to visit Dina Dalai and demand a reply to the letter he had delivered yesterday. Dignified in his maroon fez and black sherwani, he smiled at tenants he met along the way, saying “Salaam” and “How are you?” He was blessed with an automatic smile; it formed whenever he opened his mouth to speak. This felicitous buccal trick was a liability, though, if the occasion of his message warranted something more in the line of a solemn visage – a touch of frowning, perhaps, for overdue rents.

Ibrahim was an elderly man but looked old beyond his years. In his left hand, still sore from pounding the door yesterday, he carried a plastic folder secured by two large rubber bands. It contained rent receipts, bills, orders for repairs, records of disputes and court cases pertaining to the six buildings he looked after. Some of those disputes dated back to when he was a young man of nineteen, just starting in service with the father of the present landlord. Other cases were more ancient, inherited from Ibrahim’s predecessor.

So thoroughly was everything documented, Ibrahim sometimes felt he was lugging the very buildings around with him. The folder handed down almost half a century ago by the retiring rent-collector had not been of plastic, but rudely fashioned out of two wooden boards bound by a strip of morocco. It had carried with it the previous owner’s smell. A fraying cotton tape, sewn to the leather, went around to secure the contents. The dark, cracked boards had warped badly; when opened, they creaked and released a sweaty tobacco odour.

Young and ambitious as Ibrahim then was, he was ashamed of being seen with this relic. Though it contained nothing but respectable rent receipts, he knew that people would judge it by its cover, which resembled the filthy binders carried by disreputable marketplace jyotshis and fortune-tellers to shelter their quack charts and fake diagrams. That he might be mistaken for one of those odious mountebanks mortified him. He began to harbour grave doubts about this job which forced him to carry around a questionable folder – he felt shortchanged, as though a bazaar vendor had fiddled the weights and tipped the scales unfairly.

Then, on one lucky day, the morocco spine broke. He displayed the wreck at the landlord’s office. The clerk examined it, confirmed its demise from natural causes, and filled out the appropriate requisition form. Ibrahim was given a length of string to make do while the paperwork was processed.

After a fortnight’s delay, the new folder arrived. It was built of buckramed cardboard, very smart and modern-looking, in colour a dignified umber. Ibrahim was delighted. He began to feel optimistic about his prospects in this job.

With the new folder under his arm, he could hold his head high and strut as importantly as a solicitor while making his rounds. It was far more sophisticated than the old one, with generous pouches and compartments. Briefs, complaints, correspondences could now be organized methodically. Which was just as well, because around this time Ibrahim’s duties increased, both at work and domestically.