A Life Less Ordinary (18 page)

I took the rice and money and went to Nitai, who worked as a caretaker in a house nearby. At the time, his employers, the sahib and memsahib, were not home. I went and rang the bell and he leaned out of the third floor to ask who it was. When he saw me, he came and opened the door. Before I could say anything, he pulled me inside. There I found my brother and his wife, who looked surprised to see me. My sister-in-law would not even speak to me properly, but even so, I asked when they had come there. They did not answer me, but Nitai said they'd come to visit and he'd persuaded them to stay. My instinct was to run away, since they were being so cold to me, but Nitai kept insisting I stay. The more he insisted, the more my brother was displeased, but Nitai did not let me go until he had fed all of us.

After I had left, my brother and Nitai had words about my coming there. Nitai told my brother, “She is your own sister—and she is like a sister to me as well. Look at how she's having to run around in search of work. Things are so difficult for her, but you people are not doing a thing for her. She came to me in search of work and I talked to the people next door, and that is why she came here, to tell me what had happened. If you can come to my home, what is the problem with your sister coming to my home?” And to this my brother, my real, blood brother, replied: “If she comes to see you, I will break my friendship with you.”

Nitai told me all this later. I was not surprised. In fact, I had warned Nitai when I was leaving his home that he could expect my brother to say something unpleasant about my coming to see him. And I thought to myself,
If this is what my own brother thinks of me, why should I be surprised at what others say?

The following day, I went to Nitai to ask if the people in the house next door had said anything to him yet. Nitai said, “Are they still giving you the runaround? How are you managing to feed the children?” He knew very well how my brother treated me. “Wait here. I'll go and check with them.” And leaving me there, he went to see the memsahib.

I learned later that he asked her why she did not give me a clear answer. “Why don't you just tell her whether you want her to work or not? What's the point in keeping her hanging?” The memsahib did not get angry at this at all. She said to him, “All right, son, I'll let you know by tomorrow morning.” She kept me waiting like this for another week or ten days and then suddenly, one afternoon, without warning, she came to Nitai and said, “Go and get her quickly. Tell her if she wants to work here she'd better come at once.” So Nitai rushed to find me, and said, “Come quickly! She's calling you.” I went at around four or five in the afternoon and she kept me there till eight. I was worried that I had left my children without telling them anything. Around eight o'clock, the memsahib came and said to me, “I can give you a place to stay but not straightaway. It will take some time, but I'll let you know. For the moment, you will have to come like this every day and work.” I had no choice in the matter, so I agreed.

The next day, I got to work around eight in the morning. I saw then that I was one of four people working there and my job was to work inside the house. They seemed to like my work a great deal. There was another girl like me working there, and in the beginning, she would not talk to me because she did not realize I was a Bengali. One day I spoke to her in Hindi and asked her where her home was. When she said Kolkata, I spoke to her in Bengali, and asked if she was Bengali. She was quite taken aback and looked at me in surprise. “I'm Bengali, too,” I explained, “and we can talk to each other in our own language.” But the owners did
not like their servants talking to each other. If they saw their servants sitting, standing, or just talking, they would immediately pull them up. The Bengali girl was happy that I was from the same place and she told me that she felt reassured now that she knew where I was from. “I've been quite lonely,” she said, “and it's nice to know there is someone I can talk to, but our mistress does not like us talking to each other, so what can we do?” I thought,
Well, there's nothing much we
can
do.
I had no alternatives. I needed the job, so I would have stayed on whatever the conditions. I had nowhere else to go.

Barely had a few days gone by when one day the memsahib called out to me, “Baby, come here.” I hurried to her, worried that something had happened for her to call out to me like that. “Go and pack your belongings,” she said, “and get your children and come here.” But how could I do that? Just pack up everything on their say-so and bring it all there? Apart from anything, I would have to bathe the children, wash and dry the clothes…so I said to her, “I can't manage this today. I will come after two days. I've lived with discomfort for so many days, a few more won't matter. I'll finish everything that needs to be done in the house and get the children's hair cut and do all the other things I need to do.” But this made the memsahib very angry. “When you did not have a place to stay you were begging for one, and now that I am giving you one, you don't seem to want it!” Why should I object? What could be better for me? I wondered. At the moment, I have to leave my small children behind and come this far to work and who knows what they have to listen to in my absence. Then when I get back after work, they come running to me, crying out “Ma, Ma!” in such pathetic voices that I feel terrible, and every day they ask me why I am so late. How can I tell them that if you are working for someone else, you can only be free when they give you their permission?

But the memsahib was not mollified. So I said, “All right. I'll go tonight and fetch my children and bring everything.”

“Not tonight, go right
now
. Leave aside what you are doing and bring your things right away.”

I did as I was told and quickly made my way home. My elder brother saw me and was surprised. “So early today? Is something wrong?”

“I've come to fetch the children,” I said. “The memsahib has told me to bring everything at once…”

“Go, go!” he said “That's excellent. Go quickly.”

I thought,
They'll all be relieved to see me go.
My brother had found my elder son a job in some house, but he hadn't told me where it was and I had no idea how to find him. So I asked him to keep an eye out for him and I collected my things, took my younger son and my daughter with me, and rushed back to the memsahib's house. By the time we arrived, it was around eight or nine at night. I rang the bell and the memsahib and the Bengali servant girl came out at once. The memsahib said, “What took you so long? Go now, go and sleep. There's no need to do any work right now.” I thought,
She hasn't even asked if we have eaten anything or not.
Luckily I had bought the children some things to eat from the shop because I thought there wouldn't be time to cook.

We managed to get through the night somehow. From the next day, the burden of work increased so much that sometimes I barely had time to breathe. I couldn't understand why, but people were always after me: do this, do that, there's work to be done here, and here…and because they had given me a place to stay, I couldn't even say anything. Sometimes I did not even have the time to cook proper food for the children, and no one seemed to be concerned. Often I'd be working till eleven at night and there was no concern that my children might be hungry or that
I needed to go and check on them. So I had to cook for the next day before I went to bed at night and this would often mean that it would get very late. In the morning I had to be up before six—memsahib called for me every morning. I'm a light sleeper, so I'd wake at the first call but even so, she'd keep calling out until she saw me.

Memsahib's daughter worked in an office in Delhi and had to leave home by eight, before which I had to get her breakfast ready. In the evenings, she came back around six. I was required to wait at the gate for her bus to arrive and as soon as she got down, I'd take her bag and anything else she had and walk her into the house. Some days, if I was late, I would get a shouting. I also had to keep some fruit ready for her to eat, and as soon as she sat down I'd offer her tea, water, sherbet, whatever she wanted. Then, if she wanted, I had to massage her head or her feet or whatever: the work was never-ending.

Sometimes the sahib told his wife, “Look, this girl also needs some rest. Why don't you give her a bit of time off? I'm sure she'd like to spend a little time with her children…” But his wife did not like this. I could understand all this, but I kept my silence—after all, I had my children. If she threw me out where would I go? There was no way I could live with my brothers, but I couldn't manage without going to their homes, either, because that was the only way I could get news of my elder son—and then there was my memsahib, who would not let me go anywhere. If I ever asked her if I could go and get some news about my son, she'd say no, not right now, there's too much work. If I said I had to go and buy provisions, she'd tell me to go and come back by a certain time. If I was late she would shout at me. I wasn't allowed to go anywhere, or to talk to anyone. It was really difficult to stay there like this. But I did not know anyone whom I could ask to help me find some other work. There were other people working in that house,
but somehow she did not get at them in quite the same way as she did with me. I was the one who was made to work the hardest—perhaps she thought that since she had given me room to live with my children, she had a greater claim on my time.

In some ways, things were not so bad. I lived in a large house. We ate reasonably well. I was getting paid regularly, and I had even managed to save a little bit. But I missed my son, and often I would just sit and weep thinking of him. The Bengali girl encouraged me to ask our memsahib for time off to go and look for my son. “Go on, ask her,” she said, “what's the use of crying like this? I don't know how you cope, not knowing what has happened to your son.”
Yes
, I thought,
only I knew how I was managing.

One day, on the way back from the market, I decided to go to my brother's house. My son was sitting outside. It was terrible. He seemed to have all kinds of cuts and bruises on his hands and feet and he couldn't walk properly. His foot was bleeding. I was so upset to see him, I wondered if he even got fed where he was working. I decided to take him to the doctor—my brother saw him as I was leaving and came and said, “Why don't you send the boy home? If you don't want to go back don't go, but send the boy back to his father. Or else, take him away from here.”

I said, “Brother, I live in someone's house. I already have two children with me there. They won't let me have another child with me. Please let him stay on with you for a while until I can find another job or a house and I will come back and take him away.” Then I turned to leave.

Back at the house, memsahib gave me job after job: do this, no, do that, finish this first…I realized that she was annoyed with me for being late. Finally she asked, “Why were you so late?” So I told her. “I stopped by at my brother's house. I wanted to see my son. He's not well and I had to take him to the doctor. I will go again tomorrow.”

She was furious. “Yes, yes, go. Go every day, why don't you? Leave your work and go off, wander about outside.”

I thought,
I had hardly been wandering about—when had I ever had a chance to even take a leisurely walk?
I did not like her attitude to me at all. She wouldn't let me go to see my son, and if ever he came to the house to see me, she would not let him enter. I had to go outside to speak to him and even that was only allowed for a limited period of time. I was starved for my son, and I thought, surely he wanted sometimes to talk to his mother and his brother and sister? My Bengali friend sympathized with me, and she encouraged me to leave and look for another job. How will you manage like this? she kept asking me. And she was right, concern for my son was killing me. I was worried about what he was eating, how he was living…and because of this I couldn't eat properly, either. My heart wasn't in my work…and I had to listen to recriminations all the time.

The family I worked with had a dog called Kesfo. He gave me much more love and attention than that family ever did. When I was sad, he would come and cuddle up to me, lick my feet, nuzzle me with his nose. He understood my sadness. And if I responded by stroking him a little, his tail would begin to wag. Soon we became such good friends that he refused to be looked after by anyone else. I was the one who had to feed him—he would refuse to eat if someone else got his food. I had to take him out for a walk so he could relieve himself. And if I left my door open, he would run into my room, jump on my bed, and settle down there. If I was asleep, he would try to wake me and I understood that he needed to go out. I was also happy to take him out, for when I went out with him, I felt completely safe: no one dared to trouble me whether it was morning or night when I was with him.

Memsahib and sahib often went out and came back very late, sometimes around two or three in the morning, and I had to stay
awake for them and let them in when they came. The other servants, including the Bengali girl, Anjali, were usually asleep by this time. Anjali and the cook, Bhajan, had an odd relationship. Suddenly she would stop talking to him, and he would come to me and say, “Baby, tell her to speak to me.” They'd fight and bicker all the time, and then they'd come running to me for help. But if I tried to tell them not to fight, it made no difference. All this came to an end the day Bhajan heard that his mother was very ill. He had a letter from his father and was so upset to hear about his mother that he began to cry. He told me his news, and also that he had asked memsahib to give him some time off so he could go and see his mother and she had refused. I felt very sorry for him. “Go and show her the letter,” I urged him, “it may help to change her mind.” Instead, he showed the letter to the sahib and he agreed to give him time off. Sahib treated us much better than memsahib, and sometimes when she was angry with me, he would step in and placate her.