Cracking India (29 page)

After the initial shock, two or three older women from Papoo's family pull themselves together and move forward to greet and bless him as is ritually required. The elderly and cynical dwarf permits their embraces and then sits back, his spread legs swinging carelessly, and the women, some of them tittering in a shocked way behind the fingers screening their mouths, resume their chattering. I remain rooted to the dirt floor, unable to remove my eyes from him, imagining the shock, and the grotesque possibilities awaiting Papoo.

I sit quietly beside the bride. The women from the groom's family lift her
ghoongat
and comment indulgently on the innocence that permits the child-bride to sleep through her marriage. Bending frequently, stepping over the satiny spread of legs and thighs of about twenty women jammed together on the floor, they exhibit an impressive display of the clothes and the tawdry jewelry they have brought for the bride and her mother.

A little after noon two enormous round copper platters, heaped with fragrant pilaf and goat curry, are brought into the room. The women gather around them and silently fall to eating. The caterers provide a separate china plate for the bride. Muccho shakes her daughter awake, urging: “Come, doll, sit up and eat, doll.” I study Muccho's face with curious eyes. There is a contented smile on her lips—smug and vindicated.

As Papoo struggles groggily to sit up, her eyes swivel weakly under her half-open lids. Muccho shakes her roughly again, and
forming small morsels of rice with her fingers, stroking Papoo's back, feeds her. Papoo chews slowly, absently, her childish, lipsticked mouth slack. “Oi, dopey.
Ufeemi!
Wake up!” says Muccho affectionately. And though the tone of voice calling her an opium-addict is disarmingly facetious, it suddenly strikes me that Papoo has in fact been drugged. I have seen enough opium addicts to realize this. Mr. Bankwalla's and Colonel Bharucha's cooks are both addicted.

Towards evening the
doolha
is brought into the room and made to sit by his comatose bride. He keeps his face covered by the
sehra
but by the way his head shifts I can tell he is slyly ogling me and the young women moving about the room.

Later in the afternoon the Mission padre stands in the door in his long black cassock with a high, white collar. His heavy laced-up boots appear incongruous with his flowing garments. His hair is cropped very short and he has a well-bred and timid expression on his humble face. I wonder if he is the padre whose wife absconded with the seductive tailor.

The women hug their knees and shuffle back to make room for his passage as the padre, accustoming his eyes to the dark, steps hesitantly into Moti's quarters. Holding his gilt-edged Bible and rosary deferentially he makes the sign of the cross and squats before the couple. Papoo is shaken awake and surreptitiously propped up by Muccho as the padre recites the Christian marriage litany in Punjabi.

There are mysterious developments afoot in the servants' quarters behind the Hindu doctor's house paralleling ours. The courtyard has been walled off and a very tall and burly Sikh with curling hair on his legs stands guard outside a high, tin-sheet gate, criss-crossed with wooden beams. There is a padlock the size of a grapefruit on the gate, and a large key hangs from the steel bangle around the Sikh's wrist. He unlocks the gate sometimes to pass the women inside sacks of grain and baskets of vegetables.

The servants evade questions as if there is something shameful going on. Cousin, Adi and I are agog. And on a Sunday afternoon —it is already October—we sneak up the stairs and, minding the holes in the roof, tiptoe to look into the enclosed courtyard. Our servants' quarters roof runs in a continuous line of clay to their roof, demarcated only by a foot-high brick wall.

We assume it's a women's jail, even though they look innocent enough—village women washing clothes, crossing the courtyard with water canisters, chaffing wheat and drying raw mangoes for pickling. There is very little chatter among the women. Just apathetic movements to and fro.

The Sikh guard squats in front of a small water tank in his white cotton drawers, scouring his teeth with a walnut twig. He must have just washed his hair because it is flung round his neck like a coarse scarf to keep it from trailing in the mud.

The guard spots us on the roof and glowers ferociously. As he stands up his hair uncoils and hangs down almost to his knees. We scamper from his view like scared spiders, careful not to fall through the holes where the mud has given way between the decaying rafters.

After a while, taking care to tread quietly and not daring to talk, we peer between the rafters into the dim, smoke-filled
cubicles. I feel a nervous, nauseous thrill, as I make out the dark shapes of women in shalwar-kamizes moving lethargically between their cots. In one of the cubicles a thin long face looks up unseeing through the veil of smoke and the eerie desolation of that pallid face remains stamped on my mind.

The Hindu doctor's house so unobtrusively occupied by our new refugee neighbors sprawls in an ungainly oblong block between the women's jail and Rosy-Peter's annex. Its cement plaster shows beneath scabs of peeling whitewash. I don't know how many people dwell in the abandoned bungalow, but the number of its occupants appears to be increasing. There is more movement behind the windows boarded up with cardboard and newspaper, a greater frequency and laxity in the sudden shouting and subdued chatter.

We still don't know anything about them. Who they are, where they're from. They keep to themselves, unobtrusively conducting their lives, lurking like night animals in the twilight interiors of their lairs, still afraid of being evicted from property they have somehow managed to occupy.

The woman is pulling a faded kamize that is too short for her over a wash-grayed shalwar. Her head is covered by a frayed voile
chuddar
and she is standing before Mother, awkward and uncomfortably tall. I recognize her the moment I see her. Her eyes are downcast and a nervous, apologetic smile—that is more like a twitch—jerks about her lips. I feel a surge of panic. Does Mother know she's interviewing a criminal to replace Ayah? But there is a quality so anxious and despairing about the narrow pallid face that I conceal my knowledge. I would rather trust myself to the dangerous care of the jailbird than betray her: so strong is the drag of guilt and compassion she has exerted on me. She looks at Mother
out of appealing eyes. Docile. Ready to please. So in need. Servilely murmuring: “Yes,
jee,
I will do everything... Anything you want.”

“These are decent folk, mind you! They're not the kind that let fly dog-and-cat abuses,” interjects Imam Din gruffly, leaning against Mother's bedroom door with the proprietory air of an elderly and pampered flunky. “You'll be looked after if you work properly.”

He is as transparent as me. He cannot hide his pity.

“I am not frightened of work, brother,” says the woman in thickly accented, village Punjabi. “I will sweep, clean, milk the buffalo, churn the butter, wash clothes, clean out latrines, make chapatties ... After all, I've been a housewife.”

She stops speaking abruptly and looks unaccountably guilty and even more bashful. Suddenly, folding her knees, she hunkers down on the bedroom floor and draws her
chuddar
forward over her face.

“You won't need to do any of that!” says Mother. She indicates me with her glance. “Here's your charge. All I want you for is the care of the children ... Don't let them out of your sight.”

The woman swivels on her heels and gazes into my eyes so intensely that I feel it is I, and not Mother, who is empowered to employ her. The jerky smile about her lips distends fearfully. “I will guard her like the pupils in my eyes,” she says. “Don't I know how careful one has to be with young girls? Especially these days!” Her tone of voice and choice of words—as of village women uttering platitudes—is grotesque in the obviously straitened and abnormal circumstances of her life.

We call her by her name, Hamida. We can't bear to call her Ayah.

Looking for Ayah. We are all looking for Ayah. Mother and Electric-aunt, heads together, go goos-goosing and whispering, contorting their faces in strange and solemn ways. And when they see
us they hush and dramatically alter their fierce expressions. Their reassembled, we-were-just-talking-of-this-and-that features frighten me more than the news they are attempting to spare me.

Father once again cycles to work, leaving the Morris for Mother. Electric-aunt and Mother drive off, come back, and are off again with such frequency and urgency that I ache with expectation and shattered hope each time I anxiously look into the returning Ayah-less car.

Sharbat Khan returns from the hills and Hari, alias Himat Ali, squatting on his trembling haunches and weeping shamelessly, tells him: “He sprang at me out of a gunnysack, dead!” And wiping his tearing eyes says, “The dead bastard! Didn't he know she'd be alone?”

Wrapped in a blanket, turban wound round his mouth, Sharbat Khan cycles up for low-voiced conversations with Iman Din and Yousaf. He rattles away—sometimes accompanied by Yousaf—and the way their legs pedal, and the way they lean into the wind, I can tell they are looking for Ayah.

Sharbat Khan looks different. His tiger eyes are grim and bloodshot. He drives his foot hard on the pedal of his machine and examines the edges of the knives he sharpens as though he will use them to kill us all. Sometimes he looks at me as if he is trying to probe my soul and search out the aberrations in my personality that made me betray Ayah. Then he shakes his head and bitterly says: “Children are the Devil... They only know the truth.”

I can no longer look into his eyes.