Shining Hero (18 page)

When he arrived, another family had set up there. They had erected a canopy of bamboo sticks and plastic bags from the railings and the woman was lighting a little smokey fire of burning debris. Under any other circumstances Karna would have stood over them shouting demands for them to leave but now he felt too exhausted, despairing, and sorrowful to do anything more than sink down at the small area of pavement left free by this family of intruders.

At once the woman turned from her fire and began flapping her hands at Karna.

‘Get away with you,’ she shouted. ‘What are you doing there? This is our family place.’

‘Where is my mother?’ muttered Karna. He felt dizzy.

‘I don’t know where your mother is but she’s not here,’ said the woman. She began breaking up an old basket and feeding the fire with it. ‘So clear off.’

‘She was here,’ said Karna, but his voice was so low it was almost inaudible. ‘She was dead and she was lying here.’

‘We know nothing about her. Go away,’ said the woman and turned her attention entirely back to the cooking of the evening meal.

The man in the next patch said, ‘They took her body away on a rickshaw.’

‘Where to?’ whispered Karna.

The man shrugged.

When Karna continued to sit on the corner of the pavement, the woman, without looking up from her cooking, shot out her foot and gave Karna a shove. The little boy rolled softly into the gutter and
lay there, sewage water and mud saturating into him. He had no fight left.

Karna lay there all night. The people who had taken his mother’s pavement were still asleep, rolled up in their cloths like corpses, when Karna woke up in the morning.

He rose and walked away knowing that his mother’s piece of pavement was lost to him as well as all the other things.

That day he went back to Chacha Khan. But Chacha flew into a rage at the sight of him. ‘First you demand higher wages, then you walk out for two days and now you expect me to take you back again. Shoo, shoo, off with you. I have another child in your place now and also you were never any good at wrapping the beedis. You never had your mind on it and always seemed to be thinking of other things.’

Karna survived for a week, eating thrown-away scraps on rubbish heaps and crumbs from people eating round the food stalls. He slept wherever he happened to be when tiredness hit him and tried not to think about the days when he had slept cuddled against his mother and ate the food she made him while she looked on, smiling. If he allowed his thoughts to go to Dolly he found it difficult to keep back the tears.

When it seemed to Karna that all the options of life were now closed to him, he felt someone touch him on the shoulder. He looked up and saw a taller boy standing over him.

‘What’s the matter? Why are you crying?’

‘My mother is dead,’ whispered Karna.

‘You had better come with us, then,’ said the boy.

Karna entered a new life. He joined a little band of other orphan boys called ‘kigalis’. Karna and the other kigalis guarded cars when their owners were shopping. This was a lucrative business, whether the owners paid or not, for those who refused to employ the gang would return to find all removable parts gone. Karna would have imaginary conversations with his mother as he squatted waiting for shoppers needing taxis. Karna felt happy among the kigalis though
sometimes he would still go to the place where he and his mother had lived together. He would stand across the road and tell himself, that was where Ma cooked dhall for me. That was where she hung my clothes after she had washed them. He would be there so long that the people who had taken the place for their own would start to shout at him. ‘Go away, boy. Why are you standing there staring at us?’

The boys earned money running for taxis and guarding cars. Sometimes a goonda would burst upon them, as they slept rolled up together in a park, or under some trees on the maidan. Kicking and threatening, they would rouse the children and send them off on some errand that an adult might fail at – stealing drugs, delivering stolen jewels, spying on someone marked out for a mugging.

‘Today I am working for sahibs,’ Karna would tell his mother. ‘You needn’t worry about me any more.’ Or he would say, ‘Now I am a car guardian, Ma,’ as he looked after an Ambassador for a driver who had gone for a pee. And in his mind she would say she was proud of him. ‘Who knows, one day you may be employed as a car-park attendant, wear a uniform, even get a pension. You must be very good at this car-minding job that so many people employ you.’ He did not tell his lost mother of the other side of the business. She had funny old-fashioned ideas about morality. Sometimes Karna would feel guilty because he was making no more effort to keep his promise to his mother. But he could not see what else he could do. If he went back to the Hatibari the people there would only take away his piece of gold, and then he would lose all proof of who he was.

The kigalis had no expenses. They slept in parks or on the pavements and they didn’t even pay for food, for there were restaurants and cafés that gave the boys whatever was left over in the evening. So they spent their money on foreign cigarettes and going to the cinema. After a month among them, Karna managed to see his first film. Sitting in the cheapest seat he watched, hypnotised with happiness, the heroes and heroines of Bollywood sing, fight and dance their way through a magic world of jewels, flowers, peacocks and snowy
palaces. That night, instead of filth and chaos, all he could see were glittering dancers. Instead of the roar of traffic, his ears were filled with the sound of love songs. He went to every film he could afford after that and watched people winning through in the face of illness, poverty, and injustice. He revelled in the love scenes and became breathless with excitement when, in
Aradhana,
the lovers, Rajesh Khanna and Sharmilla Tagore, hide in a dark cave to try to stem their mounting passion. He began to learn the songs from the films he saw and would sing, ‘Roop tera mastana’, ‘Your shape drives me mad’ as he polished windscreens or made off with hubcaps. Soon he had assembled quite a repertoire. People would stop and listen affectionately to the humming of the ragged urchin and they paid him extra because they were amused that someone so small and grubby should be singing of glamorous adult passion. But after he saw the child star, Poopay Patalya, he had eyes only for her and lost interest in all the other film stars. He had been thrilled by her years ago, when he had seen her on the posters and his mother had been teaching him how to read. In fact the little film star’s name was the first word he had managed to read all by himself. Now he went to see every film she acted in.

The first time, Poopay was a ten-year-old bride whose ancient husband had just died. His family and the village elders had persuaded the little girl to commit suttee, telling her that then she would become a saint. Karna wanted to murder the villagers, whose only motivation for allowing a child to die in agony, was to bring profitable pilgrims to their village and thus make them all prosperous. He wanted to dive into the cinema screen and rescue the screaming girl from the blazing funeral pyre.

In the next, Poopay was a street child like Karna himself. Her face was dirty, her clothes ragged. She slept on pavements and washed in gutters. And like Karna, she had dreams of growing rich. He wanted to shout out, ‘I will make you rich, Poopay Patalya. I will give you jewels and beautiful saris as soon as I get money.’

His dreams became all about Poopay. He would imagine meeting her. He would plan the words of love he would say to her.

As Karna became better at catching taxis he began to earn more. But sometimes he would give away all that he had earned that day and be forced to miss the film. Once it had been an ill woman lying on the pavement. Karna had been reminded of his mother, and he bought milk for her. He bought popcorn for a little boy called Vijay before bringing him to where the kigalis were and all that night Karna had hugged the sobbing little boy. But most often he gave to Laika. The girl’s face was so terribly scarred that she could not smile or close one of her eyelids and Karna had spent all his money on a jasmine garland for her hair once, because a man had cringed from her and she had looked so hurt. She was perhaps two years older than Karna. Even she did not know who her parents were – the first thing she could remember was standing on street corners begging. ‘I must have been about two,’ she said. ‘I used to say, ‘No Mama, no Papa, and because I was so little and pretty – for I had not got these scars then – people gave me money. Even at two I was alone.’ People didn’t give her much money anymore because she had grown older and become ugly. A man had tried to rape her when she was eight. She had resisted him and he had slashed her face then raped her all the same.

‘I want to be a prostitute, but how can I with such a face?’ Laika told Karna. The other kigalis would tease Karna for giving his money away. ‘Buy yourself a new shirt instead,’ his friend urged him. He still wore the one his mother had bought for him a year before. Each time he put it on, he would remember Dolly getting him ready for his job at the beedi factory, putting the shirt on, doing up the buttons, stroking his hair tidy with her fingers. Then she would look at him with her head a little on one side and her eyes squeezed up so that she got the whole impression. At last, with a smile of satisfaction, she would say, ‘There, you look like the most handsome boy in the world, my darling Karna.’ But she would not say that now, for the shirt was ripped and far too small for him. His skin was grimed, his nails broken, his hair dull and dirty. If his mother saw him now she
would say sternly, ‘What a mess you are in, Karna. We don’t have to look like beggars even though we are poor.’ Every now and again he would find he had enough money for a new shirt and determine to buy it so that he would not let her down, but whenever it came to it, he found himself unable to part with the old one which had buttons that her fingers had touched. When he felt sad or lonely he would caress those buttons and almost feel his mother’s fingertips against his own.

‘I was nearly mad with sorrow at the losing of my husband the day that boy came,’ Koonty told Shivarani. ‘That is why I did not realise about his eyes until it was too late but now I feel more and more sure that that really was the child.’

‘You said it was a girl,’ protested Shivarani.

Koonty was trembling as though her body was racked with fever, her dry eyes scalded. ‘I never looked. I thought it was a girl because it moved so softly and gently.’

In the Hatipur arrak shop men said to one another, in the old days the Pandavas lost everything because of the malice of their cousins and this time they seem to be losing once again. ‘It is not our fault that the zamindar Pandu died, but only the karma of his family,’ they would say to each other and retell the tale, though everyone had heard it a hundred times, of how the Pandavas had been outwitted by the Kauravas. How, in the end, unable to defeat the Pandavas in open combat the Kauravas had resorted to trickery and invited their cousins to a friendly game of dice. How, in this loaded game the Pandavas had lost everything including their kingdom and Draupadi their wife, and were forced to hide in exile in the forest. ‘In these modern days,’ the old men said, ‘such things do not so often happen but all the same there is much suffering and loss in the family of Pandava already.’

Koonty had Boodi Ayah cut off all her mistress’ hair, then she took off her bangles and her earrings and put them away into her locked box, telling Arjuna, ‘I will never wear these again because I
am a widow, but when you marry your wife may have them.’ Then she put on a plain white sari, and taking her son by the hand walked into the village.

‘Where are we going, Ma?’ asked Arjuna.

‘We are going to find out who killed your father.’

When the people of the village had found the blood of Rahul on the horns of Buttercup and realised that the zamindar had been executed for a murder committed by the cow a horrified silence had fallen on them, so when Koonty arrived among them, they hid behind their doors and dared not come out. The rickshaw wallah saw Koonty walking and did not invite her to ride but instead sat cowering under his rickshaw and hoped she did not see him. People peeped at her from shops and windows but she saw only crows and pye dogs. She stopped when she came to a golden cow with dark-rimmed eyes that was tethered in one of the yards and told her son, ‘That is Buttercup.’ In the dark interior of the hut she could see the family watching and hoping they were unseen. After a while the man came out.

‘That cow belonged to my husband and you have stolen it as well as murdering him,’ said Koonty.

‘It was not me. I was not there. I swear it, Memsahib,’ he said and rushing to the cow undid the rope. ‘Please take your cow, Koonty Ma. I wish I had not accepted it.’

‘It is too late for that,’ said Koonty. ‘Who killed my husband then?’

‘Ravi, son of the misti wallah. Everyone in the village knows it. Everyone in the village saw him strike the blow.’

‘Where are the other cows?’ asked Koonty.

‘Ravi gave them to people in the other villages. There are three in Dattapukur. This is the only one in Hatipur,’ said the man. He was very nervous.

‘Please care for her as though she is your daughter,’ Koonty said and grasping Arjuna by the hand, turned and went walking back to the Hatibari. On the way she told him, ‘When you are old enough you must punish this Ravi.’

‘I will kill him,’ cried Arjuna, and looked forward eagerly to the moment. ‘I will shoot him with my New Market gun.’