Shining Hero (21 page)

And then Karna saw Arjuna sitting in the car and let go his hold of the other boy’s legs. The boy hit the ground with a crash and shriek of curses.

Inside the car Karna saw that Arjuna’s hair was brushed and his
hands clean. He wore a starched white shirt, a pair of flannel trousers and a tie. On his lap lay an open book. A bubble of bitterness arose in Karna, because this boy did not have to write words in dust, or read things from grease-stained paper but had a new clean book to read from. If Arjuna wanted a shirt someone bought it for him, if he wanted to go somewhere he was taken in a posh car.

Arjuna looked up, saw Karna peering in, gasped then glared. The two stared at each other grimly. Then Karna stuck out his tongue. Arjuna glowered and stuck out his tongue too.

‘Hey you,’ shouted Basu to Karna. ‘Stop that and get your dirty fingers off the car.’

‘I know that boy,’ cried Boodi Ayah. ‘He’s the one that stole Koonty Memsahib’s jewel.’

‘It’s the boy who said he was my brother, but my mother saw him and said he wasn’t. He’s just a dirty street boy and a thief,’ said Arjuna.

‘He’s got Koonty’s jewel has he? Let me to talk to him,’ Shivarani said. ‘Stop the car, Basu.’

‘Arjuna Baba will catch something if that boy comes too near,’ protested Boodi.

Outraged, Karna wriggled round till he had his back to the window, pulled his shorts down, flashed his bare bottom in Arjuna’s direction, then lost his balance and fell. Malti began to giggle. Bhima was already roaring with laughter. Basu was outraged. ‘Look what the filthy little kid is doing, Memsahib.’

‘Koonty is my mother and she’s supposed to be looking after me,’ shouted Karna pulling his shorts up again. ‘But she told her servants to chase me instead even though I’ve got a gold medal with her name on it.’

The car began to rock as the other boys took advantage and began swiftly to remove the rear lights.

‘Let me see it,’ said Shivarani.

‘Tell my mother to come and find me and then I will show it to her.’

‘I am her sister.’

‘I won’t let you see it. Only the Koonty Ma.’ If Koonty really was his mother she would come for he remembered all the times Dolly had searched for him, calling out his name, asking people, ‘Have you seen my son, Karna?’

‘He has that medal. I saw it on his neck,’ cried Boodi. ‘You must take it back from the thieving rascal, even though now Koonty Ma is dead.’

‘Koonty is dead?’ gasped Karna.

‘Yes,’ said Shivarani. She was amazed at the expression of shock and horror that had come over the urchin’s face.

‘You’re lying,’ shrieked Karna.

‘It’s true.’

There was a long pause as Karna studied her face, then as he saw the truth there he let out a wild wail of grief because his mother had died all over again.

‘Where did you get it?’ asked Shivarani.

‘It was round my neck when my mother found me.’ Karna’s voice was low and expressionless now, because he had just been bereaved a second time.

‘Where did she find you?’

‘In the river. She was a dhobi.’

Ah, that explains it, thought Shivarani. The dhobi woman had obviously found the gold chain in the river and put it onto her own child. Shivarani knew that no newborn baby could survive a journey from the Hatibari to Calcutta alone, and floating down the river. And also Koonty’s child would have been a year older than Arjuna and this boy was shorter than him by half a head and looked a year younger. She said, ‘So, since my sister is dead, let me see that medal, Karna, so that I know if you are telling the truth.’

Karna edged up the car, looked furtively from left to right, then pulled out the medal surreptitiously. It was the right one. Koonty’s name glittered in the sun. Shivarani reached out, made a grab for it.

With a yell of fury, thrusting the medal back in, Karna leapt out of her reach.

‘After him, Basu,’ ordered Shivarani. ‘Get my sister’s medal back from him,’ but Karna was running.

The chief minister came to open the street children’s day centre and in his speech said how impressed he was with Malti and her two friends for making the lives of poor children a little easier. The Calcutta children had been cautious, fearing a police trap in which they would be gathered up and sent off to an institution or children’s village. They had heard of such things happening to both children and adults during Indira Ghandi’s emergency and their freedom was more important to them than any amount of food or clothes. They came in nervously, ready to run if needed and were greeted at the gates by Bhima. He had painted red lips on the side of his fist which looked like a talking mouth and as each child passed, the talking fist said, ‘Hello, how nice to see you. What’s your name?’ The children, who had never been greeted by anyone before, let alone a talking fist, were unable to stop themselves from giggling. And they shouted with laughter when Bhima’s fist mouth snatched a sweet and gobbled it. They grabbed at the sweets they were offered at first, because they were unable to believe that the gift was not a mistake. No one had ever given them anything in their lives. Whatever they owned they had to grab or steal and they snatched wildly when the clothes were handed out. When they were bathed and dressed in their new clothes, they were seated on the ground and given a tin plate. Malti, Bhima and Shivarani went round and doled out mutton curry, boiled rice, curds, vegetable curry and dhall which the children bolted down as though, if they did not hurry, someone would take it from them. ‘You look like a good chutney server,’ Bhima said to Arjuna giving the boy a jar and a spoon. ‘Go round and give them each a dab.’

Shivarani thought that Arjuna had not seemed so carefree since his mother died. Perhaps since his father died. He danced joyfully behind Bhima as he gave out the chutney, asking the children, ‘Is that enough? Shall I give you more?’ Bhima had made him come alive again. After they had eaten Bhima taught the children to make a
sun-catching cradle with a bit of string, then he taught them a nursery rhyme: ‘The rain is falling, tapur tipur and floods have come in the river. The Lord Shiva has three wives, one chops and cooks, one eats, and one gets in a rage and goes home to her father.’ He followed this with the word game, ‘I have a frog. What frog?’ Arjuna was at first amazed that these children, some of whom were years older than he was, had never before heard it, then he joined in eagerly.

All that day, no matter what she was doing, or who she was talking to, Shivarani’s attention was on Bhima. This is how it was for her, these days. No matter what she was doing, her ears could not stop listening to the funny, silly things he said and even after she left him in the evening she would hear his voice inside her head. Bhima was in her dreams, she woke in the morning with thoughts of him. She realised with a shock, at one point during that day, that the chief minister had been talking to her for ages and she had not heard a thing he’d said because Bhima was telling the children the Mahabharata story of Arjuna and the parrot. Later, ordering the children to follow him and do everything he did, he led them round the yard, hopping on one leg, the children copying him or going on hands and knees, or waving his arms round like a windmill with Arjuna and a hundred pavement children windmilling their arms too. For the first time in days Arjuna was laughing and playing again and Shivarani thought, ‘What a wonderful man Bhima is and what a wonderful father he will be.’

From then on increasing numbers of children came eagerly to the centre, till by the end of the week, when Malti arrived to open up there would be a mob already waiting to dash in the moment the gate was opened. After a fortnight there were so many children they hardly fitted into what had seemed at first like a generous space, and Shivarani and Malti were endlessly going round the countryside trying to raise funds or get people to donate rice, vegetables and clothes.

Shivarani at first told herself that the reason she was staying on, week after week, when she had so much more to do, was because she was waiting for Karna to turn up. She could not admit, even to
herself, her true reason for staying on. She still looked out for Karna, though she was losing hope of finding him.

Swiftly the story of the wife of the Hatibari, who had wrapped a chain round her waist and drowned herself out of grief for her husband, spread around the countryside. The act had been almost suttee, people felt, and that made Koonty almost a saint. Pilgrims started arriving from other villages to see the place where the Hindu wife had died and to throw marigolds into the water. The misti wallah began to cook ‘Koonty Ma shandesh’ to sell to them. They sold out by midday. The darjees stitched Koonty’s initials onto the clothes of children so that Koonty Ma would protect them from demons. The tea wallah was so busy he was forced to employ two extra boys. The garland wallah sold marigold garlands that he swore were exact replicas of the one Koonty Ma had round her neck when she went into the water. The owner of the arrak shop had to double his Calcutta order. Shivarani began to feel angry, accusing people of making profits out of her sister’s sorrow, but the people of Hatipur were unashamed. ‘You should be proud of Koonty Ma, who has behaved as the perfect Hindu wife and also is better off now, for the life of a widow is a terrible one in this country of ours.’

Shivarani’s anger was partly from guilt. Koonty had often said, ‘I could not bear to be a widow. I would kill myself if my husband died,’ but Shivarani had become afraid that it would never have really happened if she hadn’t told her sister that lie about the dead baby. It was only after Shivarani had told Koonty that she knew for sure that the baby died in the river, that Koonty had seemed to lose all hope.

DR Uncle felt guilty too and kept wondering why they had not noticed. ‘At the moment of the goddess’ immersion the boat gave a tremendous lurch. We all had to cling to the sides and were thrown about all over the place. At the time I assumed it was the wash from Durga’s sinking, but now realise it must have been the moment that
Koonty went in too. It was only when we came to moor the boat that we discovered the chain was missing.’

‘The whole thing comes from the way women are treated in this country,’ Shivarani raged. ‘My sister would be alive now if there was compassion for widows, instead of contempt.’ She planned to devote herself from now on to the welfare of women, and in particular widows.

When Shivarani took Arjuna and Boodi Ayah back to the Hatibari she worried that Arjuna’s sadness would return but the days in Calcutta had done him good, and he leapt from the car and rushed to see his cousins, hardly remembering to say goodbye to her. It was, thought Shivarani, surprised but relieved, as though the bad things that had happened had been erased from his mind. It was just before she left that she found him sitting alone on the front steps of the house, chiselling a stick.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘An arrow. I need to know how to make them for the day I am big enough to humbelate Ravi like my mother told me to,’ he said without looking up.

She drove away, her anxiety back.

Back in Malti’s mother’s house she packed and made her arrangements for the trip to the villages then went around to the YMCA where Bhima was staying. She found him in his room. He was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette, looking at the ceiling, but he sprang up at the sight of her. ‘My glorious Shivarani, how wonderful to see you.’ He did a joking bow and an exaggerated motion inviting her to sit on the only chair. ‘So you are off in the morning. How will we manage without you?’

‘Come out with me,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you dinner at Amber.’

‘Shiv, Shiv. Don’t tempt me. I haven’t a bean at the moment.’

‘I’ll pay, Bhima. Please come.’

He shook his head. ‘I will not be able to take you anywhere in return.’

‘You don’t have to.’ But she could not persuade him. How stupid of her not to realise that he had no money, she thought later. The day would come, of course, when he would get a job, but now he was still a student and presumably his adoptive parents were not rich.

She left Calcutta for the villages early in the morning and as she slowly cruised past the children’s centre, over the sound of children’s laughter, she heard Bhima’s voice singing them a story. She was possessed with a huge temptation to forget the women, to turn the car, go back to the centre and stay there forever.

Karna was practising making himself look more like the son of a zamindar so that the next time Shivarani Ma saw him, she would believe that he was Koonty’s son. In the cinema he would carefully study characters who came from such houses as the zamindari and later practise the way they walked and arranged their features. He had lately mastered the gesture of twirling a moustache though it would be several years before he would have such a thing. He would stand before the posters of films, and study every detail of the clothes of the aristocrats. He had already bought a cream-coloured kurta with red glass buttons that looked so like rubies, that he thought no one would ever tell the difference. And a pair of curl-toed slippers and a large bright wristwatch.

That night, as he slept on the pavement in the snuggle of his kigalis, he dreamed that Shivarani looked out of the window of her black car and said, ‘Now that you are wearing those curl-toed slippers, I know you are my sister’s son and I am sorry I did not believe you at first.’

He woke suddenly with the feeling of her arms round him.

It was not Shivarani who held him so tightly, but a scarfaced goonda with a mouthful of golden teeth. Shocked at having been taken unawares, Karna, screaming, tried to struggle free. The other
children woke too and tried to pull Karna from the goonda’s grasp, but it was too late. The man already had the boy in his arms and leaping out of the scrum of sleeping children, began to run.