Shining Hero (3 page)

Later he told her mother, ‘She was trying to rescue a kitten, I think, though I can’t get her to talk about it.’ He felt he was doing well, impressing the mother with what an understanding husband he was going to be. ‘I heard something. A sound of mewing in the water.’

‘She was always very kind to animals,’ said Koonty’s mother and secretly thought that perhaps the zamindar’s family would be satisfied with a smaller dowry, now that they had discovered what a compassionate bride they were getting. ‘She would sacrifice herself for some small creature.’

Later the young zamindar presented Koonty with a kitten, but at the sight of the furry mewling thing she began to cry and thrust it from her. ‘Take it away. I don’t even want to look at it.’

Bowed with drops of toil and languor, low, a chariot driver came,
Loosely held his scanty garment and a staff upheld his frame
.
Karna now a crowned monarch to the humble Suta fled,
As a son unto a father reverentially bowed his head
.

The Emperor Aurangzeb suffered from a carbuncle until an East India Company official called Job Charnock found a physician who managed to cure it. As a reward, Job was granted a tract of land eighty miles up the Hoogly river by the Nawab of Bengal and there he founded the city of Calcutta.

By the end of the eighteenth century Calcutta was the capital of the East India Company’s government, with an opulent and lively social life and opportunities for making a quick fortune for a lucky few. To this day, throughout the town, grand Western-style buildings, now crumbling, point back to its imperial past.

Dolly, her impoverished parents’ eleventh child, was born in the house where once William Hickey had dined with his face covered with blood, because he had become ‘sadly intoxicated’ at a previous get-together and had fallen while dismounting from his phaeton.

At the time of Dolly’s birth, more than a hundred families were living in considerable squalor and poverty in Hickey’s one-time grand residence. But because the new baby was born in the year of India’s independence her parents said, ‘Perhaps the goddess is going to bless us at last even though this is only a female child.’ For this reason, when she was old enough, they sent Dolly to the local school although their other daughters had never been give such an opportunity.

Each evening Dolly would come home and as she helped her mother pick through the rice for stones or roll the chupatties she would chatter joyfully about the things she had learnt that day. ‘We did fractions,’ she would announce, as she crushed the spices on the great thick slab of stone. Splashing water from the brass jar onto the seeds and pods and barks, she would heave the heavy stone roller over the top. Rolling, splashing, crushing she would tell her mother, ‘Did you know that the Moguls ruled India before the British and that this is the first time for ages that we Indians have been free?’ Or, as she stirred the great pan of simmering milk, keeping the iron spoon going to stop the milk boiling over or burning at the bottom, she would tell her mother about trade winds, or magnetism.

Sometimes the father would say worriedly, ‘Do you think all this education is spoiling her? Perhaps she is getting too much of it and won’t be able to find a husband.’

‘She is not neglecting her domestic duties,’ said the mother.

Later, after her parents and her ten siblings slept, Dolly sat by the light of a kerosene lamp and did her homework. She was determined to do well. She planned one day to live in a proper house, not a room in the bustee. If she passed her exams and got a good job, when she was grown up her children would have a bed each and they would eat mutton curry every day. Sometimes one of the babies would wake and cry, disturbing her. Then she would take it on her knee and joggle it on one arm while going on with her writing.

‘My teacher says I will certainly get into university. He is sure I will get a scholarship,’ she told her parents.

Her father’s face was stern, her mother’s anxious. ‘What? What?’ cried Dolly, suddenly afraid.

‘All this education is not needed for a woman,’ said her father.

‘There are better things for a woman to do with her life than to study,’ said her mother.

They had found Dolly a husband.

‘But I don’t want a husband,’ wailed the girl. ‘I am only thirteen. I’m too young to get married.’

‘I was married at ten,’ said her mother.

Dolly pinched lips and refrained from saying, ‘I don’t want my life to be like yours.’ Instead she said, ‘Baba, Ma, please. I am doing so well at school and if I get into university I will get a good job. I will become a teacher, maybe.’

‘How long will this take?’ asked her father.

‘Four years. Five years.’ Dolly was shivering.

‘We cannot go on feeding so many,’ said Dolly’s father. ‘We cannot spend all this on one when there are so many others who have a need. Anyway you are only a girl and the money must be spent on the boys.’

‘I could earn some money from teaching now, maybe,’ pleaded Dolly.

‘Teach who? In this village?’ Her father was scornful. ‘Who can afford to pay a young ignorant girl to teach them? Anyway there is a school that costs nothing already. And after you have finished university you will be too old for marriage.’

‘You can go on studying after you are married. There will be nothing to stop you then. You will be living in a company compound with all kinds of facilities. There will be many opportunities open to you there,’ her mother consoled her. ‘As it is we have to make a great sacrifice for your marriage. There is the big expense of the wedding feast and also the dowry. A large amount of our savings will have to be spent.’

Cheered by the thought of going on with her schooling after marriage, and eventually going to university after all, Dolly agreed.

The young bridegroom, Adhiratha, was twenty-seven years old and a company car driver. ‘He even has a pension,’ her father told Dolly. ‘You are very lucky for you will be provided for all your life. Even after he retires. You will not be poor when you are old like your mother and me.’

‘In fact we need a daughter with such a husband or how will we survive in our old age?’ said Dolly’s mother.

Dolly laughed at the thought of caring for her parents, not being able to imagine such a role reversal.

‘He is everything nice,’ said Dolly’s mother, showing her daughter
a photo of Adhiratha. She was happy to see the girl smiling again.

The picture showed a pleasant-looking young man with a thin face, a large moustache and glasses.

‘He looks clever,’ said Dolly. She was quite excited now, longing to meet the man, with whom she thought she had fallen in love already. As a Hindu wife-to-be, and therefore required to respect the husband, as was the tradition she did not use his name even in her mind.

‘He has a sensitive face,’ she thought and the ‘He’ to which she referred was now the central person of her life. All other ‘he’s’ she thought, must go by some other name from this day on.

Adhiratha looked like the kind of person who would appreciate education and Dolly visualised the two of them discussing books together, or even both attending night school. After all he would not be wearing glasses if he was not an intellectual.

If Dolly had known then the real reason for the glasses, would her parents have continued to insist on the marriage? Would Dolly have felt afraid?

Dolly fell wildly in love with Adhiratha the moment she set eyes on him.

‘How glad I am,’ she thought after their wedding, as they sat together in a proper electric-lit room to eat their meal. The company bungalow was a pukka stone and mortar affair with running water and glass in the windows.

They could not stop smiling at each other across the table. Sometimes before the meal was eaten, with only a smile for a signal, the two of them would leap up, overturning chairs, spilling misti and rush for their bed with its new sheet and dunlopillo mattress that had been kept wrapped in its cellophane for protection.

In bed they would lie naked, sweating under the slow turning fan, and explore each other’s beautiful bodies all over again. Adhiratha would bury his face in Dolly’s thick black hair that smelled of the
spices she had been cooking. He would kiss the softness of her neck and whisper, ‘I love you, Dolly, I love you Dolly, I love you Dolly.’

He went to work each day wearing his smart chauffeur cap and a pristine white uniform with the company logo embroidered on the pocket that had been lovingly starched and pressed by his little new wife.

After he had gone Dolly would sing as she dusted her house, washed up the dishes, and swept her yard. She remembered how she had quarrelled with her parents when they had tried to arrange her marriage but now she was so happy. Her heart sang with joy because she loved Adhiratha so much and because everything she wanted in the world had been given to her. A hundred times a day, as she swept and polished their bungalow and made special delicious things for her husband’s evening meal, Dolly would say to herself, ‘How lucky my parents insisted I got married to Adhiratha.’ They even had a little garden and Dolly would pick hibiscus, zinnias and canna lilies and arrange them in a jug, then blush with delight when Adhiratha came home and praised her artistry.

Dolly was invited to continue her education at the company school and when term began, each day she would walk across the compound to her class, crossing shady yards, under trees planted by the company, past beds of flowers. There she revelled in the company of girls of her own age and she and her friends would sometimes get a chance to go to the bioscope, then later imitate the accents and behaviour of Ashok Kumar, or swank around pretending to be Meena Kumari.

But no matter how much studying she did, nor how much fun she had with her friends in the day, when Adhiratha got home in the evening she was always there, ready with his evening meal. Her mother had taught her to cook. Her chupatties puffed out like footballs, her parathas were as thin and fine as silk, her kheers and paish the best on the company compound. When Adhiratha invited fellow workers to a meal they would marvel that so young a wife should turn out to be such a marvellous cook. Pulling her sari over her head in deference, she would serve out the food for them, while the
young men teased her until she blushed. ‘Hey, Dolly, those chupatties will float up like balloons if you make them any lighter.’ ‘Hey, Dolly. I think I will throw away my own wife and take you home with me instead so that I can eat sag like you make every day.’

‘No you won’t, you swine,’ Adhiratha would josh back. ‘She’s mine. She’s the best thing in my life and I’m not giving her up for anyone.’

‘But when are you starting the baby?’ Dolly’s mother kept asking and patted Dolly’s stomach, which sounded hollowly empty.

‘We are waiting for a year. Till I take my exams,’ Dolly told her parents.

‘How modern,’ said the father. ‘Let us hope that the gods will not take offence.’

‘What do you mean?’ Dolly was startled.

‘They give us children when they decide. It is not up to you to make such decisions.’ He spoke fiercely. ‘Exams are not an excuse for delaying children.’

‘Oh, Baba, you don’t know anything,’ laughed the modern Dolly, amused by her parents’ silly superstitious and old-fashioned attitudes. ‘These days women don’t just have to fill the house with babies like they did when you and Ma were young.’

‘But why take such risks?’ said the mother, trying to soothe the situation. ‘What difference will it make? Have the baby and when it comes, God will look after you. And look after the baby.’

‘I plan to look after my baby, myself,’ said the blasphemous, proud Dolly.

Soon after their marriage it was the time of the Durga Puja.

Goddess Durga is the giver of rice. She is the mother. But she is also yellow and terrible. She is Devi, one of the female aspects of the Absolute, that infinite, inert and creative Silence. Her serene
and aloof expression does not change as she slays the demon who is trying to destroy the world. She shows no trace of rage or emotion because, for her, the deed, the Cosmos and her self are only illusions, only parts of the Cosmic dream. She rides a lion, holds weapons in her many arms, is cool as a dream and calm as an untroubled river. She is the inaccessible, the inevitable, for she knows that all this is an illusion. All this is Maya. And Durga is responsible for the illusion, she is the illusion and she is only playing at creation. Creation is the play of the gods, nothing to be really taken seriously. That is what her calm face says.

Each year great images are made of her all over Bengal. Wood armatures fifteen feet high are wrapped with straw, then covered with clay, which is modelled into the smallest detail. Lips rich with scarlet gloss, eyelids dark with lamp khol, fingernails manicured with crimson lacquer, her tiny waist belted in gold, her human hair glossed with resin. Her tinsel-trimmed sari glitters and her cut-glass jewels sparkle.

The puja lasts for four days, during which the images, which have taken so many months to sculpt, are worshipped by the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, who present the goddesses with flowers, fruit, garlands and sweets. For Durga is very powerful and has it in her power to grant life to the dying, health to the sick, children to the infertile and husbands to the hideous. There is no one so rich and privileged that they never need her help.

There was much competition, at Durga Puja, among neighbourhoods and companies, but year after year Adhiratha’s employers always came out with the most beautiful image of the goddess and the most impressive shrine. The company shrine was an exact replica of a Hindu temple and as large. It was made of cotton material stretched over a bamboo frame which in the dark glowed with the light of a thousand multi-coloured electric bulbs. It was painted so realistically that people who saw it from a distance thought a new temple of brick and stone had sprung up overnight.

On the first Durga Puja after her marriage, Dolly made a dish of the milky sweets called shandesh. They were the shape of little fishes
and she decorated them with foil of purest gold. When they were ready she put on her best sari and decorated her forehead with scarlet kumkum, then she walked across the compound to the shrine. There, many other people were making offerings to Durga. Some were prostrate on the ground before the goddess. Even the directors of this company had come with gifts for their goddess, for the company was thriving.