Shining Hero (4 page)

Dolly put the plate at the feet of the austere towering image, then, placing her palms together, knelt and bowed till her head touched the ground and said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

After the period of worship was over, Adhiratha was one of those given the honour of carrying the goddess to the holy river, where she would be ritually immersed. People cried out Durga’s praises as the gigantic figure, with her calm face and ornate attire, was jogged along the roads. Some people ran ahead of the procession and threw themselves in the goddess’s path as though she was the Juggernaut and they wished to be crushed to death by her.

At the river other Durgas were arriving, though none as large and lovely as that which Dolly’s new young husband and the other men were carrying.

The company had two long boats waiting, boards lashed between them to form a platform for the statue. It was hauled onto this, then held in place and steadied with poles and ropes.

Dolly and Adhiratha stood on the bank watching while the boat was punted to the centre of the river which was already bobbing with a hundred little boats and rafts carrying Durgas of every size.

There, with the lookers-on ululating and shouting holy praises, the goddess was tipped into the river. As she sank, people scooped up handfuls of water, that had become further blessed by contact with the deity, and threw it over their heads. And as the goddess disappeared from sight, men filled their mouths with petrol and, setting fire to it with cigarette lighters, blew great arcs of flame over the water.

Firecrackers were hurled from the banks and bridges. Little clay
lamps burning oil were set bobbing away on the water like luminous ducklings. For a while the whole bubbling river was spattered with bursts and crackles of fire and the wild cries of the people calling out to the vanishing goddess.

Dolly took her exams and did well. She had been married for a year. In the evening when Adhiratha got home he told her, ‘They have promoted me. I am to become head driver and will get a raise of a hundred and fifty rupees a month.’

Dolly put her arms round him and hugged. She felt so happy she could not speak. Then she whispered something.

‘What? I couldn’t hear.’ Adhiratha was teasing her. Although he had not heard, he knew quite well what she had said.

Her eyes down and whispering a little louder, she said, ‘We can start our family this year.’

‘Did you ask for Durga’s blessing?’ he asked, laughing, as he hung his chauffeur’s hat on the rack. His wife’s devotion to Durga always amused him. ‘It’s only a statue,’ he would say. ‘I’m the one who does all the hard work, while she just stands there. It’s me you should be thanking.’

‘Oh, you,’ Dolly chided. ‘You must not talk like that about the goddess. She might put a curse on us.’

That night Adhiratha made love to her without using a condom and afterwards they laughed and embraced each other, certain that the baby was already made.

After three months when Dolly had still not become pregnant, the first little flicker of worry began to set in. Dolly, only half joking, told Adhiratha, ‘I said you should not have spoken disrespectfully about the goddess.’

‘Silly girl,’ said Adhiratha. ‘It is early days. Look how well everything is turning out for us.’ His new job had earned them a bigger bungalow and the allowance for a couple of servants. There was only one little trouble to shade their lives – Adhiratha’s eyes often ached.

He had always had trouble with his eyes and his glasses were not a
sign that he was educated or particularly literate as Dolly had presumed from looking at his photo. He had worn them since childhood.

‘Don’t keep rubbing them,’ Dolly urged and made eye-washes for him out of herbs and spices, remedies that the people in the village used when they could not afford a doctor.

Dolly woke in the night sometimes, to hear him moaning softly. She would gently massage his forehead with her thumbs till the pain ebbed away.

‘You have to see the doctor,’ she demanded and went on insisting in spite of his protests.

‘I am a driver. If this company finds out that I have problems with my sight they may sack me.’ He tried to soothe her, ‘My eyes have given trouble all my life. I know how to cope with it,’ but she would not be calmed. She felt sure his eyes were getting worse.

In the end, at her insistence, and with many misgivings, he agreed.

The company doctor gave Adhiratha painkillers and made an appointment for him to see a specialist.

Dolly had still not conceived a child by the third Durga Puja after their marriage. She was getting worried, no longer soothed by Adhiratha’s assurance that ‘it’s early days’. Her mother had been pregnant with her third child at this stage. Dolly felt ashamed to go and visit her parents these days.

‘What is the matter with you? Are you infertile or something?’ Dolly’s usually gentle mother became quite angry at the idea. And worried. Would Adhiratha’s family take revenge on her daughter, if they began to think she was infertile? There were stories of such failed brides having kerosene thrown over them then being set alight by the parents-in-law.

At this year’s Durga Puja, Dolly prostrated herself before the haughty goddess and instead of saying, ‘thank you’ said, ‘please, please, please’. She rose at last, speckled with grit from the ground, having only implored, ‘Make me a baby, make my husband’s eyes better.’

The specialist diagnosed Adhiratha’s problem as glaucoma, a build-up of fluid within the eyeball. He gave the young chauffeur drops
to put in his eyes that might, over time, reduce the pressure.

‘How much time?’ asked Adhiratha.

‘One or two years. This medicine retracts the pupils, affecting your sight, so you must not drive a car for a couple of hours after application.’ Adhiratha had to get up two hours earlier each morning to get rid of the effects of the medicine in time for his day’s work and he lived in a constant state of anxiety in case he was called upon for emergency jobs, when his vision was still blurred.

‘It is preying on your mind, my husband,’ Dolly said. ‘Isn’t there another job the company can give you that does not need good sight?’ Secretly she began to think that part of the reason for her failing to conceive was because her husband was so worried and tired.

Six months later Adhiratha crashed a company car.

‘We are sorry to see you go,’ said the manager. ‘You have been an excellent driver.’

‘Is there no other job you can give me?’ pleaded Adhiratha.

The man bowed his head and looked sad. ‘If this had happened a year ago, yes, we might have found some place for you in the packing department. But last year we made a loss. We are getting rid of staff. I am so sorry, Adhiratha, but there is nothing I can offer you.’

Adhiratha was given a farewell party and a lump sum.

Dolly cried the day she and Adhiratha had to leave their bungalow in the company compound. She moved in with her parents while Adhiratha dossed down with friends and hunted for a place to live that they could afford. Because he had only been working for the company for five years, although they had been as generous as they could, the severance payment was not enough for him to rent anything better than a short-term lease of a room in the bustee.

‘It’s home, though,’ he told Dolly when she arrived to join him. ‘And knowing you, you’ll make it nice.’

Dolly cried again when she saw the sordid room.

‘I’ll get a job, don’t worry, don’t be afraid,’ Adhiratha tried to reassure her, but she could hear the fear in his voice too.

Adhiratha had no skills apart from driving and for a while worked as a taxi driver. But a smashed taxi put a stop to that.

‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ soothed Dolly. ‘We still have a little money left, and something is sure to turn up.’ By now he had to accept that his driving days were over. No longer treated by the free medical service of the company and without enough money to pay for the expensive drugs, his eyes rapidly deteriorated. He could hardly see six feet ahead of him. And what work can an almost blind man find in a city with so much unemployment?

‘Don’t be sad, darling husband,’ sobbed Dolly. ‘I have got my school cert so I should be able to get a job while you are looking for something. I might become a hotel receptionist.’ She felt quite excited at the idea and visualised herself seated behind a smart desk, wearing a uniform, and meeting all kinds of interesting people.

But when she went out in response to adverts in the
Statesman
she found that she was competing for humble jobs with people much more qualified than she was. Men and women who had left university with first-class degrees were clamouring to become shop assistants, bus conductors, railway clerks and company secretaries. Dolly didn’t stand a chance.

After six months the severance payment was nearly finished. Soon, not only would they have nowhere to live, they would have nothing to eat either.

‘We will have to go to the village and live with your parents,’ wept Dolly.

Adhiratha shivered at the idea. ‘They have ten other children and are trying so desperately to raise enough money for the dowries so that my two sisters can marry. If there is no work in the city there is certainly none in the village. How can we possibly inflict ourselves upon them?’ He felt sick with shame.

Next day Dolly went back to the company where she and Adhiratha
had once been so happy. She went from bungalow to bungalow offering to do the washing for the families there. At the end of the day she had the promise of five households of washing.

She came home and told him, saying, ‘We will have to buy a charcoal steam iron.’

Adhiratha was aghast.

‘Suggest something else then,’ said Dolly. ‘At least I will be able to make just enough so that we have shelter and do not starve.’ She added with deepening bitterness, ‘Now I understand why Ma Durga never gave us a child. Because she knew we would not be able to afford to give it a decent life.’

Adhiratha held her tight against him, hugged and hugged her till her miserable shivering stopped.

Later he said, ‘We haven’t even got running water. How are you going to wash all these clothes?’

‘In the river. Like the other dhobis,’ said Dolly firmly.

‘Oh God.’ Adhiratha groaned and put his hands over his eyes. ‘But you don’t know anything about being a dhobi.’

‘Don’t know anything?’ she mocked. ‘Darling husband, who has been washing your clothes these last three years, since your mother stopped doing them? Have you ever complained? Weren’t your collars and cuffs always crisp with starch? Didn’t I always get the last grimy traces off them? Didn’t I starch your uniforms and dhotis with boiled rice water till they were so stiff they could have stood up on their own? How can you say I don’t know how to be a dhobi?’

‘But that was different,’ said Adhiratha. ‘In the bungalow we had hot running water from the tap. A clothesline in the garden. Electricity for the iron. Here you have none of those things.’ In the bustee room the only light was from oil lamps and lanterns. Water came from a ruptured pipe along the road.

But Dolly was undaunted. ‘There is no other way. I will manage.’

She washed endless piles of clothes, all day long, standing ankle-deep in the shallow part of the river, among a line of other dhobis. Daily at dawn she would be at the riverside wetting the garments,
rubbing them with strong yellow soap, then beating them against a stone already rubbed smooth and shiny by hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of dhobi wear. From the time the sun rose until it sunk again Dolly beat the washing then laid it to dry on the riverbank. At night, carrying the vast heap of dry, clean washing on her head, she would return home. There she would prepare the evening meal for her husband and herself on a chula, a stove made in a pierced bucket that had been lined with mud and which burned the cow-dung fuel that Adhiratha collected and dried each day. Their morning meal was only rice water from the previous night’s cooking.

During the weeks that followed Adhiratha tried to help Dolly in every way he could. He struggled behind her carrying the heaps of dirty clothes. Went round the bungalows collecting the washing in a basket. Even tried to assist his wife in beating the clothes against the stones. In the end she told him, ‘It is not your dharma to be a dhobi. Try to find some work that is more suited to you.’

‘I am no good at it, you mean,’ he said humbly.

‘That is what I mean,’ she laughed.

Adhiratha found a job at last. Pulling a rickshaw.

It was Dolly’s turn to be aghast. ‘You are to become a rickshaw wallah? I am to be the wife of a rickshaw wallah?’

‘Well, I am the husband of a dhobi woman,’ he laughed. ‘We are coming down in the world. That is all.’ Then he gave her a hug and said, ‘We have still got each other. We are still young. Who knows what will turn up.’ He picked up her hand, and caressed it. It was wrinkled like the hand of a dead person from so much immersion in water.

‘We would be better off if we had never had the good period in the company compound,’ she thought. Their present situation, a home surrounded by stinking drains and a single daily meal of rice and dhall, would have been easier to bear, she thought, if she had not experienced those happy days in the leafy compound, where they ate chingri and hilsa and bathed their rice in ghee.

That year, on the first day of the Durga Puja, as Dolly passed the company shrine on her way to collect the dirty washing, she turned
her head the other way. And hoped the goddess noticed and felt ashamed, for by this time Dolly and Adhiratha had been married for five years and, in spite of all her prayers, there was still no child. In fact Adhiratha had begun to say that it would be a disaster if Dolly became pregnant now.