Shining Hero (5 page)

Dolly was tempted not to offer homage to the goddess that year. She wanted to punish Durga who had given her a happy life for a very short time, so as to be able to take it away and let Dolly see what she was missing.

But all the same, after she had gone round all the houses, and her basket was full, she made her way back to the shrine.

She had gone without her meal the previous evening and bought a small milk sweet with the money she had saved. As she unwrapped this, her stomach let out a rumble of hunger. She became seized with a strong temptation to eat the sweet instead of giving it to a goddess who was never going to listen to her prayer. All the same she put the sweet down on its peepul leaf and prostrating herself, begged aloud, ‘Oh Mother Durga hear my prayer and make me a mother too.’ She did not mention Adhiratha’s eyes. Perhaps she had been presumptuous, the last four years, in asking the goddess for two favours at once.

She reached the river late because of her visit to the goddess. The other dhobis were already laying their clothes out on the rocks to dry.

Dolly waded out into the water and, wetting the first of her sheets, rubbed the harsh yellow soap over it. All afternoon, up to her thighs in water, she beat the cloth against the smooth rocks.

‘You had better hurry,’ said the other dhobis in the evening, as they folded their already dried clothes and stacked them in the baskets. ‘They will be bringing the Durga down here for immersion soon and you mustn’t still be in the water.’ Dolly had to bite back tears remembering the previous years when she had been celebrating the company puja with her husband. Now she was not even allowed to stand in the water when the goddess came.

Frantically Dolly worked but the pile was huge and the clothes
filthy. By the time the sun began to set the other dhobis were leaving and she had still not finished.

She would have to take the wet washing home, ten times as heavy, to dry in the tiny apartment.

She heard the shouts. People were yelling, ‘Oi, Ma, get out of the water. The goddess is coming.’

She looked up and saw the procession approaching. Men in fresh white carrying the gigantic figure of Durga on a palanquin on their shoulders. Not Adhiratha this year. Rickshaw wallahs don’t carry the goddess.

They were coming to this part of the river to immerse the Durga.

‘Out of the water, out, out,’ they cried as they approached. To immerse the goddess in water polluted by an untouchable dhobi woman would be a terrible sacrilege.

Desperately Dolly began to gather up her pile of washing, pulling still wet sheets and saris, shirts and pajamas out of the water, hurrying because the Devi was very close.

Something bumped her knee as she scrabbled up her wet washing.

It was a hand of last year’s Durga, huge, the arms of clay long since melted away. It lay palm up, its beautiful fingers curled round something sharply gleaming. Dolly bent to take a closer look and felt amazed that the nail polish should still be intact after so long in the water, thrilled because the knuckles and finger rings were almost unblemished. She was thinking to herself, this must be a miracle, when the shining thing lying on the palm began to move as though it was alive. For a moment the light reflected off the holy hand became so bright that Dolly had to look away, dazzled.

When she could open her eyes, she bent to take a closer look and saw, cuddled among the goddess’ fingers, some creature with tinsel twisted round it. A puppy perhaps, that had got tangled in the remains of Durga’s marigold garlands.

The shouts of the approaching Durga worshippers were growing ever nearer and more furious.

Dolly was the only one still in the water but instead of hurrying, she bent, staring fascinated at what lay in the palm of last year’s goddess. The glittering thing let out a sound like the mewing cry of a cat. The hand began to twirl as the current caught it again.

Dolly’s arms were full of washing. It was only a half-dead kitten, then. Round the weighty bundle she did a namaskar of respect to the hand of Durga then turned away as the current caught the hand with its living glittering burden and started to twirl it off.

Then Dolly realised what the sparkling mewling thing was, dropped her armful of clean washing into the water and grabbed. Snatched the shining thing from out of the middle of the hand just a moment before it was carried out of reach.

She held a newborn child, still attached to its placenta and tangled up in sparkling tinsel. The hand that had prevented the baby from sinking went speeding off along the river.

Dolly stood thigh-deep in water, dazed with joy, because the goddess Durga had, after all these years, answered her prayer. Everybody knew that goddesses do not do things like ordinary people. This child had been sent to her in an unusual way, but all the same it was what she had asked for and what the goddess had given.

Grabbing up the once again filthy and now dripping washing and thrusting it into her basket, pressing the holy child against her breast and ignoring the furious outcry from the Durga worshippers, she waded out of the river and began to stagger home.

She arrived ages late. Adhiratha was home already and shocked at the sight of Dolly’s catch.

‘How are we going to feed this child?’ he demanded as Dolly began unravelling the baby from the twists of tinsel. ‘Put it back where it came from. We have hardly enough for ourselves. Wait till we get a child of our own then it will be able to drink milk from your breast and will cost us nothing.’

Dolly was furious. ‘How dare you speak in such a way of the gift of the goddess?’

‘Well, she should have provided some food for the child. How can she expect us to feed it?’ All the same he could not help creeping over and peeping curiously into the face of the little newborn baby.

‘Getting things from the gods is not like going shopping,’ Dolly ranted on. ‘You don’t just go and say “I would like two kilos of baby” as though you were buying onions. You don’t say “I want a couple of breastfuls of milk as well as a baby”. You just take what you get.’ The last of the tinsel was unravelled and then Dolly let out a scream of surprise for hanging round the little boy’s neck she had found a golden chain from which hung a disc. Taking it to the window she read the words ‘Koonty Pandava of the Hatibari of Hatipur’.

She turned to her husband, her eyes filled with amazement, and repeated the words to him. Her surprise now became touched with a tiny chill of fear which Adhiratha echoed by saying, ‘That is some other woman’s child.’

‘It is not. It is mine,’ cried Dolly hugging the baby against her body, and wishing the disc had been washed away in the water.

As she carried the new child to the water spurt, she felt terribly tempted to sell the piece of gold and then pretend it had never existed. She felt a scald of conflict. Without the disc the baby would have no identity but the one that she and Adhiratha gave it. Without that disc she and her husband were the baby’s parents. But on the other hand this piece of gold and the information it gave were the baby’s only possessions. She had no right to take them from him and one day the little child might need to know who he was.

She shook her head and tried to dash away the worrying thoughts that the disc aroused in her as she rubbed the mud from the baby’s body. When she got back into the room with the now spotless baby, Adhiratha was rushing round, hunting for something. He looked up, laughing, at the sight of her holding the child against her chest. The baby was making little whimpering sounds and nuzzling its lips into Dolly’s choli.

‘What have you lost?’ asked Dolly. The desperation of the baby was troubling her.

Triumphantly he held out his hands. ‘I knew I had some paise hidden in this pocket. I’ll go out now and buy some milk for her.’

‘For him,’ laughed Dolly. Happy tears began to run down her cheeks because she knew everything would be all right from now on. Holding the now howling baby in one arm, she reached up and kissed Adhiratha.

‘You don’t know how much I love you,’ she said. ‘You just don’t.’

‘I won’t be long,’ he said as he rushed out. ‘I expect there will be some left over at the khatal.’

The cattle stall in the centre of their area was owned by the landlord and his tenants bought milk for their households and businesses from there as well as using the dung for fuel.

Dolly stood at the open door looking down into the darkness of the stairway, till she heard at last the sound of his footsteps receding.

The baby went on crying for a little while and then, exhausted, fell asleep.

Dolly waited, thinking, ‘He is being a very long time. Perhaps there was no milk left at the khatal. Perhaps he has had to go to the house of the Gwala.’

An hour later she was still waiting. The baby woke up again and once more began crying. Where could Adhiratha be?

After another hour, in which Dolly started to panic and the baby’s desperation was unendurable, she decided the only hope was to go from room to room, and hut to hut begging milk from someone.

Adhiratha never came back. He was hit by a lorry and died on the spot. It was two days of numbing dread and misery before Dolly found out.

Sankha’s voice, Gandhiva’s accents, and the chariot’s booming sound,
Filled the air like distant thunder, shook the firm and solid ground
.
Kuru’s soldiers fled in terror or they slumbered with the dead,
And the rescued lowing cattle with their tails uplifted fled
.

Shivarani Gupta, Koonty’s eldest sister, was so tall by the time she was thirteen that her father began to worry that she might never find a husband.

Shivarani laughed, called him an old silly and accused him of knowing nothing about the modern world in which, she said, tall women were the fashion.

By the time Shivarani was sixteen she was taller than ever and her father’s anxiety was greatly increased. As was her mother’s.

The Guptas lived on a modern bungalow on the Hatibari estate that had been built ten years earlier to house the estate manager. Meena Gupta, Shivarani’s mother, went once a week to Calcutta to meet her friends at the Calcutta Club where they ate miniature samosas, drank flowery orange pekoe and played mahjong. And there Meena Gupta poured out her worries.

‘Shivarani is growing like this sort of giraffe because of the genes of my husband’s family. My sister-in-law is nearly six feet tall and if my mother had known about her, she would have forbidden the marriage for everyone knows what difficulties come to families whose daughters are too large.’

Mrs Gupta’s Calcutta Club friends smiled with sympathy, thinking
how dreadful it must be for someone as fair and small as Mrs Gupta to have a dark giantess for a daughter.

The Guptas began to approach suitable families, hoping for a match for their lanky daughter while she still possessed one marriageable asset, the bloom of youth.

Three times Shivarani was paraded, wearing her prettiest sari and Meena Gupta’s most costly jewels, before the parents of suitable boys. Three times the Gupta family heard no more of the matter until receiving an invitation to a wedding. The suitable boy was marrying a shorter fairer girl.

‘So many boys wanting to marry Shivarani,’ lied Mrs Gupta to her Cal Club friends. ‘Boy after boy, from good family after good family brought before her for approval and like princess in fairy tale, she rejects them. Eeny meeny miney mo.’

There followed insincere commiseration on the unreasonableness of nubile daughters. ‘We all have such a girl at home, don’t we know it.’ They knew that in reality it was the boy, or his family, who was rejecting Shivarani. But then what good family would marry a girl like that?

Someone said helpfully, ‘I have seen a product for lightening the skin being advertised. Perhaps you can purchase it in Sahib Singh’s.’

The suggestion made Mrs Gupta unreasonably cross. ‘And why should I require such stuff? Are you saying my daughter is black, Leela?’

‘Have another little samosa, Meena. Don’t pay attention to silly Leela,’ the friends tried to soothe.

Meena Gupta, silently blaming her husband for his outsize sister, nibbled her samosa through a veil of tears and vowed, though there was nothing to be done about the height, she would try to lighten Shivarani’s complexion the moment she got home.

After the third rejection Shivarani, her face red with her humiliation, her eyes red with tears, said she would not allow herself to be paraded any more. Her parents, frantic with worry, because what sort of life was there for a woman without marriage, begged Shivarani to give the process just one more chance. Reluctantly the girl agreed.
‘But on condition, no jewels and no pretty sari. They must see me as I am.’ Shivarani’s parents shuddered. What hope was there for the girl, unless she was disguised in opulence and glamour? But those were Shivarani’s terms and she appeared before the aunts and mother of the prospective bridegroom wearing a plain handloom sari in beige and, ‘Oh no, my God,’ whimpered Meena, a pair of high-heeled shoes. ‘You said they must see you as you are, but you are not as high as that,’ mourned Meena Gupta but Shivarani insisted. Either she would appear thus dressed or not at all.

There came a little gasp from the assembled family of the prospective bridegroom that Meena knew was not of admiration. But all the same they continued with their questioning as though, in spite of everything, they were still interested.

A photo of the boy was produced. Meena accepted it with caution and for a moment hardly dared focus her eyes on it. There was sure to be something dreadfully wrong with the fellow or why was his family, even after seeing Shivarani in her khadi sari and high heels, still considering her? When Meena at last dared to look, she thought he was quite handsome.

When Shivarani saw the photo, for the first time in the husband-choosing process, she actually smiled. ‘He looks nice,’ she said.

At last Meena Gupta felt it was safe to tell her club friends. She was unable to keep the triumph out of her voice as she said, ‘He is good-looking, of high intelligence, from excellent family, and what more can any mother want for their daughter?’ Meena thought she saw a quick glance flash between two of her friends. ‘What?’ she asked. ‘I there something I don’t know?’

‘Of course not,’ said Leela hastily. ‘I have never seen the fellow and I am sure he is a very good match.’ She had been on the rough end of Meena’s temper once already and did not want to risk it again.

Meena went to have tea with the boy’s parents and to meet the boy himself while Shivarani waited anxiously at home. But when Meena, usually the most garrulous of women, returned, she hung her shawl on the hook and removed her outdoor slippers in silence.

Shivarani clenched her hands till her knuckles went white, and waited. After a long silent moment she asked, ‘What was he like?’

‘Very nice,’ said Meena. ‘Just as good-looking as in the photo. And he is clever too.’

‘Yes, but,’ pressed Shivarani.

Meena turned her back to her eldest daughter and looking into the hall mirror, began patting down her hair.

‘There is something wrong with him?’

Meena, her gaze on her reflection, shook her head.

‘But I know there is something,’ Shivarani pursued.

‘Well …’ said Meena.

‘What, yes? What?’ Shivarani could hardly bear it.

Meena shrugged gently and said, ‘He is young. Perhaps he will grow a little more.’

Shivarani, frowning, said, ‘Young? How young? I thought you said he was nearly thirty.’

‘That is young,’ said Meena stiffly.

‘What are you telling me?’ cried Shivarani. ‘That you are hoping a man of nearly thirty will keep on growing?’

‘But you never know. That’s what I am thinking,’ murmured Meena Gupta and winked a tear away.

Shivarani stared at her mother’s back and the colour drained from her face. ‘He’s a midget, you mean?’

‘Hush hush,’ soothed her mother. ‘Size is not all. He comes from a prosperous family. He looks like a very nice person. He has doctorates in three subjects. And most important of all, you are so tall and so if you have a short husband your children will come out the right size.’

Shivarani burst out in fury. ‘You want me to marry a dwarf so that your grandchildren come out the right size? That’s really amazing,’ she roared. ‘That is the end,’ she said. ‘No more bridegrooms. I will make my own way in the world.’

Meena Gupta knew then that the battle was lost and that Shivarani might never marry.

Her consolation became her youngest child, Koonty. Meena drew
a pencil line on the frame of the door, measured the child weekly and each time felt reassured that Koonty was growing at a normal speed. Meena was not sure what she would do if her youngest child started sprouting too. Perhaps there were things she could do if the fault was discovered early enough. Maybe Sahib Singh’s, the Park Street chemist, had a medicine for slowing human growth. Meena was watchful of Koonty’s complexion too. She kept a photo of Shivarani at the same age, and at regular intervals held it up against Koonty’s cheeks, comparing for darkness although it is difficult to see skin colour properly in a black and white photo.

Shivarani’s parents began to feel despondent about the future of their big dark daughter. Meena, who could not think of anything more dreadful for a woman than to remain unmarried, said hopeful things like, ‘Perhaps your Papa could find the cash to send you to UK. I have heard that the men there are not all that fussy about what kind of woman they are married to,’ and could not understand why Shivarani suddenly burst out weeping.

‘What are you saying, Meena?’ cried Shivarani’s father, outraged. ‘That our darling should be shipped off to marry some undiscriminating gora?’ And to Shivarani, ‘Marriage is not all, my darling, no matter what your mother says. Perhaps you could join some religious community and devote your life to love of God. Mahadevi did so and she experienced constant holy bliss in spite of being without husband.’ Mahadevi was a Tamil saint of the middle ages who, abandoning all aspects of society, including clothes, wandered South India clad only in her long hair, devoting her life to Shiva and singing hymns to him. Shivarani’s father adored his eldest child, but felt he could not properly understand her because of the way her weeping intensified at his suggestion.

Shivarani went to college, put all her attention on her work and tried not to notice the way the young male students responded gently to other girls but not to her. She had friends, even among the men, but they treated her as though she was a friend, and like one of them. How else could have they been to a woman who was an inch or so higher than the tallest guy?

One of the young men was a joker. No matter how serious the conversation he would always spoil everything by some silliness or other. In the evenings when the young men and women gathered in the dark and grimy coffee house and were in the midst of a serious discussion about the fear of war with Pakistan, Bhima would ruin it all by making a funny face then chanting, ‘When I kiss a little Hindu I’m careful not to smudge her bindu. When I kiss a Pakistani I hold her tight and call her “jani”.’ The others, unable to stop laughing at such nonsense, would all the same get cross. ‘That rubbish has spoiled the important tone of our conversation.’

The students would talk for hours over a single bitter brew of dirt-cheap coffee-flavoured chicory, discussing the problems of India. There were those who said things would only be solved by a revolution after which corruption would be rooted out, education made available for all and equality created for Indians of every caste and either sex. To destroy the present society and rebuild it better was considered by some the only solution to the present problems of corruption and inequality. Others though disagreed, and felt that change could only come by building on what was already there and that killing people and destroying property would never solve anything. The arguments would grow increasingly heated as the night wore on and in the end they always seemed to turn to Shivarani for arbitration as if, though the same age as the rest, she was perceived as older and wiser. One evening it was only she and Bhima still left, still arguing. Darkness had fallen, fireflies started to sparkle in the trees and the mosquitoes started to bite. Bhima, instead of listening to her ideas on education for all, began trying to balance a glass of water on his head, an experiment ending with water gushing over his nose. ‘You look like Shiva catching the Ganges on his head,’ said Shivarani strictly. ‘And you have not been listening.’ She did not approve of such frivolity.

‘Your beautiful hair is on fire,’ said Bhima, wiping his face. He gently took a firefly from her head, and held out the little flashing light to her in his palm. Shivarani suddenly could not remember what she had been about to say.

When she came home for her vacation Shivarani was shocked at the frivolity of her younger sister, Koonty, who rampaged round the Hatibari estate playing with the local children as though she was one of them and whose bedroom walls were covered in posters of film stars. ‘Even here, in the village of Hatipur, there are children who don’t have enough to eat,’ said Shivarani. ‘You should be thinking about things like that instead of getting swoony over some film star. Tomorrow I am going to the village to see what help I can give the people there. You should come with me.’

‘Don’t get cross with me so soon,’ begged Koonty. ‘Tell me about the people in college? Did you fall in love?’

Shivarani hesitated for the smallest moment before saying, ‘No.’

Koonty could not come with Shivarani to the village. She had been invited to the Hatibari by the young zamindar. ‘I will come with you next time, I swear, Didi,’ she said.

Shivarani jumped, startled at the creaking stirring of a bush, thinking that a snake was about to emerge, and had told herself that if the brain-fever bird did not shut up, she would be driven mad. When she was halfway to Hatipur the bird did fall silent for a while, and then all she could hear were the squawks of mynahs, the high screams of the rose-ringed parakeets robbing the guava trees and the river slapping its banks like an arrogant hero beating his thighs. The air was peppery and stung a little, as though the leathery trees and the bushes with their dangerous-looking speckled leaves were gasping spice. She wished her parents had not chosen to live in such an out-of-the-way place.

As Shivarani arrived a cry went round for someone to bring a chair for the Hatibari manager’s daughter. Ignoring their protests and refusing the battered plastic seat she told the gathering crowd, ‘I have been studying for the past three years, learning about the problems faced by the villagers of India. Now that I am back, please tell me what has been going on here.’