Someone Else's Garden (25 page)

For the first time Mamta looks at the fat lady, alighting behind her. Paramjit Kaur’s skin is milky, with apple pink spots on her cheeks where broken veins have released their sweetness. Two comely black moles of the non-raised kind have been placed on her chin by nature, as a standard of comparison only, to accentuate the creaminess of her skin. The fat lady was once that stereotypical beauty described in all the matrimonial advertisements in the
Times of India
: 5 feet 2 inches tall, large eyes, wheatish complexion, medium build, long hair.

‘You have to be quick in the city,’ Paramjit Kaur gives her one last piece of invaluable advice, ‘your village ways won’t work here.’ And to prove her point she pushes past her into the breaking light, sending Mamta flying to the floor.

Mamta is left alone, as alone as anyone can be in a city.

Her feet do the thinking for her. Primeval automation sends her out of the terminal and into the street safely. It is lucky for Mamta that the city is still in that state between sleep and wakefulness. Soon traffic will flood the streets, but for now, it is the occasional rickshaw that lurches past in slow motion, that’s the only reason Mamta isn’t run over. She doesn’t know yet that she must look both ways before crossing the street, but that will be an easy lesson for her. Her keen mind will see, record and follow.

Across the road, a municipal tap gushes water into a waiting line of pails. Taps. Mamta has only heard of them. She looks at the large group of women, rubbing sleep out of their eyes. The tap bleeds water into the street, gushing at the mouth like a fountain. In Gopalpur what wouldn’t you give for so much water surging out right at your feet, enough to create a mudslide? The thick ooze puckers its grubby lip to kiss the edges of the saris of the waiting women. While she watches, the tap runs dry. Women are left holding their empty pails. They shake their fists at the tap and at others with full pails, but then wander away resigned, swallowed whole by the city. Some days the tap is generous, on others it is not.

‘Kalu, if you want to sleep here you have to sweep. Get up, you lazy bastard! Do you think this is a free five-star hotel?’ A man dressed in khaki shouts into the underbelly of a building in a row of three-storey flats hovering along the edge of the road.

‘Chacha, I fixed your cycle chain.’ A man emerges from the darkness under the stairwell dragging a cycle behind him.

‘Get to work, lazy bastard.’ The night watchman pushes the man called Kalu away with his stick, taking care not to soil his hands on Kalu’s lower-caste body. Mamta watches through the iron grille gate that bisects the perimeter wall crowned in broken glass to shred the feet of any who might dare to climb over it. Hindi movie posters inches thick cling to the whitewashed wall, stuck on with glue so strong it is impossible to peel them off. Pasted one over the other, the hits stay on the longest, the flops get brushed over with glue before the coat beneath has had a chance to dry.

Kalu waves off the staring Mamta with the back of his hand. When she doesn’t move, he sticks out his tongue at her. For the first time in days, she feels shy laughter flutter in her throat.

‘Thief! Bandit! Ungrateful wretch! Give them a home and what do they do? Rob you blind, that’s what! Get out! Go, I said! Don’t come here ever again, I will make sure you don’t get work in the whole of Begumpet. Thief! It’s a wonder we all haven’t been murdered in our beds.’ A woman beats her slipper against the head of a skinny boy who shields himself from her blows with open palms that stand out flour-white against his almost naked black body.

The boy runs doubled over, tripping, straightening and tripping again. The skinny black body summons the memory of her younger brother Prem. She is disoriented. She may have left her stepdaughter behind, but she won’t allow her brother to be beaten with a slipper. Mamta takes a few fumbling steps into the building to help him up. But the boy rushes past, leaving Mamta in his wake.

‘You, come for the job, have you? Where do these people come from? Made of air they are, appearing like spirits! Hardly one thief out, when another appears. Don’t think I don’t know all about you.’

Instantly afraid, Mamta squirms in her sari and covers her scar with her hand. How could this woman a whole night’s journey away from Gopalpur know about her husband’s money, her husband’s slippers, her running away? The city must have eyes everywhere. She could send her back to Barigaon for her deserved punishment, or back to her family in Gopalpur for the village’s crude justice. Shit-smeared and raped, the image pops up, real again.

‘She’s a good woman, memsahib. I know her well. She comes from the next village. They call her . . .’ Kalu looks to Mamta, questioning.

‘Mamta,’ she says, ‘Mamta.’

‘Honest Mamta, that’s what they call her.’

‘All right, Honest Mamta. Do you know anything about cleaning bathrooms?’

Mamta’s eyebrows arch into her hairline.

‘Don’t look at me like I’m speaking English. Can you clean bathrooms?’ The woman comes closer. ‘Arey, is this woman dumb? Are you a Sudra?’ Each word brings a spray of saliva with it, no doubt because of the gap in the woman’s front teeth.

Kalu nudges her in the ribs. ‘She’s also very shy, memsahib. Honest and Shy Mamta, that’s what they call her. Are you a Sudra, Honest and Shy Mamta?’ He nudges her again. ‘Say yes to the memsahib, she’s asking you a question.’

‘Yes, yes, I am,’ Mamta lies, admitting to a bogus lower-caste status.

In truth, she is a Vyasia, a worker bee, miles above a lowly Sudra. But Sudra is what the lady wants and Sudra is what she’ll get. Things work differently in the city, in the city a lower caste can be an asset.

‘Start this evening. Don’t forget, I know you, I will find you. Rob me and even Jesus won’t be able to save you.’ The fat woman waddles up the stairs, complaining loudly, ‘Hai when will the committee put in a lift?’

It’s then that Mamta is distracted enough to notice that her mistress-to-be is wearing a man’s grey shirt and black pants with stirrups round the arches to keep them stretched through the length of her leg. She shivers with disbelief and blinks several times. ‘Mrs D’Souza. From Goa.’ The man called Kalu explains of the retreating figure. ‘She barks a lot, but she’s not bad. She might beat her servants, but she gives them leftover food. That’s the best part. And she helps poor people. Her god demands it. Charity.’

How poor do you have to be to be helped?

‘You’re not afraid of dogs, no?’

‘Dogs?’

‘She has a noisy one. Baby. A snapper, that Baby, but she’s small, so don’t worry.’

‘She has a dog?’

‘Kalu, are you going to keep chatting all day or do some work?’ the man in khaki shouts from the gate.

‘I have to get back to work. You better get going yourself,’ hisses Kalu. When he sees that Mamta isn’t about to take his advice, he hisses at her again, ‘What’s wrong with you? Stop acting like an idiot.’

‘Yes,’ says Mamta, still acting like an idiot.

‘You can sleep under the stairwell with me. Get your things. Don’t worry, no one will touch your Sudra belongings here, too unclean for them.’ Mamta doesn’t move. ‘Go on. Get your things.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she says, turning to go. Then she stops and asks, ‘Who’s Jesus?’

‘Mrs D’Souza’s god.’

‘The one who demands the help for the poor? Jesus,’ she repeats. ‘We didn’t have him in Gopalpur,’ she says, walking out of the gate.

‘Be on time this evening,’ says the khaki-dressed man. ‘Too many of you new ones land up late for work on your first day. Five o’clock.’

Out of the gate, Mamta realises she has nowhere to go to wait for five o’clock to arrive. It’s still early, but the city is quickly adjusting to morning. The garbage dump opposite the three-storey flats is as busy as an anthill. First the humans arrive. Children all, sent out to pick through the decomposing remains of the previous day. The rubbish tip is a larder to them. The boys comb the stinking top layer, quickly eating anything they can digest, while the girls save their pickings to take home, tucking pieces of rotting vegetables and dirty paper into their chunnis. Then come the old rag pickers. They dig a little deeper, choosing their treasure from the discard of the younger masters of the heap. Sometimes there is a fight between the young and old. The young always win. They snatch the loot from weaker hands, running away much too fast for the old to catch up. After that, it’s the cows, then the goats, the dogs, the rats and finally, by the evening, when the sentient beings are done, it will be the turn of the cockroaches.

Mamta looks at the rubbish tip. Will this become her sustenance too? No, she has lived like an animal for so long, she won’t do it again. She walks back towards the khaki-dressed man. ‘This address?’

Without thinking, he scrawls something on a piece of paper, handing it to her carefully enough not to touch her lower-caste hand. She stares at the precious address, firm writing and confident slant of the letters topped by a flat line sturdy as a roof.

What is she going to do with a written address? ‘What name?’ she traces the letters with her finger.

‘Himalaya House,’ he says, without making the connection that she cannot read. There are many types in the city, the most unlikely ones can read, he has stopped wasting time on unnecessary judgements.

She is afraid to stray far, seeking and finding again the women in the morning’s waterline. Their tin and cardboard homes built on the pavement crawl with children of all ages. The smell and the sound emerging from the slum are both equally vulgar. The houses all lean to one side, tilted by the last monsoon wind. Several will collapse this monsoon season. She notices with a sense of satisfaction that the slum houses are more fragile than her hut back in the village. She enters the tiny lane which meanders senselessly through the higgledy-piggledy mess.

She cranes her neck and looks into one of the houses through a hole in a rotting wall. It isn’t just curiosity that drives her to look inside, but a belief that she belongs with these people, this strata of society that has nothing, this homogenous mass of destitution that calls the pavement home. But of course they won’t let her belong. No slum accepts intruders easily. Over-population, not disaster, is what ruins a slum. This particular one has survived seven conflagrations and twelve evictions, each time returning to life within hours. It is a tribe that is willing to cull its extras by killing them, or by sending them out to forage a living in other slums. For people like Mamta, the slum is a dangerous place to dally.

The slum dwellers may not be house proud on the outside, but on the inside their homes are filled with treasures: plastic buckets, cupboards, shelves, lights, transistors and the most coveted prize of all: televisions. She tunes in to one particular transistor going full blast. A woman’s golden voice sings to her:

‘The lamps are dying,
My eyes are tiring,
Softly, softly, take me, my love
Come to me, come to me . . .’

Softly, softly, take me, my love.
The music conjures up an imaginary stage, hands grasping her shoulders. Her head resting on a yielding chest. Distracted, she admires rows of tiny cowry shells cleanly and cleverly plastered over the opening that serves as the doorway. She recognises the impulse immediately. She herself did the same, didn’t she? And her husband’s unhappy, sinister home looked the better for her decoration.
Softly, softly, take me, my love.

It is such a small thing, the flick of a warning hand, but the stranger’s shooing strangles her dream. Her gullet starts to fill with tears. She is worse than dirt, more lowly than an animal. The slum dwellers would tolerate any one of the million stray city cows in their midst before they would tolerate her.

A stream of slum dwellers, marching off to work, part precisely round her like ants. She feels filthy against their spurious cleanliness. They have washed with ditch water and now appear clean and oiled, hair slicked back, and more perfumed than any bona fide shower-taker. She follows them out. The slum is not her place.

Mamta’s city education has begun.

As the morning heats up, the babies fall silent, while the young children wander off in gangs to conquer the city as beggars, newspaper sellers, petty thieves and prostitutes. She sees the little girls flirting with men almost twice their age using practised gestures learned by rote. Today might be the day they will cease to be children and finally cross over into the knowing, earning land of adults. Every once in a while they forget what they are to become and revert to their childish ways, teasing, running, and playing invented games.

The mothers and older girls load the babies on their hips to go beg at the thickening traffic jam. ‘I beg for my baby,’ they imply, ‘not for myself.’ They wear their filthiness like armour, extending their stick arms to the sky, coaxing an elusive coin from strangers’ hearts. On a good day one person in ten rolls down his car window to throw some money at them. The women dive after the coins, their drugged babies lolling to one side like dying flowers on long stems. They pick up the money and toss Mamta a stare over their shoulders. With no baby dangling off her arm, they do not consider her a genuine threat.

The smell of the city is overwhelming. It is the first thing that hits a newcomer like Mamta. It is the stale smell of unwashed humanity, the acrid smell of gasses emitted by rot and refuse, the noxious smell of poisons let loose indiscriminately to fly on the wind, but most of all, it is the smell of industry. It is this intoxicating smell of industry that keeps more people coming to the city every day, every hour, every minute, every second.

The morning is quickly going stale. All along the ditch, children, some bald and some hairy, sit in straight rows with piles of shit dropping into the drain below in full view of passers-by. Most of their parents completed their ablutions in the dark pre-dawn, before the city was fully awake, but there are always a few latecomers. Mamta doesn’t look at them, she too lifts her sari and squats, alongside the rejects of humanity. There is no room for shame in her action. Like the others, she too washes herself clean with water from the ditch, and rises, equally purposefully.