The Blue Notebook (12 page)

On the long way home in the ox-drawn cart, I chatted inanely to Father, gesticulating with my arms as I spoke. Father was happy to listen to me with a quiet smile on his face. There were moments, though, when he would reach across the cart and touch my hair or accidentally bump me. Sometimes he would reach over and give me a little hug. Although he asked, I wouldn’t tell him what was in the cardboard box.

When we stopped that night, we sat outside drinking tea
and I made Father put his hat over his eyes. I took a book of stories from the top of the cardboard box and asked him if he was ready. I told him to keep his eyes closed, and I started to read to him. In the story the hero loses his beloved to another family. Her new husband treats her cruelly as he only married her for power and money and because he knows his wife loved another. The heartbroken wife escapes and tries to make her way back to the hero, who has been pining for her. On the return journey by means of a river, a torrential storm sinks her boat and washes her up onto a tiny island in the middle of the river. The island begins to disappear as the waters rise, and she sends her cries of desperation into the winds. The hero hears her cries, dashes to a boat, and rides through the storm onto the island. Though his boat is also destroyed in the storm, he manages to clamber onto the island and rushes into her arms. The lovers die in each other’s arms, and the island is submerged along with them.

Father did not say a word until I finished. As I concluded the story, I peeked under his hat; his eyes were shiny and tears were streaming down his face. He just stared at me. “Father, there are happier stories, let me …” “Batuk, that is not why I am crying. I never imagined that any child of mine would ever learn to read … this is your ticket out of Dreepah-Jil.” He caught his thoughts and continued to speak excitedly. “We will have to find you a teacher … One day you will be a … doctor, a lawyer.” I interrupted, “Or a teacher.” “Yes, darling, or a great teacher, Batuk. Come to me.” I went to my father with another book tucked under my arm, the magical abhang poems of Namdev. As I read words I barely understood and soaked them within me, my father held me. That night we both created dreams for me. Neither he nor I ever aspired to my becoming a prostitute.

Despite the story I wrote for him, Puneet remains miserable. Today, again, he sits at the entrance of his nest with his head down, moping. The bandages have gone (along with his bhunnas). I wave hello to him but really, I want to walk over and slap him across the face. I must admit that I think about him less and less these days. He waves back at me unenthusiastically. The good news is that he has more devotees than ever.

No one seems to mind that in between baking sessions, I sit at the entrance to my nest, my pad on my knees, writing. My earlier fear of my notepad being discovered was unfounded as Mamaki cannot read, although she is able to place check marks against our names in her little book. She quite likes that I “scribble away” at the entrance to my nest because this seems to bring in cooks rather than deter them. Novice cooks will often walk up to me from the street and ask what I am writing. My answer is always the same: “I’m just scribbling” (men don’t like to feel stupid). My writing creates an easy way for shy men to approach me, and once they have done so, Mamaki pounces. She throws open her arms and swoops them under the folds of her sari, into my nest; job done! Also, with me sitting and scribbling, Mamaki can point down and talk about me to men who are walking by. She said to me yesterday (I am fast becoming her favored), “Maybe I should get all the others to scribble too.”

For me, the cooks become my paragraph ends or, sometimes, my chapter breaks. The afternoons are often the quietest and that is when I generally write in my book. This afternoon is hot. I call to Puneet, “Puneet, I have a joke for you!” Meera’s
little head pops out from the cage between ours with a big grin. “Oh, I love jokes,” she says with a smile on her squished-up face. Puneet is unmoved and grunts. I continue, “What do you call a dog with two heads?” Meera squawks, “Woof, woof.” “Other one, other one,” she pipes. “All right,” I say, “what do you call an elephant leaning against a tree?” Meera furrows her brow; she is adorable. I answer, “Bruised.” Meera looks puzzled. “I do not get it.” Puneet then speaks in a most gloomy drone. “It’s because the tree fell over and the elephant hurt itself.” (It is a terrible joke but I am awful at jokes.) Meera then responsively bursts into hoots of laughter and I laugh with her; she really is a child (this is her key selling point). Mamaki takes extra for her by telling her cooks that she is ten years old when in fact she is twelve. “Other one, other one,” Meera calls. I think for a while and say in an undertone, “What do you call a woman with three titties?” Meera shakes her head and shrugs. “Mamaki Hippopotamus,” I answer, “two on her chest and one on her chin.” Meera breaks into hysterics. Then Puneet perks up: “What do you call a woman with a beard?” He sits up straight. Meera answers, “Mamaki Hippopotamus.” “Yes,” Puneet says a bit too loudly, and laughs for the first time in ages. I continue, “Puneet, what happened to the sixth girl of our group?” Puneet answers, “She is in between Mamaki’s buttocks.” Meera is laughing so hard I think she will wet herself. Meera says, “My go, my go,” barely able to get out the words. She says, “Where is Mamaki’s husband?” I answer, “Between her titties.” No response. Meera and Puneet are silent and both are looking over my left shoulder. “He’s dead,” Mamaki says from behind me, and waddles off down the street. The three of us are silent for as long as we can possibly be, but then Puneet
starts to smirk. His smirk becomes my giggle and soon the three of us break out in floods of laughter. Gripping his stomach, Puneet, who is almost crying with laughter, says, “He suffocated … they were having sex and he slipped inside her … That’s why she walks like that.”

That was the last tummy-aching laugh we would ever share together.

I first met Puneet in what is referred to as the Orphanage. It covers a space about half the size of the meat market and is a series of bamboo poles that support a patchwork of threadbare cloths of many vintages. As one cloth piece becomes decrepit and falls apart, it is replaced with another piece that is slightly less worn.

The Orphanage is policed by Yazaks, men and women who have divested themselves of humanity. Yazaks view their orphans solely in terms of the income they provide. The Yazaks reside in a brick house at the easternmost end of the Orphanage, from which sounds of music and television continuously blare. Interestingly, except where money is concerned, the policing is lax because there are so many children who are indistinguishable from each other. The Orphanage is made up of a herd of street urchins who reside there until called upon to perform some service or other, for which they are directly rewarded with food, clothing, or sometimes (rarely) money. No work, no food. No one steals from the Yazaks or cheats them
because just as a child’s presence is anonymous, so is his or her absence. Many rumors abound; for example, I heard about a child from the Orphanage who stole a bicycle on his own and pocketed twenty rupees from a fence without telling his Yazak. The fence told the Orphanage, as the child’s wrist tattoo was a signature that identified him as coming from this particular Orphanage. Justice was immediate and occurred in the open. Using his right hand, the Yazak lifted the child, age eleven or twelve, by his hair off the ground and with his left hand cut his throat with a Damascus blade. Before the second spurt of blood had shot from his neck, the Yazak had thrown the boy to the ground just as you might throw away a sweets wrapper. Before the boy’s soul was released at the moment of death a minute later, he had been stripped of his meager clothes and shoes by the other urchins. That evening another child collected a bowl of rice with sauce for carrying the body to the public dump, the burial ground of the poor.

The girls are not spared Yazak savagery. There was an instance where a girl had her vagina sewn shut for copulating for her own pleasure. This was done by a large female Yazak with a needle and thread while sitting on the girl, with older children restraining each limb. A hole was left for urination but this is generally irrelevant either because the girl manages to remove the stitches herself with a knife or broken glass, or infection sets in on the inevitable path to the garbage dump. For second offenders, the clitoris is sliced away and the vagina sewn completely shut; few second offenders become adults. You might think that this makes no sense as the girl is lost from the pool of prostitutes. You are wrong because the punishment creates such fear in the other girls, of which there are many,
that they never cheat their Yazaks. Closing a girl, as this procedure is called, is therefore an investment. What is more, the “closed girls” who survive become specialized at serving with their mouths and brown holes and draw a higher premium from their clients.

Running away is rare. When a child runs, recapture is almost inevitable because there is a strong honor system among the Orphanages for returning wanderers. The punishment for running is stoning. Here, the runaway is tied into a yam sack and laid on the pavement in the middle of the Orphanage. The child is then stoned; the verification of death is irrelevant, as once the fun is over, the sack is sealed and thrown into the garbage dump. The cries of pain during a stoning are so petrifying that it serves as a most effective deterrent, particularly as the punishment is delivered by those whom it seeks to deter.

Through this system of skillfully metered justice, the Orphanage is a remarkably orderly and peaceful home for children who otherwise would become street vermin.

There are no babies in the Orphanage, as they go to a separate place. Babies are highly valued, and in fact the prostitutes are discouraged from wasting their clients’ issue. The babies go to a light brown tent, directly in front of the meat market, that houses upward of fifty babies and wet nurses. The babies are rented out daily to the well-organized beggar network, since a beggar with a baby gets five times more income than a childless beggar (this rule of thumb is also true for children with deformities and missing limbs). It is important to nourish the babies well enough to keep them alive but it is crucial not to overfeed them, to prevent them from becoming fat.
A fat baby does not cry from hunger although a needle poked in the bottom guarantees that any living baby will cry Babies are tattoo-marked also and have to be returned at sundown for refeeding. If a baby survives to childhood, he graduates to the Orphanage; and if not, to the dump.

How do I know all of this? My husband, Shahalad, taught me.

The morning after I was initiated at Master Gahil’s house by the smiling uncle, Dr. Dasdaheer came to see me again. His shirt seemed to be the same crumpled one I had seen him in the day before. The doctor examined me but this time only around my vagina. He declared, as if this would lift my spirits, “Good. No damage.” He left a folded white long-shirt on the bed for me to wear. After he left, I put it on, as I had been naked up to that point.

I lay motionless on the bed for another hour or two. Eventually the door lock clicked, the door opened, and in walked Master Gahil. The master wore a white topcoat with gold trim and he was beaming. “Batuk, you were simply wonderful last night; congratulations, my little princess.” I stared blankly ahead of me and he continued, “You know how much you like old Kumud’s sweet-cake? That is how much your Uncle Nir loved you.” I thought of Uncle’s ever-smiling face, and his shiny shoes. “When a man becomes an uncle,” Gahil continued in his bellowing nothingness, “he starts to like a new type of sweet-cake, and you, princess, are the most delicious of them
all.” He grinned as if expecting me to laugh at his little joke. Instead I continued to stare at nothing. He inhaled deeply and continued, “Batuk, my darling, you are special because you can help uncles feel so lovely. That makes you very very precious, just like a princess in a palace.” He walked toward me and sat next to me on the bed. I did not look up or flinch as he carried on. “In fact, little darling, I have made a special arrangement for you—just for you—so that you can make much, much more sweet-cake with different uncles. They will all love you so much. They will give you presents and clothes and toys and lovely, lovely food. You will see how much fun it will be; you make sweet-cakes for them and they will give you lots and lots of presents. Isn’t that heaven?” I turned over and lay facedown on the bed.