The Hope Factory (22 page)

TWELVE YEARS EARLIER, WHEN
the course of her young life had left her widowed and alone, expelled from her husband’s modest family hut by his parents, the starving mother of a baby boy, she had turned to her brother for help.

He was living with his wife in what had been their late
mother’s hut, where her sister-in-law now tended to the onions and looked after her own children. Far from being the proud owner of many acres, he too struggled to make ends meet, and his response to his sister’s predicament was unhappy; the far greater misfortune, he seemed to feel, was his; the tragic tide of events that had made her his responsibility.

His frustration and anger were nightly expressed in shouts—as though Kamala herself had been responsible for the accident that had relieved her husband of his life—and finally, when he returned home one day to find her lining her eyes with kajal, in a cruel, intemperate beating for behaving in a manner unsuited to a young widow. Especially one who was such a monstrous burden on her family.

With no resources apart from the sinewed strength of her body, Kamala knew quite clearly what she was going to do—get away from her brother and the village, travel to the big city and get a job that would flood her body with nourishment, and, through her, enter the eager sucking mouth of her son, who, unlike his predecessors, had not perished in the womb and miscarried but had fought his way out of that hostile tomb and now lay drinking greedily at her breasts, which, as if to compensate for those previously lost chances of succor, swelled gratefully with milk every time they were sucked dry, draining her body and filling her with pride at the same time.

“Please stay with us, Thange,” her sister-in-law said again, when Kamala whispered these plans to her. “Your brother does not mean all he says. He often acts in a temper. You know that. He is very proud.”

He is a fool, said Kamala. You are too good for him, Akka.

“How will you live? Thange, how will you survive?”

“I’ll manage, Sister. You’ll see.” She did not tell her sister-in-law about her secret resource, given to her by a friend’s
mother—the name and telephone number of a job broker in the city.

The phone call to Bangalore was short and expensive, but very productive.

“Can you speak Hindi?” the job broker asked her in a businesslike fashion.

No, said Kamala.

“Can you speak English?”

No.

“Do you know how to clean houses?”

Kamala paused in surprise before replying, wondering if this was one of those trick questions whose answers were cunningly other than the obvious. For who did not know how to keep a house clean?

Yes? she answered cautiously.

“Good. Are you honest, and a good, hard worker? … Are you of decent morals? … My good ladies are very particular, and I have never disappointed them…. And, most important: Do you know how to keep a respectful tongue in your head?”

Certainly, said Kamala, for there was no one standing by to click their tongues and contradict her.

“And can you look after babies?”

Oh yes, said Kamala, hugging the tiny sleeping bundle held in a sling around her neck fiercely to herself. “That is what I am best at.”

IT HAD BEEN A FOOLISH PLAN
from the start, but it had taken hindsight for her to realize why. It was a foolish plan for one very obvious reason, which was made immediately clear to her.

The job broker lived in a government compound, in a dirty two-story building painted blue that housed several families, for her husband worked in some capacity for the city corporation. Kamala had spent half an hour staring at the building from the opposite side of the road, wondering how she was ever to reach it.

She had traveled from the village overnight on the bus, covering the four miles that remained within the city on foot, asking directions as she went, sticking nervously to the broken footpaths to avoid the rush of the traffic that skimmed past her on wings of steel. She stopped once to buy a banana, almost shrieking at the price she was asked and waiting suspiciously to see if the banana seller charged others differently before handing over her money. For all its extravagant city price, it tasted overripe and soggy, but its sweet flesh insensibly lifted her spirits.

And so she had arrived at her destination. Or almost arrived, separated from the government compound by a road of a nature she had never before encountered, even in her walk through the city—as wide as the broadest river, with screaming lines of traffic: buses, lorries, cars, vans, auto-rickshaws, motorbikes, scooters, all rushing back and forth without break and without pause, pouring onto a bridge that soared high. Kamala, clutching her baby against her with one hand and a jute bag with all her worldly possessions with the other, finally decided to ask for help. “Anne, brother,” she asked, of a man walking by. “How is one to get to the other side.”

“By crossing the road, sister,” he replied without breaking stride, “like everybody else.” Kamala sat down and weighed the truth of his words. She discovered it was indeed true: people were walking across the road all the time, each time, it seemed, placing their lives in peril, leaping and dancing as they
moved, jerking this way and that to avoid the oncoming traffic. They would start on their perilous journey, and she would hold her breath and almost close her eyes, opening them to see the people safely crossed to the other side.

It took her half an hour to decide to try it herself. Her strategy was to cross along with someone who looked sensible: not like the young boys who seemed to take pleasure in the daring crossing; and not someone so old that they might decide, halfway through, that they had seen enough of life after all and simply stop to meet their fate. She finally threw in her lot with two respectable looking women; they did not seem to mind the addition to their party; perhaps there was a greater strength in numbers. Kamala held her baby tight against her chest and kept close to the two women, moving in concert; dancing forward when they did, stepping back, freezing, running a quick yard or two, freezing again, moving forward, moving back, feeling the gusts of air from passing vehicles, in front of her, behind her, so close that she had almost felt the touch of their metal upon her skin, until they finally reached the other side. A deep gasp released the breath in her chest. Kamala turned to thank the other women and perhaps to share a laugh at the narrowness of their escape, but they had already moved on.

The job broker’s husband’s government job was possibly a post of some prestige, for their building had electricity and running water. The job broker herself worked part-time as a cook and made her money, really, from the people she placed—collecting from them a full two months’ salary, payable (if she knew them to be reliable) in installments of up to six months.

All this had been explained to Kamala over the telephone, and Kamala was entirely agreeable. For a good job, even a payment of three months’ salary seemed a small price. But now, as she waited for the job broker to appear, she steeled herself for
the discussion about to come. What if the job broker, having coaxed her this far, now demanded four months’ salary as her pay? Should Kamala demur or pay up without argument? Or perhaps argue a bit to save face, and then concede? Wasn’t, in fact, even five months’ salary, an indenture of almost half a year, worth it ultimately? To have good food in her belly and the promise of more?

The woman appeared on her landing, and Kamala looked down at the ground in relief. The job broker had the generous girth of someone who stretched her employers’ budget to feed both them and her own family on ample scale. She had the calm demeanor of a woman who did not break her promises lightly. Kamala felt her fears quieten.

“Namaste, aunty,” she said respectfully to the massive and competent figure who stood a few steps above her. Her laden arms prevented her from joining her palms in greeting, but the job broker did not seem to take offense. She nodded back, looking over Kamala in a considering manner. Her eyes rested first on Kamala’s face, and something in it brought a hint of a softening smile to her own; then they swept downward, dismissively, over Kamala’s body and dress, before coming to a sudden, freezing halt halfway down.

“What is the meaning of that?” she said, pointing to the sleeping bundle tucked under Kamala’s arm. “That’s not a baby, is it?”

“Yes,” said Kamala, smiling proudly. “That’s my baby. My little one, my son.”

“You are to be congratulated,” the job broker said. “And do you have somewhere to leave it while you work? Someone who can look after it for you, this baby?”

No, said Kamala. I am alone.

The job broker stared at her before turning away to spit on
the ground, the bubbles of her saliva resting on the earth before sinking and converting a small circle of dry sand into mud. “You stupid, stupid girl,” she said. “Have you no sense at all? Should you not have told me about this earlier? Who will hire you with a babe in arms?”

I can do the work with him, Kamala said. Really. Please believe me, aunty.

He is a good baby. No, he will not cry and disturb the masters, she said.

No, aunty, how can you say such a thing, yes, of course I was married and widowed—I did not lie about that.

No, he is not a mistake.

I can do the work with him. I promise.

But the job broker, as job brokers will, kept her eye on her own internal quality standards and could not be swayed. “Come back when he is older, or when you have made other arrangements for him,” was all she would say, before turning away with a censuring shake of her head and disbelief at the naïveté of village girls.

And, as with all foolish, ill-considered plans, it had come to naught, as simply as that.

IF SOMEONE WERE TO ASK HER
today how, as a young, widowed mother of one, with no experience and (in the light of this fiasco) very little of either judgment or brains, how then had she managed?—Kamala would rely upon the full serious weight of her dignity to reply, “Well, sir, I contrived. Somehow, I contrived,” and she would clack her thin gold bangles together to indicate that, by some measures, she had done even better than that.

Returning to her brother’s house was not an option she was willing to consider, come what may. When she went back to her village, she would go in strength and self-respect, or not go at all.

There was only one alternative open to her.

She became a coolie, a day laborer. A life immeasurably distant, it seemed to her, from the respectability of those who earned their wages monthly, or who toiled on the farmland that they and their ancestors before them had owned. A coolie
worked through the day, took his money, and was free to drink it or spend it or lose it. A coolie had no fixed job, or job title. He went where the work went, one day to work on a construction site, another day to clear out a dirty gutter. And with the influx of village people pulled daily into the city, a coolie missing today, for whatever reason, was a coolie replaced with ease tomorrow.

Kamala joined construction work. Not, of course, on those large city sites that grew quickly into tall buildings of steel and glass—those were built by men in hard yellow hats using large, fantastical pieces of machinery—but on the smaller constructions: houses, small offices, which were built, brick by brick, entirely on the muscular strength of workers, male and female, just like her.

The supervising building contractor looked her up and down, and signed her up on the spot. She learned quickly, training herself to walk upon the narrow planks of wood that bridged one half-built wall to another with rounded trays of cement and stones and bricks balanced upon her head; surefooted, so she would not slip and fall into the open foundations below and break her head. She learned to form part of the winding lines of workers who lifted, carried, passed, and dropped mechanically, as they were instructed, in work that used the skills of a monkey and the brains of a child and the strength of every muscle in her body for ten hours a day.

For her work she was paid only half what the menfolk earned. This was natural, she was told; it was a job that relied on muscle power, and the men had much more of that to offer. The money she earned was not enough to feed, clothe, and house her in any respectable manner, but the job had one saving grace: she could take her baby with her to the job site and fashion a sling for him on the branch of a tree, and let him sleep
there while she worked. And, if he should wake hungry, nobody minded if he cried loudly until his mother could attend to him. In the clang and clamor of a building construction site, a baby’s voice disturbed no one.

She lived with an acquaintance she met on the very first day, someone who swayed under a loaded head on the narrow plank bridge before her and whom Kamala instinctively steadied with her free hand. The white-haired woman thanked her in a voice rich with the stink of alcohol. She was fifty years old and as gnarled and dried as an old piece of firewood; she dealt with the circumstances of her life in the simplest of ways: each evening, she converted the day’s wages into arrack and drank herself to sleep.

Their home was a makeshift tent constructed from debris rescued from job sites. There were a whole row of these slum tents along the edge of a road, close enough for the residents to walk to their jobs on the construction sites nearby, then dismantle them and move on in a year or two, when they were chased away by municipal authorities or when the jobs ran dry. Like the other tents, hers was waist-high, with a triangular frame of low, crossed wooden poles covered with old rags and bits of asbestos sheeting, and draped over with a blue plastic sheet held down by stones placed along the edges. Inside, another sheet of blue plastic was spread on the floor, sufficient for the summer but none of it very effective against the wet of the monsoon, which sank, dense and cold, through all the layers—the plastic, the asbestos, everything—to embrace them to its poisonous bosom. At those times, Kamala would let the baby sleep on top of her, the chill and damp of the ground below rising through her body and making her tremble, but the blood flowing within her strong enough to keep her child warm, especially if she covered them both with rags and more plastic.