The Hope Factory (24 page)

The contractor saw the brick descend and hit the steel rod; he shied in fright and glanced at the child. There was just time for him to pick up or push the child out of the way—if he was the type to move quickly and in a well-coordinated manner. Perhaps he was not that type, or perhaps, with the child so dirty, he could not bring himself to touch him with his hands. Some would later remember him making a weak, ineffective motion, as though to push the toddler out of harm’s way with his foot.

And then the brick landed safely upon the sand.

The maisthri, shocked out of his own temper, came hurrying down. The contractor, shocked in turn, could only stare blindly at him, searching within himself for words to deal with the situation. The silence was broken by neither of them. “You dog,” she said. “You street-filth-eating dog.”

Kamala had dropped the brick that was in her hands, careless of where it landed. She ran to her startled child and settled
him tightly astride her hip. And thus bolstered and fortified, she turned to the speechless men confronting each other and seemingly unaware of her diminutive presence until she opened her mouth.

“You could have killed him,” she said. You rascal. You careless dog. He could have died. What did he do to you, my poor child, that you should want to kill him?

And then, with all the force of her well-developed muscles, she slapped the maisthri across his face. Next to him, the contractor flinched, as though he had received the slap on his own face.

Sister! she heard someone say. Don’t do this. Come away. Your child is safe.

She saw the stunned look on the maisthri’s face succeeded by growing outrage. “You whore,” he said, stepping toward her. “Who do you think you are? I’ll teach you a lesson.”

He was prevented from doing so by the contractor, who restrained him with a warning hand on his shoulder. “It was an accident,” the contractor said, as though more for his own comfort than for hers. “It was an accident.”

But Kamala would not be comforted. Two and a half years of dammed anger broke through, sweeping everything—judgment, economics, her future—before it. Her child was, after all, not harmed. But her anger seemed to have nothing to do with that. “You rascal,” she said. “Scoundrel. Despoiler of your sisters and mother.”

Sister, sister, the voices around her said. The contractor said, “Come, come. You cannot behave like this. What is this.”

She swung her hand again toward the maisthri; he stepped back and avoided it. So she collected her breath in her lungs and spat into his face. Hands tried to grab her and restrain her.

Do not touch me! she said.

And it was undoubtedly the force of her temper, radiating powerfully from every inch of her, that kept everyone at bay, silent and watchful, as she went to the corner of the site, picked up her plastic woven lunch basket, and, holding her baby tightly against her, walked away from them all.

HER TEMPER KEPT HER
company through the day, as she fed her son some food and scowled at the road that ran in front of her tent. Her only continuing regret was that she had missed striking the mason’s face on her second attempt.

But by sunset she had calmed to the point of taking decisions. The anger that flooded through her lent a great clarity to her thoughts.

The next day, she rose before dawn. She quietly collected everything she would need that morning into a large jute bag. Then she woke her sleeping child, quieting his protests with the comfort of her breast. He did not wake fully, and so she maneuvered herself out of the tent with him sleeping on her shoulder, the bag clutched awkwardly in her hand. She quietly crossed the road, leaving behind her other possessions and Old Gowriamma, who slumbered on undisturbed with soft alcoholic snores.

The previous evening, she had reached up her saree skirts in the privacy of her tent and untied the strip of cloth that she always kept mid-thigh. The papers that crackled within were her talisman. She had told no one about it, even if it occasionally constrained her movements, feeling it fatten over the months with the same satisfaction with which she had witnessed the flesh collecting on her son.

She had counted them all out, the paper notes old and worn and sometimes dirty, but with their value undiminished. From
the bundle she extracted a few rupees and proceeded briskly to make certain purchases that she would have considered very frivolous even half a day earlier.

And now, in the predawn chill, she planned to make a businesslike use of them.

A LANE LED OFF
the main road that housed the slum tents, and Kamala walked toward it. Down the lane, right at the end, in this quiet corner of Koramangala, was a large two-story bungalow, clean and new. Kamala knew it well; she had worked on it for much of the previous two years, moving to the new site only when the construction work on this was completed. The house was still unoccupied, its windows bare of curtains, the front door firmly locked. Some fellow came every now and then to attend to the garden; the only person who remained daily was an old watchman who spent his day hours squatting by the gate, smoking beedis and communing with the wall opposite. At night, he engaged in a flurry of activity—drinking a tot of arrack (purchased alongside Old Gowriamma), trying his luck and limited economics with the prostitute who opened for business at night in one of the slum tents after concluding her daytime labors as a construction worker, and finally, rolling himself into a tight, blanket-covered ball at a sheltered corner of the house’s pristine verandah and sleeping the whole night through, waking a little after sunrise.

That was usual. Once a week, he vanished for a day and a half, attending to business god knows where. And that absence was perfectly timed for Kamala’s needs this morning.

In the predawn darkness, Kamala paused outside the gate of the bungalow, hushed and abandoned. She opened the latch of the gate and slipped through, shadowlike, on the path that
led to the rear. There, surrounded by high walls that would assure her of privacy, stood the object she sought: a cold-water tap that was used to water the back garden. The rooftop tank that fed it was kept full by the watchman, and now, when she turned it on experimentally, the water gushed out, cold and clear and priceless.

Her son, well fed on her breast, was content to sit sleepily while his mother grimly made her preparations. Then, when her fell intent became clear, he burst into tears, but to no avail. A quick smack reduced his wails to a continuous, grizzly whimper, and Kamala tucked her saree up at her waist and proceeded to give her son the first full bath of his life.

She stripped him of his nightshirt and rubbed him down with expensive sesame-seed oil, working it deep into the skin to soften it and dislodge the dirt, in a cleansing ritual she had almost forgotten. Then, when his body and head and hair were so well oiled he almost slipped from her grasp, she doused him with cold water from the tap and proceeded to use the soap that she had purchased along with the oil the previous day. She used it once to get rid of the oil and dirt, washing it away, and then, without mercy, used it once more until it bubbled and frothed under her fingers, rejoicing in the sweet smell that rose from his skin. When he was washed clean, she unraveled the top half of her saree and used it to dry him. The bath, or rather its earnestly awaited conclusion, revived him, and clad in nothing he capered about the lawn while Kamala attended to herself.

The sky was still dark, but the blue bloom of predawn was upon them. She had to hurry. She kept her underskirt on but removed everything else, unmindful of the depravity of the act in her desperate desire to feel the rush of water on her body. The oil gleamed against the darkness of her skin, burnishing it,
and the cold water cascading through her hair seemed to wash away two and a half years of construction site dust. She raised her skirts to wash between her thighs and down the oiled length of her legs, and then, finally, she was clean.

As with her son, she dried herself with the saree she had just removed, and then reached inside the jute bag for a change of clothes, pulling out a clean cotton saree that she had carried with her for two years and rarely worn, saving it blindly for just such an occasion. For her son too, she dressed him in a new shirt and combed his locks. The kajal stick for both of them, to line their eyes. And for herself, as a finishing touch, a dot of kajal as a bindi on her forehead. Her hair ran wet and loose down her back; when it dried, she would tie it into a braid, and decorate it with a bunch of jasmine flowers behind her neck.

She wore no jewelry around her neck, wrists, or on her ears except for a black amulet thread that she wore like a necklace, but that did not matter. She was dressed and prepared as a bride might be, ready for a momentous change in her life. In the early morning light that began to glisten off the house windows, she caught sight of their reflection and rejoiced. The baby at her hip was clean and glowing and well dressed; if the contractor were to see him now, he would not hesitate to pick him up and hold him tight. And the calm, respectable woman in the plate of glass showed no sign of the desperate life she had led for over two years. True, her face was thin and dry and her body a little scrawny, but that could not be helped. And perhaps, if she handled the day with due attention, she might eventually have a chance to reverse some of that damage.

And thus, washed and attired, she turned her attention to the next step.

WHEN THE JOB BROKER
emerged from her house, she was met by Kamala, who had arrived an hour earlier and squatted down on the dry earth in front of the building, waiting for her quarry to appear. She had moved only once in that hour, to peel and feed her son a banana. Now she rose and folded her hands respectfully.

“Namaste, aunty,” she said.

The job broker returned her greeting with some reservation. She was good at quickly sizing up people; there was an air of implacable determination about this girl that might signal trouble.

“You asked me to come and see you, aunty,” said Kamala.

“Oh,” said the job broker. “It is you. Yes, yes. Finally …” she said. “You must be Saroja, and you, wretched girl, are a whole two days late.”

I am not Saroja, said Kamala. And I am right on time.

Seeing the job broker’s confusion grow, she explained. “You asked me to come and see you when my baby was older,” she said. “He is now two and a half years old, and I can perform any household job you want me to.”

The job broker stared at her in some astonishment and curiosity, as though hoping to penetrate this shroud of confusing statement. She seemed to notice everything, the job broker, from the happy toddler, clinging to his mother’s saree and smiling up at her with a full-fed, sunny chubbiness in odd and telling contrast to the hollowness of his mother’s cheeks, to the awe-inspiring aura of cleanliness that clung to Kamala, the washing and bathing and donning of scrupulously clean clothing. And, in the serious intensity of her face, the job broker finally registered a fleeting contrasting memory of the same face: younger, fresher, sparkling with a look of eager anticipation.
“Why, I remember you,” she said, her face incredulous. “You came from that village, I remember, and with the baby.”

Yes, said Kamala. And now, as promised, I would like that job.

The job broker opened her mouth to indignantly repudiate this claim of old promises—for surely such statements were implicitly accompanied by expiry-dates and a time-bar?—but instead she said nothing and stood pondering.

Perhaps she was troubled by the weight of professional demands caused by the errant Saroja and her urgent need for a hirable maid. Or perhaps it was simply that Kamala’s sudden and desperate appearance triggered some latent sympathy within the job broker, jostling her, for a minute, by the recollection of chances she had received in her own life that had allowed her to prosper. For, in spite of her brusque, businesslike exterior and her capacity for holding the hearts and dreams of others in her hand, the job broker was not, by nature, a bad woman.

“Fine,” she said. “I will keep my promise.”

AND SO IT WAS
that Kamala had at last slipped upward into the ranks of the domestically employed, where she had remained for the past decade, working hard to raise her son respectably. She was proud of what she had achieved, alone, unaided. Prouder, perhaps, than her brother was of anything he had done.

But it was the unacknowledged truth of her life, celebrated by no one but herself. She had kept those years of her past secret, when she lived in a roadside tent and toiled amidst cement and stone; speaking about that time to no one, not even her
son, for everyone she knew would find it shameful and degrading, not recognizing the strength she had discovered within herself because of it, or the fears of destitution that haunted her even today of waking up to find herself living by the side of the road in a tent, white-haired, drunk.

MR. ANANTHAMURTHY WAS FOND
of discoursing on the auspicious nature of Deepavali—and as though to prove him right, Anand received a surprising phone call.

“Happy Deepavali, saar,” said the Landbroker. “I have good news for you…. I have arranged some land for you to see.”

“Really?” He had not believed that the Landbroker would ever deliver on his vague promises. “That’s great.”

Early the next morning, Anand passed the biscuit factory and parked his car next to the bicycle repair shop opposite the Mariamma temple. The Landbroker was waiting for him, emerging from his nondescript car into the brilliant sunshine, wearing his oversize, gold-rimmed dark glasses and a tight pink polyester shirt.

“Namaskara, saar,” he said as he clambered into the passenger seat next to Anand and pulled a large satellite photograph out of a file. “Gugalarth,” he said, and Anand blinked uncomprehendingly for a moment before he realized he was looking
at an image downloaded from Google Earth. On this, the Landbroker had drawn the outline of a spread of land that enclosed several contiguous farms, his stained finger stabbing at the paper while he spoke at length and with some intimacy about the land, twelve acres, saar, and the price per acre. On paper, the land looked small and somehow false, as the earth does when seen from a plane, a piece of a strange planet that cannot possibly translate into human concerns.