The Hope of Shridula (15 page)

17

August 1946

Y
our wife is of a gentle nature, like your mother and grandmother," Saji Stephen told his son Nihal Amos. "Tell Sheeba Esther she will continue to be in charge of Glory Anna."

Saji Stephen sat on the veranda, taking comfort in the coolness of the day. His sons sat with him, one on either side.

"And your wife, Rajeev Nathan . . . she is like your Uncle Boban Joseph. She achieves her end, but everyone suffers along the way. Tell her she is free to tend to her children in any way she wishes. Without assistance."

"Good," said Rajeev Nathan. "Fine."

"With one small room, we have no place for Glory Anna to sleep," Nihal Amos said.

"She will move back into the room she shared with her grandmother. I will secure a personal servant for her."

Nihal Amos looked at his father in surprise. "I must say, you are of an uncommonly accommodating mind today."

"Whatever do you mean? I am at all times a most reasonable man," Saji Stephen said. "Tell Sheeba Esther that her only responsibility will be to oversee the girl and make certain her needs are met. Only until next year, however. I have already arranged a most excellent marriage for her."

"Good," said Rajeev Nathan.

"Fine," said Nihal Amos.

When Udit arrived at the settlement to summon Ashish to the landlord's house, Zia mumbled her displeasure. "Does he think you are still a child?" she grumbled. "Does he think you should sit and wait for him to call you whenever he desires a playmate?"

"I had no choice when I was a child, and I have no choice now," Ashish said. "He is my master."

As usual, Saji Stephen was standing beside the garden waiting for Ashish to arrive. "Come, come!" he called as soon as he saw Ashish coming up the path. Saji Stephen turned away and walked up to the veranda. Ashish followed as far as the patch of dirt.

"You are a fortunate Untouchable," Saji Stephen called down to him. "I give you special attention."

Ashish kept his eyes fixed straight ahead.

"Your daughter," Saji Stephen said. "What is her name?"

"Shridula. Blessing."

"Yes, yes. I remember. She came here to sit with the girl Glory Anna. Now I find myself in need of a personal servant for the girl, and I want it to be your daughter. She will come and live here in this house under the supervision of my second son's wife."

Ashish flinched as though he had been hit with a rock.

"She will have a much better life here than she would in your miserable hut," Saji Stephen said. "I will give her better food. I will permit her to sleep in the barn. She can visit you from time to time—if she wishes."

"No," Ashish pleaded. "Do not ask for my Shridula. It would be too hard on her mother."

Saji Stephen bristled, and his eyes hardened. "You do not understand me, Ashish. I do not ask. The girl belongs to me. I shall do with her as I wish, and I wish her to serve the girl Glory Anna."

"No. Please. If I could—"

"I do you a courtesy to inform you of my intentions," the landlord said. "Were you any laborer besides my playmate Ashish, I would simply send someone to bring the girl to me. Willingly or by force."

"Landlord . . . Saji . . ."

"
Master
Landlord!" Saji Stephen's words were clipped and brittle.

"Master Landlord, I beg of you, allow my daughter to come to your house in the morning and return home in the evening. Please . . . master."

A smile creased Saji Stephen's face.

"Go back to work," the landlord said. "At sunup tomorrow, your daughter is to be waiting at the edge of my garden. She will stay here day and night, for as long as I say."

"No!" Zia screamed when Ashish told her of the landlord's command. "No, not my Shridula!"

"Saji Stephen is not like his brother," Ashish explained, for he knew the terrors that must be running through his wife's mind. "She will be a servant for the girl. The girl's auntie will watch out for them."

"No!" Zia cried. "Shridula cannot go! Why did you agree to such an arrangement?"

Ashish reached out and touched his wife's leathery arm. "It is not for us to say," he said softly. "Saji Stephen is our master."

Shridula sank down in the corner and buried her head in her hands. No one had ever considered the possibility that she might have an opinion.

"How long does he want her to work in his house?" Zia asked.

Ashish shrugged his shoulders. "He said she could come back and visit us."

Zia tossed her
pallu
over her head and wept.

"He said she would have plenty of food," Ashish said. "Maybe our Shridula will come back to us plump like a rich lady." Even Zia, in her anguish, had to smile at that possibility.

The monsoon season was not willing to retreat without one last drenching downpour. It started in the hours after midnight and refused to let up. By the first light in the eastern sky, Shridula pulled the end of her
sari
over her head and hugged her mother good-bye.

"I will walk with you," Ashish said.

"No," Shridula told him. "This is for me to do."

Shridula picked her way to the landlord's house through the flowing mud and the pouring rain. By sunup, she stood waiting at the edge of the garden.

In the rainy gray of full morning, as she continued to wait, a cool breeze blew from the west and plastered the girl's wet
sari
against her reed-thin form. She shivered in the downpour and continued to wait.

The sun kept rising—Shridula could feel its heat even though clouds blocked its light—and fear began to well up inside her. What if she had done something wrong? What if the landlord punished her father for her stupidity by sending
thags
with clubs to beat him up? Tears tumbled down her cheeks and mixed together with the steadily falling rain. But still Shridula waited.

When the sun reached its zenith, it finally broke through the clouds. Sheeba Esther, a small woman with the face of a girl, peeked out from around the veranda.

"Oh!" she cried in surprise. "You must be Shridula!"

Shridula folded her hands and bowed her sopping-wet head.

"Come, come! I did not expect you in all this rain!" Sheeba Esther pulled Shridula over to the corner of the veranda and threw a sheet over her. "You poor child! Wait here while I get dry clothes for you."

"I can work in the garden," Shridula suggested to Sheeba Esther. She looked doubtfully at her fresh sari. "But not in this."

"You are not here to work as a gardener," Sheeba Esther said. "You are to serve Miss Glory Anna and keep her company."

But Shridula had not the first idea how to serve someone of upper caste birth. And she certainly didn't know how to keep such a one company. So for most of the day she sat on a stool and stared at her hands.

At long last Glory Anna said, "Shall I teach you to make tea for me?"

"I do not think so," Shridula said. "I am Untouchable and I will pollute you."

"I am a Christian," Glory Anna said. "We do not have those same rules."

Shridula looked up at her. This could be a trick.

"Really," Glory Anna said. "My grandmother told me. Come, I will teach you to make tea."

18

September 1946

G
o ahead," Glory Anna urged Shridula. "I want you to brush my hair." She pointed to the intricately-patterned silver hairbrush that sat alongside the matching comb and mirror.

Shridula didn't move.

"Hurry!" Glory Anna picked up the brush and, with growing impatience, thrust it toward Shridula.

But Shridula shrank away. "I must not," she mumbled. "I am an Untouchable. Untouchables are not allowed to touch metal."

"Such tiresome rules!" Glory Anna heaved an exasperated sigh. "The landlord says you are to be my servant. That means you must obey me, and I say you must brush my hair." Again she thrust the brush toward Shridula. "Hurry now. Do as I say."

Shridula reluctantly took the brush. How cool the silver felt against her fingers! How smooth! She rolled the handle back and forth in her hand.

"Brush my hair!" Glory Anna demanded.

Slowly, taking great care to be gentle, Shridula pulled the brush through Glory Anna's glistening black hair.

Imagine, her Untouchable hand grasping metal. Silver! Imagine, Glory Anna dressing her in a
sari
made of real silk! Imagine, washing her Untouchable body with fragrant
soap!
So many new things!

Every day with Glory Anna opened fresh doors of experience for Shridula. Her most well-worn words became:
No, no, I must not!
Glory Anna's refrain remained:
Oh, but you must!

The first night and the second, after her evening chores— brushing out Glory Anna's long hair, folding Glory Anna's
sari
and laying it in the chair—Shridula headed for the barn to make herself a bed in the hay. On the third night, as Shridula prepared to leave, Glory Anna said, "If Sheeba Esther got a sleeping mat for you, you could sleep on the floor here in my room."

Which is how, in the dark of the night, Shridula came to be lying on a mat squeezed between the cupboard and Glory Anna's bed, wishing with all her might she could see the stars overhead. Wishing she could feel the breeze blow through the branches of her father's
neem
tree, which he had planted with his own hands. Wishing she could listen to her
amma
and
appa
whisper to each other as she fell asleep.

"I am sorry you were born an Untouchable," Glory Anna said. "And a girl, too."

"I am a blessing to my parents."

"I am a blessing to no one," said Glory Anna. "On the day I was born, not one person rejoiced. My father thinks I killed my mother—I know he blames me. Maybe if I had been a boy . . ."

"They did not put you in a pot and bury you," Shridula said. "They did not leave you out in the field to die."

"Only because my grandmother would not let them."

"Well, then, maybe to her, you
were
a blessing."

Glory Anna said nothing. Shridula stretched out on the sleeping mat and let her eyes drift closed.

"Maybe so," Glory Anna whispered. "Maybe I was a blessing to my grandmother."

"What are the fluffy white cakes?" Shridula asked as Sheeba Esther laid a platter before the girls on the veranda.

"
Idli,"
Glory Anna said. "Rice cakes. Have you never eaten them?"

Shridula had not. Nor had she tasted
dosa,
the big pancakes. Glory Anna showed her how to eat those with spiced vegetable stew. Certainly Shridula had never poured
ghee
over her food before. "Not so much!" she cried to Glory Anna, who poured it on like a golden river. Glory Anna laughed and poured out another dollop.

Saji Stephen frowned when he saw the girls sitting together on his veranda. He had warned Sheeba Esther to keep the Untouchable out of sight. But since the landlord was supposed to be away all day, she had given them permission to enjoy the pleasantness of a cooler day.

Shridula was the first to hear the angry shouts.

"Just some men," Glory Anna said. "They are down by the road."

Shridula scrambled to her feet. "I should not be here."

But Glory Anna caught her by the arm. "Never mind them. Some villager is always angry and yelling at another. It has nothing to do with you."

Shridula, hesitating, shot a nervous glance down at the road.

"Sit down," Glory Anna insisted. "Here, take another
idli."

But as Shridula reached for the rice cake, a rock crashed through the pepper vines and smashed the platter to pieces.

"Unrest is what it was," Rajeev Nathan declared as he stomped past his father and across the veranda to where his brother sat. "Political unrest. It had nothing at all to do with Glory Anna or with that Untouchable servant girl of hers. It had everything to do with me!"

"Ridiculous," Saji Stephen said. "Stop pacing and sit down."

"Can you not see, Father? It is not the Untouchable that upsets them. It is the fact that I have a Muslim wife!"

"You are a Christian, she is a Muslim, they are Hindu. It is ideal. You said so yourself. You are the model of the new India. Is that not what you always told us?"

"The problem is, they do not
want
that kind of new India. They want two nations, one for Hindus and one for Muslims."

"And where would you fit into that?" Saji Stephen asked. He made a thinly disguised effort to suppress his laugh.

"I do not fit into it at all, Father! That is precisely the point!" Rajeev Nathan's raised voice quaked. "Two weeks ago Muhammad Ali Jinnah proclaimed Direct Action Day. To peacefully demand a Muslim homeland in British India is what he said, but look what happened—Riots in the north! Thousands dead in Calcutta alone! The disruption and violence have spread all over India, and now here they are in the south. Riots right in Malabar!"

Saji Stephen stared at his son. "What a lot to imagine from a single rock smashing our
idli
platter."

"Really, Rajeev Nathan," Nihal Amos said with a sigh. "You can take so small an event and cast it into the most dramatic light."

"Do not call me Rajeev Nathan! Do not call me by any Christian name! From this day forward I am simply Rajeev the Indian!"

On an especially lovely morning, on a day fresh and cool, Rajeev made a trip alone in the horse cart. Switch in hand, he urged the horse to move faster, to pull the cart quickly past the high caste settlements and on toward the Sudras' fields.

Sudras, their
mundus
tied high and short, their bare legs showing for all to see, sweated as they worked in their small paddies. They did their own planting, their own growing, and their own harvesting, their wives at work alongside them. Their children worked, too. Even the small ones, who ran back and forth toting water to the paddies and lugging sheaves of cut rice back with them. But Rajeev refused to look at the Sudras. He kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

Rajeev arrived at the English Mission Medical Clinic before noon. He clambered out of the cart, hurried to the front door, and pounded on it with his fist.

"My grandmother told me how the white men came to India," Glory Anna said to Shridula. "All the way from the other side of the world. It was God's will they should come and govern India and take away our riches."

Shridula wrinkled her brow.

"My grandmother said that at the end of India's land, where the sun sets, is a great sea. One day when the Indian people went to bathe in that sea, they saw a strange creature standing on the beach. His hair was red like fire, his face very pale, and his eyes as blue as the sky. The creature could not speak the Indian language, so no one understood what he said. After that day, many of this kind swarmed all over the seashore."

"How did they get there?" Shridula asked.

"No one knows," said Glory Anna. "They were just there. They came and they never left."

Shridula stared at Glory Anna's silky-smooth skin, so creamy pale. Her eyes were not colored like the sky—except perhaps when the sky is black with monsoon clouds—and not a spark of fire could be found in her hair. Even so . . .

Slowly Shridula raised her own dark arm and examined it.

"Are you one of them?" Shridula asked.

"No!" Glory Anna said. "Only . . . Well, I think maybe they were Christians, too."

"What about the Brahmin? He is not a Christian, but his skin is even paler than yours."

"He is not like me, though," Glory Anna said. "Brahmins are not like us!"

Shridula studied her own dark arm. "I want to see my family," she said. "The landlord said I could see them. I want to go home."