The Sari Shop (5 page)

Gokul talked about Lakshmi again, but in a very droll manner, as if she was the funniest woman on the earth – she was illogical, she brought up old fights when she was angry, quarrelled for no reason and then inexplicably made up. She had a fascination for talcum powder, loved to embroider useless cushion covers and was consumed by strange desires. He laughed indulgently as he talked and was completely unlike his angry self of earlier in the evening.

Then Ramchand related his morning encounter with Mahajan. He told them of the sound his hopping feet had made and how Mahajan had shouted up at him. Ramchand laughed a lot while relating the episode, as if he hadn’t been scared at all.

In the end, amidst all the laughter, Subhash elicited a promise from all of them to go to Sangam Cinema the coming Sunday to watch a rerun of
Hero No. 1
. They all ordered more cups of tea and talked till late at night. Finally, at eleven, Gokul got up. ‘I think I’d better go now. By now Lakshmi will have got down to cursing all my ancestors.’

Everyone laughed and Gokul left in a hurry. Hari and Subhash said goodbye to Ramchand and they left too, still laughing uncontrollably over something.

Ramchand had sobered up a little, though. He saw Hari and Subhash disappear in the chilling fog and then he began to walk back to his lodgings.

*

Now that he was alone, the gaiety that had been upon him all evening fell away. The evening fog had turned into the dense, opaque mist of the night. The roads looked deserted. Ramchand made his way slowly towards his lodgings. He felt uneasy. The old feeling that always lurked in hidden corners inside him, crouching between his lungs, swimming in his blood, now came upon him more hideously than ever. He despised himself for the frivolous, futile evening he had spent, and saw his own conduct during it as cheap and vulgar.

The way he had been slapping Subhash’s back, and the way he had been laughing at Hari’s jokes!

Why did he have to do all these things?

He thought of Mrs Sachdeva and Mrs Bhandari and felt disgusted. At them as well as at himself! He thought back to the events of the day. All the events seemed disjointed, the people were caricatures, the sounds were all hollow and faraway sounding, and he saw himself as an ineffectual, affected, half-baked creature trapped in a particularly bad, pointless movie. Ramchand suddenly told himself that enough was enough. What was all this madness? Where would it lead him, after all?

No, this wouldn’t do. He had to take control. Tomorrow was a new day. He would change everything. He wouldn’t lie about in a stupor that his thoughts always induced. He would start exercising so he’d be fit and healthy, he wouldn’t be
intimidated by anyone and he would stop watching those silly movies on Sundays with Hari and the others.

Ramchand quickened his pace. He would read some good books. He had heard that Mahatma Gandhi had written an autobiography. Yes, he would start with that. And he would decide once and for all whether he believed in God or not.

He had been walking fast and reached his lodgings sooner than he usually did. He took out his big iron key in the light of the street lamp and climbed up the flight of dark, narrow stairs that led straight up to his room on the first floor. He unlocked the old, wooden door and stepped inside. He fumbled for the light switch in the dark and switched it on. The naked bulb that hung from the centre of the ceiling came to life, casting its dim glow on the walls. Ramchand took a deep breath.

He would also paint this room, and get a 500-watt bulb. It would brighten up the room and, anyway, it was difficult to read by the light that his 40-watt bulb gave out. Yes, a brighter light and a painted room. And he would practise English-speaking in front of the mirror every day. At least for twenty minutes. You never know, he might even get a better job some day… Tomorrow was a new day, after all. And it was with these thoughts that Ramchand changed into his kurta-pyjama, took off his grey socks and wriggled his toes into his old blue night socks that had holes in the toes, and crept under a pile of blankets and quilts to go to sleep. He woke up a little late the next morning. The old city of Amritsar had woken up before him. He could hear the strains of the early morning kirtan at the Golden Temple playing on somebody’s radio. Bells were ringing at a nearby temple. A vegetable vendor was shouting that he was selling fresh tomatoes for six rupees a kilo. Another vendor was selling marigold flowers to freshly bathed, pious housewives for their morning pujas. The landlord’s children on the ground floor had already switched
on the television. Ramchand had a slight headache again and he found the morning noises unbearable. He struggled into a sitting position, pushing his covers aside.

The weak winter morning sunshine filtered through the barred window of his room and fell on the discoloured floor in golden stripes. Ramchand tried to recollect his thoughts of the night before but could remember only the cold words that formed them. He failed to recapture anything else. His mind went blank, and he sat for ages on his sagging charpai, on top of his untidy bedclothes, scratching away deposits of dirt and dead skin from the base of his toenails. He sat there for a long time before he realized that he was going to be late for work again today.

Ramchand had been born twenty-six years ago. At the time, his father ran a very small shop in Amritsar that sold, among other things, rice and pulses, candles and brooms, sugar and gramflour, fried groundnuts and homemade biscuits. Ramchand loved the gunnysack smell of the shop.

The small family lived in a smaller room behind the shop that had a tiny adjoining toilet.

One corner of the room was curtained off with an old, doubled-up red sari of Ramchand’s mother’s that had a pattern of large yellow flowers on it. In the curtained-off part, a small drain had been let out. A plastic bucket and mug were placed here and the family used this space as a bathroom. Another corner of the room formed the small kitchen, an area where Ramchand’s mother cooked on a tiny stove, rolled out perfectly round chapatis, neatly chopped onions and tomatoes and arranged shining clean steel utensils in neat rows. She always told Ramchand to keep away from the stove. She had smiling, serious eyes and she wore a leaf-shaped gold nose stud on her tiny, straight nose.

One day, she had finished kneading dough to make chapatis and was about to get the kerosene stove going. ‘Little boys should never go near fire, understand? Don’t forget. Remember what happened to Choo Hoo?’ she told the five-year-old Ramchand, who was hovering around her. Then, seeing him look a little mutinous, for he always liked to be as close to his mother as possible, she pulled out a lump of dough from the vessel she had been kneading it in. ‘Here, take this,’ she told him with a smile. ‘Go and sit in that corner and make something
really nice with it. Go and make the
most
beautiful thing in the world,’ she told him.

He understood, because she often made sparrows and rabbits with dough for him. She would work on the dough deftly with her slim fingers, pulling here, pinching there, rounding at one place, flattening at another, till a shape emerged from it. She would make a sparrow and give it a nice, sharp beak, wings folded by its side and a tail. She told Ramchand stories about how the sparrow used her beak to fight with her husband, and how she fed her children by bringing them food in this very beak. She laughed at his surprised face. When she made a rabbit, she gave him a perfect bobtail and nothing else. Just a blob with a bobtail. ‘Where is its face?’ Ramchand asked in confusion. ‘It is so scared of you, it is running away,’ she said laughing. ‘And when a rabbit is frightened, all you see of him is his little bobtail.’

Once she made a mouse and called her a Choo Hoo. ‘Is it a girl mouse then?’ Ramchand asked suspiciously.

‘Yes, and a pretty one too.’ She had made this mouse with special care, and had given her a nice tail, eyes and mouth. ‘You see, she has no whiskers,’ she told Ramchand, ‘because her mother told her not to go near the kerosene stove and she was naughty and she did, and her whiskers got singed.’

Ramchand was very impressed by this story. It was okay for Choo Hoo, because she was a girl mouse, but what if he went near the kerosene stove and never grew a moustache like his father’s when he grew up?

Sometimes his mother made a face with the lump of dough, using a matchstick to make two dents for eyes, one for a nose and then a series of dents in a smile-shaped line to make a toothy, smiling mouth.

When she gave him the dough and told him to make the most beautiful thing in the world, he rolled the lump round and round in his chubby fingers and thought and thought and
thought. What
was
the most beautiful thing in the world? It was his mother, of course, or possibly his father. But he couldn’t make them out of dough. Besides, they were not really things. He rolled the damp piece of dough around in his hands, thinking hard.

Then Ramchand’s father called out to his wife from the shop. ‘Please come here,’ he shouted to his wife as courteously as one could shout. Ramchand’s parents were old-fashioned – they never addressed each other by their names.

She turned the stove off, put the kerosene can and the matchbox safely away on an upper shelf and threw a sharp, anxious glance at him. She was terrified about the stove; she had heard so many stories of children having accidents with them. But ever since she had told him about Choo Hoo, he seemed to be keeping his distance from the stove. She hadn’t even planned it, it had just come out when she had finished making a perfect little mouse and had realized it would be difficult to give it whiskers. She smiled, untucked the pallu of her sari from the waistband of her petticoat, spread out the pallu, adjusted it around her shoulders and looked at her son. He was still absorbed in the piece of dough. Feeling he was safe, she went out to the shop. Apparently, her husband needed her help to look for a new tin of black pepper that he had misplaced. They found it after about ten minutes and Ramchand’s mother went back in to continue with her cooking.

She found Ramchand in the same corner where she had left him, with the piece of dough still firmly in his hand. But he was crying. And he wasn’t howling or throwing a tantrum or weeping like children do. He was really crying, with real heartbreaking sorrow, gulping and sobbing, his eyes full of grief.

Pain tore through her heart. She rushed to him and scooped him up in her arms, hugging him, examining him to see if he had physically hurt himself. But he hadn’t, and she sensed it
anyway. His eyes told her that. She murmured to him, she crooned to him gently, and when he calmed down slightly, the sorrow and incomprehension still in his eyes, she asked him very, very seriously, the way one asks an adult, ‘Tell me, why are you crying?’

He didn’t answer at first. He just looked down at the piece of dough in his hand, the look on his face more confused than miserable. He looked at the beloved, familiar face of his mother. Her clear gaze met his with honesty. He trusted her. He could tell her. ‘Ma… ma, you said… you said… you told me to make the most… most –’ He gulped. She waited. ‘You said, make the most beautiful thing in the world.’

‘And?’ she asked, her face still serious and enquiring.

‘And,’ and here Ramchand burst into tears again and wailed out, ‘I don’t know… I don’t know what is the most beautiful thing in the world.’

She didn’t laugh at him. And she never knew how grateful her son was to her for the rest of his life for not laughing, not even speaking or moving at that moment. She hugged him lightly and stroked his head gently.

Ramchand’s father came in then, saw Ramchand’s tear-stained face and, to his surprise, also saw tears glistening in his wife’s eyes.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

And she didn’t say, ‘Nothing. He just fell down.’

With complete, perfect composure, she told him.

Ramchand looked at his father apprehensively, his own face tense, the tears dried, the lump of dough now dusty, its surface drying and forming little cracks.

His father looked straight into his son’s eyes and said, ‘But I don’t know that either.’

The silence of his mother. The simple truth in his father’s voice. These were things Ramchand never forgot. There was perfect peace in the room after that moment. Ramchand didn’t
know where that lump of dough went. It was forgotten by everyone. His mother washed his face and hands, dried them gently with a soft cotton cloth and gave him some warm milk to drink. His father brought him a sugar-coated biscuit from the shop. Ramchand knew it was one of the most expensive ones in the shop.

After that, nobody mentioned the incident again and, after the shop closed, dinner and bedtime were just the same. But from that day onwards, Ramchand loved his parents much more.

*

Ramchand’s favourite pastime as a small child was to explore the maze of sacks and tins in the shop, open them to see what was inside and lose himself in the exciting, ever-changing, yet never-changing smells of the shop. This was allowed only when there were no customers around. When there was a customer in the shop, his father expected him to behave, and leave when he was told to. On such occasions, Ramchand always obeyed.

When the shop was empty, Ramchand’s father would be at his most genial, and his mother would also come and sit by the counter. While his parents talked, Ramchand would open this, touch that, run his fingers through rice, sit on top of sacks and declare that he was the king and plead with his mother to join him inside big cardboard boxes in which a local brand of washing soap was supplied to the shop. She would refuse, his father would laugh and Ramchand would emerge smelling of soap. Then he would go and tickle his own chin with the tips of the brooms and gurgle with laughter. His mother would laugh too and the air would turn very happy, full of shop smells and the laughter. His father would also laugh sometimes, but most of the time he just smiled benignly at his little son.

It was only rarely that Ramchand’s father was in a bad mood. It usually happened on days when he had been dealing with too many customers, or when mice had found their way into one of the sacks. On such days, he would growl impatiently at his son.