The Song of Kahunsha (7 page)

“Welcome to our little kholi,” says Sumdi.

Guddi lies on the ground under the shelter of the gunny bags. She scratches her toes and grimaces as she does this. Sumdi lies down on the footpath too. He crosses his arms behind his neck and stares at the sky.

Chamdi carefully copies Sumdi’s actions. The problem is that Sumdi’s eyes are now closed and it seems as though he will be fast asleep in a few minutes. Chamdi knows he will find it hard to sleep tonight. The orphanage offered him a bed and clean sheets. Here, the footpath is uneven, and stones and dirt poke his back. All he can do is stare at the sky and hope that its blackness will bring him sleep.

Then he asks himself if the sky is where his mother lives.

This thought has come to him before, but tonight he truly believes it. That is the only reason my father left me, he thinks. I reminded him of my mother. She lives in the sky now. Someday, she will show herself to me.

Chamdi stares into the darkness and traces the shape of his mother’s body. From one star to the next he draws lines, connects them with skin and flesh. He picks the largest star to be his mother’s head and attaches to it tresses of black hair, as he has always imagined she had. He does not use stars as her eyes because he has dreamt of his mother in the past and in his dreams he has seen her eyes: they are exactly like his, large and black, and he holds this image of his mother in the sky.

Soon his eyes close and he can hear Bombay breathe—car horns, the panting of dogs, and something else: the sound of a woman moaning.

Yes, it is quite clear to him that he can hear a woman moan.

He sits up on his elbows and sees a form on the floor, leaning against the wall of the building opposite him. It is too dark to tell who it is, but there is no doubt that the person is in pain. He glances at Sumdi and Guddi. Should he wake them?

If I wake them they might think I am scared, he tells himself.

But Chamdi cannot ignore the moaning. He gets up and slowly walks towards the person. He winces as he steps on something sharp and hopes it is not glass because there is enough glass in him already. He looks down—it is the red cork of a soda bottle. As he approaches the woman he notices that her eyes are closed and she leans her head against the wall. She talks to herself, but Chamdi cannot understand what she is saying.

Just as he is about to touch her shoulder to calm her, he freezes. There is a baby in her lap, only a few months old, and completely still. The woman’s face is lined with dirt, and when Chamdi looks
closely, he finds that clumps of her hair are missing. She continues to moan with her eyes closed.

Chamdi is so close to the woman that he can feel her breath upon him. There are creases near her eyes and lines of age have been darkened with sweat and dirt. Her mouth is dry and pale. Chamdi looks at the naked child. He touches the child’s face with his forefinger. It does not move. Go back to sleep, he tells himself. His shaking finger pokes the child again, this time in the belly. Nothing.

“What are you doing?” asks Sumdi.

Chamdi spins around.

“Don’t be scared, it’s only me.”

“I’m not scared.”

“What are you doing?”

“I was just … I think this baby is … not well.”

Sumdi does not seem alarmed by the sight of the woman or the baby in her lap. “Go back to sleep,” he says.

“But the baby’s not breathing.”

Sumdi puts his finger near the baby’s mouth. “I can feel its breath,” he says. “It’s sleeping. Don’t worry.”

Sumdi then holds the woman’s face in his hands. “Amma,” he says to her.

He gently shakes the woman’s face a few times and she stops moaning.

“You know her?” asks Chamdi.

Sumdi puts his hand on Chamdi’s shoulder and leads Chamdi towards their kholi. Chamdi wonders if Sumdi does this to support himself because of his afflicted leg, or if it is a sign of friendship.

“Go to sleep. We have work to do tomorrow,” says Sumdi.

“What work?”

“I’ll show you tomorrow.”

They both lie down on the footpath again.

“Chamdi,” says Sumdi.

“Say.”

“You can run fast, no?”

“Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Just answer me. Please.”

“Yes. I can run fast.”

“Good,” says Sumdi.

And Sumdi closes his eyes. His hand touches that of his sister, who is still sleeping, and she stirs in her sleep a little, but the touch does not wake her. And Chamdi’s thoughts are still with the woman—he wonders why she is moaning and what she is talking to herself about so he raises his head
and takes a look at her again. She bares her teeth to the moon and the child remains a statue in her lap.

Chamdi looks up at the sky once more and begs his mother to show herself, but maybe that is impossible, so he tells her to arrange the stars in such a way that the name of his father will be revealed, for if Chamdi is to find one man in this city of a thousand-thousand-thousand people, then the least the heavens can do is reveal his father’s name.

The street comes to life early in the morning. Crows sit in the trees and atop roofs and wake Chamdi. He is surprised to find that a lot of people sleep on the streets. A young man yawns and stretches as he lies on a handcart. He sits up, runs his fingers through his hair, and opens his eyes wide. Two men pass him by with small buckets of water in their hands. They smile at each other as though one of them has cracked a joke. A man dressed in khaki shorts uses a long broom to sweep the garbage that has collected on the footpath. An old woman sits on her haunches and brushes her teeth with her fingers. There is
a thick black paste around her lips and she pours water into her mouth from a blue-and-white-striped mug and spits onto the street. She does so in front of the sweeper and does not seem to care that he has just cleaned that part of the footpath. A bald man in white robes walks barefoot across the street. He holds a steel cup with a long handle in one hand and carries loose marigolds in the other. From the red tikka on his forehead, Chamdi can tell that the man is on his way to the temple.

Chamdi hears Guddi clear her throat. She spits on the street too, just like the old woman. Guddi’s face looks dirtier than it did last night, but her cheeks are surprisingly full. Chamdi notices that she went to sleep with her orange bangles on. The brown dress she wears has small holes in it, and she wipes her hands on the dress, uses it as a towel.

“Look at him,” says Guddi. “He went to sleep with his scarf on. I told you he’s a complete idiot.”

“Let him be,” says Sumdi.

Sumdi must have been the first to rise, thinks Chamdi. He seems wide awake. He opens a rusty tin can and picks a matchbox from it. He lights a fire on a small kerosene stove and places a steel
bowl on it. It is hard for Chamdi to take his eyes off the scar on Sumdi’s face. It is deep and jagged, as though the skin had been torn apart. Chamdi wonders how Sumdi lost part of his right ear. If they sleep on the street, maybe a rat bit it off. Chamdi is grateful that this thought did not come to him last night. He tries not to stare at the ear.

“You want tea?” Sumdi asks.

“Will you stop feeding him and make him do some work?” shouts Guddi.

Chamdi looks inside the kholi and is surprised to find Amma there. She is mumbling to herself again, but she is not still like she was last night. She moves her body back and forth with the child in her lap. The child’s belly is swollen.

“What’s she doing here?” asks Chamdi.

“Why is that bothering you?” asks Guddi.

“I did not mean it badly,” says Chamdi.

But he does not explain that he is surprised to see Amma in the kholi because it seemed as though Sumdi did not care much about her last night.

“Where can I go?” asks Chamdi instead. He directs his question at Sumdi and does not meet Guddi’s eyes.

“For what?”

“You know,” he says, awkwardly.

“But all you had last night was a slice of bread,” says Guddi. She seems to have picked up Chamdi’s meaning faster than her brother. “So were you lying to us about being hungry?”

“Pick your spot,” says Sumdi. “Do it anywhere you want.”

“What if someone sees me?”

“Ask them not to take a photo,” says Guddi.

Sumdi and Guddi laugh. “And you expect us to believe that you have lived on the streets,” says Sumdi.

“No, it’s just that …”

“Come with me,” says Sumdi.

He leads Chamdi about fifty feet away to three broken steps. One pillar stands in a corner with rusty iron rods sticking out of it. Slabs of stone are strewn all over the ground.

“This building got burnt,” says Sumdi. “Only these three steps remain. And we got a bathroom out of that. Now crouch on these steps and let it land.”

Sumdi limps away, and as Chamdi lowers his shorts, Sumdi turns and looks at him.

“Be careful of your jewels,” he shouts. “The
rats might steal them.” He slaps himself on the thigh and limps away.

Chamdi tries to finish quickly. Not that he believes Sumdi about the rats, but he is uncomfortable. He thinks of Mrs. Sadiq. If she were to see him in this position, she would be shocked. If the Koyba Boys were to see him relieving himself on the street, they would tell the world. He thinks of the toilets in the orphanage, and an afternoon two years ago when Mrs. Sadiq went to the market and Raman passed out in the toilet. When Chamdi bent down to wake him up, he could not believe how powerful the smell of alcohol was. He threw water on Raman’s face and Raman got up suddenly and flailed his arms about and screamed. Chamdi ran out of there.

As Chamdi finishes, he does not know how he will wash himself. Still on his haunches, he looks around. If he were at the orphanage, he might have used a leaf. But the only tree in sight is the one sheltering the kholi, and the tree’s leaves are too high anyway.

A round stone saves him. He spots it only a foot away, so he stretches his arm towards it. As he wipes himself with the stone, he thinks of the
Koyba Boys again. Maybe they should play koyba with this stone.

He pulls his shorts up and walks back to the tree. Sumdi and Guddi are already sipping their tea. They share the same glass, pass it back and forth.

“Did you empty your tank?” asks Sumdi.

“Yes,” says Chamdi.

“Have some tea then.”

“No, I’m okay.”

“Maybe our tea is not good enough for the raja,” says Guddi.

“It’s not that. I can see there’s not enough because you two are sharing.”

“We’re sharing the glass,” says Sumdi. “We have enough tea, but only one glass. So you also have.”

He offers the glass to Chamdi. Chamdi hesitates.

“Are you shy?” asks Sumdi. “Are you feeling shy that her lips have touched the glass and if your lips also touch the glass then …”

Guddi hits Sumdi on the wrist and mutters, “Early in the morning …”

“Don’t mind her,” says Sumdi.

Chamdi watches as Guddi pours some milk from an open vessel into the round cap of a
bottle. It looks like the cap of the liquor bottle Raman used to drink from. She then moves towards the baby, which is in Amma’s lap, and pours a little milk into its mouth.

“What’s she doing?” asks Chamdi.

“Feeding the baby.”

“Why is Amma not feeding it herself?”

“Amma is sick.”

“Oh …”

“She does not have any milk in her. Now stop asking questions.”

Chamdi takes one more sip of tea and passes the glass to Sumdi, who pours some more tea from the bowl into the glass. Amma begins to moan again, and although she looks directly at her child, it seems that she is seeing right through it. Chamdi glances at Sumdi.

“She’s our mother,” says Sumdi abruptly, as he stares at the steaming bowl. “She wanders off with the child all the time. Now we are tired of worrying. She can hardly understand what we say to her. She just sits in a corner and tears her own hair off her head. I hate it when she does that.”

“Where’s your father?” asks Chamdi.

“Dead.”

Chamdi wants to hit himself on the head for asking that question.

“You see that Irani bakery over there?” asks Sumdi.

Chamdi looks at the bakery opposite them. There is an advertisement for Pepsi above a board that says Rostamion Bakery and Stores. Below the board, a man with a large moustache dusts the glass display case in which the bread is stored. The first few buttons of his shirt are open to reveal a dense layer of black chest hair. Next to the bakery is Café Gustad, where a young boy sweeps the floor, stopping occasionally to wipe the sleep from his eyes. Black chairs are stacked on top of each other, and tables with marble tops and wooden legs are randomly placed throughout the café.

“A car crushed our father three years ago,” continues Sumdi. “Just outside that Irani bakery.”

If the father died three years ago, how can that be Amma’s child? But Chamdi does not ask this question aloud. “I’m sorry” is all he says.

“What to do? There’s nothing we can do,” says Sumdi. “Our mother went mad after he died. And we have to look after her now. What to do?”

Chamdi feels awkward. Is he supposed to come up with an answer to Sumdi’s question?

“You can help us,” says Sumdi at last.

“Me?”

“We have a plan,” says Sumdi.

“What plan?”

“To steal.”

The thought of stealing appalls Chamdi. He has never stolen in his life. Not once. Even though he knew where Mrs. Sadiq kept the special cream biscuits at the orphanage, he did not take any except when they were offered to him.

“I’m not going to steal.”

“Coward,” says Guddi.

“Don’t worry,” says Sumdi. “It’s a clever plan. Listen. Amma is very sick. If we don’t take her to a doctor she will be finished. If something happens to her, who will look after the child?”

“Nothing will happen to her,” says Guddi fiercely. “I will not let anything happen to Amma.”

“You understand?” asks Sumdi. “We want to steal money to take her to the doctor and then we want to get out of this place.”

“Forever,” says Guddi.

“Where will you go?” asks Chamdi.

“To our village,” says Guddi. “We have a village. So will you help us or no?”