Three Bargains: A Novel (2 page)

“It’s a good-size room,” he heard his father say to his mother. “The servants’ quarters are behind the main house. There are two more rooms for the other servants.”

From the train Madan saw the Yamuna River curving around the eastern end of Gorapur, but the rest of the town seemed to have forfeited this grace, erupting haphazardly through the fields of millet and rice, a checkerboard of green and concrete. They had made their way to Avtaar Singh’s factory down wide thoroughfares constricted with houses and storefronts with no beginning and no end. Walking back now, they skirted deep green paddy fields and pyramids of flaxen hayricks between eucalyptus trees. In ponds crusted with algae and scum, brown-feathered dabchicks and their young bobbed attentively along.

Ever since they’d left the village, his mother chanted, “Ram, Ram,” and Madan wished she would stop. He was tired and thirsty. His feet throbbed, and he was tempted to sit down right there and cry. Avtaar Singh’s words whirred like crickets in his mind. He knew his father didn’t want him to talk but he had to ask this one question. He didn’t know how he could go another step without knowing.

“Bapu,” he said. “Remember that man—will he make me go to school?”

His father stopped suddenly, making Madan run into him. He grabbed Madan’s arm.

“Aah, Bapu!” Madan protested, but his father ignored his yelp of pain.

“You listen to me and remember this. Don’t put so much faith in the words of these types of people, these saabs. They like to put high and big ideas in our minds. Then, when they lose interest, your fall from such height will leave every bone in your body broken.”

“Bapu, I don’t want to—”

But his father pushed him on ahead. Rubbing his arm where the force of his father’s grip still stung, he kept on walking, avoiding his mother’s reproachful gaze, ashamed about breaking his promise to refrain from agitating his father in any way. He was not sure how long they walked but he dared not complain about his chafed toes or his legs shaking with weariness.

After a while, Swati awoke and his father said, “Your grandfather is waiting to see you both.” Madan hadn’t seen Bapu’s father since he was much younger, but knew that his grandfather had moved in with Bapu after retiring from his job in a ball bearing factory.

When Madan saw the walls surrounding Avtaar Singh’s house, the vastness of the structure did not surprise him. It should be that way for a man as immense as Avtaar Singh. They stood at an intersection, and his father pointed to the gravel driveway visible through the bars of a latticed front gate and to the creamy white stucco house beyond. From their vantage point, a line of windows was visible through the tapering tips of the Ashoka trees abutting the outer wall. There was some intermittent traffic, a car or a lorry. They seemed to travel a long way before they came to the end of the property. Across the road was a grassy field, and a stout cement marker emerging from the ground stating
DELHI 200 KMS
, but apart from that, nothing but Avtaar Singh’s house occupied this stretch of land.

When Ma made a move toward the gate, his father said, “No, no. This way for us.”

He turned left, leading them into the narrower street running along the outer wall. They passed a rickshaw stand, fruit and vegetable stalls, carts piled high with spicy dried channa and puffed rice poured into twisted cones of old newspaper for a quick snack. At the end of the road, a dhaba with a corrugated tin awning gave welcome shade to its hungry customers. Madan saw a boy, not much older than himself, running between the worn wooden benches and taking orders for food and tea. From a distance, the boy could have been Madan, all flailing limbs and skin the color of turned earth. Was this where Bapu was planning to send him?

Toward the end of the outer wall was an opening with a low rusted gate. His father shepherded them through. They were at the back of the main house now. A cement courtyard led to three adjoining rooms. On one side was a communal toilet and bathing area with a plastic bucket. A second opening provided access to the main house.

His father shouted, “We’re here!”

Out of the darkness of a room at the far end, his grandfather emerged leaning heavily on his curved cane. Ma went up to touch her father-in-law’s feet and Madan did the same.

“How they’ve grown,” his grandfather said to their mother, beaming down at Swati and Madan, his loose lips flopping and smacking against each other, but he made no move toward them and instead seemed distracted as he twirled around on his cane.

“There they are.” Picking out a set of teeth from a glass of water, Madan’s grandfather shoved them into his mouth with a snap.

His mother began to survey the room, removing the bundle with their few belongings from atop her head with a sigh of relief. Bapu left to get some food and Madan watched his grandfather shuffle after him, calling, “Don’t forget my beedi. You ran off today without getting me even one, so don’t forget now, ha?”

Madan and Swati took off their rubber slippers and ran around the room in circles. The cool concrete soothed and tickled their burning soles, making them giggle. In the corner was a charpai, which, Madan could tell from the acrid smell of beedi emanating from the dirty white sheet, was where his grandfather slept. A small stove attached to a red gas tank sat on the floor on the other side of the door. The rest of the room was open and clear, strewn here and there with Bapu’s things. Madan knew it wouldn’t remain that way for long. Ma would fill it up with what they needed; she had a way of doing that without much effort.

“Ma, I want . . .” The rest of Swati’s sentence disappeared in Madan’s and their mother’s uncontained laughter. It was a running joke among the three of them, how Swati, ever since she could talk, would begin everything with, “I want . . .” as if she had emerged from the womb needing more than they or life could give her.

Most times, it was ridiculous things that caught her eye—a runaway kite in the sky, a flower of uncommon hue in a far-off field, a knock-kneed horse clopping by. Sweet as a stick of sugarcane, she would gaze up like a dog asking for a pat from its master as she made her guileless request, the thick sweep of her lashes enough to make one catch one’s breath in wonder, her tight braids angling her ears forward as if anxious to hear her verdict. When explained to her, she accepted the impossibility of her many requests with a touch of disappointment, but with overriding equanimity, never fussing, deferring with a sideways tilt of her head to their greater authority. “I-want Swati . . .” Madan and Ma affectionately called her, and she too played along, as amused by her own self as they were.

“I want water,” Swati said, a practical appeal in this instance. Madan shared another smile with his mother. It was such a relief to be in Gorapur finally, to be with Bapu whatever his opinion on the matter, to be laughing like they had not for so long. Ma took the cover off a large earthen pot and poured water into the two steel tumblers stacked next to it.

“Here.” She handed Madan a tumbler as well. “It’s nice and cold.”

Swati glugged the water down and stepped outside to gawk at their grandfather mumbling at the compound’s exit. His mother sighed. “Don’t mind your father. He’s a man whose life doesn’t seem to move ahead without some sort of trouble.” Then, casually, “What was that about the saab and school?”

He told her about the man with the great mustache and the chair that spun in circles and how he said that Madan would go to school.

“But Ma,” he said, anxious to share what else he had learned, “Bapu said he’s got me a job at a dhaba. I’ll bring money for you, Ma.”

She rose from the floor, wincing as she stretched her legs.

“I’m so happy we got this place, this . . . room,” she said. “But it’s only one room. That’s all your father will ever get us and I’m grateful for it. But an education . . . an education is a way to get a house full of rooms and food to quiet your stomach and clothes that don’t fall off your back.”

His mother dipped a corner of her sari in the remaining water in the tumbler, wiping his dirt-streaked face. “Just don’t upset your bapu,” she said.

He looked down at his feet, the toenails framed with dirt, feeling the lingering touch of her roughened hands on his face. Since Bapu had gotten this job in Gorapur, Ma had been pleading with him to bring them here. “My place is by your side,” Madan would hear her whisper to his father when he visited. What she feared was the way people looked at her, the men, who smirked and asked where her husband was, or made remarks about what Bapu was doing in Gorapur. “He’s fucking every whore in town, like this,” they said, jerking their hips like someone was biting their backside. “Why don’t you enjoy with us too?”

When someone tried to break down the family’s door one night, rattling the wooden planks hard enough to loosen the hinges, they’d slipped out the back window and hidden in the fields all night. “I want my shawl,” Swati had said, trembling at Madan’s side as they crouched among the dewy stalks. He had shushed her harshly, trying to keep her quiet, burning inside with his own helplessness, shamed by his own fear. The next morning, Ma threw their belongings into a sheet and hauled them to the train station. She used the last of their money to call Bapu.

“You’ll understand someday,” she said to Madan. “But without a husband, I’m nothing to this world. Without him, I have no value.”

“Fucker, son of a bitch, son of a bitch!”

Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, Madan squatted next to his grandfather, staring up at him. Sitting on a worn-out rattan chair, its seat sagging with his familiar weight, his grandfather leaned one hand on his cane, the other flailing toward the entryway to the servants’ quarters. “Son of a bitch,” his grandfather repeated like a windup toy monkey that wouldn’t stop beating its cymbals.

Madan giggled. He knew what the words meant but he couldn’t understand why his grandfather was spitting them at his father’s now-vanished back.

“Shut up right now, old man, or I’ll wring your neck!” Bahadur, who occupied the adjacent room, had had enough. “Do I have to hear such language first thing in the morning?” he said through their common wall to Madan’s mother.

Ma came out shaking her head and shushing his grandfather. “Keep quiet. I’ll send Madan to get your beedis.” She held on to her father-in-law’s shaking shoulders and tried to still him, but he escaped her grip with a jerk of his head. Madan giggled again.

“Take this,” said his mother, shoving a one-rupee note in Madan’s hand and giving him an exasperated look. “You know where to go?”

He nodded. Yesterday, as if loath to watch his family gobble down the rotis he’d brought for dinner, his father had announced he needed to go out for a while. “Why don’t you take Madan with you?” his mother suggested. Satiated but exhausted, Madan hoped his father would refuse, but he realized Ma wanted to show his father that his son could be of help, an asset perhaps his father had overlooked until now. So he’d stuffed the remainder of the roti into his mouth, pushed it down with a deep glug of water and was ready by the door by the time his father grunted his assent. He would make sure his father would wonder what he ever did without them.

Madan had walked quietly along as they headed toward the main market, past the dhaba dealing with the evening tea rush. Questions still bubbled in him but he thought it best to talk only when spoken to in case he said something that would set his father off again.

Though far enough not to disturb their quieter neighborhood, the market appeared before them faster than Madan had expected. Their road ended in a T-junction and to all sides of him the market unfolded. Madan’s heart lurched as his father dragged him into the pandemonium.

“Madan-beta, this is a world far away from the bleating goats and mustard fields. Here there are people who bleat pitifully to your father.” He laughed heartily at the play on his own words.

The market circulated around a central chowk, splitting hurry-scurry into different directions. Dodging three-wheelers weaving perilously onto the unpaved roadside, Madan scooted under heaps of sugarcane loaded on wooden carts while keeping an eye out for piles of horse droppings, the cacophony of blaring horns drowning out his father’s words.

When they passed Sunrise General Goods, his father said, “In here for sure!”

Assorted household items and nonperishable foodstuffs crammed the shelves of the narrow store, and from behind the laminate counter a small, squat man jumped out.

“Prabhu-ji, I did not expect to see you today,” he said, his smile appearing and disappearing as he rushed up to pump Madan’s father’s hand. He rushed back to the till and, taking out a handful of notes, said, “This is all I have right now.”

His father threw his head back and laughed. “I’ve only brought my son, Sharma-ji. I’m showing him around.”

Mr. Sharma reached into a large glass jar on his countertop, filling Madan’s pocket with small hard sweets dusted with sugar, and hastily stuffing a white plastic bag with Parle-G biscuits, Rin soap and a bag of chappati flour.

“This is my son,” his father said at Komal Cloth Shop, Dhingra Motor Garage, Mamta Shooz, and Select Wine and Beer Shop. “This is my son,” he said at Shami Petrol Pump, Jindal Watches, Arya Tires, and Touch N’ Feel Flower Shop. At all the different places, people squeezed his cheeks and looked happy to see them.