Three Bargains: A Novel (27 page)

“There’s always someone worse off than you,” he remembered hearing in those early years when he returned from school feeling sorry for himself because of someone’s hurtful transgressions. Who had said that? He couldn’t recall now.

He leaned his head against the glass of the window. The shadows on the roof rocked back and forth with the motion of the train. As the train shuddered and clanged, changing tracks, he saw an indistinct hand reach out and grab the slightly raised edge of the roof, and there it stayed, holding on tight, struggling to stay on, trying not to fall.

O
NE OF THE KIDS WORE NOTHING BUT A FADED BUTTON
- down sweater, his small, drab penis peeking out from under the sweater’s frayed edge. He looked no more than a toddler in stature, especially compared to the two other boys standing over Madan in ragged T-shirts and shorts, their hair afros of dirt and dust.

“He’s here,” one of them shouted to someone outside. “We told you. He always comes here.”

The half-dressed kid dug his fingers into Madan’s jeans pocket, deftly searching around inside, checking for any loot before Madan came to full consciousness. The kid came up empty. Someone else had already cleaned out Madan’s pockets.

“Fucker,” Madan swiped his hand away. “Get off me.”

They laughed at him as he raised himself up groggily, his back stiff from the hours passed out on the rough concrete floor of the sewer pipe. The taste in Madan’s mouth was bloody and foul. The pipes were not yet in the ground and already the bulbous gray rats had taken up residence. The kids scrambled out ahead of him and scooted into the gaping round opening of a neighboring pipe, where their mother fanned a cooking fire. Stacked up in mounds at the side of roads and near construction projects, the long tunnels of rough cement flushed out migrant laborers, homeless derelicts, drunks and drug addicts, before they were buried deep underground to continue to drain the shit and piss of the city.

Madan’s new friend, Tahir, idled on a rusted-out scooter by the roadside. “I was sure this time you’d have caught the train and disappeared,” Tahir said. “I don’t remember seeing you after three o’clock this morning.”

He handed Madan the cigarette dangling from his lips. Madan took a grateful drag, closing his eyes against the hurtful glare of daylight and the pressure in his bladder competing with the dissonant honk from cars, auto-rickshaws and taxis streaming in and out of the nearby train station. How easily everyone clambered on the trains and left the mad city.

After stepping off the train nearly three years ago, he stayed in the station for a few weeks, sleeping on the platform, foraging for leftover food dumped out of the first-class cabins, dodging the police clearing the station of detritus and people like him. Every day he saw the Gorapur train come and go with its shrieking whistle.

“Seet!” Tahir said, searching his pants pockets, his Bihari accent eating up the
h
sound of
shit
.

“Seet! Where’s that paper? This guy told me about a job at a garment factory near Naraina.”

Before Tahir there had been Manoj, and before that Sunjay, and before that some other boy. He met them at the train station, where he earned a few rupees cleaning bogies, doing odd jobs sorting garbage, slapping political posters on city walls in the middle of the night or hauling construction debris. They were all more or less his age, and whether it was Bihar or Odisha, Rajasthan or Uttar Pradesh, he made sure he knew no more than the rudimentary facts of where they were from or why they were in the city. He was afraid to learn that he was no different than the whole miserable lot of them.

Smoke from the cooking fire wafted toward Tahir balancing on the scooter and pricked Madan’s eyes. In the deep loneliness of his days, he could imagine himself stepping out of the train in Gorapur, walking past tender shimmering fields to the timber factory, sharing a beedi down to its burning end with his grandfather, watching Swati mumble as she sewed or Jaggu singing along to the sound track of the radio. But as the days of piecemeal work and hard labor turned into nights of oblivion, return seemed more distant, more an imagined suitcase of riches at the end of the line. His mother’s harsh edict had been his final shove out, but the sharp, savage truth was that the man who had sent him into exile was the only one who possessed the power to grant him permission to return home.

A couple of times he built up the nerve to call Jaggu at the auto garage where he worked, but put down the phone before anyone picked up. If word reached Avtaar Singh or he had an inkling of Madan’s call . . . Madan couldn’t bear to think about what would happen to Swati, and Jaggu, even his captious mother, if Avtaar Singh learned that Madan had been in touch or they had any idea of his whereabouts. He had evaded Avtaar Singh’s final and deathly decree once, and he was no fool. Avtaar Singh had made sure of that much, at least.

Tahir finally extricated a torn corner of a restaurant menu and flashed it in triumph at Madan, and then touched his breast pocket where a bottle of typewriter correction fluid nestled in the folds. The white, pasty fluid was Tahir’s own train station to nowhere. A few sniffs and the gray cast descending over his eyes took him away from this broken-down scooter, the rawness of his bitten-down nails and whatever had caused the puckered scars laced across his jaw. The same kind of bottle sat by the typewriter in Mr. D’Silva’s office in Gorapur. Madan could see it clearly. Every rattle of the door or wobble of the desk knocked the tiny bottle over, and each time it aimlessly rolled about until someone righted it.

Madan ground his cigarette butt into the pavement, surprised to see it didn’t go up in flames. The midmorning sun baked the concrete pavers. He could feel the heat burning the soles of his feet through his flimsy canvas shoes. A dip in the cool, flowing waters of the canal would soothe the web of mosquito bites drilled across his back and arms and wash away the sticky layer of dirt welded to him. But a bucket of tepid water back at his rented room would have to suffice, if the room was still his. With Tahir there was only money for today and none for tomorrow. It was not a bad way to survive when who knew if the light of the morning would be yours to enjoy.

A flock of pigeons landed in a feathery jumble in the median of the road, as if the few scraggly trees around them were not worth their while. To their credit, the only real green was the slash of jade-green uniformly adorning the blaring three-wheeled auto-rickshaws. They pecked between the pavement cracks, and the sewer pipe boys waited for a break in the traffic before running across the road to shoo and chase the birds back into the air for the fun of it.

What did they think, these sewer boys, about what this day or the next would hold for them? Life would not allow them to spend it chasing pigeons. They weaved through the traffic, joining the other beggars knocking on car windows, pleading and lamenting their situations for some change. What had the boys been told when they fought off the night’s cold wrapped up in day-old newspapers or went another day without a dry chappati in their bloated bellies? He watched the old man dragging his wooden plank for legs from car window to car window, and the lady with the baby disintegrating in her arms, and the water seller breaking his back pushing his heavy cart to sell a glass of cold water for a measly five paisa, and felt that they must know something that eluded him. If this was all there was to life, why did they cling to it so desperately, insisting on living when there seemed no need for them to do so?

Tahir was trying to read the information on the scrap of paper. He claimed he had completed elementary school, but it was probably a lie. Madan whipped his arm around Tahir’s neck in a headlock, twisting tighter as Tahir choked and flailed about, pulling at Madan’s vise-like grip.

“Garment factory?” Madan spat out. “What do we know about making clothes, you idiot?”

Tahir had been living off the streets much longer than Madan, and with a forceful grunt he leaned into Madan and propelled himself off the scooter, which listed to the side as he toppled them both over with a thump. They tussled and jabbed. Pedestrians hustled by without the time or inclination to interrupt or get involved. Just as quickly as they had started, the two of them stopped. Madan was the first to jump up. He noticed Tahir flinch as he thought Madan was going to come back at him. Putting his hand out, Madan helped Tahir up, and they dusted themselves off. Tahir straightened the scooter and Madan vaulted onto the backseat.

“Motherfucker,” Tahir said. “Can’t even help this guy without a fight.”

The deep, sonorous gong delineated the day workers from the night, and caused a commotion among the labor as they gulped their morning tea from the stall outside the metal factory gate. The smog suffocating the sun turned the sky a pallid white, but the good thing about factory work was there was no time to look up and contemplate the color of the sky. Madan streamed in with the morning shift, skirting the throng of laborers gathered outside the small temple beside the gate. At his annual Diwali address, the potbellied proprietor of Choice Leather Works had encouraged everyone to start their day’s labor by remembering God, and on the days he appeared with the morning gong instead of after lunch, he stood up front and led the morning prayers. For most of the laborers, it was a good way to put off work for five minutes.

In the honeycomb of garment factories along the unpaved roads in this industrial pocket of the city, work was constant if temporary. When there was a big order and the machines were at full charge and trucks needed loading and unloading, there was work. But when the orders were scant, the factory took a large chunk of the workforce off their books until the next time. Madan had become used to being let go and rehired. There was always the next factory close by, and if there was a skill he could claim to have—it was factory work.

Tahir chafed against the routine of the work, the strictures of labor. “It’s not my style,” he said, and left. If Madan knew where to go, he would have left too. Tahir’s solace was in the streets at night, smoking under overpasses, sleeping the afternoons away in a haze of ganja, earning enough to eat and buy a couple of bottles of something to help him forget. Fine for Tahir, but Madan had lost the ability to forget.

“Wait for me!” Dinesh pumped his thickset arms to keep up with Madan, his shirt stretched taut by the speed bumps of muscles across his chest. When not hauling skins off the tannery truck, Dinesh spent his time at the bodybuilding gym. The red smear on his forehead told Madan he had come from the temple.

“What are you doing after work?” Dinesh asked.

“Busy.”

“Doing what? I want to tell you about—”

“Not interested,” Madan interrupted.

“It’ll take a minute. One minute, and your life will be different! Let me help you.”

“I’ve already told you how you can help. You said you’d speak to the supervisor to make me permanent. After this week I’ll be on the streets again, and you’ll be scratching your ass in here.”

“What’re you saying?” Dinesh said. “I’ve spoken to Ketan-bhai. I swear. He said when a space opens up he’ll talk to us. Just listen to me for a minute.” Dinesh tried to reach for Madan’s arm, but Madan was going too fast. Dinesh always had some hustle going.

“You won’t be able to say no to this,” Dinesh said. “I swear.”

Madan shook him away and loped off to work. He didn’t care if he made it onto the full-time roster, but it had been the only thing he could think of when Dinesh had asked for help with some bank paperwork and Madan wasn’t about to do the work for free or it would be a never-ending list of requests. Though it would be a nice change to have a regular place to come to every morning, and not have to scrounge around for his next job. And he was grateful for the bone-deep exhaustion that came with the grind and toil of manual labor, so he could collapse into a dreamless sleep every night, keeping off the streets and away from the temptations of the train station.

It was after one in the afternoon when Madan stepped out of the factory gate. The lunch-crowd rush was huddled around the lunch vendor’s wooden cart. Workers sat on concrete slabs, eating, smoking or dozing against the sun-warmed wall spattered orange and brown with tobacco spittle and mud. Madan bought a dried-leaf plate of beans and rice and found a spot to read his newspaper while he ate, tuning out the drone of the numerous conversations swirling around him.