Dead Water (28 page)

It’s a bad time for the brickmaking business. Word’s gone round the camps that indentured labour is done for. This, anyway, is the pronouncement from Delhi. Politicians are on the TV saying that there’s no longer any place in modern India for employment practices that border on slavery.

Which is all very fine, but urban sentiments fall on stony ground in Chhaphandi. Freeing the serfs into
what
, exactly? In roadhouses up and down the Sher Shah Suri Marg, Vinod explains the matter: ‘The only other work these people get is shovelling shit. Literally, shovelling shit. Maybe one or two get to change the dressings in charity hospitals. What kind of life is that?’

Next, the Communist Party roll into town, stirring up trouble, inflaming the workers at the Yadav Brickworks. A couple of days later, a mother of two, Samjhoria Nankar, declares herself free, downs tools, and walks out of the Chhaphandi brickworks to attend a rally. She comes back, of course, to eat Vinod’s food and burn his fuel, but she doesn’t go back to work, oh no, she just sits there (‘the fat pig’), all the while demanding her ‘rights’. That’s why Vinod has been taking a lathi to Samjhoria Nankar’s back.

There have been fights at the brickworks before, of course. It is a place of hard knocks. Whenever upstart
bhangis
win at cricket, the rich boys of the village ride up on their Enfields and beat them down to size with bike chains. It is in the nature of things. In this region the wealthy make their own justice. Terror is a tool of control, cheaper and more effective than the law. Horror inspires fear, and fear inspires respect.

Vinod’s escalating harassments of the Nankar family have been anything but calculated. More like the tantrums of an overgrown child. Rishi comes home one evening from his shift at the glass factory and finds Pali’s milling operation still in full swing. ‘Late delivery?’

Pali elbows past him with a tray of bangles. By the door sit beaded bags, loaded with samples wrapped in brightly coloured tissue. Pali is due aboard the Kalindi service tonight. She’s going to New Delhi to play the aspiring businesswoman, displaying rural handicrafts to a discerning urban market. If she secures good orders, as she expects, almost everyone in the street will be able to afford a brand-new plastic water tank this year.

‘I’ve been busy entertaining your friend,’ Pali grumbles. ‘Yash Yadav is on the roof with your mother.’ She turns off the gas taps, one by one. The Bunsen burners gutter out even as the girls are working.

‘What the hell is my mother doing on the roof?’

‘Flirting.’

Rishi takes the dregs of liquor from behind the portable television and climbs the ladder.

Yash, the region’s counter-terror tsar, is a man people turn to for advice regarding agitation, insurrection and incitement. He’s the one who says to backbenchers, newscasters, clueless relatives and dotty old women where the national rot is to be found. The toothless old men of Devnagar adore him. He is their shining boy. He is, to hear them speak of him, the youthful embodiment of every ancient courtesy. He wears pressed shirts. He wears a watch. He shakes their hands in the morning. He buys them tea. He loses to them at backgammon and chess.

Yash can bowl over toothless old women too: Rishi’s mum has given him the embroidered cushion to sit on and has even brought Pali’s best china up on to the roof. The plates are piled with kids’ food: halva, kulfi, sugared almonds. At Rishi’s arrival she stands, yabbering like a schoolgirl. ‘Rishi! Inspector Yadav and I have had such a fascinating afternoon! He has been telling me
everything
– so shocking! What would we do without him?’

Yash says: ‘Let’s talk in the car.’

Rishi rides to Chhaphandi in Yash’s brand-new, saffron-yellow Maruti Zen. The front passenger seat is set so low he can barely see over the dashboard. The car’s wallowing suspension makes him feel seasick – not that he’s ever seen the sea.

While they drive, Yash tells Rishi the news. Vinod has come to blows again with Manjit Nankar. He claims that he caught Manjit interfering with the Lohardaga girls. The pair of them must have been drunk, for neither one managed to land a decisive punch. Bleeding and panting, they plunged into the shadows behind the Nankars’ hovel. ‘Someone left a hod-carrier lying around.’ Yash draws his sigh from a deep well of weariness, as though human incompetence generally is his personal burden. ‘This Manjit person tripped over it.’

The blade buried itself in his skull, killing him instantly. The news, the horror of it, has an almost physical mass: it sinks in. ‘Who knows about this?’

‘You. Me. I phoned Mohinder. Safia and the kids know by now. A bunch of
bhangis
, you know, kiln-workers. I have that in hand.’

It takes Rishi some while to map the enormity of Yash’s plan. ‘You can’t expect me to do this!’

Yash won’t even give him the satisfaction of a reply. Rishi has bought his way out of his dowry obligation by becoming Yash’s little helper, and little helpers do what they are told.

Defining the southern edge of the kiln-workers’ compound, broken pallets lean in teetering piles against the walls of a forty-foot-long shipping container. The container fell off the Sher Shah Suri Marg years before, rolling down the embankment, grey and relentless, like one of those elongated dice from the cricket game Aadi and Ram played with Rishi sometimes. Howzat! The Yadavs use it now to store tools and equipment. They keep the kerosene in there.

About fifty workers live beside the kilns. Most are teenage girls, itinerants from Lohardaga. Their huts are thrown up as and when they are needed. Each girl gets one room, which doubles for cooking and sleeping. The rooms aren’t big and the older girls are taller than their rooms are long. This doesn’t matter so much, and the girls can still stretch out at night as the rooms don’t have any doors. Some of the girls have made doors of sticks and straw to keep the dogs out, and the more enterprising ones have made roofs of straw to protect them from the sun.

Vinod and Yash are waiting by the container. As Rishi shambles up, Vinod unfastens the padlock securing the container door and tugs the locking bar. The hinges squeal. The keys to the Komatsu are hung from a string just inside the door. Vinod throws them to Rishi and Rishi climbs into the Komatsu.

The Lohardaga girls, woken by the engine’s growl, poke their heads out to see what’s going on. The sardar dropped them off only a couple of months ago and they’ve yet to acquire much discretion. (Vinod’s memorable assessment: ‘In the fields they piss themselves where they stand and they don’t even think to cover themselves.’) That said, they can smell trouble brewing under their noses. They flee their hovels and scamper through the cornfields with their few possessions balanced on their heads. One takes her door with her, a square of battered corrugated iron.

Rishi, more nervous than anything, laughs.

Vinod and Yash pour kerosene into the house that, only hours before, served as the Nankars’ home while, high up in his cab, Rishi listens to the clank of buckets, the splash of kerosene, a baby’s cries stifled by a mother’s hand. A dog’s barking, a cockerel’s crow.

Vinod Yadav lights a rag and throws it into the empty hut. The
whoomp
of ignition is felt more than heard. The oily, brazen flames of the fuel die back quickly and leave the hut smouldering steadily. There is little inside to catch light other than the fabric of the hut itself. The straw roof blackens and caves in quickly; corrugated-iron sheets tumble into the ruin. Streamers of white smoke spring from the mud walls as though the hut were a cracked kiln. In the cab, his view framed by the tubes of the safety cage, Rishi feels weightless, as though he were on board a fairground ride.

At Yash’s signal he puts the Komatsu into gear and rumbles forward. He takes the front wall of the hut clean off, jamming to a halt in a cloud of dust and ash. He yanks the Komatsu into reverse and wobbles out of the wreckage pile. He stops, applies the handbrake, and lowers the front scoop. Vinod and Yash disappear into the container. They come out again lugging something in a sheet. Rishi watches, pressing his hands into his groin. Vinod and Yash manhandle the bundle into the scoop. The vehicle tips forward slightly on its suspension, then rights itself. Rishi pulls a lever, raising the scoop’s hydraulic arms. Yash waves at him: Rishi stops the scoop. Yash and Vinod disappear into the container a second time. Rishi waits. They reappear, lugging a second roll.

‘What?’

Neither Yash nor Vinod will look at him as they heave it into the scoop. The Komatsu rocks and creaks.

‘For the love of God, what have you done? Yash?’

They turn their backs on him, surveying the burning house, then Yash wanders over to the shipping container a third time and comes out with a coal bucket. Rishi watches as Yash carries it back and sets it down beside Vinod. It is full of potatoes.

Vinod looks at the bucket. He picks up a potato. He weighs it in his hand. He chucks the potato into the wreckage of the Nankars’ hovel. He picks up another. Yash joins in. Potatoes. Why are they throwing potatoes into the wreckage?

The Nankar woman demanded better wages for the family. She said they were starving. She even lodged a police complaint about it. So this is the idea: let the busybodies come. Let them have their enquiry. When they do, they’ll find food here, right inside the remains of the Nankars’ home.

Potatoes.

Rishi wrestles the Komatsu into reverse gear. He turns the vehicle roughly round, sending bars of lemon light through the safety cage and on to his lap. Heavy tyres churn the dry earth as he drives out of the compound. The sun is shining through the branches of the trees as he draws clear of the kilns.

There are a couple of hard nuts among the workforce, so the Yadavs can expect some do-gooders to come snooping around in the next few weeks. Some handwringing scribbler from the Janwadi Lekhak Sangh. Still, it will be hard for the workers here to drum up a public protest if there are no corpses to protest around.

The fire pit is not new. Rishi used to burn waste from the brickmaking operation here. Old rags, articles abandoned by absconding workers, broken pallets. He drops the bodies into the pit and uses the Komatsu to cover them with old tyres. Once the tyres are alight, their thick, liquid smoke fills the complex: a choking stink. The burning tyres will break the bodies down.

He strips off his shirt and jumps down from the cab of the Komatsu. The sun is hot on his back. He wades through weeds, through lumps of cow shit, teeters on discarded fence posts and broken kerb stones, slides on a scree of abandoned gravel. Behind him, a column of black smoke rises, thick and knobbled like a spine. It rises and then, at a certain height, it meets an invisible barrier. Something. He is no weatherman. Though it occurs to him, as smoke flattens off and spreads towards him, thick as ever and wrinkled like a cauliflower, or a brain, that when fluids of different densities and temperatures pour into each other, they make layers, and where these layers meet, internal waves will form.

He stares at the smoke and the smoke furrows its brow and stares back at him. He looks away, afraid, for the first time, for their children. Abhik and Kaneer. Twins. Not that he knows them, or remembers them, or could even tell you why their names come easily to him. No. Not their children. Not little children. Not even Yash Yadav would, could –

Caught between strata of different densities, the smoke cloud curls into a rope and stretches out across the sky. In the low and dirty light, oil-droplet rainbows sheen its sides. A cow wanders past, driven from its grazing by the stench of Rishi’s fire, and ambles down the cart track towards the railway line.

Pali will be boarding the Kalindi Express about now.

Important changes follow upon the Firozabad rail disaster. With Pali dead, torn apart in the crash, Rishi finds life in Devnagar unbearable. His mum can’t operate the bangle factory on her own, and hasn’t the eyesight left to work for herself any more, so it’s arranged that she moves in with Safia, to help with the boys. Shubi and Ravi. Safia needs all the help she can get since Vinod came out of hospital, his arm a swollen and infected stump. Rishi and his mum arrive at Old Samey’s around noon. Rishi still thinks of this as Old Samey’s house, though Samey is dead and it’s Vinod who’s ostensibly head of the Yadav household, and Safia who rules the roost.

The place has changed little since childhood. A coat of paint here. A mended window frame there. This is the same drive Rishi and Safia staggered along the day they lost their brothers to the flood. This is the verandah rail Old Samey leant against, chewing tobacco, watching them, eyes cold and shimmering like puddles. Over there is the barn where the Ansari family lived like cattle, waiting out the rains.

Mum is out of the car and halfway up the steps before Rishi has even applied the handbrake. ‘I’ve come to stay with you!’ she cries, with obvious relish. A hundred thousand Bollywood movies have prepared her for this classic comedy entrance: the monstrous mother come with her luggage to darken youth’s hand towels, to eat through its larders, overstarch its sheets, and overdiscipline its children.

Safia, trapped in a dialogue that is half tradition, half misremembered rom-com, shows her mother love. Makes her tea. Feeds her sweets, Shows her to a room that she can call her own, and leaves her there, at last, to nap a while.

‘Why not stay with us?’ she asks Rishi, when they are alone on the verandah.

It is a gesture as futile as it is touching. Home to what? There have been too many losses, too many tears in the fabric. Aadi and Ram, drowned in the floods of 1976. His father, swallowed by the emptiness inside him. His wife Pali.

Rishi visits now and again as the months go by, to give his sister a break. He sits with his mother. He tries, over and over again, to explain to her who Pali was, though why he feels the need to confuse her and upset himself, over and over, is beyond him. ‘She made things out of glass. Don’t you even remember the glass?’

From the window of his mum’s room, Rishi can just about make out the little parcel of land that should have been his in the first place. He could buy it now, of course. He could buy it several times over, but why? For what? The few family that are left to him are all Yadav’s little helpers now, one way or another.