Shining Hero (10 page)

So whenever she had a little gap in her work during her fifteen-hour day, Dolly would race across the yard to feed the baby. As Dolly washed the cement floors with a piece of hessian, rubbed the utensils with charcoal or swept the beds with a short straw broom, her mind was always on her little boy. She would worry about him a thousand times as she scoured the dishes with coconut string, scrubbed the saucepans with sand in a tin bowl of cold water, or washed the floors with disinfectant. The moment her work was done she would run as though the goddess Kali was after her, to where her baby lay weeping
in his cradle and only feel safe when she had him hugged tight inside her arms. And then, even though she was so tired that her legs shook, she would light her cow dung brazier, heat up water, and give her little boy his bath. It troubled her that the child was left so much alone, but at least she was earning a little money, they had a roof over their heads and as he grew older she would be able to give him decent food. Karna grew older, learnt to sit and then to walk. Dolly did everything she could to keep the toddler safe while she was out, but he was forever getting up to mischief and the room was not designed for a baby. Once Karna dragged a stool to the window, climbed up, fell out and had to be retrieved screaming and bleeding from the road. Another time he managed to find matches and nearly set their bedding alight. The final straw came when Dolly rushed in at midday to give him his meal and found the door open and the room empty. It was two hours before she found Karna toddling along on the main road. She seized him from the path of a lorry in the nick of time and sat sobbing, hugging and shivering, while nine-month-old Karna, thrilled to be back in his mother’s arms, beamed and prattled triumphantly. It was half an hour before Dolly could find the strength to get up and go back to her employers, carrying her exuberant child.

Her mistress was waiting on the stairs, her expression thunderous. ‘You are incapable of even looking after that single child, let alone performing domestic duties at the same time. Every day there is some new reason for you to abandon your work,’ she shouted. ‘And today, when my husband came home there was no midday meal for him. Now he has returned to his office with an empty stomach and a great anger. Things have gone too far. I do not want you in my service. I will pay you what I owe and you must be out of that room by tonight, because I have another maid coming already.’ Dolly threw herself at the woman’s feet, wept, begged, promised, but it was no good.

‘You have made all these promises so many times already and you have never been able to keep them. It is the fault of that child. He is more trouble than three children put together and as long as you are burdened with him you will never find anyone to employ you.’ Baby Karna beamed and chuckled as though he was being complimented.
Just having his mother holding him was all he ever wanted and if it meant that some woman shouted at them at the same time, what did it matter?

That night Dolly and Karna were back on the pavement again. In a way she felt relieved, for now, although they were poor once more, she could keep her child with her all the time. She became a rubbish-heap scavenger, specialising in flowers discarded from women’s hair or from thrown away garlands that had been used for honouring gods or guests. She would also find overblown blooms that gardeners had discarded, or flower arrangements that householders had considered past their prime. There were usually a few blooms that could be salvaged from any bunch or garland, no matter how wilted and damaged they at first might seem. Dolly would sort through her finds and roll the good ones into a moistened piece of cloth, to be taken home later and woven into new garlands, a little more bedraggled than the originals, but cheaper.

Dolly scavenged among men, women, children, pye dogs, crows, cows, all making a living out of the filth of the rubbish heaps. There were people who collected string, carefully garnering the lengths then rolling them into tidy balls. Others worked with old tins, others with pieces of cloth, others gathered the tinsel from garlands. There were people searching for tin, for plastic, for paper. And there were the really desperate who relied on the heaps for nourishment, fighting with the crows, dogs and rats to eat some rotten discarded end of a banana or samosa. There would be a sudden scramble because a green coconut shell had been unearthed with a little flesh still adhering or someone had come upon a thrown out bread loaf. The little desi cows seemed to be the only creatures to thrive upon the heaps. They were plump and had shining coats as though old newspapers, in which greasy food had been wrapped, provided a better diet than all the care and scientific feeding that Arjuna’s father gave to his pure-bred Jersey herd. Pandu’s Jerseys would never look as fit at the little cows of Cal. The cows were rented from their owners by people in
the bustees, who fed and milked them and used their dung for fuel. They were let loose all day to forage on the rubbish heaps or among the shops where shopkeepers and passers-by would give them fruit or a sweetmeat. In the evening the animals returned to the bustee for hot bran and jaggery.

The rubbish heaps, breathing out powerful odours of rot and gas, were cleared away a couple of times a year. The raw rubbish was carted in lorries to the wet lands on the outskirts of the town and there dumped on damp land where it acted as a fertiliser for fields of vegetables. Among the hectares and hectares of still stinking debris grew the largest whitest cauliflowers, enormous aubergines, cabbages nearly two feet wide and the best ladies’ fingers in the whole of Bengal.

A new British Deputy Commissioner found one such stinking heap toppling near the High Commission and contacted the council, complaining of the health hazard, the smell and the flies and requested it be removed regularly, but was told there were insufficient funds. In the end he offered to pay for it himself, but this generous offer was greeted with fury by members of the ragpickers’ union. They marched in vast and tattered numbers round and round the residency shouting that they were about to be deprived of their living until he was forced to withdraw his offer and had to continue to live in the proximity of the heap. Sometimes these heaps would grow to ten, fifteen feet high then suddenly topple. Several ragpickers had been killed or badly injured by being buried under a collapsing heap of rubbish.

In the evening Dolly would bathe Karna ferociously under the ruptured pipe till she had rubbed away every trace of stink and rot. To Karna’s mother the sight of her frail son, shining with water in a muddy puddle, was the best sight of her whole day. When he was clean she would seat him on the ground and serve him whatever food she had managed to scrounge, for he was, after all, the man of the house. Sometimes she would manage to get enough fuel together to brew up a tiny fire on the pavement and cook her little man a hot meal of rice and lentils and on very good days even give him
a spoonful of achaar to go with it. She always waited till Karna had finished before eating anything herself and as his appetite increased there would be very little left over for her. Often nothing.

When he was two she looked round and could not see him. She ran wildly up and down the road screaming and found him at last tugging at passing people’s clothes, patting his stomach and lisping, ‘No Mama, No Papa, very hungry,’ copying a bigger beggar girl called Laika.

Dolly was furious. ‘How dare you. We are not beggars. We still have our dignity.’ But the moment her back was turned he was down in the street again, and the money he gave her was welcome. She could not deny that. But there came a day when she could not find Karna anywhere. She went to all the places where he might be, till someone told her he had seen Karna being carried away by a foreign lady.

‘Which way did she go?’ asked the weeping Dolly. ‘Where did she take him?’

People pointed this way and that. Someone told her, ‘The kid was screaming.’ Dolly ran even faster and felt despair. She asked everyone she met, ‘Have you seen my little boy? He’s got golden eyes and a foreign lady has taken him.’ Dolly kept running madly and shouting, ‘Karna, Karna, Karna.’ The idea even came to her as she ran that, though she longed for her child so dreadfully, he would be better off with this foreign lady who would be able to give him good food, nice clothes and a proper education. But all the same she could not stop hunting for Karna. Perhaps when she found the lady, she might agree to let her take Karna away.

She ran, sobbing, all up Park Street and along Free School Street. She raced, panting heavily by now, along New Market Street. She rushed along Chowringee, banging into porters with merchandise on their heads, ignoring the outraged cries of shopping memsahibs, crashing into sahibs with briefcases.

She found him outside the Grand Hotel. The foreign lady was looking discouraged.

‘He told me he was an orphan,’ she said to Dolly. ‘Otherwise
I would never have carried him away. I was only hoping to help him.’

Dolly was afraid, after that. ‘Don’t beg from foreigners till you’re older,’ she warned. ‘Stick to people from Bharat for now.’ He, of course, did not listen to her but was more careful now.

Dolly, worried at her son’s lack of education, began to teach him to decipher the words on the enormous cinema posters. The first words Karna learnt to read were the names of film stars and the titles of films. He began to watch out for new advertisements on his own and would come home, thrilled, to tell his mother he had managed to read ‘Prem Pujari’ or ‘Johnny Mera Nam’, all by himself. Concerned that his education was so one-sided she looked for other teaching tools. She encouraged him to recognise the letters on car number plates. She began to collect bits of newspaper off the rubbish heaps and instead of selling them on, wiped them clean of filth and grease and used them to teach Karna a wider range of reading. She even had a newspaper that she had kept from the good days and would bring it out on special occasions reading him the story of a man who had climbed the Himalayas without proper clothes and had survived because he was a yogi. ‘If you are a yogi you can do anything,’ Dolly told him. ‘Yogis can make themselves hot or cold by willpower, and make their tummies full without eating any food.’ Karna liked to read about Bollywood most of all. ‘I am going to be a film star and then I will turn you into a Maharani,’ he told his mother proudly.

She was afraid of pride, though, feared angering the gods with it. ‘You must take care not get punished like Dhuriodhana,’ she warned him. ‘He was the eldest of the Kauravas. A powerful rishi warned him not to fight the Pandavas in the war of the Mahabharata, but Dhuriodhana was too proud to take advice and mocked the rishi by slapping his thighs in a show of strength. Later in the battle he was punished by having both his legs broken.’

‘It’s only a story,’ said Karna. He began to bring back presents for her – shandesh, oranges, saffron, betel nut, little pots of warm dahi, a handful of lychees, telling her that he had earned the money carrying
a lady’s bag or showing a foreigner the way. ‘You must be earning well, my son,’ said Dolly with pride. ‘But please don’t spend so much of it on these luxury items. We need rice and another cloth to wrap round us at night.’

He did not tell her that the gifts he brought were really stolen. She had funny, old-fashioned notions about morality and he did not know what her reaction might be if she found out.

Cricket became the craze all over Calcutta and the streets were filled with boys and young men bowling, fielding, batting. Lorries, their drivers pretending they had broken down, blocked the entrances to streets, increased the traffic blocks, so as to allow cricket matches to take place in peace and untroubled by passing vehicles. Karna and other little pavement boys got great bowling practice and improved their batting skills, using rotten oranges for balls and an old box for a wicket just outside the New Market till they were shooed away by porters. For a short while Karna wondered if he would like to be a cricketer instead of a film star.

Dolly felt sad because, in spite of all her son’s hopefulness, he would probably amount to nothing because of her. If he had gone to school, she thought, he would have been playing cricket with a proper ball instead of a bruised orange.

As Karna grew older he started to help Dolly pick through the Calcutta rubbish heaps for something saleable, hunting through the debris and competing with other ragged and emaciated men, women and children. And with crows, pye dogs and rats. He began to fight to claim some reusable item, even taking on adults and sometimes winning. Dolly thought he would have been killed ten times over if she was not always on the lookout, and ready to grab him and hold him back when he got into one of these one-sided tussles.

At the time of Koonty’s engagement to Pandu it had been decided that Koonty’s father would seek another job as Pandu would find it awkward to have his father-in-law working under him. Koonty’s
father had in fact long had plans to work in Canada, and now the chance had come and Meena and her husband were to emigrate. Shivarani, who had been touring the countryside for months, wrote to say that she would be coming to see her parents before they left and that she was bringing a male friend.

Shivarani arrived by car in the afternoon, and Meena, who had gone through every emotion possible since she woke in the morning, felt quite dizzy as she watched the young man emerge from Shivarani’s car. Her joy was overtaken by fluster as Bhima fully revealed himself. She seemed hesitant and reluctant as she ushered the young man to take a seat on the verandah, and told her maid to bring sweets and tea.

Laxshmi, a stocky, sensible woman, who had been abandoned by her smuggler husband on giving birth to a fourth daughter, Bika, hurried off suppressing a smile and wondering how Mem was going to handle this.