Shining Hero (12 page)

They had respected him for too long. They could not challenge him. They departed silently, their heads a little low. For a while the only voice that could be heard was Ravi, shouting bitterly, accusing his followers of cowardice and disloyalty to the cause. It was only when they were once again outside the Hatibari grounds and on the road that the rest began chanting again.

‘Next time they won’t give up so easily,’ said Pandu when he got back.

That evening a marigold garland was put round Daisy’s neck and she was led through a delighted, fascinated village and offered to Nitai Mandel.

‘Good cow, good cow,’ Nitai Mandel said, patting Daisy lovingly on her blonde neck. ‘And no more worry for you, Zamindar Sahib. One bit of trouble from any of these young hotheads and I will have three hundred men out at your place to put a stop to it – for though the boys do not listen to me any more, their fathers and their uncles do.’ Then, addressing the cow herself, he said, ‘Welcome to our house, my daughter, and may you be happy here.’

‘But his men could have taken all twelve cows from you,’ said Arjuna that night. ‘Why was he happy with only one?’

‘Because we had honoured him,’ Pandu said. ‘This is something
you have to know. How much people will do for you if you honour them.’

Pale before the unknown warrior,
gathered nations part in twain
.
Conqueror of hostile cities,
lofty Karna treads the plain
.

Dolly was often ill and gradually the fear grew in her that she would die and leave her little boy alone in the world. She had kept Karna’s golden disc in a cloth bag round her waist all these years. Sometimes she would take it out and examine the decorative elephants round the edge; run her finger over the scrolled words, let the heavy gold of the links run through her hands, and work out ways in which this jewel might secure Karna’s future if she should be taken from him. When Karna was five she opened her eyes to find him standing over her, sobbing. He had, he said, been trying to wake her for an hour. She realised she must have lost consciousness and knew she must do something soon. She would take Karna to Hatipur, and show him the place, tell him that if she died he must go there and force these people to take responsibility for him. And when the little boy kept on crying she told him, ‘You must be brave, Karna. You are called after a great hero and you must be like him.’ She had told him the story often: how the Mahabharata Karna pretended to be a Brahmin and went to get teaching from the rishi, Parashumara, how the teacher fell asleep during a lesson with his head on Karna’s lap and a worm began to burrow into the chela’s thigh. The pain was terrible but the boy, not wishing to disturb his teacher, did not move and Parashumara only woke when Karna’s blood began to flow. She
had not yet told him the other half of Karna’s story, though. She thought he was too young to hear how, when the teacher woke and understood what had happened, he realised Karna must have lied to him, for no Brahmin could have endured such pain. The teacher therefore cursed Karna so that, though the young man would know mantras to give him great mastery of body and spirit, when the battle moment came, he would be unable to recall them.

Dolly found out that Hatipur was a village forty miles away, only three hours by train. She began to save every paisa for the railway tickets, hardly eating anything herself and giving Karna so little that he would yowl with hunger at the end of his meal. For the first time in her life, on the days she felt well enough, she began to beg. There were days when she did not even have the strength for this but all the same, after a few weeks, she got together twelve rupees then went with Karna to the station and asked for two return tickets to Hatipur.

‘Rupees forty,’ said the man.

Suddenly Dolly felt she could not go on. She sank to the ground and sat there, overwhelmed with hopelessness.

‘What’s the matter, Ma?’ begged Karna, tugging at the end of her sari. ‘Come on. Let’s get on the train.’ He had been anticipating this moment for days, ever since his mother had told him that she nearly had enough money for the ticket. ‘Come on, Ma. Get up or it will go without us.’

‘We’re not going,’ said Dolly and she felt tears fill her eyes. ‘We don’t have enough money.’

Karna wilted with disappointment for a while. He had been looking forward to his first ride on a train. He said, ‘Don’t cry, Ma. I will get lots of money for the tickets. I will polish shoes all day long till I get enough.’

‘It will take too long,’ said Dolly. ‘We need to go soon.’

‘Then I will find a quicker way to make money.’ Karna thought of all those foreign memsahibs who went shopping in New Market
with their money-bags hanging over their shoulders. Everyone knew that such people carried huge amounts of rupees with them and he felt he could easily snatch a bag and run off before anyone was able to catch him.

Sadly Dolly shook her head. ‘There might not be enough time for anything, my son,’ she said. ‘I might not be here by the time you earn enough money.’

‘But where will you be?’ He squatted beside her and looked into her face. ‘Ma, Ma, where are you going?’ but she did not answer.

She could not move. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘I’m just tired, that’s why I said that. Leave me alone for a little while, son. Go and look round the station, see the trains, while I have a rest.’ Her voice was so quiet that he could hardly hear her over the roar of trains coming and going.

He gave her a last look of worry before reluctantly going off.

Dolly was wondering if she would ever get up again and thinking that a lot of her weakness might be from lack of food, when a passing passenger dropped a banana. It fell at her feet as though the gods had sent it to her. If she ate that, who knows what strength might come to her? She was reaching out for it when she was struck a great blow on the side of her face and a clawlike hand snatched the food away. A man with a hideously scarred face, dressed in grey rags, was scowling down at her furiously. ‘This is my part of the station and everything that falls on it belongs to me,’ he told her. She pressed her hand against her smarting cheek and watched numbly as the man strode off, ripping away the banana skin and devouring the fruit with ravenous gulps.

Karna had found a standing train and examined it with delight. He was determined to make up for his disappointment at not travelling today. Looking from right to left, making sure the car attendant polishing the outside brass was not looking, he sneaked into the empty air-conditioned compartment and sat down on the soft plush seat. The springs gave way with a groan that filled his body with joy.
He had never sat on anything so soft in his life. He was breathing in the smell of cold rubber and foreign cigarette smoke when the car attendant burst in. The man grabbed Karna by the arm, dragged the child to the door and flung him out onto the platform where he fell heavily onto the concrete. As Karna struggled to his feet, wiping the dust out of his cuts, the man shouted, ‘Next time you get a beating as well,’ and picking up his duster, went on with his polishing.

A woman who lived on the railway line, in the ten-foot area between the buffers and where the trains actually stopped, looked up from her cooking and saw Karna crash onto the ground. ‘He’s only a little boy. Have you no pity?’

The car man gave a grunt of contempt and moved on to the next carriage.

‘Are you hurt, little man?’ the woman called to Karna. ‘Come. Are you hungry?’ Karna, enthralled by the smell coming from the clay pot bubbling over a fire of newspaper, edged towards her and looked down. ‘Yes, I am hungry,’ he said.

‘Come, eat with us,’ said the woman, smiling and she beckoned him down. ‘Come on, don’t just stand there.’

‘But there is also my mother,’ said Karna. And he pointed to the place, far along the platform, where Dolly was sitting.

‘Bring her. There is enough for all, I am sure,’ said the woman.

Nearby, squatting on the rail, sat a group of boys playing cards. At the woman’s words, they looked up and said in outraged tones, ‘Ma, there is hardly enough for us. How can you give any away?’

‘Didn’t you see the fellow throw the poor little boy onto the platform?’ demanded the woman fiercely. ‘People like us must stick together.’ And to Karna, ‘Go on, darling. Bring your mummy here and let her join the meal with us.’

‘Come, sit down here with us,’ said the woman when Dolly shakily arrived. ‘You don’t look very well at all. Let me help you.’ It was quite a struggle for Dolly to clamber down onto the rails.

‘My name is Savitri,’ the woman said as Karna leapt down after his mother. ‘These are my sons and this is my daughter.’ A little girl with ribboned hair and glass bangles on her wrist, looked
up from chillies that she was chopping on a bit of waste board and smiled.

As he ate, Karna could not take his eyes off the trains. This was the most exciting and terrifying place he had ever been. He was on a level with their wheels and every now and again a train would come roaring upon them and stop so late and close that it seemed certain to Karna and his mother that it could not fail to crush them.

‘It’s all right,’ said Savitri, seeing them flinch. ‘They always stop in time. We have been here for six months and not one of the hundreds of trains has ever hit the buffers.’

‘I wish I could live here like you,’ Karna said.

‘There are better places.’ Savitri smiled at his enthusiasm. ‘The worst thing is the noise at night, with trains coming and going so much, though you do get used to it. And we have so little room. But we can get everything we need off the station. Fuel for our fire, even most of our food.’

Later, as Dolly and Karna made their way back into town, Dolly thought that the kindness had done as much to restore her as the hot meal of rice and spiced dhall.

In the days that followed she tried to get work as a maid again, but word of her ill health had gone round and no one would employ her. She began to think of other ways of getting to Hatipur. She considered trying to travel without a ticket but she had never stolen anything in her life and did not know how to begin.

She began to approach people selling goods – the fruit wallah, the khatal wallah, the seller of New Market flowers, offering to deliver their product to Hatipur. She offered to carry sweets for the misti wallah and mustard oil from the food store. Her proposal was always greeted with scornful laughter. ‘Hatipur? Those illiterate peasants wouldn’t know a rose if they saw one.’ Or, ‘How would you expect to get milk all that way without it going bad?’ or ‘Those villagers wouldn’t be able to appreciate the sophisticated produce of Calcutta even if they had enough money to pay for it.’

She returned to the railway station, in case there was someone there wanting a delivery taken to Hatipur. ‘I can’t understand why you want to go to this place so much,’ said Savitri. ‘Still, if I hear of anything I’ll tell you.’ But no one at the station wanted Dolly’s services.

Karna, too, was mystified by his mother’s endless efforts to reach a place called Hatipur, and begged her, ‘Couldn’t we go on a train to somewhere else? Couldn’t we go somewhere that doesn’t cost so much?’

But she insisted it had to be Hatipur.

‘Why? What’s there?’ he would demand.

But she only said, ‘I’ll tell you when you’re bigger.’

She set off round the small industries, offering her services. After three weeks, when she had given up hope, a manufacturer of soap, swayed by the longing in Dolly’s eyes and a need to expand his business, said he would pay her train fare and a little over to take his product to the village.

The soap factory owner had given her a little cash, saying, ‘It will give our business a bad name if you are dressed in such rags so please be wearing a clean outfit when you deliver our goods.’

She had bought new clothes not only for herself but for Karna as well and there was even a little money left over which she kept by for emergencies.

On the morning of their departure Dolly washed Karna all over with one of the soap bars, massaging the foam over the little boy’s squeezed-shut face and then rinsing him with water poured from her cupped hands. The loss of one won’t even be noticed, she thought. She would pay for it herself.

Dolly had been tempted to spend the last of her money on a rickshaw to the station so that Karna’s white socks would not get soiled, but in the end decided to keep it, and buy the two of them a hot meal in the village.

When they reached the station the train was already in.

Dolly gave her son a sandal-perfumed shove saying, ‘Go on, Karna, get into that compartment there.’

Savitri saw Dolly getting onto the train and looked amazed.

‘We’re going to Hatipur,’ Dolly called.

‘I have never understood why you are always wanting to go to that place but all the same I am happy for you.’ Everybody on the station had been laughing at Dolly’s crazy desire.

Dolly, telling herself one more won’t matter much either, prised a soap bar from her box and, shouting, ‘Here is something for you,’ threw it down to her friend. Savitri caught it and sniffed with delight before looking up at Dolly with a smile of gratitude. The scarred man who had grabbed the banana was picking through a pile of rubbish and did not recognise Dolly standing on the train, wearing her new clothes. But as Dolly stood at the train door and touched her cheek she wished she could have a banana to drop now. She would watch with her arms crossed like a memsahib while he grovelled and struggled at her feet. Already she felt like someone from another world altogether.

Karna was smiling and prancing with delight.

‘Stand calmly like a rich boy,’ Dolly kept urging him, but he could not. His legs were dancing on their own. Today nobody was going to throw Karna off the train because Dolly had bought tickets. The train gave a lurch. ‘Hurry, Karna, now we must find a compartment,’ said Dolly. She was shaking with nerves for she was finally getting to Hatipur and she didn’t want to, any more.

As she pressed her way along the crowded corridor of the third-class compartment Dolly felt anxiety giving way to hope. She felt almost well. Perhaps, after all this time of hunger, rags and homelessness, she was going to have an income and she would not die after all. If things went well, she thought, the soap factory might go on employing her. She might be able to afford a little rented room in the bustee again after a year or two, with a window and some furniture. Her body ached for a charpoy bed. They might even manage to afford a mosquito net after she was given a salary.

In the days before Adhiratha lost his sight they had gone on holiday by train, travelling second class, not third like now. A waiter had come to their compartment and taken an order for their meal. At
the next station, an hour or two later, another waiter had brought chicken curry, dhall, chupatties, saffron rice served in china plates on a metal tray, a white cloth over the steaming food to keep the flies off. Dolly’s mouth watered at the memory as she gently shoved Karna onwards and lugged her boxes. They passed one full carriage after another until, by the time the train had begun to get up speed she came to one that seemed slightly less packed than the rest.