Shining Hero (16 page)

Shivarani’s doll industry was flourishing and dolls were being taken for sale to a posh shop in Park Street. On the three-hour journey to
the town Koonty and Shivarani hid their jewels against their breasts and Shivarani told the driver not to stop for anything, for dacoits and highwaymen were robbing travellers all the time these days. In town Basu, their driver, edged the car past buses smothered under outside passengers, cyclists balancing a ten-foot-high pile of terracotta pots or three yards of sugar cane. He eased Shivarani’s rusty Ambassador among food sellers, street musicians, shoppers, school kids, men in pristine white, swinging briefcases and hurrying to the office. Arjuna, squashed between his aunt and his mother on the back seat, reflected how Shivarani had her own special smell, different to Koonty’s: chalk, supari, foreign and something metallic.

They reached New Market at last, and Koonty took Arjuna, protesting wildly all the way, to have his hair cut.

‘What is the matter with this fellow?’ laughed the barber. ‘Why is he wriggling like a fish trying to get away from the net? Does he not know how a barber saved the world?’

Arjuna stopped howling and asked, ‘How?’

‘Some demons, long long ago, grabbed power of the earth,’ said the barber, tying a bib round Arjuna’s neck. ‘Everywhere there was crying and sadness, and the Earth went to her father, the god Vishnu, and begged him to help her. So Vishnu got his barber to cut off two of his hairs, one light and one dark. The light hair became Balarama and the dark hair, his brother, Krishna, who later drove the chariot of Arjuna in the Mahabharata and these two great gods chased away the demons.’

At New Market, cool air spilling onto Arjuna’s neck where his hair had been, Koonty said, ‘I hope number ninety-eight is free otherwise we may have to make do with thirty-nine.’

Each authentic New Market porter wore a badge showing his number and you had to take one even if you only wanted to buy one packet of needles.

Luckily ninety-eight was there, squatting at the entrance, his basket at his feet. He rose smiling at the sight of Koonty and her son. He was a slim pockmarked man of indeterminate age and with surprisingly un-greyed hair. He had been carrying for Koonty ever since she
could remember and he had carried for her mother too but to Koonty he looked just the same as he had when she had been a little girl.

‘The barber cut off a lot of my hairs but none of them turned into gods,’ Arjuna told the porter.

‘Next time better luck, little man,’ the porter smiled as he put his basket on his head.

As Arjuna and his mother followed number ninety-eight into the market, they saw ahead of them a foreign memsahib with several porters clustered round her, each urging her to hire him. Refusing them all she set off, the loudly exhorting porters following. Beggars began to join the crowd of imploring porters. Each time the woman passed a stall or shop, accompanied by her nagging mob, the owner sprang out, urging her, with terrible insistence, that she buy from him. Child beggars and legless people plucked at her clothes. A man crept alongside her, whispering, his lips so close they almost touched her ear. ‘You like filthy, Memsahib? I take you to shop where you can buy very filthy.’ On her other side another man whispered, ‘You got dollars, Memsahib? I give you very good exchange. You come this way and I give you best in this town.’

Arjuna was fascinated as he and his mother walked serenely in the wake of number ninety-eight, perfectly unmolested. Once you had chosen your porter all the competition melted away. Your porter, basket on head, large number badge on his chest, protected you.

‘Why don’t you tell her, Ma,’ Arjuna said.

‘She will soon learn,’ smiled Koonty.

Koonty bought Arjuna a camouflage suit, plastic helmet and tin machine gun. On their way back to the car, Arjuna asked, ‘Where does number ninety-eight live, Ma?’

Koonty realised that though she had employed this man for so many years, she knew nothing about him. When she had been a little girl he had sometimes carried her in his basket among the shopping when she got tired, as later he had carried little Arjuna. And not only did she not know where he lived, with a flush of shame she realised she did not even know his real name. She thought of him, as her mother did, as ninety-eight. Pronounced Nunetyett. Like that it sounded
like a real name but surely his wife, if he had one, must call him something else. Was he married? Did he have children? She did not know. As the driver opened the boot and the porter carefully loaded the shopping in, Koonty opened her mouth to ask her questions, but in the end she said nothing. It was too late for intimacy. Too many years had passed.

Kuru Dadoo and Nitai Mandel both died that year. When the monsoon came the river swelled and ripped its banks till the sound of thundering water was audible in every part of the village. Boodi Ayah in the bazaar, getting herself some more tobacco for her pipe, had to wade to her ankles in water when she saw the young Marxists, led by Ravi, marching towards the Hatibari. ‘Power comes out of the barrel of a gun,’ they were shouting. Ravi was sixteen now and his followers were more determined than the last time.

Arjuna’s father had been making love with a girl called Shonali when he heard their shouts and understood what was happening. A huge man, bulky, soft-bodied, fair and fine-skinned, he was not made for running. His clothes, silken, floating, clasped with jewels, caught the wind and held him back. His shoes were curl-toed and embroidered in gold. As he lumbered past, people shouted, ‘They are stealing your cows, Zamindar Sahib.’

He took off the hindering shoes and for the first time in many years tried to run barefoot. His body shuddered with its impact with the road as he tried to get home fast and put a stop to the disaster that had been building up there in the short time he had been caressing Shonali of the midnight-thick, queen-of-the-night perfumed hair. A mountain on the move, Pandu gripped the jewelled handle of the dagger that his father had left to him.

Ravi led his followers as they came chanting to the elephant gates and walked right through them. Durwans are not paid to get murdered. Durwans are not compensated for appearing to side with the zamindars and against the people. The Marxists entered the cow stalls where the men were milking. Koonty raced after them
and tried wrestling with their hands as they untied the cow ropes. ‘We are taking them for re-distribution,’ said the youths as they led Pandu’s cattle into the yard. ‘The days of the zamindar are over. In these times of equality for all it is not right that one man should have so many cows when there are peasants in this village who have none, whose children starve for lack of milk.’

Pandu arrived, wheezing. ‘You bastards,’ he yelled, pulling out the dagger and trying to chop Buttercup free. It had been Pandu’s fancy to name his herd after English wildflowers. He recognised the lad who led Buttercup. It was Rahul, Ravi’s older brother. Only recently Pandu had given this boy money for his college fee.

‘I thought we were friends,’ Pandu said over the back of the bouncing Buttercup. ‘I thought your family was grateful for the help I have given.’

‘We want our rights, not charity,’ said Rahul.

‘These cows are not your right. They belong to me, not you or your party.’

‘I am communist and all possessions are the property of all society,’ said Rahul.

‘I have always looked after your family. I have cared for you as though you were my own.’ Pandu’s tone was sad.

‘My first loyalty is to the cause,’ said Rahul, but he could not meet Pandu’s eyes.

As they struggled, Buttercup began to panic, butting and kicking while the young man tried to jerk the rope out of reach. Around them people shouted, cows mooed, dogs barked, servants wailed.

There came the sound of cow hooves galloping and, in a splatter of mud, Arjuna, shouting with excitement at the adventure, went racing towards the river trying to capture Meadowsweet, who had broken free. She had been halfway through milking and her udder was still tight and spraying milk. She was wild with panic and heading for the swollen water.

‘Leave her, son,’ cried Koonty. ‘She is only a cow.’ There came a splash and Koonty started screaming. Arjuna had managed to grab at Meadowsweet’s trailing rope at the moment the cow toppled into
the water. He was jerked in after her and in a moment the wild current had sucked down the pair of them.

‘Ogo, Ogo, come,’ yelled Arjuna’s mother.

People abandoned the cow seizure and began running to the waterside, trying to help rescue Arjuna who popped up suddenly in unexpected places and remained on the surface for a few short moments, his head bobbing on the water like a coconut. He was out-pacing them. He was vanishing fast down a speedy current. Koonty began screaming like a mad woman, ‘You bitch, you filthy whore, you Durga, you murderess of children.’

Only later, when the red dust had settled, when Arjuna had been pulled from the water, did anyone notice that Rahul was lying on the ground and the dust under him was redder with his blood.

Rahul’s father had been bailing in the water with a long bamboo, trying to halt the rich man’s son in his rush to death at the very time his own son lay dying.

There followed long shocked moments, in which people tried to understand. There had been a lot of killing in this village over recent years but the people who had died had been the landowners, the greedy shopkeepers and moneylenders. The upper classes got killed nowadays, not the lower. It came as a shock to see one of their number, a village son, the son of the misti wallah, lying dead. What had happened? People pressed around to get a better look at the body. What killed him?

Someone remembered the flash of a knife. Someone else had seen the zamindar sahib take out a dagger. ‘How did it happen?’ people were asking over the sound of the misti wallah’s weeping. ‘Who did it?’

‘Rahul is dead and the zamindar has killed him,’ said Rahul’s brother, Ravi. ‘In the old days the landlords could do what they liked with us. Kill us, take our property, rape our wives and daughters. Now all that has changed and since the Communists came in we have got the power.’

The crowd was waiting, as the zamindar, his silken clothes streaked and dribbled with river mud, came walking back. The people of the
village watched in silence as he came hauling his great body painfully towards them. There was blood on his kurta.

Pandu wanted to thank them for saving his son and felt muddled by the oddness of their behaviour. He could sense hostility as he approached the people but was too tired to sense danger.

The crowd waited for the zamindar with fists clenched round hastily gathered poles and stones. Shooting lights began flashing in the zamindar’s eyes as the men tightened round him. He felt suddenly dizzy. He needed to sit down.

‘Could someone bring me a glass of water,’ he said. His heart was quivering painfully against his ribs. He looked round, into the faces of the men who had saved his son and saw hatred in their eyes. No one went to get water for him. The only movement was that of fists tightening round stones.

A lone police constable, on the outskirts of the crowd, not daring to enter it, tried to get a glimpse of what was going on.

What can one man do? Anyway it did not look good for the police to be seen siding with the landlords against the people in a Communist state. Softly he twisted his handlebars and pedalled away. He would put in a report. That is the most he would do.

And she saw her sons in combat,
words of woe she uttered none,
Speechless wept, for none must fathom
Karna was her oldest son
.

Dolly’s arm never came right after the day the dacoit slashed it in the train. Even hunting the rubbish dumps was sometimes too hard for her and she began to worry constantly about Karna’s future, so the day she found someone willing to teach her son a skill she was filled with gratitude. The beedi wallah offered to take the child and train him, as well as give him a small wage. ‘I need children under the age of ten,’ said the man. ‘After that their fingers become too big to roll the leaf or tie the string.’

Dolly was jubilant. ‘Everything will be all right now,’ she told Karna as she spruced him up for his first day’s work. ‘Chacha will teach you and when you are grown up, you will become fat and rich and have gold stoppings in your teeth, just like him.’ Her son had been saved from spending his life as a beggar or something worse.

Every morning, before the sun was up, Dolly would examine Karna to make sure he looked clean and tidy, then send the little boy off to a room in a bustee that had once belonged to Clive of India. The beedi wallah had taken this room by force, coming in with several of his brothers, all armed with lathis and throwing out several penniless families.

There, Karna and a dozen other ragged, emaciated children, sat cross-legged on a hard floor for fourteen hours a day, rolling raw
tobacco leaves in thin sticks and then tying them with whiskery thread. The children, many of whom had developed harsh coughs from breathing tobacco dust, ranged in age from a peaky-faced child of three who sat in a constant puddle of his own urine, to a blind boy of nine. They were overseen by the pock-marked beedi wallah who leant on a bolster, smelled of imported aftershave and chain-smoked smuggled foreign cigarettes which further polluted the atmosphere of the already stifling room. Chacha kept a bamboo pole at his side for hitting the children if they paused, talked, or made a mistake. His business was doing well. His beedis were the finest in town because he used children and his profits high because he kept wages so low.

There came an evening when Karna, his long day of work finished, got back to find his mother lying where he had left her on the pavement in the morning. Full of panic he gave her water which revived her slightly. Deciding she needed food he tried to sneak up and grab a samosa from the stall in the next street, but he was too small and could not reach. Eventually the man became suspicious and batted Karna away with an oily ladle. ‘My mother is ill. Will you give me one?’ pleaded Karna. The smells of the frying pasties were filling his stomach with longing.

The man baled into the sizzling oil, said, ‘Do I look like Mother Theresa?’ then went on serving his gathering of late-night customers. But all the same Karna could not stop staring hopefully at the smoking golden triangles emerging from the hot dekshi. A young man, standing by the stall, gave Karna a smile and handing some more money to the samosa wallah, said, ‘Fry the kid one as well.’

Karna went back to his mother tossing the scalding food from one hand to the other and dancing because the kindness had lifted a little of his weariness. But when he held the food to her mouth, though she moved her dry lips she did not bite it. He picked out a little of the soft potato filling and pressed it against her teeth, but she seemed unable to swallow. Putting the rest of the samosa into his pocket, Karna decided to try to get some milk for her instead. The small boy’s legs were shaking with fear and weariness by the time he got to the khatal near where he and his mother had once lived. The gwala
remembered Karna and, after much persuasion, gave him a little milk in a tin cup.

By the time he got back to his mother she had managed to sit up a little. When she saw him, she began to cry. ‘I could not stand. I tried and tried but I could not get up so I have been unable to make you any food.’

‘It’s all right, it’s all right,’ soothed Karna as though he was the mother and she was the child. ‘I will eat the samosa. You drink this.’ He poured the milk, drop by drop, into her mouth.

‘I want to say something, Karna,’ said Dolly when she started to feel better. ‘Now listen to me carefully.’ Her voice was very low so he had to put his ear to her mouth.

‘What, Ma? I am listening.’

‘Do you remember giving me that promise, Karna?’ Her voice was like a breath.

‘What?’ His heart was sinking. He did not want to do the thing she asked.

Dolly’s words came out, slow, straining, and so quiet that Karna could hardly hear.

‘You promised that if I am no longer here you will go back to Hatibari and show them the disc.’

‘Don’t go, Ma. Please don’t go,’ Karna begged. He put his arms round his small thin mother and pressed his head against her breast. He remembered the time the dacoits came, how she had hidden the money there. He wished she could hide him inside her bosom now. ‘Stay with me, Ma.’ But she did not answer and he knew. He could feel her heart tinkling quickly and unevenly against his ribs. A great cough began to rise in her and he held her tightly, trying to calm her racking convulsion.

‘You must keep the promise you made to me, my son, because this is the last thing I will be able to ask of you,’ she breathed.

‘I promise, Ma,’ whispered Karna and he gently kissed her head. Her hair that had once been so thick and luxuriant had turned grey and thin.

Next day he felt afraid to leave her but knew he must. His wages
barely bought them the smallest amount of food. At the beedi factory he begged the owner to pay him more. ‘I work all day and still don’t have enough money to give my mother proper food,’ he said.

The manager scowled. ‘Take what I give you or get out,’ he said. ‘There are plenty of children who would value this job. If your mother wants money she should not be so idle but get some work, herself. If I go giving you more, all the others will be wanting it too. It’s people like you that ruin the market.’

The day after that, Karna could not wake Dolly. Although he shook and called her, she lay there limp. After half-an-hour he began to feel afraid. He ran to the khatal, since milk had revived her once before. The khatal owner was not there. His wife was squatting before the chula, stirring a metal pot of boiling milk. She did not know where her husband was and she did not have any milk to spare.

‘Some of that,’ begged Karna, pointing into the steaming pot.

‘This is for the kheer,’ said the woman. ‘We need it all. Move out of the way.’

‘Just a little. A very little.’ Karna stood firmly over her.

The milk was at the crucial stage. If the stirring was paused for a moment it would boil over. Without looking up the khatal wallah’s wife turned her spoon in the rising heaving milk and ordered Karna to go.

‘What will I do?’ beseeched the child.

The khatal wallah’s wife had always been irritated by her husband’s enthusiasm for Dolly, who was prettier and younger than she was and now told him crossly, ‘You will have to go and look elsewhere.’

‘Please, oh please,’ begged Karna.

In the end, because the child would not go away and the milk was past the boiling-over stage the woman took up an empty baked-bean tin with her free hand and impatiently ladled a few drops into it. She handed it to Karna, instructing him to bring the tin back then quickly went on stirring to stop it catching on the bottom.

Dolly was still not awake when Karna got back so he tried to feed it to her while she slept. He tilted the tin against her mouth but it trickled down her chin as though her lips had gone stiff. There was
so little milk that he did not want to waste it so he tried dipping his fingers into it then putting them against her lips, but still she did not swallow. At last he managed to force her mouth open and pour some of the fluid into her throat. Then he sat back watching and waiting hopefully. But nothing happened and the milk only lay in a white pool at the back of her mouth.

For the rest of the morning he ran wildly from one place to another searching for someone who would help him, going back at intervals to his mother and always finding her unmoving and asleep. He ran to Sahib Singhs, the Park Street chemists and tried, in gasping breaths, to explain. The chemist asked Karna a series of questions and eventually, understanding that the boy’s mother had once had a cough, took down a large bottle of syrup and poured some into a bottle. Karna watched the ruby-red liquid flow as though it was life pouring back into his mother.

‘Fifty paise,’ said the chemist and waited, wrapped bottle in hand.

When the man understood that Karna had no money he became furious, ordered Karna out of the shop and tilted the syrup back into the jar. Desperate Karna began stealing things which might cure his mother of her prolonged sleep. He ran till his chest began to hurt from so much panting and his feet became scalded from the rough pavements. He returned to Dolly with coconut, plantain bananas, a bottle of Thumbs Up, a Five Star chocolate bar and a bottle of something misty and black that he had seized from the Ayurvedic chemist. As he approached the place where his mother was, he began to feel hopeful, certain she would be awake and cross because he had been gone so long. He longed for her to be angry with him, to say with a frown and in a stern voice, ‘Never go off without telling me again.’ Then she would hug him and say, ‘I love you really, Karna. It’s just that I get so worried about you.’

His mother was sitting up. Relief and happiness rushed through him. He felt a great laugh burst from his stomach as he dashed towards her, holding out all his gifts.

But as he got closer his happiness vanished. The hunched form was not Dolly at all but a large pye dog sniffing over her as though it was
about to bite into her cheek. Karna ran at the animal screaming and the dog slunk off.

Dolly was lying exactly as he had left her. She had not moved the smallest bit. A fly was walking over her lips. Putting down his burden he swatted the fly away then took her head in his arms and, rocking, began shouting, ‘Ma, oh Ma, oh Ma,’ as though it was only because he had not yelled loud enough that she was still asleep. He rocked her head and begged her to wake up. After an hour he stopped using words but, still rocking his mother’s head, he started wailing, letting out short anguished howls that had no words in them, only misery.

The man who lived on the next bit of pavement looked up from plucking at his toes and said indifferently, ‘No point in going on like that, son. She’s dead and you won’t bring her back.’ Then he returned to his toes.

Karna sat beside the body of his dead mother all the rest of that day and all night too. Hunger began to grow in him, but for a long time he could not bring himself to eat the food he had stolen although he knew that Dolly would never need it now. Throughout the night he lay by her side and, at first, he would reach out his hand and touch her body for comfort. But after a while it stopped feeling like his mother for her limbs lost their warmth and became stiff.

In the morning he woke, knowing that, though he was only six years old, he was now completely alone in the world.

Sitting by Dolly’s side for the last time, Karna ate the piece of coconut, the two plantains and the chocolate, pretending that it was the breakfast his mother had given him and she was now sitting with him while he ate. He drank the Thumbs Up. He ate the squashed samosa from his pocket. Then, putting the bottle of Ayurvedic medicine at his mother’s side just in case she woke when he was away, and could be cured by the magic dose, he got up. He looked down at his mother for the last time then walked away.

Under his shirt he felt the golden disc on which was written the name of the woman who, his mother had told him, must look after him from now on.

It took Karna over two hours to get to the station but as he drew
nearer he remembered Savitri and began to feel comforted. She was so wise and kind that she might even know how to bring his mother back to life again.

He sneaked under the barrier when the ticket collector was turned away and ran to the track. He peered down onto the rails. The area before the buffers was empty. Only a little debris wafted back and forth in the breeze of an arriving train. One small broken glass bangle lay between the lines. It must have fallen from the wrist of Savitri’s little girl.

Karna dashed round the station, tackling people. ‘Where are they? What’s happened to them?’ It seemed as though, if only he could find Savitri, everything would be all right again. He would not have to go to Hatipur and ask this unknown woman to be his mother and Dolly would wake up again. ‘Where is Savitri?’ he sobbed to the guard who had his flag up and his whistle in his mouth.

‘Where are the people who lived on the rails?’ he demanded of the man who sold plastic bottles of water.

The man with the scarred face, who had snatched the banana, looked up from a heap of debris which he was rummaging through and muttered what sounded to Karna like, ‘Train got them in the end. I knew it would.’ He seemed pleased. Karna caught the ticket collector by the sleeve and pulled at it as though he was ringing a temple bell.

‘Stop that,’ said the man, smacking Karna’s hand away. ‘They’ve been moved on. It’s the new government policy. Now get out of here.’

Karna’s heart was heavier than ever as he crept into the train to Hatipur when the guard was not looking.

He travelled to Hatipur crushed under the seat because he had no money for a ticket. He did not come out once the entire way, in case he was thrown off the train and was unable to fulfil the promise to his mother. He did not stir when people kicked their heels against him or allowed their bottles and bags to roll on him. He was very tired and fell asleep at last in the stifling airless heat of the under seat so that he nearly missed the station of Hatipur and had to scramble and leap
from the train as it began to gather speed. Then he had to run again, and dive under the barrier, pursued by the ticket collector.