Shining Hero (20 page)

There is always a mood of sadness when Durga has departed, even though she will be back next year. When the boats turned and began punting back to shore, their occupants were quiet. Then someone shouted, ‘Where is Koonty?’

The lights were going out now and in the increasing darkness they searched and hunted through the boat, feeling, groping, finding the knees of children and Boodi Ayah’s feet. But they could not find Koonty. They began to hunt among the other boats and through the water. The puntsmen prodded mud with poles, people began shouting, calling, ‘Koonty, Koonty.’ Arjuna started crying. His cousins dived into the river and felt beneath them with their feet. People on the banks clambered through the water weeds and started feeling with
their hands for the widow of the zamindar. At times they would think they had her then find that the handful of hair, the foot, the clutch of sari was that of the newly drowned Durga.

‘Call the police,’ DR Uncle shouted to people standing anxious on the banks and ‘Go to the Hatibari and use the phone there.’ They went running back across the gardens and dialled for Dattapukur. The widows squatted down, covered their heads and started weeping. Gadhari put her arms round Arjuna and tried to hug away his sobbing.

Jumna’s dark and limpid waters
Laved Yudhisthra’s palace walls
.
And to hail him, Dharma raja,
Monarchs thronged the royal halls
.

Shivarani’s friend, Malti, was setting up a day centre for the street children of Calcutta and had asked Shivarani and Bhima to come and help her get it started. The chief minister had been asked to open it officially so when, in the middle of a thunderstorm, the phone rang, Shivarani thought it must be him agreeing to come. Through the cracks and crackles on the line at first she was unable to understand what Gadhari told her. It was as though her mind would not allow her to hear the words, ‘Koonty is dead.’

‘What happened? How did it happen,’ she shouted over the dim line, when she realised at last what was being said. She heard, ‘Durga Puja’ ‘the river’ and ‘only just found the body.’

‘But when I left she seemed so much more calm,’ yelled Shivarani, choking back sobbing. The opening was postponed and Shivarani returned to attend the sad occasion of Koonty’s funeral. Bhima offered to come and give support but Shivarani refused. ‘My parents are coming back from Canada for the funeral and I don’t like the way they treat you.’

‘It’s not their fault,’ he said. ‘It’s how they have been brought up. How the whole of India has been brought up. If I will be of comfort to you I will come in spite of their efforts at retaining ritual purity.’ He did a little joking flapping of the hands, fingers spread, knuckles
out, the age-old Indian gesture that high-caste people make to warn untouchables not to come too close. ‘And you can understand it,’ laughed Bhima. ‘After touching me, your parents would have wash in cow’s urine to clean away the pollution.’

‘Oh, God, Bhima. Don’t talk like that. They should adore you for the person that you are.’ She had not seen her parents for three years and wondered if she could bear to talk to them. But when she arrived, Meena was so bowed with shock and sorrow that Shivarani could think of nothing but ways of comforting her. She even tried hugging her mother, a thing she had not done since she was six. But she was too tall and her arms were too long and boney. The contact was a failure, ending with Meena ducking and struggling to get free and saying, ‘Your wristwatch has got caught in my hair and pulled my chignon out.’ She had become slim, smart, fashionable and westernised in her Canadian exile. Shivarani did not try to hug the lonely little orphan boy and left caresses to Boodi Ayah, DR Uncle and even Gadhari, who, being a mother, was better at it than she was. But even Boodi Ayah’s hugs could not comfort Arjuna. He stood straight and rigid, accepting the attention of these adults, his gaze distant and his thoughts elsewhere.

After the funeral the Kaurava cousins became reluctant to let Arjuna play with them because he did not concentrate on the games anymore. In their cricket matches he would miss the ball altogether. When term time came, and the cousins went back to school, Arjuna wandered listlessly round the garden for a while. DR Uncle, out of pity, offered to bowl tennis balls for him but the little boy had lost his appetite for play.

Boodi Ayah begged, ‘Talk to me, Arjuna Baba,’ but he would not say anything. He knew what Karna had meant now. He had grown older and understood what deadness was. It was not only his parents that he had lost. The happy silence that, ever since he was very small, had frequently filled him, now came no more. He had lost the knack of staying underwater without breathing. Because of sorrow he had gone beyond the range of magic.

Gadhari told her husband, ‘Arjuna just mooches around all the time
and I cannot cope with it anymore. Also I don’t see why I should. He is not my child. All my children are away at school and I think he should go to his aunt for he is her responsibility now.’

‘He is my brother’s child,’ said DR Uncle miserably. ‘How can we send the child away from his own home just because he has lost his parents?’

But Gadhari was bitter that Arjuna had inherited the Hatibari estate and she could not bear to think that Koonty’s son should be the owner of her house. She would have liked to take the case to court, showing the foolishness of the grandfather’s will which had resulted in this miscarriage of justice. ‘He would not have done it if he had known that Pandu was going to die so young,’ raged Gadhari.

‘All the same, because he is a minor child, he is still under your authority,’ the lawyer told Gadhari. ‘He must do as you say till he comes of age, though nothing can be done about the inheritance. When he comes of age his property must be made available to him.’

DR Uncle would have liked to sell the Hatibari and live somewhere else after all the sorrow there but Gadhari refused utterly. ‘How will we buy another house? We will have to beg a seven-year-old to purchase one for us.’

No one knew how to comfort Arjuna. Gadhari eventually suggested that he go to live with his grandparents in Canada but Arjuna said, ‘I want to stay here. Definitely.’ This was his new word. He used it as much as possible.

‘Won’t you be lonely when the cousins are at school? What will you do all day?’ said Shivarani.

‘I will get my guns ready,’ Arjuna said. ‘Then I will learn how to do strangling.’ Shivarani was taken aback. Arjuna had always seemed quite a gentle boy. ‘And then I will learn how to shoot arrows. Then when I am ready I will poke little holes in Ravi, but not exactly kill him.’

‘Oh, no, Arjuna,’ cried Shivarani, alarmed.

Arjuna was adamant. ‘My mother said I must, I forget what, humbelate him or something, in front of everyone because he killed my father – so that’s what I’m going to do and that’s why I’m going
to stay here. Now I’m too little and he’s nearly grown up but while I’m growing I’m going to work out how to do it.’

In the days that followed, Arjuna’s anger mounted. Shivarani, who stayed in the Hatibari now because the bungalow had been taken over by the new manager of the estate, would watch her nephew throwing stones in the river and shouting ‘I hate you because you killed my mother.’ When Boodi Ayah tried to brush his hair he kicked her, when Gadhari tried to put her arm round him, he pushed her away, when DR Uncle came to bowl tennis balls for him he flung them back, trying to get his uncle in the face. He began to run round the garden yelling, ‘I hate Durga, I hate Durga,’ terrifying Boodi Ayah, who expected holy retribution every moment. He began to rush at the wall, hitting his head against it till he bruised himself. He bit into his own arm so deeply that it bled. Arjuna’s anger was against everything and everyone, because everything and everyone had destroyed his parents. Before his mother died he had focused all his rage on Ravi but now it seemed to Arjuna that he had enemies on every side. The river, the boat, the family and the goddess were all responsible for his mother’s death. And the person he blamed most of all was himself. He had been in the boat and had not even known that his mother had fallen in the water. He should have grabbed her as she fell, he should have dived in after her, his mind should have heard the sound of her dying so near to him, but he had been having fun and heard nothing but the fireworks and the happy shouts of worshippers. Somehow the heavy mooring chain had become wound around her body and he had not noticed. No one had noticed. She had drowned and her son who swam so well and who could stay underwater for three minutes on end, had failed to save her and had in fact been laughing when she died.

In the end the family decided to send Arjuna to stay with Shivarani in Malti’s Calcutta house while Shivarani made arrangements for the opening of the children’s centre. It would get Arjuna away from the Hatibari and the constant reminders of his parents for a little while and it was felt that it would be good for Arjuna to meet children so much worse off than him.

Malti had persuaded several Calcutta businesses to finance the centre, a large modern building comprising of a school and play room, and an adjoining kitchen and washroom. The latter, where the children would be able bathe themselves, consisted of a sloping concrete floor, with water outlets at the lower end, and a series of taps and buckets. Malti hoped in due course to be able to install a boiler but for the moment the children at least had running cold water and soap in which to wash themselves and their clothes. There was also a small dispensary where a chemist would be giving out basic medicine, and where once a week a doctor would be giving his services for free. The building was flanked by a large yard and a playground equipped with swings, seesaws and a slide. The centre was to be staffed by unpaid volunteers and the project had been so popular that money was still coming in and already Malti had people on the waiting list, hoping to do voluntary work there.

Although there had been much publicity already, Bhima fixed a loudspeaker to the roof of Shivarani’s car, and Shivarani, Malti and Bhima, with Arjuna sitting silent and crushed between them and Boodi Ayah, were driven round Calcutta by Basu. Bhima used the speaker to announce their invitation to the children of the street to come for a day and be given a meal, clean clothes, a bath and an education in reading and writing. Even Arjuna could not stop himself from giggling as Bhima sang, ‘Come to children’s centre next week or I’ll give your nose a nasty tweak.’

When the kigalis slept they often held each other for safety and for comfort and sometimes in Karna’s dreams the arms that hugged him would be Dolly’s and not those of another skinny boy. Instead of a child’s ribby chest, Karna would dream that he leant against the soft breasts of his mother and when he woke, waves of grief would rock him and he would yearn for the feel of Dolly’s hands caressing his face and her kisses on his cheek. It was a year since anyone had told him they loved him. Sometimes his grief would turn to shame as he
realised how much he had let her down. She had always struggled to keep him smart and clean, scrubbing his skin with soap till it stung, then standing him under the water squirt with his eyes squeezed tight while she rinsed him. In the year since she had died he had not once washed with soap, for there was no one to care if he was clean or dirty. He went on trying to learn to read and write, though, because Dolly had thought that so important. When Karna found bits of newspaper he struggled to make sense of the words. Laboriously he would work out the sentences on hoardings, spelling out advertisements for butter, water pumps, tailored suits, condoms, farm machinery. Squatting in the dust he would trace out words he saw on the posters for films – Dilip Kumar, Hathi Mera Sathi, Ganga Jummuna Saraswati, not knowing what they meant but practising the letters all the same. He could read the name of ‘Poopay Patalya’ though, and write it too. And the word he wrote the most often of all was his mother’s name, Dolly. After he was told that Koonty was his mother, Karna wrote her name too. And then, changing one letter at a time, he turned the name of Koonty into Dolly. He had had to take out the disc at first, to remind himself how to spell the name of the other mother then he worked his way from Dolly to Kolly to Kooly to Koonty. Then did it backwards ending up with Dolly again. Then tried it the other way round, doing Dooly, Doony, Doonty and back again until gradually Koonty became transformed into Dolly not only with letters, but in his imagination as well until at last the Koonty mother became in his mind indistinguishable from Dolly.

He did not tell the kigalis what these two names, Dolly and Koonty, meant to him for in the dangerous world of the Calcutta pavements, the less that was known about you the better. But because he repeated them so often the other little boys began to write them too. Soon the walls of Calcutta were scrawled with the names of Karna’s mothers. The children wrote them in charcoal left over from pavement fires, they wrote them with dropped ball-point pens, they scoured them into whitewash with nails, using bits of broken glass they scratched them onto the bonnets of the cars of those who refused to pay for their guardian services and smeared the names with fingers dipped in
rotten fruit pulp onto restaurant doors that had refused them food. One of the kigalis, a boy called Rishi, who thought of himself as an artist, tried to draw little portraits of Koonty and Dolly, but these for some reason made Karna furious. He scrubbed all over the pink faces with charcoal, at the same time yelling with rage at Rishi. People who saw the graffiti would wonder if this was some new political party of which they had not yet heard. Shall we vote for the Kooly Donty party? Or were these the names of gangs? And suddenly Kolly Doonty sounded dangerous.

Karna and his gang were stealing exhaust pipes ordered by the goondas when a loudspeaker car appeared, announcing, ‘At the children’s centre you’ll get a bath, and nice food to eat and a game and a laugh. And if you don’t come I’ll chop you in half.’ The kigalis were momentarily taken aback by these unexpected words but then they realised that the speed of this crawling car made it perfect for plundering. Bhima was giving the address and timings of the centre as Karna clung to the boot and gripped the legs of another boy who hung under the car and started to get the bolts undone. Bhima said, ‘A new shirt for boys and saris for girls, and even some beads though we won’t give you pearls.’ The boys could make as much noise as they liked as they pulled off the exhaust pipe for no one could hear them over the sound of Bhima’s announcements. ‘If you are ill we’ll have you made better, and with us you will read till you know every letter.’

Basu shouted suddenly, ‘They are picking the parts off, Memsahib. Let us stop a moment and I will catch them and give them a thrashing.’

Bhima put aside his mike and, laughing, said, ‘My goodness, Malti and Shivarani. Do you think we will be able to cope with such vigorous entrepreneurial urchins at our centre?’

‘They’re just a band of thieves. They don’t deserve your kindness,’ said Boodi Ayah sternly.