Someone Else's Garden (35 page)

‘Tomorrow is my day off, I am going to get a form for the Post Office Saving Plan from the dispensary. Shall I get you one? Then you too can start saving and change your life.’

‘A form? Savings? I don’t have anything to save. I don’t have a fancy job like you,’ he says, half joking.

Mamta jumps on the number 210 bus which takes her to the dispensary.

Eyebrows is there, shouting orders. ‘Everyone who bumped into furniture today stand in this line. Those with cuts in this line . . .’ The scene hasn’t changed much, except for two new posters up on the wall. The smaller one is of a baby studded with dots: smallpox. In her village the afflicted were looked after by their mothers, because everyone knew that mothers were the only ones immune to the disease. Mamta regards the pus-filled spots with deep concentration, committing their exact shape, size and scabbiness to memory. Every bit of city knowledge is knowledge that might save her in the village one day. Nothing is wasted. The larger poster has two pictures on it, one of a back with patches of faintly noticeable discoloration poked at with the tip of a ballpoint pen, and the other of a face with a collapsed nose. Mamta looks at the nose and touches her own beautiful bridge. Yes, her nose is lovely, but perhaps she should poke a ballpoint pen into her birthmark. She’ll ask Eyebrows.

‘Didi . . .’ elder sister, it holds the right degree of respect.

‘Your number hasn’t been called, to the back.’

‘But I only want a form . . .’

‘To the back, wait for your number. Can’t you see I’m busy? I am just one person here. Today the volunteer hasn’t shown up either. So where are all these unemployed? We are supposed to have millions of them, but do you think you can get even one person to do a job when you need them to?’ No answers are given. None are expected.

Feeling like an impostor amongst the wounded and dying, Mamta takes her number to wait in line.

‘Side, side.’ The women look up, jerked out of their reverie by the commotion. A body shows up on a stretcher covered in a sheet. It is moaning and stinking. The waiting women put their pallavs to their noses.

Eyebrows knows exactly what to make of it. She tries to throw back the sheet, but it sticks in places to the moaner. She tugs harder then gives up. The waiting women have seen enough of the burned flesh to conclude that the woman is wounded all over. ‘So what was it, a cooking accident? Is she your daughter?’ she asks the dazed man and woman who brought the body in.

‘Yes,’ they cry, ‘yes, she’s our unfortunate daughter.’

‘Why don’t you put a police case on her husband and her mother-in-law?’

‘She wants to go back when she’s well.’

Eyebrows laughs a disgusted laugh. ‘And you don’t mind that? You’d send your daughter back to the monsters who did this to her?’

‘Didi, what can we do? We paid him the dowry. We have nothing left now. What should we do with her? You are educated so you can talk like this, but for us there is no choice. We are grateful that she wants to go back.’

‘You see this? You all are to blame. You, you, you. I am to blame. The world is to blame. I have no pity left in me for you lot.’

‘We had to bring her here. We tried to cure her, but her moans are making us mad. This happened ten days ago. Some of her burns healed, but these others, they are just too deep. We can’t care for her any more. I am a shoemaker, people from our slum have stopped coming to me for shoes because of her smell. We can’t survive like this. Take care of her. Please, Didi, take care of her.’

‘Yes, make her well so they can take her back and finish the job,’ says Eyebrows, grabbing the victim’s hand, still finely decorated with fading henna pattern, the one part of her body that’s escaped burning.

The parents shuffle out of the clinic, they are too tired to tangle tongues with Eyebrows any more. They leave their burned daughter, a hopeless case, in the hands of a total stranger. Their daughter will never see them again.

‘I will send you to the hospital, don’t worry.’

‘No . . . no . . . no,’ the woman can barely speak. ‘No . . . hospital.’ The waiting women shake their heads. They understand completely. A hospital means shame, might even mean a cure. Yes, the woman wants to go back
if
she is cured, but she doesn’t want to be cured.

‘You can’t stay here. I can’t take care of you properly,’ says Eyebrows.

‘No . . . please . . . plea . . .’ The victim’s words, released with such great effort, have no effect on Eyebrows.

‘See this woman?’ She shows off the patient, opening her arms wide to include her whole body. ‘You can stop it. Fight it, I tell you. Why is it that such a thing can happen in our country? In a land of saints, where so many great beings have lived? Is this not the land of Gandhi, of Mahavir, of Gautam Buddha, of Kalidas, of Sudama, of Guru Nanak, of Nizammudin Chisti? Where are these saints now? Are you listening? Do you hear me?’ Eyebrows is the rare type of woman who will not be numbed into silence by repeated scenes of pain and suffering. Her mind will stay alert and she will rant to anyone who cares to listen. Some call people like her Fools, others call them Warriors. ‘The sages may tell us that enlightenment is where solace lies, but in the meantime what does she do? Die slowly? Scripture cannot provide a cure; it is only a grindstone that pulverises pain, making it easier to swallow,’ says Eyebrows loudly. Every woman there is compromised enough to happily settle for an easier pain to swallow. Eyebrows’ face is red; in that moment she is one with the dying woman.

Then after a long time, someone says, ‘The saints tell us that there is a reason for everything.’ The woman is diffident with her explanation. Each one present is a speck of dust stirred up in the swirling eddy of Eyebrows’ rhetoric, they are all looking for an answer, and if not an answer, then at least stillness so they may settle again. ‘All this is happening to take us to the next spiritual level. It is only when things get unbearable that God comes to us. It is no coincidence that Buddha or Mahatma Gandhi or Kalidas or a million saints were born in
this
country.’

‘So you think those that burn their wives are doing us a spiritual favour?’

‘No . . . no,’ the woman has lost her footing, she’s never disagreed with anyone before, not even another woman. ‘No, it isn’t like that. We all have to act in the plays of our making, according to our karma. With great injustice comes great compassion, great understanding, great enlightenment.’

‘Whoever told you that sold you worm-eaten wheat.’ ‘Then how can you explain saints like, like Buddha, like Mahavir?’ Mamta knows the answer already, otherwise how could she have come this far?

‘Okay, where is the patient?’ The ambulance driver and his assistant have arrived to take the moaning woman away. Eyebrows is busy bandaging someone else’s arm, and doesn’t look up to say goodbye.

‘Next!’ she shouts.

‘I just wanted the forms for the Post Office Saving Plan, and oh yes, one other thing. I think I have that disease in the poster.’

‘Leprosy?’

‘Yes, on my forehead, see this red patch? You have something for it?’

This time Eyebrows laughs. A genuine laugh. ‘No, you don’t have leprosy. You wouldn’t be able to feel your birthmark otherwise, and I can see that you feel it quite a bit. Go home, you are a lucky one. Hey! I’ve seen you before. You came here with a cut eyelid, right? What did you do with the stitches? Took them out yourself, did you? No bruises today, I see. Good girl,’ she says as if Mamta got high marks in a very difficult exam. ‘Good girl. Here, fill these out and bring them back. I’ll take them to the post office for you. Can you do fifty a month?’

‘Fifty?’

‘Fifty rupees? Every month can you put fifty rupees in the rolling scheme?’

‘Yes. I think so.’

More than a year into her service, and Mamta knows she is happier than she’s ever been. She is definitely more than a sweeper now, she is a servant, the highest position she can hope to reach in this lifetime. She sleeps on the landing and has stopped eating the dog’s food because she gets so many leftovers from the table.

Mamta may miss the familiarity of her old life. She may even resent making her life here in Begumpet unseen and unheard, but sleeping on the floor outside the kitchen door, inhaling the smell of Baby’s food with each breath and feeling Mrs D’Souza’s latch-key dig into her hipbone, Mamta knows she is finally secure. If she is to look at things objectively, she’ll know that her new better life has begun to heal the old bitter one.

And then there is the dispensary. She goes to the dispensary once a month to give Eyebrows her savings to place in the Post Office Saving Plan. While she’s there, she cleans the dispensary’s bathroom for an extra ten rupees.

Each month she tots up her mental list of all she sees: two beatings, seventeen bad beatings (hard enough to cause broken bones), innumerable venereal diseases, the odd case of leprosy, some other confounding ailments which result in sores of all sizes, eight minor burns and four major burns. Major burns are inconvenient. The girls have to be taken to the hospital and Eyebrows is required to go to the patient’s house with a token policeman in tow.

Each time Mamta returns home, she says her prayer to Devi mentioning the sick and diseased by number. Then for good measure she bows before Mrs D’Souza’s statues, repeating her prayer for the patients, this time to the Madonna.

During her third summer in the city, her husband manages to suppress his shame and borrow enough money to come looking for her in Gopalpur. ‘If I catch her, she’s a dead woman. Six sacks of wheat are what I want from your family. And mind that it’s good wheat, not some worm-eaten grain full of chaff.’

‘We will give you news if she turns up,’ says Prem.

‘Let her just set foot in this region, I will break her neck. I don’t want her back, I just want the wheat.’

‘Where are we to get wheat for you? Look at the fields, fallow. The Big House takes all our produce,’ he lies. ‘Can’t give you wheat, can’t even give you chaff.’

‘Then you better start giving me some information. Tell me where she is.’

‘I don’t know where she is, but I will try my best to find out.’ The conversation reaches an impasse, the man has to accept crumbs. ‘But only if you promise to keep it quiet.’

‘Keep it quiet! As if! She has disgraced Gopalpur. I will tell that fellow from Saraswati Stores what your sister has done and then the whole world will come to know. She is a runaway, no one can save her now. Not your bapu, not your amma.’

‘So what did you do to her?’ Prem has assessed the situation shrewdly. His time protecting Daku Manmohan has been well spent.

‘You pet dog! You dare to question me? Your sister is a bitch, a worse she-dog I never saw in my life. I clothed her, fed her, and what did she do to me? How did she repay me?’ For all his blustering, Mamta’s husband has to leave unsatisfied. He came to find her and his money, failing which he would have settled for some wheat, but things went worse than he expected. He is leaving empty-handed. He dare not talk about the stolen money, or about what he did to Mamta. Cut out her flesh and sold it, and she had the audacity to steal
his
money and run. Bitch!

All of Gopalpur eventually hears the news. Seeta Ram is told under the banyan tree. ‘That she-devil, born to disgrace us, born to strip us naked. Your bloody daughter, a runaway. She left her husband. If I catch her, I will kill her. For me she is already dead. Dead. Dead. He should find her and slice the nose off her face. A runaway!’ He assaults Lata Bai with his words.

Lata Bai has no defence. Her words are dry and dusty, a hindrance like the Gopalpur wind. She is furious, but for a different reason. Seeta Ram’s anger is guided by under-the-banyan-tree rules, but Lata Bai’s stems from the disappointment of disgrace. By running away Mamta has made her own rules. She has betrayed not just herself and her mother, but all womankind. Lata Bai has no option but to be equally murderously indignant with her daughter.

‘All this time I thought your sister was in the city with her husband’s consent. She won’t last, with her husband and her bapu out to kill her, she won’t last, and it will be her own fault,’ she tells her remaining children.

‘Amma, have you ever thought that she might have had a good reason to run away?’ Prem can still hear the desperation in his sister’s voice.
You must tell no one. No one.

‘A good reason to run away! Do you think I never had a good reason to run away? To leave all this –’ she sweeps her arms across the horizon, encompassing and rejecting her home at the same time. ‘Don’t you think other women have a
good reason
to run away?’ She is condescending, speaking to him from her position of the stronger sex. What does he know of endurance, or reasons to run away? He is a man, a weak man. ‘But that doesn’t mean we do it. Duty, Prem. Duty!’ Duty is the one thing that’s been dinned into their heads generation upon generation. Earthly duty, karmic duty, divine duty. It is the one (and possibly the only explanation) that justifies many things in their lives, including their place in the divine order – the caste system. People are picked for a duty and their skills are honed over generations for that duty alone; that’s why there are whole communities of mathematicians who can multiply six-digit numbers together in their heads from a very early age; and weavers whose early warp and weft acrobatics led to the unknown invention of the computer in far-off lands across the seas; and sea-children born with permanently bowed legs for their forefathers seldom having walked on land.

‘Duty, she should have done her duty. We are born to perform a duty, no matter how disagreeable. To run away from your duty is to spit on our divine teachings. I deserved more for all I taught her.’ Mamta’s running away is a personal insult to her mother. ‘Your bapu was right, I spoilt her. She should have stayed. She was married before Devi, and now to disgrace us like this . . . you with Daku Manmohan, Mohit . . . and now Mamta deserting her family. What did I do in my past lives to deserve this? You children won’t be satisfied till we are drummed out of this village with shame biting our backs!’ She is surprised at herself, at how much she disapproves. She is in the unfortunate position of being the one who understands but cannot accept.