The Hope Factory (3 page)

“And your good son, amma?” she asked. “He is well, and your daughter-in-law also?” This was a delicate question, since the landlord’s wife had recently quarreled with her husband and was now living at her brother’s house. The courtyard had echoed with raised voices and slammed doors, an unusual occurrence for an otherwise quiet-spoken couple, but with three
children fully grown, they had not planned for her current pregnancy and it seemed to throw both of them into turmoil. “As well as can be expected. Pregnant, after all these years! What a pair of fools they are, at this age.”

Mindful of her audience, Kamala didn’t give full rein to her enjoyment of such an intemperate latter-day romance, though she could not resist saying, “Blame it on the full moon, amma. Even Radha and Krishna were not immune to it.”

The old lady regarded her with a fulminating eye. “Radha and Krishna were not old enough to be grandparents themselves!” She laughed reluctantly. “Well, a baby is always welcome. Such a joy, unlike us old ones, always grumbling …”

THE PEACE OF THE EVENING
settled about the courtyard; the sounds of cicadas and crickets mingled with the voices from the other rooms, pleasantly close, pleasantly hushed. An old kerosene lamp warmed Kamala’s room and filled it with a gentle yellow light that made strange shadows upon the walls.

Her ears caught the creak of the courtyard gate as the vegetable kurma was on its last simmer. The air was redolent with spices and coconut, and her son came nosing through, sniffing like a starving puppy.

“No! No!” she said. “Not a mouthful until you have washed yourself.”

The mug’s worth of water splashed over his face and hands and feet was more a ritual of pleasing his mother than any real attempt to clean himself; Narayan flung himself on the ground next to Kamala as she heaped his plate with hot rice and ladled the vegetable stew over it. At first he was too hungry to do more than eat, mixing the rice and gravy quickly with his right hand and shoveling it into his mouth, his fingers ready with the
next morsel before he had swallowed the last. His eyes, though, held the sparkle of news, and Kamala waited patiently for him to finish. There was a simple contentment in watching him eat that never went away.

The fact was, and she accepted it now, that no matter how much she fed him, his skin would never achieve the soft luxuriance that the children of the wealthy possessed, ample with flesh and free from city dust. The bread and coffee she gave him for breakfast, the three rotis she packed with pickle for his lunch, the rice and vegetables she fed him at dinner could not compete with the quantities of food available in the homes where she worked, their kitchens filled with eggs and meats and packets of chips and milk and cake. They ate so much, those children, that their plumpness frequently distended to fat, their bellies bursting forth to hang above their trousers.

Not so, her son. His body used every scrap of food ingested, much as hers did. His face was lean, his naked body thin and corded with muscle and bone. For all that, he was strong; he could lift his mother and swing her about, laughing while she shrieked. And his mind was ever alert, constantly devising new ways of getting himself into trouble. When he had been younger, she had been charmed by his inventiveness, laughing with pleasure at his antics and comparing him favorably to his peers, especially that stolid Ganesha who lived opposite, whose mud-encrusted mind was free from independent thought and always looked to his mother’s face for answers. But now, that same stolid Ganesha had grown into a boy who worked at his studies in the evenings and gave his mother no trouble.

“Did they give you much homework today, in school?” she asked. Narayan’s eyes met hers, so brimful of mischief that her heart immediately sank. She gazed sternly at him, trying to decipher his actions. And immediately understood. “Bad boy!”
she raged. “How could you! Do not tell me you have missed school again! Bad child! Why do you do this!”

“Don’t shout, Amma,” he said. “It was for a very good reason. See what I have brought for you.” He emptied out his pockets and displayed, before his mother’s astonished gaze, a collection of notes and coins. “All for you! See?”

“But where did you get this? Child, what have you done!”

But Narayan, with his inborn air of a showman, was not to be hurried. He ate the last scraps of his food. He washed out his plate and placed it to dry. And when he judged his mother was ready to explode, he sat down and told her his news.

“It was that Raghavan’s idea,” he said, not quieting Kamala’s anxiety a bit. Raghavan was three years older than her son, and a product of the streets. His father was a drunk, his mother something worse, and he had survived doing god-knows-what. He was tough, resourceful, and in Kamala’s view, not at all to be trusted. Not for Raghavan a life of decent hard work; he had about him an air of raffish dissoluteness and was always talking of ways to make money quickly.

Kamala disliked him and absolutely hated his friendship with her son. He would lead Narayan down wrongful paths, Raghavan, with his heavy-lidded eyes, and his pack of lazy, good-for-nothing friends, who thought that smoking cigarettes like their favorite movie star was sufficient to render them just like him. And if in his movie roles, the star stared with disrespectful, lustful eyes at passing girls, so must they. As he fought and defeated the corrupt lathi-stick-wielding policeman with his bare hands, so too must they mock and harass the local traffic policeman, who did nothing worse than stand tiredly at the street corner occasionally misdirecting the traffic. When his movies suggested that outspoken, defiant damsels needed acid thrown on their faces or were indeed asking to be
raped, they nodded wisely. When he played a poor man who challenged the authority of the rich, he did so to the untrammeled appreciation of Raghavan and his friends, who refused to recognize that the actor lived, in his off-camera life, an existence fully as wealth-encrusted as the ones he opposed onscreen. Kamala could not accept any of it. That irritating young male braggadocio, besides being unpleasantly disrespectful, conveyed, at its base, a distinct lack of common sense. That wretched actor, instead of (in his latest comedy) portraying a young man who defied his parents and survived on his wits by resorting to robbery along with a pretty female companion, why couldn’t he have played a young man who studied hard and listened to his mother and aspired to a job offer at a nice city office? Then all his besotted young male followers would follow suit, and all across the state, mothers would light lamps in thankfulness and young girls (and policemen) would sigh in relief. Or if the movie star should plead innocence and say, why, my work is just entertainment, why should I be asked to behave like a pious temple priest a-blessing the poor, then why couldn’t young idiots like Raghavan, thought Kamala, coming to the nub of the matter, realize that movies were one thing and real life something quite different? Fools.

So now she prepared to listen to Narayan with a certain amount of prejudice in her mind and a dread that the money he held had been acquired through illegal, dubious means.

“Guess where I got this from, Amma,” he said. She was in no mood to play guessing games over his latest deviltry. “Nonsense,” she said. “Tell me immediately, how did you receive this money?”

“From the street corner,” he said.

“What do you mean, from the street corner. What nonsense have you been up to? That policeman is going to catch
you and give you a beating! And perhaps that would be a good thing!”

“No, he will not, Amma. Don’t worry. He knows what I was doing; he is now my friend. Don’t worry so, it’s nothing wrong.”

And, trying her patience no further, he told her: he had spent the day selling magazines and newspapers to vehicles that halted at the traffic lights on the main road. “It works like this,” he said. “The agent for the area gives us a full ten percent for selling magazines, and for some, even fifteen, twenty percent. And, Amma, I am really good at this; even the policeman said so. After just two hours I was selling as much as the senior boys who have been doing this for a long time.”

“And that useless street-rascal Raghavan also did this? He sold magazines?”

“Yes. Actually, he was the one who told us about it. But after a while, he went off to see a movie. I kept at it the entire day!” Narayan counted out the money he had made—it was almost a hundred rupees. “Do you see?” he said, gloating. “If I do this every day, Amma, I can earn as much as you do in a month!”

Kamala had not anticipated something like this. That her son, her little Narayan, should find out this clever way of making money and then proceed to do so very well at it—and not let himself be distracted by those louts who went off to the movie. The money he had made was not insignificant at all, not a sum she could dismiss. If what he said was true, if he could indeed sell these magazines so well—it made her mind spin giddily with the notion of suddenly having twice as much money at her disposal and the great easing of burden that would bring. But hard on the heels of such fantasy came a sobering reflection: if she let Narayan get seduced by such earnings today, then she would seal his fate; he would give up
his hated studies immediately and settle into selling magazines for the rest of his life. There would be no school, no English, no office.

She paused a moment more, fighting the temptation of money. She met the brightness of her son’s eye with a smile and bit back her uncertainty. “It is a wonderful thing you have done,” she said. “The little Lord Krishna, with all his mischief and cleverness, could not have done better!”

“Tomorrow, I am going to go extra early,” he said, “and make still more.”

“You may do so,” she said, “and again the day after, for it is the weekend. But on Monday, you will have to go back to school.”

“But, Mother …” he said, aghast at her foolishness.

“No, Narayan,” she said. “You cannot be selling things on the roadside your whole life. Do you not want to learn to speak English nicely and then get a job where you will make much more money?”

“I can speak English,” he said indignantly, and demonstrated by saying in that language:
“I speaking English. I speaking English very good.”

She laughed. “See?” he said, encouraged. “I do not have to go to that stupid school to learn that. I can speak Hindi and Tamil too; I have even learned a few words of Telugu.” This was true; her son had, over the course of his life, magically absorbed these languages right through the pores of his skin from the very air in the city, which throbbed and thrummed with the spoken words of people from all over the world.

But she would not let his linguistic facility change her mind: Narayan must complete his schooling.

THE COMPOUND WALL OF HIS HOUSE
stood tall, white, unadorned, and forbidding. When they had finally been able to afford the land, Anand had imagined a small, neat house with a large garden, his mind fondly resting on the old-fashioned Lakshmipuram bungalows in Mysore with their monkey-top gables and sloping roofs, but his wife had thrown her hands up in horror, oh, dear lord, no, let’s have a modern aesthetic for goodness’ sake, and since he knew nothing of such matters, he acquiesced and found himself with a sharp-angled house that seemed far too large for their needs. Far too large, certainly, for his: an overweight, cantilevered structure coyly trying to squeeze itself into a space several sizes too small, bursting at its plotular seams, almost spilling over onto the neighbors, leaving room for a small patch of grass in front and little else, sucking up air and space and whatever financial resources he could muster. Each month, Anand diligently paid off a segment of the bank loan that had funded the land and the construction; it
would be another five years, he estimated, before the house was theirs. Longer, perhaps, for him to feel entirely at home in it.

All seemed quiet when he entered, the house settled in for the night, but this impression was deceptive. His wife erupted out of the bedroom.

“You’re coming, no?” Vidya said. “Don’t ditch, now!” Her long hair spilled in sheaths down the front of her blouse, its manicured straightness a sign that she had spent the afternoon in the beauty parlor. “Don’t tell me ‘tomorrow is a very important day so you can’t come.’ ”

Anand took refuge in dignity. “I do have an important day tomorrow,” he said, “but I’m coming. Of course I’m not ditching.”

“Then come quickly,” she said. “I’ve been ready for half an hour already.”

Anand could tell, by the way she was inserting large golden hoops into her ears as she walked downstairs, that this was not strictly true. “I won’t be long,” he said. “The children are upstairs?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Valmika has some studying to do. Ey, she got an A on her bio test. Damn good, no? … And, listen, I just settled Pingu down to sleep, so don’t go disturbing him now.”

“I won’t,” he said, running up the stairs.

He went straight to his son’s bedroom. Vyasa was tucked into bed; Valmika, fourteen years old and seven years older than her brother, was seated on a rocking chair by his side, her toe balanced on the edge of the bed, swaying gently to and fro as she read aloud from a storybook. Anand paused a moment in the doorway watching their absorption in the story before they noticed him with matching smiles.

He hugged his daughter. “An A in bio, well done, yaar!”

“Appa!” said his son, impatiently claiming his attention. “I got hurt today. Mama shouted at me, and Akka laughed.”

Anand gave in to temptation. He flopped onto the bed next to Vyasa and arranged his arm about him. “How did you get hurt?” he asked. “And why did Mama shout?”

“I fell down in cricket, and I failed in maths so Mama shouted.”

“Why, what happened?”

“I was running to catch the ball and tripped. Then we had maths. My foot was hurting, and that’s why I forgot to study for the test, Appa.”

“And I laughed,” said his sister, poking at him with her big toe, “because you’re a goose…. You should have studied for it the previous day, nut-mutt.”

Anand quieted his son’s indignation and kissed him good night, fighting the urge to surrender himself to the fatigue of the day, to be lulled into a gentle doze by the ebb and flow of his daughter’s voice as she resumed her storytelling. His children: a powerful joy, so simply achieved—a pleasant, straightforward act, and, nine months later, like magic, an exquisite happiness. He had expected to feel delight at the birth of his first child—for indeed, like everyone else, he had been weaned on ancient Indian tales of parental love on an epic scale: fathers who died when separated from their sons; mothers commanding respect from the strongest of men; daughters swept away by matrimony, carrying with them their fathers’ broken hearts; parents cursing those who harm their children through endless birth cycles—but he had yet been startled by the intensity of emotion that swept through him when his daughter was first placed in his arms. And, once again, two miscarriages and seven years later, at the birth of his son. And startled still further when such intensity didn’t fade with time; when, instead, it continued
to manifest itself at odd moments, when he unexpectedly caught a glimpse of his children or heard their voices on the stairs and felt his heart tighten; when he listened to their accomplishments at school with a pleasureful, bashful pride; when he disciplined them for misbehavior and felt himself softening with tenderness even as he lectured them with stern voice.