The Sari Shop (13 page)

Ramchand shivered. The winter air was creeping into his room. He shut the window and sat down. His room felt horribly bare.

One day, Chander didn’t turn up for work. Mahajan grumbled a little but then left it at that. Chander didn’t turn up for the next two days either, nor did he send any message. By the third day, Mahajan was fretting and fuming. He snapped at everybody all morning, and told Hari that an uneducated monkey would do better work than him. Hari later said that one of these days they must ask Mahajan to introduce them to an
educated
monkey, perhaps one with an MA degree. Ramchand got nervous because Hari said this very loudly.

‘Be quiet, Hari. You’ll just drive him to lose his temper. The way you are grinning! I am sure Mahajan can see all your teeth gleaming from far away.’

Hari laughed and went about his work, singing
Aati kya Khandaala
to himself.

Ramchand was cautious all morning and tried not to catch Mahajan’s eye. He crept about quietly, doing his work as noiselessly and inconspicuously as possible. But at the end of the morning Mahajan suddenly called him in his booming voice.

‘Raaamchand!’

Ramchand almost jumped out of his skin.

He went to Mahajan, twisting his hands together nervously.

‘Yes, Bauji?’ he asked Mahajan in his politest voice.

‘I’ll give you Chander’s address, and I’ll give you the directions,’ Mahajan almost barked at him. ‘You go right now and see what that loafer is doing. Ask him if this is his father’s shop, where he can come and go as he pleases. Tell him I have asked to see him.’

Ramchand’s taut body sagged with relief. He had been sure Mahajan had discovered that he had not cleaned the shelf he had been told to two days before. At the same time, he felt a little sorry for the absent Chander.

Mahajan gave Ramchand directions. Ramchand listened attentively. ‘Now repeat the directions to me,’ Mahajan said, his voice still angry. ‘I want to make sure you have understood all I have said to you. I don’t want you to get lost. Then I’ll have to send another person to look for you. Soon all of you will be wandering on the streets. Sometimes I wonder whether I am the manager of a sari shop or a lunatic asylum.’

Ramchand repeated the directions a little nervously. One never knew what little word might inflame Mahajan further when he was in one of his unreasonable moods. Mahajan listened and nodded and then Ramchand set off thankfully, not believing his luck. Years of being jailed in the shop, and then suddenly he was having one outing after another. First the Kapoor House, now this. This wouldn’t be thrilling, of course, but it was something.

*

Chander’s house was quite far from the shop, in the poorer interior of the city. Ramchand walked steadily for half an hour. The further he went into the interior, the more crowded and dirtier the surroundings became.

He turned into a narrow lane at the corner of which a small Hanuman temple stood, hoping this was the temple Mahajan had meant when he had given him directions. Mahajan would be furious if he went back and told him that he had got lost and hadn’t been able to find Chander’s place. Ramchand turned anyway, and passed the small temple. He could hear a pundit chanting inside and bells ringing furiously. The street was very narrow, a mere crack, as if the old buildings had just
split open a little to let people pass. At present, it was full of people trying to squeeze their way past each other. Ramchand found himself edging through this crowd.

A woman with vegetable bags in her hands and a shining excited face rushed past him, knocking him aside with her elbow. Ramchand suddenly stumbled, and instinctively put out his hand to balance himself. His hand accidentally brushed against the breast of a woman who was hurrying by in the street. The woman, dressed in a cheap, bottle-green salwaar kameez and a black nylon chunni, stopped. She turned to him in fury, ‘You bastard, mother fucker, can’t you see where you are going?’ She almost spat the words at him. Ramchand was so shocked that he could neither move nor speak. He just stood there staring at her dumbly. He had been about to apologize. He tried to speak but no words came out. There was something savage about her hardened face. It was deeply lined, though she could not have been more than thirty, even less perhaps. Her body seemed taut with rage. Ramchand continued to stare at her, his mouth slightly open.

Their eyes locked.

She glared at him and trembled with fury, till other people moved on and she was swept away in the crowd. Ramchand stared at her back till she disappeared. Then he walked on. His heart thudded with a vague fear and he felt jittery. He wandered around in the streets for a while, completely disoriented and then tried to get a hold on himself. He stopped at a tea stall. If he had been sent on an errand, he might as well make the most of it, he thought. A hot cup would calm him down. He had one and then had some fresh pakoras that the tea stall owner was frying. They were hot and fragrant and Ramchand felt drowsy as he sat munching them and warming himself in the sun. Then he had another cup of tea.

After half an hour he got to his feet feeling much better, and went on his way, asking people for directions. In the end
he found himself again in the street with the Hanuman temple on the corner. He walked on till he was standing in front of Chander’s house and was shocked. It was more a hovel than a house. It was a ramshackle structure that looked like it could collapse at any moment. Shop assistants were poor, but they were not as poor as this. Besides, Chander didn’t even have any children to support.

And though Ramchand had considered the street he lived in to be the dirtiest he had ever seen, at least the dirty water flowed easily in its open drains. Here, going by the stench, the drains seemed to be blocked, filled with a slimy black sludge.

Ramchand knocked on the door and stood waiting, hoping this was the right house. The door looked ready to fall to pieces. He knocked again and heard raised voices within. He was surprised. He had never heard Chander raise his voice before. He was one of the quietest and gentlest men Ramchand had ever known. Then the door flew open and Chander stood there, looking furious. He calmed down when he saw Ramchand.

‘What is it?’ Chander asked him, in a slightly apologetic voice.

Ramchand was about to speak when his eyes took in the room behind Chander. Inside, a frail woman lay huddled in a heap in a corner. Red hand imprints stood out clearly on her face. Her hair was dishevelled; her green salwaar kameez was in disarray; her black chunni lay on the floor. Tears ran down her face. A corner of her mouth was bleeding a little. He recognized her as the foul-mouthed woman in the street, the one who had yelled at him. But she looked different now, weaker and broken. The lines on her face seemed even deeper, her eyes more hollow than before. She didn’t move or speak. Ramchand averted his eyes.

‘They are asking at the shop when will you come?’ he said timidly. Chander suddenly seemed like a stranger.

‘I’ll come. I’ll come tomorrow. I am very unwell. Explain to Mahajan. I will definitely come tomorrow,’ Chander mumbled. His breath smelled strongly of alcohol and his eyes were bloodshot.

‘Okay,’ Ramchand said awkwardly. He didn’t look at the woman again, even though he was deeply conscious of her, conscious of her as if she was the only living creature in the universe.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow then,’ he said to Chander, turned and walked away. The woman remained huddled in the corner, along with a battered tin trunk.

All that day, Ramchand remained restless.

*

In the evening he slipped off alone, not wanting to talk to anyone on his way back. Even though it was early for dinner, Ramchand stopped to have a bite to eat at Lakhan’s before he went back to his room. Lakhan was just stoking the tandoor when he got there.

‘Sit down, Ramchand, this will take some time.’

Ramchand sat down. There was only one other man sipping tea in another corner of the room.

The tandoor got going at last, and the embers cast a red glow over Lakhan’s tired looking face. Ramchand usually avoided conversation with him, afraid that he would start talking of his dead sons. But today he was still thinking of Chander’s wife. He wanted to find out if she was all right. Even after he had walked away so callously. Well, what could he have done? She was Chander’s wife, after all. He couldn’t interfere in Chander’s domestic matters. But he still longed to ask someone if she was okay and whether she had stopped crying. So he looked at Lakhan’s face, on which pain had left permanent lines, and called out to him, ‘How are you?’

Lakhan looked up. He said in a quiet voice, ‘It is my son’s birthday today. The elder one’s.’

‘Oh,’ Ramchand said and that was all.

He had a cup of tea and ate two rotis with sabzi. He had been having too much tea, he knew that. He didn’t smoke or drink. Tea was his only addiction, an answer to everything, to every headache, every thought, every confusion, every scolding from Mahajan. He knew he shouldn’t have so much tea. It gave him acidity sometimes.

Lakhan went around the dhaba, attending to things, talking to his helpers, moving mechanically, his eyes opaque like a blind man’s. When he came close to where Ramchand was sitting, Ramchand screwed up the courage to ask, ‘Is your wife all right?’

At these words, Lakhan’s mask-like face crumpled up in an instant.

‘No, she isn’t. It has been over fifteen years, but she refuses to forget. I come here and make more daal, stir vegetables till I forget, garnish them with coriander, make mint chutney, cook much more kheer than necessary, trying hard to forget, but she… she just sits inside weeping, kissing their photographs, remembering each and every incident in their lives. She talks about the time when the elder one took his first step. We were so surprised. We took him to the Golden Temple that evening, to get the True One’s blessings. And the time the younger one had some rasmalai. A kid took him to a God-knows-which sweetshop and he had rasmalai there. The same night, he had constant vomiting and diarrhoea. The poor kid couldn’t even keep a sip of water down in his stomach. His mother and I rushed him to the hospital. We were almost dead with anxiety. Even after he recovered, we were so careful for such a long time. One of us would get up at dawn to boil water, so that it would be cool enough for him to drink when he woke up. She keeps remembering all these things. So many
memories. She doesn’t forget and she doesn’t let me forget. You know how it happened?’

Ramchand’s stomach tightened. He did not want to know. But it was too late to withdraw now. Lakhan continued in the same low, monotonous voice. ‘If we had known that morning that the day would have such a terrible end, we would have at least prayed to Waheguru. We would have prayed for Guru Nanak’s blessings. But then, what would have been the point? It was in God’s own house that He let it happen to our children. Or maybe He was helpless too. Sometimes we get angry with Him, sometimes we even stop believing in Him, but then we get scared. What if the souls of our children are in His care, and our disbelief stops them from being one with the Great One.’

By now Lakhan Singh was completely wrapped up in the past. He continued, ‘That day they hadn’t gone to the Golden Temple to pray, though. It was just that it was a very hot day, and they hated being cooped up here. We were all getting irritable. I snapped at the elder one because he was singing loudly, that too a song I especially disliked. I thought it vulgar. The hotter he felt, the louder he sang, just to irritate me. The younger one refused to listen to his mother. And in fact,’ here a half-smile appeared on Lakhan Singh’s face as he remembered the last day of family squabbles, ‘my wife and I also quarrelled. The boys had taken their baths, and then what the younger one did was, he took out a new navy-blue turban that I had got for him and started wrapping it around his head. He was only sixteen and turbans were still new to him. I told him, “It is so hot and the turban is so new and starched. Why don’t you save it for a special occasion? It will just get ruined with your perspiration.” He turned to me and said, “Because I feel like wearing it. I feel like looking good.” I just laughed, but his mother said God should have given her daughters instead. At least they would have been more considerate of a
mother’s feelings, that too on a hot June day. I had to keep going out to the dhaba to see to customers. Well, they kept teasing their mother, making demands for sherbet, asking her why she had to marry me, why hadn’t she married a rich man so that they needn’t have worried about turbans being old or new. She’d giggle at one thing they said, get irritated with the next, and finally she was ready to pull out her hair, they were bothering her so much, so she said to them, “Since both of you are all dressed up, why don’t you go out somewhere so that I can have peace at least for an hour or two.” They immediately said they would go to Company Bagh. Their mother said, “No, it is too far away.” So the elder one said, “We’ll go to Darbaar Sahib then.” My wife got really angry then. “So, to you there is no difference between the Golden Temple and Company Bagh, hunh? One is the holiest shrine to us Sikhs, and the other is a public garden, but does it make any difference to these two animals? Oh, no. All you want to do is loaf. Go now.” So both of them went to the Golden Temple.’

Here, Lakhan Singh paused. Ramchand could feel the older man’s grief physically, but he still did not say anything. He waited for Lakhan to go on. He knew the rest of the story though – the Sikh fundamentalists holed up in the Golden Temple… Indira Gandhi’s orders… the Indian army’s siege on the temple… they had brought boots in, Sikhs had never recovered from this fact – Sikhs who washed their feet before entering the holiest of their temples… the battle between the fundamentalists and the army… the countless heart-breaking stories of how innocent people, visitors to the temple, ‘devotees’, the newspapers had called them, had also been trapped inside… Sikhs had just been killed outright, lined up and shot at… Eyewitnesses who had escaped somehow reported this, but the army did not admit it officially… there were reports later of heaps of bodies being carted away in army trucks…