The Sari Shop (6 page)

‘Go away, go away. Go and study. Try to become something in life, unless you want to continue to measure out besan, pack up sugar and haggle with housewives for the rest of your life. And deal with suspicious customers who think you cheat them while weighing things out, who want to check your weighing scales for themselves.’

Ramchand didn’t understand much of this. He would just smile adoringly at his father, whom he considered to be the best man in the world, and sooner or later his father would take him in his lap and feed him salted nuts, saying, ‘I am going to send you to an English-medium school, okay? You will work hard there, won’t you?’ The five-year-old Ramchand would nod obligingly, with no idea at all of what an English-medium school was.

Ramchand also loved to accompany his mother to the Shivalaya temple every Monday morning, carrying sweet-smelling marigold flowers in his upturned palms to offer at the temple. Before she got married, Ramchand’s mother had fasted rigidly on Mondays to appease Shiva, so that she would get a good husband. Now she had a husband who was a good, honest man, who made her happy, who never even raised his voice while speaking to her, let alone hit her like many husbands did. Having found such a husband, or having been granted such a husband by Lord Shiva, she continued with her fasting, afraid of annoying Shiva if she stopped abruptly.

Ramchand looked forward to the temple excursions with great pleasure. He also thought that his mother was the nicest woman in the whole world. With her, however, he could dare to misbehave more than he could with his father. She was
quick to lose her temper, but was also quick to regain it. Then she’d pick up her son, nuzzle his neck, hug him and kiss him, and call him a precious star. Ramchand often took advantage of his precious-star status.

At the temple, he would get excited the moment he was surrounded by the jostling, chanting crowds, with the brass bells ringing loudly and the smell of incense, marigold and sandalwood in the air. It would all go to his head and then he’d start to run around in energetic circles, pushing everyone who came in the way. His mother would first snap a warning at him. Her nerves would already be frayed because of hunger and she couldn’t handle Ramchand in such a crowd on an empty stomach. But he usually took no notice of her warning, which was strange, because on most days he was well behaved. It was just the Monday excitement at the temple that made him hyperactive. After a couple of warnings, she’d feel like crying. Why did he go mad in the temple every Monday morning? Then she would give him a couple of tight slaps and he would subside.

And after being slapped, he would solemnly promise each time not to misbehave next Monday. And he always did misbehave. And got slapped again. It had almost become a matter of routine for both of them.

Except for these Monday mornings, the small family lived peacefully and was fairly happy. However, soon after Ramchand turned six and started going to an English-medium school for which his father had been saving up, the gunnysack and marigold smells abruptly went away. Ramchand’s parents were killed in a bus accident while going to Haridwar on a pilgrimage. Their bus was overloaded with pious people, and it just toppled over. Ramchand had been left with his grandmother in the family village near Amritsar. The six-year-old Ramchand’s first feeling was that of great astonishment at
the fact that a mere toppling over of things could take all smells away for ever.

Horror followed later.

Everyone expected the child to cry and ask for his mother at night, to ask where his father was, or why he wasn’t living in his own home. His grandmother had anxiously framed suitable answers, ready to be used when he asked her any of these questions. But he never did. He became very quiet and resisted all physical contact with the grown-ups around him. He did cry occasionally, but not like a child. His eyes would grow cloudy and tears would trickle slowly down his cheeks. If anyone tried to pick him up or wipe away his tears, he would howl in anger and kick them with his small feet.

At last, Ramchand was sent back to Amritsar with a distant uncle’s family so that he could go to school. He had never met this uncle before. Uncle worked as a craftsman in a jeweller’s shop. He lived with his family in a one-roomed house too, though they had many more things than Ramchand’s parents had ever possessed. In the room there was a dressing table with some cosmetics on it. There was a wooden cabinet for plates and glasses and they had a steel almirah in which there were hangers for clothes. Ramchand had never seen hangers before. His parents had kept all their clothes folded in a trunk. Everything seemed alien. Uncle’s wife was fat and irritable, and often stayed in bed all day with a chunni tied tightly around her head, complaining of a headache. She had two children of her own, both boys, younger than Ramchand. When she was in bed with a headache, her wrath descended on anyone who dared to make a noise and disturb her. Often, when one of the children made a slight noise, she would rush and slap all the three children hard, once on each cheek and then go back to her bed, pulling a sheet over herself. Her own children were used to it, and dodged and giggled
when she tried to hit them, incensing her even further, but Ramchand had never been slapped before, except on Monday mornings, and he knew he had asked for those slaps. His aunt’s random slaps bewildered him completely. He sorely missed his good-humoured father and his temperamental, but loving mother. At nights, he dreamt of the red sari with yellow flowers on it that was doubled up and used to curtain off their ‘bathroom’ at home.

Ramchand was put into a new school, along with Uncle’s children. New home, new school, new smells. No more marigold-gunnysack smells for Ramchand. Ramchand started growing up.

Every summer Uncle dutifully took his family for a vacation to his wife’s parents’ house in Old Delhi. At this time, who was family and who was not, was made very clear to Ramchand. He would be sent to spend his holidays with his grandmother in the village. Year after year, he spent long summer afternoons alone by the river, and it was here that Ramchand first came face to face with solitude. In the hot, sleepy afternoons under the trees, where only the gentlest sunlight filtered through, with the river lapping coolly, all thoughts became a rustly, swishy, ripply, secret blue-green. And Ramchand came to know the other being in himself, the secret blue-green shadowy Ramchand, who either thought things that did not make sense, or who sometimes thought things that came so dangerously close to making sense that he backed off from them, the way one does from a slavering, mad dog.

The actual Ramchand-of-the-world gossiped, laughed, attended Mundan ceremonies, and bought new, shiny polyester shirts on Diwali with great pleasure.

But the knowledge that the blue-green Ramchand waited inside him changed the Ramchand-of-the-world gradually. He grew quieter, withdrawn. Waiting. In the same way as a man
who has a tumour in his brain, or a hole in his heart waits.

When Ramchand was fifteen, Uncle decided that a boy like him did not need any more education. It was more important that he should be settled in some trade. Ramchand was taken out of school and sent to Mahajan, whom Uncle knew through a mutual friend. Even though Ramchand intensely hated his school, he was tearful throughout the last day. When the bell rang and the children left noisily, chattering and laughing and swinging their water bottles, it was with a heavy heart and dragging feet that Ramchand walked out slowly. He left the life he had known as a schoolboy, thinking uncomfortably of a vague memory he had of his father measuring out sugar into 200-gram packets and telling his mother that he wanted Ramchand to study in an English-medium school. He also remembered the times when his father would take him on his lap and make him promise he’d ‘become someone and not remain a shopkeeper like your father’.

With his eighth standard certificate lying at home in his trunk in a green polythene bag, Ramchand entered the shop.

Four years later, his uncle had died of a sudden heart attack. He had been at work, making a necklace in gold and pearls. He had just keeled over and died. Twenty days later, when it was long past the official mourning and all the guests had left, Ramchand’s red-eyed aunt, looking unfamiliar in a white sari without her bindi and bangles, like a tree that had shed its leaves, had politely asked him to leave and find his own way in the world, so as not to add to her already increased responsibilities. She had sent him off with all his belongings in a tin trunk and her blessings. It was then that Ramchand had, with Mahajan’s recommendation, managed to rent the small room with the two windows facing each other, the peeling paint on the faded walls, and a strange, musty smell.

Years later Ramchand had realized many things. He realized that his father had once had a shop. A very small one, true,
but a shop nevertheless. And by rights, that shop should have been Ramchand’s. Instead, it now belonged to Uncle’s sons. He also realized that the leaf-shaped gold nose-pin that his aunt wore had once adorned his own mother’s nose. He realized that after his grandmother’s death, her house in the village had been sold off by his uncle, not only depriving Ramchand of any share in the house and an assured home in the family village, but also depriving him of any more serene afternoons by the river.

Ramchand also understood now, years later, why he had never been introduced to Uncle when his parents had been alive, and why Uncle had never visited them though they lived in the same town. But by now, perhaps, it was too late. Or maybe Ramchand just couldn’t be bothered to fight for what was his any more.

*

Clouds hung over the city and blocked out the sunshine. A cold wind blew gently and people longed for the sun. By afternoon, it had begun to drizzle. Winter in Amritsar this year was already freezing cold, the drizzle made people shiver and retreat further into their mufflers, shawls and woollen socks. People moved around in the cold city with stiff joints, chapped lips and icy palms. They caught colds, noses became red, eyes watered. Dogs searched for warm, dry corners with their miserable tails tucked in between their legs. The wind became stronger and chillier, blowing the light drizzle this way and that, so that the rain danced about crazily in the air, wantonly lashing people’s faces and bodies and buildings sideways, instead of falling straight on the ground as decent rain should.

Inside the shop, everyone shivered and felt the glumness of the grey winter day. Everyone except Ramchand. He never found the rain depressing; he just could not. No matter what
the discomfort, it was never the cold, the dampness, the mud and the puddles that he noticed. Rain had filled him with exhilaration even when he was a child. It did so now too. Rain always sustained him, even if it was the gloomy drizzle of a winter afternoon.

Hari groaned and grumbled till everyone around him began to feel gloomy. ‘This inhuman cold is giving me a body ache,’ he said. ‘And it has made every joint in my body so stiff that I just feel like an old man. Can’t move at all.’

Gokul snapped at him, ‘Hari, boy, all these aches and stiffness of joints that you have been complaining of since morning, they are not at all because of the cold. They are a result of laziness, of idleness, of not moving your joints at all till you are forced to do so. If you
had
moved your joints, the new batch of satin would have been put away neatly by now.’

‘What, Gokul Bhaiya?’ Hari said, stretching lazily. ‘Why is everyone always after my life? I think for the past one year I have been working myself to the bone.’

Gokul snapped again, ‘There is a lot of work to be finished, Hari. So just forget your joints and don’t tell me about your aches and pains, okay? Just sort out the satin immediately.’

Hari got to his feet with a martyred air, sighing wearily.

Gokul continued to frown.

Chander remained sunk in a depressed silence, speaking only when he was asked something. Shyam sat away from the others, sunk deep in thought.

Rajesh was talking to Mahajan in a corner. From the black looks they were giving each other, they were evidently disagreeing about something for a change.

Ramchand was the only one who was not in a bad temper.

He looked dreamily out of the window at the misted world outside, where all shapes and images were beautifully distorted by the raindrops floating in the air. He was sorting out some new stock and he hummed lightly to himself.

Aa chal ke tujhe main le ke chaloon

Ek aise gagan ke taley

Jahan gham bhi na ho

Aansoo bhi na ho

Bas pyaar hi pyaar pale

Ek aise gagan ke taley…

A few raindrops clung to the outside of the glass window. They gripped the glass, trembling a little, shining like fragile pearls. Ramchand smiled at them, his fingers busy at folding and unfolding and checking the price tags. He continued to hum the same song over and over again. He was happy.

And of course, he thought bitterly, you couldn’t even sing in peace in this shop. For he saw Bhimsen Seth come waddling up to Mahajan. These days he rarely came right up. His weight was making it increasingly difficult for him to climb the flimsy stairs.

Everyone snapped to attention at once. Chander looked up, Ramchand stopped humming, though he continued to hum in his mind. Hari began to sort out the different shades of pink satin and Gokul took the frown off his face and tried to look pleasant but busy.

Bhimsen was panting when he said, ‘Mahajan! There is some important news. Ravinder Kapoor’s daughter is getting married.’

A gleam appeared in Mahajan’s eyes.

‘When?’ he asked, rubbing his hands together. Ramchand cracked a knuckle absently, watching the two men talk.

Mahajan turned to him and gave him a glare.

Ramchand stopped cracking his knuckles, went red and immediately got back to his work.

Mahajan turned again to Bhimsen Seth, his smile back in place.

‘In January,’ replied Bhimsen. ‘The exact date will be fixed in a couple of days.’

Mahajan nodded, pursing up his lips in concentration. Bhimsen said, ‘They are naturally not coming to the shop. They are so big. So send them stock at home, Mahajan, the best stock you can.’