Jasoda

  ‘How many days do you need?’

  ‘Give me fifteen.’

  ‘You’ve been here a fortnight. Seven more days is all you will get.’

  She nodded her consent and decided to look around for a more congenial place.

  There was no space for the children to walk or play and Jasoda was terrified that they would get run over by a bus or taxi. There had been only one car in Kantagiri in the last decade, that of His Highness. But here the cars, buses and taxis were all stuck together back to front. For Jasoda, Mumbai would always be a blur. Hours after midnight there was still no quiet, no winding down.

  She left the three children in the care of their grandmother and walked around every day trying to find a place that would do as a temporary residence and might be safer for the children to wander around. It would also have to be more lucrative. Late one morning she entered a small garden. Somewhere a woman was screaming her head off. Jasoda couldn’t take her eyes off the body of water on the other side of the garden. ‘What’s that?’ she asked the gardener who was watering the plants.

  ‘Is that supposed to be funny?’ he asked her. ‘Have you never seen the sea?’

  ‘Is that the name of your river?’

  ‘I just said it was the sea. The Arabian Sea. It’s saltwater.’

  ‘How far does it reach?’

  ‘It doesn’t end. It goes around the earth.’

  She stood there watching the waves. Should she settle down here with the children and their grandmother? The woman was still shrieking. Jasoda decided to explore the area a bit more. She went on to the rocks outside the garden. They were littered with excrement but the tide was already sweeping it into the waters. She wanted to climb on to the embankment and wet her feet but the rocks looked sharp and dangerous. Best to explore the place some other time. She was leaving the garden when she saw a group of women standing outside a shed at the other end where the woman was crying. Death was a common occurrence for Jasoda. No point joining that circle of mourners.

  She was wrong. No dead person there. A young woman was thrashing about helplessly in the little tin shed while the other women stood by helplessly. The pregnant woman must have been in her late teens. Her hands were tight fisticuffs. She was sweating profusely. The blood had drained from her face and she looked exhausted.

  ‘How long have the delivery pains been going on?’ Jasoda asked nobody in particular.

  ‘A day. Maybe more.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Ratna.’

  ‘Where’s her husband?’

  ‘He’s working as a construction labourer.’

  ‘And her family?’

  ‘In the village.’

  Jasoda went back into the garden, picked up the watering hose, washed her hands and came back. ‘Will someone give me a bit of oil, please? I need to find out how far the baby’s come.’

  ‘Who are you?’ someone asked.

  ‘I’m a midwife.’

  An old woman hurried off and came back with a bottle of cooking oil. Jasoda poured the oil generously on her right hand, spread her odhani over the girl and whispered in her ear, ‘Ssssssshhhhh. This is going to hurt a bit, Ratna.’ She slipped her hand inside the would-be mother’s skirt. ‘Breathe normally and relax. It will take just a minute.’ The woman was in no shape to answer. Jasoda’s hand was in now and groping around. It was as she had suspected. The baby’s foot was caught on the side of the vagina but that could be easily taken care of. The problem was the young woman herself. She was terrified. A few calming words and a healing touch and the baby would be out.

  ‘You’ve killed her,’ one of the women said loudly. ‘She’s stopped breathing.’

  ‘No,’ Jasoda said softly. ‘She’s fainted out of fear, nothing else.’

  It took five minutes to move the foot out of the way.

  ‘Anybody has a knife? Any knife?’

  ‘The fruit vendor across has one.’

  One of the women got it.

  ‘Fire anywhere? Hold the blade on fire and come back as soon as it turns red.’

  Jasoda waved the knife in the air for a minute to cool it and then cut the cord. She held the child’s head in the palm of her left hand and slapped it hard on its bottom. It threw up a bit of placenta and inhaled sharply.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ she told the mother and waited for instructions. When none came, she asked, ‘You want to keep it?’

  ‘Yes,’ the mother whispered. ‘Otherwise why did I go through so much pain?’

  It was clear to Jasoda that she was in another country now. ‘It’s time for me to take your leave.’

  ‘Don’t go.’ The young mother held her hand tightly.

  Jasoda washed the baby and handed it over to the mother. ‘Do you and your husband stay here?’

  ‘Yes,’ the young mother told her. ‘What shall I call the child?’

  ‘How can I tell you? Your husband and you must decide.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll call our daughter by the name of some siren from the films. He likes those kinds of women and holds it against his mother that she chose me. Now that my breasts are fuller, I’m sure he’ll get me pregnant round the year.’

  ‘My husband chose the names for all my sons.’

  ‘And you named the daughters?’

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  ‘Now you have one. What shall I call her?’

  ‘We’ll call her Heera. If Ratna is a jewel, your daughter will be a diamond.’

  Jasoda returned to the garden that evening with her family and the few vessels and clothes they had carried with them. She had come to know a few of the women because of the delivery and the young mother would be her guide. But what proved to be the decisive factor was the water she had seen flowing from the hose in the garden. At least that would not be a problem as it was in Kantagiri. And then there was that big lake they called ‘dariya’ at the back of the park that she wanted her children to see. It was the same colour as the sky. If she was to believe the gardener, it had no beginning and no end.

  Jasoda would never get used to the traffic. She worried that a truck would climb the pavement and run over her brood. Before she went to bed she made sure that her family lay as if conjoined. The youngest, Sameer, tended to sleepwalk and that was a constant worry. Every now and then she woke up at night to check whether he and her other two children and their grandmother were still with her.

  The little money she had collected before leaving Kantagiri was nearly over. She had tried to find a job as a servant in the tall buildings across the road but the security guards in most of them wouldn’t let her enter the premises. Even when no one stopped her and she knocked on a door (it took her time to discover something called a bell which rang inside), the lady of the house invariably asked her for a reference or proof of previous employment. It was clear this was not going to work. She would have to try something else and very quickly at that.

  There were always beggars at the traffic lights near the church, many of them children, but Jasoda was loath to send Himmat and Pawan there. The drivers of buses, trucks, cars and taxis seemed to have only one thought in their heads, to run over as many people as possible. But she changed her mind when all she had left was ten rupees. There was one other factor: despite strict instructions not to leave the pavement, the children, including little Sameer, played hide-and-seek amongst the stalled cars, wove in and out of the traffic, ignoring the speeding motorbikes burning rubber for an appointment with Yama.

  That afternoon she posted the children at the traffic lights after instructing them to tag along with Ratna Maasi and always stay within sight of her. By the first evening, Pawan had brought home eleven rupees and Sameer four but Himmat had nothing. Ratna told Jasoda that Pawan was a regular charmer. He had to merely place a finger shyly under his chin and switch on a double-dimpled smile for the rear window of a car to be rolled down and the woman in the back seat to dip into her wallet and part with a rupee coin or even a fiver once in a while
.

  Jasoda didn’t quite know where he had picked up the new language that she had heard him speak to the people in the cars. ‘Pleaje, maddam, give phive ruppije.’ He followed it up with a tuneless song. ‘No fadder, no mudder. No brudder, no shister. Nutting to eet. Give phive ruppije, pleaje,’ he sang. Sameer was the unpredictable one. He was still competing for attention. Ratna told strange stories about him. A big plush car with a siren stopped at the red lights and a woman in a brocade sari that must have cost a hundred thousand or more pulled the window down and handed Sameer a rupee. He examined the coin and said, ‘Merkedes car, zari sari and you give me one rupee? You keep it. Bad days coming your way.’ The woman began to howl. ‘Drive, drive,’ she yelled at her driver. ‘That filthy boy has cast an evil eye on us.’

  Jasoda worried that Himmat was far too mature for his age. She knew he was unhappy. He wanted to go back to school and study or at least lay his hands on a book and read it. She had held his face tightly between her palms. ‘I’m sorry I can’t afford to send you to school. You are the man of the family now and the only one I can depend on. So, go out and beg and return with more money than Pawan and Sameer combined.’

  It was no use. Himmat refused to beg. He would stand at the traffic lights but not utter a word. He was neither hostile nor friendly. He stared at the passengers without blinking and made them feel uneasy till one of them extended his hand and proffered a coin. Ratna had seen a man offer him a tenner but Himmat had refused to touch it. Sometimes a passenger might be peeling the wrapping of a chocolate or biting into an apple and impulsively hand it over to him but he would turn his head away.

  Jasoda thrashed him till her mother-in-law intervened and hid the boy behind her. ‘You’re more than willing to eat from the money your brothers earn but you are too proud to do a bit of work yourself. From tonight you can go hungry till you change your mind.’

  For two days, the boy refused to eat. She could see him wilting and stealing a glance as the rest of the family ate. On the third evening, he handed her five rupees.

  ‘So, you’ve come around finally.’ He was silent. His hand shook and he seemed ready to collapse. Obstinate as a mule, that’s what he was. She was relieved that he had caved in.

  It was a week later that she learnt Himmat hadn’t had a change of heart but had started working with a ragpicker who went through the litter from three huge bins near the bus stop. Himmat helped him separate the paper, glass, plastic and other trash from the rotting food. They then moved to the litter dump behind the car park and the short strip where men with ponies offered rides in the evenings to three- and four-year-olds, one arm around the child’s waist as they ran alongside. It was back-breaking work and even after washing with a harsh soda-based soap, Himmat’s hands and forearms itched and sometimes he drew blood scratching them even as he lay exhausted at night.

  Jasoda had been so preoccupied with getting to know the city, settling down and eking out enough to feed her family, she hadn’t noticed that she had missed her period for a few months – three months, to be precise. She had to find work in a hurry since there would be one more mouth to feed soon. Every once in a while, she was asked to help deliver a baby for a woman who was living on one of the pavements at the traffic-signal junctions in the vicinity or in a corner of Chowpatty Beach where a fair number of the migrants from the drought-ridden areas had settled down.

  Pawan was still the main breadwinner but he got distracted quickly and anyway everything depended on the mood of the people sitting in the cars and taxis. There was one other problem. Most cars that passed the broad road near the garden were regulars and familiarity induced philanthropic fatigue. Their occupants looked the other way when a beggar whom they had patronized more than a couple of times knocked on the window. The only alternative was to change locations every week or two but Jasoda couldn’t abide the thought of one of her children getting lost or turned into pavement invalids in an accident.

  Himmat ate a stale chapati from the previous night’s meal before going to work and, if he was lucky, the chapati wrap came with a lump of jaggery inside it. He left for work by seven-thirty a.m. He came back around four p.m., famished and done in. He strove to double his daily wages by working twice as hard but his earnings rarely went beyond fourteen or fifteen rupees and often the next day he was far too tired to make even five rupees.

  Ratna’s daughter Heera was not the most loveable of children. She could cry for hours, stop for a few minutes to be breast-fed and immediately revert to testing the limits of forbearance of those around her. Her father had hinted that perhaps it would be better if she was left on the rocks when the high tide came in. There was no one who could pacify her, not even her mother. The only exception was Himmat. She would giggle and smile any time she saw him and fly into his arms even when he was unprepared for her reckless leap. At night, Ratna would beg Jasoda to allow Heera to lie next to Himmat so that the little girl as well as the rest of them could get some sleep.

  ‘That’s my Aunt Jasoda,’ Ratna said to the surly man before he could get a word in. ‘She arrived just four days ago from her village where there’s a drought and people are dying all the time.’

  The man ignored Ratna and addressed Jasoda. ‘You have been here for nearly three months and haven’t paid a paisa for occupying my road. Now that I am back from my hometown, you owe me three months’ rent.’

  ‘The Sarkar owns the road.’ Ratna had warned her new midwife-friend not to provoke the man but Jasoda was not about to follow her advice. She didn’t have the money. Nothing could alter that. Might as well try a bit of spunk and see what happens.

  ‘As far as you are concerned I am the Sarkar. I’m not just the government, make no mistake, I’m the Almighty Himself. I can throw you and your children out of the city if I want. I can take your children away and put them to work if you don’t pay the rent and you will never see them again.’

  ‘What do you want me to do? I don’t have the money to feed the children. How am I going to pay you?’

  ‘There are five of you. That’s one hundred and twenty-five per month. By the first of next month, you will owe me three hundred and seventy-five.’

  What was she going to do? She could take the children and their grandmother and disappear. The question was, where would she go? By now she had begun to grasp that there was not a road in the city which wasn’t controlled by the pavement bosses. She had heard that in some other places they charged thirty-five or even fifty rupees per person. This place had much to recommend it. The garden had a water tap and the rocks behind the wall at the back served as toilets for the whole family and many others. Ratna’s husband Mohanlal had worked out an arrangement with the keeper of the place. Ratna or Jasoda would cook his meals so long as he supplied the grains, lentils and vegetables. Naturally, the wood for the fire would come from the trees in the garden.

  The next morning, Jasoda sat Himmat and Pawan down and explained to them how grim their situation was. They were grown-up children now and would have to share the burden of earning enough to pay the surly man. She would allow Pawan to venture further afield and see which traffic-light junctions were the most lucrative. Himmat too would have to pitch in after his regular working hours and help collect extra money whichever way he could. She herself set out after she had fed the family. This time she didn’t merely scour the buildings on her road but went farther afield to Nepean Sea Road, Narayan Dabholkar Road and Malabar Hill. She was not in the mood to take a ‘no’ but that’s all that she got for three-and-a-half weeks.

  It must have been a week later when Himmat came back with a small sack full of mogra flowers and a reel of rough thread.

  ‘Where did you get the money?’ Jasoda asked him.

  ‘I borrowed it from my boss.’

  ‘What are we supposed to do with so many flowers?’

  ‘I thought we could make garlands and sell them.’

  ‘Do you know how to knot the flowers?’

  ‘You could show me.
’

  ‘I haven’t a clue. Besides, it would take us the full night to make garlands and by that time the flowers will have wilted and died.’

  The flowers did wilt and die but a couple of days later Himmat once again brought a handful of mogras. Jasoda was about to berate him when he flashed one of his rare smiles and gave her a flower garland he had made for her hair.

  ‘That’s beautiful. Who taught you?’

  ‘Secret, secret. But I’m going to show you and Daadi how it’s done. All we need is practice and we can sell them at our corner and make some money.’

  Jasoda was returning from one of her day-long sojourns to find work when she saw a tall building where the security guard was missing or more likely had gone to the toilet. That way she had a better chance of not being stopped or thrown out. She was through checking out the first four floors and was on the fifth when she saw water flowing from under a door. She rang the bell a couple of times and then didn’t take her finger off. Finally, a man in a three-piece suit, wet from top to toe, opened the door. He threw up his hands and spoke in some foreign tongue.

  All she could make out was that he was inviting her in and then he went wading through the water in the front room straight to the bathroom. She followed him. The shower-pipe was broken and the blast of water from it was crashing into the opposite wall and cascading down, flooding the whole place. She ran to the kitchen soaked to the bone and looked into every drawer and then turned to the man in the suit with a wooden spatula in her hand and started banging her fist. He looked puzzled and shook his head and then something clicked. He ran into the passage and opened a chest of drawers and pulled out a hammer. She was back in the bathroom now, standing on a chair, a face towel in one hand and the hammer in the other.

  She tried to jam the mouth of the pipe with the towel but the pressure of the water kept throwing it back. The trick, she realized, was to shove a corner of the towel in and hold it there so that the flow decreased and then hammer the towel in bit by bit with the thin end of the spatula. It took a full ten minutes but the water had now begun to drip slowly from the lower end of the towel. The owner of the flat was on the phone and Jasoda had got hold of a broom and was pushing the water in the front room back into the bathroom. Then she started wiping the floor with a towel and wringing it in a bucket. The man looked at her aghast and waved his hand as if to say no, no, no. She ignored him till he joined her on the floor with another towel and started to swab alongside her. She whisked the swab from him. A man has his work and a woman hers and both should respect that fine line.