Jasoda

  ‘Tell your man that I would not have presumed to knock so late at night but for an emergency. My mother-in-law is very ill. Would you have any turmeric, alum, rakta chandan, clover and anything else for a poultice that will reduce the swelling in her throat?’

  Jasoda pulled her odhani over her face as the tailor came out of the house.

  ‘You have two houses?’ Himmat asked the tailor.

  ‘Yes. Though this is really Poonam Chachi’s place.’

  ‘Then she has two houses, the grocer’s and yours?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘That makes her richer than us and everybody else, barring His Highness?’

  ‘Enough questioning,’ Jasoda yelled from inside.

  Poonam moved heavily as she collected the dried bark, branches, roots and other ingredients from the shelves of her kitchen.

  ‘When are you due?’ Jasoda asked her.

  ‘Any day now.’

  ‘Call me if you need help.’

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘Send the tailor when the pains start.’

  ‘I’m scared. For twenty years I thought I was barren. Now I don’t want to lose the child.’

  ‘You won’t. I will deliver a sturdy baby.’

  ‘How dare you leave my mother to die all alone?’ Sangram Singh pushed the children aside as he bore down on his wife. Jasoda had picked up a small round sandstone slab from the kitchen and was on the staircase when her husband caught her arm and pulled her back.

  ‘Not now. I’m busy.’

  The children clung to Jasoda as she wiped the foam from her mother-in-law’s mouth. The old woman was no longer equal to the effort of breathing. Her lips were turning black. Her hands and feet were cold. Sangram Singh watched as Jasoda felt her pulse. She wasn’t able to locate it.

  ‘If something should happen to her,’ Sangram Singh warned his wife as he stepped down the staircase, ‘you and you alone will be responsible for it.’

  Jasoda settled down on the floor and sprinkled water on the sandstone slab as she ground the herbs and roots into a paste. It felt cold on her hand but she knew that once it dried up, it would become hot and astringent. When she had ground a sufficient quantity of the salve, she swept the whole lot on the palm of her right hand and applied it to the old woman’s throat, chest and forehead.

  ‘Catch, Himmat.’ Jasoda tossed one end of her odhani across the bed at her older son. ‘Now let’s work up some breeze, so the poultice will dry quickly and ease the constriction in her throat.’

  Between the two of them they swung the odhani back and forth.

  ‘Let me, let me.’ Pawan tried to grab the cloth from his brother.

  ‘Come over this side, beta, and hold my end.’

  The red cloth fanned the air in slow, gentle waves. It seemed to soothe the children and rid them of their fear. The ceiling, the bed, the floor, the walls of the room, the house itself had become a cradle and rocked almost imperceptibly. Jasoda went down and reheated the tea with a few of the herbs and the jaggery she had got from the tailor’s woman. When she climbed up again, the children were asleep on the floor. Jasoda rested her mother-in-law’s head on her lap and fed her the brew, one sip every few minutes. Colour seeped back into the old woman’s cheeks as dawn was breaking. Jasoda was covering the children with a torn blanket when her third son Sameer was born.

  Sometime around eight in the morning the old woman opened her eyes.

  ‘Light me a bidi, Jasoda,’ she whispered.

  ‘You can barely breathe, let alone swallow, and you want to smoke? A bidi will bring back your fits of coughing and you’ll choke.’

  ‘Not such a bad idea. Light up.’

  Jasoda took out the half-empty pack of bidis and the matchbox from the pocket in her mother-in-law’s blouse, lit one and handed it over. The old woman held it with her middle finger and thumb and inserted the burning tip inside her mouth. Her cheeks collapsed upon each other as she inhaled deeply. She did not cough. She closed her eyes and took short, deep puffs.

  ‘Set me down on my own mattress on the floor now.’

  Of late, Sangram Sangh had taken to visiting Savitri at odd hours. Sometimes he came directly from the Palace in the evening. She could smell liquor mixed with onion and garlic on his breath. He stayed till midnight, at times even later. About a month ago, he had got one of her people to carry a mattress from the Prince’s godown. It had long, drifting stains not of love-making but of incontinence and bleeding and sickness. Interwoven into the warp and woof of the cloth and into the interstices of the cotton was the stench of death and disease. Savitri would not have that curdled cotton with its morbid history in her home. Sangram Singh listened to her objections and then, before she knew what he was up to, he bundled her in it and rolled her on the floor. He was in good humour these days. He told her to put it out in the sun. He said the sun was a great healer. If it could leach sin from the soul of a man, it could bleach the stains and smells from an ordinary mattress. He was impressed with what he had said and repeated it.

  Savitri discovered that he was right, though. Within days the mattress smelt of the sun. Since it was torn in many places and the cotton was lumpy and hard, Sangram Singh put her to work on it. He set aside a couple of handfuls every day so she could unravel the knots and clumps with her fingers and fluff out the cotton. The next day he inspected her work. If each strand was not combed and separated, he sat her down and made her do it again and then stuffed the newly sprung cotton back into the mattress. When they lay down, the mattress felt soft and squishy up to their waists and then dipped into a flat stony slab.

  One morning, Savitri was plaiting her hair when Sangram Singh dropped by with a blank sheet of paper. Her thumb lurched as he pressed it into the inkpad and then laid its impress on the paper.

  ‘Only one impression?’ Savitri asked.

  ‘If you have a dozen houses and farms which you’ve been hiding from me, I better get your thumb prints on a whole sheaf of papers.’ He smiled and tickled her under her chin.

  Shortly after his mother’s crisis, Sangram Singh had been busy making an inventory of items in each room of the Palace. There was no life in Kantagiri and His Highness was getting restive. He had even begun to talk of going away for a while, maybe forever. Cataloguing His Highness’s belongings was a laborious business but Sangram Singh was meticulous. He jotted down whole and broken furniture; silver, brass, gold, stainless steel, copper and aluminium vessels; torn and brand-new sheets, towels, curtains, cushion covers, bedsheets, mattresses; lampshades, plates, glasses, crystal; garden implements and so on in notebooks. Each book with its red cloth jacket and its running stitch design (the standard format for accounts books since time immemorial) had three hundred pages.

  On the afternoon of the third day he needed a break and went to Savitri’s. The door was unlocked but she was not in. He lay on the mattress and waited for her. The cotton was soft from head to foot. The rents in the cloth were sewn. He rolled from side to side and tossed up and down. The cloth held. He fell asleep.

  He left in the evening. When he was at the door, he noticed that the shard of the mirror on the shelf, the three cooking vessels near the makeshift chullah on the floor and the patchwork choli and ghagra on the clothesline were missing.

  Pawan was feeding grains of bajra into the mouth of the millstone when the tailor came by.

  ‘Jai Ramji ki.’ He smiled foolishly as he greeted Jasoda.

  ‘Jai Ramji ki,’ Jasoda wished him. Wooden handle in her fist, her hand went back and forth, turning the top stone wheel rapidly. The alignment of the grinding stones was askew and the top one kept slipping.

  ‘Don’t pour the bajra so fast,’ Jasoda told Pawan. ‘The flour’s still grainy.’

  The inner surfaces of the stones had been ground smooth over the years and it took a couple of hours to get a week’s supply of flour for the family.

  ‘Let me.’ Pawan grabbed the handle from his mother.

  The smile
was still playing on the tailor’s face and he seemed about to speak.

  ‘Be careful now or your fingers will get crushed.’ Jasoda looked at the tailor. He still hadn’t found the words he was looking for. ‘How far down has the baby come?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know but there’s not much life left in my woman.’

  ‘Why did you not come earlier?’

  ‘I was scared. I got drunk.’

  ‘Himmat, take over from Pawan.’

  Jasoda collected a few things she might require. ‘When did the pains start?’

  ‘Two days ago, I’m not quite sure.’

  ‘Don’t waste a grain, Pawan. That’s the last bajra we have.’

  ‘Go, bahu,’ her mother-in-law told Jasoda. ‘I’ll look after them.’

  Poonam was going blue and was past caring about the baby when they reached the house. Jasoda washed her hands and let her fingers rove inside Poonam’s skirt, trying to gauge the position of the foetus.

  ‘Is it too late?’ the tailor asked.

  ‘Maybe. I have a question for you. If you have to choose between mother and child, who…’

  ‘Save my woman, that’s all I ask.’

  ‘Let’s hope it’s still in my power to give you what you ask.’ Then after a pause she added, ‘We are going to get your woman drunk.’

  ‘She doesn’t drink.’

  ‘She will today. Pick up a quart and be back by the time I boil the water, scissors and knife and this strip of cloth and get things ready.’

  The tailor must have gone to one of the untouchable huts for he was back within minutes. Poonam gagged on the raw hooch but Jasoda continued to force it down her throat. She put her head on Poonam’s belly and waited a long while, hoping to get a pulse, but the baby seemed inert.

  ‘You won’t be needing me now,’ the tailor told her as he stepped out.

  ‘Get back in and help me.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. Do exactly as I tell you.’

  Jasoda laid Poonam on the floor, opened her legs and kept them spread-eagled by planting her own feet against the insides of the woman’s thighs. She wound the boiled strip of cloth around the knife-edge and kept it to the side.

  ‘Sit behind your woman and hold her by the armpits. We are going to play tug-of-war. I’m stronger than you but don’t let go, come what may.’

  Jasoda raised the scissors and took a deep breath.

  ‘Forgive me, Mai, but I do hope you know what you are doing.’

  ‘So do I.’ Her hand came down and fell to her side. ‘I’m all Poonam’s got. I admit that’s not much but you better make up your mind. Do I or don’t I?’

  The tailor looked away.

  Jasoda made a deft incision in the vaginal opening, laid the scissors down, poured oil generously on her hands and shoved her right hand inside before the blood welled up and spurted out. Poonam passed out. Jasoda’s hand probed deep. Her fingers slipped between the neck of the child and the cord wound around it. Her left hand was in now and her index finger had pulled the umbilical cord up. She slipped the tiny knife all the way in. There was no space in there but she manoeuvred the knife into place under the cord and cut it. When the baby’s head was in her hands, she began to pull it out slowly. Her grip slipped. She knew she was running out of time and had to avoid one thing at any cost: letting go of the child’s head. Now the head was trapped in her palm while she leveraged the baby’s chin.

  ‘Hold on tight. Otherwise all will be lost. Now pull your woman away from me.’

  ‘It’s a girl,’ she told Poonam when she opened her eyes.

  ‘Is she okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jasoda held Poonam’s eyes. ‘But is there anything else you want me to do?’

  ‘No, Jasoda mai. I’m going to keep my girl.’

  Sangram Singh had been working on the Palace inventory for over eleven weeks now. Barring the cinema theatre in the basement and the projection room with its collection of hundreds of film prints, which the Prince had declared out of bounds for him, he had inventoried the full ground, first and second floors. All that was left to do now were the children’s playrooms and then he would move on to the last four rooms on the third floor. That wouldn’t take too long since two of the rooms had burnt down, the first by lightning and the second one when the place was being painted some forty-seven years ago and one of the workers had thrown out a beedi-stub which hadn’t quite made it past the parapet.

  Sangram Singh was on to his forty-seventh notebook. He came around nine every morning and could legitimately demand breakfast, lunch, dinner plus tea four or five times a day along with the occasional snack. He sat on the floor on a square cotton cushion placed on a thick carpet and wrote on a low, sloping desk on which seven generations of accountant-cum-clerks had worked. It was a hereditary post with the last occupant having fallen foul of the Prince since he was unable to balance the books in a manner which would enable His Highness to avoid paying any taxes. Not only had he been relieved of his job but of his premises at the rear of the Palace compound too. After him, since no one was hired to keep the books, the question of paying taxes did not arise.

  When he was finished jotting down every item in the previous room, Sangram Singh got one of the three servants working in the Palace to sweep and swab the playroom next door and move his desk, cushion and notebook into it. Before sitting down to work, it was his custom to spend time familiarizing himself with the various items in the room. There were at least a hundred and seventy years of toys in the playroom. The toys were meant for the children of the royal family but he had seen even the Prince and his mistress spend hours playing with them. Some had not even been opened, others were broken and damaged beyond repair while still others had parts, gears and wheels missing.

  The toys were made of clay, wood, brass, steel, plastic and cardboard. There were at least fifty Ludo, snakes-and-ladders, checkers and chess sets; seven sets of battery-driven electric trains, two hundred metres of tracks, signalling equipment; bicycles and tricycles; rocking horses; five hundred and fourteen jigsaw puzzles; miniature fire engines; dolls that walked, talked, belched, threw up and performed other bodily functions; music boxes; skates, elaborate Meccano and Lego sets; clay parrots, pigeons, peacocks, tigers, panthers, lions, zebras, giraffes; cars, submarines, destroyers, luxury liners, frigates; battalions of soldiers, grenadiers and infantry; bombers, helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft and commercial planes. At times he came across toys of which he couldn’t make head or tail.

  It would take him close to a week merely to sort out and separate the toys. He was about to tackle the three jigsaw puzzles whose pieces had got mixed up when the Prince called him. ‘Are you done yet or not?’

  ‘I’m pleased to report that in another three weeks, four to be on the safe side, every article in the Palace not excluding even a toothbrush or a plastic button will have been documented.’

  ‘I’ll be dead and gone and you’ll still be saying another couple of weeks, three at the most.’ His Highness’s face relaxed. ‘The longer it takes, the richer I must be.’ The expression on his face changed again. ‘Are you sure you haven’t missed some rooms, some invaluable heirlooms?’

  ‘No, Huzoor. Except for what is in the safes, you can go through the Palace with a fine-toothed comb, even better, take a lice comb and you’ll discover that every single thing including the comb is noted and described in detail for posterity.’

  ‘It’s costing me a fortune just to keep you in paper, not to mention the vast quantities of food and tea and sugar you consume every day. And who do you think is going to pay for the mattress you stole and which you used to bed your mistress?’ Suddenly he started to laugh. ‘I believe she’s given you the ditch, Sangram Singh. Left you for better prospects, I hear.’

  ‘That’s a lie. Whoever told you that should have the guts to say it to my face. I threw her out.’

  ‘A likely story. But let’s get back to the mattress you stole.’

  ‘Didn’t steal, Huzoor. J
ust took it to get it repaired.’

  ‘Did you now? More than four months have passed and it’s still not back. Let me see if you’ve made a note of borrowing it in the books?’

  ‘I have, I most definitely have. It’s in one of these forty-seven books, I don’t exactly recall which one. I’ll locate it by the evening and show it to you.’

  ‘Show me now. Better still, I’ll come with you. It will give me a chance to inspect your work and understand your system of cataloguing.’

  The two of them walked back to the children’s playrooms. His Highness was rolling his wheelchair jauntily and was six or seven yards ahead of Sangram Singh. He twirled his stick, whirled it around till the air hissed, flung it up to the ceiling and caught it. Every few steps he stopped and waited for Sangram Singh.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Even lambs who go to the slaughter show more enthusiasm than you.’

  Sangram Singh looked up. He saw the marble stairs and above it, in the dead centre of the landing, a winged marble child aiming his arrow into his eye.

  ‘Why are you dragging your feet, Sangram Singh? That won’t help. I’ll sit up all evening and all night, if that’s what it takes.’

  Sangram Singh put on his spectacles and settled down to read.

  ‘Hukum, Huzoor. Which would you like to look at first?’

  ‘Any notebook will do. Give me the one on the top. Later you can find the entry for the mattress.’

  The subject of the mattress was not mentioned again that day. The Prince glanced through the first notebook briefly and then asked Sangram Singh for seven other volumes at random.

  He leafed through them hurriedly and then looked up at Sangram Singh. ‘May I have a word with you?’

  Sangram Singh was instantly at the Prince’s side. ‘Most certainly, Huzoor.’

  ‘My memory has been playing games with me these days. Do please help me out.’

  ‘At your service, Huzoor. My memory, I assure you, is excellent and at your disposal.’