In the Convent of Little Flowers (5 page)

“So do I,” said the manager brusquely. At the end of the week the security guard fell ill, and lithe, strong Chandar, his muscles defined by years in the fields, took his job.

Meha tries to look at her outstretched hands but they blur in front of her eyes. She knows they are withered and old, creased at the knuckles. But for twenty years they had served her well.

The money still was not enough. The bank job brought in only a few rupees, barely enough for food. One night as
they lay on the footpath looking up at a cloudy sky, Meha said to Chandar, “Geeta said her memsahib’s neighbor lady needs a
bai.
”

He turned to her, his voice harsh. “My wife will not be a maidservant. We are a proud people, Meha. What will the village elders think if they knew? I forbid you to go; you will not be a
bai
like Geeta.”

“But Chandar, how long will we live like this? Geeta says the monsoon will come next month. There is no money to even buy a tarpaulin to shelter us.”

Chandar shook his head stubbornly, refusing to meet her eyes. Meha lay beside him in silence. What pride was there in living like pariah dogs on the street? She slid an arm over his chest. A man passing on the street snickered, then stood over them watching. They stayed very still and soon he wandered away. Meha touched Chandar’s face and her hand came away wet with hot tears. She laid her hand back on his chest, over his thumping heart. The next morning she went with Geeta to the neighbor lady’s house.

Slowly, very slowly, the money came. Bikaner went to school. It was nothing like the village
patshala
with its drowsy, cane-wielding schoolmaster. This school was a thin building of three stories, fifty children to a classroom, and women teachers in bright saris. Uniforms and
chappals
were required and so Meha went to the bazaar near Dadar station and bought them, watching the rupees dissolve in her hand. But she understood that it was necessary for Bikaner to go to school. At home in the village, it would not have been
necessary, but here even a peon was an Intermediate pass, or at least had appeared for the exams.

Meha and Chandar learned that even this last distinction—having sat for the school passing examination, though not necessarily having passed it—would sway a prospective employer. So they wore the same village clothes they had brought with them for two years so that Bikaner could go to school. In the beginning he came back very often in tears, his uniform torn from schoolyard tussles, for he fought with almost every child in his class. His spirit bent under the weight of ignorance and jibes. Why did he know so little, he asked Meha. Why hadn’t they tried to teach him more? The village
patshala
schoolmaster had only taught him the alphabet, and that only in Hindi and Marathi, even though Bikaner was almost seven. Here he was taught English, the teacher recited strange-sounding nursery rhymes, Bikaner was bigger than all the children in his class (they were only four years old!)—the humiliations were endless.

Through all these cries, Meha was patient. Wait, she had said, taking Bikaner in her lap, in a year you will be in the right class. She tried to explain to him how they had had so little money for food and water these last few years, and so he had not gone to the village school regularly, and Bikaner would grow furious. When he quietened, she sat up with him every night after dinner under the orange halogen streetlamp, pointing out the letters he was to copy one by one. What is this?
Z,
he would laugh as he replied. You don’t even know
Z,
Ma. Idiot Ma. But she persisted, learning the
unfamiliar shapes and sounds from him and in the process teaching him.

She opens her mouth and says, “Za-ye-d.” Just the way Bikaner had taught her. Pronouncing it wrong as usual, she knows. A little smile wells up in that great aching space her heart has turned into for these last four years. It was during those moments, sitting under that streetlamp, Chandar sleeping nearby in the darkness, that she had finally found something akin to affection for her son. He had laughed at her attempts to make out the curves and lines, had made fun of her, but they had learned together.

Three years passed on that footpath. They were moved a few times. Each time the good citizens of Mumbai considered the footpath-dwellers a blight on the landscape, they moved. From one footpath to another, in another street, in another part of town. In each place, there were new people to get used to, new sounds to block out at night, new bus routes for Bikaner and Chandar to learn. Then for another two years they rented a shack in a
jhopadpatti
— rows of thatched huts with a dirty canal on one side and an array of skyscrapers on the other. As she walked on the street between the huts of the
jhopadpatti,
Meha would look up at the flats towering above them and think of mosaic floors, concrete walls, a toilet that flushed, water out of taps.

All the money she saved was put into an account at the bank by her memsahib. Every night almost, Chandar and Meha would look over the passbook and she would explain the numbers to him, trying to remember what her mistress had taught her. Here was the credit column, here was Chandar’s monthly salary paid in, here was the fifty rupees in the debit column they took out to pay for firecrackers for Diwali. Slowly, the credit column grew and Chandar and Meha had enough for a down payment on a tiny flat on the outskirts of Mumbai. One bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, a small balcony. Three hundred and fifty-six square feet with walls. It was in one of the big buildings on the sixteenth floor. For the first few months Meha walked up the stairs every day, not trusting the old, clanking lift. It terrified her to get into that iron box with its metal crisscross folding screens. The first time, she held her breath almost all the way up, watching blocks of concrete and open floor spaces rise successively before her eyes. It frightened her to live so far above the earth that she loved. She did not look down from the balcony for many years.

They adjusted to Mumbai life and became Mumbai-ites. Meha survived the big city, thrived in it in fact, and Chandar continued his job as guard at the bank. Those were happy days, with no foreshadowing of what was to come. Bikaner finished his Intermediate and even got a BA in economics and then sat for clerical exams at the Farmer’s Bank.

The first day he went to work, pride in their son nearly killed both Chandar and Meha. She woke early that morning
to iron his shirt, his polyester-cum-cotton-weave pants, even his undershirt. That morning as a special treat, Meha put the
chappatis
and curried eggs in front of Bikaner instead of his father.

Chandar left first in his khaki security guard’s uniform, the name and logo of Farmer’s Bank emblazoned across his chest pocket in red thread. Bikaner left at nine-thirty
A.M
., a whole hour after his father. Meha cried as she swirled the flame of the
aarti
around his bright face and marked his forehead with a streak of vermilion.

By the time Bikaner arrived at the bank, Chandar was already on his stool outside the huge glass doors. The heat had begun to pick up and beads of sweat dotted his forehead under his Nehru cap. He leapt up smartly and brought his hand to his forehead.

“
Salaam,
sahib,” he said, almost choking.

Bikaner stopped and looked at his father. “Bapa …”

“Go, go inside, sahib,” Chandar said, opening the door for him. Waves of air-conditioned air swung out and Bikaner squared his shoulders, wiped his sweaty palms against the front of his shirt and stepped into the bank. Behind him, reverently and firmly, Chandar shut the glass door.

Later he told Meha of this first morning, because she pestered him about it. When he came to this part, she had been anxious. Why are you ashamed? she remembers asking him. Not ashamed, just … now Bikaner is a big man. We should not pull him down, he can go far, he had said.

*  *  *

Meha shakes her head and closes her eyes, thinking of this man next to her, her husband of so many years. What a big mistake that had been.

No one at the bank knew Bikaner was his son. Chandar saw no reason why they should. His place was here, on the concrete steps leading to the bank—and Bikaner’s was on the other side, enclosed in an English-speaking, ledger-rifling glass world where a uniform did not point out his occupation.

For the next few months, as Chandar salaamed with alacrity and jumped from his stool to open the door, Bikaner’s nods of greeting became more and more distant, just like the other clerks and officers at the bank. The only time he looked at his father was when he was slow in opening the door. But Chandar did not complain. Every day, at least a few times, he flattened his face against the sunglare of the glass and looked with pride at the bent, well-oiled head of his son, the bank clerk. Every day, Chandar came home with his uniform armpits and back ringed with sweat and the soot of Mumbai, and Bikaner returned home flush with the pink coldness of air-conditioning.

Three seconds.

A year later, while Meha pored over horoscopes of girls for Bikaner, he told them he wanted to marry a fellow clerk at
the bank. Chandar knew the girl, of course, but he told Meha later that night that she was of a different caste. Even after seventeen years in the city, Meha and Chandar were not used to living shoulder-by-hip with people from all castes. Things were simpler at home where they rarely met or saw other communities. Everything had an unquestioned system—the village well, the
patshala,
the vegetable market timings, but here…. They thought for a long time, agonizing almost. Bikaner was going to bring home a bride who was not Kshatriya, not of their warrior caste. But things were changed now, everyone said so. Besides, they could not argue with their son. He had told them of the girl, not asked their permission.

Their first shock came when she visited with her parents. Meha cleaned the flat meticulously. The mosaic floor shone with scrubbing; their mattresses and bed linen were piled neatly in one corner; the kitchen counter glowed with trays of golden
laddus
and
jalebis
and onion
bhajjias;
and ginger and cinnamon simmered in the chai water, awaiting the guests and tea leaves. Meha dressed in her second-best sari, a green-and-pink Banarasi silk Chandar bought for her the day Bikaner started working. Then they found they had no
paan
at home. Chandar rushed out to the corner shop for ten
paan
leaves and a small packet of betel nuts. On his way back, he met his future daughter-in-law and her parents.

She stopped and looked at him in surprise. “Why, Chandarnath, what are you doing here?”

He stood at the bottom of the stairs gazing at her
stupidly, a deep ache beginning to fill him. The only thing he could think of was that Bikaner had not yet told her who his parents were. His words came out with a slow, cold force. “I live here.”

The smile on her face faded briefly. She patted her sleek hair and said, “I am here to see my new in-laws. Bikaner Sahib, you know.”

Chandar nodded, the
paan
weighing down on his hands. There was nothing to do but follow her upstairs. They got into the lift together, Chandar standing at the very back, counting the levels with his eyes on the ground. At the sixteenth floor, he got out also. The girl said, “Did Bikaner Sahib hire you to do some extra work for today?” Then she ignored him as they all went to the door. Meha saw their confusion and threw questioning glances at Chandar, but he explained nothing, simply slipping into the flat to take his place by his son, his hands folded in a
namaste.
To her credit, the girl too covered up her shock. A wedding date was arranged.

By now, the tiny flat Chandar bought had tripled in value. It was fully paid off. In Mumbai where every little square inch was covered with either humanity, animals, hoardings or buildings, Chandar and Meha owned three hundred and fifty-six square feet of prime property. The local paper said that even in New York City space was not so expensive. The new daughter-in-law settled in quite happily in the bedroom while Meha and Chandar slept on the floor of the kitchen. The flat was more than adequate compensation for a security guard father-in-law. But the girl insisted that
Meha stop working; she could not go to the bank and tell her colleagues that her mother-in-law cleaned other peoples’ latrines, she said.

When she spoke like that, Meha was ashamed too. For many years she had swept and mopped floors, washed vessels and clothes, kneaded
atta
for
chappatis,
cleaned latrines, even wiped the snotty noses and the dirty bums of her mistresses’ children. The money she earned had paid in part for the flat, had paid to get them off the footpath into their own home. But now she was ashamed.

Bikaner and the daughter-in-law had two children; first, a boy born much in the same mold as his father, then a girl who looked like Meha. Then Chandar retired. The bank rewarded his loyalty with a small pension and a gold-plated watch.

Over the years Bikaner had grown more and more irritable with his parents, somehow more restless with himself. Meha wonders if they had done something wrong, if there had been some way to teach him peace along with those alphabet lessons under the halogen streetlamp. It was not something taught, but something earned, she knew. For all their troubles, Chandar and she still smiled. They smile even now. Now when there is no turning back.