The Song of Kahunsha (2 page)

He sees people celebrating Holi. Everyone is out in the streets dancing to the beat of dhols, throwing coloured powder in the air, jumping into those colours and becoming them for a day or week. The people have finally understood the true nature of Holi—if their faces are dipped in green, then for the next few days Bombay is lush, and men, women, and children pass through
their troubles with ease. If their chests are smeared in red, it means they will fall in love and get married. Every colour known to man comes to the people of Bombay as a friend, and the people become them all.

But such a place must be known by another name, he reasons. So he invents one, and says it out loud:
“Kahunsha.”
To him this means “the city of no sadness.” Someday all sadness will die, he believes, and Bombay will be reborn as Kahunsha.

By the time he wakes up, he feels refreshed.

As he enters the sleeping room, he sees little Pushpa, who sits on her bed with her head against the wall. She breathes heavily because she has asthma. Once, at night, she woke Chamdi up and said she was dying. No one is going to die, Chamdi replied, terrified because he could not do much. So he patted Pushpa on her head and prayed to Jesus, although he felt it was meaningless to pray when she was not even allowed to breathe. After a while he just sat there in the darkness and listened to Pushpa gasping for air. Right now, Pushpa twirls her hair and daydreams, and Chamdi is pleased to see that she is not suffering.

The sleeping room is quite gloomy now, although a small amount of light spills in from the prayer room, which gets more sun. Chamdi looks at all the children who exist in this borrowed light. Our eyes show that we are orphans, he thinks. He tells himself that if he were to see any of these children years from now, as grownups, he would still be able to recognize them.

He turns his attention to Dhondu. Dhondu the ghost-boy who sleeps with one eye open. Even though Dhondu is the most well-built boy in the orphanage, he is terrified of ghosts. He believes that if he falls into a deep sleep, a ghost will enter his body, and he will be forced to spend the night outside his body like a scared spirit. At night, Dhondu speaks a strange language that he claims to have learned from the ghosts. He can hear them fight between themselves over who shall take his body first. On nights when there is not much to do, which is every other night, all the children watch in great delight as Dhondu is chased by ghosts.

Kaichi lies on the floor. Kaichi looks different from the rest of the children. He has green eyes and fair skin because he is from Nepal. Chamdi is thankful that Kaichi is asleep right now. Kaichi
has earned the name because he always cuts into everyone else’s conversations like a scissor. But right now, Kaichi is still as a stone. Chamdi steps over him.

The grandfather clock in the sleeping room strikes three, and it occurs to Chamdi that he missed lunch. It is not much of a lunch, a ball of rice and vegetables, but at least it fills his stomach. He wonders why no one came to the prayer room to wake him up, especially Mrs. Sadiq.

Besides Jesus, Mrs. Sadiq is perhaps the only person that Chamdi talks to openly. She has looked after Chamdi since he was an infant. But he does not trust her completely. He feels she is hiding something from him. All these years, she has fed him and bathed him, but there have been times when she has not been able to look him in the eye. He believes she knows something about his parents. One day he will find out.

Still, Chamdi is grateful for all that she has done for him. Mrs. Sadiq has taught all the children how to read and write. But she pays special attention to Chamdi. She once called him a “bright boy” in front of all the other children. It gave him a chance to explain that he was “bright” because he believed in the power of colours.
All of
you should stand near the bougainvilleas each day
, he proudly announced.
Then you shall be bright like me
. But the children laughed as if Chamdi were mad. From that day, he decided to keep his secrets to himself.

He walks through the narrow corridor that leads to Mrs. Sadiq’s office. A portrait of a Parsi lady hangs on the wall. For many years Chamdi thought this lady looked very stern. But one day Mrs. Sadiq told everyone who the Parsi lady was, and Chamdi changed his mind. The lady’s name is H.P. Cama. When she was alive, the orphanage was her home. It was due to her kindness that the children have shelter today. Mrs. Sadiq taught all the children to thank “Lady Cama” each time they pass through the corridor. Chamdi does not thank her each and every time because sometimes he is in a hurry to get to the toilet, but he has told Jesus about Lady Cama: If you see her in heaven, please look after her.

Now Chamdi watches Mrs. Sadiq from the corridor.

She sits at a brown wooden desk and reads a letter through silver-framed glasses. Behind her, through the open window, Chamdi can see the bougainvilleas sway in the breeze. He likes the manner in which their red petals surround Mrs.
Sadiq’s head, without her knowing, as though they are protecting her. She raises her head and looks at the clock on the wall, but she does not notice Chamdi. As she reads the letter again, the sun adds a tinge of light to her white hair.

Chamdi looks at her long, bony arms as they rest on the table and wonders how many children those hands cared for over the years. He knows that just as he longs to know his real mother and father, Mrs. Sadiq once longed for a child of her own. He overheard her talking to Jyoti one afternoon while the two of them sat on the orphanage steps and drank tea. It was one of the few occasions Chamdi had seen Mrs. Sadiq treat Jyoti as a friend instead of a servant.

Chamdi discovered that Mrs. Sadiq used to be married. Her husband disliked her working at the orphanage. He told her that if she could not have children of her own, there was no need to go look after someone else’s. One day when she got home, he had packed her bags. He asked her to leave. So she picked up the little that she owned and took a taxi back to the orphanage. She never saw him after that day. Mrs. Sadiq thinks her husband could be dead by now because he was fifteen years older than her. That was all she said to Jyoti.

It surprised Chamdi that Mrs. Sadiq’s life story could be told in only a few sentences. So he made up his mind to achieve something so wonderful that if he were to tell anyone his life story, it would take days to tell, even weeks, and the ending would be a happy one, unlike Mrs. Sadiq’s. He wanted to tell Mrs. Sadiq about his plans, but she would have shouted at him for spying on her.

Mrs. Sadiq looks at the clock again. She runs her hands over her white hair, which is tied in a bun. She wears a blue sari and matching rubber chappals. Chamdi can always tell which room of the orphanage she is in from the
flip-flop
of her chappals. When she steps out of the orphanage, she wears leather sandals. The rubber chappals had made her slip in the rain once, and that is when she hurt her back. The bottle of Ayurvedic oil that she rubs on her back sits on the table next to a blue glass paperweight. Mrs. Sadiq holds the blue paperweight in her fist and then looks at the clock. Chamdi wonders if she thinks the clock and paperweight are connected.

She finally sees Chamdi standing in the corridor.

As she gets up from her wooden chair, the small green cushion that supports her lower back falls to the floor. She slowly bends to pick it up,
but Chamdi can tell from the strain on her face that her back hurts. So she lets the cushion remain on the floor. Chamdi enters the room, picks the cushion up, and places it against the back of Mrs. Sadiq’s chair.

Mrs. Sadiq smiles at Chamdi, but he knows she is worried about something because a smile is not supposed to make a person look older. She walks to the window and rests her elbows on the sill. Chamdi looks out the window too, sees the well, and warns himself never to go near it again.

Chamdi and Mrs. Sadiq stand in silence and listen to the occasional car horn. He wonders what would happen if the orphanage were in the heart of Bombay. He would have to hear buses rumble in a mighty manner all day long. Jyoti has told him that the buses of Bombay have no respect for human beings. His own eyes have marked how cruel buses are to humans—they prevent people from getting on, and the people who do get on are forced to hang from the buses in the most dangerous manner. Jyoti also told him that when she came to Bombay from her village, there was no seat for her inside the bus, so she sat on the roof along with five men and travelled that way for a whole day. At the time Chamdi thought that he
would love to sit on the roof of a bus and see all the villages of India.

But right now he wants to know what troubles Mrs. Sadiq because she has not said a word to him. Chamdi has noticed that in the last three months Mrs. Sadiq has grown quieter and quieter, and he wonders if it is a sign that she is dying. He is afraid to ask her. But he must make her talk because the more she speaks, the longer she will live.

Before Chamdi can ask her anything, Mrs. Sadiq pats him on the head, walks back to her table, and reads the letter again. She picks up the black telephone receiver and puts it to her ear as if to check whether it is working. Then she puts the receiver back in its cradle, takes her silver glasses off, and rubs her eyes.

Maybe she did not sleep last night, thinks Chamdi. Her eyes are red. But they could also be red from crying. He finds it strange that although tears are colourless, they make the eyes turn red. He has often wondered about his own eyes. If he stares at the bougainvilleas for days and days at a time, will his eyes acquire their colour? Then he would be the only boy in Bombay, or even the world, to have pink or red pupils.

The ring of the telephone snaps him out of his thoughts. Mrs. Sadiq does not answer it immediately. She lets it ring, and Chamdi knows that she wants him to leave. If she were his mother, he would have clung on to her leg and refused to go.

Before Chamdi leaves the room, he glimpses the bougainvilleas through the window and is pleased that the breeze makes them dance. It is a sign that Mrs. Sadiq will be okay.

Mrs. Sadiq scratches her right eyebrow with her thumbnail. After a few seconds, she moves on to the left. This is a habit Chamdi has noticed over the years. Whenever she is worried, she does this. But he has never seen her worry so much about a simple telephone call. He knows she is holding something from him, just as she holds something from him when she refuses to tell him about his mother and father. But no matter how many times she tells him she knows nothing about his parents, he is determined to find out the truth. After all, it was Mrs. Sadiq who named him Chamdi—“a boy of thick skin.”

Today Chamdi does thank Lady Cama as he passes her in the corridor. Chamdi knows it is not possible, but he feels her ears have grown larger. It could be because her ears are constantly filled with so many thank-yous. If this is true, then God must have the largest ears in the world.

Sonal, the oldest girl in the orphanage, stands looking out the window in the sleeping room. She wears a faded green dress that came with a set of old clothes donated by a Christian family that was moving to Madras. The brown shorts and white vest that Chamdi wears came from the same family. Chamdi envies the Christian boy whose waistline is wider than his. It means the boy eats much more than a ball of rice and vegetables. Chamdi wants to become a man fast. He wants to be strong. He knows that Sonal wants to grow up quickly too. She is hurt by the way she looks right now. Chamdi heard Mrs. Sadiq telling Sonal that girls take time to show their beauty. So Sonal now believes that she will be a beauty when she grows up. She is not sure at what age she will become beautiful, but she is willing to wait patiently.

In a corner of the room, three boys stand in a group and play koyba, the game of three white stones. Even though they are not brothers, these
boys resemble each other. They are stout of chest but their legs are thin. Chamdi believes they look similar because they are always together. They do not talk much with the other children. One of the boys lifts his right leg as he releases the small round stone from his hand. It hits the stone on the floor with precision.

Now Chamdi sees Jyoti walk out the main door. It is still too early for her to go home, so he assumes she must be off to the market to buy vegetables or cooking oil for Mrs. Sadiq. Chamdi wonders what Mrs. Sadiq would do without Jyoti because Mrs. Sadiq does not have the strength to squat on the ground and scrub floors, or cook food for twenty children. Even though Jyoti’s work is shoddy, she has not left the orphanage to work in someone’s private home for a larger sum. Perhaps this is because of her husband, Raman. Chamdi knows that no household would employ a drunkard. At least here Raman cleans the toilets and then he is out of everyone’s way. On some days he passes out in the courtyard and all the children gather around him and wonder if he is dead.

Just as Chamdi is about to walk down the steps and into the courtyard, he feels someone tug his hand. It is Pushpa. She holds in her hand an old,
tattered copy of
Chandamama
, a children’s storybook that contains fabulous tales like “The Child Who Ate a Mountain” and “The Flying Rhinoceros with Morals.” Pushpa wants to speak, but she waits till she has enough air. Chamdi knows what she wants anyway. He takes the book from Pushpa’s hand and walks with her to a corner of the room near a large wooden cupboard that contains the children’s clothes and toys. The cupboard has a long mirror on one door and a pink flower tree painted in the wood on the other. There is a bird in one of the tree’s branches. Chamdi loves this painting because it looks as though the bird’s mouth is open and it is sending out a song that travels miles and miles.

They sit on the floor as far away as possible from the Koyba Boys. One of the boys has just won three games in a row and he is walking around with his chest out. The other two are upset that they are not winning, so they rub all three white stones together and kiss them for luck.

Chamdi likes it when Pushpa wants him to read a story to her. He never starts reading at the beginning of the book because he believes that he needs to open the book to the story that is meant to be read. As he looks at Pushpa, he notices again
that even though she is tiny, and the youngest child in the orphanage, her eyes are large and round, much like the koyba stones.