“IT’S ONE THING to take a little ganja, roll it inside a chapati, and chew it at the day’s end, just to relax the muscles-I can forgive that in a man, I really can. But to smoke this drug-this smack-at seven in the morning, and then lie in a corner with your tongue hanging out, I tolerate that in no man on my construction site. You understand me? Or do you want me to repeat this in Tamil or whatever language your people speak?”
“I understand, sir.”
“What did you say? What did you say, you son of…?”
Holding her brother by the hand, Soumya watched as the foreman chastised her father. The foreman was young, so much younger than her father-but he wore a khaki uniform that the construction company had given him, and twirled a lathi in his left hand, and she saw that the workers, instead of defending her father, were listening quietly to the foreman. He was sitting in a blue chair on an embankment of mud; a gas lamp buzzed noisily from a wooden pole driven into the ground next to the chair. Behind him was the crater around the half-demolished house; the inside of the house was filled with rubble, its roof had mostly fallen in, and its windows were empty. With his baton and his uniform, and his face harshly illuminated by the incandescent paraffin lamp, the foreman looked like a ruler of the underworld at the gate of his kingdom.
A semicircle of construction workers had formed below him. Soumya’s father stood apart from the others, looking furtively at Soumya’s mother, who was muffling her sobs in a corner of her sari. In a tear-racked voice she said, “I keep telling him to give up this smack. I keep telling-”
Soumya wondered why her mother had to complain about her father in front of everyone. Raju pressed her hand.
“Why are they all scolding Daddy?”
She pressed back. Quiet.
All at once the foreman got up from his chair, took a step down the embankment, and raised his stick over Soumya’s father. “Pay attention, I said.” He brought his stick down.
Soumya shut her eyes and turned away.
The workers had returned to their tents, which were scattered about the open field around the dark, half-demolished house. Soumya’s father was lying on his blue mat, apart from everyone else; he was snoring already, his hands over his eyes. In the old days she would have gone to him and snuggled against his side.
Soumya went up to her father. She shook him by his big toe, but he did not respond. She went to where her mother was making rice, and lay down beside her.
Mallets and sledgehammers woke her up in the morning. Thump! Thump! Thump! Bleary-eyed, she wandered up to the house. Her father was up on the bit of the roof that remained, sitting on one of the black iron crossbeams; he was cutting it with a saw. Two men swung at the wall below with sledgehammers; clouds of dust rose up and covered her father as he sawed. Soumya’s heart leapt.
She ran to her mother and cried:
“Daddy’s working again!”
Her mother was with the other women; they were coming down from the house, carrying large metal saucers on their heads filled to the brim with rubble. “Make sure Raju doesn’t get wet,” she said as she passed Soumya.
Only then did Soumya notice it was drizzling.
Raju was lying on the blanket where his mother had been; Soumya woke him up, and took him into one of the tents. Raju began whimpering, saying he wanted to sleep some more. She went to the blue mat; her father had not touched the rice from last night. Mixing the dry rice with the rainwater, she squeezed it into a gruel, and stuffed morsels into Raju’s mouth. He said he didn’t like it, and bit her fingers each time.
The rain fell harder, and she heard the foreman roar, “You sons of bald women, don’t slow down!”
The moment the rain stopped, Raju wanted to be pushed on the swing. “It’s going to start raining again,” she said, but he wouldn’t change his mind. She carried him in her arms to the old truck-tire swing near the compound wall, and put him on it, and gave him a push, shouting, “One! Two!”
As she pushed, a man appeared before her.
His dark, wet skin was coated in white dust, and it took an instant for her to recognize him.
“Sweetie,” he said, “you must do something for Daddy.”
Her heart was beating too fast for her to say a word. She wanted him to say “sweetie,” not like he was saying it now-as if it were just a word, air that he was breathing out-but like before, when it came from his heart, when it was accompanied by his pulling her to his chest and hugging her deeply and whispering madly into her ear.
He went on speaking, in the same strange, slow, slurred way, and told her what he wanted her to do; then he walked back to the house.
She found Raju, who was cutting an earthworm into smaller bits with a piece of glass he had stolen from the demolition site, and said, “We have to go.”
Raju could not be left alone, even though he would be a real nuisance on a trip like this. Once she had left him alone and he had swallowed a piece of glass.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To the Bunder.”
“Why?”
“There is a place by the Bunder, a garden, where Daddy’s friends are waiting for him to come. Daddy cannot go there-because the foreman will hit him again. You don’t want the foreman to beat Daddy again in front of all the world, do you?”
“No,” Raju said. “And when we get to this garden, what do we do?”
“We give Daddy’s friends at this garden ten rupees, and they will give us something Daddy really needs.”
“What?”
She told him.
Raju, already shrewd with money, asked, “How much will it cost?”
“Ten rupees, he said.”
“Did he give you ten rupees?”
“No. Daddy said we’ll have to get it ourselves. We’ll have to beg.”
As the two of them walked down Rose Lane, she kept her eyes on the ground. Once she had found five rupees on the ground-yes, five! You never knew what you’d find in a place where rich people live.
They moved to the side of the lane; a white car paused for a moment to go over a bump on the road, and she shouted at the driver:
“Where is the port, uncle?”
“Far from here,” he shouted back. “Go to the main road, and take a left.”
The tinted windows in the back of the car were rolled up, but through the driver’s window Soumya caught a glimpse of a passenger’s hand covered with gold bangles; she wanted to knock on the window. But she remembered the rule that the foreman had laid down for all the workers’ children. No begging in Rose Lane. Only on the main road. She controlled herself.
All the houses were being demolished and rebuilt in Rose Lane. Soumya wondered why people wanted to tear down these fine, large, whitewashed houses. Maybe houses became uninhabitable after some time, like shoes.
When the lights on the main road turned red, she went from autorickshaw to autorickshaw, opening and closing her fingers.
“Uncle, have pity, I’m starving.”
Her technique was solid. She had gotten it from her mother. It went like this: Even as she begged, for three seconds she kept eye contact; then her eye would begin to wander to the next autorickshaw. “Mother, I’m hungry”-rubbing her tummy-“give me food”-closing her fingers and bringing them to her mouth.
“Big brother, I’m hungry.”
“Grandpa, even a small coin would…”
While she did the road, Raju sat on the ground and was meant to whimper when anyone well dressed passed by. She did not count on him to do much; at least if he sat down he would stay out of other kinds of trouble, like running after cats, or trying to pet stray dogs that might be rabid.