In the afternoon, Uma took the child in her arms and went to visit didimoni on the seventh floor of Southern Gardens Flats. She did this from time to time, because she was always welcome in didimoni’s flat and she liked to keep in touch with her.
“Oh — it’s Uma,” said Mrs. Sengupta, whom Uma called “didimoni.” “Come into the room! How are you?”
“I’m well, didimoni,” said Uma shyly, stepping inside the bedroom. She sat on the floor beside the bed, Priti in her arms.
“The child has become very sweet — pretty…,” said didimoni.
Uma smiled with pleasure; that was another reason she liked coming here — the child was always fussed over. Priti looked back at didimoni and around her in silence, as if puzzled by the flat.
“And is everything going well?” asked Mrs. Sengupta.
“What should I say, didimoni,” said Uma with a small smile, “sometimes I want to leave him and come back here with Priti to work — he bothers me at times!”
Didimoni laughed — but did not know what to say. For although she could have possibly given Uma a job, it would have been too much of a problem having a child in the house; she had tried it with another servant, and it hadn’t worked. Nor did she really take Uma’s complaint seriously. And yet her heart went out to her. She had become thinner than before, and darker, and her teeth seemed to protrude from her mouth more prominently.
“Never mind,” she said, thinking back to her own marriage. “There are always misunderstandings at first, and then they get smoothed out.” Uma nodded and smiled a little, while Priti, in her arms, looked this way and that. Uma remembered how, in the first days she had met Bishu, she used to think he was a driver, because he sometimes had the car keys in his hand; only later had she discovered he was a cleaner.
After half an hour, she got up and said goodbye to didimoni, promising to come again, and walked to the front door and then the lift, glimpsed by the cook and the other servant who had once been her companions in this flat. On her way out, the child in her arms looked in a leisurely way at the furniture in the house — it was difficult to tell if she was registering anything — as if content to be adrift in this frail maternal carriage, an avid, if powerless, observer of life.
* * *
IN THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER, towards the end of the rains, Mr. Banerjee threw a couple of dinners in his flat. An unusual brightness emanated from that side of the mansion; parties were seldom thrown these days. Behind the white façade of the mansion, the lives of the occupants were in a sort of abeyance; none of the tenants paid rent to Mr. Banerjee — and Mr. Banerjee did not seem terribly concerned. Only against one tenant was a court case under way.
One morning, when Bishu was walking past the lawn towards the lane to buy a few things from the tea stall, the Hindustani watchman at the gate called out to him. “E Biswajeet!” They had never really liked each other, and the watchman always addressed him by his full, not his shortened, name. He was a bulky man in khaki, certainly larger than Bishu, who was only five feet four inches, and he had moustaches. “Have you heard?” “Heard what, darwan?” asked Bishu. “I haven’t heard anything.” “Arrey, everyone has heard and you haven’t heard,” said the watchman. “You’re a strange fellow! Your friend was taken away this morning by the police.” “My friend?” said Bishu — he felt suddenly ill; he could not hear the raucous cries of the crows overhead. “Which friend?” “Arrey — which friend — that friend of yours, Jagan, the one you brought to work,” said the watchman, leaning back on his stool. The watchman, his uniform, the lane, Southern Gardens, the sunlit lawn, all seemed to belong to a world of which Bishu was not really part. “Why?” he asked softly. “What does he do?” “The fellow is a thief, a known thief — he and his aunt’s son and some others were stealing bicycles and other things and selling them in these parts. They opened his trunk and found a gun in it — I saw it myself! Where did you bring him from, e Biswajeet?”
The first thing Bishu did was go back to Jagan’s room and open the door; the room was completely bare, except for sunlight and shadows coming through the window. Then he went upstairs, and Uma came out of the door and said, “Where were you? Mali was looking for you.” “Why he looking for me?” asked Bishu, stepping inside. Daal was boiling on the stove, and Priti was sitting on the floor and slapping it with her small hands. “How should I know? Is he an easy man to talk to? He just mumbled something and went off — I think dadababu wants to see you.”
Later, when Bishu met Mr. Banerjee in the sitting room inside his flat, he found the latter had already taken a decision.
“Bishu,” he said, “I asked you to bring me a good man. Did you know Jagan was stealing bicycles?”
Bishu wondered if he would lie, but he swallowed, and nothing would come out except what had really happened.
“One night, dadababu,” he said, “I sees bicycles. But I don’t asks Jagan, because after rains he has fever, and I don’t disturb him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Bishu?” asked Mr. Banerjee.
“Dadababu, I don’t see the bicycles again. I–I forgets them,” said Bishu. “I don’t realise…”
“This morning,” said Mr. Banerjee, “the police asked me if any of the servants were involved with that man. I could have told them your name, but I didn’t. But, taking into consideration what has happened, I don’t think I can keep you in this house any longer.”
Bishu was standing barefoot, his hands behind his back, staring at the floor. Then he said:
“Dadababu, I do not knows this man. When you tells me, ‘Get me good man,’ I tells Mejda, and he says: ‘I sends man from Khurda district, I knows him, he is from our village, he is good man.’ I not knows the man, dadababu.”
“Be that as it may, you should have been more careful,” said Mr. Banerjee. “I can keep you no longer.”
Bishu was silent. Then, looking at the floor, he said again:
“Dadababu, I works for seven years in this house, this is my first mistake. Please forgive me … I never gives you trouble before. Last year, you goes out of Calcutta for one month and didi alone in the house. If I thief, I could steal then from the house, but I does not steals anything. Please forgive me this time.”
“I can’t change my mind, Bishu,” said Mr. Banerjee. “You will have your full month’s salary and your notice.”
When Bishu got back to his room, he sat on the floor and repeated every detail to Uma; Uma listened silently, while Priti still sat nearby, absorbed, playing. He slapped his forehead with his hand, and said, “That serpent was always in our house, and I does not know it? Hai, what happened!” He could not even properly remember Jagan anymore, just the yellow check shirt and the dhoti he had worn on the day of arrival, and his ordinary, lined face, a face like so many others, of people struggling and arriving in this city and looking for work. “The man is a serpent! Quietly stealing bicycles, and I does not know! There was gun inside his trunk!” he said, as if he himself had seen it, which he now thought he had, so clear and vivid and treacherous it seemed to him. “Now, when I thinks of it, I never sees him in his room when I comes back at night — he must be doing all his dirty business at night!” Then he said, angry and hurt: “Dadababu blames me! I does nothing, but, for no reason, he tells me to go! No, I does not want this job!” The injustice of it shocked him. Uma could hear the cries of shaliks and mynahs and crows increasing with the afternoon. She felt sorry for Bishu, who was, after all, younger than she, and on whom the burden of his small family had fallen unexpectedly.
Evening was full of activity. Bishu went to his friends in the building at the end of the lane, South Apartments, which was even bigger and more impressive than Southern Gardens Flats — it had come up two years ago. He told his friends to see if there were any jobs available. It turned out that a Mr. Chatterjee in one of the flats needed a helper in the house, and one of Bishu’s friends took him to see the gentleman. Mr. Chatterjee saw Bishu and did not dislike what he saw; it appeared there might be a chance for a job. Meanwhile, Uma, carrying Priti in her arms, went to didimoni to tell her of what had happened. Didimoni was aghast. “But what will you do now?” she asked. “The worst that can happen is we will go to Manecktala where we used to pay rent for a room. That room is still there,” said Uma. Mr. Sengupta, didimoni’s husband, said: “Bishu doesn’t seem to be to blame. If it comes to that, I could have a word with Mr. Banerjee and ask him to reconsider his decision.” At the same time, he was not sure if interference in another’s affairs was wise unless absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, Uma went back reassured, and with a lightened heart.