‘What will happen, then, Jumna?’ asked Mrs Sengupta. Jumna, sitting on the carpet, pulling the aanchal of her sari to cover her head, said, ‘What will happen? Memsaab, you worry for nothing.’ Jumna was moved; she was not insincere; the poor have a special ability, after all, to understand the torments of their employers, to empathise with them. It was as if she absorbed some of Mallika Sengupta’s pain.
Her real name was Heera. Before she came to work for this family six years ago, a bearded jamadar with red eyes and a paunch used to come in the mornings to clean the bathrooms in the Cumballa Hill flat. While going down the hill one evening, Nirmalya had suddenly seen him from the car, staggering drunkenly on the road. Nirmalya had always wondered what the man did for the rest of the day. ‘He’s a strange man. His kind eat crows,’ said the driver. ‘Crows?’ Nirmalya was awe-struck. Nirmalya thought of the jamadar sitting in a room, a dead crow in his hand; he was preparing to cook it. One of those crows that sit on parapets, balconies, behind the windows of toilets, and fill the day with their cawing. Nirmalya couldn’t decide whether to add a family to the scene — children in the room, sitting next to the jamadar as he began to cook. ‘Yes, yes, “they” eat crows,’ said the driver, and, from the way he said the word, Nirmalya could see the shadowy ‘they’ the jamadar belonged to was, in the driver’s eyes, beyond the pale. Then the jamadar was back the next morning, silently wiping the floors.
If the jamadar came from the realm of night and darkness, Jumna came from the world of light. Of course she was a jamadarni, and maybe came from the same caste as the jamadar, but, from the beginning, Mrs Sengupta had been won over by her demeanour — ‘She’s cultured, more cultured than the ladies I meet at parties.’ This spoke for Jumna’s manners and intelligence in that dawn of her employment, and it also spoke for Mrs Sengupta’s own dislike of, and her unease at, the increasing number of company parties she went to. As for Jumna, she’d come, like the jamadar, to wipe the floors, to clean the toilet bowl, but gradually she shed her jamadarni sweeper-woman status. She became all things — confidante; surrogate mother to the boy; slave and friend; part-time servant — and the hands that held the bucket and toilet brush also came to make chapattis. ‘She makes very good chapattis,’ said Mallika Sengupta, ‘she puts them straight on to the gas flame and they swell like balloons.’
The boy took it upon himself to educate Jumna. He was also profoundly curious about why she was poor. Already, at eight, though he despised school himself, he was an advocate of the religion of education; he was convinced that going to school could have changed Jumna. They had long and serious dialogues. ‘Baba, I only went to school till the second class. Then I’d tell my mother I was going to school, but I wouldn’t go. I would go somewhere with a friend and come back and say I’d been to school.’ ‘And that is why you are in this state now,’ the boy said, his thesis proved.
During other conversations, Jumna, abandoning her jhadu, would provide more metaphysical explanations.
‘It must have been some paap I’d done in my last birth,’ as if she’d hit upon a reason that was actually plausible, ‘which is why I’m leading this life in this birth.’
‘Something you did in your last birth,’ said the boy, looking at the familiar face of the woman before him. The logic appealed to him. Although his eyes were open, the world went dark for a second, and he wondered who Jumna might have been, and what terrible transgression she might have committed: this person who rang the doorbell at nine thirty in the morning.
‘But since you’re having such an awful life in this birth,’ said the boy, leaning forward on the heavy drawing-room chair, ‘you should have a wonderful life in the next one.’ He smiled, because it was a joke; but he also hoped it might be true.
‘I hope so,’ she said solemnly, picking up the jhadu. She too was joking; but she didn’t completely reject the idea.
‘You’ll probably live in a palace,’ said the boy, elaborating. They shared the joke together in the drawing room. In this way, they’d become close. The sorrow of this woman, without his knowing it, had — like something you eat or drink early in life, whose effects become clear only in adulthood — entered and penetrated him.
He wanted to cure her and educate her. When he was still a child, his parents brought him a doctor-set; temporarily, he became her doctor. She was ignorant; she must be treated and warned. ‘You drink tap water,’ he accused her. ‘It has germs.’ Indeed, she drank tap water in the kitchen, cupping her hand and bending, then wiping her mouth with the back of her hand in absent-minded satisfaction.
So, the treatment commenced. He had to inoculate her. He used the plastic syringe from the doctor-set. Then, to be more thorough, he pricked her with needles from his mother’s large dressing table. ‘Why must you do this, baba?’ she asked, genuinely bewildered. ‘Because you have germs inside you,’ he replied. She could say nothing to the boy.
Two days later, tearful but smiling, she said to his mother, ‘Baba is playing doctor. He pricks me with needles.’ And she showed the marks on her arm. ‘He’s been giving me injections,’ she said, still smiling.
‘I was trying to cure her,’ the boy said stubbornly.
The treatment stopped.
* * *
HE WAS LORDLY with her, and at home in general, but he was afraid of the outside world. It wasn’t fear as much as a shyness of contact — a mild terror of people he already knew. He disliked convivial occasions; he particularly disliked festivals. During Holi, he was the last to go and play; once, when he’d been standing among the furniture in the Cumballa Hill flat, unsure of whether to join the friends who were clamouring outside the main door and indulging in profligate bouts of doorbell-ringing, he was horrified to see, suddenly, purple water trickling underneath the door into the flat; one of the boys outside was busy; it was like a horror film.
He didn’t like Diwali either, though he hadn’t entirely admitted this to himself. Come Diwali, Apurva Sengupta journeyed dutifully to Teen Batti to bring back a small package of sparklers and firecrackers. Then nighttime, and the dark umbrella of the sky flashing with meteors; but Nirmalya wanted the sky to be quiet again. There was a small back garden in La Terrasse from which his father tentatively launched rockets into the sky. But, while chocolate bombs exploded in the neighbourhood, it was clear that Apurva Sengupta didn’t care much for the festival either. When Nirmalya had asked him why he never bought chocolate bombs (because, although he was uneasy with the festival, he was also eager to be part of it), Mr Sengupta said:
‘This is the way businessmen use up their black money,’ as a pudgy boy in shorts on Little Gibbs Road advanced and swiftly lit a fuse and then ran away again. ‘They have all that money lying around, they have to find ways of spending it.’
A one-night conflagration of undeclared assets! This was one of the revelations of Nirmalya’s childhood. Almost all his friends’ fathers had ‘black money’. Yet he always sniffed the air when a bomb went off, because he loved the sweet smell of burning explosives.
* * *
THE BOY CAME OUT into the sitting room; his mother had called him repeatedly. At fifteen and a half, he had a shadowy goatee under his chin. For more than a year, he’d shaved with pride, even when there was only the slightest evidence of facial hair; standing in front of the bathroom mirror, it was half daydream, in which he felt separate and aloof from his classmates. But now there was a sudden change, and he allowed the goatee to grow. He also allowed his hair to grow. He’d let it grow once before, when he was in school, and had been punished for it; there had been warnings in class, and then an order to stand outside the classroom, and finally a trek to the vice-principal’s office. He was disciplined, lectured, his parents notified; he’d had to have a haircut — his mother had forced him to have it cropped. Now he let it grow again; his exams were over; he felt answerable to nobody.