by Alka Joshi
Seeing Kanta and Manu with Radha’s baby had lifted my spirits, too. They were doting parents, eager to take care of their first, and now only, child. I had watched Radha for signs of jealousy, but she seemed content to share her baby with her auntie and uncle. They would all be coming back to Jaipur in a week, and Radha would live with them.
It only took a few days back in Jaipur, however, to bring me back to the reality of my life. After thirteen years of hard work, I was right back where I started, as poor now as I had been at seventeen. We would no longer be getting thirty thousand rupees from the adoption agreement. I’d refused Parvati’s tainted marriage commission. I had no money to pay back Samir’s loan or the Lady Bradley medical bills. My saris had faded from too many washings; there was no money for new clothes. I walked to my few appointments (ladies like Mrs. Patel had remained steadfast) to save money on rickshaws.
I could have asked Kanta and Manu for money, but that would have been like requesting compensation for the baby my friends had adopted. The very thought of it repulsed me.
I had other debts. The neem oil vendor to whom I owed several hundred rupees came knocking at my door. Six months ago, I would have told him to go through Malik. Yesterday, I merely showed him my empty hands. He had a lean, hawkish face with eyes set too close together. He scanned my property, my tattered belongings, my threadbare blouse. I could tell he was surprised at how far I’d come down in the world.
His small eyes studied me, lingering on my chest, until I felt the need to cross my arms over my breasts.
He snorted and swallowed phlegm. “You henna women, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“You can henna my wife in exchange for what you owe.”
When I arrived at his house, the vendor said his wife was waiting in the bedroom. As I walked toward it, he grabbed my arm.
I stiffened.
“I want you to henna her breasts.”
I stared at him. Not since my time in Agra with the courtesans had I been asked to henna anything other than hands or feet, with the exception of Kanta’s stomach, which had been my idea.
I could hardly refuse him. I had no other way to repay what I owed. I stepped inside the bedroom, closing the door behind me. The vendor’s wife, a thin woman as dark as a coconut husk, waited for me on the floor, her hair covered with her pallu. Since we were alone, I suggested she might be more comfortable uncovering her head; she smiled shyly and refused, hiding even more of her face with her sari.
She surprised me by saying, “You’re thinner.” She had seen me in better days, when I had shopped at her husband’s store with Malik.
I had stopped giving reasons for my diminishing weight. When someone asked, or noticed, I simply shrugged. Almost daily, Malik brought treats the palace chef had prepared, but I only took a few bites before my appetite left me.
I asked her to remove her blouse. She had breastfed three children, and her chest sagged. I used the henna design to hide as many of her stretch marks as I could. I had finished decorating one breast only when I heard the bedroom door creak. I lifted the reed and turned to see the oil vendor standing in the doorway, working a toothpick between his lower teeth.
I raised an eyebrow to ask what he wanted.
“Continue,” he said, stepping inside the room. He closed the door. His wife retreated farther behind her sari.
“My work with the ladies is private. You can see it soon enough after I leave.”
“You’re the one with the debts, remember?”
I dropped my gaze and turned back to his wife.
“Could you paint a face? On her breasts?”
I ignored him, dipping the reed in the henna. “I’m painting a spiral of new buds, an infinite blessing of good fortune on your house.”
“Other images might do the same.” His voice softened in a way that chilled me. I could imagine the leer on his face.
“Such as?”
“Your face.”
The impudence! He knew how desperate I was, or he wouldn’t have dared. The insult wasn’t just aimed at me, but at the mother of his children. That he might disgrace or shame her was of no concern to him; she was his property. I felt disgust, as I’d felt at the home of the kulfi-walla earlier this week, when he asked me to henna his hair. Of course I had refused. The drawing skill I was so proud of wasn’t worth anything to people like him.
“Well?”
I wanted to throw something at him to shut him up, but the reed was too light, my henna pot too precious. I met his eyes. “No. The agreement was to paint her breasts.”
He chewed his toothpick. After a moment, he said, “Very well.”
But he didn’t leave. He settled on the floor, behind me. I moved my body so I didn’t have to look at him, even from the corner of my eye. I continued patterning leaves that spiraled outward and upward from her nipple, to make her breasts appear lifted.
After a few minutes, I heard him rustling. I knew by a slight shift of her head that his wife had heard, as well. A wave of nausea swept over me as I realized his hands were fumbling with his dhoti. I felt her shame, and something else. Her resentment. At me, not him.
I dropped the reed on the floor and jumped up. Hurriedly, I began loading my supplies into my carryall.
He gripped my arm. His hand was warm from pleasuring himself; I wrenched it loose. “Don’t touch me!”
I reached for the henna pot.
“You haven’t finished!”
I grit my teeth. “I would sooner clean latrines than step into this house again.”
He tore the henna pot out of my hands and threw it at the wall. “You’re cheating me?” The paste splattered the floor and walls. His wife jerked the sari off her face and, for a moment, all three of us stared at the wreckage.
Saasuji’s bowl, my precious henna pot, was nothing now but shards. I could buy another for a few rupees in the Pink Bazaar, but this bowl had made me feel close to her even as I moved a thousand miles away.
Furious, I elbowed the vendor’s ribs and pushed him up against the door with all my weight. His shoulder hit the doorframe, and he fell to the floor. I’d knocked the wind out of him. Before he could catch his breath, I grabbed as many of the clay shards as I could, dumped them in my carryall and ran out of the house.
I burst into a run, crossed the road and turned into the first alley. A rat scampered down one side, in the murky, fetid water. I braced myself against the crumbling wall, bent over and vomited. Milky tea swirled in the tobacco-colored cesspool.
A memory of an alley similar to this one came to me. Me, at sixteen. Back in my village. Running from an angry, violent Hari. Spewing my guts out.
Here I was at thirty, still looking for an escape. But where was there to go?
“Ji? Are you all right?”
I whirled around.
Lala, Parvati’s former servant, was looking at me with concern. She led me away from the sewage, then used the end of her sari to wipe a corner of my mouth.
I put my hand on her wrist to stop her, using my own pallu to wipe my mouth.
“It’s a hard habit to break,” she said, smiling, “after raising MemSahib’s boys all those years.”
Her dark face was leaner than I remembered, the cheeks sunken. I took in her patched sari.
“Where did you go after...?” I couldn’t complete the question. I already knew why she and her niece had been fired from the Singhs’. Samir had confirmed it.
The woman ran a tongue over her teeth. “To my brother’s at first. He’s a big man, a builder, and he has means. But he refused because she was with child. Finally, he arranged a marriage for her.”
I remembered that Naraya had been arranging a hasty marriage for his pregnant daughter. “Your brother—is he called Naraya?”
Her eyes welled with tears. “Hahn.” She wiped them with her sari. “A h
arder man you will not find. Called his own daughter a whore, a she-dog.”
I already knew the answer but I had to ask, “And Master Ravi—”
“I raised him, but I spoiled him, too. We all did. Such a beautiful boy he was. I told my niece he wasn’t for her, but she wouldn’t listen.”
“Where is she now?”
Tears rolled down the old woman’s wrinkled cheeks. “Her new husband locked her out of the house when he found out she was already pregnant. She sat in the courtyard, Ji, and put herself on fire. They both died—her and the baby.”
My legs gave way. I would have fallen if Lala hadn’t supported me.
“I had heard about your sachets. They could have helped her.” That day, a year ago, at Parvati’s. I remembered Lala standing on the veranda. I had a sense that she wanted to talk, but she seemed to lose her nerve. I should have sought her out and asked what she needed. It’s the kind of thing my saas would have done. How far I’d come from everything my mother-in-law stood for!
I looked at Lala. Here I’d been feeling sorry for myself, when this woman had given everything—even her livelihood—to take care of her niece.
“And you, Lala? How...?”
“I tried other ladies, but MemSahib made sure they wouldn’t hire me. I clean houses now. Here, in this neighborhood.”
Parvati had ruined Lala, too, to protect her son from scandal.
I stood up, leaning on Lala for support, dizzy from the effort. “I wish—I’m so sorry—”
“We are powerless against God’s will, Ji.”
She rubbed my back, as she might have comforted a child.
My saas wouldn’t have scolded me for my actions, or lack thereof, either; she would have patted my arm pityingly, as Lala was doing now, which was worse. I wanted to shed my skin and start over.
I mumbled another apology before turning toward home.
* * *
Malik caught up with me a mile from Rajnagar. He stank of cigarettes.
I edged away. I stank, too, of sick and shame.
I was holding a piece of my henna pot in one hand. He looked at it.
“I’ll take you home,” he said.
“I have no money for a rickshaw.”
“I do.”
“I don’t want your money,” I said, regretting now how harshly I’d spoken. “I have two legs.”
“So do I. We’ll walk together.”
Malik had been my helper, and my friend, for a long time. He’d followed me around Jaipur for a while before I noticed him. When I did, I saw a skinny child, bedraggled, shoeless, watching me with eyes alert and clear. I knew that if I waited long enough, he would come to me. When he did, to ask if he could carry my tiffins, he spoke respectfully, but also with a confidence that belied his youth and frail body. I handed my tiffins over to him, as I handed my carrier to him now.
I didn’t deserve his loyalty, just as I hadn’t deserved the comfort Lala had tried to give me.
“Auntie-Boss.”
“I’m not your boss anymore.”
“You’ll always be my boss,” he said with the smile that came so easily to him. “Because you’re smarter than Chef.” He started walking backward so he could face me. “I told him I could get the sweetest raw cashews from the Pathans—better than the ones he puts on his lamb curry—for less than he’s paying now. And the fool turned me down. You know why?”
I said nothing.
“He won’t do business with a Muslim—except for me, of course! But you’re a better businessman. You would have gone for the better deal.”
I stopped walking. “If I’m so smart, why don’t I have two stones to rub together?”
“Arré! That was my fault! When you were in Shimla, I bragged about your henna to the kulfi-walla.” Malik spat. “He put henna on his hair and told everyone you had done it! Now all of Jaipur thinks you’ve touched his unclean head.”
That explained why the tailor and the vegetable seller crossed the street when they saw me coming. And why the doodh-walla had stopped delivering my milk. When I went to ask the milkman if he’d forgotten, he said he wouldn’t take money from a fallen Brahmin. Now I scurried weekly to a shop twenty minutes from my home, hiding my face in my pallu, trying not to call attention to myself, like a petty criminal.
Malik picked up a stone and threw it, casting a sideways glance at me. “You can’t go on like this.”
Something in the way he spoke ripped apart whatever was holding me together. I stopped and covered my mouth with my sari, let out a sob.
Malik put an arm around my shoulders. I allowed it.
“Auntie-Boss, I know you’ve worked hard. But weren’t you happier before you built that house? Your business was good. You had money in the bank. You were free to do as you pleased.”
“I was never free, Malik. No more than I am now.”
“Move away.”
“Where? To do what?”
“Same thing you were doing here. Maybe in Delhi or Bombay. I’ll go with you.”
“You’re doing fine here.”
“Didn’t I just say I don’t like working for fools, Madam?”
Dear Malik. How much I had missed him.
I let out a long sigh. “Starting over isn’t easy.”
Malik looked as if he’d been as patient with me as he could; it was time for tougher medicine.
“When have you let that stop you, Auntie-Boss? You must move from Jaipur—there is no other way. Unless you’ve thought of something better.”
* * *
My belly and breasts were raw from scrubbing. Shreds of coconut husks and slivers of charcoal pricked my underarms, the insides of my thighs and my scalp. I sloughed the debris off my skin with my palms, wincing from the pain, praying the punishment would make me feel less polluted. But no matter how hard I rubbed, I could still feel the neem oil vendor’s hand on my arm this afternoon, his breath on my back. And I would start the cleansing all over again.
When I was too tired to go on, I rubbed lavender oil into my raw skin. I put on a clean sari, the hem of which was frayed. As I combed through my tangles, my eyes landed on the hole in my cot I’d meant to fix—a year ago already?—when the jute had started to fray. Now it had completely come apart. As I slept, sometimes my foot went right through the hole.
A sadhu called from the street to beg for food. I put the comb down and wrapped newspaper around the chapattis Malik had brought yesterday. I ran out the door to give him the food. The holy man, covered in a faded saffron cloth, was waiting, leaning on a cane. He had renounced his home and material comforts, and freed himself of ego, something I didn’t have the courage to do.
When I held out my offering, he said a blessing for me in a dialect I didn’t understand. But he didn’t take my gift. He stood looking at me.
In the pupils of his eyes, I saw what he saw: a sapling of a woman, wet strands of hair dangling like snakes around her shoulders, the thin sari. Neck and arms scratched and bleeding. I realized that I seemed so pitiful to him that he, who had so little, was refusing the food I offered.
I thrust the chapattis in his hand, roughly, and ran back inside, slamming the door. I leaned against it and closed my eyes, my heart hopping wildly in my chest.
When my breathing returned to normal I moved to the worktable.
With shaking hands, I unfolded the letter that had arrived yesterday.
October 10, 1956
My Dear Mrs. Shastri,
Our current situation is best described by Mr. Dickens: it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness. Alas, the migration of the hill tribes and their herds to southern climes has brought our local clinic to an abrupt halt—and, with it, our consultation agreement (at least until the season changes). There is, however, light in the darkness: the opportunity to begin planning the herb garden.
Were you to commit to an extended stay in Shimla, you could study our climate, soil conditions and the indigenous herbs here, talk to the city’s residents (you’ll even find herbal enthusiasts among our staff) and draw up a plan for developing the Lady Bradley Healing Garden.
Say you will consider my proposal and help me minister to the people of Shimla. Of course, I intend to do everything in my power to persuade you to settle in our fair city once you’re here. Are our environs not beautiful enough? Our people not adequately hospitable?
Undeniably, you have a valuable service to provide the ladies of Jaipur, but if I am to believe Mrs. Agarwal, some untoward and unjust accusations have been leveled at you. Let me speak plainly here. Pride should not get in the way of sharing your gift with a larger public. (Mrs. Agarwal should be held blameless for sharing your plight with me; when she paid your sister’s medical bill, I was compelled to ask her how you were. If she hadn’t told me, I might have lacked the courage to write to you with this request.)
You have much to teach us. Your work could help—and has helped—save more than a few lives and given our patients comfort. The hill people have not forgotten you. (Our pregnant patient from the Gaddi tribe whom you helped can’t stop raving about your bitter melon recipe. Her baby is due any day now!)
I, for one, hope you will consider, and accept, this invitation. I eagerly await your arrival, both as a keen and willing student and as your devoted friend.
With great respect and anticipation,
Jay Kumar
Kanta’s generosity brought tears to my eyes. She’d known that if she had told me what she was going to do, I would have stopped her. Radha’s medical bills were one less worry now.
I thought about what Malik had said. Not for the first time, he suggested I move away from Jaipur.
Jay Kumar was offering me a chance to heal, to work with people who wanted what I had to offer. Who believed my knowledge was sacred. It was a chance to do the work my saas taught me. She lived in me, still. I could make her proud once more. Be proud of myself again.
