The Hope Factory

by Lavanya Sankaran

  There were times, in the early years, when the battle fatigue hit Anand so hard he would almost stop, dreading the next phone call, harbinger of trouble, of something gone wrong, of chaos unanticipated. But something in him had clung on, blindly, and he had managed to pull himself out of the primordial slime and say, very simply, yes, we can do it. We can produce things of world-class quality, and we can deliver them on time. And in him lay the strength that comes from such alchemical magic, the power discovered within himself to take environmental dross and turn it into pure gold.

  He walked back to his car and reversed slowly out of the area. He would mention this visit to Ananthamurthy, who had toiled in this old, greasy shed by his side. Or perhaps not. Neither of them was particularly given to romanticizing their past; Ananthamurthy would probably stare at him in surprise and wonder why Anand was telling him things he already knew.

  ON THE DRIVE HOME, Anand found himself rehearsing parts of the speech that he would be making the following day. “Welcome,” he said, to the steering wheel. “Welcome.” He fell prey to his usual insecurities for a fleeting moment and wished that he had certain natural advantages: of height, a better speaking voice, the ability to size up people at a glance and the charisma to instantly win them over. “Welcome,” he tried. The highway bestrode a gentle ridge, covered by the rising tide of the endless city, colored cinder-block houses topped with black plastic water tanks racing up the slope in a wave. His car nudged past stained city walls layered with cinema and political advertisements, the film actors posed with an engaging artfulness not quite mastered by the politicians: plug-ugly, with odd hair and shifty smiles like wanted crime posters gone coy and desperate to please. “Welcome,” he said, in passing. Not. Motherfuckers.

  two

  THE SHINY LITTLE HATCHBACK CAR appeared in exquisite contrast to its surroundings, the metal glossy, the padded interior cool with air-conditioned comfort. The road it traversed was composed of tar and dirt and fetid garbage and flooded with a wash of pedestrian traffic that spilled into the path of the car in careless, dusty profusion. There was little room to maneuver within the press of human habitation: shops, dwellings, tiffin rooms, all crammed together, higgledy-piggledy, dangerously one-atop-the-other, falling right off, a miracle of wishful architecture and denuded finances.

  From where she stood, next to the onion seller’s cart, Kamala studied the passage of the vehicle with something akin to pride. She did not own the car, it was true. She had never been inside this or any other car. But she had watched the owner grow into his current eminence from a dusty schoolboy (not too different from her own) playing cricket in the gully outside her home and being scolded by his mother, who, like her, cleaned houses for a living.

  The car stopped next to a new building painted a cheerful pink. He was here to visit to his parents after a break of several months; Kamala, along with the rest of the neighborhood, knew all the details. Who could have anticipated it? That he would win a scholarship, that he would study engineering, that he would find employment with a company in Pune, and flourish so well that his parents could give up their jobs cleaning houses and tending gardens and live, like royalty, in bright pink homes and have him visit, driving all the way from Pune in his bright new car.

  She would pay them a visit later, Kamala decided, carrying some fruit with her. That would be perfectly acceptable. To visit, and to congratulate them on their success—and find out how such success was to be achieved.

  She turned her attention back to the onion in her hand, testing the weight of it on her palm. It was still warm, trapping within itself the dregs of the day’s heat and of the various human hands that had handled it. Unlike with other vegetables, there was no real art to the purchase of an onion. For tomatoes in season, for instance, one might bide one’s time through the day—wait for the morning rush of customers to subside, for the remaining tomatoes to ripen further in the noonday sun, turning lush and red and plump with juice, until evening time, when the vendors were eager to get rid of them at any price; the tomatoes would not survive the damp of the night. That was the judicious time to buy. But onions were different; hardy, unromantic vegetables, their price did not change with the passage of the day but with seasonal supply. At times, a kilo of onions cost five rupees and, frugally husbanded, could last a week, but in the low season, the prices went up by so much that one usually did without.

  “Sister, are you going to purchase it or not? What is so special about that one onion?”

  Kamala started. “Forgive me, brother, I’ll take these,” she said and picked out two more, handing them to the onion seller for weighing.

  The paper-wrapped onions joined the other vegetables inside her woven plastic bag. In addition to onions, she had bought a quarter kilo of green beans, some potatoes, carrots, and two tomatoes. She would cook them into a rich kurma, she decided, the stew thickened with coconut and spices and oil, and serve it on steaming hot rice to her son for dinner.

  She walked homeward, passing the parked car on her way, and could not resist peeping in through the glass window, touching the metal door handle for good luck.

  THE GULLY SHE LIVED IN was off the main alley and narrow enough that she could span the gap between the houses by stretching out her hand. “Stop, stop,” she called to the young boys hitting at a cricket ball. “Rest your game a moment till I pass.” Until recently, her son would have been one of their number, playing cricket in the gully and getting scolded when the ball bounced and crashed against the walls of the houses that ran down each side, but, as he grew, he discovered new pursuits that took him farther afield. Right now, he was nowhere to be seen, but he would come home as soon as dinner was ready, as though summoned magically by the scent of fresh-cooked food.

  She entered a small, narrow courtyard with several singlestory dwellings clustered around it. The largest comprised four rooms and was the home of the landlord. The smallest, a single room, belonged to Kamala.

  She put her bag of vegetables down and went to the bathing area to wash her hands and feet. By the time Kamala was seated on the stoop outside her door, the pile of vegetables washed, a plate and a knife laid ready on the ground, the landlord’s mother had emerged from her own house, as she usually did, with some of her own dinner preparations in hand. The chopping of vegetables and the cleaning of rice gave them an opportunity to inspect each other’s menus, proffer suggestions, and enjoy a gentle gossip.

  “Oho!” the landlord’s mother said. “You are planning a feast of vegetables.”

  “I got a little greedy, yes, amma,” said Kamala. “It’s been a time since I prepared a nice vegetable kurma for my boy.”

  “Kamala-daughter, he is at the age when he could eat all the vegetables in the world and still be hungry for more,” said the landlord’s mother. “His schoolwork, it’s going well?”

  Kamala grimaced; a boy as clever as her son should not find it so difficult to sit quietly at his studies. “His studies would go well,” she said, “if he paid them a little more attention.”

  “He is very smart,” the landlord’s mother said placatingly. “He is sure to do well, do not worry. He is smart and full of ambition.”

  Kamala was unable to explain why it was her son’s sense of ambition that made her so uneasy.

  “And your good son, amma?” she asked. “He is well, and your daughter-in-law also?” This was a delicate question, since the landlord’s wife had recently quarreled with her husband and was now living at her brother’s house. The courtyard had echoed with raised voices and slammed doors, an unusual occurrence for an otherwise quiet-spoken couple, but with three children fully grown, they had not planned for her current pregnancy and it seemed to throw both of them into turmoil. “As well as can be expected. Pregnant, after all these years! What a pair of fools they are, at this age.”

  Mindful of her audience, Kamala didn’t give full rein to her enjoyment of such an intemperate latter-day romance, though she could not resist saying, “Blame it on the
full moon, amma. Even Radha and Krishna were not immune to it.”

  The old lady regarded her with a fulminating eye. “Radha and Krishna were not old enough to be grandparents themselves!” She laughed reluctantly. “Well, a baby is always welcome. Such a joy, unlike us old ones, always grumbling …”

  THE PEACE OF THE EVENING settled about the courtyard; the sounds of cicadas and crickets mingled with the voices from the other rooms, pleasantly close, pleasantly hushed. An old kerosene lamp warmed Kamala’s room and filled it with a gentle yellow light that made strange shadows upon the walls.

  Her ears caught the creak of the courtyard gate as the vegetable kurma was on its last simmer. The air was redolent with spices and coconut, and her son came nosing through, sniffing like a starving puppy.

  “No! No!” she said. “Not a mouthful until you have washed yourself.”

  The mug’s worth of water splashed over his face and hands and feet was more a ritual of pleasing his mother than any real attempt to clean himself; Narayan flung himself on the ground next to Kamala as she heaped his plate with hot rice and ladled the vegetable stew over it. At first he was too hungry to do more than eat, mixing the rice and gravy quickly with his right hand and shoveling it into his mouth, his fingers ready with the next morsel before he had swallowed the last. His eyes, though, held the sparkle of news, and Kamala waited patiently for him to finish. There was a simple contentment in watching him eat that never went away.

  The fact was, and she accepted it now, that no matter how much she fed him, his skin would never achieve the soft luxuriance that the children of the wealthy possessed, ample with flesh and free from city dust. The bread and coffee she gave him for breakfast, the three rotis she packed with pickle for his lunch, the rice and vegetables she fed him at dinner could not compete with the quantities of food available in the homes where she worked, their kitchens filled with eggs and meats and packets of chips and milk and cake. They ate so much, those children, that their plumpness frequently distended to fat, their bellies bursting forth to hang above their trousers.

  Not so, her son. His body used every scrap of food ingested, much as hers did. His face was lean, his naked body thin and corded with muscle and bone. For all that, he was strong; he could lift his mother and swing her about, laughing while she shrieked. And his mind was ever alert, constantly devising new ways of getting himself into trouble. When he had been younger, she had been charmed by his inventiveness, laughing with pleasure at his antics and comparing him favorably to his peers, especially that stolid Ganesha who lived opposite, whose mud-encrusted mind was free from independent thought and always looked to his mother’s face for answers. But now, that same stolid Ganesha had grown into a boy who worked at his studies in the evenings and gave his mother no trouble.

  “Did they give you much homework today, in school?” she asked. Narayan’s eyes met hers, so brimful of mischief that her heart immediately sank. She gazed sternly at him, trying to decipher his actions. And immediately understood. “Bad boy!” she raged. “How could you! Do not tell me you have missed school again! Bad child! Why do you do this!”

  “Don’t shout, Amma,” he said. “It was for a very good reason. See what I have brought for you.” He emptied out his pockets and displayed, before his mother’s astonished gaze, a collection of notes and coins. “All for you! See?”

  “But where did you get this? Child, what have you done!”

  But Narayan, with his inborn air of a showman, was not to be hurried. He ate the last scraps of his food. He washed out his plate and placed it to dry. And when he judged his mother was ready to explode, he sat down and told her his news.

  “It was that Raghavan’s idea,” he said, not quieting Kamala’s anxiety a bit. Raghavan was three years older than her son, and a product of the streets. His father was a drunk, his mother something worse, and he had survived doing god-knows-what. He was tough, resourceful, and in Kamala’s view, not at all to be trusted. Not for Raghavan a life of decent hard work; he had about him an air of raffish dissoluteness and was always talking of ways to make money quickly.

  Kamala disliked him and absolutely hated his friendship with her son. He would lead Narayan down wrongful paths, Raghavan, with his heavy-lidded eyes, and his pack of lazy, good-for-nothing friends, who thought that smoking cigarettes like their favorite movie star was sufficient to render them just like him. And if in his movie roles, the star stared with disrespectful, lustful eyes at passing girls, so must they. As he fought and defeated the corrupt lathi-stick-wielding policeman with his bare hands, so too must they mock and harass the local traffic policeman, who did nothing worse than stand tiredly at the street corner occasionally misdirecting the traffic. When his movies suggested that outspoken, defiant damsels needed acid thrown on their faces or were indeed asking to be raped, they nodded wisely. When he played a poor man who challenged the authority of the rich, he did so to the untrammeled appreciation of Raghavan and his friends, who refused to recognize that the actor lived, in his off-camera life, an existence fully as wealth-encrusted as the ones he opposed onscreen. Kamala could not accept any of it. That irritating young male braggadocio, besides being unpleasantly disrespectful, conveyed, at its base, a distinct lack of common sense. That wretched actor, instead of (in his latest comedy) portraying a young man who defied his parents and survived on his wits by resorting to robbery along with a pretty female companion, why couldn’t he have played a young man who studied hard and listened to his mother and aspired to a job offer at a nice city office? Then all his besotted young male followers would follow suit, and all across the state, mothers would light lamps in thankfulness and young girls (and policemen) would sigh in relief. Or if the movie star should plead innocence and say, why, my work is just entertainment, why should I be asked to behave like a pious temple priest a-blessing the poor, then why couldn’t young idiots like Raghavan, thought Kamala, coming to the nub of the matter, realize that movies were one thing and real life something quite different? Fools.

  So now she prepared to listen to Narayan with a certain amount of prejudice in her mind and a dread that the money he held had been acquired through illegal, dubious means.

  “Guess where I got this from, Amma,” he said. She was in no mood to play guessing games over his latest deviltry. “Nonsense,” she said. “Tell me immediately, how did you receive this money?”

  “From the street corner,” he said.

  “What do you mean, from the street corner. What nonsense have you been up to? That policeman is going to catch you and give you a beating! And perhaps that would be a good thing!”

  “No, he will not, Amma. Don’t worry. He knows what I was doing; he is now my friend. Don’t worry so, it’s nothing wrong.”

  And, trying her patience no further, he told her: he had spent the day selling magazines and newspapers to vehicles that halted at the traffic lights on the main road. “It works like this,” he said. “The agent for the area gives us a full ten percent for selling magazines, and for some, even fifteen, twenty percent. And, Amma, I am really good at this; even the policeman said so. After just two hours I was selling as much as the senior boys who have been doing this for a long time.”

  “And that useless street-rascal Raghavan also did this? He sold magazines?”

  “Yes. Actually, he was the one who told us about it. But after a while, he went off to see a movie. I kept at it the entire day!” Narayan counted out the money he had made—it was almost a hundred rupees. “Do you see?” he said, gloating. “If I do this every day, Amma, I can earn as much as you do in a month!”

  Kamala had not anticipated something like this. That her son, her little Narayan, should find out this clever way of making money and then proceed to do so very well at it—and not let himself be distracted by those louts who went off to the movie. The money he had made was not insignificant at all, not a sum she could dismiss. If what he said was true, if he could indeed sell these magazines so well—it made her mind spin giddily wit
h the notion of suddenly having twice as much money at her disposal and the great easing of burden that would bring. But hard on the heels of such fantasy came a sobering reflection: if she let Narayan get seduced by such earnings today, then she would seal his fate; he would give up his hated studies immediately and settle into selling magazines for the rest of his life. There would be no school, no English, no office.

  She paused a moment more, fighting the temptation of money. She met the brightness of her son’s eye with a smile and bit back her uncertainty. “It is a wonderful thing you have done,” she said. “The little Lord Krishna, with all his mischief and cleverness, could not have done better!”

  “Tomorrow, I am going to go extra early,” he said, “and make still more.”

  “You may do so,” she said, “and again the day after, for it is the weekend. But on Monday, you will have to go back to school.”

  “But, Mother …” he said, aghast at her foolishness.

  “No, Narayan,” she said. “You cannot be selling things on the roadside your whole life. Do you not want to learn to speak English nicely and then get a job where you will make much more money?”

  “I can speak English,” he said indignantly, and demonstrated by saying in that language: “I speaking English. I speaking English very good.”

  She laughed. “See?” he said, encouraged. “I do not have to go to that stupid school to learn that. I can speak Hindi and Tamil too; I have even learned a few words of Telugu.” This was true; her son had, over the course of his life, magically absorbed these languages right through the pores of his skin from the very air in the city, which throbbed and thrummed with the spoken words of people from all over the world.

  But she would not let his linguistic facility change her mind: Narayan must complete his schooling.