The Hope Factory

by Lavanya Sankaran

  “He dreams of working on the computer, saar,” Kamala said.

  “Oh, wonderful,” said Anand-saar. “That is good. If he is keen, I can see to his training. But, Kamala, you in turn must see that Vidya-ma is happy with your work …”

  “I will, saar,” said Kamala. And the fierceness of that promise, a resolution made on the altar of Narayan’s future, hardened within her like tempered steel.

  Later, in the kitchen, she said quietly to Thangam, “It was good news!”

  “Really.” Thangam looked at her with sharp, assessing eyes. “Has he increased your salary?”

  “No, no, nothing like that,” said Kamala. “But he is going to sponsor Narayan’s education.”

  Thangam nodded, already losing interest.

  Kamala walked home, thinking about how she would advertise such good news: especially making sure to tell that complacent mother of the stolid, hard-studying Ganesha across the way about the prospective brilliance of Narayan’s academic future. And that, thought Kamala, was the miracle of the young. They could fulfill your deepest wishes in a manner that you could not predict.

  nineteen

  IT SEEMED HE WAS EXPECTED, but where was his father-in-law? The profusion of marble Italian nymphs in Mr. Sankleshwar’s reception room remained silently unhelpful on the subject. The receptionist had asked him to wait and then retreated into some inner sanctuary. Anand ignored the magazines on the glass table; he checked his watch. It wasn’t like Harry Chinappa to be late. He would give him five minutes more and then call.

  The door to the inner office opened; Harry Chinappa stood framed in the doorway, a file in his hands, a smile of great cordiality upon his face.

  “My dear boy,” said Harry Chinappa. “There you are.”

  “I have been here for a while,” said Anand.

  “Excellent. I thought to myself,” said Harry Chinappa, “that it is not like Anand to be late. Now, to more important matters … Anand, you know me, I’m not one to interfere, but I do not want to see you making a grievous mistake…. Mr. Sankleshwar has arranged a very beautiful property for you—I think it is extremely suitable.”

  “What?” said Anand. “No, that’s okay.” He was instantly annoyed; he perceived that he had been enticed here on false pretenses—Harry Chinappa had not given up on making him buy something from Sankleshwar. “I told you. I have no need. I have already proceeded with that Landbroker.”

  “Oh, that fellow,” said Harry Chinappa. “Don’t worry about him. Agreements of that nature can easily be put aside…. We can’t be foolish, m’boy. That fellow sounds like trouble. Now, I want you to look at these…. I’m so pleased; the land is an absolute treasure….”

  He opened the file and pointed to a map, in full spate, seemingly oblivious to Anand’s growing irritation. “I imagine we can head out for a viewing after this morning’s meeting. It sounds simply perfect for our needs. Sankleshwar has really been magnificent. Beyond my expectations, really…. It’s all here,” he tapped the folder again, “the land specifications, the term sheet, everything. I reviewed them in some detail, and even managed to tweak them in our favor. And,” he lowered his voice, “not everyone can say that in their dealings with Sankleshwar. He is famous for being extremely shrewd, you know.”

  “No. Thank you. But no.” Anand spoke wearily, feeling as though he were speaking chaste Kannada to an uncomprehending foreigner. “I am not interested.”

  “Don’t be silly. We haven’t seen the land, true, but Sankleshwar wouldn’t recommend something that wasn’t completely appropriate. Not to me, I fancy. I think we can trust him completely. And the terms are extremely reasonable. All that remains is to draw up the papers, and we can proceed with that right away. This meeting, I told Sankleshwar, is a mere formality, after all.”

  “A mere formality? What do you mean? What? You haven’t actually agreed to buy something from these people?” Anand stared at his father-in-law in shock.

  “Anand. One can’t delay in matters like this. One could lose the property to a faster mover,” said Harry Chinappa, the fucker, as though this were a matter of no greater import or consequence than choosing bloody prawns from some chuthiya catering menu.

  “What? I told you. This will not work. I am buying something else.”

  “My boy, what are you saying? You’re backing out completely? Don’t be foolish. You cannot seriously be thinking of doing business with that other fellow? Mark my words—you’ll get into trouble with him. What do you even know of him? Don’t be stupid now. This is ridiculous! We’ve got an excellent deal here. Besides, we can’t back out now. I’ve spent hours with Sankleshwar on this. I’ve agreed to all this. I’ve given him my word. We can’t back out. That’s impossible.”

  “Excuse me,” Anand said. “But I have not agreed to anything. I have not given my word. And you had no business doing so. On what basis did you agree? I told you no. This is not,” he said, “some matter of some stupid prawns for some fucking party. This is a matter of my company, and here you will not interfere…. I will talk how I like! I will use what words I like! … Yes, I know very well who I am talking to…. You please do what you like with the family but you please keep your distance from my work.”

  And with the weight of his words pressing down like death in the silence of that marble-encased room, Sankleshwar’s comely secretary spoke, with a cheerful, astounding normalcy: “Sir? Will you both go in? Thank you.”

  Anand did not even glance at her. He glared at his father-in-law—and turned and walked out of that room. Harry Chinappa could shovel his own shit. Anand was not going to be a part of his explanations.

  He drove straight home. His father was seated on the verandah with his newspapers.

  “Have you eaten, Appa?” Anand asked, forcing himself to a dutiful courtesy. His father usually consumed his main meal of the day at 9:30 in the morning, in a strict schedule that followed his morning walk, bath, and worship.

  “No,” said his father. “Your wife is cooking pig flesh in the kitchen; the smell is upsetting my stomach—so I have decided to go on fast. A banana and one glass of milk—later, when the smell has died down—will be sufficient. A fast,” he said, “is good for the digestion, very cleansing, though the subsequent bowel movements take a day or so to settle down. Are you not going for your bath?”

  “Later,” said Anand. “I have to finish some work in the study.”

  “When I used to return home from outside, I would first head straight for the bath before saying even one word to anybody. But those are the old ways, is it not?”

  “Is Vidya upstairs?” asked Anand.

  “I believe not. I believe not. The servant,” his father said, “told me she has gone out.”

  Anand headed to the study, his father’s voice following him: “… and by raising rail prices, the blighters will raise the prices of onions also. This country,” his father said, resorting to the expression he had employed as long as Anand could remember, “is going to the dogs.”

  He heard Vidya enter the house and walked out of the study. He could see from her grim face that she had heard from her father. Thankfully, the children were at school. She addressed her father-in-law: “So I have bought some bananas for you. Will you eat them right away?”

  “A little later,” Anand’s father said. “After the smell has died down. No, no, nothing else. A glass of milk and a banana will be more than sufficient.”

  She followed Anand into the study and shut the door. He said, still seething: “Listen. I don’t want you discussing my work ever again with your father. Okay? After what happened today, I don’t want him involved. At all. Understand?”

  “Understand? Do you think,” she said, “he would want to be involved after what you did?”

  “What I did? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Ey, my father told me everything. Okay?” she said. “You ask him for help—he runs around for weeks organizing things for you, and then you coolly just turn and walk away
. He told me. You shouted at him and abused him and used all kinds of foul language. He is really shocked, Anand. So am I. He has never been spoken to like that in his life. I was so shocked, I began to cry. How could you do this to him?” She sat down on the sofa.

  “He had no goddamned business doing what he did. He had no business agreeing to anything.”

  Vidya spoke through his words. “And that’s the other thing. Because of you, his reputation will get affected. He said that Sankleshwar actually accused him of double dealing—my father!—but thankfully, he put him right…. Otherwise, Daddy’s good name would be in tatters! Even so, he says, because of you, his own real estate development scheme could get messed up…. Anand, how could you!”

  “What? What the fuck did he tell Sankleshwar?”

  “Don’t use that language with me now!” said Vidya. “He told Sankleshwar the truth: that you were the one who did the double-deal, agreeing to Sankleshwar and agreeing to someone else at the same time…. Anand, don’t look like that! Daddy’s reputation is important to him.”

  “And mine isn’t?” Anand asked, so furious he could barely speak. “Vidya, listen. I didn’t do a ‘double deal.’ I only agreed to work with that other Landbroker person. Your father had no right agreeing to anything with Sankleshwar. What he did was wrong! Are you listening to me?”

  “He risked his entire reputation for you. He’s bending over backwards and you bloody go and do something that he says no self-respecting businessman would do.”

  “Vidya, are you even listening? He had no business agreeing to anything. He had no right.”

  “Yes, only you can do whatever you want. No one else has any right! That is just how you want your world, isn’t it? No need to show respect to anybody else. He put his integrity on the line for you. He’s a man of his word—and you are not. You are not! That is the person you’ve become.”

  “Well, you and your father are the only two people who think so.”

  “And, of course, we are the only two people,” said Vidya, “whose opinion doesn’t matter to you…. I can’t believe you would treat my father so badly, while expecting me to cater to every whim and fancy of yours. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Don’t do it. I’ll take care of my father—and you please take care of yours.”

  “He’ll never forgive you, Anand,” she said, bursting into tears. “And neither will I.”

  Great, he said. Don’t.

  Later he heard her on the phone. “Kavika,” she said.

  Fuck, he thought. Not that.

  twenty

  THE COURTYARD WAS QUIET these days, for more than half the rooms that surrounded it lay empty. The landlord had sent tenants on their way as their leases had come to an end, without renewing them or replacing the tenants with fresh ones. But early this morning, the silence was rent by noise that showed no signs of diminishing.

  Kamala opened her door and quickly shut it again in shock, before sitting inside the darkness of her room, listening hard. Narayan sat cross-legged next to her, barely discernible in the dark, offering the mute comfort of his hands, which Kamala clasped tight, as much to soothe as to be soothed.

  Loud wails, shouts of anger, the drag and thump of heavy household objects.

  “But where are we to go? Mother, please!” The young bride wailing. “Brothers. Please. You are like family to us. We have no one else.”

  If you throw us out like this, where do we go?

  If we have nowhere to live, how can he find employment?

  Please give us another month. We will find the rent. Mother, please. Brothers!

  But the landlord’s two oldest sons, normally so polite, would not relent. They dragged the belongings of the reluctant young couple out onto the street, under the unyielding supervision of their grandmother. The landlord himself was nowhere to be seen. It was well known that he could not bear to witness scenes of sorrow among his tenants.

  At some point, Kamala and Narayan crept out of their room and, unnoticed, past the shouting figures outside the courtyard, he to school, she to her work. Today, Kamala was sure, the landlord’s mother would ask for increased rent. And how was she to handle that? She recalculated, again and again, the figures in her mind. Would Vidya-ma agree to a small raise in her salary? Would Anand-saar? Who else could she turn to for a little extra money?

  The landlord’s mother was indeed waiting for her that evening. But she did not ask for increased rent. Dumbly, Kamala listened—and finally much of what she had seen over the past few months became clear to her. Things she had stupidly ignored, small, telltale signs, were suddenly connected to one another in a hateful pattern. The reason the courtyard lay silent and empty. The reason the bride and her husband had been so rudely evicted. The growing sorrow of the landlord’s face, where unhappiness multiplied every time he glanced at her. And right there, on the corner where the main street touched her gully, stood the reason why.

  For a thousand or more years, this little neighborhood had slumbered as a village. Then, the distant city rumbled closer and closer until, one day, it was entirely swallowed up: a village no more. The farmers sold their fields and turned shopkeepers; erstwhile village homes were offered up for rent to any passing stranger; trucks and buses and bicycles flooded through without courtesy and with easy right-of-way. Opinions were generally divided as to the desirability of all this. There were those who bemoaned the loss of the fields and the cool, clean greenery of the village—they were usually old or idle. The others were too busy trying to create employment from their altered circumstances. Overnight, the villagers’ character changed: from farmers protective of their own to businessmen eager to engage with the strangers in their midst.

  And thus it might have remained: a malodorous, low-grade urban neighborhood, teeming with life and refuse, if a fundamental shift had not happened in the newly developed rich neighborhoods that lay alongside: the land prices there began to rise rapidly. Rumors flooded down the linking road to the slum: over there, earth that had once existed as ragi fields was now turning valuable, earning per square foot, the rumors said, sums that a provision-store keeper might be hard-pressed to earn in a month. What madness was that?

  Whatever the nature of such insanity, it began to seep into the village-slum. And the first proof, that it was not just idle talk and the stuff of male fantasy around the tea shop, was right there on the corner of the main road.

  The little provision store had vanished, along with the butcher next door, who had always kept a cage of long-suffering chickens at the entrance to his shop. In their place stood a brand-new building, three stories high, glossy, gleaming, girded with fresh paint and steel. Inside, people had already set up shop: a lawyer, two doctors (one for general sickness and the other with a piles and fistula clinic), and an Internet café. The basement bore a sign that proclaimed the future location of a language training center for English. The erstwhile butcher and store proprietor now danced about like vastly superior beings, buying clothes, televisions, scooters, and sending their children to English-medium schools.

  And this was what Kamala learned from the landlord’s mother: how could any rent she paid—even if it were doubled—compare to the sums the landlord might earn if he sold his property to the real estate touts sniffing around daily like eager dogs scenting the tracks of a bitch in heat?

  WHEN NARAYAN RETURNED IN the evening, he discovered his mother seated on her haunches in a darkened room and staring at the wall. She had not lit the lamp. She had not prepared any food.

  “Amma,” he said, her very silence alarming him. “What is it? What is it?”

  She hesitated briefly, but the story quickly spilled out of her. He would bear the consequences of it soon enough; he may as well hear of their fate right away.

  They were going to lose their home. Mindful of their eight-year friendship, the landlord’s mother had approached the subject adroitly, describing the deep financial difficulty her son found himself in, the claims of others
upon him. Poor man, she’d said, the troubles multiply about him and age him before my eyes. To meet these claims, he was forced to put this courtyard up for sale. What choice did he have? She felt terrible, she’d said. But Kamala had the bounty of her brother to rely upon, a prosperous life waiting for her in the village if she so wished, so she did not worry.

  Kamala had known, instantly, that it was time for her to plead. She could not think of leaving her job for another: the salary was decent, the gift of Narayan’s education a pearl beyond price. She needed to safeguard that at all cost. She also could not afford to move anywhere else. New rentals in this area had become recently unaffordable; the day she moved out, this neighborhood would be closed to her. The nearest affordable places were far away in the distant tendrils of the city, in strange new neighborhoods among unforgiving strangers. To reach her workplace, Kamala would have to begin her commute before dawn—and what would happen on the nights when she was required to stay late? Buses late at night were difficult beasts to catch, slippery with their schedules, murky with nameless predators who feasted on lone female travelers. Narayan too would have an equally long commute to his new Anand-saar-sponsored school. She would never see him; he would be entirely out of her control and management, prey to his own inventiveness.

  So Kamala had pleaded. Please increase my rent, Kamala said. Just for a little bit. Or allow me to make a large lump-sum payment that will help your son. Something to delay the sale of this courtyard by a year or two. Please. Amma, please.

  The old lady had listened, and something in her implacable face had yielded to Kamala’s tears. She’d placed her hand upon Kamala’s head. “You have been like a daughter to me. I cannot promise anything, but let me speak to my son.” She’d nodded. “And you in turn speak to your brother and see how much you can raise.”

  I will, Kamala had said. I will.

  Now she gazed hopelessly at the wall in front of her. It was one thing to make such an offer, but how was she to raise a sufficiently large sum of money? Her mind spooled forward into ever-widening aspects of misery.