The Hope Factory

by Lavanya Sankaran

  Stop it. My son is not a thief and he never will be. Do you hear me?

  She could hear the thudding of feet, the hasty collection of an astonished audience: Valmika, Thangam, Shanta.

  Kamala, awash with a glittering, righteous anger, did not care.

  twenty-nine

  THE FIRST TEXT MESSAGE FROM Valmika said: Pls call mama necklace trouble. The second, sent minutes after the first, said: call!!!!

  Anand checked his phone. There were no missed calls from his wife.

  Around him, the noise of the factory resonated reassuringly. The machines were running; administrative staff were filing in. Kamath had arrived early, his concern evident as he surveyed his unshaved, sleep-deprived boss.

  “Don’t worry, Kamath,” said Anand. “Everything will be fine. Don’t worry.”

  He projected a similar confidence to Ananthamurthy. He did not want his team demoralized further. He himself desperately wanted a bath, to cleanse his mind and spirit with buckets of hot water. A bath, and something to eat.

  He didn’t want to return home for either.

  He received Valmika’s messages as he walked out to the car. He called her—but he didn’t have to ask why she was calling. Over his daughter’s nervous, thankful “Appa?” he could hear Vidya’s voice in the background, crying, hysterical, shouting. “I’ll be there,” he told his daughter. “Kutty, I’m leaving right away. I’ll be there.”

  VALMIKA MET HIM AT the entrance of the house. He placed a comforting arm about her, this beautiful girl, his daughter, already taller than he was, with Harry Chinappa’s genes unfolding inside her. “It’s that necklace,” she said. “Appa, there was a huge uproar this morning.”

  That seemed to be an understatement. His arrival appeared to trigger a Brownian motion of people about the house. Thangam and Shanta came tumbling down the stairs and scurried into the kitchen. His father emerged from his bedroom to say, “Something has happened … I don’t know what….”

  “Kutty, what is it?” He could see Valmika hesitating, not used to broaching discussions about her parents’ affairs. “It’s okay,” Anand encouraged her gently. “Tell me what happened.”

  “That necklace,” she said. “Mama has been … sick … in bed….” He could see the tears rising in her eyes.

  “It’s okay, tell me. Mama has been upset, I know….”

  “Yes. And yesterday, the necklace went missing. Remember? From Thatha’s family, really old, priceless. I’m not sure, I don’t know why, maybe the other maids said something, but when Kamala came to work this morning, Mama shouted at her. Something about Narayan taking it—and, Appa! Kamala got so angry.… She shouted back at Mama. She picked up an empty water glass and threw it against the wall. Even Shanta screamed. Then she left the house, and Mama …”

  Ruby Chinappa appeared on the landing. They had spoken with each other on the telephone early that morning, but they had not discussed her daughter at that time. Now, she did not seem to know how to proceed. “Oh, Anand,” she said and burst into tears. He pushed past her into the bedroom.

  The shouting he had heard over the phone had died down. Vidya had subsided into silence. She was sitting in bed, still wearing the same T-shirt and pajamas he had seen her in two nights ago, surrounded by snot- and tear-filled tissues. Her features appeared dead, drowned, distended. She would not look directly at him.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Anand could see his daughter and mother-in-law at the door. He asked Valmika, softly, “Where is Pingu?”

  “School,” his daughter whispered. “I thought he should go.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “Kutty, why don’t you take Avva downstairs and ask Shanta to make a cup of tea for her before she goes home. Ask Thangam to bring one for Mama as well. Also, ask her to bring a broom and sweep up this mess.”

  Anand turned to Vidya. He sat down on the edge of the bed. He didn’t know what to say. His insides felt like rough gravel after the events of the previous day; he wished he could turn and walk out.

  “The necklace went missing?” An obvious question, tentatively uttered, in lieu of all the other unresolved quarrels that lay between them.

  “Fuck the necklace,” she said. Flat-voiced. “If she took it, let her keep it. Who gives a shit?”

  He had spoken the truth two nights previously—and part of him still exulted, whooping rebelliously, in the freedom. Another part, which had supported this relationship for fifteen years, knew the hurt his words had inflicted.

  “Ey,” he said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that to you. I’m sorry.”

  She met his eyes finally. “I’ve done my best by you, Anand.” But the sharp doubt was in her, he could see that, razor-edged, slicing through her self-respect, the rationale for her entire adult life.

  “I know. I know…. We’ve built some good things together…. And you’re a good mother. Ey, don’t cry.” His inarticulate words tugged the tears out of her; she cried like a woman abandoned. He placed a hand on her back and rubbed gently, an old, comforting gesture he had not used in a long while.

  HIS CHILDREN. HIS DAUGHTER, so caring, so worried, and his son, a laughing ball of trust. To regret his marriage was to regret his children, and he could not do that.

  Anand had never thought of his emotional needs when he was younger; now, years too late, he was seeing the gaps in his existence, but it was knowledge he could not act upon. To walk away, to reach for his own personal happiness would be at the expense of theirs. His children. His silly mother-in-law. His father, resting downstairs.

  That decision descended heavily upon him; he felt the squeezing pain of it and an instant corresponding doubt—would he be strong enough to shoulder it for the rest of his life?

  “Don’t worry,” he said to Vidya. “Everything will be okay. And we will find that necklace. Don’t worry.”

  Her sobs slowly settled into hiccups. Valmika brought a cup of tea and helped Thangam sweep up the pieces of the broken glass. Vidya drank her tea, Anand sitting on the bed next to her. After a while, she slept.

  Anand joined his daughter for breakfast.

  “Let Mama sleep for a while,” he said. “She’ll feel better.” He saw his daughter’s relieved acceptance of his words, her attention turning hungrily to the food on the table. He watched her eat. A bite of toast. Forkfuls of scrambled egg. “Oh, and, Appa,” she said, when she was done. “I helped Thatha organize stuff for his pooja.”

  “Oh, great, kutty,” he said. “That’s a big help…. Now, shall I drop you to school?”

  “No, I hate going late,” she said, heading up to the stairs. “And I won’t miss much; we’re spending most of our days rehearsing for the school play. I’ll stay here and do some maths revision for my test tomorrow.”

  The day’s newspaper lay folded on the dining table.

  EARLY THIS MORNING, HE had called Harry Chinappa from the factory.

  Harry Chinappa had ignored the first phone call, made to his cellphone. Anand, full of a steady purpose, had dialed again. His house this time.

  Ruby Chinappa had picked up the phone. “Anand!” she said, her voice full of false cheer. “I was just saying that we have not seen you in some time….”

  “Is he there?” he asked. “Can I speak to him?”

  He could hear the loud whispering in the background, Ruby Chinappa saying: “… you must talk to him! You cannot ignore him forever … so awkward…. No, I don’t think it is something to do with Vidya, he would have told me.” When she came back to the phone, her voice wobbled with effort: “Anand,” she said, “he is in the bathroom, can’t speak now…. Yes, of course, call back….”

  Anand waited fifteen minutes, working on his resolution.

  When he called for the third time, Harry Chinappa came on the line. Anand had vaguely rehearsed a speech in his mind, calm and clear and convincing. Something about putting aside their differences and working for the good of the company and the family future.

  Instead, he found himself
saying, brusquely and without preamble: “You must help me.”

  “What?” said Harry Chinappa, outrage evident in his voice.

  Anand blurted out his story, speaking with a dreadful urgency, almost forgetting, in his haste, the implacability of the man at the other end of the telephone. Harry Chinappa waited for Anand to stop speaking.

  “No,” he said.

  “You cannot say no,” said Anand. “Did you not hear me? This is the result of your actions. You have to help.”

  His insistence triggered a rush of words from Harry Chinappa: No, he said again, he bloody well would not help. Who did Anand think he was, speaking to him like that? After making a fool of him, Harry Chinappa, he now had the impudence, the temerity, to ask for help again?

  “Please.” Anand belatedly shifted to pleading and hated himself for doing so. “Please.”

  No.

  The phone call ended; Anand found himself trembling in revulsion. In the quelling of their hapless mutiny, in retribution for their massacre of English women and children, the Indian sipahis were made to lick the bloody floor of the massacre site before being shot alive out of British cannons. Anand could taste the blood of that floor in his mouth, feel his own impending annihilation, his body and spirit rending in the fast-speeding wind and fire, his life’s work collapsing into rubble.

  ANAND CAREFULLY UNFOLDED the newspaper, not really looking at it. He sipped at coffee; he could not eat anything. His hands were trembling, he noticed, quite disconnected from his brain. Everything—the night, the phone call with Harry Chinappa, the scene with his wife—pressed into him like the pleated bellows of an accordion, filling him with heavy breath and aching teeth and little else. He felt voided. Of ideas, of hope, of desire, of thought. He was nothing.

  The headline ate at his eyes. VIJAYAN ADDRESSES INDUSTRY LEADERS.

  The words reconfigured themselves in front of him, dancing, calling. Clapping their hands. Shouting. Dancing. He went to the little powder room and cupped his hands under a stream of cold water, running it over his wrists, touching chill, wet fingers to his eyes. Then he returned to the paper.

  VIJAYAN ADDRESSES INDUSTRY LEADERS. The subheading said: INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION IS THE WAY FORWARD FOR THE COUNTRY, TO COMPETE WITH CHINA, TO RAISE STANDARDS OF LIVING.

  He read it over and over, a great realization born within him, growing stronger by the second, spreading with the strength of a metal sheet through his body. The trembling in his fingers stopped.

  There was nothing, really, to stop him getting in touch with Vijayan directly.

  It would not be easy, or straightforward, or use any of the skills he had developed over a lifetime. In fact, in order to pull this off successfully—he experienced a sudden twisted moment of mirth—he would have to do that which he had avoided for his entire married life: he would have to take a page from Harry Chinappa’s book.

  thirty

  “AMMA!” SAID NARAYAN, WHEN he saw his mother step into the courtyard. “Back so quickly! She has given it to you, then?”

  Her demeanor alone should have told him it was not the case. Still in a towering rage, she could barely recount what had happened. “There is a necklace missing,” she said. “They thought …” she faltered; the branding shame of it. “Vidya-ma thought I was absent because I was disposing of it.”

  Her anger was instantly reflected in him. “What! How can they! How can they think that about you, Amma!” He stood up, shaking. “I hate her! That Vidya-ma. How could she say such a thing! It is just as Raghavan says. Those people! I hate them all. Just see what I will do to them. Raghavan says—” And he stopped, for his mother slapped him hard across the face.

  “Raghavan!” She slapped him again. “You stupid boy. I was not accused. You were. And do you know why? It is because of your stupid friendship with that evil fellow. Because of that, they think you are also a rogue!”

  He was shocked into silence.

  “I had to stand there and defend you. I told them you would never steal. I told Vidya-ma so. I shouted. They would not believe me. And now,” she said, “I have no job. You have no school. She will send the police after us. We have lost everything.”

  And Kamala, who never cried, sat down and wailed as though all was dead.

  Her anger was at all things: at Vidya-ma, for her careless, life-destroying assumptions; at the thief who had created this mess; at herself, for losing her temper and her job in a quick, thunderous flash; and, finally, at her son, for his bad judgment in friendships.

  In the corner, collapsed, Narayan sat silent.

  Tears drying on his burning cheeks, his eyes flickering for a brief instant up to his mother’s and instantly reverting to the ground.

  THE COLD DESCENDED UPON them that evening. Suddenly, as was its wont at this time of year. A warm morning, a brief afternoon cloudburst, and in its wake, the arrival of winter.

  In a dark corner of her little house where the shadows gathered, there was a bag that held a dusty roll of clothes: a few stored, a few outgrown and destined for the old-rags man, and a few, Kamala was ashamed to admit, so full of memories that she could never bring herself to get rid of them. She dug through this bag and pulled out two sweaters. She put Narayan’s sweater to one side, worrying, as a mother will, about the chill winds that must be surrounding him even as they embraced the city; knowing, as a mother should, that even if he was feeling cold there was little she could do about it until he returned home. He had left the courtyard in the middle of the morning and she had not seen him since.

  With the donning of her own cardigan, her mind seemed to absorb a measure of calm. She closed her eyes in prayer, but the futility of her morning’s worship at the Hanuman temple remained with her. She searched her mind for other gods; they seemed elusive, slipping away, hiding behind the branches of distant trees.

  She busied herself with preparing a small meal for Narayan; there was a measure of comfort at the thought of feeding him. The anger she had seen in his eyes worried her. He was at that age when he was prey to adult emotions without the corresponding wisdom that led to their resolution. Where was he? Where could he have gone for all this time? His new school bag lay in a corner; he had not gone to school. She thought of Raghavan; her heart clenched.

  It was well past dinnertime when he appeared, stepping through the shadows of the courtyard, a shape, a shadow, scarcely more defined than the shadows around him. Where have you been? she wanted to ask, but when he stepped into the circle of her Petromax lamp, she saw that the darkness still remained on his face. She silently placed his food on a plate; equally silently, he ate.

  He rolled himself into a sheet and fell asleep, her son, turning as elusive as the gods hiding behind the leaves of the trees. Restless herself, Kamala could hear him shifting through the night. At one point, she thought she heard a stifled sob. Who knew what fears chased themselves through the dreams in his mind? Once, she put out her hand, placing it on his shoulder—and felt an instant easing of tension within him. She longed to be able to enclose him in her arms and soothe away his fears easily and naturally, as she could when he was younger.

  Both of them were quiet the following morning, Kamala rising first and preparing rotis for breakfast; Narayan visiting the bathroom before wrapping some sugar in a roti and stuffing it quickly into his mouth. He dusted his hands and came over to her, wrapping his arms around her fiercely in a hug that almost extinguished the breath from her, a hug so stern, so full of purpose, so full of love.

  He slipped out of the courtyard without saying anything.

  “He is a good boy,” said the landlord’s mother, materializing at the door. “Yesterday. Did you see what he did yesterday?” Apparently, Narayan had spent the entire day outselling every other man and boy at the street corner, working at such a furious pace, even the policeman said he had seen nothing like it. “Surely he must have handed the money to you,” the old woman said.

  “No,” said Kamala, listening with a fierce, tender pride, “not yet,” un
derstanding all at once his seriousness of purpose, that adult intent to do what he could to help. Such a boy he was.

  THE COURTYARD GATE CREAKED OPEN. There was no mistaking who stood there; that precise arrangement of bells and tinkles, of bangles and anklets had accompanied her work for over a year.

  “Thangam,” she said. “Come in, my little sister. Come. What is it?”

  Thangam sat down hesitantly on the stoop, her expression a mixture of sorrow, coyness, nervousness, and numerous other things, like a hungry peddler of dubious wares. She whispered, not to Kamala but to the ground in front of her: “The necklace has been found.”

  The news imprisoned Kamala; she could not move.

  “The necklace was lying behind Vidya-ma’s dressing table.” Thangam’s words tumbled and spilled, urgently, full of a hidden pleading. “Everyone realizes that Narayan could not have done it, sister. Everyone! He is a good boy. And Anand-saar would like to see you…. I spoke to him about you myself, akka, and I asked him if I could run here and tell you the news, I know what it must mean to you, that is what I did, Kamala-sister.” And so saying, Thangam bent her head in abasement.

  “Who found it?” Whoever had “found” the necklace was most likely the thief who had abstracted it in the first place. And who else could it be but Shanta? Who else would allow Kamala to suffer as she had done? Who else would rejoice to see her lose her job?

  “I did,” said Thangam and burst into tears.

  A great, sharp anger mingled with a vast, comforting relief. Kamala found it in herself to hug the girl close and pat her gently on the back until she got up to leave.

  Alone, Kamala felt her fury rise once more, against foolish, greedy Thangam and Shanta the rutting bitch, who had not hid her savage enjoyment of Kamala’s plight. She knew, without having to ask, that her display of anger against Vidya-ma the previous day, however righteous, had surely cost her the job.

  Anand-saar had told Thangam that he would see Kamala the following week. This would be to settle the salary she had due. She, in turn, could thank him then for supporting Narayan’s education for a few short weeks.