‘Shanti!’
‘It’s true, though,’ she said. Her hands remained on my forehead, but she spoke in a low, dull tone. ‘I told him again and again how much we owed your family, but he refused to listen…’
‘There must be a misunderstanding,’ I said. It was impossible, this fit of pique. ‘Does he think we’re taking advantage of her?’ A vigorous shake of the head followed. ‘I’ll go talk to Pradeep; assure him how much we all value Saloni.’
‘No, no, baby.’ Shanti’s hand lifted from my forehead, and a new, terrible thought occurred to me.
‘He’s not jealous of her, is he?’ I asked. I’d seen it time and time again, the bruised male ego, but Shanti was shaking her head.
‘Don’t be dramatic, baby,’ she admonished. ‘It’s always a tricky time; a new marriage, getting to know each other. Things will settle down in time.’ She came forward again to my side of the bed, but didn’t touch me. Her hands were by her side, worrying the fringes of her dupatta as she spoke. ‘No, baby, really,’ she said, continuing agitated. ‘He’ll see reason.’
I frowned. Was Saloni to continue to waste away until Pradeep was restored to his senses? I couldn’t see his objection to his wife continuing with us, and then, as Shanti continued to look distraught, I thought of how Ajay had spoken of Saloni. ‘He doesn’t,’ I asked, ‘think that Ajay is causing trouble?’
Shanti sighed. She worked her dupatta fringe devoutly, as if running through a string of rosary beads, but in the end, she nodded. ‘Pradeep doesn’t like Saloni to be around Ajay Sir.’
I thought hard. I couldn’t remember any particular interaction between Saloni and Ajay. There was some flirtation between him and Puneeta, and he teased me more than he did the others, but I couldn’t remember any such incident with Saloni. She was studious, keeping to herself, focussing on doing her work and returning to her chores such that it was sometimes an effort to draw her out. There was no small talk; no asking after our health or our weekends. There was nothing but the taking of orders and smiling with a quiet pride as Maya and Sonia complained about the thoroughness of her work.
‘Really,’ I told Shanti, ‘Saloni hasn’t even looked at Ajay.’ I watched Shanti closely, though she didn’t speak. ‘They’ve barely even spoken.’
Shanti didn’t reply, and then, as I stared, she offered, ‘I don’t know, baby. Pradeep won’t listen.’
‘I’ll talk to him if you like.’
‘No, baby. We’ll just have to be patient.’
Our conversation ended inconclusively, but the next morning, Saloni was at her desk in the office. ‘I’m sorry,’ she was saying breezily. ‘I was ill yesterday,’ and we all nodded in understanding. She didn’t look at me, didn’t mention our exchange of the previous day, but set to her work.
Shanti checked in on us, ostensibly to bring us refreshments, but I was certain she was keeping an eye on her daughter-in-law. I wasn’t sure if she shared Pradeep’s suspicions, or sought to reassure her, but she squeezed Saloni’s hand as she passed her by, and the girl looked up at her with gratitude.
XVIII
The winter seemed never-ending. All across Delhi, people organised blanket drives, recycling old rajais and shawls and handing them over to those who lived on the streets.
Our colds persisted. Tasha-di was the first to fall ill, and Sonia’s children were next. Her eldest was preparing for his Board papers. Everyone at the office still remembered the dread of preparing for the school exams; the early morning wake-ups, the cessation of leisure activities, the embargo on walks or movies or TV or books, the poring bent-back over books until late in the evening, until it felt like half the senses—touch, sight, feel—were impaired, and the others—sound and smell—painfully heightened. The weeks we devoted to preparing for our annual exams were bad enough, but the board exams held at the end of our tenth and twelfth years of schooling filled us with particular dread, even at a remove of twenty years. And here Sonia’s son was, expected to revise when he was ill, down first with the flu, and then with a bug he caught off his sister.
Sonia herself was off for a month or more. She was nursing her children back to health and watching over her son’s revision, and we considered her out of action until exams ended at the close of March. She hadn’t been assigned any articles, and though the December and January issues carried her features, Maya took over Sonia’s column for the February issue.
It surprised us, then, when Sonia came into the office early in March. ‘It’s not Maya’s article, is it?’ I joked. ‘I know it’s not up to your standards, but I did quite enjoy it.’
Sonia laughed. She had tracksuit bottoms on; her mother uniform, I remembered her telling me. There was no hint of make-up on her, no perfume, no high heels. ‘How have you been, Sonia?’ Maya asked. ‘Are you surviving the exam season?’
A sigh followed, and then a quick wave of the hands. ‘But forget that all,’ she said, turning bright eyes towards us. ‘I wanted to talk to you about these labour chowk men.’
‘Labour chowk?’ I asked, but then I looked at Maya, and knew she hadn’t heard the phrase before either.
‘Labour chowk,’ Sonia repeated, masticating the words around her mouth, as if relishing their sound. ‘Labour chowk,’ she said again. ‘You know it’s been ridiculously hectic at home, right? Well, to make matters worse, last week, one of the curtain rails broke.’
This was a tangent, but Maya was quick to offer support. ‘Pradeep,’ she was saying, ‘is very handy around the house.’
‘No need,’ smiled Sonia. ‘Our cleaning lady went and sourced a handyman. I got talking to him, and I learnt that she had found him at the labour chowk.’
‘What,’ asked I, still unable to understand the purpose of her story, ‘is a labour chowk?’
‘Yaar,’ Sonia said. ‘All these labourers congregate in designated places to hawk their services for the day. You can get all sorts there—builders, carpenters, plumbers, anything. It’s basically a daily open-air market for manual labour, and my cleaning lady had gone to the one in Chandni Chowk to find me a carpenter.’
‘That’s fantastic, I said, still unable to understand the purpose of the anecdote. ‘Entrepreneurship in action.’
‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Sonia, but Maya and I could both see she had the bit between her teeth. She smelt a story where we couldn’t sense one, and she eyed us impatiently, anxious for us to feel her excitement. She waited for a moment, her eyes flitting from my face to my sister’s, but when no realisation dawned on us, she began to speak again. ‘But it’s more than that, don’t you see? It’s our society in a microcosm. It has everything; an immigrant’s dreams of success, the deadening wait for occupation, the harassment, the discrimination, the cruel anonymity of big city life, mind-numbing poverty and gaudy ostentation existing side-by-side as they do in Delhi, and in the end, after all the sacrifices, after all the deprivation, the labourer’s exploitation at the hands of the moneyed elite.’
‘Woah,’ Maya said. I knew she was worried that the story wouldn’t resonate with our readership. The idea was good—no, great—but I wasn’t sure if our readership would enjoy reading about it. We had started off wanting to turn a mirror to Indian society, but featured so many lifestyle stories that our consumers were just the moneyed elite Sonia was criticising.
Sonia’s eyes were fixed on my sister, who cleared her throat. ‘Well,’ she said, and Sonia turned disapprovingly away.
‘Maya!’ She had begun to pace the office, and Maya guided her through to the garden room. The ground was cold here, and freer of the carpets Ma had loved to lay on the floors throughout the house. Sonia sniffed loudly. ‘Can you see what I’m talking about?’ she asked. ‘These labourers come here as boys from India’s deepest villages; from Jharkand, from Bihar, from UP. They crowd in these…’ She shuddered. ‘I went there, you know. I got the carpenter to take me there, and they were all herded in there, on top of each other, fighting, shoving, cursing, and then at the sight of a potential c
lient, all straightening themselves out neatly and patting themselves like so many pieces of meat for sale.’
Maya was shaking her head. It was clear she was moved by the workers’ plight.
‘It’s horrendous,’ Sonia cried. ‘At the start of the day, these people will go to your home to work for four hundred rupees a day. But as time passes and they remain unclaimed, their desperation rises. Mouths at home still have to be fed, and by midday, you can hire them for half the price.’
‘Oh God.’
‘That’s what my cleaning lady did,’ Sonia told us. ‘She thought she was doing a great thing finding me such a bargain. The poor thing expected to work the entire day for Rs 200. He fixed the curtain rail, sorted out one of my desks, put back a shelf in my cupboard, and replaced all our bust light bulbs for the price I pay for a cup of coffee.’
‘And,’ said Maya, ‘you want to do a profile.’
‘I thought you’d never ask.’
Maya was frowning, looking at me, and I shrugged. Our issue for May was already filling up. And Sonia’s human-interest story was unlikely to strike a chord with the local crowd. People liked their hard luck stories at a remove; wars in a faraway land, refugees unlikely to flood one’s own borders. I checked my calendar. State elections were coming up, which we were planning on covering. We had decided to limit political features to one per issue while the magazine remained free to maximise its appeal, and I half-heartedly suggested, ‘We may be able to fit something into the July issue. We were thinking of asking you to focus on the elections in the May and June issues.’
‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘This feature can appear in the April issue. If,’ she said, looking unusually coy, ‘there’s space for it, that is.’
‘Aren’t you going to be busy with the Boards?’
‘Yes.’ She sighed. She had sat down on one of the old wicker armchairs, and now she rose and began to pace again. There was a nervous energy to her that I recognised from a day or two before the magazine had gone to print. She had the same air of distraction, the same frenzied movements, smelt strongly of coffee, and had the same familiar circles under her eyes. ‘I’ve written a draft already,’ she said, and as I cried out, she wagged a finger at me. ‘I’ve taught the boy to count,’ she said sternly. ‘I’ve taught him to read and to spell. I’ve done all I can for him; he will pass or prosper on the basis of his hard work now.’
She fixed me with a glare, and I wilted.
‘It’s not too much to ask, is it?’ Her voice was plaintive, as if she was convincing herself as much as us. She had her maternal guilt to cope with as well as the weight of societal expectations. I’d never seen her husband agonise about making himself available for their children’s revision.
‘I make sure he’s up at the right time; I make sure he’s properly fed and taken care of. I don’t let him study in the dark, I don’t let him eat rubbish, I don’t let him forget about his hygiene. But beyond that, there’s little I can do. I can’t revise for him. I can sit there in his room, surveying his every move, but what’s the point of that?’ She held her hands out in appeal, and we both nodded rapidly. ‘He knows I’m at my desk if he has any problems. And I’ve been waking up early, earlier than him even, to fit in my work so I’m not distracted while he’s revising.’
‘How long have you been working on this draft?’
‘A week,’ she said. She reached into her bag, pulling out a sheaf of papers.
She held the papers out between Maya and me, and I took hold of them.
Raju rises at my approach, but his movements are measured. There is grey in his stubble, his teeth are stained yellow—with age, with tobacco, with a paucity of time—and his head trembles slightly as he talks. Everything seems a bit slow about Raju, and considered, and in another life, he would have been the village sage, the repository of local experience, doling out stories on holy days and handing out judgements on the indiscretions of youngers. We are at the Chandni Chowk labour chowk, a mart for human toil, and Raju is one of dozens of labourers who are following my movements with interest. They are all quiet, all respectful, but behind me, a refuse bin is overflowing, and I smell the stench of urine from the public toilet. How much, I ask him, does he charge for work? Anything you please, he replies, and I know he is not being glib. Employment is the prize here, and as I have already been talking to him for five minutes, he knows his chances are good. He will work for whatever paltry or generous sum I suggest, but if he demonstrates truculence now, he knows I have dozens of more biddable others to choose from.
I looked up to see Maya reading over my shoulder. She met my eye and arched an eyebrow. Sonia was watching us. ‘It’s rough,’ she told me, ‘And my structure is awful. But I’ll tidy it up once I finish it.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Maya was saying, and I nodded.
‘This Raju,’ I asked, ‘is he a real person?’
‘Yes,’ she said. He’s the person who came to work for us.’
‘Raju,’ I said. It was a generic name, a little like Jane Doe, and I said, ‘I wonder if that’s really his name.’
‘No it’s not,’ she explained, ‘his real name is Rajeevlochan. It was too long for people in the city, and at first it was truncated by one employer to Rajeev, and finally by another to Raju. He’s grown to like the name now,’ she added, ‘and let’s face it, it’s not exactly a name anyone is going to forget.’
‘Do you have the time to work on it?’
‘Raju is coming back tomorrow. He’ll introduce me to a few of his friends. Their stories are the final burst of colour I need for my piece. I’ll write it all up when the kids sleep.’
‘So…’ I began, worried about an appropriate deadline to suggest to her, when she broke in. ‘I have it in hand, Siya,’ she told me in an overbearing voice. ‘I’ll have it completed by this time next week.’
XIX
Sonia’s article was featured in The Satirist’s March issue. She delivered the article two days after she came to see us, well ahead of schedule, responding to edits before we woke in the morning. The piece itself was well-received, with several people stopping us in the street to ask about labour chowks. Some, of course, were scouting for cheap labour, though most had been shocked to learn that labourers’ services were traded in markets around the city.
‘It’s human interest,’ Maya said as she told me about another reader who had complimented the article. ‘And Sonia writes with such empathy that you can’t help but feel for the human condition of her subjects. I’ll handle the articles on the State elections. We must get her to focus more on articles in this vein.’
And she was right. Despite our initial misgivings about the change of tone her article heralded, the move had been the right one. One after another, we heard people approach us to talk about Raju’s struggles. Raju was as needy as any other worker we saw on the street, but Sonia’s writing had made it real in people’s minds. In most people’s minds. Mrs Bhatnagar, my old walking companion, provided a ready counterpoint to the norm. ‘Just imagine,’ she said as she accosted me outside the house. ‘Delhi’s like a souk of old—all this trading in slaves and spices and golds and perfumes.’
‘Hardly,’ I replied, but as I stepped off, she followed me.
‘You’ve got a good readership now.’
This was spoken as a pronouncement and not as a question, and I nodded briefly. ‘My daughter,’ she was saying, ‘she was in a hotel the other day, and she saw your magazine in the lobby. Very glossy, she said.’ This too was said with approval. ‘Very stiff,’ she was adding, ‘very good, thick paper.’
‘Have you read the magazine?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Normally I don’t read magazines,’ and I nodded. There was a turn towards the market a moment away, and I wondered if I would be able to get away.
‘I need to check in at Mr Seth’s place,’ I said, but Mrs Bhatnagar tugged me on the arm.
‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘normally read these sorts of magazines, but I picked
up a copy after my daughter spoke of it.’
I was nodding, smiling at her words, moving towards the market, when she added, ‘But you know, you need to consider that it’s all these foreign tourists who come and pick up this sort of magazine.’
‘Well…’
‘The hotel, you know, then all the tourists coming to this market. Is it good if they read this sort of stuff about India?’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘it’s an Indian magazine, just like Outlook or…’
Mrs Bhatnagar was ploughing on. ‘But I saw foreigners reading your magazine. They should not form such a negative opinion about India.’
I didn’t tell her that Raja Singh had come up to me to praise the magazine’s reporting. I didn’t bother to mention the positive pieces we always gave pride of place. The features on Delhi’s cultural scene, the literature festivals and the history walks, the reviews of the latest bars and restaurants, the ingenious rain water recycling system set up by two local school girls. She was talking now about our demonetisation article. ‘I didn’t read it at the time, of course, but I went and looked up back copies.’ My pace had picked up, and as she hurried to keep up with me, I heard her grunt. Her face had turned red with her effort, but she wagged her finger at me, ‘It was painful, of course, the entire demonetisation episode. Especially,’ she said, stopping and looking at me pointedly, ‘for those of us who were there at the time.’
‘But it was the casual workers, the labourers, those who work in the shadow economy…’
‘Oof,’ she was saying, ‘we all suffered, but we all knew it was for a good cause.’ She widened her eyes. ‘We had to crowd out all the black money in the system. Stop the terrorism that comes in from across the border…’
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