A Life Less Ordinary

by Baby Halder

  I went there and looked around. There was a small temple and behind it, a little cluster of houses grouped together in a basti. I left the children on the steps of the temple and went into the basti. I asked around, but no one seemed to know my brothers. I saw some people playing cards near the temple and I went and asked them. A young boy jumped up and said, “You mean the man who drives a car?”

  I said, “Brother, can you tell me his name, please?”

  He gave me the correct names of my brothers and I heaved a sigh of relief. I asked him to tell me where they were. But he said they were not there anymore, that they had left some time ago. Then he mentioned a man named Vimal who would know how to find them. “He is the one who taught your brother how to drive,” he said, “he’ll surely know where he is.” I asked if he would be kind enough to take me to Vimal’s house, but when we arrived, we discovered that Vimal was away at work. We met his wife and she was kind and offered us lunch.

  When Vimal came back that evening, I asked him about my brothers. He said, “Oh, they are in Chakkarpur now. The bus fare there costs twenty or twenty-five rupees or so.”

  I said to him, “Please come with me, Vimal-da. You can just drop me there and come straight back.”

  He replied that he wouldn’t be able to come with me right then. “But you know you have a cousin here. Your mother’s sister’s daughter…”

  “A cousin? My aunt’s daughter? Which one?”

  “Why, don’t you remember your Badi-budi?”

  “Of course! Oh, please show me where she lives.”

  I thought, Thank heavens I have found someone from my family after all! But on the heels of this thought came another: I had already fought with Badi-budi once. Who knows whether she would even be willing to talk to me? But nonetheless, I went along to her home with Vimal-da.

  She was sitting in the veranda making rotis. Vimal-da called out, “Hey, Budi! Just turn around and see who has come to see you.” For a moment, I panicked. What would I do if she refused to talk to me? But the minute she set eyes on me, she broke into a smile and greeted me so warmly that I knew she had forgotten our little fight. “What are you doing standing there, Didi?” she said to me, “Come in, come in! Have you fought with Brother-in-law?”

  “Yes,” I said, “something like that.”

  “But how did he let you come away?”

  “Leave it be…do you really think he could stop me once I’d made up my mind to go? Of course, when he finds out he’ll kick up a fuss. But never mind that: tell me, where are Dada and the others? Where do they stay? Can I go to them now?”

  “At this time? Forget it. Stay over and start out in the morning. After breakfast, I’ll take you there myself. But how do you plan to stay there with these children?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be able to? I’m not going to live off my brothers. I’ll find a job…”

  “Work should not be a problem—there are a lot of women working there. So many women who are alone, separated from their husbands, trying to earn a living…you’ll certainly find work, but the problem is that the moment you do, you’ll have to move out of your brothers’ home and take a place on rent.”

  Vimal-da got up and said he had to leave. I asked him if he thought it would be possible for me to get work there. He said yes, it would, and if I didn’t, I should come straight back here. And then he left.

  No sooner had he gone than Badi-budi turned to me and said, “So what did you fight about so much that you had to leave Durgapur?” I told her everything clearly.

  “I’m surprised that you have managed to come so far with three children and all this baggage. How did you cope?”

  “Why, what is so difficult about this? Don’t you know that if you have an address or a place to go, you can travel great distances to find it?”

  The next morning I woke up the children and fed and bathed them properly—they had not had a bath or a good meal for two whole days. It was two o’clock before we managed to set off. We took a rickshaw to the bus stop. Badi-budi’s husband saw us to the bus, and told the driver to put us down at the Chakkarpur turning. When we reached our stop, we got off the bus and started walking. A short distance down the road, we saw my elder sister-in-law and her daughter washing their feet outside their home.

  “Look, there’s your sister-in-law,” said Badi-budi. When I got closer I saw how pale and thin she had become. And she barely talked to me. I looked at Badi-budi. She understood immediately what I wanted to say and before I could open my mouth she said, “Look, if you stay here with them, you will be very unhappy. You will not be able to bear it. You’ll have to listen to everything they say. Just remember, the moment you get a job, you must find yourself a small place to live and move out. Stay here only as long as is necessary—you don’t have much choice.” I thought how right she was: I knew that was exactly what would happen. “But what if I don’t find work here?” I asked.

  “No, there’s no question of not finding work. You’ll find something. You just have to look around a bit.”

  My younger brother’s home was close to my elder brother’s. I went with Budi to his home but here, too, I faced the same reaction: my sister-in-law took one look at me and turned her face away. I had come from so far away and rather than making me feel welcome, my sisters in-law were behaving as if I were a great burden on them. I asked Budi, “Well, do you think I will be able to live here at all? From the looks of it, I think that perhaps I should leave right away…”

  The next morning Budi got ready to leave. Now there was no one even to talk to me politely in my brothers’ homes. Budi reminded me before leaving, “Just remember: if you don’t find work here, come to me. I’m always there.”

  I felt a little heartened. I thought that if I needed to go away, at least I had her home to escape to—and who knows? I might even find work there.

  Budi left and I returned to my brother’s home. My younger brother seemed to be a little better off than my elder brother—he worked as a driver and earned a reasonable income. I had thought that I might stay with him for a few days, but his wife was so unwelcoming that I did not want to go there. But my older brother had only one room in which he lived with his wife and his four daughters. How could my children and I share such a small space?

  I was mulling this all over when my brother and Ratan arrived. Ratan’s sister was married to my younger brother. He also lived in Durgapur, and when my Baba had learned that Ratan was in search of work, he’d suggested that he take me with him to Chakkarpur where he was planning to go. At that time, Ratan had agreed, so when I saw him I asked him, “Hey, Ratan, when did you come here?” He said that he’d only been there a few days.

  “But you were going to bring me with you. What happened?”

  “What could I do?” he said. “Everyone there told me not to.”

  The moment my brother heard this, he started berating me. “Why did you leave everything and come here? If you had to come, at least you should have brought Shankar with you. Ratan has been with me for a while, and now you, with your children…? How am I going to keep you all here?”

  I did not say a word to him. I knew that if I said anything he would be furious. Finally, he calmed down. Soon afterward, a young man he knew came to visit. His name was Subhash and he lived close by in a rented room. Suddenly, while talking to him, my brother turned to me and said, “Arre, Baby, I completely forgot! I have another room, and I’m paying rent on it for nothing. I had planned to open a shop there. Why don’t you move in there? You could stay till you find work and if Ratan wants, he can also stay there with you.”

  I looked at Ratan. I could see that the idea appealed to him. My brother realized that we were both happy with this arrangement. So then he told his friend Subhash, “You know, Subhash, you are cooking for yourself right now. Why don’t you hand over your pots and pans to Baby and she can cook for you alongside her own family? Right now she has a few constraints as well, so your pots and pans will come in handy, and you could
pay her whatever you spend on your food. Once she finds work she can return your things.” Subhash thought this was an excellent suggestion and the arrangement was finalized.

  Still, it took some days to leave my brother’s home. I got the pots and pans from Subhash’s home, but it took time to clean up the new place and to set everything as I wanted it to be. It was difficult to find the time to do this, as the whole day was spent out on the streets, going from house to house in search of work, and worrying about how to feed the children. In the evenings, when I came back, I would go either to my elder brother’s place or to my younger brother’s to eat. But it was not a nice feeling: when no one talks to you properly, there’s no pleasure in their company. The thing that made me happiest was the thought that once I’d moved into my new place, I would only have to meet my sisters-in-law when I wanted to!

  BEING IN MY OWN PLACE MEANT MORE WORK, BUT IT also meant more money. Subhash and Ratan paid me twenty rupees each every day, and every now and again my brother would slip me some money without telling anyone. I would cook for everyone in the morning and would then set out to look for work, but everywhere I went, the same question kept coming up: “Where is your husband?” The moment I said that he was not with me, that he lived in the village, the prospect of a job would disappear.

  I spent many hours and many days in search of work, but everywhere I met with the same resistance. I began to worry about what would become of us. I was really scared that I would have to return to my husband.

  My elder brother also asked around a lot but was not able to find a job for me. Then one day he said to me, “Why don’t you go back and bring Shankar with you?” And I thought, if this was what I had to do, I may as well have stayed there with him. Surely, I hadn’t traveled all this way, and gone to all this trouble, just to go back to where I’d started? Every now and again my sister-in-law would raise the same question with me and with my younger brother and his wife. It was as if they had learned a lesson by heart, the way they kept impressing on me again and again that I should not have left him. All of them thought that it would have been better for me to die than leave the home of my swami, my lord and master. No one so much as tried to understand why I had left. More than anything, I wanted that my children should have a good life. It is not enough to give birth, for birth brings with it a responsibility: the responsibility to enable a person to grow into a human being. My husband could not—or did not want to—understand this. For if he had, it would also have meant sharing that responsibility, and he was not interested in that. This also means providing a good atmosphere and surroundings, but he did not want to change our situtation, and we used to fight about this in front of the children. It was that that made me realize that things would not work out and that I had to be strong and find a way out of this mess.

  So I thought, Well, if people think I’m doing the wrong thing, let them. I’ll just keep on looking for work and someday, somehow, I’ll find it. There were so many working people living in that area, surely I wasn’t going to be the only one without a job? I would find work: I was determined to.

  One day my younger brother and I were arguing about this when a friend of my elder brother’s, Nitai, arrived. When he heard about my situation and how I had been going from pillar to post in search of work, he said, “Don’t worry, Didi, leave it to me. I’ll find some work for you.” Meanwhile, my elder brother had been looking as well, and one day my sister-in-law took me to a large house close by. She had talked to the owners about giving me some work, and once there, she explained everything to me. So I finally found my first job.

  But barely a few days had passed before people around started to say, “Oh, so you’re working in that house, eh? But they are very bad people and they don’t pay well. In fact they try to get out of paying at all…and they’re very difficult people to work for.” People said all kinds of things but I refused to pay them any heed and carried on working. I thought that it had taken me so long to find anything, and work was so hard to come by, and now that I had my first job, it would be foolish of me to just listen to what people were saying and let go without even trying! Surely they would pay me at the end of the month? But I’d barely been working there a week when one day Nitai suddenly showed up and said, “Didi, I have found work for you in a large house. You had better come with me and see what you have to do.” So I went off with him straightaway.

  On the way I asked if the people he had found would give me a place to stay. He said he had mentioned it to them but that I should discuss it with them myself. When we got there, I waited outside while Nitai rang the bell. A woman came out. She seemed really nice, at least in appearance. Nitai talked to her while I waited quietly. After a while she asked me, “Will you be able to work from eight in the morning to seven at night?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “but if I could get a small place to stay that would be very good, because otherwise I will have to leave my children on their own the whole day. If you can give me a place to stay, I will work night and day for you.”

  It was settled that I would come back the next morning at eight. I went immediately to the house I’d been working in and told them I would be leaving, but a couple of hours later, Nitai came back and told me that it would be better if I waited a bit. “Those people say they’ll take you on after a few days,” he said.

  I was in total shock! What had I done? Why had I been so foolish, so precipitate? On his advice I’d given up even what I had, and what would my brother and sister-in-law say when they heard? The memsahib in whose house I had worked for a few days came to see me and took me to her house again. “Look,” she said, “if you don’t come back to work for me, I will not pay you for those few days you have worked there.” So I thought, Well, let her not pay me. And once again I came away from her house.

  I’d listened to Nitai and left my job immediately, but then, I reasoned with myself, that was not his fault. After all, he only passed on what those people had said to him. The fault lay with me, for without firming up things with my new employer, I’d let go of the old job. What could I do now? I thought I should go back to the place Nitai had taken me and ask them directly about when I should begin work. So I went there and rang the bell and immediately a young boy of sixteen or seventeen came out. I asked him to call the memsahib, and when she came out, her face fell. She said, “Oh, it’s you again is it? Why have you come back? I told Nitai I would send word if I needed you.”

  I said, “Look, after finalizing things with you, I’ve left my other job. What should I do now, tell me? It’s so difficult to find work.”

  “All right, wait here. Let me see what I can do.” She went inside and came out with some rice and a little money, which she offered me. “Take this,” she said, “and feed your children and I will send you word through Nitai when I need you.”

  I took the rice and money and went to Nitai, who worked as a caretaker in a house nearby. At the time, his employers, the sahib and memsahib, were not home. I went and rang the bell and he leaned out of the third floor to ask who it was. When he saw me, he came and opened the door. Before I could say anything, he pulled me inside. There I found my brother and his wife, who looked surprised to see me. My sister-in-law would not even speak to me properly, but even so, I asked when they had come there. They did not answer me, but Nitai said they’d come to visit and he’d persuaded them to stay. My instinct was to run away, since they were being so cold to me, but Nitai kept insisting I stay. The more he insisted, the more my brother was displeased, but Nitai did not let me go until he had fed all of us.

  After I had left, my brother and Nitai had words about my coming there. Nitai told my brother, “She is your own sister—and she is like a sister to me as well. Look at how she’s having to run around in search of work. Things are so difficult for her, but you people are not doing a thing for her. She came to me in search of work and I talked to the people next door, and that is why she came here, to tell me what had happened. If you can come to my home, what
is the problem with your sister coming to my home?” And to this my brother, my real, blood brother, replied: “If she comes to see you, I will break my friendship with you.”

  Nitai told me all this later. I was not surprised. In fact, I had warned Nitai when I was leaving his home that he could expect my brother to say something unpleasant about my coming to see him. And I thought to myself, If this is what my own brother thinks of me, why should I be surprised at what others say?

  The following day, I went to Nitai to ask if the people in the house next door had said anything to him yet. Nitai said, “Are they still giving you the runaround? How are you managing to feed the children?” He knew very well how my brother treated me. “Wait here. I’ll go and check with them.” And leaving me there, he went to see the memsahib.

  I learned later that he asked her why she did not give me a clear answer. “Why don’t you just tell her whether you want her to work or not? What’s the point in keeping her hanging?” The memsahib did not get angry at this at all. She said to him, “All right, son, I’ll let you know by tomorrow morning.” She kept me waiting like this for another week or ten days and then suddenly, one afternoon, without warning, she came to Nitai and said, “Go and get her quickly. Tell her if she wants to work here she’d better come at once.” So Nitai rushed to find me, and said, “Come quickly! She’s calling you.” I went at around four or five in the afternoon and she kept me there till eight. I was worried that I had left my children without telling them anything. Around eight o’clock, the memsahib came and said to me, “I can give you a place to stay but not straightaway. It will take some time, but I’ll let you know. For the moment, you will have to come like this every day and work.” I had no choice in the matter, so I agreed.

  The next day, I got to work around eight in the morning. I saw then that I was one of four people working there and my job was to work inside the house. They seemed to like my work a great deal. There was another girl like me working there, and in the beginning, she would not talk to me because she did not realize I was a Bengali. One day I spoke to her in Hindi and asked her where her home was. When she said Kolkata, I spoke to her in Bengali, and asked if she was Bengali. She was quite taken aback and looked at me in surprise. “I’m Bengali, too,” I explained, “and we can talk to each other in our own language.” But the owners did not like their servants talking to each other. If they saw their servants sitting, standing, or just talking, they would immediately pull them up. The Bengali girl was happy that I was from the same place and she told me that she felt reassured now that she knew where I was from. “I’ve been quite lonely,” she said, “and it’s nice to know there is someone I can talk to, but our mistress does not like us talking to each other, so what can we do?” I thought, Well, there’s nothing much we can do. I had no alternatives. I needed the job, so I would have stayed on whatever the conditions. I had nowhere else to go.