The Secrets Between Us

by Thrity Umrigar

  Parvati watches in horror as Meena’s husband reluctantly comes to his front door and then steps out into the common passage. “What the hell is going on?” he says, looking at his wife with distaste as she tells him about the grave insult she has suffered at the hands of his card game partner.

  The two men look at each other. “What is to be done, Praful?” the other man says at last. “I mean, Meena is correct. We cannot have vomiting-fomiting going on in the hallway.”

  Parvati opens her mouth to explain, to insist that this was a onetime occurrence, but Bhinder Swami gives her a look that makes the words die on her lips. “This woman is a nuisance, yaar,” he says to Praful. “I mean, I don’t want to bring up this bloody issue at the next building association meeting.” He stares in the distance for a moment, then speaks again. “Tell you what. How much does she pay you daily? I’ll double that. That way, everyone’s happy.”

  Parvati sees Praful’s face whiten at the insult, but just then Meena speaks. “Have you gone mad, ji? Why we should pay to get rid of this problem? We are within our rights . . .”

  “Chup re.” Bhinder says it softly, but Meena shuts up midsentence. Satisfied, Bhinder turns his attention back to Praful. “So, we have a deal?”

  “No.” Praful shakes his head vigorously. “You insult me. The money Parvati mausi gives me doesn’t even buy my train ticket to work. I . . . she’s my relative. She has no one in this world. That’s why only we give her shelter.”

  “Then do it inside your home, na, boss?” Bhinder says immediately. There is a coiled, sinister strength to the man that reminds Parvati of Malik. She knows that Praful will not be able to stand up to this man.

  She folds her hands in front of the Swamis. “Please,” she says, her eyes glittering with tears. “Please seth, please memsahib. I’m a poor woman. I’m all alone in this world. This is my only home. Please take pity.”

  For a moment she thinks she has succeeded, imagines a softening in Bhinder’s eyes. Even when he speaks, his voice is soft, almost regretful. But his words strike fear in her. “This is our home, bai,” he says. “Not a homeless shelter. Now, please excuse us.” He turns to his wife. “Get inside the house, Meena.”

  Parvati and Praful look at each other in silence for a long moment after the Swamis shut their door. Then, as if he is unable to face the terror in her eyes, he turns away. “You heard what he said, Parvati mausi. Nothing much I can do.”

  She stares at him wordlessly. “Praful—” she says at last.

  He makes an exasperated sound. “How this has become my problem, I don’t even know,” he says. “What you want me to do, mausi? You think I am the landlord of the whole building?” He looks behind him furtively. “You know Radhika complains every single day about this arrangement. Says everybody in the building thinks we are beggars, letting you stay in exchange for your money.”

  “We know that’s not the reason why, beta,” she says. “I am so much in your debt.”

  But he is not placated. “I’ve helped as much as I can, mausi,” he says. “You saw how that man talked to me. I have to be able to hold up my head in my community.”

  She says it softly. “Chotu,” she says, slipping into his childhood nickname. “Who first taught you that lesson? To always hold up your head?”

  There is a long, stunned silence, and Parvati knows she has gone too far. This is their unspoken agreement—to let the past remain the past—and she has violated it. After a few seconds Praful says, “Stay here,” and slips into the apartment, leaving the front door ajar.

  Parvati peers in frightfully, half expecting the man to return with a broom with which to beat her. It would serve her right for embarrassing Praful in the way she has. But when he returns, he is not carrying a weapon. Instead, he gives her two pieces of paper. One is a torn sheet with an address written on it. The other is a fifty-rupee note.

  “Take this,” he says to her, “and go to this address. Ask for Mohan. I will call him to tell him you are coming. He . . . he will give you a cot for tonight. Give him the money.”

  She stares at him wordlessly, choking on the gratitude she feels at Praful’s generosity after the insult she has levied at him but also wrestling with the cold realization that the boy she has known since he was born, the man she calls her nephew, is casting her out from what she had hoped would be her last and final home. “What do I do tomorrow, beta? Where from I get another fifty rupees tomorrow?”

  Praful clenches his teeth. “That is not my problem, mausi,” he says. “I have done everything that I can do for you. Now, please. Collect your bag and go.”

  Parvati’s eyes flash with anger. “Where are you sending me? What kind of a place is this?”

  Praful averts his eyes. “You know what kind of place, mausi.” He pulls his lips into a thin smile. “But not to worry. You will be safe there. Your old age will protect you.”

  It is dark as Parvati searches for Tejpal Mahal. When she finds it, she stands in front of the run-down building, taking in the scaffolding that cages it, the pile of rubble near the front steps, the shrieks and debauched laughter that reach her from the open windows. For a wild moment she contemplates sleeping on the pavement along with the other homeless people, but comes to her senses. She will trust that Praful has not put her in harm’s way.

  A half hour later she is lying down on a rope cot in a tiny room with thin walls. The sounds she hears from the other rooms make her heart beat rapidly, make her feel like she’s never left the Old Place, that Principal is going to burst into this room at any minute and ask her to get ready. She feels a scream start from deep within her at the irony of this situation. Will she never have a say-so in any aspect of her life? she wonders. Does she have no more choice in deciding her own destiny than one of her cauliflowers? Like them, she has been bought and sold, sliced and diced, moved from one corner of the city to another. And Praful, Praful, knowing her horror at ending up again in such a place, has still sent her here. She gladly would have slept on the floor of his bathroom than to be here. For this boy, she had purchased a Cadbury éclair every single day out of her meager income at the Old Place. This was the boy who, during thunderstorms, crawled up to sleep next to her, because his own mother was too far gone on the hashish. This was the boy who she took to the movies on her day off and who she walked to school each morning. This is the boy who got out of the Old Place, who didn’t become a hit man or a pimp, who worked as a bookkeeper, who married a respectable girl, but who had still sent her here.

  She turns onto her side because the cot is digging into the growth at the bottom of her spine. O, ungrateful woman, she chides herself. That boy has spared you from the streets tonight. Show some gratitude, no? At least tonight you will be safe. But what about tomorrow? she thinks. Where does a lone woman go in this bustling city of millions?

  And then the answer comes to her: There is no place for her to go but here. And in order to return here, she must pay Mohan thirty rupees a day, an impossible sum. She wonders if Nilesh would allow her to purchase more cauliflowers on credit so that she can earn a greater profit. And perhaps she can cut back even more on monthly expenses like soap and toothpaste? But even as she contemplates the question, she knows that her bare-bones existence will not allow her to cut back too much more. Yes, she decides, tomorrow she will go to Nilesh’s place earlier than usual. If he is not too busy, if he doesn’t look through her the way he usually does, she will explain her dire situation to him. And if he will not extend credit to her? Her mouth goes dry at the thought. She has only been this frightened once before—on the day she’d arrived at the Old Place.

  The solution arrives hours later, just as she’s about to fall asleep. She knows what she must do—if she has not chased them away with her anger and disdain, that is.

  She must help them sell custard apples.

  8

  Despite her horror at having spent the night in that disreputable place, Parvati’s body hurts less this morning than it usually does after spe
nding the night in the stairwell. For this she is grateful. As she had suspected, Nilesh had refused to give her extra produce on credit, had given her a long, incredulous look before turning away to attend to the next customer. Once again, Parvati has learned her worth—she is not even worthy of a verbal dismissal. Now, she sits in her usual place in the market, and when Rajeev appears at last, she gives him an ingratiating smile. But before she can approach him, Rajeev walks haughtily by and Parvati fights an undertow of regret at having so rudely severed ties with the only person at the market who has been kind to her.

  She is about to race after the man when she sees him walking up to Bhima, and her face involuntarily curls up with distaste. For years, this woman Bhima never so much as glanced in her direction. If, once or twice, their eyes met, Bhima would turn her head sharply and look away. The other woman carried herself as if she were better than all the rest of them, as if by working for a rich mistress, she was wealthy herself. Now, Parvati watches as Bhima says something to Rajeev, who trots beside her, his empty wicker basket balanced on his head.

  Parvati turns toward Reshma. “Need any help selling today?” she says. “I can help.”

  Reshma frowns suspiciously. “Are you ill, mausi?” she says. “Or am I looking ill to you? Why for I need help selling my own vegetables?”

  Muttering a curse under her breath, Parvati turns away so that Reshma will not see the tears in her eyes. People called Mumbai the city of dreams. All she saw was a noisy, smog-filled, heartless metropolis, a place where the old BEST buses that wheezed down the street seemed to have more heart than the people they transported. As if the city itself has read her thoughts, there is the whine of a drill and the teeth-rattling noise of a jackhammer coming from across the street where the new mall is being built. The fishmongers, who for decades had occupied the land, had been forcibly evicted two years ago, and despite their daily street protests and a court injunction, work on the mall goes on. At first Parvati had been glad, hoping she could go across the street to use the clean indoor toilet facilities, but when she’d mentioned it to Reshma, the younger woman had laughed bitterly. “Arre, mausi, are you mad or what? You think they building a big-shiny mall for us little people to go do our business? In other malls, I’ve heard they are charging entrance fee, to keep out people like us. And look at this one—like a palace it shines. Who is going to allow you to enter?”

  Everywhere Parvati looks these days, the city is shining. New shops selling brand-name clothes and jewelry spring up daily. New, expensive restaurants outside of which young people stand in line to enter. Shops selling fifty flavors of ice cream. Sweetmeat stores that do a roaring business selling barfis and kaju katlis topped with gold leaf. New models of imported cars and more cars on the roads than ever before. Cinema halls that have, she has heard, twelve screens. This new Mumbai hates its old. Every day, old stone buildings are being torn down to make way for tall buildings, thin as pencils, poking up into the sky. Every afternoon, large private tankers come to these new buildings to deliver water because there is not enough public water for the demand. But the biggest change of all, Parvati thinks, is in the people. The Mumbai she has known has never been a gentle, forgiving place. But the old Bombay, the Bombay of Raj Kapoor and Nargis, had a sweetness to it, a childlike innocence. This new Mumbai is fast-paced, coarse, indifferent. She sees that indifference in the frightening blankness in the eyes of the office crowd—whether it steps over a centipede or a homeless person, it’s all the same. Nothing slows the crowd down, nothing makes it pause. It is as if everyone in this city is chasing his or her fortune and to get at it, they will stand on and crush the heads of their own mothers. There is only one unforgivable sin in this city, and that is the sin of poverty. Everything else is taken in stride—corruption at the highest and lowest levels, disloyalty, betrayal. In any case, what loyalty can one expect from a city that has surrendered its very name—gone from Bombay to Mumbai—in the flash of an eye? Such a city will consume its poor, parasitic residents the way a big fish swallows up hundreds of little fish, and then cast about, looking for its next prey.

  From the belly of the fish, Parvati sits on her little patch of pavement and looks at the world with old, tired eyes.

  9

  Bhima wipes the sweat off her face with the pallov of her sari. It is midday and they have sold exactly five custard apples. Rajeev was correct—between being chased off by territorial vendors from one spot to another and having no place to set Rajeev’s basket down, it is an impossible situation. Her eyes fill with tears of frustration at her own stupidity. Why couldn’t she mind her own business? What stupid sense of obligation to Bibi had made her take yet another day off from her own job at Mrs. Motorcyclewalla’s home to sell a fruit whose smell she was already beginning to hate? On top of which, she now had to pay Rajeev his day’s wages out of her own money. Rather than recovering Bibi’s money, she was wasting her own.

  As if he has read her mind, Rajeev stoops toward her, clenching and unclenching his right fist. “How much longer you want to do this, mausi?” he says. “I don’t want to waste your money. Half a workday still left—I can go back to my regular job.”

  “And what face do I show to Bibi?” Bhima snaps. She unties the knot on her sari, removes a pinch of the chewing tobacco, and pops it in her mouth. Maya has been lecturing her to stop using the stuff, but right now, Bhima needs its familiar comfort as she confronts the colossal error she has made in poking her nose into her neighbor’s business. She looks up at Rajeev. “Don’t you know of anyone else in this marketplace who will let us sell from their spot?”

  Rajeev shakes his head. “It is not so easy, mausi,” he says. “People here will sell you their newborn before they will rent you an inch of space. They are afraid you will claim it as your own.”

  “Why do I need to claim their filthy space? I just wish to sell the fruit poor Bibi’s husband paid for, and bas—I am done.” Bhima spits the red tobacco juice on the street. “If only that foolish woman had let us rent her spot, we would’ve sold these fataa-faat and been finished. But no, the maharani prefers to squat all day, playing with that evil growing on her neck.”

  Rajeev blanches at her words, and Bhima follows his eyes to where Parvati is standing a foot away from them. Her stomach drops. She knows that the older woman has overheard her unfortunate words and opens her mouth to apologize, but Parvati doesn’t give her a chance. “I’ve changed my mind,” she says curtly. “You can use my space. But it will cost you fifty-five rupees, not fifty.”

  Bhima can scarcely believe what she’s hearing. She glances at Rajeev and then quickly nods. “It’s okay,” she agrees.

  “One other thing. I want two custard apples. Free.”

  Bhima nods again.

  And so the deal is struck.

  Reshma grumbles at the intrusion, but Parvati silences her with a look. They unload a dozen of the fruit onto Parvati’s tablecloth, but Reshma bristles with anger when Rajeev tries to set down his large wicker basket. “You and your basket are blocking my customers’ view,” she hisses. “I’m warning you, if you take one morsel of food away from the mouths of my children, your children will have worms in their mouths.”

  Bhima turns sternly toward the hysterical woman, but Rajeev’s face goes pale at the woman’s curse. He has only one child—a son who had battled dysentery throughout his childhood, who, against all odds, is now in college, and upon whose slender shoulders rest Rajeev and his wife’s accumulated hopes. The thought of Reshma’s curse alighting on Mukesh’s beautiful body is enough to make Rajeev shudder. He lifts up the basket immediately. “You sit and sell, mausi,” he says to Bhima. “I will keep walking. I’ll check back every five-ten minutes, don’t worry.”

  Her lips curling with disgust, Bhima turns her back on Reshma. “Khali-pilli, for no good reason, she’s making that poor man walk around in this heat with a topli on his head,” she grouses to no one in general.

  To her surprise, Parvati clucks her tongue in sympa
thy. “He’s a good boy, that Rajeev.”

  Bhima eyes her suspiciously, remembering how the woman had berated Rajeev yesterday when they’d approached her for her spot. A little cracked in the head, she decides. Otherwise, who changes their mind like this from one day to the next? But now there’s no time to think because she has to tend to her first customer who is holding the fruit in her hand, weighing it, breathing in its aroma. “How much?” the woman asks.

  True to his word, Rajeev runs back and forth all afternoon, unloading more of his cargo each time Bhima’s supplies run low. To her amazement, Bhima discovers that she is enjoying herself, the back-and-forth with customers, the haggling, the inflating of the price and then softening her stance, the thrill of making a sale. She has been at the other end of this dance all her life, used to love driving a tough bargain because it saved Serabai a few rupees. Now, she realizes that she loves being on this end of the negotiations even more. Rajeev has told her how much the others are asking for the fruit and she has decided to undercut them all. That, and the fact that her fruit is of good quality, is the reason why she is selling out.

  At three o’clock she has a visitor, a muscular, light-skinned fellow, who towers over her, scowling. “What’s the plan, sister?” he says. “You trying to put the rest of us out of business or what? And where’s the permit to be selling at this corner?”

  Bhima looks at him nervously, unsure of whether he is bluffing about the permit. But before she can respond, Parvati is on her feet. “You don’t have any other job, Rogal? Bullying old women? Talking about permit-fermit? You want to see her permit, you go see Malik’s nephew. Then let’s see who survives the next day, you or me.”

  At the mention of Malik’s name, the man lowers his eyes. He swallows hard. “Arre, Parvati, why unnecessarily you getting all angryfied? I was just asking . . .”