She Will Build Him a City

by Raj Kamal Jha

  Watch Balloon Girl’s bare legs, her mother’s feet. He can do anything with them now and no one will know.

  ~

  In their white bathrobes that fall open so that he can see their skin, Mother’s breast and Balloon Girl’s ribs, they look like giant white canna lilies strewn on his bed. Like the women in the Diego Rivera print he has framed on his wall. He takes all the time in the world to move, step by careful step, as if he’s walking on jagged glass, so that they are not disturbed. He gets into bed, lies down, his back pressed against the wall, in a position so awkward he isn’t sure how long he can stay that way.

  Next to him, Mother and Balloon Girl move in their sleep.

  He can’t get his heart to slow down, he’s afraid its beating will wake them up. He is still, his body tense, his muscles taut. He can smell them, soap, water and dinner. Water from their hair has stained the bedsheet in two shapeless patches of wet. In the night light, he can see Mother’s feet, her nails ingrown and chipped. Countless crevices crack her hard heels, skin peels on the soles of her feet like earth gone dry. Balloon Girl’s feet, in contrast, are soft, she must have stayed in the water for a while because the tips of her fingers and toes are still wrinkled.

  He touches Balloon Girl’s heels, she doesn’t move her leg, he lets his hand rest there and he closes his eyes, setting the alarm clock inside his head for an hour so that he can wake them up in the dark, get them to change back into their clothes, give them some money, drop them back at the entrance to the hospital.

  And if Balloon Girl doesn’t mind, he will keep Red Balloon which bobs in the night air in the room, drowsy, not far from the sleeping child and her mother.

  CHILD

  Enter Bhow

  In her broken English, which she is trying to mend at free classes an NGO offers two days a week to domestic helps, Kalyani reads Orphan stories from books donated to the Little House library. She sings him Bengali songs she’s heard from her parents, nonsense rhymes; she tells him about days when she herself is a child in the village who hears the April nor’-wester whistle through mango trees, chases dragon­flies as they flit, from leaf to leaf, across the surface of the pond unbroken, still as glass, just before the skies open up with rain. She tells him how she goes to the city one day to see the trams. Like trains, but smaller. Only two coaches that go so slow you can hop on, hop off without the tram stopping. The first circus her father takes her to where a man rides a motorcycle spinning himself up and down the sides of a spherical cage. She includes bits from her biography: about her brother, who works as a gardener, and her sister who would love to play with him. She tells Orphan about how her father and mother don’t have any money to buy her dolls when she is a child so she makes her own. With paper, shreds of cloth, broomsticks, coloured glass from broken bangles. Of course, Kalyani knows that Orphan is too young to understand any of these stories, that her words sail over his head but, she knows this, too, that the words, wrapped in the warmth of her voice in all its cadences, its sings and its songs, lull him to sleep.

  ~

  There’s one story that’s her favourite.

  And Orphan’s, too, for this is the one he responds the most strongly to, in which he follows each move of Kalyani’s eyes, hands and lips, tracks her every gesture. So Kalyani makes this part of her daily routine with him, right at the end, just after he is fed, washed and ready for bed.

  Carrying Orphan, she walks with him down the long hallway of Little House.

  ‘Today, we will look at three of your friends and see how each one of them came here. Look, there is Sunil, you know how Sunil came here? He came here in a big car that drove right up to the gate.’ Through a window, they can see the street outside and Kalyani points Orphan to a car passing by.

  She moves to the next child.

  ‘Look, there is Pooja, you know how she came here?

  ‘One day, a wind blew a little cloud from the sky into her house. Pooja wanted to fly so she jumped onto it and Baby Cloud flew across the city. Over streets and cars and buses and vans, between buildings, it passed all the big clouds in the sky, Mother Cloud, Father Cloud, and landed here on the roof of Little House. Pooja climbed off Baby Cloud and walked into her room. She was wet with water from the cloud and we had to dry her with a big white towel.’

  Kalyani tells Orphan to look up at the sky and always there is at least one wisp of white. ‘That’s the cloud that brought her,’ she says.

  ‘Now there is Neha. A big black bumblebee, sitting on a big, beautiful yellow sunflower, saw Neha sitting on a leaf and picked her up, carried her from flower to flower, leaf to leaf and then came here. Dropped her, gently, on her bed.’

  She points to a fallen leaf.

  By now, Kalyani reaches the end of the hallway from where they can see the main entrance to Little House. She walks up to the gate, stops just a few steps short – taking a child out of Little House, without the director’s clearance, is forbidden – and from where they stand, they can see the dog. ‘You know how you, Orphan, came here? You came riding on the back of that dog, can you see her?’

  She points to the biggest dog in the group, a black-and-white mongrel with a coat unusually clean for the mess she is sitting in: vegetable peels, plastic, paper cups, filth, all the waste from Little House.

  ‘That dog’s name is Bhow,’ Kalyani tells Orphan. ‘Bhow brought you here. You sat on top of her, she was like your horse, you came here riding across the city, like a little prince.’

  Kalyani sits down on the floor, Orphan can barely support himself on his feet so she props him up against herself to help him get a better view, his hands on her shoulders. And they sit there, for ten minutes, fifteen minutes for him to look at Bhow. Not knowing, of course, that it’s Bhow who watches Orphan being abandoned, who watches his mother drive away in that summer night, and it’s only when Orphan has had his fill, when his eyes begin to close, that Kalyani lifts him up and, humming a tune, walks slowly back to his bed.

  This has become their ritual: choosing three children each day, listening to how each one came to Little House and then ending up with Bhow, who never leaves the garbage heap.

  ~

  One such evening, after their walk down the hallway during which Kalyani tells him how one child has come to Little House in a flying chair, one in a boat that sails down the water running from the tap, and a third is blown in by a wind, after she has shown him Bhow, when she’s adjusting the pillows around him in bed, smoothening his blanket, the child reaches out and touches her face.

  Orphan’s little fingers brush her cheeks and her eyebrows. At first, Kalyani thinks this is an accident but this is a movement, planned and plotted inside that little head, ruled by that little heart, because moments later, Orphan does it again, his hand reaches out to touch her, his fingers close around her hair, he says something that sounds like Ma. Tears flood Kalyani’s eyes, the first time since she has come to Little House, she quickly wipes them away.

  ‘You go to sleep,’ she says.

  ~

  ‘Watch what you tell him.’ Dr Chatterjee stands right behind her, making her jump with a start. ‘He likes you.’

  ‘I didn’t tell him anything, sir,’ says Kalyani.

  ‘Maybe behind all this talk of becoming a nurse and running away, you want to be a mother.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she says. ‘What will I do with him? There are so many families in this city wanting to adopt him, everyone wants a son. Why shouldn’t Orphan live like a prince? Now, leave us alone, it’s time for him to sleep.’

  Turning her back to him, as she pats Orphan to sleep, her fingers tremble, her head begins to spin, she doesn’t know what has come over her.

  MEANWHILE

  Two Lovers On-Board the Night Metro

  You are late, she says.

  Sorry, I couldn’t get an autorickshaw, he says.

  I don’t like to wait here.

  You never told me this.

  I don’t like this apartment, this bed,
I don’t like this mattress, the walls, this paint. The AC here makes so much noise.

  This is the only place I could get without answering too many questions. The man who owns this lives in New York, he isn’t here to bother us.

  I know.

  You said we needed a place of our own. Neutral zone, no hotel room.

  I know.

  I could change the mattress?

  The mattress is all right. Just waiting here, by myself, I can’t stand.

  Next time, why don’t you wait outside and we both walk up together? I will call you when I am a minute away.

  You know you can’t do that. He checks all my calls, received, missed, every call.

  Why do you let him?

  He’s my husband.

  ~

  My son’s not well, she says. Must be the heat, he had fever last night, I hope it isn’t dengue.

  Dengue breaks out late October, this is only July. You could have stayed home.

  I wanted to see you.

  Sit down, you make me nervous, the way you stand there, looking out of the window.

  He asked me, Ma, where are you going? I said, I am going to the doctor, I will be back very soon in about half an hour, with your medicine. He said, Ma, stay at home, I am frightened. I told him, I have locked the doors and windows, nobody can come in. Pull the blanket over your head, I said, think you are inside a tent.

  Where’s your husband?

  On tour.

  So who’s with the child at home?

  The maid.

  ~

  You are trembling, he says.

  No, I am not, she says.

  Give me your hands.

  You know a year before my father died, he fractured his ankle, he was in hospital for five days, in a lot of pain and when he would fall asleep, I would sit by his side, hold his hand. I realised I had never held his hand since I had been a girl so in that hospital room, I held his hand as long as I could. One day, I think I held it for almost an hour.

  ~

  You know something, she says, anyone who holds your hands won’t know how old you are.

  What do you mean?

  They aren’t hard, rough.

  Must be because I have done no manual labour.

  I like your hands.

  You were born when my daughter was six years old.

  You keep doing this arithmetic.

  No, just wanted to let you know.

  Where is she? You never talk about her.

  She left.

  Means?

  I don’t know where she is.

  Have you tried Googling her?

  I have.

  And?

  And, what? Nothing.

  ~

  You are crying, he says.

  I don’t know, she says, for more than an hour last night, his temperature was 104.

  Let’s go see the doctor.

  So late?

  Emergency is open the whole night.

  What do I tell the doctor?

  Let’s listen to what he says, he may give us some medicine, ask for some tests you could get done first thing in the morning.

  OK.

  ~

  He locks the door, follows her down the stairs.

  Heat rises from the tarred street as if a furnace smoulders below their feet. The night sky is cloudless except for stray flecks of white that squat low on the new skyscrapers, the promise of water glinting on glass and steel, reflected in the neons that spell out the names of offices where men and women work, day in, day out, at call centres, looking at clocks in all places except their own.

  Convergys, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ericsson, Nokia, Sapient, Lucent.

  Each with its own colour: blue, orange, so many shades of white, green. Down below, the fluorescent Metro sign glows, yellow against night black.

  They board the train, the coach is empty at this late hour except for a young man standing in the corner. Thin, his wrist so slim that his watch slides halfway to his elbow when he raises his hand to brush his hair. He looks at her, she looks away.

  ~

  This is so much nicer than the flat, she says, this Metro coach, as she leans into him, the train’s air-conditioned draught fans her face. He tilts his head to touch hers, to listen to the voices inside her head, to breathe in the day’s heat and sweat tangled in her hair. Her hands cover his, their fingers lock, and she knows all is well with him by her side, that she’s going to pick up the medicine, her son will wake up soon and his fever will be gone.

  They close their eyes, the young man in the corner turns to look.

  WOMAN

  Kindergarten Teacher

  What would your father have done tonight?

  He would not have been sitting downstairs like I am: all alone, waiting for you to wake up, wary in my own house, unsure of my own child.

  No, not your father.

  He wouldn’t have let himself be bullied into accepting your terms like I have. That I can’t ask you any questions. He would have laughed the whole thing off, said what kind of a silly condition is that, walked up the stairs, got you to open the door, got you out of bed and walked you down the stairs. Got you moving, got you living, just like he does with me when I first move to the city forty-five years, fifty years ago, the wife of the youngest professor in his college.

  ~

  The day is long, so are the hours after he leaves at 10 a.m. I have never lived in a city so big, I have never been alone in a house for so long on a single day so when your father’s away, I search for empty spaces to fill. Chairs, table, windowsill, the balcony floor between the flowerpots. After the maid has left, I take a little towel, wipe away imaginary dust from tabletops, the frame of our bed, the Philips radio.

  At the window, I see a group of women, all older than me, sitting, in a circle, on the low terrace of the next house, knitting, talking. One is oiling another’s hair. They smile at me, one invites me to join them.

  In a few months, I get tired of this routine and I tell your father.

  Thank God you told me this so soon, he says, I thought you would spend ten, twelve, fifteen years like this before telling me that you were bored to death waiting for me every day. I have an answer, he says, you get ready tomorrow morning along with me, we are going to meet someone.

  Who will do the morning chores, I ask, who will iron your clothes, pack your lunchbox, and he says, forget all of that for one day, I will wear wrinkled clothes, I will buy some fruit on my way to college, there’s no need for a lunchbox, what we will do tomorrow is much, much more important. You have a bath, wear a nice sari and be ready, I need you to get a copy of your college certificate.

  What certificate, I ask, I am not going to go to any university. And what college certificate, I have one but is it even worth anything? BA in Home Science, cooking, stitching, who needs all that?

  I heard you, your father says, let’s not talk about it until tomorrow morning.

  That night, I can’t sleep. Lying next to me, your father senses this, he doesn’t tell me anything. Only once, he asks me, are you OK?

  I can’t sleep, I say, I don’t know where you are taking me tomorrow.

  Relax, he says, you don’t need to worry.

  ~

  The next morning is a blur.

  Your father wakes up, reads the newspaper, goes to the market to get the day’s groceries, the maid comes and starts her cleaning, scrubbing, I tell her to go home early because I want her out of the way. By the time your father is back, I am bathed, dressed in a sari I have worn only once before. I still have that with me, I will show it to you tomorrow morning. It’s sky blue, little white stars sprinkled all over, it will look very good on you given how slim you are.

  Your father looks at me and says, look at the new teacher, every child will wish to be your student.

  ~

  St Aloysius Day School for Boys and Girls.

  Your father and I wait in the lobby of the principal’s office under a giant photograph of St Aloysius.
A frail child, his hair cropped close, he holds a wooden crucifix. I read the legend typed on a piece of paper pasted on the wall next to the picture. I remember it to this day:

  ‘St Aloysius died at twenty-three, he helped hundreds of sick people when the plague struck Rome.’

  Will they ask me about the saint? The plague? Rome? I know nothing, I am nervous, your father holds my hand underneath a file that holds my certificates.

  We wait until someone from the principal’s office calls me in. By name, it’s funny, I have not heard someone say my name like that.

  I get up, wait for your father to join me but he doesn’t.

  You go inside, he says, answer their questions, answer whatever they ask you and tell them what you know. If you don’t know the answer to a question, say I don’t know. If you don’t like it inside, get up, say thank you to her and walk out, I am here, I am not going anywhere.

  ~

  The principal’s name is Sister Agnes Consuelo.

  She speaks slowly, softly, she speaks only in English. She begins with simple, direct questions, easy, to which I answer confidently with a yes or no.

  Your husband said you are new to the city, do you like it so far?

  You live near the school?

  You have a BA degree?

  That’s a nice sari you are wearing, she says, where did you get it?

  My parents gave it to me, I say, and she says, I like my teachers in saris.

  Tell me about your day, she asks, and I tell her exactly what I told you earlier, how I wait for the maid to leave and then dust the rooms again, listen to the radio. I am afraid she may ask me something about the news on the radio which your father listens to every night but she doesn’t, she stands up, smiles and says, see you tomorrow, I will introduce you to the Kindergarten Class, KG, Section A, the students are waiting for you. We will help you become a teacher, she says.

  She takes my hand in hers. Welcome to our school, she says, your husband is right, you will make a good teacher.

  Thank you, I say.

  The meeting’s done, about fifteen minutes, it seems like five.

  ~

  Evening comes, your father and I are children, talking non-stop, he’s back home early, we go shopping because he says all women who work in the city need to carry a bag to keep pens, keys, handkerchief. Bag bought, we go to Bata to buy a pair of shoes. No harm if it has a little bit of heel, he says, begin wearing them right now so that you get used to them before morning, as he gets the cashier to pack my old shoes in the box while I slip into the new ones. This way you won’t get sores tomorrow, he says. It’s evening, surely you can’t cook dinner now, he says, and so we go to a South Indian restaurant. He orders masala dosa – let’s have something you do not cook at home – and we return home around nine at night.