She Will Build Him a City

by Raj Kamal Jha

  ‘Thank you, Payal,’ says Ms Thomas. ‘It only goes to show the shocking state of our public infrastructure, one freak storm and so much damage – that will be the subject of our debate later in the evening. We shall play that video Payal has got and we will get Mr Rajat Sharma, the director of Little House, on the show, too.’

  MEANWHILE

  Mr Sharma’s Son and the Camera Phone

  My name is Aman Sharma, I am eleven years old, my father says I am too young to own a cellphone of my own. It’s not about money, he says, because my father can afford one, he is director of Little House, it’s an orphanage. He was on TV recently. He is always on his phone, his secretary is Mrs Chopra and he keeps calling her to check who has called him in the office.

  My mother has a phone, too, not a smartphone, but it has a very good camera. When I am done with school homework, when her phone is charged, she allows me to play with it. For forty minutes, forty-five minutes every day, slightly longer on Saturdays and Sundays.

  She has set five conditions.

  One: I can only use the phone when she is at home.

  Two: I can only use the phone when she gives it to me. I cannot pick it up even if it’s lying unattended.

  Three: I cannot make any calls except in an emergency. Emergency means if there is a fire in the house or if I find her unconscious. Something as serious as that.

  Four: I cannot answer any incoming calls.

  And, five: I cannot give her number to any of my friends in school.

  Yes, I say, I will follow these rules. Which is quite easy since I am not interested at all in any of these things. I don’t have any calls to make, I don’t have any friends I wish to talk to. All I am interested in is the camera. Because whenever I get the phone, I go straight to camera, options, choose video.

  And I film.

  ~

  I know all camera options on my mother’s phone, video format: high, normal, basic. Scene mode, night or auto. How to record camera sounds, even add text. I know that the best time to film outdoors is before sunset, that you should try to keep the light behind you so that there isn’t too much shadow. I cannot download the video and edit it outside the phone so I use the phone camera itself as an editor. Recording and pausing, recording and pausing. Sometimes, I record black or white between scenes. That’s my fade-in and fade-out. I keep deleting much of what I have recorded because there is not enough space on the phone. There are a few films I like which I have not deleted.

  Nothing very special, but for some reason I like these films.

  ~

  The first is called Lunch.

  It’s about my mother warming lunch for me when I am back from school. She takes the portions out of the fridge one by one, rice, chicken, dal. She puts each back on the gas. Its flame is blue and yellow. Then she serves them neatly, on the white china plate that’s my favourite. Speaking clearly and slowly, naming each item, I record that as voice-over. The last scene: my lunch on the table, my mother washing her hands.

  ~

  The second film is called Mynah Bird.

  It’s about a mynah, drenched by the rain.

  It flies onto our balcony, finds its perch in a tiny space where the wall meets the roof. I have never seen so wet a bird; so much water drips from its feathers that it can hardly sit or balance itself. There’s a wind and the mynah trembles. Behind the bird, you can see the sky, dark and grey. I switch the camera to night mode, record the rain, its sound, the rustle of the mynah’s feathers as they scrape the wall. The bird is so frightened that, even when I bring the camera to just about 10 inches from its beak, it doesn’t fly away. I get a tight close-up, I am able to film that funny sound the bird’s feathers make as they rub against the wall.

  ~

  I tell my mother I need a camera, I really need a video camera. A small camera. She can set a hundred, a thousand, a million conditions and I will follow each one. My mother says, you aren’t doing well in school. Wait for a year, two years and if you do well, I will tell your father to get you a camera. Two years? That’s such a long time, I tell my mother, hundreds and hundreds of scenes will pass me by, unrecorded, but she doesn’t listen.

  I want to – but I cannot – tell her that every day in school all I think of is what to record when I get my own camera.

  For example, when Sharmila Ma’am is teaching history, my eyes record her lips. Red. Her eyes, her glasses, their steel frame. Chalk in her hand, dust on her fingers, some on her sari. The shape of our exercise books in her red bag. Her shoes, her toenails also painted red. I fail the history exam. Not only because I don’t listen to what Ma’am says but also because I don’t like memorising dates and numbers.

  ‘Mrs Sharma,’ Sharmila Ma’am tells my mother at the parent–teacher meeting, ‘you need to sit down with your child. He needs help with history. He is bright but he is very distracted, he keeps looking at everything except the blackboard.’

  ‘Of course, I will,’ says my mother.

  ~

  My mother is nervous. She is waiting for my father to return home. I know when she is nervous, she plays with the ring on her finger as she is doing now. Taking it off, putting it back on.

  Late night, my father is back.

  I am in the next room, awake, with her phone.

  ‘Why can’t we give Aman a camera? We can buy one of those small digital ones. He wants it so much, even we can use it,’ says my mother.

  ‘He’s failed an exam and you want him to have a camera?’

  ‘I think it will help him. I will set down conditions. You should see some of the things he has recorded on my phone.’

  ‘Every kid these days does that, everyone is recording.’

  ‘He is special.’

  ‘He has failed an exam, the only one in his class.’

  ‘I will help him with history, I took it in college.’

  ‘Why didn’t you help him all this while?’

  After this, I cannot make out what they say except that each one is talking in a loud voice.

  ~

  I am outside their room, right next to the door which is open, offering me a chink through which I record.

  I film my father, my mother, their audio, their video.

  My father slamming the door as he leaves the house, the sound of his footsteps as he walks down the stairs. My mother, playing with the ring on her finger.

  WOMAN

  Witches Dance

  Rain continues to fall. It floods the platform, makes the water creep towards the bench where I sit, you cradled in my lap. Your father has kept our two suitcases on the bench. We don’t want those to get wet, he says, while he himself, standing at the entrance looking into the night, is drenched to the bone. He has covered his head with a handkerchief which is now soaked with water that drips down his neck over his collar all across the back of his shirt.

  I can get a towel out from the suitcase, I tell him.

  No need, he says, let’s wait for my cousin to come, let’s reach home and then I will dry myself, what’s the point when we are going to get wet again.

  I see a light, he says, that must be for us.

  ~

  It’s a bullock-cart.

  Your father’s cousin has come to pick us up. Had this been morning and you awake, you would have seen the bull, each horn wrapped in a red cloth held in place by yellow threads, a tiny bell lost in the folds of its neck. The bullock-cart has a fresh coat of white paint and a canvas shelter rigged into a tent with bamboo frames. To protect us from rain and any immodest eyes that may look at this time of the night at me, Opaar’s new wife, new mother, newly arrived from the city.

  We set out, swaying, lurching along the dirt-track that meanders from the station to the village. Rain, which is now a drizzle, streams down the sides of the cart. You wake up crying, your father tells his cousin to stop, to let me change and feed you, and then we resume our journey.

  The only sounds I hear are the raindrops and the cart’s wheels creaking. Like an
old wooden door opening and closing in a steady wind.

  Your father falls asleep, his head rests at an awkward angle but I don’t want to wake him up, he has had a very long day. He had to go to college hours before we boarded the train, he said there were some students who needed something explained.

  His cousin, the man who is driving the cart, shouts out to the bull, nudging it back on track everytime it goes off course into the slush by the side of the road.

  I, too, fall asleep.

  ~

  In Opaar, it’s still dark when we arrive. They are waiting for us, many of them carrying lanterns, so many I can neither count nor estimate. There are your father’s brothers, their wives, his nephews and nieces; your father’s uncles, aunts, their children; his sister is also visiting with her husband and their children. Young and old, child and adult, men and women all talking to each other, their noise like chatter of birds in trees.

  It wakes you up as I climb down from the cart onto a wooden platform someone has placed next to the wheel so that I don’t have to step into the mud. The men move away from me, crowd around your father. They are asking him about the train, the delay, the rain and the city.

  It’s my first trip here after my marriage so the women break into song, a coconut is broken, rice grains are sprinkled on my head, earthen lamps are lit. You begin crying. Two girls, perpetually giggling, take you from me and begin rocking you.

  She is so beautiful, says one of them, she’s like a doll.

  My heart misses a beat with you gone but I am reassured with your father by my side, the crowd of smiling faces, all unfamiliar but all welcoming, so I let the girls keep you for a while.

  And then it’s like magic.

  We are led to our one-room house your father says he built with his savings. It’s one of the few in Opaar made of bricks, stones and some cement; most of the other houses in the village are thatched huts with mud walls and floors. By the light of lanterns, in less than an hour, an army of volunteers, visible and invisible, children and grown-ups, gets to work. Their shadows dance on the walls as doors are opened, the room is swept, the bed is made, an earthen pitcher is filled with water, a mosquito net is strung over the bed, the windowsill is wiped clean, the floor is mopped, someone brings a hand-fan, someone else lights two kerosene lanterns – there is no electricity in the village – someone brings two buckets of water and puts these on the porch outside, someone fans your face, two clean towels are brought and hung from pegs hurriedly hammered into the wall.

  By the time they are gone, you, your father and I have every conceivable comfort possible and, as we lie down to rest, you fast asleep, we see dawn breaking.

  ~

  Three days and three nights we spend in Opaar. I am the Queen, our house is the Palace and you the Little Princess, so special is the treatment we get. A group of girls have been deputed to serve as my attendants. They make tea for us in the morning, warm milk for you, bring water for my bath. The bathroom is a thatched enclosure with no roof, one door missing, so they stand guard as I quickly pour the bucket of water over my head. One girl oils my hair, another braids it, others bring their school books and friends and they all sit around me in a circle and ask me to teach them English.

  In the evening, one of them brings a lantern, another gets water and they escort me to a clearing behind the house, across a field and beyond the pond, to the toilet. The embarrassment of doing it in the open for the first time is only fleeting as the girls laugh, tell me stories of how they got caught, how they now know all the best places to do it where no one goes, where the ground is flat and hard, where your feet don’t sink in the mud, where grass doesn’t tickle you when you sit down. They teach me tricks: how to squat, each foot on a stone – chosen carefully so that it doesn’t wobble – to increase the clearing between myself and the earth.

  On our second day in Opaar, there is a thunderstorm shortly after lunch and girls come running, each one carrying a wicker basket on their waist like a baby. The wind whistles through mango orchards across the paddy fields beyond our house. That’s your orchard, they tell me, it belongs to you and your daughter and your husband.

  I stand in the porch with you, the cool water-laden wind blowing so hard you close your eyes. Palm trees bend like thin sticks in the wind, children run, skip across the mud, to catch the mangoes as they fall. That evening, the girls return with three big raw green mangoes. They cut thin slices, rub burnt chilli paste and salt on each slice dipped in mustard oil and we eat, all of us, one by one, until we are full, the chilli so hot that we sit, our mouths open, blowing air to cool our tongues on fire.

  ~

  At night, the girls tell me about the witches in Opaar.

  Who slip out of their homes under the cover of blackness and head for the pond where the village ends, where the railway tracks are, where no one lives and no one goes because big black cargo trains with no lights come thundering by at night, they follow no schedule, they travel without warning. To appease the spirits that give them magical powers, each witch has to sacrifice a child, preferably a baby not over three months old, and that’s why, the girls say, all parents of babies in this village have to be extra careful. Sometimes these witches sacrifice their own babies. They drown them in the pond by holding their heads underwater, smear their tiny bodies with mud they collect from the riverbank, wait for it to dry. Once the dead babies are caked with mud, the witches light earthen lamps which they arrange in a circle around each corpse. Then they dance through the night to the flickering light of the lamps, their giant shadows flitting in the trees.

  That’s why whenever a baby in the village falls ill, the girls are now speaking in whispers, we have to find out if it’s under a witch’s spell because then we call the witchdoctor who comes with a broom he beats the witch with, shouting at the spirit to leave her body. He hurts her, she begins to cry but the fact is that she is not crying, it’s the spirit inside her crying and only when she is bruised so hard that she begins to bleed does the spirit leave her body, she crumples to the floor.

  ~

  I want to tell them there is nothing like witches or spirits, I want to tell them that a sick child needs a doctor, not a witchdoctor, but watching their eyes gleam in the dark, I let it be, I let myself slip into their world and although one part of me has decided to listen so that I can retell these stories to you when you grow up and want stories that scare you, another is deeply drawn into these tales until I am one with the inky blackness outside, the sound of crickets chirping, the wind whistling in the trees, the sudden report of a raindrop falling, the hulking grey shadow of the mosquito net on the wall, the chill of these fears reinforcing the warmth of the familiar. That these men, women and children in Opaar have, even if it is for the moment, decided to embrace us as their own, giving up the little they have. Unmindful of their own hardship, they have joined hands to throw a protective circle, of trust and love, around us and placed us at its centre.

  ~

  Days after your father’s funeral a few years later, some of the same men, women from the village come to visit us. They tell me to bring you to the village so that you can play in the open. In the city, there is no place to play, they say, she can join other children collecting mangoes that drop from trees in a storm. She can swim in the pond, she will make so many friends. There is also land that’s in your name, they say, come and claim it, we will get a lawyer from the District Headquarters to help you with the paperwork.

  But with your father gone, so is Opaar.

  Everyone we met there was there because of him. You and I were his and, therefore, Opaar’s.

  With him no more, I worry what kind of a welcome we would get. Would they call you the one who brought bad luck to the family, the daughter who took the father away? Would they say, look at her mother, she doesn’t wear white after her husband’s death? Or maybe I am mistaken, there is still a place there for you and for me. Perhaps you would like to visit the village now that you are all grown-up, see how t
he village has changed, get our house opened once again, aired. Lie down under the mosquito net, watch the shadows on the wall, listen to the wind in the trees. Keep your ears open for witches dancing in the dark, big black cargo trains tearing down to nowhere.

  MAN

  Protest Rally

  Gridlock on the highway, his car hasn’t moved an inch in almost an hour. He tells Driver not to switch off the engine because he needs the air conditioner at maximum, the temperature set to less than 20 degrees because outside it’s more than 40. The car seems to have plunged into a lake on fire and even if the windows are rolled up, it doesn’t matter because heat flows in, through the tiniest of spaces. It bakes the seats, scorches the surfaces, from the dashboard to the inside of doors, the entire inside of the roof. It snakes through the collar of his shirt to wet his back and chest, trickle into his shoes, between his toes.

  The city police – egged on by angry judges of the High Court – banned dark sun film on vehicle windows after incidents of rape in moving cars. Take the covers off, they ordered, sunlight is our society’s best disinfectant, let everyone see what’s going on inside. To cut the glare, therefore, he rolls down the window on his side, drapes a newspaper’s double-spread over the glass, then rolls the window up making a temporary curtain of newsprint that offers him shade.

  That done, he pushes back his seat, adjusts it to flat, lies down, puts his headphones on to shut out all the noise, the AC, the fan, the rustle of Driver’s clothes, the scrape of Driver’s fingers, hard and calloused, against the steering wheel, soft and plush.

  It’s still hot inside; he reaches out to turn the temperature knob down – and it’s then that he sees the first face.