A State of Freedom

by Neel Mukherjee

  Each of the alleys had a runnel along one side – in one case, on both sides – which was the drain, a channel for general liquid filth and sometimes solids too. In the monsoon the drains brimmed over, turning the alleyways into tributaries of mud and effluent; veins of liquid the colour of milky tea, with small islands of waste, running through a close huddle of dirty, dark organs in the innards of an unknown animal. These tributaries spilled their borders and the liquid oozed into the homes, even into those that stood on stretches raised a couple of feet above the lanes, not level with them. Still, these minor annoyances brought out the innate resourcefulness of some inhabitants, much as the toasting of spices releases their aromatic essence. Someone had the bright thought of putting several sealed bags of cement – stolen from a building site – just outside the front door of his home, the idea being that the cement, like sponge, would absorb all the water and if not keep the front powder-dry, then at least prevent water from entering the room, especially through the unsealable space under the front door. The bags of cement were not enough for the volume of water that the monsoons unleashed. Absorb water they did, but the sacks got super-saturated quickly and were drowned intermittently for three months, sometimes lying submerged, at other times showing their swollen grey backs like some stranded dolphins. Three or four months after the end of the rainy season, they had hardened into concrete boulders, forming a set of disorderly giant beads in an unfinished amateur-crafted necklace discarded permanently outside the front of the home. Sand would have been better, several residents with the gift of hindsight advised; we told them so many times: get sand instead of cement, they said. No one pointed out that sand was not saturation-proof.

  Toilets were communal. A set of nine cubicles – four for women, separated by the width of the slum from the five for men, serving the twelve hundred or so residents – stood on the northern edge, beyond which there was a strip of black rocks giving way to the placid sea. The women’s toilets were built of brick, had rusting tin doors, which had to be tied with a piece of coir or plastic rope into a metal hoop hammered to the inside wall in order to be locked, and the most common kind of roof in this slum, not brick or concrete but an improvised thing made of beaten cane boards, bamboo, plastic and wire. Black plastic sheets on top were meant to keep the toilet waterproof. There were no windows or ventilation, save for two postcard-sized squares punched on the top of each back wall. Since there was no electricity connection in the cubicles, these holes served as the only portals for letting in light during the day, although the light was so ineffectual in the enclosed darkness that some women joked they couldn’t tell if it was a stationary rat or a pile of shit that hadn’t been sluiced out, the latter an all-too-common occurrence since the toilets – or the entire slum, for that matter – did not have a water connection and the small plastic mug, canister or bottle of water that most of the users carried into the toilet all went towards cleaning themselves, leaving nothing for flushing, which, in any case, was not a priority.

  There was no running water in the jhopri and the residents said, not entirely unseriously, that they valued water above gold: the neighbour two doors down from Milly and Binay maintained that his son’s dowry would be a home with a twenty-four-hour legal water connection. Taps, not jewellery, he said. The wish was not far-fetched. Each home had a small army of containers – cans, buckets, drums, jerrycans, canisters, ewers, empty litre- or two-litre plastic bottles – occupying a significant proportion of the indoor space; indoors because thefts of water were not uncommon. There were fixed hours when the municipal corporation turned on the water supply at designated spigots dotted through the city. The slum-dwellers had to queue at these taps with their empty containers, fill them up and carry them back home. If you didn’t make it to the tap on time to join the line, you had no water for the next twenty-four hours. The queues at this spigot were long and intensely competitive and bad-tempered: this was the only tap within convenient distance of the slum. The supply was activated for such a limited time that it was vital to be at a point in the line that would ensure filling up; too far back and the connection was turned off before you got to the front and you were left to return empty-handed. As a result, the number of containers each person brought to the tap was ruthlessly monitored, with the vision of vultures, by fellow residents.

  Milly had always been the person responsible for fetching water. She had done it when she was a child, back in her home village, and she did it now in Bandra, not only because it was mostly the work of women and children but also because she was free in the evenings, when the spigot was turned on, while Binay’s job in the restaurant meant that he was away during those hours. She now had two jobs, both nearby, the second one from around nine in the morning to noon, which left her free for the rest of the day.

  Their water came free of charge but the electricity did not, although this was not because they paid electricity bills sent by a power company. The power in the slum was illegal, siphoned off from the supply by tapping into power lines. A slumlord paid the man who did the technical work, and in return the slum residents paid the slumlord. In the case of Milly’s jhopri, the man in charge of providing stolen electricity also owned a number of rooms, which he rented out. Milly and Binay paid three thousand rupees a month in rent, and an additional charge for cable television and electricity connections.

  Besides a television mounted on a wooden trunk, their ten-feet-by-fourteen-feet room had a bed, the rank of water containers, a single-burner stove connected to a five-kilo LPG cylinder, and a cheap metal almirah that could be locked. Their two plates, one pot, one pan and one tawaa were kept on the floor, beside the gas stove. There was a chaupai on which Milly sat while she cooked. A rope was suspended in one corner, held in place at either end by two iron nails hammered into the walls; this was used to hang clothes. A naked light bulb was suspended from the ceiling. A laminated picture of Christ, halo behind his head radiating rays in all directions, white robe bared at the chest to show the sacred red heart, auburn locks cascading down to his shoulders, was pinned to the wall beside the television; in fact, he looked a little bit like Salman Khan. Milly had bought it from one of the vendors who sat outside St Mary’s Church, selling candles in the shapes of hands, legs, arms, all looking like waxworks of amputated limbs, and other things deemed necessary for devotional purposes – prayer books, posters, pictures, matches, incense, ordinary candles, oil, holy water.

  Over time, Milly and Binay acquired other domestic necessities: a table fan; a second bed, made of coir rope and wood, that was left upright, leaning against a wall, with one of its narrow sides on the floor, and only put down at night; two steel bowls; two big tins, one for rice, the other for dal. The battle in this matter was a three-way one, between space, money and need, and need almost always lost.

  10: Work, money, accounts, the reproduction of everyday life

  Milly held on to the two jobs in Bandra until late into her first pregnancy. They liked her at ‘Sea Crest’ and ‘Baseraa’ well enough to have her back when her daughter, Mallika, was three months old; better still, she was allowed to bring her child with her. She had to juggle the hours a bit, and was anxious about the baby crying and annoying her employers. In the event, the people at both places were indifferent to the occasional mewling and squalling. What nearly did for Milly were the sleepless nights, especially when the baby was teething. During this period she often went to her first job at the Chandmals in ‘Sea Crest’, at seven in the morning, having been awake from three or four. There were days when she knew that if she didn’t keep moving – sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows, washing the heavy sheets by hand – she would fall asleep at work, and that would be not only embarrassing but perhaps reasonable grounds for being told off or even dismissed. None of these fears came to fruition. Her employers were not unkind and as long as they felt that their lives and routines were not inconvenienced by their bai’s new motherhood, they were mostly helpful, the Didi at ‘Sea Crest’, who was a mothe
r herself, even going so far as offering Milly advice, giving her a cot and rocking-horse and her two boys’ baby clothes, which she hadn’t had the heart to throw away.

  In gratitude, Milly cooked Sindhi dishes as surprises for the family at ‘Sea Crest’. The Chandmals were Gujarati and vegetarian; her sai bhaji, learned in Lower Parel, was a big hit. Her trick was to use the obligatory dill in the dish not as a herb, but as another vegetable, similar to the spinach that was also included. And it required hardly any cooking: she soaked chana dal overnight, chopped generous amounts of spinach and dill, a small handful of sorrel and a bunch of fenugreek leaves, diced a couple of onions, a potato, an aubergine, an okra, half an arbi. In a pressure cooker, she heated oil and sautéed the vegetables and onions for five to seven minutes, added all the greens, the drained chana dal, some slit green chillies, salt, half a teaspoon of turmeric, some ginger paste and a heaped teaspoon of coriander powder, a little bit of water, then gave it a good stir, locked the lid and counted seven to eight ‘whistles’. She opened the lid when it was safe to do so, added more dill, and coarsely mashed the contents until it was a thick, jungle-green swamp.

  When Mallika grew up a bit, Milly began to leave her at home with Binay. Binay earned seven thousand rupees a month in his job as a cook. He used to send fifteen hundred to his home in Lalthekar – ageing parents, three brothers, two sisters, both of them unmarried, money that disappeared the minute it arrived, like a pot of water on a parched, fissured field – but with Milly earning eight thousand rupees from her two jobs, he decided to increase the amount of money he sent to his village. His parents needed all they could get, particularly now that the expensive business of marrying the sisters was upon them and had to be seen through in the next two to three years. So Binay’s entire salary was swallowed up in paying the rent and sending money back home, and Milly’s money became the fund for household expenses.

  But bringing up a child was an expensive business and the only solution that they could come up with was for Milly to take on another job. Binay could look for a different restaurant kitchen to work in but his salary wouldn’t be much higher, nor would he have more flexibility with his hours, since any restaurant would need him for the entire duration of the evening shift. Milly did not find it easy to come by a third job: most people wanted a bai to come in the mornings and Milly was not free until just after noon. Mallika was four and Milly just pregnant with her second child when she got the cleaning job at the Sens’ in Band Stand.

  On her second week at the new place, she saw a vaguely familiar face leaving the Sens’ flat just as she was arriving. She searched her head to pin down where she had seen the woman, but it kept eluding her until the new Didi, making conversation with Milly as she went about her duties, told her that the woman she had seen leaving was Renu, their cook. She came for an hour in the morning, then at around eleven in the morning and left around one, then again in the evening to cook dinner. She lived in the same jhopri as Milly – had she never seen her around?

  Yes, of course, Milly thought: that was who she was, the woman she had noticed a few times in the queue for water.

  The new Didi, Tulika Sen, was a kind, generous person; also gratuitously helpful and not circumscribed by the unspoken laws that governed the mutual taking and giving in a servant – mistress relationship. She tried to engage Milly in conversation and find out about her life back in her village, her life in the city now, about Binay and his job, about Mallika. Milly, wary from her experiences in Jamshedpur and her first job in Mumbai, gave monosyllabic replies as far as she could; she had no idea that this could be seen as discouraging or insolent. It was not Milly’s intention to be cold to the new Didi, only self-protective. But Didi persisted; her warmth and interest were genuine and penetrated through the protective shell to the person beneath. Milly was surprised, because she didn’t think her life could be of interest to anyone else; it wasn’t to her; she only lived it because that’s what one did. She started giving more expansive answers to Didi’s questions but some things – Budhuwa, Soni – she felt she couldn’t bring herself to speak about. She told Didi about Debdulal and Pratima and the Vachanis and, as an aside to those stories, all her desire to finish Class 12, still burning but now buried under the ash of days, was uncovered.

  Tulika Sen looked after Milly. When she found out that Milly was pregnant with her second child, Mrs Sen began to give her a huge lunch every day. There was maximum democracy with food here, the greatest Milly had come across so far. In the beginning, Didi had taken portions of leftovers from the fridge and microwaved them for her around two o’clock. Over time, after Milly had learned how to work the microwave, Didi put out the bowls and Tupperware containing the food that she wanted Milly to have, asking her to help herself; and later still, she pointed them out in the fridge and let Milly do the rest. Milly ate what Didi and her husband ate – dal, rice, roti, sabzi, fish, meat. She was given everything, and not only when they were stale or about to go off.

  The Sens ate well, although it was Milly’s understanding that their cook, Renu, had been trained by Didi to cook the kind of food they wanted. It appeared that when their son, who lived abroad, came to visit once a year, he gave instructions every morning to Renu on the menu for lunch and dinner and, frequently, the recipes for the different dishes. One day, when Didi was away, he served Milly her meal; in slightly uneasy Hindi he explained what everything was – chana dal with coconut and raisins; chicken in white poppyseed gravy (he used the Hindi word, khus khus, and asked her hesitantly if he wasn’t getting it wrong; she looked away and murmured, to the wall, that she knew what he meant); fish-fry; cauliflower with potatoes and peas … Milly knew that the luxurious food was because his parents wanted to shower their mostly-absent son with love. She knew how affections and feelings spoke through food; and often need, too. Sometimes, when she was given something at Didi’s home that she knew her daughter Mallika had never tasted, did not even know the name of, she set aside a little bit and took it away in a plastic bag to bring it to the girl back home. Binay frequently brought back food from the restaurant – chow mein, chilli chicken, fried rice, chop suey, chicken manchuri – new food, new tastes for their tongues, new words for their mouths. Milly ate with gusto, after the first few seconds of hesitation in front of the unfamiliar dissipated into nothing; hunger, or greed, was so much more powerful.

  A small corner of Milly’s mind was always busy calculating how much household expense was saved when Binay bought home food from his workplace.

  ‘You have to pay for the food you bring home?’ she had asked him once. ‘Do they take it off your wages?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. There are leftovers of the staples, chow mein, fried rice, almost every day. Sometimes we serve it the next day if we think it’s not going to spoil, but some days we just share it out among the staff.’

  Silently, she savoured this novelty of excess food, of food being given away for free. A knot deep inside her began its long, slow untwisting, but even then she felt it was never going to go away for good. She felt a sort of mingling of fear and shame and anxiety when she bagged the food given to her by Sen Didi for her children, as if she was stealing. A small question, asking Didi’s permission, could easily have sorted it out, but she was too shy, too afraid, to say the words, until one day Didi came into the kitchen and caught her in the middle of spooning crab curry into a plastic bag she had taken out of the cupboard under the worktop, where all the reusable wrapping and containers were stored.

  ‘Aren’t you eating that? Don’t you eat crab?’ Didi asked.

  Milly, her back to Didi, let the option of lying flash through her head for the briefest of moments, but the words that came out of her mouth, while she still had her back turned, were, ‘No, I’m taking it for my daughter.’ Then she stopped, wishing the earth would swallow her.

  Didi, however, did not react the way Milly had expected her to. She said, ‘Why are you using a plastic bag? All the gravy will leak … Use one of the ti
ffin boxes and bring it back tomorrow.’ And two days later, ‘Milly, if you want to take any food home for your children, just take it. You don’t need to divide your own portion and eat less.’

  Milly bent her head sideways to acknowledge the permission, but did not turn round from her washing-up to face Didi. It wasn’t until much later, after Milly had learned to notice and read the generosity and kindness in this family, things she never looked for or even secretly sought, that she realised what she had been given was a kind of freedom. It took her time to relax into it. Recalling her time in Jamshedpur, Milly thought that the bigger the city, the greater the penal strictures about errors and accidents, so when she broke a teapot at Sen Didi’s, she confessed to it right away and asked for her wages to be cut.

  Didi laughed. ‘It’s only a teapot, it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It didn’t cost me a lot, don’t worry about it.’

  Tulika Sen increased Milly’s salary but in slow instalments, always adding on some extra tasks or an extra quarter- or half-hour so that Milly wouldn’t think it was charity. It was she who told Milly of an adult-education night-school in St Mary’s Church, the church Milly attended every Sunday morning, and gently nudged her to attend; you can even take Mallika with you, she said. Shortly after her boy, Amit, was born, Milly’s salary at the Sens’ went up to five thousand rupees. Following Mumbai custom, she was paid a bonus – one month’s salary – every Diwali, at each home she worked for. This money, amounting to twelve thousand rupees and increasing to fourteen thousand by the time Amit turned one, Milly deposited entirely in a savings account.

  She had found that the current account she had had, the one in which Hemali Vachani had deposited her salary every month, had not been frozen by the bank, on the instructions of the Vachanis, or its money cleared out by them. When the people at ‘Sea Crest’ had paid her in cash at the end of her first month there, she had told them about her fears for that account and all that money. Milly had not imagined that it would be so easily sorted out. But Mrs Chandmal at ‘Sea Crest’ had asked her to bring her ration card with her and had taken her to the Bandra branch of the bank. It was here that Milly learned there was nothing called a ‘passbook’ any longer; everything was on a machine. They printed out a summary statement for her. She worked out later that day that her money was safe; no one but she could touch it. In a week’s time she had what she had presumably been shown as a ‘passbook’ by Hemali Didi – a new cheque book for deposits.