In the end, Pooja gave up. Her old life was gone, and although her father wanted her to endure her family’s mistreatment long enough to finish her education, the rejection was too painful to bear. She ran away a second time with Babin, and this time they made it to Nepal. They stayed there for a year, until her mother sent a message that she was forgiven.
So Pooja and Babin came home and settled back down in their village. Pooja taught school and Babin tried to become a professional singer but failed, and so instead he drank cheap whiskey and felt sorry for himself. Years passed like that: Pooja worked to support Babin, and Babin drank.
“He got depressed and he got into alcohol,” Pooja said. “Now I understand that. I didn’t have the brains to understand at the time.”
I started to protest, but she kept talking.
“He would drink every morning,” she said. “He became an alcoholic.”
As miserable as this existence sounded to me, Pooja was nonchalant. In the trajectory of her life, marriage had been one of the better stretches: she was close to her family and, despite the troubles of drink and money, there was love.
Seven years into their marriage, two things happened at once: Pooja got pregnant, and Babin came down with a fever. His malady was never diagnosed. Pooja was six months pregnant when she became a widow.
“What was that like?” I asked.
“He went away. He was no more,” she said simply. “That period was like—I was in the middle of nowhere. He had been my support. He was not supporting me financially, but he was supporting me emotionally.”
By tradition, Pooja and her baby should have stayed with her in-laws. But she found no solace there. On the contrary—they angrily blamed her for failing to nurse Babin back to health, and demanded that she agree to turn over the baby to be raised by one of Babin’s brothers.
“What did you say?” I was so immersed in this story I almost forgot to type notes.
“I said, ‘I waited seven years to get pregnant. I’ll never give my baby to anyone,’ ” Pooja said. “That was my thing: ‘I am a good mother.’ ”
“And they accepted that?”
“Not really. They were very mean to me. They’d keep me separate and talk in the other room.”
“Horrible.” In Pooja’s life, I realized, the first cruelties came not from the world, but from the family, in the household—the household again.
“But my dad came,” Pooja said, and yet again I felt a rush of gratitude for this father. “He said, ‘She’s not a burden to me. I can take her back.’ ”
Pooja went back to her father’s house, broke and grieving and about to give birth. She wanted badly to deliver her baby in the hospital but couldn’t see a way to pay the bill. To pass the time, she began playing low-stakes hands of gin rummy with the women of the village. She won every time.
“God was great at that time,” she told me. “My luck—I don’t know. I think that God favors me somehow.”
I wondered whether the women had deliberately thrown the games. Maybe this had been a way to take pity on the desperate widow. I didn’t ask; it seemed rude to question Pooja’s long-cherished story of providential caretaking. By the time she went into labor she’d stashed enough money to pay for her own delivery and to help an unknown woman pay for hers—this charity over the objections of Ricky, who still rolled her eyes at the memory years later.
Pooja named her baby Aryan, which means “noble.” He was a sickly child whose medications sharpened the problem of money. A neighbor babysat for free while Pooja taught school, and her father drove a taxi for a nearby hotel, but there was never enough cash. The family struggled to pay for food and school supplies.
Pooja tried leaving Aryan at home and migrating to Nepal and then Calcutta, where salaries were higher—but that meant leaving Aryan in the care of Ricky, who was still a child herself. The boy grew so sick he wound up in the hospital, and Pooja came home again.
“I never knew it was so bad for you,” I said.
This was an understatement: these stories were hitting me like a rebuke. It was dawning on me that Pooja had deliberately downplayed her poverty out of pride, and that we’d both saved face by pretending we came from roughly the same sort of background.
Sometimes, of course, the pretense had cracked. One particularly damp monsoon season, I’d discovered black mold spreading across a spare pillow, and handed it to Pooja to throw away. But instead she’d squinted at the spots and said lightly—too lightly—“I think I can fix it, ma’am. I’ll take it,” and carried it up to the roof to dry out in the sun. That memory came back to me now.
“We faced very hard times,” Pooja agreed, interrupting my thoughts.
“That’s why we still have bad feelings with the other family members,” Ricky said. “Because they knew, but they didn’t do anything.”
Her eyes filled with tears. I had never seen this side of Ricky—tough, brash, bawdy Ricky, and all this sorrow welling underneath.
“We were so desperate, you know? They could have just invited us to eat. But they never did.”
“That would be hard to forgive,” I agreed.
“Now they ask us,” Ricky said indignantly. “Now that we have enough money, they want us to come. But it’s like—where were you before?”
“We keep to ourselves,” Pooja said firmly. “We are nice, we chat, we visit, but underneath, we keep to ourselves.”
“I don’t go,” said Ricky, who always pushes further. “Now I won’t accept their food. They should have asked us before.”
“I hear you,” I said.
“We did so much struggling to survive. We needed school fees for me and Aryan,” Ricky said. “I didn’t have money for the books. The teacher would tell me, go out. I’d have to walk out with everybody staring.”
The indignity flared fresh in her eyes.
“I’d come home so angry. Sometimes we didn’t have the money even to buy a pencil and eraser. And Aryan would lose his eraser—” Ricky paused. “I’ll tell you the truth. I would even hit him. I’d be so angry with him.”
I concentrated on keeping my face empty. I tried to arrange my features into a simulacrum of compassion. She had been a girl, too, I reminded myself, a child, and life can be so mad—but still—I glanced at Pooja, but Pooja’s head was tilted toward Ricky. She already knew, then, she had heard this before.
“So that’s when you came to Delhi,” I said to Pooja.
“Yes. I was feeling so bad. Aryan was little and he needed his mom,” Pooja said. “But there was no option.”
She came to Delhi, stayed with an uncle, and went to work for a British family who paid her five thousand rupees a month—about seventy-eight dollars at the current exchange rate. The move was painful but life-saving: this seemingly meager sum was enough to bridge the gap from just barely surviving to financial stability.
“We celebrated,” Ricky remembered. “I still remember—everybody bought new clothes on Dussehra and we were so happy. I saw that happiness on Aryan’s face.”
The topic of Delhi reminded the sisters of another pet subject: Varun, the abusive boyfriend who’d upended my own family’s status quo and who, I now learned, had been tormenting Pooja for more than a decade.
Pooja first met Varun in her early days in Delhi. Back then he was sweet and solicitous. He helped her find a better job, and quietly trained her in cooking and service.
“After a year, he started to change,” Pooja said. “He started saying, ‘Have you slept with Sir?’ I was saying, ‘What are you talking about?’ ”
Soon, she said, “he was beating me every day.” Varun isolated Pooja from her family, lashing out if she gave time and attention to anybody else. He was even jealous of her son.
“Aryan hated him,” Pooja said. Ricky nodded in confirmation. They all hated him. But Pooja stayed.
&nb
sp; “I always thought, if I give him a chance, maybe he will change,” she said. “I was always saying, ‘One day things will be all right.’ I wasted years of my life. I was like a puppet. He had control in his hand.
“Now,” she added, “I’ve learned a lesson.”
“I can’t believe you were abused so long,” I said. “I used to worry that I ruined your life by making you choose between your job and Varun. But now I feel like that was for the best, anyway.”
“Yes,” said Pooja.
“If only you got rid of him before,” Ricky said, rudely.
The more we talked about Varun, the lower Pooja shrank into her seat and the taller Ricky swelled with indignation.
“Another thing I always wondered about.” I wanted to change the subject. “How was it for Aryan, knowing you were taking care of other kids?”
“He came to visit,” Pooja said. “But I couldn’t give him much time.”
“How did he handle it?”
“When he was eight, he had some knowledge. He’d say, ‘I’m your son. Why do you keep that girl on your lap?’ ”
“Oh God.” Just hearing this was like a needle in my heart. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘I have to love her also. I work for her, and she is also a little child. When you’re not here I look after her, and she loves me a lot. She is like my child, too. But after all you are my child.’ ”
“Did he understand?” I asked.
“Slowly, as he grew, he understood.”
“But how is it now?”
“I feel sometimes that because I was not in connection with him for a long time, maybe that led him to be more quiet and reserved. I think so. His communications with me are very limited.” She nodded at Ricky. “He plays with her. He never plays with me. He talks with Ricky about everything. About girlfriends, everything. But with me, I say, ‘Who is she?’ ‘She’s my friend,’ and that’s it.”
Pooja spoke plain and straight. She didn’t try to make it pretty.
“He stays at home. He doesn’t go out. His friends come looking for him, but he likes to stay in the dark. He pulls the curtains,” Pooja said. “Maybe I didn’t give him so much attention. There were times when he needed me and I wasn’t there. But I was not selfish. I gave ten years of my life to somebody who was ruthless. I spoiled my life with my own hands.”
The thought of Aryan led to the thought of money. The thought of money led back to Aryan. These are the two strands that bind Pooja’s life. Sometimes Aryan asks his mother, plainly, to live with him. But Pooja can’t figure out how to make it work. She can’t afford schools in the city, and she can’t earn enough money back in the village.
“Staying away from my son, the guilt is always there,” she said. “Even my dad, when he gets angry, he says, ‘What did you do for your son?’ I feel very bad then. And I cry. My dad says, ‘You saw only your life.’ ”
This struck me as both cruel and unfair, but I didn’t protest. I bit my tongue and wrote it down.
* * *
————
It was late; it had gotten late. I paid the check, and we spilled out into the mall, past the shuttered shops and empty cafés. My legs were unsteady. Standing up, pushing away from the table, was like waking up from a dream.
Rambling through the dimmed mall, I asked about Pooja’s boyfriend. Their Facebook activity had fallen quiet, and I was wondering whether they’d broken up.
“He’s waiting,” Pooja said. His family wanted the couple to get married as soon as possible. The boyfriend’s elderly mother was ill, and the family wanted Pooja to nurse her. Another man and a new life were waiting. Pooja could step into it—but she hesitated.
“Now he says everything right. He wants to take care of Aryan. We will all live together. I won’t have any problems,” she said. “Men always say like that at first. But I want to know, what will he be saying later? That’s my thing.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Let’s take selfies,” Ricky suddenly suggested.
“But you know,” Pooja said as we wrapped arms around shoulders and grinned. “None of our people know we are working in these jobs.”
“What?” This was the most surprising detail I’d heard all night. “What do they think you’re doing?”
“I dunno, ma’am,” Pooja said. “A call center.”
“They think you work at a call center?”
“Yes. Only my father and son know the truth.”
“But why?”
“They’d laugh at us. These aren’t respectable jobs.”
“They see we have money, and they think we have great jobs,” Ricky said. “If they knew the truth they would make fun of us.”
“Does your boyfriend know?”
“No way,” Pooja said flatly. “His family—they hire servants themselves. If they knew I had worked like that, in people’s houses, they would never let him marry me.”
I imagined the stress of sustaining this fiction, and stiffened with vicarious panic.
“Won’t they find out? Aren’t people from home also working here?”
“Yes, but they face the same problem.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Our group of friends—none of our families know what kind of work we do in Delhi.”
I dropped the sisters off and drove back toward home, head awash in the stories I’d heard. I wondered whether Aryan was depressed. I remembered how Pooja shrank next to her sister when they talked about Varun, as if her mistakes had cost her the right to stand up for herself.
The car slid down rain-silvered roads, past steaming puddles and creaking, hand-painted cargo trucks massed on the city’s border, long-haul drivers waiting for midnight to bring their goods into the capital. Looking out the window, I had the illusion that Gurgaon was not a real place but some ultramodern stage set. The mall had been bright and crowded with people, but the only impression it left was one of emptiness—the great naked panes of glass, caverns of manufactured materials, grinding escalators, and the cold breath of air-conditioning. All that stuff assembled and stitched cheap by people like Pooja, branded and marketed and imported by people like me, bought by God knows who, and God knows why. These things for sale were props and ephemera. The mall was just a great gleaming empty cube meant to contain our miseries. A distraction that became a trap.
Chapter 29
A few weeks later Pooja knocked on the door of my hotel room. I’d flown to Siliguri, a crowded, restless trade and transit hub in the Himalayan foothills. In what struck me as a surprisingly libertine arrangement, Pooja was staying there with her boyfriend and his family, trying to decide what to do next.
I hugged Pooja, and as we stepped apart, she swept her eyes over the room. Shabby blankets covered the bed, plastic flowers collected dust, and mold spots stained the walls.
“I was surprised you stayed here,” she said.
“I know somebody who knows the manager.” I shrugged. “Supposedly he has some really good drivers—Nepali drivers—to get us to your village through the strike.”
She mentioned another hotel. “That one is nice. Next time you stay there.”
“I don’t mind.” How little Pooja knew of me! She had no sense of the many cheap and dirty and dangerous places I’d occupied before coming to India and sliding into the formal role of “ma’am.”
I had no tea or snacks, so I poured glasses of purified water. In the window the summer-white sky flushed pink with coming night. A highway screamed past, a metallic hurricane of cargo trucks and buses.
“Remember that time you argued with Aryan on his birthday because he wanted to come here for a movie?” This memory had suddenly come to me: Pooja shouting into her phone in the kitchen.
Pooja laughed. “I always tell him, ‘Don’t go to Siliguri.’ There are so many dru
gs. Dealers look for boys like him.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Brown sugar.”
“Heroin?”
“I don’t know. They call it brown sugar.”
“It’s brown? They shoot it?” I pretended to inject my arm.
“Yes.”
“Heroin.”
“That’s the thing with my boyfriend,” she said abruptly. “He’s a drug addict.”
“Oh no.” But I wasn’t really surprised. I’d noticed a reference to NA on his Facebook page.
“But now he went to rehab. He hasn’t done it in seven months.”
She studied my face as she spoke. As if she expected me to tell her, with certainty, whether this recovery could stick.
“He goes to these NA meetings,” she added when I didn’t say anything. “But he used drugs for twenty-eight years.”
“That’s good,” I said doubtfully. “They say those meetings can really work.”
“I told you, his family has a lot of money. So, if he doesn’t stay clean, his inheritance will go into a trust.” She looked at me again, and again I sensed an eagerness for my verdict, as if I could tell her whether the financial motivation would be enough to keep him clean.
“Addicts have to want to stop for themselves,” I finally offered. “That’s what everyone says.”
“I’m afraid he’ll start again.”
“What does he say?”
“He had a lot of emotional pain. His mother was always busy…”
Disinterested in the psychological topography of this troublesome-sounding boyfriend, I asked about the bruises on her arms. Pooja explained that she’d gotten banged around helping to hoist Rupesh’s mother—and her wheelchair—up four flights of stairs. Speaking of which, they had a big flat in a stylish neighborhood, and that was only one of their many properties—
As she chattered about his family’s wealth, I stared at the jellyfish of congealed blood suspended under her skin. Had somebody hurt her, was she using needles? Her explanation was plausible. I suspected I was making too much of the bruises because they were there, visible, unlike the many hours and days of her life that were hidden from me. Still, I couldn’t stop staring.
Women's Work Page 30
