“Do you bruise easily?”
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s get some air.”
I immediately guessed she’d steer us toward a shopping mall, and she did. In the food court she sipped a Pepsi and I drank a rose milkshake and Pooja talked about Rupesh: Meeting him in a dumpling shop and flirting on Facebook. His failed marriage and the child he’d left behind. Mostly she talked about his money. She wanted the money, of course, but she wasn’t sure she loved him. No, that wasn’t right—she loved him, but she didn’t trust him. No, not that she didn’t trust him, exactly, but she didn’t trust men, in general. I tried to concentrate, but I was drowsy from traveling. “I need to go to bed,” I finally said.
We rode like tourists together through the hot night, bending and gawking as we jostled in an auto-rickshaw. Siliguri is a town crammed with people elbowing one another aside on their way to somewhere else. Its roads spin off to Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and China. We passed tall square buildings layered with floor after floor of shops, gaudy and compact and glowing in the night, stacked up toward blotted stars. There was something thrilling about all that market, all the far-flung geography that converged in a knot of highway and commerce here, the trading of things and money, bodies of sellers and buyers bending and quivering like candle flames in their many chambers.
“It’s like Calcutta, isn’t it?” Pooja shouted over the din. I knew what she meant. I remembered a kaleidoscope of raised highways, tireless crowds, colors cut into shards, the faces and jumble of life.
“Yes.” But then I remembered again and added, “But Calcutta is more.”
“Yes. Calcutta is more.”
Then the auto-rickshaw crashed with a crunch into a parked motorcycle, and Pooja shouted, “Oy,” in her big throaty voice. The motorcycle’s owner peeled himself from the crowd, squinting bloodshot eyes in a face like raw beef. He was a drunk man with drunk friends. They screamed at the driver, grabbed the roof, and slammed the rickshaw from side to side in a sickening rock. I gripped the seats and braced for the moment when somebody would notice me, the white person in the backseat, and their anger would come my way in a burst of bright pain. Pooja just sat there impassively; she might have been waiting for a bus. At last the driver pushed the men back and peeled down the road. Only then did conversation erupt.
“These people are crazy!” Pooja called into my ear. “They park anywhere, and then you give them a little bump and they want to kill you.”
“Weren’t you scared?” I asked Pooja.
“No,” she said. “I would have given him one tight slap. If he had hit that driver, I would have climbed out and beaten him.”
I could imagine this. She would have waded down into the darkness and taken on the drunks. From Pooja, I expected nothing less.
* * *
————
The next day we drove to a neighborhood of tightly packed alleyways and tiny shops.
“You see, there’s a nursing home there.” Pooja pointed out a gate. “Families come and go, but there’s nowhere to eat. I was thinking…”
A metal shutter clamped tight over one of the shops. No bigger than a closet, but it was enough, and the rent was cheap. If Pooja bought burners and cooking gas, she could start a business selling simple, fresh Indian food.
“People are always wandering around here looking for something to eat.”
“It’s a great idea.”
“The problem is, my money is stuck in the bank with the strike,” she said. “I have to see. Can I get my money, or no?”
“Pooja,” I sighed. “This is all such a mess.”
“It’s always like that.”
Heavy morning rains thinned to drizzle. Pooja frowned out the taxi window.
“I don’t like Siliguri. It’s like—” She made a face. “These women come down from the mountains and think they’re hidden here. They have boyfriends. They go on Facebook and they chat, they make dates, they meet.”
I didn’t point out this was exactly how she’d met Rupesh.
“I don’t like this Facebook,” she continued. “When I see women—these ladies—they have no dignity.
“And they are so stupid. They come to Siliguri, and they think they are in Hollywood.”
I laughed and repeated her words, watching cows doze with bellies in mud, sunburned men with toothpick legs propped onto rusted bicycles.
“I feel insecure,” she said abruptly. “I don’t trust him.”
“Your boyfriend?”
“Yes. I get so worried when he’s going on Facebook.”
“Really?” It seemed to me they were both on Facebook constantly.
“Yes, we always have a big fight.”
We watched the wet city move past the windows.
“He asks me, ‘Are you going to marry me?’ He asks me that all the time. I say, ‘I don’t know.’ ” She was almost singing, her tone swinging and falling. “He says, ‘Then what are you doing here?’ I tell him, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
The lazy intimacy in her voice made me want to turn away, as if I’d opened a door on them in bed.
“He says, ‘It’s not good for you to stay like this. Later what will happen to you? People will know, and if we don’t get married, they’ll talk.’ ”
“It’s true,” I said. “You should decide.”
“I know. Maybe I’m being selfish.”
“Selfish how?”
“If I marry him I won’t have any more financial problems.”
“You can still have other problems. If he starts using drugs again you’ll have a huge problem.”
“His cousins tell me, ‘We won’t make you face it alone. If he relapses we will be there for you.’ ”
We stopped at a supermarket to buy food for Pooja’s family. Supply lines to Darjeeling had been cut for months; people were trading vegetables and tea and running out of everything. We piled the cart with mustard oil, sugar, flour, rice, red lentils, tea. Pooja added crackling pouches of salty snacks and cookies and a large bottle of Coke.
“With these things, my son will be happy.” She put the junk food onto the belt. “He’s easy like that. He doesn’t expect anything big.”
I paid, and then we loaded the bags into the taxi and drove until she suddenly told the driver to turn.
“Is this your house?”
“Not my house,” she corrected me sharply. “I only stay here.”
A barefoot guard slept on a bedraggled sofa in a walled car park, stomach hanging from a fading undershirt. He slit his eyes, not bothering to lift himself.
“Will you come up?” This was more order than invitation.
“Is it okay?”
“I told him you’re coming.”
“But I feel nervous to meet him.” If Pooja’s boyfriend didn’t know she was a domestic worker, then who was I supposed to be? What if I accidentally got her caught in a lie and blew up her chance to marry into a rich family?
“He’s also nervous.” Pooja hustled toward the stairs, and I trailed reluctantly behind. “He says, ‘I’m looking unhealthy, I’m thin.’ When he was on drugs he was never afraid to talk to anyone. But now he became timid.”
We were already climbing the marble staircase. Rusted stains of betel leaf streaked the corners, and the walls were scrawled with crayon, but something about the building suggested a faded grandeur.
“I tell him, ‘You can’t hide,’ ” Pooja puffed as she climbed. “ ‘You wanted to be with me, so be with me.’ ”
She rang the doorbell, and I silently clocked the fact that she didn’t have a key. A maid opened the door and disappeared with a subservient shuffle.
Rupesh came out smiling and sheepish, a slight man dressed in a tight black T-shirt and jeans. A line of dark rot ran along his gums, giving the illusion that his teeth were floating
, suspended by nothing.
“Beautiful piano,” I said.
“He has so many pianos,” Pooja said. “How many do you have?”
“Seven.”
“Seven,” she repeated.
“In Kurseong?” I remembered Pooja saying the family had more property there.
“Yes.”
“How nice.”
Superficial rejoinders. Long pauses. Pooja told the maid to bring me a glass of water. I asked after Rupesh’s mother.
“Come say hello,” Pooja said.
“I don’t want to bother her.” I was alarmed.
“She’ll be happy.”
Reluctantly I followed Pooja to a bedroom where an emaciated old woman sprawled on her quilt in a nightgown. She moved her head and croaked.
“Hi,” I sing-songed. “Hello.” Big smile.
She croaked again.
I brought my hands together in namaste and ducked back out of sight.
Sitting next to Rupesh, I sneaked glances at the tattoos crawling down his arms. He mumbled uneasily and spoke in a thick accent. I kept asking him to repeat things. Pooja watched from across the room.
“Want to see the place where he went to rehab?” she called, her laugh clattering rudely among us.
We froze. She wanted to drag his addiction into the open. She feared it, and so she wanted to neuter it with discussion. Neither I nor Rupesh shared this desire.
“Oh, is the rehab in our direction?” I asked mildly.
“Yes, yes,” he echoed my tone.
“Oh, okay.”
“How long have you been in Delhi?” he offered after a pause.
“Four years,” I said, and scrambled to change the subject before he could ask how I knew Pooja. “Before that we were in Beijing.”
Pooja was no help. She watched us flounder with an insouciant grin, daring us to wreck her world. She was the only one with anything to lose, but she didn’t care. She never cared! I don’t think I’ve ever known anybody with a stronger gut than this widowed village maid with her Coke-bottle glasses and fingernails filed to points.
We made it through the visit. Rupesh didn’t ask. Either he was truly as incurious as Pooja supposed or, as I was starting to suspect, he already knew. Maybe he sensed a truth he didn’t wish to confirm. Maybe he feared spoiling his romantic dreams. Or maybe he was simply oblivious. I didn’t think so, but sometimes it’s hard to tell.
* * *
————
The road was a thread wrapped around the cones of hills, spinning higher, cutting into the edge where earth became nothing. Low sunrise rays cut through mist over tea fields; a clan of monkeys scrambled across a bridge; mountain rivers tumbled toward the sea. The taxi climbed into the foothills, and the valley fell below. The strike had emptied this highway of tourists and trade. All up the mountain people jogged and rambled over asphalt oddly drained of the usual cargo trucks, buses, and braying cars. As we neared Pooja’s village, she peered intently into the crowds. Aryan was somewhere along the road. He’d gotten up before dawn to run; he was training for a marathon.
“I can’t see him,” Pooja fretted.
“Maybe he went the other way.”
“No.” She turned to me. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“Don’t look down. Only look forward. If you look down you may get sick.”
She spoke in metaphors without trying; she could have been talking about life itself.
“You need to have a big heart to drive in the hills—Aryan!” she suddenly shouted, and thumped the driver’s arm. Cranking down the window, she hollered his name: The car was still rolling, but she was already climbing out.
A tall, lean boy peeled himself from a knot of teenagers and loped over. Pooja and her son beamed at each other and intertwined their fingers, turning their hands in the morning light. They said a few words, nodded, and then Pooja jumped back into the car.
“He will come,” she said, and we drove on.
Pooja’s father puttered in the road by his house, scraping up leaves and trash with a pair of thin wooden paddles. He strode toward the car, robust and delighted and natty, even, in black sweats and smart black-framed spectacles. I couldn’t recognize the shrunken, sickly man I’d met in Delhi. He led us inside, and we sat down to chat, slowly and irrelevantly, in careful English.
He left the front door open, leaking in the outdoor smells of fresh broken leaves and melting ice. His family had lived in this house, hammered together from planks gone mellow with age and painted bright blue, as long as anybody could remember. The front room held a carefully made bed, a cramped sofa, and an ancient television. Hindu gods smiled with closed lips from the walls, and thin red curtains allowed a sheen of sun. The floor was swept clean, pictures and teacups and plates carefully arranged on shelves. The house smelled pleasantly of kerosene and cigarette smoke and tea.
“Only my sister and I clean.” Pooja scowled at a thin layer of dust on the lidded teacups. “Otherwise it’s two men living here in a mess.”
“It seems very clean,” I protested.
“Only we dust.”
“Can I smoke?” her father asked.
“It’s your house,” I said. “Anyway I like the smell.”
I accepted a cup of tea and asked him about working for the Soviets in Calcutta. We traded a few lines of Russian. Pooja was abstracted, sitting by the door and craning to peer down the road.
“Here he comes,” she finally said.
Aryan ducked through the door and bent his thick crop of hair first to his mother and then to me, bending toward our feet. I laid my hand on his head as she had done, flustered but pleased, too, to be included.
Mother and son did not kiss or embrace; they hardly touched. They sat across the room and stared into each other’s faces, and between them tenderness billowed like the juice of dried tea into water.
Aryan couldn’t sit still. His legs bounced and jigged on the balls of his feet. His hands crawled over the bedcovers like crabs. He pantomimed brushing his teeth, and ducked through the curtain to the kitchen.
“He’s shy,” Pooja said.
“He needs some time,” his grandfather said.
People kept pausing in the open door. Neighbors, cousins, friends—all of the above, usually. They grinned and shook their heads as if to say, Of course Pooja would come during the strike.
“If you want to write the story about how I took care of my son,” Pooja told me, “you need to write about everybody in this town. They all contributed one way or the other.”
“This is Kalpana,” she announced when the lady across the street appeared, palms pressed together. “I told you about her.”
I remembered—the neighbor who’d minded a newborn Aryan those first months while Pooja taught school. She’d fed him cookies during school hours because Pooja couldn’t slip away often enough to satisfy his newborn appetite.
Kalpana wore a housedress and cardigan; her long hair was tugged back from a weather-beaten face. All the time I’d been sitting in Pooja’s house, I’d been watching idly as she brushed the eaves with a long-handled duster, swept the floors, and sloshed around with washing water. “Her house is right there.”
“Yes,” Pooja said.
“In my imagination, everything was farther away.”
The village was a brief scattering of houses strung along a single mountain road. The road was the spinal column, heart, and brain of the village; the most lively and unpredictable thing in town. A mountain pass older than pavement; the villagers say, writhing through the Himalayas from India to China. Children played on its banks. Old people sat around and watched it flow.
There was just one road, but that road had two sides. One side edged off the hillside into heaven. The other was choked from behind, smashed up against the
rising mountain.
Pooja’s mother had come from the heavenly side of the road. Her family had a house and shops that hung over the valley, open to air.
Pooja’s father came from the choked side of the road, and that was where the family remained. The house was just two small rooms attached to a dim, moist kitchen and a small prayer closet to hold the souls of the ancestors. Because she had married out of her father’s house, Pooja was not allowed inside this shrine.
“There is no bathroom,” Pooja told me. It was a confession. “We go in the back. This is uncomfortable for us.”
“I imagine so,” I agreed.
Jungle grew thick on the hill out back. “That’s why snakes come inside,” Pooja said.
I knew we were both thinking of the story she used to tell me, giggling to see me shudder. A snake had once crawled into her father’s house and onto her sleeping body. She felt it slide across her chest, the bones knitting and kneading. Blindly she grabbed the animal and threw it; her father shoved it into the road. It was four feet long, they said, and poisonous. The next morning they looked for signs of the snake but found nothing. In Hindu philosophy, snakes are laden with seemingly conflicting meaning—fertility, timelessness, desire, infinity, creation, destruction. Killing a snake is considered spiritually dangerous.
Remembering, I shuddered again—but was distracted by the sight of teenagers trooping down the road with backpacks.
“School is open?” I was confused.
“Just coaching,” Aryan said quickly.
Pooja turned to follow my gaze.
“Coaching like sports?”
“So they don’t fall behind,” Pooja said coldly, turning back to scowl at her son. “So they pass their exams.”
Aryan bounced his knees a few times and then stretched his arms showily overhead.
“Aryan doesn’t want to go?” I guessed.
He grinned quickly. “No.”
“You don’t like school?”
Women's Work Page 31
