Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “I hate it,” he said.

  Pooja glared. Aryan smirked and showed his palms in innocence.

  Abruptly Pooja suggested we go out. She walked in the middle of the road, flanked by me and her son. All around us sang a chorus of falling water, dozens of streams flowing past the village, under the road and onward. Swooning notes of old Bollywood scratched from open windows. Birds screamed and clucked in the thick growth. I gulped great lungfuls of mountain air, clean and cold after the long swelter of a Delhi summer, and tried to imagine how Pooja had left this pristine mountain perch for the squalor and sin of the Indian capital.

  Pooja introduced me to everybody we met, to countless cousins and uncles and aunts and friends, and never failed to mention that I was writing a book and that she, Pooja, was going to be featured. She was related to virtually everybody in town.

  “Where do you play football?” I asked Aryan.

  “There.” He pointed up the hillside. “There’s a playing field.”

  “Can we go?”

  Pooja and her son exchanged looks.

  “No,” he said.

  “Two people died there,” she said. “Just before the strike.”

  “Died how?”

  “Electricity. A wire,” Pooja said.

  “One man was on top of the other,” Aryan said. “They were burned. Their faces—”

  “They think he tried to pull the wire off but then he got killed, too,” Pooja said.

  “God.”

  “But then the strike started and nobody came to check,” Pooja said. “So now we don’t go.”

  Life in this village was full of casual death. I’d been hearing the stories all morning: The girl buried in a landslide on her way to second grade. The aunt who went off the side of the mountain in a car. The cousin who died of sepsis infection after an endoscopy. Fire departments and hospitals were too far away to make much difference. These families had made their homes between loose earth and sky; they had to take their chances.

  The road curved, tracing a wrinkle in the mountain, and a deep ravine yawned open. A waterfall, choked with trash, coursed in muddy shadows.

  “They say bad spirits are here,” Pooja said.

  “Why?”

  “Some deaths were here—”

  “Suicide,” Aryan interjected.

  “Suicide,” Pooja agreed. “We don’t come at night. It’s not allowed.”

  “People jump?” I peered over the edge. The slope didn’t look steep enough; you might only break a leg or arm.

  “I don’t know,” said Pooja in a voice that made me think she knew. “One girl died here. And then another girl was walking here, and she saw the dead girl. She told people that. She was scared. And then she died, herself. And then we stopped walking here at night.”

  We were all quiet for a while.

  “I know these things sound crazy,” Pooja finally said. “But if you live here, if you know the people, you believe.”

  At the temple gate I rang the bell as I passed, copying Pooja and Aryan, brilliant prayer flags brushing my hand. We hiked uphill through dense growths of bamboo, fern, and pine until the trail led out into a clearing. A small, squat temple; crisscrossed prayer flags; a few wooden benches.

  “Whatever you ask here, somehow you get it,” Pooja said.

  Every year people came from miles around for the temple festival, she said. They slaughtered chickens and goats and feasted for hours. Afterward the temple was polluted by blood.

  “Always, the next day, rain comes to wash it and make it pure again,” Pooja told me. “This is true. Every year, always, it rains the next day.”

  I believed her. Standing at the temple, with wind in my ears and incense smoldering on the altar and the earth piling up toward heaven, I believed everything she said.

  Pooja and Aryan approached the temple gates and prayed. They touched the tiles painted with Hindu gods. They touched the gate itself. They didn’t look at each other. Then they stepped away.

  I prayed, too, partly because I didn’t have anything else to do and partly because I believed Pooja when she said my prayers would be granted.

  We hiked back down to the road, leaving the transcendental atmosphere of the temple behind. By now I had fallen into the village; I fantasized about staying. But surely it must be terrible sometimes—choked with dust from groaning traffic; frigid cold in the winter. Pooja interrupted my musings by pointing out the house of Aryan’s girlfriend.

  “She’s really your girlfriend?” I asked.

  “No,” Aryan said.

  “Yes,” Pooja corrected. “I have seen the messages.”

  Aryan grumbled and hunched his shoulders and blushed. “It’s okay,” Pooja said. “You have an understanding mother.”

  “She’s older than him.” She turned to me. “Nineteen. Can you believe it? I spoke to her on the phone. I said, ‘You know this boy is very young. He’s too young for you.’ ”

  “What did she say?”

  “ ‘We are only friends, Auntie.’ ” Pooja’s voice was a lilting imitation.

  Aryan stared at the road under his feet, the corners of his mouth tightening, submerged laughter around his eyes. He hated the conversation and relished it, both at once. We discussed teenage love. Pooja was dismissive.

  “I got married when I was a young teenager. I didn’t know what I was doing,” Pooja said. “Of course, I got Aryan. But still it ruined my life.”

  Right in front of him she said that: It ruined my life. I turned my head in time to see him flinch. But he said nothing. He walked along listening to me and Pooja discuss his age and his feelings, and he said nothing. He was an athlete; he could have left us behind. But he was trained to politeness. He matched our pace.

  At the next cousin’s house, over plates of macaroni and egg fried with chili, Pooja began to dig into Aryan again. He was repeating a year. He wanted to drop out.

  “What does he want to do instead?” Realizing I’d adopted the family habit of discussing Aryan as if he weren’t there, I turned to him. “What do you want to do?”

  “Only football.” He grinned.

  “Only football.” Pooja spat the word like a bitter peppercorn. “Only games. He’s not studying. One day I’ll kill myself if he doesn’t study.”

  “Why?” I hated hearing this phrase.

  “All these years I’ve been struggling. I want him to understand why I left him—it was because I wanted to give him a good life,” Pooja cried indignantly. “He thinks making money is easy. He hasn’t seen how I suffered for everything he has. I have gone very, very low. And the fact is, I am getting old.”

  “Why is he repeating class ten?” I asked. “Why are you repeating class ten?”

  “He messed up his exams!” Pooja yelled before he could answer. “He doesn’t understand me.”

  “He’s lazy,” Pooja’s aunt agreed.

  Aryan yawned elaborately, shimmied his shoulders, and grinned a puckish grin. The women of his family gazed at him adoringly.

  As we walked up the road Aryan began to sing. “Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye.” He glanced over, and Pooja joined the chorus. This was a radio hit then, a pop song about a single mother who sacrifices and suffers so her son can have a better life. They looked at each other and looked away and sang a few more bars.

  I was getting anxious about the road. We’d slipped through at dawn, before the militias were awake and stirring, but I thought we were starting to push our luck. The militias had recently been setting cars on fire for breaking the strike. It was time to leave.

  “Do you want to stay?” I asked Pooja.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I have things to do, too.”

  Before we left, Poonan and her father ducked into the kitchen. He caught my eye and rubbed his thumb and finger together. “We hav
e to talk about business,” he said and chuckled.

  When they came back, Aryan and his grandfather followed us to the road and stood watching as we climbed into the taxi.

  “Pooja, you’re always like this,” giggled a cousin. “You come like the wind, and you go like the wind.”

  Nobody hugged. Everybody smiled.

  Aryan stood waving until we couldn’t see him anymore.

  We drove back down through fog that poured into the green valley like milk filling a cup. Vines of morning glory; clean, thin waterfalls; banana trees flashing past. We drove all the way down, out of the hills, past army barracks and fields of rice and tea, where women paced the plantation rows under vibrant parasols. We didn’t stop, and we barely spoke until we reached a coffee shop on the edge of Siliguri.

  We ordered the coffee I’d been craving since dawn, and my notebook was out and there was a calm, naked mood, as if we would now, at last, come to the meat of things. Pooja’s mind was full of her son, her father, her past, her choices. She’d come back down the mountain because here in Siliguri were the things she might choose—the man, the food stall, props of a future unformed. Pooja in the middle, pausing.

  “I will die soon,” she announced. “I’m tired of everything.”

  That’s how she began. That was her first declaration upon leaving her father’s house. She continued for a while, talking in vague and melodramatic terms about her despair, and I murmured things like, “Don’t say that.”

  Then she began to discuss the details. Her boyfriend had recently sold some property for about $150,000. He took Pooja along when he finalized the sale. He put the money into the bank and told Pooja they could live comfortably off the 7 percent interest.

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  Pooja shrugged. Rupesh was dangling money. He’d offered her $1,500 to open her food stall. She’d declined.

  “I tell him, ‘I’ll ask anyone in the world, but not you.’ He says, ‘Why are you so egotistical?’ But I don’t want his money. And I don’t want to hear the later part: ‘I gave you this and this, don’t forget it.’ ”

  “You’re scared.”

  “I learned a lot from Varun.”

  “I remember when you first came to my house, you looked different,” I said. “Your hair was just hanging and you wore those baggy clothes.”

  “Whenever I dressed up, Varun got so angry he ripped the clothes off my body.” She pretended to claw her own chest. “But I thought, ‘Whatever he is, he’s the one.’ Now I realize: Acceptance is very bad.”

  Pooja’s thoughts paced rings around the same topics: Son, boyfriend, father. Money, shop, jobs. To marry, to work, to move, to stay? She repeated herself, and yet it was not repetitive, because each time she returned to a subject she opened it wider and spoke more clearly.

  Her friend had told her about a nanny job in Dubai paying seven hundred dollars a month. With that job, she could save enough money to build a house with an indoor toilet.

  The mention of Dubai made me skeptical.

  “Who’s this friend, how do you know him?”

  “It’s a lady.”

  “How much do you trust her?”

  She changed the subject.

  “I’m worried about Aryan. I want to keep him with me,” she said. “He’s not seeing my difficult part. I want him to understand: ‘My mom is working a lot and I need to stand on my feet.’ ”

  “I think you’re being hard on him,” I said. “He’s a good boy. He will understand, but he’s still young.”

  “When I was his age I was already married.”

  “But you don’t want that for him.”

  She stared into her coffee cup.

  “I should be closer to him,” she said quietly. “I left him when he was three and a half years old.”

  “But what else could you do?”

  I sounded angry, and, in fact, I was. I’d lost patience with Pooja getting lashed by everyone, including herself, for going to work. The only other viable choice had been to give away her son. She’d sweated and survived; she’d saved her family. Must she also be pilloried?

  “I left him when he needed me most,” she said. “How many times he must have wanted to hug me and cry. It hurts me to think about it. He must have been in pain.”

  She stopped talking for a while, and then she told me, again, that she would die soon. Sometimes she couldn’t breathe. The feeling came over her, and she had to stick her head out the window and gulp for air.

  “Like a lid comes on top of me,” she said.

  I told her about anxiety attacks. “You’re under a lot of stress.”

  “I finally want to tell you the whole story,” she said, and took a breath.

  “I told you before”—she looked straight at me—“I was pregnant when that happened with Varun.”

  “Yes.” So she did remember telling me—neither of us had mentioned it again, and I’d wondered.

  “He wouldn’t accept that the baby was his,” she said.

  “That’s what you were fighting about that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” Surely he didn’t think that skinny delivery boy—

  “When he left I was three months pregnant. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t face the doctor’s questions. Where is your husband?”

  “They would ask that?”

  “Sure.” She gave me a pointed look, as if this were a stupid question, then continued:

  “I was thinking about killing this baby. My child. How can I do that? My child is trying to live inside of me, how can I kill him? I felt a terrible guilt just for thinking about it. I didn’t know what to do.

  “Mary said, ‘Don’t worry.’ She knew a pill that would abort the baby up to the third month. She said, ‘How many months are you?’ I said, ‘Like that. Three months.’ ”

  Pooja looked at my face. “It was risky,” she said and nodded, agreeing with what she thought she’d read there. But my thoughts were elsewhere:

  “Mary,” I repeated, surprised and not surprised.

  “She said, ‘Give me a thousand rupees and I’ll bring you the medicine,’ ” Pooja continued. “She brought two pills. She said, ‘Take one today and another after two days. Then it will come out.’ She told me to pray to Mother Teresa, to pray very hard that I wasn’t committing a sin.”

  “Oh God.” Mary! Even abetting an abortion, she couldn’t drop the ostentatious piousness. She’d pressured Pooja, a vulnerable Hindu, to pray to a Catholic saint lest she go to hell.

  “I took the first pill. It was there, in your house. But nothing happened. Two days later I took the second pill and still nothing happened. I sat in my room all night and prayed. I was so scared. ‘It’s not coming out, what will I do now?’ Finally, at three in the morning, it came out in the most horrible way. In a pool of blood. I was in so much pain. I cleaned everything. I came to work in the morning.”

  “Oh God,” I said again.

  “I hated myself for doing that. I never wanted to kill my baby like that.”

  So that was the story, then. That was the whole story. But Pooja was still talking.

  “After that, I began partying hard. I worked all day at your house. I’d start drinking from a bottle in my bag as soon as I left. I’d go to my sister. I would drink and dance like a crazy person, until I fell down dead. I spent so much money just to escape from this pain. In the end of the night they’d just throw me into an auto like I was dead, and send me back to Delhi.”

  “So you were drinking even more than we knew,” I said, and contained in this thought was an absolution I offered to myself. I was right, then, to fire you.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said simply. “It was bad.”

  “I can’t believe this all happened.” But that wasn’t true. I could believe it. What I meant was
: It is insane that, although all of this took place in my house, I would never have known.

  I stared up at the flat plaster lid of the ceiling and blinked a few times. I wanted to say something to Pooja. What could I say?

  Hey Pooja, let’s go somewhere and cry until we can’t cry anymore.

  Hey Pooja, getting into your life is like giving myself to an ocean that is washing me out to sea, and in a way I wanted to go there, but then again maybe not.

  Hey Pooja, I have to go.

  We both have to go.

  Hey Pooja, we have to go now.

  Pooja had finally given me the thing I’d been looking for all these months. She had finally given me some truth.

  She had been in our household and we had shared life, and yet so much of Pooja’s trouble had been hidden from me. Now I saw her. I saw her full spread of contradictions and complications. Many women in her position would hide their problems out of pride or privacy, or even with a canny understanding that their employers are not, in their heart of hearts, eager to confront the depressing reality of the lives of the domestic staff.

  But how could I evaluate the ethics of these arrangements—let alone write a book about them—without understanding what had been endured under my roof? Whatever Pooja’s troubles, I had a certain responsibility for them. I’d taken her into my house, and forced her to kick out her partner. I had benefited from her weaker circumstances in some ways, and in other ways, I had created them. At least now I knew. She had given me the crucial piece of information I had lacked.

  There was always an easier story to tell ourselves: Pooja is drinking. Then: Pooja is becoming a drunk.

  Then: Pooja must be fired. Pooja has been fired.

  Finally: Pooja was here once, but now she is gone.

  Now I didn’t need these stories because I had some truth. Now there was this person, this woman, this mother. And she had told me what she had done and what had happened to her.

  But with the knowing came fear. She had said: Soon I will be dead. She kept saying that. I was afraid she was clearing out her soul. I was afraid she’d brought me home to hear her final confession.

  I felt the danger. With Pooja, I always felt the danger. I felt the pain of her, the mistakes of her. The way things fell to her in the world. Her gift of winning and her genius for losing.