Daughters of India

by Jill McGivering

  ‘Ripe, nah?’ The old man, watching her, smiled, then shook his head. ‘If they don’t sell soon, they’ll spoil. I’d feed them to my own family but where’s the profit in that?’

  She ate in silence and let him talk.

  ‘My good wife departed this life ten years ago, may the gods bless her.’ He sighed, lifted a switch and brushed flies off the apples. ‘If she could see this place now, foreigners swarming all over the place, I don’t know what she’d say. It isn’t decent, the way they look at our girls. I tell you, I thank the gods that we had sons, my wife and I. Five healthy boys.’

  He gave her an appraising sideways look. ‘No tika? No husband yet, nah? Your parents couldn’t find anyone?’

  Before she could answer, he went on: ‘Well, don’t give up hope. Some men get lonely enough to marry older ladies, even your age. Go for a widower.’ He winked. ‘I’ll keep an eye out.’

  Shouts drifted across from the central section of the bazaar. Asha strained to look. A crowd was gathering, damming up the path.

  ‘Trouble.’ The old man cocked his head. ‘What did I tell you? Bengalis.’ He turned his head and spat a stream of blood-red betel juice into the dust as she left him and moved on to see.

  The crowd grew quickly. Young men jostled and pressed forward, their hands on each other’s shoulders, calling and jeering. Asha drew her dupatta forward and picked her way round the edge of the throng.

  A tall, thin man held a boy by the arm and whipped him with a branch. Nearby, two smaller boys were slumped on the ground. One showed only the top of his head. The other peered out miserably through eyes that were sticky with blood and swollen with bruising. She knew the child. He was Abhishek, Rahul and Sangeeta’s boy.

  ‘Bloody thieves!’ The man’s voice was breathy as he laboured to keep hold of the wriggling boy and thrash him. ‘I’ll teach you.’

  ‘Give him a good hiding.’ An old woman in the crowd urged him on.

  ‘Call a jawan,’ shouted a man. ‘He’ll sort them out.’

  Asha stepped forward. ‘Stop it!’ She used her classroom voice.

  The man paused for a moment, looking up at her in surprise. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘He’s only a child.’

  The boy hung limp from the man’s hand. His shirt had fallen to tatters and his back was striped red with blows.

  The man sneered, raised his stick as if to lash out at Asha too. ‘If they’re old enough to steal, they’re old enough to take a beating, nah?’

  ‘Steal? Are you sure?’

  ‘I saw them. All three of them, helping themselves to tomatoes, filling their pockets.’

  ‘I’ll pay for them. Let their parents do the beating.’

  He narrowed his eyes. His anger was spent and he looked exhausted from the effort but his mood was still sour. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

  ‘I know her. She teaches at the government school.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her. You teach them a lesson.’

  People, gathered tightly around, started to speak out. Most of them knew Asha and her family but they knew the hawker too and it was hard to stand back and see a public beating end so soon. Especially if you had a good view.

  ‘She’s Ramesh’s cousin. Don’t you remember her father?’

  ‘That sweeper-wallah who got sent to prison?’

  ‘That’s right. She was a girl then.’

  ‘I lost good oranges last week. What’re you waiting for?’

  Asha took another step forward and held out her hand for the stick. The man was so close that his sour breath blew in her face. He stared at her open palm. Something in her manner made him uncertain. A moment later, the fight flowed out of his limbs and he let go of the boy’s arm. The boy staggered forward and Asha pushed him behind her.

  ‘I will pay you,’ she said. She didn’t want the man to lose face in public. ‘You can trust me.’

  She turned her attention to the boys on the ground and stirred them up with her toe. The smaller of the two finally raised his head and she bit her lip to stop herself from crying out. Sushil. Her own nephew. The line of his small nose was crooked with swelling.

  ‘Come.’ She reached down and lifted the two boys by the hair. Once they were away from the crowd, she cuffed Sushil.

  ‘Go home,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with you later.’

  Rahul’s stall was in the far corner of the bazaar, squashed between a fruit hawker and a chai stall. It was a narrow bunker with walls of bales of cotton and silk, inlaid with trays of buttons, ribbons and lace. The low shafts of light from his overhead lamp picked out motes of cotton hanging in the air.

  Asha held his boy by the arm. ‘Rahul?’

  In the gloom, a figure stirred. Rahul emerged from behind the bales like a ghost, pale and lean. He held bunches of cloth samples in his hands as he stepped forward and peered through narrowed eyes.

  ‘It’s me. Asha.’

  He had known her before she even remembered, when she was little more than a baby and they all lived as servants in the grounds of the Britishers’ house. Then again, years later, when he hung around Sanjay Krishna’s home with the young freedom fighters and she, alone by then, slept in the outhouse there. He was approaching middle-age now. His stomach had thickened and his eyes were spoilt by long days crouched in poor light, chalking, pinning and stitching, by hand or with his battered sewing machine. A worn tape measure dangled round his neck.

  He put a hand out for the boy. ‘Abhishek?’

  ‘They caught him stealing tomatoes.’

  His face darkened. ‘Is it true?’

  The boy hung his head. Rahul lifted his chin and looked him in the face, reading his eyes. ‘What happened?’

  The boy didn’t speak.

  Asha said: ‘The sabzi-wallah thrashed them. My cousin’s boy, Sushil. He was there too.’

  Rahul shook his head, put his hand in his pocket and drew out a handful of coins. ‘Please, give the sabzi-wallah this.’

  Asha put her head on one side and considered. She wanted to refuse him, to wave the money away, but the truth was, she didn’t have any herself and she had promised the hawker in front of everyone.

  ‘I’ll pay back my share,’ she said at last. ‘When I get my wages.’

  Rahul pressed the handful of coins into her palm and closed her fingers round them. ‘No need. I’m grateful.’ He turned to the boy. ‘Go home, Abhishek. Tell your mother you were in a fight only. Don’t make her ashamed.’ His voice was more sorrowful than angry. The boy slunk away. Rahul stood for a moment, looking after his son. ‘He’s a good boy,’ he said. ‘But he needs to learn.’

  He shook himself and turned to Asha. ‘Come, little sister, sit with me. I seldom see you nowadays.’

  He settled again at his workbench at the back of the stall and she sat on the ground near him. He bent his head over his work and listened as she told him about the school and the way she worried about the children’s hunger and her cousins and their older sons, so far away now in Burma, labouring for the Britishers there and sending home money when they could. At first it had been good money and the men’s absence had seemed worthwhile but now they heard rarely from them – no money for so long already – that they wondered why they were hungry, all these women left alone with young children, and if they were abandoned. And how was she to stop young Sushil from stealing tomatoes when his belly was empty, even if he knew it was a wrong thing?

  He listened in silence, his eyes fixed on his stitching. He was adorning a fine piece of cloth with sequins. His head was tilted towards her and his hair was thin on the crown and flecked with grey, as the cloth in his hands was flecked with white and gold, and it seemed a secret that she was privileged to share.

  She paused in her story after a while and felt the pleasure of the quietness between them. She liked to watch him sew. He had long, slim fingers and they played the cloth as if it were alive and happy to be worked. She wondered if this was how it felt to be married and thought of the old man
with the apples and his betel-stained teeth and his promise to find her a husband and laughed out loud.

  Rahul looked up and smiled. He had a sweet smile. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  He fell back to sewing and they sat in silence a while longer.

  ‘How’s your business?’

  He puffed out his cheeks. ‘With the price of cloth now, it’s hard to make a profit. I need rich customers.’

  She pursed her lips. ‘Who can afford to buy daal and subzi, let alone fancy clothes?’

  He inclined his head, his eyes never leaving his work. ‘Britishers only. They have money.’ He lifted the cloth in his hands to make his point. ‘A piece like this, I can ask a lot for it. What Indian could afford it?’

  She felt her insides tighten. He should work for his own people only. For their betterment.

  He said, as if he read her mind: ‘What to do? I have a wife and child to feed. And, praise to the gods, another son on the way.’

  ‘Another one?’ She smiled. ‘Congratulations! How is Sangeeta-ji?’

  He hid his face from her and she sensed his blush. ‘Very fine. The baby isn’t due until the summer.’

  She nodded. ‘A few years and I’ll see him in school, I hope?’

  ‘If the gods allow.’ Rahul lifted his eyes to her. ‘Can you find places in school, Asha?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s crowded but we can find a way. Besides, he isn’t born yet. Who knows how things will be in the future? Maybe the Britishers will be gone and we’ll be living in their houses, nah?’

  Rahul hesitated. His needle, usually plying so quickly through the cloth, slowed. ‘But for other children. The poorest, even. Are there places for them?’

  Asha gave him a shrewd look. ‘What, Rahul? What plans are you hatching?’

  He lifted his eyes to hers. ‘After school tomorrow, come with me, will you? Let me show you.’

  The following day, Rahul sat at the front of his stall, his long-fingered hands idle in his lap, waiting. His face was set and his eyes solemn as he got to his feet without a word and led her out across the slum.

  They strode through the sprawling network of shacks, a collection of crawl spaces like her own home, some made of wooden struts and topped with sacking, others with scraps of metal and scavenged iron as roofs.

  The winter sun was warm and she raised her dupatta to her face to filter the stench. The cobbles underfoot were slippery and cut through with open drains. A toddler, the ironmonger’s youngest, lifted curious eyes as they passed.

  She struggled to keep pace with Rahul. ‘Where are we going?’

  He didn’t pause to answer, just hurried on. Cloths, hung as curtains across doorways, were tied back to let in air and sun and the shacks gave up sudden pictures of the worlds inside. A mother, squatting on her haunches, dandled a half-naked baby. A wrinkled old woman crouched over a steaming cooking pot. A fat-bellied man snoozed on a charpoy in the shade.

  As they neared the edge of the slum, Rahul led her out towards waste ground, far from her walk to and from school. Beyond, there was little but open land and rubbish dumps. She paused to catch her breath.

  On the corner, a man with a straggly beard and blood-spattered apron hacked apart a chicken on a wooden board. The visceral tang of bloodied guts quivered in the air. She pulled her dupatta closer round her face.

  Rahul hurried on. Beyond the slum, the ground rose towards a raised ridge of road. It was a fetid, unhealthy area, dotted with low-lying marsh and rife with mosquitoes. Asha climbed the ridge and stood beside Rahul, looking out.

  The expanse was covered with new shacks, even more shabby and cramped than the ones they had just passed. Low plumes of smoke rose from cooking fires. To one side, rising beside them, lay a vast rubbish dump, a grey cesspit of rotting filth. Black scavenging birds, stray dogs and ragged children poked through it.

  ‘Banaras people.’ Rahul paddled the air with his fingertips. ‘They weave silk. The best.’

  He pressed down into the maze of shacks and picked his way along a narrow mud track, then finally turned, ducked through a low doorway and disappeared to the right.

  A small courtyard opened up in the centre of a cluster of meagre buildings. It was stuffy and dimly lit, overshadowed by the structures that had grown up round it. The air puttered with soft mechanical clacking. The space was dominated by four wooden looms. Women and girls sat cross-legged at each, their heads covered, their backs hunched over their work. They pulled their scarves closer round their faces as Rahul walked amongst them.

  Asha looked more closely. Many were children. She stopped at the loom of a girl who looked barely six years old. The child strained forward over her work. Coloured metal bangles – red, gold and silver – jangled at her wrists as her hands flew back and forth. A shiny stud glistened in her nose. Her hair was tied back, veiled by the cotton scarf that covered her head.

  Her loom was simply made: a bed of taut strings running between thin strips of wood. Her tiny fingers picked their way along a row of coloured silks, weaving each by turn in and out of the strings. Her movements were fast and sure and she plucked the silks with grace.

  Each time she reached the end of a row, she pulled a bamboo bar towards her in a single, swift movement to compress the threads, then began, a second later, at the start of the next row. Asha tried to imagine how her hands and back must ache.

  In the corner, behind the looms, three old ladies squatted together in the dirt. They were rotating circular spindles on bamboo sticks. The spindles chirped and danced. Each one tugged a fast-spinning, clattering drum of silk thread, mounted to one side on a bamboo frame, which the women wound into skeins.

  Rahul gestured to her to follow him into a small brick building at the far side of the courtyard. It was the only structure with proper walls and a door, propped open with a stone. It was dark inside. She stood for a moment on the threshold while her eyes adjusted, blinking back rods of light.

  Rahul held up a piece of cloth. It swam through his fingers, a delicate aquamarine patterned with grey and gold flowers. The silk shimmered in the half-light like flowing water. He handed it to her. Warm and impossibly soft. As her eyes began to adjust to the gloom, she blinked and looked around. The silks were raised above the ground on boards and protected with matting. There were thirty or forty stacks, which made up a rich rainbow of colour.

  ‘Those girls did all this?’

  Rahul shook his head. ‘Other families too, all from Banaras. Mothers, aunties, cousins.’

  ‘Why haven’t they sold it?’

  ‘Sometimes local merchants come to buy. These people get a poor price but what to do? They’re outsiders and afraid to argue.’

  The silk caressed her hands.

  ‘I’m borrowing everything I can,’ he said, ‘and buying it myself. I give a better price than the merchants and I can stitch it into dresses, blouses, scarves. Few people have money to afford such fine stuff, nah? But if I could sell to the Britishers …’

  She refolded the aquamarine silk and let it float back onto the pile. Her fingers ached for its softness. Rahul, reading her, pawed through the pile and selected a golden strip. He raised it to the light to judge the weave, then ripped it along the thread in a sudden violent motion and handed it to her.

  ‘For remembering,’ he said, ‘how beauty comes from suffering.’

  In the courtyard, the six-year-old girl hadn’t shifted position. Her fingers flew on and on without pause.

  They stopped off, on the way back, at a chai stall, which overlooked a piece of waste ground at the side of the new slum. Metal cauldrons were propped on bricks over wood fires. Bare-chested men, bodies glistening with sweat, dipped and stirred raw cotton inside, twisting it in the boiling dye with staves. Their faces shimmied and shook in the rising steam.

  The chai-wallah, a scrawny boy, brought them glasses of milky tea. Specks of black rose and fell in the cloudy liquid.

  ‘So.’ She sipped at her chai, sweet and mil
ky and warm in her empty stomach. ‘Those are the children you want me to teach in school?’

  He nodded. ‘In the mornings, only. In the afternoons, they weave.’

  She considered. ‘Their parents agree?’

  He sipped his chai. The ground at their feet was stained with spilt tea and splashes of betel and buzzed with flies.

  ‘They respect me,’ he said. ‘I give them money.’ He paused. ‘And at school, the girls can eat also. They’ll have more strength for work.’

  Asha looked at his long toes in his sandals, as delicate as his fingers. The toes of a kind man. ‘I can’t teach every poor child, Rahul-ji. The school would burst.’

  He nodded. ‘Not every child. Just these.’

  It might be possible. So many children were pulled out of class now, even at their age, and sent to work. There were always spaces.

  She watched Rahul as he sipped his chai. He was such a scrawny youth once, ready to tease her. He was so passionate about politics, about fighting the British for rights. Somehow, life had tamed him and she wondered at it.

  ‘Was it so hard in prison?’

  He looked surprised. He never spoke of it and she never asked. ‘Hard for me, and for Sangeeta also. Abhishek was young.’

  She nodded. People said he lost his uncle’s mithai shop because he was shut away in jail. When he finally came out, he ran errands and sold onions in the bazaar while he learnt at night how to sew.

  ‘Is that why you abandoned the fight for our freedom? You’re afraid of prison?’

  He drained his glass and set it down. ‘Now I have a different fight. To feed my family.’

  Asha narrowed her eyes. He was a good man and a clever one. He could help them, she was sure of it.

  ‘If I take these children into school, will you do something for me?’

  The chai-wallah collected their empty glasses with clinking fingers. They waited while he wiped down the bench with a dirty rag and left.

  Asha leant in closer. ‘A new chapter in the fight is beginning. Come with me to hear our leaders. Will you?’