“Her granddaughter is growing and growing, and she can’t even take her own advice.”
“Chee! Why should we worry? We have our own daughters, don’t we?”
“Not to mention our sons.”
We don’t know if Banu knows what our mothers say when they are together. Or, for that matter, what they say when they are alone—how Banu’s ajji helped Rukshana’s mother get her union job, helped Selvi Aunty enroll Joy in school without a proper birth certificate, helped Neelamma Aunty deliver Deepa at a real hospital with real doctors.
Whenever Banu shows up in the evenings, just in time for dinner, our mothers make her a plate with an extra dosa, a second helping of sambar. After she leaves, they tell us, “Next time you tell that girl to eat at her own house. You understand?”
We understand. Which is why we never say anything to Banu. And our mothers never turn her away.
For a while, the grown-ups thought Banu was slow. Not slow in the feet. Slow in the head. For a long time, we thought so too. We’re not even sure how she’s still in our class, she’s failed so many subjects so many times. Ask her to add two plus two, and she’ll say anything but four. As for the ABCs, we’re not sure if she ever got past B. Not sure if she can write the second half of her own name.
So no one is surprised in sixth standard when Banu starts skipping school to go to construction sites. We figure she must have gotten bored with studying and started having an affair. Because what else is there at a construction site? The chaos of jackhammers? The rattle of steel pans and broken stones? The smell of ten thousand village dreams burning to the ground?
Banu’s fallen in love, it’s true. But not with a person. With a trade.
Banu has fallen in love with building.
Every afternoon, Banu comes home with pockets full of rocks and sand and nails and metal rods. Everything she takes is bent or broken. Most of us don’t notice. We’re too busy memorizing seven times eight equals fifty-six and Gandhiji was born on October 2 and “Johnny Johnny Yes Papa.” Sometimes, when we walk home with her, we wonder about a thumping or a rattling or a crunching coming from the inside of her school bag. But we don’t think much of it. This is Banu, after all.
While we memorize, Banu builds. Goes off behind the bushes, between the roots of the tallest and sturdiest banyan trees. Constructs an empire along the banks of Heaven’s very own river of hospital sludge.
Builds a fort with steel spikes and pebble towers, a moat big enough for a dragon. A palace with windows made out of broken bottles and a gate that slides open and closed. A farmhouse with a wire fence and two bedrooms, a kitchen with the fixtures for one of those brand-new ignition stoves. Roads stronger and straighter and wider than any Bangalore’s ever seen.
In fact, her whole city is stronger and straighter than Bangalore. Makes Bangalore look like it was stuck together with cheap glue and broken promises.
We don’t know how. She just does it.
It’s not that she builds to show off either. We only find out because Yousef steals Joy’s bag, and we chase him into the clearing. Run into his back when he stops.
It’s like walking in on the earth goddess when she’s becoming the world. Banu’s no goddess, though. Stares at us with eyes as wide as potholes.
Joy says, “Banu, you’re a builder.”
Rukshana says, “I told you there was no boy.”
Yousef says, “All this time you never said anything.”
Not that it matters. In Heaven, everyone finds out everything eventually.
In Bangalore, posh kids go to private schools. Which means they have a lot of things that we don’t have: Textbooks. Electricity. Toilets. Water for the toilets. Water to drink. But there’s one thing we government-school kids have that they don’t.
Rats. Lots and lots of fat, juicy, scurrying, burrowing rats.
You know what rats like to do?
Eat.
You know what rats like to eat?
Everything.
The radishes in the school garden. The registers on teachers’ desks. The pipes at the water pumps. The pais the little kids sit on.
These rats? They’re clever, mostly. (Definitely didn’t go to government schools.) We wouldn’t have even noticed them if not for a bite mark here, a dropping there.
Gradually, they get bolder. We hear them shuffling behind the walls, catch their pink noses poking out from cracks in the plaster. A flash of paw, a twitch of whisker. Fuzzy behinds disappearing into burrows they dig along the edge of the compound wall or in the sand where the oldest, nastiest boys play cricket after stopping by the liquor store. These rats, they have stealth. Patience. Restraint.
But even the most disciplined rodents can’t hold out forever.
Especially when they smell the holiday meal donated by the rich guy who went to our school and miraculously made good. Besan ke ladoos and chicken biryani. Proof that he didn’t forget the rest of us. Even though he probably wishes he could.
Those rats smell the crumbs left on the silver foil plates and slurps left in the metal tumblers. Grow incautious. Arrogant.
In the middle of the day, they run across the room, humans be damned. And they feast. If they have to cross a desert of feet to get there, scrambling over a terrain of bare toes with their cold, pointy claws, then so be it.
And if ten of those toes belong to Sushila Miss?
Well, charity ladoos are worth the risk.
When she feels those toes on her toes, the fur against her ankle, Sushila Miss jumps onto her desk. Hitches her sari around her bare belly in a most undignified, un-Sushila-Miss way. Doesn’t care that the desk has been known to collapse when piled with a quarter of her weight. Shrieks a multilingual noise that is pure, unadulterated fear.
“Rat!” She screams in English. And then in Kannada. And then in Tamil and Hindi. And then in English again, just to be sure. “Ili! Perichali! Chua! Rat! Rat! Rat!”
Our headmistress, though? She’s not afraid of rats.
She’s not afraid of anything.
Janaki Ma’am flies into the room, eyes blazing with the fire of a thousand vermin funerals. In her hand is a stick she’s pulled from the tree outside her flat. Wielding her weapon, she hits the wall with a thwack. Leaves a mark by the hole where a rodent rump has just disappeared.
It’s enough to make you believe that all those enormous stone Kalis aren’t enough to hold the fury lying dormant in a single woman’s heart.
Janaki Ma’am turns around, silver hair falling into her face, arms shaking.
“This,” she says, “has gone too far.”
In Bangalore, schools are run by men with mustaches like hairy caterpillars, bellies like rubbery balloons. They skim money off the textbook fund—that is, when they bother to check the budget. Stop by the building every now and then to curse the students in all of Bangalore’s official and unofficial tongues.
Our school is different.
Our school is run by Janaki Ma’am, who is a headmistress, not a headmaster. Hair the color of wishes, eyes cut like broken stones. She knew our mothers, and sometimes even our mothers’ mothers. We know because she told us.
She tells us other things too. When our mothers and our mothers’ mothers aren’t around and the boys aren’t listening. (Which is most of the time.) Truths flat and round that fit in your palm like five-rupee coins.
“They’ll say you have to marry. But you don’t.”
Truths that make our aunties cringe, our sisters giggle.
“See these? Put them in your underpants when you start to bleed. And stay away from boys—especially after the blood starts.”
Janaki Ma’am lives by herself in a flat with air conditioning in the bedroom and bookshelves in the hall. On certain puja days—not all of them, but some of them—she doesn’t even pray. Instead, she takes a holiday. Reads novels. Makes chocolate cake in her pressure cooker. When she does laundry, she hangs her petticoats and bras on the clothesline right outside her balcony window. Where everyone
in the neighborhood can see.
When we ask her about it, she says, “They’ll tell you secrets keep you safe. They’re wrong. Nothing safe ever needs to be hidden. Nothing hidden is ever truly safe.”
We don’t just listen to Janaki Ma’am. We watch her too. If we want something, we act like her. Fold our arms and narrow our won’t-back-down eyes. Flash our give-me-money smiles.
“They’ll say you can’t have what you want,” she tells us. “But you can.”
When other people tell us, we don’t believe them. But Janaki Ma’am?
She makes us believe.
“These rats think they run the place,” Janaki Ma’am says, shoving her loosened silver hair behind her ear.
“Might I suggest an exterminator, ma’am?” Sushila Miss squeaks from on top of the desk. It wobbles and shakes. She looks down, calculates. Decides it’s safer up there than on the ground.
“With what money, Sushila?”
Even Janaki Ma’am can’t hold off a vermin scourge with a government-school budget.
“I can help,” Banu says.
“Who’s that?” Janaki Ma’am asks.
“I’m Banu,” she says.
Now, don’t pass judgment. It must be the third or fourth time Banu’s spoken in class. Ever. So how are Janaki Ma’am and Sushila Miss supposed to know what she sounds like? The scrambling scratch of rat feet is more common than the whisper of Banu’s voice.
“You?” Sushila Miss asks, probably remembering the score Banu got (or didn’t get) on our last exam.
“I can build something. To hold the records. To fence the radishes. To block the burrows.”
“Please,” Sushila Miss scoffs. “This one can’t even recite her times table. Tell me, child, what is seven fives? Eight sixes? Thirteen twos?”
Banu doesn’t say anything. How can she when she doesn’t know the answers?
“You see? Worthless.” Sushila Miss starts to wave her hand, and the desk tilts almost all the way to one side. She bends her knees to steady herself. Doesn’t fall off. Doesn’t get down either.
Janaki Ma’am says, “Quiet, Sushila. Speak up, child.”
But Banu doesn’t speak up. The silence grows scaly as a rat’s tail. The rest of us can’t stand it.
“She might not know her times tables, ma’am, but she knows this,” says Joy. “Building, I mean.”
“It’s true, ma’am. You should see the way she builds.”
“She’s clever, she really is. Just not at school.”
“Why do we need times tables anyway?”
Janaki Ma’am holds up her hand. We go quiet again. Like we are the orchestra and she is our conductor. “How much will it cost?” Janaki Ma’am asks.
“Nothing, ma’am,” Banu says. “I’ll source the materials myself. And the team too.”
“Then name your team,” Janaki Ma’am says, “and start today.”
The team is obvious—if you need something done, you ask us girls. So Banu becomes our forewoman, our school becomes a construction site, and we become construction workers. None of us is afraid of rats—we’ve protected each other from much worse than a bunch of overachieving fur balls.
So we build. And we build and we build and we build.
We build a fence around the kitchen garden with long pieces of wire Banu finds in the garbage pile behind the showroom on 100 Feet Road. Banu brings us new pipes for the water pump, sand to stuff into the burrows on the compound grounds. We install shelves using pieces of wood and metal Banu drags from the slum they’re bulldozing behind the posh flats made of glass. It feels a little wrong, taking from our own like that. But not wrong enough to make us stop.
Our feet are dusty and our backs ache. Our cheeks are coated in grime, our hands are scraped and rough. Our hair smells like paint and plaster. The seasons turn and the weather gets cold. In the mornings, we come to the work site in hats our mothers knitted and sweaters our cousins outgrew. Bits and pieces of debris catch in the chunky yarn.
“Where’d you get all this stuff?” Rukshana asks.
“Behind the hospital,” Banu says.
“In the waste?”
Banu shrugs.
“Doesn’t that spread disease?” Rukshana asks.
“Probably to the rats,” Banu nods.
“But what about us?”
“Stop it,” Joy snaps. “We’re builders now. Don’t question. Just build.”
“Builders? What, like those kids who live at construction sites?” Rukshana asks. She’s talking about the migrant kids who have started appearing at our school, skinny waifs with empty bellies and hollow eyes that follow their parents from site to site, hauling and hammering the stone and sand and glass that are transforming Bangalore from a village to a town to a city.
The kids never stick around for long—most don’t even claim their free school uniforms, instead showing up every day in the same clothes, pilled from not enough washing, from too much sun. We make fun of their ashy elbows, their bare feet. Their accents, their naïveté. Convince ourselves that we are better than them. Different.
Except now that we’re Banu’s building team, we’re becoming more and more like them. We stop coming to school in our uniforms. Tie old bath towels around our heads, button men’s shirts over salwar suits. Observe our arms and backs and legs become ropey and taut and tan from lifting and hauling beneath the Bangalore sun.
“This better work,” Rukshana grumbles.
“Don’t worry,” Banu says. “It will.”
One afternoon, at the midday meal, the school ayah smiles and splashes a piece of radish onto Banu’s plate. A week later, she gives the rest of us some too.
The preschool teacher convinces the local councilor to buy new pais for the littlest kids, on the condition that she takes the pais home every night to protect them. The first time she forgets, she finds lines of bucked-tooth bites along the red and green stitched seams. The second time she forgets, nothing happens. The bamboo pleats look exactly the same.
The space behind the walls goes quiet, then silent. Sushila Miss goes back to leaving her shoes outside before coming into the classroom. (After the incident, she insisted on wearing closed-toe slippers, even when the rest of us had to go barefoot.)
Even though things are improving, Banu doesn’t rest. So neither do we. She brings us plaster to seal up the cracks in the walls and along the floors, paint to cover it all up. She makes us go to the school compound at dusk to fill the newly dug rat holes with more sand.
“We have to stop sometime,” Joy says, squinting in the looming dusk, nails black with sand. “Or we’ll never go back to class.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Banu says.
“I’m just saying this can’t go on forever,” Joy says. Like we all don’t know she’s worried she’s going to lose her first rank. Which, by the way, is about as likely as our school getting new books this year.
“She’s right. Look at us,” Rukshana says. Holds up her blistered hands, pulls at the yellowed collar of her shirt. There’s a hole in the sleeve from where she caught it on a nail. Her elbow peeks out like a cat’s nose. “We look like those construction site kids.”
“Who’s there?” Janaki Ma’am asks. Shines a flashlight at us, and we stand up and blink.
“It’s us, ma’am,” Rukshana says.
“Ah yes, the extermination team. What are you doing so late at night?”
“Filling rat holes,” Joy grumbles.
“Good,” Janaki Ma’am says, nodding. “Conscientious. I like that.”
Rukshana asks, “What does conscientious mean?”
“It means—” Janaki Ma’am stops for a minute and thinks. The silver streaks in her hair shimmer in the flashlight beam. “It means you are a group with a promising future.”
That night, all of us work so late we get in trouble for missing dinner.
A few days before the end-of-year exams, Janaki Ma’am calls us to her office. Most of us have only been inside to collect our free
uniforms or to bring our mothers to sign papers that Janaki Ma’am makes us read out loud to them. Sometimes they put their names or, sometimes, their thumbprints.
We’ve never looked around before. Never noticed the gold-framed picture of Saraswati on Ma’am’s desk, face dotted with kumkum, feet lined with freshly picked flowers.
“Goddess of wisdom and learning,” she tells us. Like we don’t already know.
We’ve never noticed the steel almirahs full of leather-bound registers with yellowing pages, the drawings from students pasted over water-damaged spots on the walls. Some of the drawings are Banu’s.
The power, which has been off all morning, suddenly comes on. The dusty ceiling fan jerks to life. Strains and pushes against the scorching summer air. Janaki Ma’am takes a handkerchief out of the blouse of her sari and wipes her forehead, her neck. Tucks the salty-wet cloth back into her blouse, and tells us, “There’s a terrible rat infestation down at the new shopping mall. The one they built next to the airport.” Pushes her lips together, sticks out her hand to Banu. “Such a shame, don’t you think? About the rats, I mean.”
Banu grins and takes Janaki Ma’am’s hand. Squeezes it proudly.
Because this, of course, is the surest sign of victory: the rats have given up on Ambedkar Government School. They have moved on to posher places. Places that would throw us out.
Where they went is not the point. The point is that they went, and it’s all because of Banu, and her builders.
It’s all because of us.
That afternoon, a straw-haired girl in a faded skirt-and-blouse set shuffles into our classroom. Feet flat and dusty and too big for her legs. Like her body was meant to grow more but just didn’t have the strength.
“New student?” Janaki Ma’am asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl says.
“Is that another of those construction site kids?” Yousef says. “Or is it a rat?”
Joy smacks Yousef across the face.
“What?” Yousef turns red. Maybe from Joy’s hand, but probably from her eyes.
A People's History of Heaven Page 5
