Three Bargains: A Novel Page 20

  He remembered making Swati laugh when, after a bath, he’d chase her around the compound vigorously shaking his wet head, spraying her with droplets of water as she ran, giggling and yelling, “Stop! Stop!” He did it to hear her laugh. He did it to hear his mother say, “Wear some clothes, you’ll catch a cold.” She would say it with her usual brusqueness, as she had since his father’s death, but he felt for a moment in those few words that she still worried about him, cared about him in some way.

  On his way to his room, he rapped on the open door of a room below his staircase. He owed money to the lady who prepared evening meals for him. Her cross-eyed husband would appropriate the payment if he was around, so Madan waited for when he knew the husband was out, to pay her directly.

  “I’m coming,” she said.

  Madan waited by the doorway, his eyes adjusting to the dimness of the interior. A baby lolled on a mat, plump and naked, with a black string tied around his middle, his tiny eyes lined with a dark smudge of kohl. Another baby hung off the lady’s hip. She bent over the stove, lighting a burner and stirring a deep pot on the ring of blue flames. Her other children were playing in the web of alleyways somewhere.

  Madan felt something run over his foot, and looking down he saw the plump baby crawl out the open door and into the street.

  “Behn-ji,” he said, “your baby.”

  “Get him,” she said, unruffled. “My hands are full.”

  The child sat in the middle of the lane and raised his arms up and down as if hailing a rickshaw.

  “Come on,” she hollered, “he won’t bite you.”

  “You’re making me late,” he said. Another tiny face, bundled tight, prickled his memory. “Get him,” she said again. “I’ll be there in a second.”

  The baby would drown with the trash in the drainage ditch by the time she turned around. Madan didn’t see why he had to make the effort when she didn’t seem worried about a bicycle or tonga running him over as he sat cackling in the lane, his bottom covered in gravel. He stepped out and, picking the baby up by the waist, deposited him back down on the mat.

  She came to the door to collect the money from Madan. “Such a big man, scared of a small person like this.” She laughed. The baby jiggling at her side sucked on a piece of carrot.

  “Don’t need any food tonight,” Madan said, irritated by her amusement. She had five needy children and a husband who barely managed to play the trumpet in a wedding marching band, and she laughed at Madan as if he were the one who was a joke. He would eat near the factory; perhaps go out with one of the other boys. He deserved a night with a half bottle or more of someone’s homemade mind-numbing brew. He checked the pocket of his pants for his stash of notes. It wasn’t much, but whatever he had, he always kept it on himself.

  Still seething, he jumped on the bus, and if there hadn’t been an empty seat he would have thrown someone off and taken their seat. He plunked down, shifting closer against the window as another passenger took the seat beside him. The bus jerked along from stop to stop. At the hospital with Dinesh, Madan had asked Ketan-bhai to add him to the permanent roster.

  “You now have an opening for a full-time worker,” Madan said. “I can start right away.”

  Ketan-bhai smiled thinly, thinking Madan was joking, and then realized he was not. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes, of course. The position is open now.”

  “So let me see. You beat Dinesh up, break his arm—”

  “Dislocated his wrist,” Madan corrected.

  “Pay all his hospital fees, and now you want his job.”

  “You heard the doctor. Dinesh won’t be able to use his hand for some time.”

  “And what if I don’t? Will I have to look over my shoulder from now on, worrying that you’ll be waiting to break my legs?

  “If I wanted to break your legs I would have done it by now. But you haven’t given me any reason.”

  Ketan-bhai had rocked back and forth on his heels, his arms folded at his chest, almost laughing, but he had gone ahead and taken Madan up on his proposition. Madan had a full-time job again, and his life was beginning to settle.

  He had thought at one time that there could be no other factory as big as the timber mill, but most of these factories surpassed it in size, and he’d heard of far larger ones coming up on the outskirts of the city. He wished he could take the bus and go straight to Avtaar Singh, not to complain or rant, but just to be with him for a while. Madan knew exactly what stories he would tell about this place to make Avtaar Singh laugh in his big, booming way, or say, Really? We should think about doing that, or shake his head and affirm, That’s why we’re happy here in Gorapur.

  He played out again the memories of those last days, before he arrived in Delhi. He should have taken the baby from Pandit Bansi Lal and run. Why hadn’t he? It was his as much as it was Neha’s. Instead of languishing here all alone, he would have had someone. Confusion, fear and the shock of the preceding events had not let him think clearly. He could have grabbed the baby out of Pandit Bansi Lal’s arms, he thought. Pandit Bansi Lal was no match for him. Madan could have been out of the hospital and on his way before the pandit opened his wretched mouth.

  As far as he could see, children didn’t need much more than what he already had—a place to live and a job to bring in some money. Out of his bus window, he could see kids on the streets everywhere, learning, growing, living, surviving. It wasn’t that hard, if they could all do it. And Avtaar Singh would have understood why he took his baby. Yours is yours, he’d have said.

  He lost track of time as he wandered down the road of possibilities, getting off at his stop and entering the factory without paying much attention to the predictable surroundings. Avoiding the temple, he made his way to sign in. He caught Ketan-bhai looking at him hawkeyed from the fringes of the crowd of worshippers.

  “Madan.” Ketan-bhai broke away from the group, calling out to him. When Madan slowed down, Ketan-bhai handed him a roll of newspapers.

  Madan took it with a nod of his head in thanks. He had quit trying to dissuade Ketan-bhai from passing on his morning’s newspapers, which would include Dainik Jagran, Navbharat Times and an English-language paper. He could always find a discarded one lying about. But Ketan-bhai insisted and it gave them things to talk about when they had lunch together most afternoons, a routine they had fallen into that Madan had come to enjoy.

  “Ketan-bhai,” the workers said. “How come you don’t sit and talk with us?”

  “All you buggers do is bore me by complaining about your wives, your children, your jobs,” Ketan-bhai said. “Madan can tell me ten interesting things in the same time.”

  There was an air about Ketan-bhai that made him seem older than the decade or so he had over Madan, and his plain-dealing ways elicited a deference from everyone, adding to his aura of sagacity. In the quick glimpse Madan once had of Ketan-bhai’s office, he’d seen files lined up in clinical order, pens separated by color in different cups on an uncluttered desk and tagged leather jacket samples methodically hung up on garment rods. Everything, even the charts on the wall, displayed Ketan-bhai’s penchant for order and harmony. “It makes my wife crazy, but I can’t sleep if I know something is not where it should be,” Ketan-bhai had said. “Bothers me to no end when anything is out of place.”

  Madan tucked the newspapers under his arm and slowed his pace to match Ketan-bhai’s. He didn’t mind these friendly discussions on wars in the Gulf and beyond, or debating economic reforms brought about by the budget payment crisis, or the latest cricket scores. Ketan-bhai would try to dig deeper, but it was no use trying to explain why it didn’t matter that he was not working behind a desk in an office or doing productive work with his mind rather than his hands. When a man has no beginning to his life and the end is a question mark, then what he does in the middle becomes irrelevant.

  Ketan-bhai’s disappointment at Madan’s reticence was clear, as Ketan-bhai was a man who couldn’t hide his feelings behind stoi
c expressions or polite chitchat. Madan had seen Ketan-bhai’s young son waiting for him by the gate on his way back from school. Ketan-bhai would hurry out and throw his arm around the boy’s shoulder and pull him close, bending his head to ask a question, and he would smile at whatever the answer, and they would talk and forget everything around them as they made their way to Ketan-bhai’s scooter.

  All at once the weight of his jumbled, distracted thoughts when jumping off the bus drained out of Madan. It was a sign of madness to think that he could have taken the child and fled. Dreaming about how he would feed it, and clothe it and have the lady downstairs look after it for a few rupees. What did he know about taking care of a baby? Madan was useless to that child, as it was to him. From its inception, the small, crying creature had come along and ruined everything. No one wanted it; even its own mother had sought her emancipation.

  Perhaps realizing Madan’s inattention, Ketan-bhai meandered off, and Madan entered the workroom. A man on a rickety ladder was replacing a faulty tube light and it flickered on, flooding the room with artificial brightness, and illuminating brown-and-black-mottled goatskins splayed out on worn wooden worktables. Before starting, the men hung around exchanging morning pleasantries. Most would collect their monthly pay and send some of it to wives and children, old parents and younger siblings, hoping in the end to make enough money to one day return to their waiting homes dotting the countryside all the way to the Bay of Bengal, in villages where goats ran amok on dusty roads, and men tilled the land with oxen, and electricity was a luxury of an hour a day.

  With a sheet of emery, Madan began to slough off the top grain of the goatskins with a steady back-and-forth motion, buffing away the cuts and scratches, the bites and horn marks and imperfections. It would take all morning to get through this first pile, but soon the upper crust of the skin would be powdered grit at his feet, and the smooth nap underneath would then be ready to be embossed with a pattern, dyed to an unnatural color, cut up and sewed back together to become something it was never meant to be.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE WORKTABLE BEGAN TO TREMBLE. MADAN LIFTED HIS head to look around and heard a burst of explosions like the rattle of gunshots somewhere below. Others began to ask, “What was that?” or “What’s happening?” And then someone said, “Run.”

  The doorway was at once blocked, everyone fighting to get out, scrambling up and over each other. “Keep calm,” someone said above the din. “You’ll kill us all here.” When one person managed to break free from the gridlock, the others spilled out, and Madan streamed out with them into the murky hallway filling with dark, gathering clouds of smoke. The back of his throat burned and his eyes began to water. He could hear the pounding of footsteps but they seemed to be coming from all directions. He made out vague shapes and felt the air move when someone passed by. The doorway disappeared behind him. He was unsure if he had turned left or right.

  Eyes squeezed shut against the heat and ash in the air, he moved along the wall. At its end, he came upon another room and stumbled inside, taking stock of his surroundings. Upturned tables and chairs and boxes of thread rolls littered the room. He closed his eyes against the onslaught. A few more steps, surely, and he would be out in the open and able to take a deep, cleansing breath. “We need help!” he heard a holler from the basement stairs behind him. It was Jairam, from the packing room. Jairam shouted into the emptying hall, “Help!” before running back down.

  There was no one to follow him but Madan. The basement was a warren of illegal rooms dug out to accommodate different parts of the factory process. Madan kept an eye on Jairam’s blue shirt. There was ash in the air along with gritty cement dust. The walls had crumbled in piles of rubble.

  “Where to? Where to?” Madan huffed to Jairam. The heat was unbearable. Behind an accordion iron gate, three women peered out though the slanted bars, their saris covering their mouths to sieve the acrid air, their eyes wide with hopelessness. Rubble from the collapsed ceiling filled the gate’s tracks, jamming the folds of the gate shut. There was another scream when a block of cement fell and shattered to pieces on impact.

  “Leave us, son,” said the woman closest to the gate. “Save yourself.”

  “Are you mad?” cried another one. “Help us, help us,” she shouted to Madan and Jairam.

  Jairam began to clear the area in and around the tracks, and Madan crouched down to help. Pieces of brick and cement ripped the skin off their hands, dirt grinding into the wounds. The ladies chanted softy, “Jai Mata Di, Jai Mata Di.” When the tracks seemed cleared enough, Madan pulled at the handle of the gate to test if it would move, but drew back at once. The iron bars were hot. He removed his T-shirt and wrapped it around his hand. He pulled on the opening of the gate but couldn’t hold on for long before the heat came through the thin cloth, adding to the fiery pain of his cut-up hands. He stripped off his pants and used both garments to hold on to the bars.

  Jairam did the same. “Move back,” he shouted to the ladies.

  In their grubby, loose shorts, they jiggled and tugged at the gate stuck in its tracks while around them chunks of mortar fell in unnerving thumps at their feet. “We have to hurry,” said Jairam.

  Madan strained harder and harder against the twisted iron until he heard Jairam grunt, “A little more.”

  The gate gave way, rolling back in the track with a short, unassuming squeak. One of the women squeezed out and then turned to help the others as Madan and Jairam held the gate open. Jairam led them away, with Madan following at the rear. The women trembled with shock and relief, crying and praying as they climbed back up the stairs.

  At last Madan collapsed on the steps outside. They were wet and cool against his bare back and legs. A van pulled up, and there was a commotion as they loaded up the injured and took them away. A few men continued to hasten about with metal pails filled to the brim with water, and khaki police uniforms appeared in Madan’s line of sight. His first impulse was to run to escape the whack of their lathis, but then he laughed at himself. He was not lying drunk on the footpath at some odd hour. It was daytime, he was in the factory, and if they wanted to clear him out, they would have to put down their batons and scrape his charred remains off this step. He stretched out and looked up at the bright sky. The sloshing of the water in the buckets pained him above all else. “Give me some,” he said, but nobody heard his whispered plea.

  Ketan-bhai sat on a metal chair next to the hospital bed in a starched safari suit, his prematurely gray hair slicked down heavily with hair cream, holding the open newspaper up to Madan’s face. “We were in the news,” Ketan-bhai said grimly. “Second page.”

  “Two Dead in Factory Blaze” read the headline, followed by a few long paragraphs.

  The words swam before Madan. He rested his head back down. The sheets were a jumbled mess beneath him. He tried to cough but it hurt his throat and his head, and nausea came like a crashing wave. He retched into the steel pan at the side of the bed.

  “It will take time for your hands to heal.” Ketan-bhai gently patted Madan’s heavily bandaged hand. “You took in a lot of smoke, so your mouth and throat are going to be sore for some time. Doctors were surprised you didn’t pass out.”

  There were other patients in the ward on dinged and corroded metal beds like his, and Madan could see legs and arms flung listlessly out on white sheets.

  “Jairam?” Madan asked. “Is he here?”

  “He’s home now,” Ketan-bhai said. “He wasn’t as bad as you.”

  “Who was it?” Madan rasped, pointing to the headline announcing the dead.

  “Did you know Govindraja from Chhattisgarh? Uttam from Badarpur?” Madan hadn’t heard of them.

  “Govindraja, I knew him from some years ago. How afraid he used to be of these government hospitals. He’d heard that when the wards filled up, they would get rid of the excess population by attaching an empty IV bottle and pumping air into their veins. A killer air bubble would travel to the heart or lungs and the hos
pital would claim ‘natural death.’ I guess it is good Govindraja found a way out without stopping here.”

  Ketan-bhai’s gaze traveled up the IV line inserted into Madan’s hand, to the plastic bottle hanging from a hook.

  “Yours is full of medicine,” he told Madan reassuringly. “Yours too,” he added to the worried patient in the next bed listening in to their conversation. Ketan-bhai probably knew all their names and where they were from by now.

  “Didn’t know Uttam very well,” Ketan-bhai continued. “There was some trouble with his brother back in his hometown, but I heard he was a solid, hardworking fellow. Once you’re gone, what else is anyone going to say about you? But why am I talking of Govindraja and Uttam? Our pasts have no meaning in this city, where everyone has a story. That’s why we all land up here. To change how the story ends.”

  A nurse moved from bed to bed checking blood pressure, handing out medications and making notations on her sheaf of papers. “Hello, sister,” Ketan-bhai said when she came to Madan. “Where is the patient’s lunch? My friend needs some nourishment to regain his strength.”