Shining Hero (6 page)

At once a great babble of excitement rose. People, packing tightly round her, began to talk all at once. They waved their arms, beat their breasts and dramatically pulled at their hair as they told of the things they needed – a well so they would not have to go so far for water, a bus service, a health clinic and most of all electricity. ‘Also we would like our own cinema,’ they told her. ‘At present we must travel to Dattapukur three miles away to see the films and because we are from outside, we have to sit at the back while those from Dattapukur get all the good places. And also when it is raining there is only a small tarpaulin for shelter and we of Hatipur are forced to sit outside of it till we become completely wetted. Even those with umbrellas become wetted underneath because of the water running over the earth.’

Shivarani quickly turned the conversation to drains, school books, clean water and medical care but every now and again one or another of the young men would let out an ear-splitting yell of ‘yahoo.’ ‘They have been to see the film of
Jungly
,’ a woman explained. ‘Have you seen this wonderful film, Memsahib Shivarani? In this Shamee Kapoor is this wild man, who is constantly shouting in such a way.’

‘But although hanging from trees and such like he is of a very handsome type,’ said another. ‘Like the gopis and their passion for the blue god, Krishna, all the women of Hatipur are in love with this fellow though the married ones do not mention it to their husbands.’ The surrounding girls giggled protests and hid their faces in their hands while the men of their families looked at them accusingly.

Shivarani brought the conversation back to tangible problems that she might have a chance of solving.

A woman spoke up, ‘My name is Laxshmi. If you wish to be helpful then you should do something for me. I have three daughters already …’ she gestured to three little girls wearing starched frocks, with bows in their hair. ‘I am pregnant again. If this child is a girl as well, my husband has said he will leave me. So can you make this child into a male?’

Shivarani sighed.

Others began to pour out their problems. They began to tell
Shivarani of the paralysed grandmother who had to be carried everywhere, the threatening mother-in-law, the child that did not thrive, the cow that had dried up too soon, the virus in the tomatoes. One man described his happiness because his cow had given birth to a female calf. Another expressed his dismay because his wife had given birth to a female child. And then there were the widows. There were fourteen of them. ‘Perhaps you can find some work for us, Shivarani Memsahib,’ they said. ‘For these days we hardly get enough to eat for even if the families of our husbands wanted to, they would be unable to spare enough for us after the children have eaten.’

‘The wife of the misti wallah has a trouble and needs your help,’ someone told her. Shivarani followed him.

The misti wallah’s wife was sitting on bolsters in the room at the back of the shop, pressing shandesh into little wooden moulds in the shape of fishes. The room smelled of sugar and buzzed heavily with bees and flies and the misti wallah’s back was visible through the bamboo curtain, as he sat cross-legged behind his piles of sweets.

‘I want my eldest sons, Rahul and Ravi, to go to school, but instead they are thieving around the village and their father does nothing to stop them,’ said the woman. ‘Ravi is the leader, and Rahul, though the eldest, follows him. I want the best for our children and my husband says he does too, but it costs money and the attention of the father to bring up children properly.’

The misti wallah’s back flinched as though he heard or guessed what his wife was saying about him. He worked very hard, getting up before sunrise to separate the curds and set the dahis. For hours, even on the hottest days he would be toiling over a vat of hot oil, dribbling in the batter to make jellabies, then dropping the hot crisp squirls into simmering sugar syrup. After his stall opened he would be sitting there all day long, serving customers with rosogullas, Lady Kennies, gulab jamans, shandesh. Spooning almond-spiked paishes and rose-flavoured kheers into terracotta pots. Packing jellabies into banana leaf and tying the bundle with thread. Even after the stall was closed his work would still not be finished. He would still have to seal the jars of warm curd with muslin and waxed paper before
carrying them to the river to cool all night in the shallows there. The evenings in the drink shop were his relaxation. He looked forward all day to the hour when he would be able to sit in silence in the little concrete room of the arrak shop and down a few tumblers of arrak. Then, fully drunk, his worries about his out-of-control sons and his wife’s complaints forgotten, he would stagger home and sleep.

The misti wallah, on his way to the arrak shop, would sometimes pass the bullock cart on which his wife and children were squashed among the other villagers, on their way to see the film at Dattapukur. His wife, like the other women, wearing her brightest sari and with jasmine in her hair, his sons wearing oversized shorts, with their hair greased down and behaving properly for once, crammed among little girls in frocks embroidered with glittering thread and men in starched pyjamas. ‘Why don’t you come with us instead of getting drunk,’ his wife would cry as he squeezed onto the verge to let the cart rumble by. ‘The cinema will not give a headache and tonight is one very good film.’

Later, at the arrak shop, the misti wallah would settle onto the cool cement seat, glass in hand, and hear the shrill excited laughter and the creaking of the axle receding, as the cart made its way out of the village, and feel grateful for the silence that followed the departure of his family.

‘My children are getting a bad example,’ said the wife as she began to shake the shandesh fishes from their moulds and decorate them with silver leaf. ‘That must be the reason for their bad behaviour but I am hoping that, since you are college returned and therefore of a great cleverness, you will speak with my husband and ask him to desist from the drinking of arrak, and come instead to the cinema with us.’

The zamindar’s son, Pandu, had taken Koonty all down the long gallery, telling her about the family portraits. And now they sat on the verandah drinking nimbu pani with ice. Although he was so much older he talked to Koonty as though she was as grown-up as
him, telling her of his plans to bring the Hatibari back to its former glory. ‘In the days of my grandfather there were fifty servants, and all the land you see in every direction belonged to our family.’ He was planning to buy a herd of Jersey cows, he told Koonty. ‘There are all these stables that my grandfather used for his pig-sticking horses and they will make good byres.’ He brought out photo albums. ‘Look how pretty my great-grandmother was. And this aunt, see her. Isn’t she beautiful? Though not as beautiful as you.’

Koonty felt a heat in her cheeks and, unable to work out how a modest woman was supposed to respond to such a compliment, said nothing. Kuru Dadoo, who was Pandu’s father, joined them and, pointing to a faded sepia photo, said, ‘That is me on the day I saved the life of a Calcutta box wallah. I was a hero in my time though you wouldn’t believe it now.’ Then he laughed till his big stomach shook, pinched Koonty’s cheek till it was sore and popped a sweetie in her mouth as though she was a little girl and not a woman of thirteen and said, ‘I hope you will be visiting us often because I need a pretty little girl around.’

Meena Gupta became very excited and hopeful when she heard of the visit. And a few days later when Koonty was invited round again Meena went nearly hysterical with hope. Kuru Dadoo had talked of Koonty’s marriage with Pandu.

‘Tell me word for word what he said.’

‘I’ve told you twenty times and I’m not going to say it any more,’ cried an exasperated Koonty.

‘Once more,’ pleaded the mother. These words were music to her after the dreadful business of Shivarani.

‘He said, “If she was a little less jungly and a bit more modest Koonty would make a suitable bride for you, Pandu,” but he might have been only joking. I don’t think he really meant it. And anyway I don’t want to be married. I want to go on being as I am.’ Being as she was consisted of swimming in the river with Pandu and his boy cousins or even going with them into the village and playing games of cricket with the village boys in the main street.

‘All this must stop instantly,’ said Meena, who felt as though
Koonty had grown up into a young woman in a moment, and without anyone noticing. Whatever could she have been thinking of to let things come to such a pass? She forbade all further visits to the village, and put a stop to meetings with the Pandava and Kaurava boys unless there was a chaperone present. Koonty cried and begged, but Meena was filled with terror mixed with a marvellous hope.

Shivarani had managed to solve a few of the village’s problems. She had got money from Oxfam to dig a tube well, and had started a little industry for the fourteen widows. They now made blue-eyed, yellow-haired dolls which Shivarani sold to a Calcutta toyshop. But Meena was not impressed. ‘What is this, going around all day among those dirty people? I think that you are stirring up trouble where no trouble was before, and sooner or later it will come to the ears of the zamindar. Do you want your father to lose his work here? Then you will be in the state of these poor people of Hatipur that you are so sorry about.’

‘Don’t listen to Ma,’ Koonty tried to console. ‘I think it’s wonderful, all the things you are doing. I wish I was a good person like you but I just couldn’t do it. I know I couldn’t.’

When Koonty was nearly fifteen Pandu’s mother formally requested the union in marriage of Koonty with her son Pandu. Meena, nearly fainting with joy, reflected that the last year of Koonty’s sulks and rows had been a small price to pay for this wonderful reward.

Koonty now spent her days moping alone in the garden while the boys rushed around on their bicycles or went swimming in the river. ‘Of course you may not swim. Have you forgotten you are to be the wife of the young zamindar?’ ‘Certainly you may not go on a bicycle. That is not at all a suitable behaviour for a bride-to-be.’

Sometimes Shivarani, feeling sorry for her lonely sister, would sit with her and brush Koonty’s hair or rub mustard oil into her fingers, while Koonty told her sister the story of the latest film she had seen. ‘The Mahabharata. And the Sun God is absolutely gorgeous, though the one I like best of all is Arjuna. I’ve got a poster of him on my wall.’
Shivarani would tell Koonty about the things that were happening in the village, how Ravi, the misti wallah’s son, had broken the darjee’s sewing machine, how Laxshmi had given birth to a daughter and her husband had left her and how she was having difficulties in getting the doll shop to pay up. ‘The widows need the money so badly. You have no idea how poor they are. It’s not just a matter of having to wear white and being forbidden jewels. Their husbands’ families treat them as though surviving their husbands is a punishable offence.’

‘I would hate to be a widow,’ said Koonty. ‘I would kill myself if my husband died.’ And she touched the gold medallion that Pandu had given her the day before.

‘What a way to talk,’ cried Shivarani. ‘Here are you not even married and you are talking of your husband dying and you killing yourself. And you should not be accepting gifts from your husband-to-be at this time. Especially you should not accept something valuable like that so near to the wedding.’

Koonty crinkled her nose and hastily tucked the symbol of Pandu’s love back into her blouse.

‘Don’t screw up your pretty face like that,’ said Shivarani. ‘I know you are going to look beautiful on your wedding day but all the same you must be careful not to get a wrinkle.’

Koonty laughed. ‘And so will you look beautiful, Didi, because you’ll have to wear nice clothes and jewels for my wedding instead of those ghastly drab old saris.’

Shivarani shook her head and smiled. ‘It wouldn’t matter how I was dressed. Nothing will make me pretty. I will always be ugly.’

Koonty was appalled. ‘But Didi, how can you say such a thing? It’s because you don’t even try. Here. I’ll show you how to do flirting things with your sari. You never know. Some gorgeous man might come to my wedding and fall in love with you.’ Leaping up she demonstrated. ‘Just flip the palu like this, as though by mistake.’

Shivarani did a reluctant tweak.

‘Not like that,’ protested Koonty. ‘You’ve got to do it daintily and at the same time your eyes have to give a quick glance in his direction and then you have to look away.’

Shivarani was away during the months leading up to the wedding, travelling round the villages with her college friend Malti, seeing what could be done to help the villagers.

Villagers would instantly drop what they were doing when the two girls arrived, and stare, fascinated. Strangers were always exciting but the big one with the black face amazed them. Sometimes a whisper would go round among the children. ‘Where are her other arms?’ They thought that Shivarani was the goddess Kali. Malti was a type these villagers had encountered doing charity work at the health clinic or coming to instruct them on birth control. She was normal height, fair-skinned, wore gold earrings and her sari, though simple, was clearly expensive. They had never seen anyone like Shivarani before. It was not only her height and dark complexion. She wore no jewels and her wrists were bare, though even the poorest village woman wore at least a glass bangle. Her hair was short like a man’s and, in fact, although she wore a cheap handloom sari, they could hardly tell if this was man or woman. Perhaps it is a hirja, they whispered to one another. Hirjas were people of indeterminate gender, who wore women’s clothes and had the voices of men. They were frightening people, who appeared at the birth of a baby threatening to curse the child unless they were given payment. Shivarani’s voice was nearly as gruff as a man’s as she boomed out her party’s promises of education, clean water, and food, housing and transport for all.