The Sari Shop (18 page)

The small house was her real world, the safe world that she returned to every day after work. There were two small rooms. Her brother lived with his wife in one. They had recently had a baby boy and needed a room to themselves. The other was little more than a hole in a wall, with just enough space for her father’s single bed and a pitcher of water. Kamla slept in a corner of the kitchen. She had a string cot there covered with a green bedspread that sometimes doubled for a shawl. Under her cot, she kept a tin trunk that contained all her worldly possessions.

This was her world, with all the familiar objects comfortingly in place. And now it would all disappear to be replaced by new things. Instead of excitement, this prospect only brought fear.

Her parents as well as Chander’s parents would continue to live in Jandiala.

She would be all alone in Amritsar with a stranger. In a new, strange house
.

She lay awake night after night, repeating these two sentences to herself over and over again in her mind till her head ached. Then one night she got tired of worrying. Nothing could be done about it, and anyway, girls had to adjust. She turned over in her bed and went to sleep.

*

And so, one fine morning, Kamla got married to Chander.

Later, the thing she could recollect most clearly about her wedding day was the smell of laddus everywhere.

Yellow, sweet laddus piled into neat pyramids on steel plates, being offered to gaudily dressed guests, being stolen by the children in the neighbourhood amidst suppressed giggles, being given to gods as offerings and being packed in red cardboard boxes to be given away to relatives.

A little girl even smuggled in a laddu for Kamla to eat on the morning of the wedding, when she sat in the inner room, the one where her Bhabhi and brother slept. Kamla was dressed in red, examining her henna-decorated palms. The day before her Bhabhi and some girls from the neighbourhood had mixed mehndi in a small steel bowl. Then her sister-in-law had, with the tip of a matchstick dipped in the mixture, made perfect circles in the centre of both her palms and had filled them in. Then the girls had taken turns, giggling all the while, to fill in each of her fingertips with mehndi. The mehndi had
stained her palms a nice, dark orange. Her fingertips flamed too, but she wished her sister-in-law had thought of a more imaginative design. When the little girl brought in the smuggled laddu wrapped in a dirty hanky, Kamla took it absently, but was too nervous to do more than nibble on it. There was a smell of laddus everywhere, in the air of the house, in the worn green bedspread on her string cot, in her clothes, in the tiny smoky kitchen, in her hair.

The only other clear memory she had was that of tearfully requesting her aunt to let her wear her red glass beads around her neck on the wedding day.

Her aunt had firmly refused.

‘You will not wear these, Kamla. What will people think?’

‘But, Bua, they match
exactly
with my kameez,’ Kamla said, almost hysterical. She was wearing a plain shiny synthetic red salwaar kameez that her brother had got cheap from his factory. She had bought a plain chunni, got it dyed a matching red and had then herself sewn golden gota at its edges to make it look bridal. Later Bhabhi had also sewn on some cheap golden-coloured sequins that she had bought. Kamla looked very pretty with the glittering chunni draped over her head, but she was still hankering after the string of glass beads.

‘I badly want to wear it. Please, Bua.’

‘No, Kamla, you will just wear the thin gold chain that your mother left behind and the gold earrings that your father has got made especially for your wedding. It may not be much, but it is enough for people like us. What will people think if you wear glass beads on your wedding day?’

‘Bua, if I wear my own glass beads and go to Amritsar, I’ll feel better. I’ll feel I am still me,’ said Kamla, incoherently, close to tears.

‘What rubbish is that? Of course you are you. See, Kamla,’ Bua said, her voice gentler now, ‘all girls get jittery on their wedding day, but you be good now. Calm down and listen to your elders.
You are going to become a responsible housewife now. Don’t act like a child.’

‘But, Bua…’

‘Enough, Kamla, don’t create trouble now. Be a good girl and be grateful for all that your father has done for you. Your father might be poor, but you are not a road-sweeper’s daughter that you will wear glass trinkets on your wedding day.’

Bua was not to be persuaded and Kamla gave in.

She remembered little else about the day.

Kamla came to live in Amritsar with Chander, bringing all her belongings in her old tin trunk. She had packed the two new saris that her father had bought, the few salwaar kameezes and saris that her employers had kindly given her, all her underclothes, blouses and petticoats, her comb, her mirror, the new sindoor and bindi packs and the homemade sanitary napkins.

All this was packed under Bua’s supervision and according to her instructions.

After Bua left, Kamla had opened the trunk again and had packed more things in surreptitiously.

So she also brought to Amritsar her precious string of red glass beads, her two childhood frocks – one pink and one red and blue check – in case she had a daughter, the new tube of Fair and Lovely that she had saved up for the last two months to buy, an imported brass safety pin and an old Chinese silk scarf that one of the ladies in the big houses had once given to her. She also brought with her the firm belief that turmeric stains did not go, no matter how hard you scrubbed.

Kamla had started out on her new marital life in the same way that all the girls she knew of did. She wasn’t expected to go out and work now that she was married. She was expected to bear children soon, and Chander told her there was no point in starting on a job that she’d have to leave soon anyway.

‘You can always start to work when the children grow up a bit. Till then we can manage. I am not
that
poor,’ he had said to her.

So every day, Kamla cooked meals, washed clothes and cleaned her new home, a tiny, one-roomed house with a tin sheet for a roof. Chander said they would move into a better place soon, as soon as he had saved up some money. And there was the Diwali bonus coming up soon.

Chander did not have much money, and had long working hours. He went to the cloth factory where he worked early every morning and came back late at night. She had to scrimp and save a lot, but she was used to it. Things hadn’t been much different at her father’s house, except that she had never been alone there. Kamla became an economical housewife. She darned holes in old clothes, repaired and strengthened their seams, hemmed frayed edges. She carefully stored used cooking oil instead of throwing it away, and reused it a couple of times. She recycled every little bit of scrap cloth and paper that she could. She prepared all the meals without using too many spices, left garlic out completely and at the end of every month found that she had saved a little by all her efforts.

But somewhere down the line, something had gone wrong.
She had begun to brood, had begun to be tired of her life. Chander drank often and beat her up. This was pretty common, she knew. Men often beat up their wives. It was a matter of routine, nothing personal. It shouldn’t have worried her.

But it did. It turned her temper sour. She would do her housework alone in the house all day, scrubbing, chopping and cleaning with a frown creasing her forehead, encased by the gnawing solitude of the small house, its tiny window bringing in only a gloomy grey light.

The whole day would pass in working at chores that seemed to grow more pointless each day, and watching the light change from dull grey to a slightly brighter grey at noon, and then dull grey again, when evening fell. Darkness would follow. Then she’d switch on the small bulb on the wall. Exposed wires ran from the bulb to the switchboard.

She’d cook dinner and start to wait for Chander. He’d stagger in, drunk, after midnight sometimes. Either he’d quietly fall into bed and go to sleep, or he’d pick a fight with her and beat her. Later, he would comfort her and caress her, but with a slurred voice and clammy hands.

Six months after her marriage she received the news that her father had died. Her brother had called up the factory where Chander worked. He had left a message with Chander’s boss, who wasn’t too pleased that Chander had given out the phone number to his relatives. Chander had immediately returned home, told Kamla the news, and before she had fully absorbed it, put her in a Punjab Roadways bus that jolted all the way to Jandiala. He gave her a twenty-rupee note to take with her.

She had got off the bus expecting to see her brother or one of her relatives there, but there wasn’t a single familiar face in the crowd at the bus stand. With great trepidation, and for the first time in her life, she took a rickshaw alone, all by
herself, and went to her father’s house. Chander joined her a day later.

A month later, her brother lost his job at the Chandrika Readymade Garments factory. They had got in some new machines and needed fewer skilled cutters and tailors now.

He spent a frustrating two months looking for another job, but all the factories were full up already. He moved to Jalandhar with his wife and young son. His wife’s brother had promised to help him get a job there. After moving to Jalandhar, he never contacted Kamla again, fully absorbed in his new life. Kamla pretended to herself that she didn’t mind, but she did realize that she had forever lost the only home she had ever known.

Now Chander’s house would be her home for the rest of her life. Every day of her life would begin and end there. Kamla became lonelier and quieter.

*

And then Kamla got pregnant. She previously had no particular idea about maternal longing and saw pregnancy as another thing that happened to you, like marriage. She had been completely indifferent to the prospect of being a mother.

She had never imagined that it could make her so happy. Her world seemed to change overnight. It became newer, fresher and the gloom that had settled on her for the past year lifted. She smiled to herself sometimes while she worked. She began to look forward to having a child of her own. She knew she would never be bored or listless or lonely again once the child came.

She began to be more interested in things around her. She would stand at the door sometimes and watch the dirty white cow that lived in the street nose for food in the garbage pile opposite their house. Or she would watch the neighbourhood
children draw chalk patterns in the middle of the street to play hopscotch in, scattering like disturbed sparrows every time a bicycle squeezed its way through the narrow street.

Or she’d intently listen to women fighting over the Municipal Corporation tap. A few days after her wedding, Kamla had accidentally discovered the secret of the tap. She had woken up feeling claustrophobic at dawn. The room reeked of alcohol and sweat, and she had rushed out of the house, swathing her shawl around herself. She had turned on the brass tap hopefully, and there had indeed been some water there, with which she had splashed her face before going back in. No one knew the tap leaked water at that hour, and she had kept her secret. Now she always filled her green plastic bucket at four in the morning, so that she wouldn’t have to stand in a queue in the sun with hordes of other women at nine in the morning. When the tap spluttered to let out a thin trickle of water into her bucket, she stood near it, a shadowy figure in the darkness, feeling grateful to the Municipal Corporation for this lapse.

Kamla began to settle down. When she sat on her doorstep sometimes and looked out at the busy people, the chattering groups of women with full lives, she wondered if she could try and make friends with some of them. Maybe they’d talk to her, even though she was an outsider. Maybe she would be able to become part of the community. And after all, who would her child play with if she didn’t try? She should start now.

But none of this worrying and planning turned out to be necessary after all. In the third month of her pregnancy, Kamla had a miscarriage.

Chander was away at work at the time, and Kamla panicked when she found the red clots between her legs and realized what was happening. She rushed out, walking to the main road with quick steps. She took a rickshaw alone, all by herself, for the second time in her life, and told the rickshaw-wala to
go to a government hospital, the cheapest hospital he knew of. She sat with her legs clenched together, weeping bitterly throughout the bumpy ride to a hospital about two kilometres away.

She felt angry with her mother-in-law for being absent, she felt furious with her own mother for being dead, and she hated Chander for leaving her alone every day. She wept and wept, hating everyone, the feeling of wetness between her legs increasing frighteningly every moment.

In the hospital everything was cold. The antiseptic smell was cold. The faces she saw were cold. People were dressed in a cold, mourning white. The wetness between her legs was cold. The metal stretchers painted white, carried around by blank-faced, indifferent attendants, were cold.

Terror followed her through the crowded hospital corridors. She made her way through the sickening smells of medicines and blood and through the sights of mangled people waiting for treatment. Patients and their relatives who had come from adjoining villages slept, ate and talked in the waiting area, in the corridors, they even spilled into a small storeroom full of stretchers. Some had urgency on their faces, others had faces that had become stiff with waiting. With tears running down her cheeks, she asked urgently who she could see. No one took her seriously till an attendant saw traces of blood at her ankles, below her sari. Then she was shown into a large ward full of groaning people. A man was gathering old, bloodstained bandages into a basket. Kamla felt like throwing up.

In the ward she was quickly made to lie down and was examined by a rude doctor – a thickset woman with a wide jaw whose breath smelt of onions.

Kamla was admitted and discharged from the hospital on the same day. Intense pain and complete terror blinded her to what was going on around her. Hands touching her… blurred
faces hovering around… coldness… These were the only things that registered. Before she left, still understanding very little of what had happened, just aware of a pain in her abdomen that intensified whenever she moved her legs, the doctor told her briskly that she had lost her baby and would never conceive again. She didn’t explain further, muttering something about ignorant village people before impatiently moving to the next patient.