Three Bargains: A Novel (31 page)

“Such a venture requires money, Ketan-bhai. And as you can see, I’m going to be sleeping on the footpath tonight.”

“I had some land back in my village, in Abohar. It was of no use to me sitting there unattended. I recently sold it. I have capital, but I need support. I know where to get the leather, the materials and I can get a good price for the production. I need someone who is confident speaking to these buyers, negotiating with them. I’ve talked to my wife about you and she agrees with me that you would be a helpful partner. We can set up a company. We need one room for an office, and a letter of credit. We will be in the middle, take the American order, give it to the local manufacturers and take our cut. It’s a good deal for you. How long can you be a laborer like this?”

“You’re going to trust me with your money?” Maybe it was Ketan-bhai who had suffered oxygen deprivation during the fire.

“You know how often I argued with them about the way the factory was set up. I warned them that something could happen, but they didn’t listen. The police let me go this time, but what about the next time? Who are they going to catch when they can’t get the owners? The supervisor. That’s who. How long can I work in these places, at the mercy of people like these? I have to take this chance to do something on my own,” he said. “Look, I have a young son. There is a different life I see for him, different from mine. And I can see that someone has taken a lot of effort with you, educated you, taught you how to think and reason, how to evaluate and get things done. Someone must have cared about you very much to do this. Don’t let it go to waste.”

It was the end of the day. The men accumulated outside the factory gates, smoking and chatting. Spying Madan’s approach, they called him to join them. “Arre, Madan-bhai!” “There’s our hero!”

The men began to quiz him about his restitution money.

“Where did it go, Madan-bhai? Women? No, you are too uptight. Drink? Must be drink. He is the type to have many sorrows to drown.”

Madan allowed the men to rib him. Of course the money would be of primary interest to them. How shocked they would be to learn how little of it remained. He had left Ketan-bhai, with his scooter full of dreams, to find a place to sleep. He ended up roaming from neighborhood to neighborhood like a nomad.

At midnight, a reluctant silence descended on the city. The jagged concentric circles of the ring roads took him to shuttered markets glowing with dirty yellow lights. He walked with the stray dogs, pausing for warmth by roadside fires, where the men huddling around the flames shared their beedis and gave him space in their cozy cabals, but soon he moved on, wandering in circles until the sun broke over the sign for the New Delhi Railway Station. He had more than enough money. He could get on the train and tomorrow no one would remember him or wonder where he was.

He did not need permission or an invitation to return to Gorapur, after all. Home was a birthright, like freedom. Why shouldn’t he get on a train? Was it because, after all this time, perhaps he would not remember their faces, or they, his? His mother’s, Swati’s, Jaggu’s? No, the reason he hesitated each time was not because of his mother or sister or anyone else. It was because he could not bring himself to face Avtaar Singh like this. With nothing to his name but a set of torn clothes and a body scarred and broken.

The ticket counter opened up and people jostled Madan, but the trains would all have to leave without him. When he did show up in Gorapur someday, he would not be in the same sorry shape as when he left.

He called Ketan-bhai at the factory after the morning bell sounded and told him he would meet him that evening. With a few passport photos and no proof of residence, no electricity bill or tax receipt, the tout at the food office exchanged the chunk of notes for a forged ration card.

“Do you have a preference for “father’s name”? the tout asked.

Avtaar Singh
, Madan was about to say.
Avtaar Singh is my father
. He had known no other.

“I have a list.” The tout showed Madan a typed list of names, more added by pen at the bottom. A generic list for people like him with no connections in the world and with no one to claim as their own. He gave the list back without reading it. “Prabhu Kumar,” Madan said. “My father’s name is Prabhu Kumar.” There were some things that could not be changed or taken away, regardless of how much anyone, even Avtaar Singh, desired it.

He hoped that Ketan-bhai had not reconsidered his offer or had a change of heart. To sign contracts and other official papers he needed the card for proof of identity, but more than that, he could sense its counterweight, giving him equilibrium and mooring him.

Ketan-bhai came out of the factory. He didn’t show any surprise or interest when he saw Madan waiting. They walked to his scooter and as Madan hopped onto the backseat, the men shouted, “Don’t grovel too much to get your job back!”

At the notary office, Madan drew up the papers, stating clearly that though Ketan-bhai was putting up the capital, the business would be an equal partnership. Ketan-bhai was about to sign when Madan asked, “Aren’t you going to read it?”

“No, no,” said Ketan-bhai. “You’re like my son. I trust you.”

Madan snatched the paper away. “I am not your son. You have a child already, am I right?” Ketan-bhai nodded. “Never,” said Madan firmly, “call me son.”

“Okay, okay,” said Ketan-bhai, holding up his hands as though the paper were a gun pointed at him. “I won’t call you son—happy? Now,” he said with exaggerated exasperation, “can I please sign the paper? My wife is waiting for me for dinner and, son or not, you’ll be eating with us tonight.” He motioned to Madan to place the paper back down.

Looking down on Ketan-bhai’s prematurely graying hair and his hand crawling over the dotted line, Madan had to stop himself from telling Ketan-bhai to hurry up.

T
HE GUESTS UNDER THE SWEEPING WHITE TENT WERE GETTING
restless. The wedding ceremony was over. The pandit went on long enough with his incantations and lecturing, and the bride and groom had walked around the fire and been showered by rose petals. It was nearly one in the morning and everyone was eager to get to the buffet table.

Madan was anxious to leave, but Ketan-bhai and his wife, Nalini, continued to mingle with friends and didn’t seem in any rush to go. The wedding was of the daughter of a fellow garment exporter, and Madan had driven with them in Ketan-bhai’s car, his shiny blue scooter replaced by an equally spiffy blue Toyota.

“Have some sweets,” said Nalini, noticing Madan’s impatience. “We’ll go in a bit.”

“Tomorrow is a holiday,” Ketan-bhai said to Madan. “Don’t be in such a rush. Go, enjoy. Meet some people.”

If Avtaar Singh had been sitting at this party, Madan thought, there would be a bevy of boisterous guests surrounding the table, his presence enough to draw all eyes to him. While he was tall and imposing, directing the tone and matter of the conversation, one could go by and never notice Ketan-bhai, sitting in his chair, enjoying his drink, conversing with one or two people, an eye on his wife to make sure she had all she needed, swooping in now and then to ask her opinion on the subject at hand. The two men were alike, though, in that neither ever seemed to see the need for a day of festivities to end. Why stop living when work was over?

“I’ll get some dessert,” Madan said. He slipped outside to where the food tables were set up. The dessert station, he knew, would be full of creamy pineapple pastries, layers of cherry-studded Black Forest cake and spirals of orange gooey jalebis. Always there were the jalebis bobbing merrily on the surface of the hot oil. He got himself a coffee and walked out into the hotel’s gardens. Away from the hotel building and the humming tent, there was a pleasant gust of air and calming, muted light.

The century had turned, and that in itself felt momentous. Ketan-bhai and Madan had started their leather business at an opportune time, in the boom of the nineties when the overseas demand had surged. Their first order from the American buyer gave them a taste of their partnership and its possibilities, and they hadn’t remained middlemen for long. They were exporters themselves now, with their own factories manufacturing shoes, jackets, handbags, belts and wallets. They had recently ventured into real estate and had been discussing their project in the car on their way to the wedding when Nalini said, “Can you men talk of something besides work? Madan should be thinking of settling down, starting a family. Who are you doing all this for, anyhow, Madan?”

Contemplating that question, Madan veered off the garden path and into the deep shadows of the hotel’s lawn, where hidden lights illuminated clumps of champa trees encircled in stone. He loosened his tie, undoing the top button of his shirt. Immediately he felt more relaxed. Slipping off his shoe, he placed his foot on the lawn. Through his sock, the grass was cold and wet with dew. Like the grasses of Gorapur. It was as if a century had passed since he had left. Seeing the bride, her head bent with the weight of the flower garlands, her small smile peeking out from under her lashes, her brother by her side, a hand on her elbow guiding her, he thought of his mother. This wedding was what his mother had wanted for Swati. He could give her that now. He could give his mother the home she dreamed of and the wedding she wanted for her daughter, but the longer he was here and the harder he worked, the further away they both seemed. He wanted to pick up the phone or send a letter. He thought about sending them money. But he never did.

“Hey! Hello!” A girlish voice intruded on his silence. Madan slipped his foot back in his shoe.

“Do you have a flashlight?”

The girl had come from the wedding with her heavily embroidered pink lehenga and the glittering necklace around her delicate throat.

“No,” he said.

“I lost my earring by the bench,” she said. “My mother’s going to kill me.”

“I have this.” He took out his cell phone from his pocket. It was a new model and the reception was erratic but he had felt the need to splurge on it.

“Wow,” she grabbed the phone from his hand. “Is it a Nokia?”

The small screen glowed as she pressed the buttons. Without asking Madan, she headed back to the bench stationed at an angle under an arbor of jasmine. Madan followed her. He didn’t want to let the phone out of his sight and she seemed to have a penchant for losing valuable things.

“My ear was hurting, so I took the earring off for a minute, but it slipped out of my hand when I was putting it back on.”

She crouched down, the skirt of her lehenga billowing around her, and scanned the ground with the light from his phone. “My mother took it out from her bank locker just today, and made me promise to take care of it.”

Madan got down too and felt around with his hand. Abruptly she got up and sat on the bench, leaving him to hunt alone. “What will I say to her? I tell my kids to be careful with their belongings, and here I can’t take care of a small earring.”

She seemed too young to have children but here in the fuzzy light it was hard to see clearly.

“Wear artificial, my mother told me. These days everybody wears artificial and keeps the real jewelry in the locker. But of course I didn’t listen.”

Madan felt she really should be looking instead of talking. He was about to interrupt her when he brushed against a nubby, hard shape in the dust.

“I got it,” he said.

“Thank god! You saved my life.” She leapt off the bench and exchanged Madan’s phone for the earring. A life delivered from harm, just like that, Madan thought. By the finding of a trinket. No fury or rage, no treachery or carnage needed.

“Preeti, I got a flashlight.” A young woman carrying a hefty black flashlight joined them, and a pack of finely dressed men and women trailing behind her descended upon them, swirling around Preeti like rings of gold.

“No need,” Preeti said. She flashed her bejeweled ear. “Found it.” There were exclamations of relief. “Guys, this is Madan,” she said to her friends. They said hello, and then Preeti and her group turned and went back to the party.

“Wait,” Madan said. “How do you know my name?” But she was gone.