Diamond Dust (19 page)

She was finally admitted by a very small servant boy in striped cotton pyjamas and a torn grey vest, and taken to meet the family. They were seated on a large bed in the centre of a room with walls painted an electric blue, all watching a show on a gigantic television set. It was an extremely loud, extremely dramatic scene showing a confrontation between a ranting hero, a weeping heroine and a benignly smiling saint, and the whole family was watching open-mouthed, reluctant to turn their attention away from it. But when their dog darted out from under the bed at her, she screamed and the servant boy flapped his duster and cried, 'No, Candy! Get down, Candy!' they had no alternative but to turn to her, resentfully.

'You have come just at
Mahabharata
time,' the woman crosslegged on the bed reproached her.

'Sit down, sit down, beti. You can watch it with us,' the man said more agreeably, waving at an open corner on the bed, and since they had all transferred their attention back to the screen, she was forced to perch on it, fearfully holding her ankles up in the air so as not to be nipped by Candy, who had been driven back under the bed and hid there, growling. The two children stared at her for a bit, impassively, then went back to picking their noses and following the episode of the
Mahabharata
that the whole city of Delhi watched, along with the rest of the country, on Sunday evenings—everyone, except for her.

There had been too much happening in her life to leave room for watching television and keeping up with the soap operas and mythological sagas. In any case, there was no television set in the women's hostel where she had a room. There was nothing in it except what was absolutely essential: the dining room on the ground floor with its long tables, its benches, its metal plates and utensils, and the kitchen with its hatch through which the food appeared in metal pots; and upstairs the rows of rooms, eight feet by ten, each equipped with a wooden bedframe, and a shelf nailed to the wall. She had had to purchase a plastic bucket to take to the bathroom at the end of the corridor so she could bathe under the standing tap—not high enough to work as a shower—and had arranged her toilet articles on the shelf and left her clothes in her tin trunk which she covered with a pink tablecloth and sat on when she did not want to sit on her bed, or when one of the other women in the hostel came to visit her and climbed onto her bed to have a chat.

The minimalism of these living arrangements was both a novelty and a shock to her. She came from a home where the accommodation of objects, their comfortable clutter and convenience, could be taken for granted. Nothing had been expensive or elaborate but there had been plenty of whatever there was, accumulated over many years: rugs, chairs, cushions, clothes, dishes, in rooms, verandas, odd corners and spaces. So for the first two weeks she felt she was trapped in a cell; whenever she shut the door, she was swallowed by the cell, its prisoner. If she left the door ajar, every girl going past would look in, scream, 'Oh, Moy-na!' and come in to talk, tell her of the latest atrocity committed by the matron or of the unbelievably rotten food being served downstairs, and also of their jobs, their bosses, their colleagues, and homes and families. Some were divorcees, some widows, and some supported large families, all of which led to an endless fund of stories to be told. In order to get any sleep, she would have to shut the door and pretend not to be in. Then she began to wonder if she was in herself.

But such was her determination to make her new life as a working woman in the metropolis succeed, and such was her unexpected, unforeseen capacity for adjustment, that after a month or so the minimalism became no longer privation and a challenge but simply a way of life. She even found herself stopping at her neighbours' open doors on her way back from the office, to say, 'D'you know what they're cooking for our dinner downstairs?' and laughing when the others groaned, invariably, 'Pumpkin!' because that was all there ever was, or else to give the warning, 'Matron's
mad!
I heard her screaming at Leila—she found out about her iron. Hide yours, quick!' It became a habit, instead of a subject of complaint, to carry her bucket down to the bathroom when she wanted to bathe, and bring it back to her room so it wouldn't be stolen: thefts were common, unfortunately. Even the tap, and water, began to seem like luxuries, bonuses not to be taken for granted in that hostel.

After a breakfast of tea, bread and fried eggs, she went out to stand at the bus stop with the other women, all of whom caught the Ladies' Special that came around at nine o'clock and carried them to their work places as telephone operators, typists, desk receptionists, nurses, teachers, airline hostesses and bank tellers, without the menace of crazed young men groping at them or pressing into them as if magnetised, or even delivering vicious pinches before leaping off the bus and running for their lives. Some women had had to develop defensive strategies. Lily, known to be 'bold', instructed others to carry a sharp pin concealed in their fists and use that to prod anyone who came too close. 'I've made big men cry,' she boasted proudly, but most women in the hostel preferred to pay the extra rupee or two to travel on the Ladies' Special instead of the regular DTS. Like tap water, it was a luxury, a bonus, which had their gratitude.

Moyna's descriptions of these strategies of living earned her the admiration of her family and friends back at home to whom she described them, but trouble began for her just as she was settling into this new, challenging way of life. She came across the hostel cook kicking viciously at the skeletal yellow kitten that had crept in from outside in the hope of one of life's unexpected bonuses—a drop of milk left in someone's tumbler, or a scrap from the garbage bin. Instinctively she lowered her hand and called it to her—she came from a home that was shelter to an assortment of cats, dogs, birds, some maimed, some pregnant, some dying. She shared her bread and fried egg with the kitten, and soon it started weaving in and out of her sari folds, then followed her up the stairs and darted into her room. This was novelty indeed: having someone to share the cell with her. It was curious how instantly the room ceased to be a prison. The kitten settled onto the pink tablecloth on the trunk and began to lick itself clean, delicately raising one leg at a time into the air and making a thorough toilet, as if it were preparing to be fit for such luxurious accommodation. Later, that night, she woke to find it had sprung from the trunk to her bed. Knowing it probably had fleas, she tried to kick it off, but it clung on and started to purr, as if to persuade her of its accomplishments. Purring, it lay against her leg and lulled her back to sleep.

One day the matron was inspecting during the day, when they were all away, for such forbidden items as irons and hot plates, and came out holding the kitten by the scruff of his neck. Moyna pleaded innocence and swore she did not know how he had got into her room. But when she was caught red-handed, emptying the milk jug into a saucer for Mao under the table, the matron slapped her with the eviction notice. Had Moyna not read the rule: No Pets Allowed?

Instinctively, she knew not to mention Mao to this family. Somehow that would have to be sorted out, if she took the room they had to offer. But, glancing round at their faces in the flickering light from the television set, she began to feel uncertain if she would take it. At her office, Tara, who was experienced in these matters, had told her, 'You don't have to take the first room you see, Moyna. You can look around and
choose
.' But Moyna had already 'looked around' and while, by comparison with the cell in the women's hostel, all the rooms had seemed princely, shamingly it was she who had been turned down by one prospective landlord or landlady after the other. She had been scrutinised with such suspicion, questioned with such hostility, that she realised that no matter what they stated in their advertisements, they had nothing but fear and loathing for the single working woman, and the greatest dread of allowing one into their safe, decent homes. Moyna wondered how she could convey such an impression of sin and wantonness. She dressed in a clean, starched cotton sari every day, and even though her hair was cut short, it was simply pinned back behind her ears, not curled, or dyed. And surely her job in the office of a literary journal was innocent enough? But they narrowed their eyes, saw her as too young, too pretty, too unattached, too much an
instrument
of danger, and dismissed her as a candidate for their barsatis. These rooms had once been built on Delhi's flat rooftops so that families who slept out on their roofs on summer nights could draw in their beds in case of a sudden dust storm or thunder shower. But now that Delhi was far too unsafe for sleeping alfresco, these barsatis were being rented out to working spinsters or bachelors at a delightful profit.

Suddenly convinced that she would not, after all, want to occupy this unwelcoming family's barsati, Moyna lowered her feet to the floor gingerly and tried to rise and murmur an excuse. 'I have to be at the hostel before nine,' she said when the episode of the
Mahabharata
ended with a great display of fiery arrows being shot into the sky and a whirling disc beheading the villain. The landlord gestured to the children to turn off the set and, turning to Moyna, he shouted to the servant boy. to bring her a drink. 'What will you have, beti? Chai, lassi, lemonade?'

'No, thank you, no, thank you,' she murmured, seeing the landlady's steely eyes on her, willing her to refuse, but the servant boy came out with a thick glass of tepid water for her anyway. While she sipped it, the inquisition began, interrupted frequently by the children who alternately demanded their dinner or another show on television and by the dog who emerged from under the bed and sniffed at her suspiciously. Moyna kept her eyes lowered to watch for Candy and perhaps they saw that as becoming modesty or demureness because, to her surprise, the landlady said, 'You want to see the room? Ramu, Ramu—eh, Ramu! Get the key to the barsati and open it up.'

And there, on the flat rooftop of the plain yellow stucco villa in a colony Moyna had never heard of before on the outskirts of New Delhi, there to her astonishment was a palace, a veritable palace amongst barsatis. The rooftop, which covered the entire area of the villa, seemed to her immense, larger than any space she had occupied since her arrival in Delhi, and it was clear, empty space under an empty sky, with a view of all the other rooftops stretching out on every side, giving Moyna, as she stood there, a sense of being the empress of all she surveyed. Of course it would bake under her feet in the heat of summer but—and this was the crowning glory—a pipal tree that grew in the small walled courtyard at the back of the house rose up over the barsati itself, sheltering it from the sun with a canopy of silvery, rustling leaves, spreading out its, branches and murmuring, Moyna felt certain, a gracious welcome.

After that auspicious view, what could it matter if the barsati itself was merely a square walled cube, that it had not been cleaned in so long that its single window had turned opaque with dust, and spider-webs hung in swags from every corner, that the bed was nothing but a string cot, the cheapest kind of charpai? What did it matter that the single cupboard against the wall had doors that did not seem to meet but sagged on their hinges and could never be locked, that the 'kitchen' was only a blackened kerosene stove atop a wooden table that also served as desk and dining table, that the 'bathroom' was a closet-sized attached enclosure, open to the sky, with a very stained and yellowed squatter-type toilet and a single stand-pipe? Already Moyna's mind was racing with visions of what she could transform the place into. Why, its very bareness gave her the freedom to indulge her wildest dreams and fancies.

Then her look fell upon the servant boy who stood waiting by the door that opened onto the staircase, twirling the key round his finger and smirking, and she became aware that she herself had a smile across her face and that her hands were clasped to her throat in a most foolish fashion. Immediately she dropped them, adjusted her expression to one of severity, and followed him down the stairs.

The landlord and landlady, now risen from the bed and waiting for her on the veranda, looking as alike as twins with their corpulence, their drooping chins and expressions of benign self-satisfaction, appeared confident of her answer: it was only what could be expected after seeing what they were offering. She would of course sign a year's lease which could be terminated whenever they chose, pay three months' deposit, plus the first month's rent right now, immediately, 'and we will welcome you to our house as our own beti,' they assured her magnanimously. 'From now on, you need worry about nothing. Your parents need have no worries about you. We will be your parents.'

Tara came over from the office with her husband Ritwick to help her to move in. Moyna had only one tin trunk, a bedding roll and now her kitten in a basket, but they insisted she would not be able to move on her own, and Ritwick growled that he wanted to meet the Bhallas 'to make sure'. The Bhallas were seated on a wicker sofa in the veranda when they arrived, and watched them carry every item up the stairs with openly inquisitve stares. It seemed to Moyna that it was not Ritwick who was sizing them up so much as that they were sizing
him
up. Certainly they questioned him closely, when Moyna introduced him to them, regarding his parentage, ancestral home, present occupation and relation to Tara and Moyna before allowing him to set one foot on the stairs. But once they arrived on the rooftop, Ritwick looked into every crack and crevice with a suspicion to equal theirs. Then he asked, 'Where's the water tank?'

'What water tank?'

'Your
water tank. Where is your water supply coming from?'

'I don't know. Where
does
it come from? The pipes, I suppose.'

He strode to the bathroom and turned on the tap. It spun around weakly, gurgled in a complaining tone, and sputtered into silence. There was no water. Moyna stood in the doorway, stricken. 'Water shortage,' she explained. 'You know Delhi has a water shortage, Ritwick.'