Diamond Dust (20 page)

'Not if you have a storage tank. Everyone has a storage tank—or several. The Bhallas will have one downstairs, but you need a booster pump and your own tank up here so water can be pumped up from the one below.'

'Oh.'

He looked at her with the kind of exasperation her own brothers turned on her when she failed to understand what they were doing under the bonnet of the car or with electric gadgets at home. She came from a family so competent that she had never needed to be competent herself.

'Did you ask the Bhallas about it?'

'About what?'

'The storage tank. The booster pump.'

'No,' she admitted.

He strode off towards the staircase with every show of determination to enquire immediately. She ran after him, crying, 'Oh, Ritwick, I'll ask them—I'll ask them—later, when I go down.'

Tara came out of the barsati. 'D'you have curtains?'

'What for?'

'Because if you wipe the windowpanes clean, your neighbours can look right in.'

'No, they can't! There's the tree—don't you see my beautiful tree? It's like a screen.'

'Come in and see.'

Tara had wiped the windowpanes clean, and a young man with a face like a pat of butter and with a small moustache twitching over his pursed lips was standing on his rooftop and gazing at them with unconcealed curiosity and, it could easily be made out since the distance was small, some admiration.

'Oh, Tara, why did you go and clean that?' Moyna cried. 'No, I don't have a curtain. Where would I get a curtain from?'

'Get me a bedsheet then,' Tara commanded, 'and help me put it up at once.'

'But the tree -' Moyna tried again, and went out to see why it had not lowered a branch where it was needed. The tree shaded the entire barsati (and Ritwick admitted it would keep off the sun which would otherwise make a tandoori oven of it) but it was tall and provided no screen against the other rooftops and the rooftop dwellers who suddenly all seemed to be standing outside their barsati doors, surveying this newcomer to their level of elevation. Moyna suddenly realised she had joined a community.

'When I came yesterday, I saw no one,' she mumbled, abashed.

'Well, you can introduce yourself to all of them now,' Ritwick said, 'and just hope none of them are thieves or murderers because if they are—' he looked grim and gestured—'all they need is one jump from their ledge to yours.'

'Don't, Ritwick,' Tara said sharply. 'Why are you trying to frighten poor Moyna?'

'All I'm saying is Moyna'd better stay indoors and keep her door locked.'

'But I was going to drag my bed out and sleep under the stars!'

'Are you
crazy?'
both Tara and Ritwick said together, and Tara added, 'D'you want your picture in the evening news, with a headline: "Single Woman robbed and murdered in barsati"?' They looked at her sternly to see if their words had had the requisite effect, and Tara added, 'Now let's go to the market and get you: all the things you need. Like one great big lock and key.'

When they returned from the market with cleaning fluids, brooms, scrubbing materials, provisions for 'the kitchen'—and the lock and key—Ritwick confronted the landlady who had in the meantime shampooed her hair and now sat on the veranda, to dry it in the sun.

'Excuse me,' he said, not very politely. 'Can you please show Moyna where the switch is for the booster pump?'

'What switch? What booster pump?' She parted her hair and peered out from under it with some hostility.

'Is there no booster pump to send water up to the barsati?'

'Water up to the barsati?' she repeated, as if he were mad. 'Why? Why? What is wrong?'

'There's, no water in the tap. She'll need water, won't she?'

'She will get water,' declared Mrs Bhalla, drawing herself up and tossing her head so that thé grey strands flew, 'when municipality is sending water. Municipality water is coming at five o'clock every morning and five o'clock every evening. The barsati will be getting water whenever municipality sends.'

'At five in the morning and five in the evening?' shouted Ritwick. 'You need a storage tank so water will collect.'

'Collect? Why she cannot collect in a bucket?' Mrs Bhalla shouted back. 'She has no bucket?' she added insultingly.

Tara and Moyna were standing with their purchases in their arms, ready to bolt upstairs, but Ritwick yelled, 'Yes, she
has
bucket, but how can she collect at five in the morning and five in the evening?'

'What is wrong?' Mrs Bhalla screamed back. 'We are all collecting—why she cannot collect also?'

'Because she will be sleeping at five in the morning and at work at five in the evening!'

Mrs Bhalla turned away from him and looked at her tenant with an expression that made clear what she thought of any young woman who would be asleep at five in the morning and 'at work' at five in the evening. She clearly had an equally low opinion of sleep and work, at least where her young tenant was concerned. Ritwick was shouting, 'Storage tank—booster pump -' when Moyna fled upstairs, dropping matchboxes and kitchen dusters along the way. When Tara followed her up, she found her sitting on her bed in tears, howling, 'And I've signed the lease for one year and paid for three months in advance!'

Moyna's way of life changed completely. It had to be adjusted to that of the Bhallas. She left her tap turned on when she went to bed—which she did earlier and earlier—so she could be woken by the sound of water gushing into the plastic bucket at five in the morning and get up to fill every pot, pan and kettle she had acquired before turning it off. All around her she could hear her fellow rooftop dwellers performing the same exercise—as well as bathing and washing clothes in the starlight before the water ran out. She went back to bed and lay there, panting, trying to get back to sleep, but by six o'clock all the birds that roosted in the pipal tree were awake and screaming and running on their little clawed feet across the corrugated iron roof, then lining up along the ledge of the rooftop to flutter their wings, crow, squawk and chirp their ode to dawn. It was just as well that they made it impossible for her to fall asleep again because at six she had to go downstairs and walk to the market where Mother Dairy would have opened its booth and all the colony residents would be lining up with their milk cans to have them filled. She stood there with all the servant boys and maidservants, sleepy-eyed, for the the sake of having her milk pail filled for Mao, and then carried it back carefully through the dust, in her slippers, trying not to spill any.

No Ladies' Special serviced this colony, and Tara had warned her against attempting to travel to work on an ordinary DTS bus. 'You don't know what men in Delhi do to women,' she said darkly. 'This isn't Bombay or Calcutta, you know.'

Moyna had heard this warning in the women's hostel but asked, 'What d'you mean?'

'In Calcutta all men call women Mother or Sister and never touch them. In Bombay, if any man did, the woman would give him a tight slap and drag him by his hair to the police station. But in Delhi—these Jats...', she shuddered, adding, 'Don't you even
try.'

So Moyna walked back to the marketplace after breakfast, to the autorickshaw stand in front of Mother Dairy, and spent a sizeable part of her income on taking one to work. She clearly made a woebegone figure while waiting, and a kindly Sikh who rode his autorickshaw as if it were a sturdy ox, his slippered feet planted on either side of the gearbox, the end of his turban flying, and a garland of tinsel twinkling over the dashboard where he had pasted a photograph of his two children and an oleograph of Guru Gobind Singh, took pity on her. 'Beti, every day you go to work at the same time, to the same place. I will take you, for a monthly rate. It will be cheaper for you.' So Gurmail Singh became her private chauffeur, so to speak, and Moyna rode to work bouncing on the narrow backseat, her sari held over her nose to keep out the dust and oil and Diesel fumes from all the office-bound traffic through which he expertly threaded his way. Quite often he was waiting for her outside the office at six o'clock to take her home. 'I live in that colony myself, so it is no trouble to me,' he told her. 'If I have no other customer, I can take you, why not?' In a short while she got to know his entire family—his mother who cooked the best dhal in the land, and the finest corn bread and mustard greens, his daughter who was the smartest student in her class—class two, he told Moyna—and his son who had only just started going to school but was unfortunately not showing the same keen interest in his studies as his sister. 'I tell him, "Do you want to go back to the village and herd buffaloes?" But he doesn't care, his heart is only in play. When it is school-time, he cries. And his mother cries with him.'

'Gurmail Singh thinks it is the school that is bad. Bluebells, it's called,' Moyna reported at the office. 'He wants to get him into a good convent school, like St Mary's, but you need pull for that.' She sighed, lacking any.

'Moyna, can't you talk about anything but the Bhallas and Gurmail Singh and his family?' Tara asked one day, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray on her desk.

Moyna was startled: she had not realised she was growing so obsessive about these people, so prominent in her life, so uninteresting to her colleagues. But didn't Tara talk about Ritwick's position in the university, and about her own son and his trials at school, or the hardships of having to live with her widowed mother-in-law for lack of their own house? 'What d'you want to talk about then?' she asked, a little hurt.

'Look, we have to bring out the magazine, don't we?' Tara said, smoking furiously. 'And it isn't getting easier, it just gets harder all the time to get people to read a journal about
books.
Bose Sahib hardly comes to see what is going on here -' she complained.

'What is going on?' asked Raj Kumar, the peon, bringing them two mugs of coffee from the shop downstairs. 'I am here, running everything for you. Why do you need Bose Sahib?'

'Oh, Raj Kumar,' Tara sighed, putting out her cigarette and accepting the rich, frothing coffee from him. 'What will you do to make
Books
sell?'

Tara was the first person Ajoy Bose had employed when he started his literary review,
Books
, after coming to Delhi as a member of parliament from Calcutta. He had missed the literary life of that city so acutely, and had been so appalled by the absence of any equivalent in New Delhi, that he had decided to publish a small journal of book reviews to inform readers on what was being published, what might be read, a service no other magazine seemed to provide, obsessed as they all were with politics or the cinema, the only two subjects that appeared to bring people in the capital to life. Having first met Ritwick at the Jawaharlal Nehru University during a conference on Karl Marx and Twentieth Century Bengali Literature, and through him Tara, he had engaged her as the Managing Editor. The office was installed in two rooms above a coffee and sweet shop in Bengali Market. It was Tara's first paid job—she had been working in non-government organisations simply to escape from home and her mother-in-law—and she was extremely proud of these two modest rooms that she had furnished with cane mats and bamboo screens. Bose Sahib had magnanimously installed a desert cooler and a water cooler to keep life bearable in the summer heat. Together they had interviewed Raj Kumar, and found him literate enough to run their errands at the post office and bank. Then Tara had interviewed all the candidates who had applied for the post of assistant, and chosen Moyna. Moyna had no work experience at all, having only just taken her degree, in English literature, at a provincial university. She managed somehow to convey her need to escape from family and home, and Tara felt both maternal and proprietorial towards her, while Moyna immensely admired her style, the way she smoked cigarettes and drank her coffee black and spoke to both Raj Kumar and Bose Sahib as equals, and she hoped ardently to emulate her, one day.

Of course the only reason she had been allowed by her family to come to Delhi and take the job was that it was of a literary nature, and her father had known Bose Sahib at the university. They approved of all she told them in her weekly letters and, Moyna often thought while opening parcels of books that had arrived from the publishers or upon receiving stacks of printed copies of their journal fresh from the press, how proud they would be if they could see her, their youngest, and how incredulous...

Now here was Tara claiming that sales were so poor as to be shameful, and that if no one came to its rescue, the journal would fold. 'Just look at our list of subscribers,' Tara said disgustedly, tossing it over the desk to Moyna. 'It's the same list Bose Sahib drew up when we began—we haven't added one new subscriber in the last year!'

'Oh, Tara, my father is now a subscriber,' Moyna reminded her nervously, but Tara glared at her so she felt compelled to study the list seriously. It was actually quite interesting: apart from the names of a few of Bose Sahib's fellow members of parliament, and a scattering of college libraries, the rest of the list was made up of a circle so far-flung as to read like a list of the rural districts of India. She could not restrain a certain admiration. 'Srimati Shakuntala Pradhan in PO Barmana, Dist. Bilaspur, HP, and Sri Rajat Khanna in Dist. Birbhum, 24 Parganas, W. Bengal ... Tara, just think of all the places the journal
does
get to! We ought to have a map on the wall—' Raj Kumar, who was listening while washing out the coffee mugs in the corner with the water cooler which stood in a perennial puddle, called out heartily, 'Yes, and I am posting it from Gole Market Post Office to the whole of Bharat! Without me, no one is getting
Books!
"

Moyna turned to throw him a look of mutual congratulation but Tara said, 'Shut up, Raj Kumar. If we can't find new names for our list, we'll lose the special rate the post office gives journals.'

'Send to bogus names, then, and bogus addresses!' Raj Kumar returned smartly.

Now Tara turned to stare at him. 'How do you know so much about such bogus tricks?'