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  Mollified by this admission of guilt which she was now in the habit of demanding, Ishita said she had every intention of looking for a job as soon as she was able.

  ‘Nothing is going to fall in your lap,’ said her father, ‘you have to go out and try.’

  Hopelessness filled Ishita. Her father was right, nothing was going to fall into her lap. But that meant she had to resume life from where she had left off five years ago. Although she had been reluctant to marry, her passion for her husband was such that now the acme of her desire was to be in SK’s bed, his arms, his heart. Alone in the house, how many times had she picked up the phone to dial his number? Just to hear his dear voice one more time? And then put the phone down sadly – she was divorced, he didn’t want her, he had made that so clear. She still had her pride. The only way to be close to him was to shut her eyes and fantasise herself back to the love they had once shared.

  ‘Beti? It’s just a few hours’ work. Let’s start with something small.’

  ‘What, Papa?’

  ‘Would you like to participate in the building drive to collect clothes and household items for the earthquake victims in the north-east? The trucks are already booked. Think of others more unfortunate.’

  But no, she couldn’t bear going door to door, speaking into people’s inquisitive faces. She just couldn’t.

  The trouble was that people did talk, confirmed Mrs Rajora as she told her husband about Leela Kaushik’s questions, again suppressing her own envy of her friend, another grandchild on the way and a son who was rising like a star in the corporate world.

  Eventually, inspired by some of the women in the building, Mrs Rajora came up with suggestions about starting a home business with baked goods, or designing clothes with a tailor installed in the veranda. The world was open to an enterprising woman. All this Ishita rejected, repeating her offers of leaving if her parents found her a burden.

  It was best to leave their daughter alone, concluded the parents. She took too much tension. They themselves would have to tell their acquaintances of Ishu’s return; better they shoulder the questions, otherwise their fragile girl might well spend the rest of her life glued to the mattress.

  When Ishita did eventually venture forth looking for a job, it turned out to be an unpleasant enterprise. Her standing was not high in the teacher pool. She had a degree but no experience. Every place she went to asked her to check later, or worse still to look in the newspapers, they would advertise should there be a vacancy. No assurances anywhere.

  She tried the many schools in Central Delhi: OSC, St Columba’s, Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, Vivekananda Vidyaylaya, the Tamil School, the Kerala School, Modern School, Junior Modern School, Mater Dei Convent, the school of Sikh Martyrs.

  Further and further away from Patparganj she tried, twenty, twenty-five kilometres. Nothing, nothing. Hadn’t she already known that in the cards dealt out by life she would not get the winning deal?

  Dusshera.

  The halwais had put up tables in the quadrangle near the society office in Block A. Feeling self-conscious among such gathered acquaintances, Ishita took a tiny morsel of mutter paneer onto her tinfoil plate, along with a puri, careful to avoid eye contact with anyone.

  ‘Beti, is that all you are going to eat?’

  Mrs Hingorani. Ishita looked at the grey frizzy hair of the woman, the lined good-natured face, and wondered what she wanted. Everybody over a certain age was a cornucopia of prying questions.

  ‘Not keeping so well, Auntie,’ she mumbled. If she wished to eschew neighbourly interaction, she should have remained upstairs, but that would have meant dealing with her mother’s disappointment, so here she was down among the wolves.

  She started to edge away, when Auntie asked was Ishita free these days? If so, would she like to do a little voluntary work? She ran a school for slum children.

  The sight of all children was detestable, but those from the slums were a different breed, not the adorable creatures that fate had robbed her of, but urchins who were visible everywhere with their running noses and sharp ways.

  ‘Why don’t you drop by tomorrow and see?’ Mrs Hingorani suggested into the heavy silence.

  Even for a person committed to lifelong inertia this did not seem too great a concession. She agreed to be by the gate next morning at nine.

  Her parents were surprised to see Ishita get up early. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘With Mrs Hingorani.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Some volunteer stuff.’

  ‘Be careful. She has a big heart, but she tries to get people to work for free.’

  Ishita, further depressed, opened the door and left. Why were her parents always investing the smallest action with so much significance? It weighed her down, she with her broken wings, who longed to fly.

  The rickshaw reached the main road, where the noise was deafening. Horns blared and the fumes of cars, buses and two-wheelers hung thickly over one and all, ensuring that if they spoke they coughed, if they breathed they shortened their life span.

  Through the ride Ishita kept up polite conversation.

  ‘How did you start a school, Auntie?’

  It began five years ago, with a young boy playing marbles next to his father, the chowkidar who manned the gate. Why wasn’t he in school? demanded Mrs Hingorani, her eyes on the child as he mapped out his future on the dusty pavement, each idle marble ensuring that he never rose from it.

  He keeps running away.

  Come to my house, said Mrs Hingorani to the truant. Soon he was joined by his sister, then his neighbours, then the neighbours’ neighbours as word spread. They came to learn English, to see a flush toilet, to sit on the carpet, to watch TV, to swell the rooms with young impoverished lives, till there were fifty, before school, after school, running in shifts, and the apartment could take no more.

  She moved to a two-room set-up in Mandavili. Mandavili, one street down, left from the lights, the poor and crowded colony teeming with domestic labourers, dhobis, sweepers, electricians, carpenters, drivers, plumbers, electricians, watchmen, rickshaw wallahs, small shopkeepers, roadside vendors of fruit and vegetables, pavement sellers of goods, all the people who provided services to the thousands of co-operative housing dwellers of PPG. The women here earned a living by cooking and cleaning, while their daughters stayed at home also cooking and minding toddler siblings.

  They stopped outside a tall, narrow building before a flight of steps leading inside. Parked next to it was a van.

  ‘Have you picked up the food?’ Mrs Hingorani asked the driver.

  It turned out she fed them as well. They came hungry, listless, unable to concentrate. A few questions, what had they eaten?, nothing, and she had taken to buttering a hundred slices of bread every day.

  The van, donated by a bereaved father, picked up party leftovers twice a week from five-star hotels, allowing the youngsters a taste of cakes, rolls and pizza slices.

  ‘Good morning, Auntie,’ chorused rows of children all different sizes, neatly dressed, hair slick with oil, faces shining. Mrs Hingorani made sure her students didn’t look the poor, underprivileged creatures they actually were. Appearances were important, a sense of worth even more so.

  ‘Where are your shoes? Tomorrow, wear your shoes and come. What do you mean they are lost? Find them.’

  ‘Why is your skirt torn? Tell Mummy to stitch the hem.’

  ‘Where are your socks? You can’t come to school without socks.’

  ‘How many don’t have shoes? The shoe seller is coming tomorrow. He will take your sizes.’

  ‘Of course you can have a uniform. Come every day and you will get one.’

  ‘Where have you been the last two months?’

  ‘This is a toilet, this is the flush. No, you can’t do anything on the floor. No, you have to use the bathroom one by one. You do your business in the pot, one at a time.’

  ‘You have to was
h your hands here, here in this basin. And put the soap back in the dish, don’t throw it in the sink.’

  It was a new world for Ishita, and one right at her doorstep. Mandavili was walking distance, but in social terms it lay light years away. Every day she now woke with a purpose. For of course she volunteered; face to face with eager children, so obviously in need, it only took a day to come to that decision. Here, who cared if she had a broken marriage, who cared if her tubes were fused together by a long-ago disease?

  What had her mother once said when trying to rouse her from her apathy? A drop of ink gets lost in a bucket of water, and here in the bucket of Mandavili her grief receded. At first she had been afraid that these children might bring painfully to mind the one she had failed to conceive, but the social gulf was too vast for that to happen.

  So it was with equanimity that she met the mothers at the PTA meetings which Mrs Hingorani organised, believing it gave them recognition and encouraged self-respect.

  These women, battling a thousand needs, empty stomachs, drunken husbands, semi-literate children, with no chance of escape from their poverty, looked at the world with hopeful, though somewhat weary eyes. If they had the wherewithal, a quiet tubectomy put an end to the baby stream – otherwise they were doomed to procreate, with little say over their bodies, their lives, or their money.

  Yes, indeed, Mandavili was the sea in which Ishita’s own sorrows could drown.

  Confidence.

  Ishita along with Mrs Hingorani marching to Parliament House to protest the nuclear device tested in the Pokhran desert. Drawing parallels between herself and the women involved in the freedom struggle: they too had courted arrest. Contradicting her father, no, it was not necessary for India to assert herself as a world power, not when she couldn’t feed her children, making the man think his daughter had grown more in the NGO than in her years of marriage.

  Raising funds along with Mrs Hingorani, asking for donations, explaining their purpose. Every month 2,000 had to be found for rent, 400 for the helper, 1,000 for the food. Money for shoes, uniforms, books and copies, money for another teacher, where are the volunteers in our country? If only there were more like Ishita, mourned Mrs Hingorani.

  To feel valued for the first time by the outside world.

  In July she was offered 2,000 monthly salary by Mrs Hingorani, her usefulness recognised, her position in the school entrenched.

  Perhaps it was something Ishita said, but one day Mrs Hingorani dropped in on her parents, to tell them how grateful she was to them for sparing their daughter, truly she wouldn’t know what to do without her. The children too had grown so attached – she was now as popular as Helmut, the German boy who had chosen to work for them. Indeed, she laughed, the mark of their fondness was the lice that Ishita had already had to deal with twice. Helmut had shaved his head, but Ishita couldn’t do that.

  In a flat as small as theirs, how can the daughter get lice and the mother not know? Ishita quickly changed the topic, and Mrs Hingorani, sensitive to glacial currents, allowed herself to be directed into whichever channel she was propelled to.

  As soon as the visitor went Ishita said, ‘I didn’t tell because I knew you would worry.’

  ‘A mother is never free from worry. First they give you lice, next it will be pneumonia, or typhoid, or … or … drug-resistant TB.’

  ‘I won’t fall sick. Mrs Hingorani hasn’t.’

  ‘Did she get lice?’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  Mrs Rajora looked distinctly cheerful at the thought of the spry Mrs Hingorani’s short grey hair dotted with eggs, crawling with lice.

  ‘I know you don’t like me working there, you want me to be in better company, and this would only have proved you right,’ said Ishita, patting the soft skin of her mother’s ageing face.

  ‘Beta, what do I matter? God will reward you, as he did Mother Teresa. So many people in her debt – such a grand funeral. You are following in her footsteps.’

  Ishita giggled. ‘I don’t have it in me to be Mother Teresa. And I am sure lice would have attacked her if she didn’t have that thing on her head.’

  ‘How do you know all the eggs are dead?’

  ‘I put the medicine on twice, Mummy.’

  ‘Ishu,’ said Mrs Rajora, struggling with herself. ‘You keep saying you need volunteers, you never thought of asking your mother? You know next month I retire.’

  The transition from university librarian to volunteer social worker was not smooth. Deep down Mrs Rajora never saw the point of it. See, they lose their shoes, see, you have to go after them to make them come – see, many mothers don’t even attend meetings – see, that boy is teaching all those little children filthy language, I heard him, what is a nine-year-old doing in KG? – see, they come back from the village and you have to start from scratch – when they are older how much are they going to remember? – what is the point in teaching slum children English, or making them use computers? – they will only go back to the streets and forget everything – see, see, see . . .

  A few weeks and Mrs Hingorani was forced to have a talk with Ishita. ‘It’s not her fault, this is the way society thinks. At least she is doing her best to help, which is more than can be said of many.’

  But her best wasn’t even scratching the surface, Ishita thought – and you are too nice to say so. Her heart swelled then subsided as two opposing claims pinched it in swift pincerlike movements.

  That evening Ishita with her mother: ‘It is attitudes like these we have to fight. You can’t say it’s no use, a journey to the moon starts with a single step.’

  Mrs Rajora looked defeated. What had the moon got to do with anything? She was willing to teach slum children, willing to expose herself to lice, and still her daughter found fault with her, imagining she was not for social justice, which was a lie.

  In the end Mrs Rajora was put in charge of the kitchen, or rather the little kerosene stove, on which they managed things like scrambled eggs with chopped onions and green chillies, or khichdi with curd from the market. Once she was in front of a fire, Mrs Rajora’s instincts to feed knew no social checks.

  And Ishita, seeing her mother squatting on the floor, working the single-burner stove, organising leftovers from her own kitchen, buying biscuits and an occasional tin of powdered milk, witnessing all this, she herself jumped over the gap between them.

  Every Sunday both parents sat with the papers, pencil in hand, circling the marriage advertisements where a divorcee was acceptable. This narrowed their choices, but surely somewhere there was a man suitable for a girl like Ishita Rajora. A girl with all the home-making qualities, with so much love to give.

  Ishita watched their efforts from a safe emotional distance. There was no point trying for happiness, but it was important for her parents to imagine they were doing something about her future.

  She was married to her work, not one suitor could give her a similar satisfaction.

  XIII

  When Shagun left her marriage, it became impossible for Mrs Sabharwal to hold her head high in the community. Every neighbour got to know as the news seeped through the walls of the clustered flats. Ami, who had arranged the introduction, felt personally offended. If Mrs Sabharwal didn’t mind her saying so, there must be something essentially wrong with Shagun for her to leave a husband as devoted as Raman.

  It’s hard to know exactly what is going on between two people, replied the mother, and she began to avoid her neighbour.

  Worse things happened.

  A process server came.

  ‘Shagun Kaushik?’

  ‘What do you want?’ asked Mrs Sabharwal, trying to sound aggressive.

  ‘Court notice.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Are you Shagun Kaushik?’

  ‘I am her mother.’

  ‘She has to sign for this.’

  ‘Give it to me.’

  ‘If I give it to you, my job will go, I am a poor man.’

  He could be a poor man, b
ut every statement sounded like a threat. An emissary of the court promising to return tomorrow same time, determined to deliver disaster concealed in the envelope hanging from his limp hand.

  No one in the family had ever been involved in a court case. There was something unsavoury about the whole thing, some profound incapacity to lead your life according to prescribed norms.

  She had heard of cases lasting ten years, twenty years, property disputes carried on by grandchildren, custody cases only resolved by the child’s reaching eighteen, divorce disputes lasting into old age. Which man would not tire of a woman – no matter how beautiful – who came burdened with legal baggage?

  Besides, she could see no place for the children in the new set-up. Suppose there were problems between them and Ashok? What would happen?

  Her daughter was not to be cowed into anxiety. Taking the children had been Ashok’s idea, if only to bring Raman to the bargaining table. She had asked nicely for a divorce, been prepared to sacrifice, but the man refused to admit the marriage was over, slammed the phone down on her, what other choice did she have?

  The mother could see no good end to any of this. ‘Just tell me what I should do when the server comes tomorrow,’ she said, her voice weighty with unexpressed fears.

  A few hours later Shagun phoned back. ‘He says we must accept it.’

  ‘You have to come, then.’

  ‘I will be there.’

  Well, thought Mrs Sabharwal as she put down the receiver, at least she would get to see her daughter. Those days had gone, along with so much else, when they used to meet at least once a week. Now just phone conversations, hardly anything else.

  When Shagun came the next day it was with Roohi. ‘My darling,’ cried the grandmother, rushing to her. ‘I have missed you so, so much. Did you think of me, sweetheart? Did you miss your Naani?’

  Roohi hid behind her mother.

  ‘Mama, please, give her time. She is still confused.’

  Mrs Sabharwal thought the little girl far removed from the sweet smiling child she had known. ‘How is school, beta?’ she asked.