the exact location, but somewhere here – was where Jumna returned in the afternoons.
Today, it was to Jumna that Mrs Sengupta turned. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so. It was as if the very fact that Jumna possessed almost nothing, that there was nothing, really, she could offer to her employer, that made Mrs Sengupta turn to her as an inexplicable source of comfort.
‘What will happen, then, Jumna?’ asked Mrs Sengupta. Jumna, sitting on the carpet, pulling the aanchal of her sari to cover her head, said, ‘What will happen? Memsaab, you worry for nothing.’ Jumna was moved; she was not insincere; the poor have a special ability, after all, to understand the torments of their employers, to empathise with them. It was as if she absorbed some of Mallika Sengupta’s pain.
Her real name was Heera. Before she came to work for this family six years ago, a bearded jamadar with red eyes and a paunch used to come in the mornings to clean the bathrooms in the Cumballa Hill flat. While going down the hill one evening, Nirmalya had suddenly seen him from the car, staggering drunkenly on the road. Nirmalya had always wondered what the man did for the rest of the day. ‘He’s a strange man. His kind eat crows,’ said the driver. ‘Crows?’ Nirmalya was awe-struck. Nirmalya thought of the jamadar sitting in a room, a dead crow in his hand; he was preparing to cook it. One of those crows that sit on parapets, balconies, behind the windows of toilets, and fill the day with their cawing. Nirmalya couldn’t decide whether to add a family to the scene – children in the room, sitting next to the jamadar as he began to cook. ‘Yes, yes, “they” eat crows,’ said the driver, and, from the way he said the word, Nirmalya could see the shadowy ‘they’ the jamadar belonged to was, in the driver’s eyes, beyond the pale. Then the jamadar was back the next morning, silently wiping the floors.
If the jamadar came from the realm of night and darkness, Jumna came from the world of light. Of course she was a jamadarni, and maybe came from the same caste as the jamadar, but, from the beginning, Mrs Sengupta had been won over by her demeanour – ‘She’s cultured, more cultured than the ladies I meet at parties.’ This spoke for Jumna’s manners and intelligence in that dawn of her employment, and it also spoke for Mrs Sengupta’s own dislike of, and her unease at, the increasing number of company parties she went to. As for Jumna, she’d come, like the jamadar, to wipe the floors, to clean the toilet bowl, but gradually she shed her jamadarni sweeper-woman status. She became all things – confidante; surrogate mother to the boy; slave and friend; part-time servant – and the hands that held the bucket and toilet brush also came to make chapattis. ‘She makes very good chapattis,’ said Mallika Sengupta, ‘she puts them straight on to the gas flame and they swell like balloons.’
The boy took it upon himself to educate Jumna. He was also profoundly curious about why she was poor. Already, at eight, though he despised school himself, he was an advocate of the religion of education; he was convinced that going to school could have changed Jumna. They had long and serious dialogues. ‘Baba, I only went to school till the second class. Then I’d tell my mother I was going to school, but I wouldn’t go. I would go somewhere with a friend and come back and say I’d been to school.’ ‘And that is why you are in this state now,’ the boy said, his thesis proved.
During other conversations, Jumna, abandoning her jhadu, would provide more metaphysical explanations.
‘It must have been some paap I’d done in my last birth,’ as if she’d hit upon a reason that was actually plausible, ‘which is why I’m leading this life in this birth.’
‘Something you did in your last birth,’ said the boy, looking at the familiar face of the woman before him. The logic appealed to him. Although his eyes were open,
Today, it was to Jumna that Mrs Sengupta turned. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so. It was as if the very fact that Jumna possessed almost nothing, that there was nothing, really, she could offer to her employer, that made Mrs Sengupta turn to her as an inexplicable source of comfort.
‘What will happen, then, Jumna?’ asked Mrs Sengupta. Jumna, sitting on the carpet, pulling the aanchal of her sari to cover her head, said, ‘What will happen? Memsaab, you worry for nothing.’ Jumna was moved; she was not insincere; the poor have a special ability, after all, to understand the torments of their employers, to empathise with them. It was as if she absorbed some of Mallika Sengupta’s pain.
Her real name was Heera. Before she came to work for this family six years ago, a bearded jamadar with red eyes and a paunch used to come in the mornings to clean the bathrooms in the Cumballa Hill flat. While going down the hill one evening, Nirmalya had suddenly seen him from the car, staggering drunkenly on the road. Nirmalya had always wondered what the man did for the rest of the day. ‘He’s a strange man. His kind eat crows,’ said the driver. ‘Crows?’ Nirmalya was awe-struck. Nirmalya thought of the jamadar sitting in a room, a dead crow in his hand; he was preparing to cook it. One of those crows that sit on parapets, balconies, behind the windows of toilets, and fill the day with their cawing. Nirmalya couldn’t decide whether to add a family to the scene – children in the room, sitting next to the jamadar as he began to cook. ‘Yes, yes, “they” eat crows,’ said the driver, and, from the way he said the word, Nirmalya could see the shadowy ‘they’ the jamadar belonged to was, in the driver’s eyes, beyond the pale. Then the jamadar was back the next morning, silently wiping the floors.
If the jamadar came from the realm of night and darkness, Jumna came from the world of light. Of course she was a jamadarni, and maybe came from the same caste as the jamadar, but, from the beginning, Mrs Sengupta had been won over by her demeanour – ‘She’s cultured, more cultured than the ladies I meet at parties.’ This spoke for Jumna’s manners and intelligence in that dawn of her employment, and it also spoke for Mrs Sengupta’s own dislike of, and her unease at, the increasing number of company parties she went to. As for Jumna, she’d come, like the jamadar, to wipe the floors, to clean the toilet bowl, but gradually she shed her jamadarni sweeper-woman status. She became all things – confidante; surrogate mother to the boy; slave and friend; part-time servant – and the hands that held the bucket and toilet brush also came to make chapattis. ‘She makes very good chapattis,’ said Mallika Sengupta, ‘she puts them straight on to the gas flame and they swell like balloons.’
The boy took it upon himself to educate Jumna. He was also profoundly curious about why she was poor. Already, at eight, though he despised school himself, he was an advocate of the religion of education; he was convinced that going to school could have changed Jumna. They had long and serious dialogues. ‘Baba, I only went to school till the second class. Then I’d tell my mother I was going to school, but I wouldn’t go. I would go somewhere with a friend and come back and say I’d been to school.’ ‘And that is why you are in this state now,’ the boy said, his thesis proved.
During other conversations, Jumna, abandoning her jhadu, would provide more metaphysical explanations.
‘It must have been some paap I’d done in my last birth,’ as if she’d hit upon a reason that was actually plausible, ‘which is why I’m leading this life in this birth.’
‘Something you did in your last birth,’ said the boy, looking at the familiar face of the woman before him. The logic appealed to him. Although his eyes were open,
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