His hairy potbelly poked out from a filthy, stinking undershirt, underneath which he grabbed Shobha’s head and brought it to his sweaty, soiled crotch. Her every breath caught a second stench of the raw sewage rivulets that crisscrossed the neighbourhood. She nearly retched on the spot. The inspector stroked her hair as he swigged from the bottle. Sounds issued from her mouth as if she were getting the sour taste of a lemon and the hot part of a chili both at once. The door to the outside was left open, a fact that late-night passers-by often noticed. Moreover, the little vacant patch of land in front of the house was a popular spot for people to stop and answer the call of nature. Here, in perfect darkness, a crush of young nogoodniks, out for a midnight stroll, gathered by the house of police flunky Ramakant to watch live porn.
‘Party night’ meant that the inspector brought a buddy. Those nights, Shobha endured inhuman torment and suffering. After getting well drunk, the men let loose the beast within. And in that room, Shobha fell victim to the violence of the wild animals and the frenzy they unleashed. Once they got going, they sang, drank more, praised the fish pakoras to high heaven, laughed and giggled, groped and fondled Shobha, squeezed and pinched. Ramakant encouraged them in all this.
A fat and flabby fair-skinned contractor was brought to one such party by the inspector. He was in his late fifties, early sixties. That night they had even set up a VCR to watch porn; back then, VCRs had just come out and could be rented in the bazaar. Leering at the stunning Shobha, he casually let slip that this year he was going to be elected as municipal councillor, having locked up all the votes from this neighbourhood and the surrounding ones.
That night Shobha was taken to the gates of hell. The contractor and inspector committed unnatural acts, including the contractor inserting a beer bottle in her rectum. The inspector laughed, ‘What the heck are you doing!?’
‘What am I doing?’ The contractor overflowed with delight. ‘Just a little drilling from the back side to bore a big hole so that the motor’ll hum from the under side! I’ve got a twenty-horsepower tractor!’ Shobha gasped for breath, blood dripping on the rug and floor, while porn flashed on the TV. Unconsciousness relieved her from the torments. It was nearly four in the morning when the inspector and contractor finally made their way home. Shobha was greeted with splitting pain when she came to; she wanted to get up and get dressed and wash off the blood and semen. She found Ramakant mounting her. She gave him a kick. Then, in fits and groans, she found the bucket of water kept just outside the front door and began washing herself, not a stitch of clothing covering her body.
As she sat groaning and washing off her blood and the spit and semen of the contractor, inspector, and Ramakant, she had the feeling that at four in the morning she had been ogled by the eyes of many men in the darkness from across the bylane. Bloodletting, blood-soaked, bestial violence: these people stayed up all night to watch this? Not a wink of sleep, smelling the shit from the sewage all night long? This was their idea of fun?
Almost a week later, the contractor showed up one afternoon in his car. The inspector was with him. They brought all sorts of goodies for Shobha: saris with matching tops, lingerie, teddies, lace panties, salwar-kurta, bangles, jewellery, and more. The contractor seemed very pleased and, between sips of chai, informed her that he had appointed her Director of the All-Women’s Welfare Association, meaning that now he would take her with him on tour to Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune, Kolhapur, and other cities.
That day, Chandrakant, a servant in the contractor’s employ, was introduced to Shobha.
Six weeks later, at a government rest house in Jalgaon, the contractor took her to the VIP room. There, party underway, Shobha slipped out under the pretext of needing to change her clothes and, bag packed with everything she had, ran off with Chandrakant to Delhi, where they rented a ground floor flat for five hundred rupees a month at house number E-3/1, bylane number seven, Jahangirpuri. He found part-time work as a helper at a department store in Vijaynagar and she began making food and snacks and pickle and preserves for neighbouring households.
Fleeing from Jalgaon with Chandrakant that night had rescued Shobha from a terrible crime; Chandrakant had masterminded the escape. Fifteen days had passed since the last party, when the contractor had announced they were going to Jalgaon. He had been busy with some construction project. Only the inspector had come in the meantime, two or three times. Shobha waited quietly for the next party, for which she had purchased thirteen rupees worth of rat poison kept hidden in her secret bundle. She mixed it into the goatmeat dish, and was ready to serve it to the inspector, contractor, and her husband, Ramakant. After she did, Shobha faced a dilemma: eat it and herself perish, or don’t eat it and run off with Chandrakant? She kept her plan hidden from Chandrakant; he seemed so guileless and honest that she was sure he would never allow her to go through with it. Chandrakant finally acceded to them running away together from Jalgaon, though he was clearly scared. SHOBHBA IN THE HALF FLAT
E-3/1 was a four-story house. There was space underneath the stairs that, with a little imagination, formed something like a room. Ten feet long, seven feet wide, not exactly a room, but a half flat, and thus with no proper front door. Chandrakant and Shobha fastened two planks of wood over the opening. The first they nailed to the top with scrap metal and hung a blue plastic curtain. The second served as a sliding door leaf. On cold winter days when both Chandrakant and Shobha went out, they kept the door closed. In front of the door, or wall, or board, or whatever you want to call it, was an additional space that measured about four-and-a-half feet. On the left side was a little tap where Shobha and Chandrakant did all their bathing, laundry, and dishes. They called it ‘the balcony’; two feet below was an open sewer. A strong, sour smell continuously wafted upwards along with a buzzing swarm of flies. A few days ago Chandrakant had found another board to cover it up.
They slept on a coarse little mat spread on the floor of their half flat, which they called, in English, the ‘room.’ Chandrakant and Shobha also owned a banged-up tin trunk in which they kept items used infrequently. Also kept in the trunk were the bangles, jewellery, saris, and salwars from the inspector and contractor; stainless steel and glass pots and plates from her parents when she got married; a pair of silver anklets; her mangalsutra wedding thread; a toe ring; armlet; a sari of silver thread. A half-inch strip of plywood was fastened above the trunk, on top of which perched the household’s most valuable and necessary item, a fan. It was because of the fan they were able to sleep in the heat, without harassment from flies and mosquitoes. When it went on the blink, the despondent pair would go out to fetch the electrician and wouldn’t rest until he’d fixed it. But it rarely stopped working. Flip the switch and it purred to life with a loud whoosh. The strong flow of cool air made Chandrakant and Shobha very happy.
In the corner of the room was a little stove that ran on wood scraps. That’s where Shobha cooked, and no food was more delicious than Shobha’s. He had been hooked on Shobha’s cooking since the days of Sarni when he went in the big car to the parties at Ramakant’s with his boss, the contractor. He used to pull right up to the door, making it a little difficult for the passersby who liked to peer inside the house. The contractor would turn up the tape deck as loud as it would go, drowning out both the noise of the ‘party’ and the shrieks of Shobha. Chandrakant was right there, stretched out in the back of the car, listening to the music issuing from its sound system. He had no idea what was going on inside. He never even peeked.