His eyes opened to find Shobha banging on the car window. She brought him food, a thali with roti, meat curry, onions, and more, sometimes a bit of rice. He liked her meat curry so much that it seemed there was never enough. This happened two or three times; Shobha began to sense his fondness, maybe because the two were around the same age. This was thirty years ago, when Shobha was nineteen or twenty, and villagers didn’t pay attention to age differences between bride and groom. Ramakant was between thirty and thirty-five. The inspector who those days raped Shobha daily couldn’t have been younger than forty-five, and the contractor, boss of servant Chandrakant, must have been nearing sixty.
Chandrakant, a young man of nineteen, was utterly different from these middle-aged, savage, stinking men; he stretched out in the back of the car, eyes closed, quietly listening to music, never asking for seconds, never taking a peek inside the house to see what went on during the ‘party.’
That night she quietly crept to the car door window and, peering inside, saw Chandrakant mopping up the last of meat sauce with a roti, two more still on his thali.
‘Do you want some more meat and sauce?’ she asked, startling Chandrakant.
‘No, no, this is plenty!’
Shobha met his reply with a smile. ‘Then what’s the use of the other roti?’
Chandrakant didn’t have an answer.
She brought another katori dish full of meat and sauce, and two more roti as well. It pleased her as Chandrakant silently took the bread and lowered his head to begin eating. She watched him as he ate. He suddenly lifted up his head: his hair was a mess, his mouth full of food. He stared at Shobha and blushed as he broke into a kind of giggle.
It was like the end of a lifesaving rope that dangled in front of the black hole of her hellish life. She decided to grab it and run away, not knowing whether it was out of love or from an intense desire to be free.
The next party, Shobha informed the inspector, contractor, and Ramakant, who were busy eating fish pakoras and drinking, that she was going outside to serve Chandrakant his food. Once there, she got in the car and told him everything. She showed him her legs, back, chest, and neck for him to examine. ‘Someone might come, I can’t show you the rest here,’ Shobha began. ‘But mark my words, one day I’ll be dead and they’ll throw my body away. Save me however you can. Take me anywhere. I’ll do your laundry, clean and dust, cook for you every day, wash the dishes. You like my meat curry, right? I can cook better. I can put a masala into the dish that’ll fill the whole house with the most unbelievable fragrance you’ve ever smelled. If you want me to sleep outside, in the courtyard, on the stoop, I will. I don’t need sheets or blankets. I can live with the clothes on my back. When you’re not making money, I’ll make it for you.’
The tape deck was still blaring music; twenty-year-old Shobha hiccupped between her little sobs. ‘You can do to me what the inspector and builder do to me and I won’t say a word. If it hurts, I won’t cry, I won’t scream. I’ll stop the blood, I won’t allow myself to bleed. I’ll clean everything up without a fuss, no one will know. I’ll just keep smiling. You can tear me to bits and I’ll keep smiling. I’ll stay by your side and serve your every need. I’ll nurse you when you get sick, soothe your body with massage. Do with me whatever you want, your heart’s desire — I won’t stop you. If you bring someone else I’ll serve her too. Just get me out of this trap.’ Shobha had gripped Chandrakant’s shirtsleeve as if she would never let go, as if it were a root on a riverbank she suddenly found, and clung to, like life itself, in spite of being swept under by the current.
Listening to twenty-year-old Shobha, nineteen-year-old Chandrakant felt for the first time he wasn’t just a servant in the contractor’s employ. He could be more, and this thought gave rise to a kind of self-confidence he’d never had. Just then, Ramakant appeared. He saw Shobha attached to Chandrakant’s sleeve, sitting close in the back seat of the car, telling him things, crying. In one fell swoop he opened the door, seized Shobha, and dragged her out. ‘Did you come out here to feed him or fuck him, you whore. Haven’t had enough yet?’
This was that same violent night when the contractor shredded Shobha’s rectum with a beer bottle and she passed out from the bleeding. That night was also the first time Chandrakant heard her scream. A scream that carried so much pain it pierced the closed car window and even Chandrakant’s eardrum. He panicked, sat up, and switched off the music. And for the first time he rolled down the window and stuck his head outside.
Inside, they had switched off the light; all there was to see was shifting shadows in the dark. He listened, but the only thing he could make out was the fearsome growling of wild animals issuing from inside the house, and it sounded as if they had found their prey and were tearing it to bits in a frenzy. For the first time, he despaired of Shobha’s fate, she who had just a few minutes ago clung to his shirtsleeve, whose tears still moistened the same sleeve, whose curry and roti he had just finished eating. The image of her tearful face flashed before his eyes, and he felt as if she were still there with him. Chandrakant thought, I will absolutely help her out of that trap and lift her out of the pit.
Fear, however, reared its head inside of nineteen-year-old Chandrakant. The inspector and contractor were very powerful. He had seen their acts of barbarity with his own eyes. He knew from conversations with them and by the way they talked about places like Lucknow, Bhopal, Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta that their influence stretched far and wide. They could get to wherever they wanted to go. And they would get to wherever he took this girclass="underline" the inspector, the contractor, their flunkeys — they would find them, there was nowhere to hide.
Chandrakant was in a tangle of fear and nerves and worry. That’s why when he fled the house in Jalgaon with Shobha, he had wrapped a towel around his face and covered his body with a sheet. Shobha, however, beamed non-stop with a joy that bordered on rapture. As the train left Sarani station with the two safely inside their compartment, Shobha stowed her trunk and bundle and Chandrakant’s bag underneath the berth with such delicacy and care it was as if she would make her new home right there on the train with Chandrakant — as if she was going to light a little cooking stove on the floor of the train and start a household. The carriage in which the two passengers rode rumbling along the iron rails wasn’t made of wood, glass, and steel, but was transformed into a simple courtyard of fragrant adobe, where sweet spicy smells mixed with the rising smoke of the cooking stove, where a twenty-year-old girl, leisurely humming a song, rolled out the roti, fully absorbed in her work.
Something in this was quite pleasing to Chandrakant; time and again he wanted to break into song. What that pleasing something was, however, he wasn’t able to fully comprehend. THE NEST AND EGGS OF A BIRD
Ah ha! So this is what had been so pleasing to Chandrakant that day on the moving train, the thing he wasn’t able to fully understand.
It was some ten days after they found the half flat in the Jahangirpuri neighbourhood of Delhi at E-3/1, lane seven. The two of them had spent the first few days purchasing household goods for their mini-place, cleaning and setting up house. Chandrakant had found work as a shop assistant in a department store in Vijaynagar, which is also known as Kingsway Camp. Vijaynagar was no more than six kilometres from Jahangirpuri, with plenty of buses at the Aazadpur bus stand headed that way. He set off for work at six in the morning, came back at two in the afternoon for lunch, and returned to work at three thirty. It was nearly nine at night by the time he came back for good. Shobha had no idea how much money she had run off with from Sarani — it had easily covered the stove, fan, curtains, tarp, tin trunk, sheets and blankets, cup and saucer sets, pressure cooker, thali dishes, glasses, food staples, tea and sugar, and all other household necessities. Smiling, she plunged her hand into her rainbow flower vinyl purse (a treasure-chest as bountiful as Tutankhamen’s), and withdrew as much money as she pleased.