Jyothi’s slight form wavered a little as Ma placed the small bundle on her head, but she held her head up high and gripped it tightly with both hands, and soon found the point of perfect balance. It was bulky rather than heavy, and far easier to carry than water. A single full bucket dragged from the well was back-breaking, down-pulling, stop-and-start work for a girl of almost five, but she could carry laundry with ease, using her arms as props, following Ma with swinging steps and a straight but pliant back, all the way up to the Great House at the top of the hill.
Ma carried a much larger bundle on her head without the help of hands, and she walked briskly, for they were late. Jyothi quickened her pace to keep up. Every now and then she stumbled on the hem of her too-long skirt, stopped to push a fold of fabric into her sagging waistband and hurried forward to catch up, for Ma would not wait. They reached the top of the hill, turned into the driveway, entered the front courtyard and walked up the three stairs to the great wooden door at the top.
Ma knocked twice with the brass elephant-head knocker. The door swung open silently and Devi Ma let them in, frowning slightly because the sun was already rising above the turrets to the east, and work was waiting.
Jyothi followed Ma, who followed Devi Ma; single file they walked along the coloured tiles of a short passageway of fretwork walls into the inner court. Ma lifted the bundle of laundry from her own head, and then Jyothi’s bundle, and set both side by side on the marble floor of the inner court.
Devi Ma squatted down beside Jyothi’s ma and together the women began the sorting and the counting: saris in one heap, dhotis in another, blouses and underwear in other, smaller heaps; counting and adding up the prices.
Jyothi’s ma could not follow the counting and the calculations but nodded at all of Devi Ma’s sums, trusting her. Only occasionally they squabbled over the price of an item, like the big yellow woven bedspread, which Jyothi’s ma said was so heavy and hard to wash her husband had needed her eldest son’s help in wringing it out, and it was worth fifteen rupees, whereas Devi Ma said it was only worth twelve. But the squabbling was amiable and soon put to rest, and Jyothi’s mother got fourteen rupees for the bedspread. After the clean laundry was checked against Devi Ma’s list and paid for, the pile of dirty laundry in the corner would have to be sorted, counted and listed. It was a good hour’s work, interspersed with good-natured stories of village gossip volunteered by Jyothi’s ma in exchange for Great House gossip.
While they did their business Jyothi sat at the edge of the pool in the middle of the courtyard and played with the water-spitting fish. It was an oval pool of turquoise tiles and shallow water that caught the early morning sunlight and played with it in golden concentric circles rippling backwards from the fish.
Jyothi wore a red ankle-length cotton skirt and a flowered blouse; her hair was neatly plaited and hung down her back in a thick black rope. She swivelled her body around, lifted her skirt to her knees and put her feet in the pool. She leaned forward and lifted cups of water out of the pool and let the water fall back through her fingers into itself with a delicious splash. The gurgle of bubbling water was music.
All of a sudden she stopped playing and cocked her head. She had heard a sound, a sweet sound, sweeter even than the water’s voice; barely perceptible yet strong, insistent, reminding her of something but she knew not what, calling her somewhere but she knew not where.
If you could turn the glow and delight of the first glimpse of the sun rising over the trees at the edge of the village into sound, it would be this. If you could turn the perfume of a rose or the taste of a ripe mango into sound, or the feel of cool water running through your fingers, it would be this.
If you could turn a soul welling with wonder into sound, it would surely be this too…
Jyothi stood up.
The fretwork passageway led back to the front door in one direction. She had never been in the other direction, had never continued up to its end; always they had left the passage at the arch leading into the inner court.
A last glance at her mother told Jyothi the business of sorting, counting and adding was only halfway through. Her mother had forgotten her presence.
She found herself in a wide room with a wooden herringbone floor, polished to such a shine she could see a faint reflection of herself in the deep brown gloss. A series of arched windows set into one wall let in the early sunlight, casting it in long slanting pools of round-topped light. The room was bare except for a few straight-backed chairs against the walls and, near the entrance to the passageway, a hatstand with an oval mirror built into it. Jyothi crossed the room and followed the sound to an open doorway at the far side. She hesitated just one second before passing the doorway.
She found herself in a large hallway, dark, for there were no windows, only several heavy doors of wood, all closed. There was no need to open any of the doors for there was also a staircase, and the sound came from above, from the top of that staircase. Jyothi walked up, her left hand on the banister, looking upwards as if expecting that, any moment now, the glorious sound would take on form and appear as a vision of light before her, a goddess beckoning her on.
Along the upstairs landing there was a wall broken by several more doors, again all closed. As in a trance, Jyothi walked along the landing, arms held out before her as if to feel her way forward, although the landing was not dark like the hallway below, but light, and the light was coming from the far end, as well as the sound. Light and sound merged into a single entity pulling her forward, erasing the memory of Ma and the bundle of clothes downstairs, and even the memory of herself and who she was, wrapping itself around her mind and drawing her into itself.
She felt light-headed, like clear water sparkling with sunlight.
Jyothi arrived at the end of the landing and stood on the threshold of a room that was all light: smooth shining white floor, white bare walls and, at the far end, opposite to where she stood, an open balustrade broken by a row of slender columns joined by scalloped arches. Beyond the balustrade Jyothi’s glance took in the green hills rolling away to the east, and the sun, now well above the hills, brilliant white at its glowing centre, and the entire eastern sky shining white, everywhere a blinding whiteness.
White, too, were the clothes of the two people in the room. It was these two who claimed Jyothi’s attention. One of them, she saw at first glance, was the source of the sound. It was a man, sitting cross-legged on a small red carpet that provided the only spot of colour in the entire room. Across his legs rested a sitar; his fingers caressed the strings, and it was the music thus produced that had drawn Jyothi.
Music! This was music! Nothing she had ever heard before was worthy of the name. Sometimes musicians came to the village and there was singing and dancing in the main street, and of course at every festival there was music. She had seen a sitar before; she had even heard one played.
But never before like this. She stood in the doorway, transfixed, staring.
Her gaze included, at the periphery, the second person in the room and now she turned her attention to him. This person was a boy, several years older than herself. Like the musician, he wore two white cloths, one around his hips and one around his shoulders, and he, too, sat cross-legged on the floor, facing the musician and, it seemed to Jyothi, as transfixed as she herself was.
The musician sat near the back wall, facing the balustrade and the rising sun. Set in the wall beside him was a small arched alcove, in which a shrine had been arranged: a garlanded statue of Krishna, several single hibiscus blossoms and a rosewood incense-holder with three sticks burned almost halfway down. White filigreed tendrils of fragrance waved softly from the alcove, filling the room and merging with the music and light to form the elusive, insubstantial body of enchantment that had summoned Jyothi.
Spellbound, she remained on the threshold, unable to move or speak, soaking in the sound, light and fragrance.
As if sensing her presence, the boy turned his head and looked at her, meeting her gaze and holding it. Jyothi stared back, unsmiling. The thought occurred to her that she should turn, right now, and run back down the hallway, down the stairs, back to Ma. She knew she’d be in trouble if they caught her, if Ma knew she had been caught.
And yet… she could not move. It was the music that held her, that and the gaze of the boy, which even across the room she could see was clear and candid, solemn but not grim, interested but not overly curious. She stood poised in that gaze for several seconds, then the boy broke the spell by lifting his hand and gesturing for her to come in; and Jyothi timidly crossed the room to where he sat.
He patted the marble floor beside him and Jyothi sat down, crossing her legs and covering her feet with the hem of her skirt, still looking at him. The boy gestured with his chin towards the musician – who continued to play quietly by himself – and Jyothi shifted her gaze in that direction and, once again, the spell that had been broken by the boy turning his head swept her up and transported her away.
Jyothi did not know if she had been sitting there for half a day or only five minutes; all she knew was that the music had stopped and the boy had spoken to her. She shook her head to indicate she had not heard, and he repeated his question.
‘What is your name? What are you doing here?’
‘I’m Jyothi… My mother brings the laundry… I heard the music…’
‘You like that music?’
‘Yes! Oh yes.’ Jyothi’s eyes glazed over. ‘It was the most beautiful thing.’
‘I think so too,’ said the boy. ‘This man is my teacher; I am now going to have my music lesson. Every day he plays a morning raga for me and then he gives me my lesson. If you like, you can stay and watch me having my lesson. Not many children like this music; none of my friends do, but I love it. I’m going to be a musician when I grow up, like my teacher. What are you going to be?’
But Jyothi’s gaze was puzzled; she frowned slightly to show that she did not understand what he was talking about. She was only four but she knew the natural order of things; when she was older she was to marry Harrichand, her father’s paternal aunt’s brother-in-law’s grandson, a boy from the next village, who would be a dhobi like her own father. The matter was settled; she knew it and so did everyone else.
She opened her mouth to tell the boy this, but just at that moment a distant cry startled them and both their heads turned towards the doorway. Jyothi not only turned, she sprang to her feet in guilt, for she knew instinctively the cry was because of her.
‘I have to go now,’ she said hastily, and stretched out her hand to the boy in a gesture of farewell. But instead of doing namaste, as would have been polite, the boy took the hand in his own and squeezed it and then, not letting go, he, too, stood up.
‘Wait! Don’t go!’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you. Won’t you—’
But Jyothi pulled her hand away and ran to the doorway.
There, for just a second, she paused and looked back; the boy was still standing on the patch of carpet; he had dropped his hand and now both arms hung at his sides. They looked at each other in silence; simultaneously, as if at an unspoken signal perceptible only to the two of them, they both did namaste. Then Jyothi turned away and ran.
Jyothi was not permitted to return with Ma to the Great House for several days. Ma and Baba were very upset; the Khemraj family was their livelihood, and a brisk business it was too. Every day there were at least fifty pieces of soiled laundry waiting for Ma when she left the house. Often there were heavy, large pieces: bedspreads and curtains that took a long time to wash but which paid extremely well, and needed little ironing, meaning that whatever extra time they took at the washing end could be saved at the ironing end. There were eighteen members of that family, the youngest being the baby Arun, the oldest, Great-grandma, ninety-five if she was a day. There were several young maidens who every day wore a different shalwar kameez; three mothers who every day wore a clean sari; as many fathers who dressed themselves in pristine white each day; a handful of wild little boys who dirtied themselves the moment they left the door; and Rabindranath, the dreamer, the musician, he who, they joked, would one day walk one foot above the ground because his soul was so light.
Nobody understood what had taken hold of Jyothi, why she had taken it into her little head to disappear. She’d never done a thing like that before.
‘It was the music,’ Jyothi kept repeating, but Ma just shook her head.
‘A child doesn’t leave her mother’s side for music,’ she scolded. ‘Silly child. You will stay home now and sort the dhal.’
So for three days Jyothi stayed home sifting through the dhal with her tiny fingers, fishing out the little pebbles and dead insects and dreaming of music, real music, the music she had heard in the Great House, and the boy who had opened the door to such delight.
On the fourth day, however, Ma relented and took Jyothi with her again; she needed help. There was so much clean laundry today that she had had to make two bundles and Jyothi was to carry the smaller one. Ma loaded it on her head: it was big, but not too heavy, and Jyothi, finding the point of perfect balance, kept her head up and her eyes straight ahead as she walked along beside Ma out of the village and up the hill leading to the Great House.
It was early morning, still dark, though the sky was turning grey in the east and as usual the village was alive with industry – there were women sweeping the forecourts to their houses, sprinkling them with water and drawing the elaborate chalk kolams. Other women made their way to and from the well with their brass vessels expertly balanced on their heads. In a shed beside the road Kamaraj milked his cow and more women lined up with their battered vessels for the milk. A bullock cart rumbled sleepily through the centre of the main road that cut through the village; a herd of goats, coming from the other direction, broke into two and billowed around the cart like a black wave curling around a boulder. The rumbling and creaking of the cart, the bleating of the goats, the splashing of water and the swishing of broomsticks formed a comfortable background of familiar sound punctuated by the occasional mooing of a cow or the barking of a dog.
A form of music, for Jyothi; sound to wake up into from the oblivion of sleep. There were times, though, when it was different – when it was all drowned out by the loudspeakers, when Chaitnarain decided to do the village a favour by playing one of his cassettes at top volume so that everything you touched vibrated and you had to shout to be heard.
Sookram had started this six months ago, in the wedding season. Then it had been every morning; since then it was only two or three times a week, but Jyothi had never liked it. She put her hands over her ears but Ma pulled them away. Ma wouldn’t say if she liked it or not; when Jyothi asked she simply shrugged. ‘Where is the question of liking?’ she said.
The road was unpaved. Five years ago there had been an attempt at paving: twenty metres leading off from the main road and up to the house had been covered with tarmac, but then it had been left to itself, and now even that small expanse was crumbling away, dissolving into rubble that was painful to walk upon with bare feet. Ma and Jyothi trod carefully along the side of the road where there was a sandy pathway free of pebbles.
As usual, Devi Ma came to receive them, but Jyothi noticed at once that something was different: there was not the usual heap of dirty laundry waiting to be counted and bundled and lugged on to Ma’s head and carried off to be washed. And, somehow, Devi Ma’s smile was different, her attitude more formal.
‘Before we begin,’ Devi Ma told Ma, ‘I want to tell you something. Put down the bundles – we will count later – and come with me.’
She led Ma and Jyothi into the house, through a maze of rooms and hallways to a large, white-tiled room at the back of the house, with an open door leading into a back courtyard.
The room was bare except for one object, a shiny white upright box as tall as Jyothi, against one wall. It seemed to be made of metal. There were the remnants of a puja on top of it: a copper plate with an incense-holder in the middle with the remains of piles of ash and kum-kum, and wilted rose petals, and encircling it a jasmine garland, the edges of the little white blossoms already turning brown, and three small blackening bananas, and half a coconut. There were the red marks of Shiva on the front of the thing, stains of red against the pristine white; God had been called upon to bless it. Devi Ma walked up to this object and placed one possessive hand upon it.
‘This,’ Devi Ma proclaimed proudly, ‘is a washing machine.’
The washing machine was their ruin. It was a poor village; the housewives did their own washing. The Khemrajs were their only regular customers. Ramkumar, Jyothi’s father, was the son and grandson of dhobis who had washed for the Khemraj family in the Great House for generations. The unwritten contract with the Great House was their only means of sustenance. Ramkumar was the eldest son and so he had taken over for his generation; his two brothers had moved to the nearest town and found work there. In the town there were wealthy people, and the wealthier housewives wouldn’t dream of washing their own clothes; there was work to be had – but not for Ramkumar. The town was not too big and not too small: the dhobis knew the families they worked for and the families knew them, and everything functioned according to an established, preordained pattern. There was no room for a newcomer, even an old newcomer. Uncles had taken in the brothers when they were still young and they had grown into the work. For Ramkumar, a man nearing fifty, there was no room, no work.
But anyway: Ramkumar had a dream.
Last year his nephew Ganesh had married, and at the wedding Ganesh’s grandfather, Ramkumar’s maternal uncle Bholanauth, had told him a story that had stayed in Ramkumar’s mind.
A year ago this same nephew, Ganesh, had had an accident; he had been knocked over by a motorcycle and had lain in hospital for three weeks hovering between life and death.
‘I knew that there was only one way to save my first grandson,’ Bholanauth told Ramkumar. ‘I had to visit the Ganesh shrine in Bombay. Ganesh is the boy’s personal godhead – I knew if I prayed to him he would intervene and save him. So we sold my wife’s gold ornaments and I made the journey to Bombay and went to the shrine.’
Bholanauth described the shrine in glowing detail; he described the city in words of awe and wonder. Listening to him, Ramkumar’s mind boggled; he could not imagine a place of such immense proportions; a place of buildings so high you could never see the sunrise; where the streets were so wide and so filled with traffic you had to wait for a light to show green before you even dared cross it; a place where people lived not in huts but in such tall buildings, one family above the other, and hung their washing out of the windows; a place of streets and buildings and swarms of people where you could walk and walk all day and still not reach the other end.
Bholanauth told him of all the miracles he had seen in Bombay, of the shops like palaces and the cars like golden chariots, and the sea that stretched to the sky. But the greatest miracle of all was the Dhobi Ghat.
The Dhobi Ghat, Bholanauth told Ramkumar, was Bombay’s vast open-air laundry, the most wondrous place on the face of the earth. He had never seen anything like it, not in all his sixty-one years. Hundreds, no, thousands of dhobis all in one place! The dhobis who worked there were like royalty. They served a city of millions. Each morning the dhobi-wallahs swarmed through the city like ants through a great stone maze. They gathered the soiled clothes and cloths of its citizens and brought them here; they washed, thrashed, twisted, slapped, wrung, rinsed, boiled and beat the laundry; they strung the garments on pieces of string tied between posts to hang in the windless city heat to dry; they unstrung them and ironed the creases out of them and folded and laid them together and turned them into piles of crisp scented packets of fabric, delivered to the owner’s door, on time to the minute and never a piece lost!
Bholanauth had almost drooled with envy at the professionalism of the Bombay dhobis. The Bombay Ghat was actually made for dhobis; practically laid out, with concrete basins and standing cubicles and drainage areas. There were machines to wring the water from the clothes. No beating of cloth on the stone steps of a tirtha, stone tank, here; no laying of clothes across a bush to dry. There was one building, Bholanauth said, with clay ovens lit by fires that heated vats of water, which miraculously drove the soil from garments. He spoke of this last building with great awe, as of a temple; it was black and smoky inside from the many fires, he said, and you could hardly see and hardly breathe, and there were half-naked attendants who stood at the edges of the vats stirring the garments in the hot water with long sticks; and there were towers made of garments wrung into long wet snakes and placed in circles on top of each other; and there were hundreds of lines of clothes hanging in the sun to dry; and they used blue to make the white garments whiter, and…
Ramkumar’s mind reeled at the description; his imagination failed him.
‘And how big is the ghat? As big as the Durga Tirtha?’
‘Bigger, bigger!’ cried Bholanauth. ‘Much bigger! Oh, you cannot imagine that place! As big as this whole town! And it is laid out in pathways you can walk along to get to the washing cubicles! All day long the dhobis are washing, washing, washing for crores of people – you cannot imagine it, Ramkumar! I have never seen anything like this. Not even the Ganesh temple so impressed me, though Ganesh was gracious to me and healed my son – Shiva Shiva Shiva – but the magnitude of this place!’
And he went on and on, each description of each new feature of the Dhobi Ghat and the people who worked there surpassing the previous, so that Ramkumar was easily persuaded that the Dhobi Ghat was the one place on earth he had to see before he died, paradise on earth for a humble dhobi.
And now, out of work, forced by circumstances to move on to new horizons, Ramkumar remembered Bholanauth’s words and they came to him as an omen.
‘To work in the Dhobi Ghat, nephew, is the greatest good fortune that could befall a man of our caste. What must those fortunate dhobis have done in their past lives, to have earned such an auspicious karma! While we stand on the steps of the tirtha beating our clothes, those dhobis reign like kings! I can only pray that in my next life I may be born in that great city, and work there among those fortunate laundrymen!’
And Ramkumar, who even as a child had claimed to have visions, though no one had believed him, now thought to himself:
This is a sign; it is certainly no chance that Bholanauth told me about the Dhobi Ghat and awakened such urgings in my heart. In my past life I, too, have thus prayed, and lived my life to deserve such good fortune. Losing my work with the Khemrajs was all God’s will, to urge me forward to the next phase of my life, to reap the fruits of my deeds in the past life. I will take my family, my wife and sons and daughter, and go to Bombay, and I, too, will work in the Dhobi Ghat!
Little Jyothi understood nothing of this talk of the Dhobi Ghat. She heard her parents arguing, for Ma did not want to leave the village; Bombay seemed so far away, and there she would have no friends, no relatives, no village. But Ramkumar was a man on fire, a man with a vision. ‘We will have a fine life!’ he said. ‘Jyothi can marry a Bombay dhobi and the boys will have the best chance there. Here in the village there is no work for them. It is best for the family.’ Finally Ma agreed.
And so, one early morning a few weeks after the arrival of their great rival, the washing machine, Jyothi clung to Ma’s sari skirt behind Ramkumar as he pushed his way through the crowds at the main bus stop.
‘Come, baby,’ said Ramkumar and lifted Jyothi up, handing her to her mother, who leaned out from the doorway, arms held out to receive the child. Ramkumar climbed in after them and made sure Ma and Jyothi were comfortably seated before squeezing down the aisle to find room at the back of the bus. Finally all the passengers were seated; the driver blew the horn and the bus crept forward as the milling crowd parted to make way for it. Jyothi nestled into Ma’s lap, rubbed her eyes, closed them, yawned and fell into dreamland, lulled by the comforting rattle of the bus. They headed north, towards Bombay, towards a new and wonderful life.
‘We should have taken a taxi,’ Monika Kingsley said to her husband Jack. ‘I told you we should take a taxi!’
‘Or wear sensible shoes!’ laughed Jack. ‘You should have brought trainers like me.’
Monika sniffed in reply; she had a thing for nice shoes and hadn’t listened to him while packing. She should have. She was not a particularly beautiful woman; her face was too flat, her eyes too close together, her lips too thin. Her smile, though, was wide, and her teeth perfect, and her eyes lit up with warmth, and therein, Jack said, lay her true beauty. But Monika knew that her legs were long, and rather shapely, so she loved to display them with nicely heeled shoes.
She stepped gingerly around a heap of rubble – crumbs of ripped-off tarmac, lumps of dried mud, gravel and sand – that covered half the pavement and extended into the street, and stumbled again. On the road next to the rubble was a gaping hole, at least three feet deep and six feet across. Rickety barricades, decorated with warning scraps of red tape, kept the traffic from flowing into the hole; instead, traffic jerked around it in a stop-and-go procedure, creating a permanent traffic jam. The hole had been there when they first arrived in Bombay yesterday. Since there were no roadworkers digging inside or around it, it was very likely to remain there for at least another one, two or three days, maybe weeks, perhaps indefinitely. In the meantime, her shoes would be ruined.
But, she reminded herself, in Bombay there were bigger things to worry about than ruined heels.
‘I’ll buy some cheap flats this afternoon,’ she conceded. ‘Sandals. There goes my vanity.’
‘Actually, it’s not much further,’ Jack replied mildly. ‘It’s this midday sun that makes it seem further. We’ll soon be back at the hotel. Five blocks down, straight ahead from the restaurant; one more block to go. I’ve been counting. Come on, give me your bag.’
He placed a gentle hand on her arm to help her around the rubble and Monika slid the ubiquitous and voluminous handbag off her left shoulder, handed it to him and took his hand. She was holding her breath; a passing lorry had just expelled a cloud of stinking exhaust fumes into her face.
‘Well, I’m going to give my feet a good soak when we get back,’ she said once she could breathe again. ‘I’m beginning to lose my—’
‘Hey, take a look at those kids!’ cried Jack; he stopped and pointed.
They had reached the widened area at the corner just before their hotel. Here, two or three lean-to hovels stood against the wall of a building, shacks made up of strips of cloth and plastic and ripped-open cardboard boxes and old planks. Several multigenerational families lived in these hovels – they had seen them before. Women with babies bulging in the fronts of their saris; a wizened old woman who sat muttering with her back to the wall; innumerable ragged children. Jack had glanced at them many times in the days since they’d been in Bombay; Monika always turned away. There was only so much pain a woman could bear, she thought. When you felt the world’s injustice poised on your shoulders, and you knew how little you could do to relieve it – well, it was too difficult to look.
There were four of them here now on the corner: little girls. Three of them were seated around an old upturned carton. On the carton were leaves of various sizes, arranged like plates around the edge of the ‘table’, and on the leaves were miniature food arrangements: tiny bits of onions and carrots and banana, cut up fine and delicately laid out to imitate servings at a real meal. It was the work, apparently, of the fourth girl, the oldest-looking, a skinny mite with two long pigtails who was serving the others – mere toddlers – with minute portions of cooked rice, three grains here, four grains there. She held the rice in a screw of paper in her left hand and carefully counted out the grains for each of her ‘children’ – according, apparently, to a system whereby each child was supplied according to size, the smallest receiving the fewest grains. Beside the roar of traffic and the stench of the gutter,
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