Page 6 of Six Days in Bombay

My face burned with embarrassment. I’d felt him working up to it yesterday and wheeled away with a quick goodbye, pretending I didn’t know what he was about to ask. Now, standing a few feet from him, it was impossible to ignore the unspoken request. I looked down at my handlebars. This was the bicycle that one of my mother’s clients had given her instead of paying what she owed for the dress she’d commissioned. My mother deserved more than a used bicycle. More than a two-hundred-square-foot flat so close to Victoria Terminus that the trains threatened to shatter the windows. Mohan wasn’t the answer to what I wanted for my mother. And I didn’t want to give him hope.

I slid my palms over the smooth steel of the handlebars. “My mother and I are going to the market tomorrow afternoon. She needs new shears.” I stole a look at Mohan, whose shoulders now drooped.

His gaze fell on the rag in his hand. “Of course. I understand.” He looked up with a brave smile. “We’ll go some other time.”

I nodded and wheeled the bicycle out the door. Oh, how I hated to let him down when he was such a good man, an honest man. When he married, he would be the kind of husband who would do anything for his wife, his children, his parents. But Mohan would remain a maintenance man. He had no ambitionsto be anything else. As far as he was concerned, he’d reached the pinnacle of his career: a secure position with a reputable hospital. A job no one could take away from him. I wanted a larger life. I wasn’t quite sure what it looked like or how I would get there, but I knew I wouldn’t be working as a nurse forever. No, I had no future with Mohan.

Indira was waiting for me when I came out the door. She was quiet, thoughtful, as we walked toward her home.

The night air was peaceful, free of the low rumble of cars and trams, free of horsesclop-cloppingand the high-pitched hawking of fruit sellers. There was a quarter moon. Several pigeons cooed, milling around a half-eaten roti. We passed a tailor’s where two men worked their machines under a dim bulb to meet the insatiable demands of theBurra Sahib’s army. The shop next door was also open. A man was weighing grain from a large jute sack into smaller cloth sacks to sell.

“I wish I could be like you, Sona.” Indira walked as gracefully in her sari as my mother did. She pulled her cardigan closed and clasped her thin arms around her waist. Early morning was the coolest part of the day even if it was laced with humidity. Later, the temperature would reach ninety degrees in the shade.

“Why do you say that?” I knew of no one who would say they envied me. Not the girls at my government school in Calcutta. Nor my classmates at the convent school where I won a scholarship. Nor my nursing school. Who would want to trade places with a half-caste? Who wants to hear the slurs ofChee-CheeandBlackie-White? Who wants rocks thrown at them on their way to work? I wanted to trade places with Indira. She was living in a country that accepted her as she was. Generations of her family had lived in India, prayed in Hindu temples. She had the complexion of a roasted almond and dark, dark hair that gleamed in the light. She had family as long as a month and as wide as a year.

“Your mother didn’t make you marry at seventeen, Sona. Hereyou are at twenty-three, able to go anywhere by yourself. Your neighbors aren’t gossiping about where you’ve been or what your children are up to. You are free.”

I scoffed. “Hardly.” My mother had been hinting at marriage for several years. So far, there had been no one who had appealed. There was an internist in Calcutta and a teacher I met through one of my nursing classmates, both of whom I found attractive, but one was betrothed, the other married.

Indira asked, “Why do you keep wanting to help me with Balbir? You’ll only get yourself in trouble.”

I stopped walking to look at my friend. “Remember my first day here at the hospital? You welcomed me with a plant in a small pot. You said chili peppers would sprout and when I harvested and dried them, I was to string them with limes to bring us good luck in our new home. I still have that plant, Indira. And Mum looks forward to making a new garland every year to hang across our threshold. In the meanwhile, she eats the chili peppers raw!” I shook my friend’s shoulder gently to coax a smile from her. “Apart from you, no one seemed to understand how hard it was for us to move so far away from our home in Calcutta.” My voice caught. “You made me feel we could make Bombay our home. For that, I will always be grateful.”

She smiled and patted my shoulder.

Up ahead, a group of young men whispered hotly under a weak streetlamp. The University of Bombay was on our way home; students gathered at this intersection at all hours.

“You have to come, Nikesh!” urged the young man with the wire glasses, so like the ones Mr. Gandhi wore. “Surely you’re tired of them strangling our textile industry—the one our ancestors built, yours and mine—for their own profit?”

“What good are protests? The British imprisoned fifty thousand Indians along with Gandhi-ji for protesting the salt tax—”

A bearded student interrupted, “And they only stopped whenthe world shamed them into it. But they’re back to taxing everything else we make. Where’s the progress?”

The glasses-wearer smiled. “It’s coming, my friends. And you’re all coming to the protest. Now, who’s forchai?” He held out his thermos.

It was the same everywhere, in Calcutta too. At thesubji-walla. Thepaan-walla. The rumbling of a patient people who would be patient no more. Oust the English parasites! My father had been one of those parasites, hadn’t he? The irony of my existence was not lost on me.

When we’d passed the students, I said, “Indira, if you ever need to stay with us, you know you’re more than welcome.” Mum and I only had the one charpoy, but I was sure we could manage something.

She shook her head. “And my children? Where would they go? No, Sona. It’s kind of you to offer. And I’m grateful for your friendship, but I can’t. This life is my fate, Sona. It is the will ofBhagwan.”

I understood her in the way I understood Indian women who felt the life they were living had been predestined. That there was nothing they could do to change something that needed to run its course. Their children, like Indira’s daughters, would follow the same fate. It made me feel helpless—and hopeless for them.

We said our goodbyes at the mouth of her neighborhood. Up ahead, there was a billboard for the popular movieJeevan Prabhat. I knew the plot. A couple is unable to conceive so the husband takes a second wife. Would Balbir be tempted to do the same? I cycled home, saddened by the thought.

***

I had to be especially quiet when entering our building’s courtyard this early in the morning. The landlord’s family lived downstairs, and the couple who occupied the flat opposite ours on the open-air landing worked daylight hours and needed their sleep. As I mounted the stairs, I heard the loud snores of my landlords.When I reached the landing, excited moans and sharp cries told me the couple across from us was in the throes of making a family. I stopped for a moment to listen. Their lovemaking aroused a feeling that bloomed from my chest down to where my menses flowed. I’d never been with a man that way. Even the young clerk who had treated me to a movie at the Eros Cinema and tried to sneak a kiss afterward hadn’t awakened that desire in me.

As soon as I unlocked the door to our tiny apartment, my mother came forward to greet me. She was always awake when I came home. I’d told her not to wait up—repeatedly—but she wouldn’t listen. She told me she napped in the evening, right after I left for work, to catch up on her sleep. I’m not sure I believed her.

Her hand clutched the sleeve of a shirt she must have been sewing. “Everything is good?”

She meant did I still have a job. Keeping my job was mother’s greatest concern. In Calcutta, I’d already lost one, and we couldn’t afford to lose another. Her business of sewing and altering women’ssalwar kameez, gentlemen’s woolen vests and children’s school uniforms paid for the food we ate. But it was my income that paid for the rent, dishes, pots, shoes, coats and the medicine for my mother’s heart, for which the hospital pharmacist kindly gave me a discount. Given how easy it was to walk away with medications in his absence at the pharmacy, I could have helped myself without noting it on his clipboard, but I’d never been tempted.

I took off my sweater and hung it on the nail behind the door. “Yes, Mum. Everything is fine,” I said, imitating the way her head wagged side to side. It always made her laugh, and I liked to see her laugh. Her wrinkles eased; color returned to her cheeks. She searched my face to make sure I was telling her the truth, then patted my arm. She abandoned the half-sewn sleeve and went to the Primus stove to heat rice andbaingancurry for me and make fresh tea. I sat down on a chair next to the diningtable, which also doubled as my mother’s sewing table. On the other side was a sewing machine and the twin of the sleeve she’d been clutching when she greeted me.

I put one elbow on the table and surveyed my surroundings. Our flat was just one small room. We shared the privy with the couple on this floor. Against one wall was a narrow bed, which my mother and I shared. A small counter for the Primus stove and preparation of food (although the dining table also served the same function) lined another wall. One bookcase held my nursing books,Great Expectations,Folk Tales of Bengal,Emma, R. K. Narayan’sSwami and Friends,Jane Eyre(the one Rebecca gave me),Middlemarch, my mother’s sewing magazines, the occasionalLIFEmagazine from the wife next door, and a stack ofReader’s Digests. After hearing stories from patients like Mira and Dr. Stoddard and Mrs. Mehta, I would come to this flat, deflated. It smelled of turmeric, sewing machine oil, my mother’s sandalwood soap and medicine. Not disagreeable, just familiar. Would the rest of my life be as small, as confined, as this? But as soon as the thought slithered into my head, I was riddled with shame. This had been my mother’s life also. How could I belittle what she’d done to feed us and house us and make sure I could have a profession that earned this well? Still, I did wonder: What would my life be like if I could break free of this cage?

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