Читать книгу Shining Hero - Sara Banerji - Страница 7

Bowed with drops of toil and languor, low, a chariot driver came, Loosely held his scanty garment and a staff upheld his frame. Karna now a crowned monarch to the humble Suta fled, As a son unto a father reverentially bowed his head.

The Emperor Aurangzeb suffered from a carbuncle until an East India Company official called Job Charnock found a physician who managed to cure it. As a reward, Job was granted a tract of land eighty miles up the Hoogly river by the Nawab of Bengal and there he founded the city of Calcutta.

By the end of the eighteenth century Calcutta was the capital of the East India Company’s government, with an opulent and lively social life and opportunities for making a quick fortune for a lucky few. To this day, throughout the town, grand Western-style buildings, now crumbling, point back to its imperial past.

Dolly, her impoverished parents’ eleventh child, was born in the house where once William Hickey had dined with his face covered with blood, because he had become ‘sadly intoxicated’ at a previous get-together and had fallen while dismounting from his phaeton.

At the time of Dolly’s birth, more than a hundred families were living in considerable squalor and poverty in Hickey’s one-time grand residence. But because the new baby was born in the year of India’s independence her parents said, ‘Perhaps the goddess is going to bless us at last even though this is only a female child.’ For this reason, when she was old enough, they sent Dolly to the local school although their other daughters had never been give such an opportunity.

Each evening Dolly would come home and as she helped her mother pick through the rice for stones or roll the chupatties she would chatter joyfully about the things she had learnt that day. ‘We did fractions,’ she would announce, as she crushed the spices on the great thick slab of stone. Splashing water from the brass jar onto the seeds and pods and barks, she would heave the heavy stone roller over the top. Rolling, splashing, crushing she would tell her mother, ‘Did you know that the Moguls ruled India before the British and that this is the first time for ages that we Indians have been free?’ Or, as she stirred the great pan of simmering milk, keeping the iron spoon going to stop the milk boiling over or burning at the bottom, she would tell her mother about trade winds, or magnetism.

Sometimes the father would say worriedly, ‘Do you think all this education is spoiling her? Perhaps she is getting too much of it and won’t be able to find a husband.’

‘She is not neglecting her domestic duties,’ said the mother.

Later, after her parents and her ten siblings slept, Dolly sat by the light of a kerosene lamp and did her homework. She was determined to do well. She planned one day to live in a proper house, not a room in the bustee. If she passed her exams and got a good job, when she was grown up her children would have a bed each and they would eat mutton curry every day. Sometimes one of the babies would wake and cry, disturbing her. Then she would take it on her knee and joggle it on one arm while going on with her writing.

‘My teacher says I will certainly get into university. He is sure I will get a scholarship,’ she told her parents.

Her father’s face was stern, her mother’s anxious. ‘What? What?’ cried Dolly, suddenly afraid.

‘All this education is not needed for a woman,’ said her father.

‘There are better things for a woman to do with her life than to study,’ said her mother.

They had found Dolly a husband.

‘But I don’t want a husband,’ wailed the girl. ‘I am only thirteen. I’m too young to get married.’

‘I was married at ten,’ said her mother.

Dolly pinched lips and refrained from saying, ‘I don’t want my life to be like yours.’ Instead she said, ‘Baba, Ma, please. I am doing so well at school and if I get into university I will get a good job. I will become a teacher, maybe.’

‘How long will this take?’ asked her father.

‘Four years. Five years.’ Dolly was shivering.

‘We cannot go on feeding so many,’ said Dolly’s father. ‘We cannot spend all this on one when there are so many others who have a need. Anyway you are only a girl and the money must be spent on the boys.’

‘I could earn some money from teaching now, maybe,’ pleaded Dolly.

‘Teach who? In this village?’ Her father was scornful. ‘Who can afford to pay a young ignorant girl to teach them? Anyway there is a school that costs nothing already. And after you have finished university you will be too old for marriage.’

‘You can go on studying after you are married. There will be nothing to stop you then. You will be living in a company compound with all kinds of facilities. There will be many opportunities open to you there,’ her mother consoled her. ‘As it is we have to make a great sacrifice for your marriage. There is the big expense of the wedding feast and also the dowry. A large amount of our savings will have to be spent.’

Cheered by the thought of going on with her schooling after marriage, and eventually going to university after all, Dolly agreed.

The young bridegroom, Adhiratha, was twenty-seven years old and a company car driver. ‘He even has a pension,’ her father told Dolly. ‘You are very lucky for you will be provided for all your life. Even after he retires. You will not be poor when you are old like your mother and me.’

‘In fact we need a daughter with such a husband or how will we survive in our old age?’ said Dolly’s mother.

Dolly laughed at the thought of caring for her parents, not being able to imagine such a role reversal.

‘He is everything nice,’ said Dolly’s mother, showing her daughter a photo of Adhiratha. She was happy to see the girl smiling again.

The picture showed a pleasant-looking young man with a thin face, a large moustache and glasses.

‘He looks clever,’ said Dolly. She was quite excited now, longing to meet the man, with whom she thought she had fallen in love already. As a Hindu wife-to-be, and therefore required to respect the husband, as was the tradition she did not use his name even in her mind.

‘He has a sensitive face,’ she thought and the ‘He’ to which she referred was now the central person of her life. All other ‘he’s’ she thought, must go by some other name from this day on.

Adhiratha looked like the kind of person who would appreciate education and Dolly visualised the two of them discussing books together, or even both attending night school. After all he would not be wearing glasses if he was not an intellectual.

If Dolly had known then the real reason for the glasses, would her parents have continued to insist on the marriage? Would Dolly have felt afraid?

Dolly fell wildly in love with Adhiratha the moment she set eyes on him.

‘How glad I am,’ she thought after their wedding, as they sat together in a proper electric-lit room to eat their meal. The company bungalow was a pukka stone and mortar affair with running water and glass in the windows.

They could not stop smiling at each other across the table. Sometimes before the meal was eaten, with only a smile for a signal, the two of them would leap up, overturning chairs, spilling misti and rush for their bed with its new sheet and dunlopillo mattress that had been kept wrapped in its cellophane for protection.

In bed they would lie naked, sweating under the slow turning fan, and explore each other’s beautiful bodies all over again. Adhiratha would bury his face in Dolly’s thick black hair that smelled of the spices she had been cooking. He would kiss the softness of her neck and whisper, ‘I love you, Dolly, I love you Dolly, I love you Dolly.’

He went to work each day wearing his smart chauffeur cap and a pristine white uniform with the company logo embroidered on the pocket that had been lovingly starched and pressed by his little new wife.

After he had gone Dolly would sing as she dusted her house, washed up the dishes, and swept her yard. She remembered how she had quarrelled with her parents when they had tried to arrange her marriage but now she was so happy. Her heart sang with joy because she loved Adhiratha so much and because everything she wanted in the world had been given to her. A hundred times a day, as she swept and polished their bungalow and made special delicious things for her husband’s evening meal, Dolly would say to herself, ‘How lucky my parents insisted I got married to Adhiratha.’ They even had a little garden and Dolly would pick hibiscus, zinnias and canna lilies and arrange them in a jug, then blush with delight when Adhiratha came home and praised her artistry.

Dolly was invited to continue her education at the company school and when term began, each day she would walk across the compound to her class, crossing shady yards, under trees planted by the company, past beds of flowers. There she revelled in the company of girls of her own age and she and her friends would sometimes get a chance to go to the bioscope, then later imitate the accents and behaviour of Ashok Kumar, or swank around pretending to be Meena Kumari.

But no matter how much studying she did, nor how much fun she had with her friends in the day, when Adhiratha got home in the evening she was always there, ready with his evening meal. Her mother had taught her to cook. Her chupatties puffed out like footballs, her parathas were as thin and fine as silk, her kheers and paish the best on the company compound. When Adhiratha invited fellow workers to a meal they would marvel that so young a wife should turn out to be such a marvellous cook. Pulling her sari over her head in deference, she would serve out the food for them, while the young men teased her until she blushed. ‘Hey, Dolly, those chupatties will float up like balloons if you make them any lighter.’ ‘Hey, Dolly. I think I will throw away my own wife and take you home with me instead so that I can eat sag like you make every day.’

‘No you won’t, you swine,’ Adhiratha would josh back. ‘She’s mine. She’s the best thing in my life and I’m not giving her up for anyone.’

‘But when are you starting the baby?’ Dolly’s mother kept asking and patted Dolly’s stomach, which sounded hollowly empty.

‘We are waiting for a year. Till I take my exams,’ Dolly told her parents.

‘How modern,’ said the father. ‘Let us hope that the gods will not take offence.’

‘What do you mean?’ Dolly was startled.

‘They give us children when they decide. It is not up to you to make such decisions.’ He spoke fiercely. ‘Exams are not an excuse for delaying children.’

‘Oh, Baba, you don’t know anything,’ laughed the modern Dolly, amused by her parents’ silly superstitious and old-fashioned attitudes. ‘These days women don’t just have to fill the house with babies like they did when you and Ma were young.’

‘But why take such risks?’ said the mother, trying to soothe the situation. ‘What difference will it make? Have the baby and when it comes, God will look after you. And look after the baby.’

‘I plan to look after my baby, myself,’ said the blasphemous, proud Dolly.

Soon after their marriage it was the time of the Durga Puja.

Goddess Durga is the giver of rice. She is the mother. But she is also yellow and terrible. She is Devi, one of the female aspects of the Absolute, that infinite, inert and creative Silence. Her serene and aloof expression does not change as she slays the demon who is trying to destroy the world. She shows no trace of rage or emotion because, for her, the deed, the Cosmos and her self are only illusions, only parts of the Cosmic dream. She rides a lion, holds weapons in her many arms, is cool as a dream and calm as an untroubled river. She is the inaccessible, the inevitable, for she knows that all this is an illusion. All this is Maya. And Durga is responsible for the illusion, she is the illusion and she is only playing at creation. Creation is the play of the gods, nothing to be really taken seriously. That is what her calm face says.

Each year great images are made of her all over Bengal. Wood armatures fifteen feet high are wrapped with straw, then covered with clay, which is modelled into the smallest detail. Lips rich with scarlet gloss, eyelids dark with lamp khol, fingernails manicured with crimson lacquer, her tiny waist belted in gold, her human hair glossed with resin. Her tinsel-trimmed sari glitters and her cut-glass jewels sparkle.

The puja lasts for four days, during which the images, which have taken so many months to sculpt, are worshipped by the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, who present the goddesses with flowers, fruit, garlands and sweets. For Durga is very powerful and has it in her power to grant life to the dying, health to the sick, children to the infertile and husbands to the hideous. There is no one so rich and privileged that they never need her help.

There was much competition, at Durga Puja, among neighbourhoods and companies, but year after year Adhiratha’s employers always came out with the most beautiful image of the goddess and the most impressive shrine. The company shrine was an exact replica of a Hindu temple and as large. It was made of cotton material stretched over a bamboo frame which in the dark glowed with the light of a thousand multi-coloured electric bulbs. It was painted so realistically that people who saw it from a distance thought a new temple of brick and stone had sprung up overnight.

On the first Durga Puja after her marriage, Dolly made a dish of the milky sweets called shandesh. They were the shape of little fishes and she decorated them with foil of purest gold. When they were ready she put on her best sari and decorated her forehead with scarlet kumkum, then she walked across the compound to the shrine. There, many other people were making offerings to Durga. Some were prostrate on the ground before the goddess. Even the directors of this company had come with gifts for their goddess, for the company was thriving.

Dolly put the plate at the feet of the austere towering image, then, placing her palms together, knelt and bowed till her head touched the ground and said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

After the period of worship was over, Adhiratha was one of those given the honour of carrying the goddess to the holy river, where she would be ritually immersed. People cried out Durga’s praises as the gigantic figure, with her calm face and ornate attire, was jogged along the roads. Some people ran ahead of the procession and threw themselves in the goddess’s path as though she was the Juggernaut and they wished to be crushed to death by her.

At the river other Durgas were arriving, though none as large and lovely as that which Dolly’s new young husband and the other men were carrying.

The company had two long boats waiting, boards lashed between them to form a platform for the statue. It was hauled onto this, then held in place and steadied with poles and ropes.

Dolly and Adhiratha stood on the bank watching while the boat was punted to the centre of the river which was already bobbing with a hundred little boats and rafts carrying Durgas of every size.

There, with the lookers-on ululating and shouting holy praises, the goddess was tipped into the river. As she sank, people scooped up handfuls of water, that had become further blessed by contact with the deity, and threw it over their heads. And as the goddess disappeared from sight, men filled their mouths with petrol and, setting fire to it with cigarette lighters, blew great arcs of flame over the water.

Firecrackers were hurled from the banks and bridges. Little clay lamps burning oil were set bobbing away on the water like luminous ducklings. For a while the whole bubbling river was spattered with bursts and crackles of fire and the wild cries of the people calling out to the vanishing goddess.

Dolly took her exams and did well. She had been married for a year. In the evening when Adhiratha got home he told her, ‘They have promoted me. I am to become head driver and will get a raise of a hundred and fifty rupees a month.’

Dolly put her arms round him and hugged. She felt so happy she could not speak. Then she whispered something.

‘What? I couldn’t hear.’ Adhiratha was teasing her. Although he had not heard, he knew quite well what she had said.

Her eyes down and whispering a little louder, she said, ‘We can start our family this year.’

‘Did you ask for Durga’s blessing?’ he asked, laughing, as he hung his chauffeur’s hat on the rack. His wife’s devotion to Durga always amused him. ‘It’s only a statue,’ he would say. ‘I’m the one who does all the hard work, while she just stands there. It’s me you should be thanking.’

‘Oh, you,’ Dolly chided. ‘You must not talk like that about the goddess. She might put a curse on us.’

That night Adhiratha made love to her without using a condom and afterwards they laughed and embraced each other, certain that the baby was already made.

After three months when Dolly had still not become pregnant, the first little flicker of worry began to set in. Dolly, only half joking, told Adhiratha, ‘I said you should not have spoken disrespectfully about the goddess.’

‘Silly girl,’ said Adhiratha. ‘It is early days. Look how well everything is turning out for us.’ His new job had earned them a bigger bungalow and the allowance for a couple of servants. There was only one little trouble to shade their lives – Adhiratha’s eyes often ached.

He had always had trouble with his eyes and his glasses were not a sign that he was educated or particularly literate as Dolly had presumed from looking at his photo. He had worn them since childhood.

‘Don’t keep rubbing them,’ Dolly urged and made eye-washes for him out of herbs and spices, remedies that the people in the village used when they could not afford a doctor.

Dolly woke in the night sometimes, to hear him moaning softly. She would gently massage his forehead with her thumbs till the pain ebbed away.

‘You have to see the doctor,’ she demanded and went on insisting in spite of his protests.

‘I am a driver. If this company finds out that I have problems with my sight they may sack me.’ He tried to soothe her, ‘My eyes have given trouble all my life. I know how to cope with it,’ but she would not be calmed. She felt sure his eyes were getting worse.

In the end, at her insistence, and with many misgivings, he agreed.

The company doctor gave Adhiratha painkillers and made an appointment for him to see a specialist.

Dolly had still not conceived a child by the third Durga Puja after their marriage. She was getting worried, no longer soothed by Adhiratha’s assurance that ‘it’s early days’. Her mother had been pregnant with her third child at this stage. Dolly felt ashamed to go and visit her parents these days.

‘What is the matter with you? Are you infertile or something?’ Dolly’s usually gentle mother became quite angry at the idea. And worried. Would Adhiratha’s family take revenge on her daughter, if they began to think she was infertile? There were stories of such failed brides having kerosene thrown over them then being set alight by the parents-in-law.

At this year’s Durga Puja, Dolly prostrated herself before the haughty goddess and instead of saying, ‘thank you’ said, ‘please, please, please’. She rose at last, speckled with grit from the ground, having only implored, ‘Make me a baby, make my husband’s eyes better.’

The specialist diagnosed Adhiratha’s problem as glaucoma, a build-up of fluid within the eyeball. He gave the young chauffeur drops to put in his eyes that might, over time, reduce the pressure.

‘How much time?’ asked Adhiratha.

‘One or two years. This medicine retracts the pupils, affecting your sight, so you must not drive a car for a couple of hours after application.’ Adhiratha had to get up two hours earlier each morning to get rid of the effects of the medicine in time for his day’s work and he lived in a constant state of anxiety in case he was called upon for emergency jobs, when his vision was still blurred.

‘It is preying on your mind, my husband,’ Dolly said. ‘Isn’t there another job the company can give you that does not need good sight?’ Secretly she began to think that part of the reason for her failing to conceive was because her husband was so worried and tired.

Six months later Adhiratha crashed a company car.

‘We are sorry to see you go,’ said the manager. ‘You have been an excellent driver.’

‘Is there no other job you can give me?’ pleaded Adhiratha.

The man bowed his head and looked sad. ‘If this had happened a year ago, yes, we might have found some place for you in the packing department. But last year we made a loss. We are getting rid of staff. I am so sorry, Adhiratha, but there is nothing I can offer you.’

Adhiratha was given a farewell party and a lump sum.

Dolly cried the day she and Adhiratha had to leave their bungalow in the company compound. She moved in with her parents while Adhiratha dossed down with friends and hunted for a place to live that they could afford. Because he had only been working for the company for five years, although they had been as generous as they could, the severance payment was not enough for him to rent anything better than a short-term lease of a room in the bustee.

‘It’s home, though,’ he told Dolly when she arrived to join him. ‘And knowing you, you’ll make it nice.’

Dolly cried again when she saw the sordid room.

‘I’ll get a job, don’t worry, don’t be afraid,’ Adhiratha tried to reassure her, but she could hear the fear in his voice too.

Adhiratha had no skills apart from driving and for a while worked as a taxi driver. But a smashed taxi put a stop to that.

‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ soothed Dolly. ‘We still have a little money left, and something is sure to turn up.’ By now he had to accept that his driving days were over. No longer treated by the free medical service of the company and without enough money to pay for the expensive drugs, his eyes rapidly deteriorated. He could hardly see six feet ahead of him. And what work can an almost blind man find in a city with so much unemployment?

‘Don’t be sad, darling husband,’ sobbed Dolly. ‘I have got my school cert so I should be able to get a job while you are looking for something. I might become a hotel receptionist.’ She felt quite excited at the idea and visualised herself seated behind a smart desk, wearing a uniform, and meeting all kinds of interesting people.

But when she went out in response to adverts in the Statesman she found that she was competing for humble jobs with people much more qualified than she was. Men and women who had left university with first-class degrees were clamouring to become shop assistants, bus conductors, railway clerks and company secretaries. Dolly didn’t stand a chance.

After six months the severance payment was nearly finished. Soon, not only would they have nowhere to live, they would have nothing to eat either.

‘We will have to go to the village and live with your parents,’ wept Dolly.

Adhiratha shivered at the idea. ‘They have ten other children and are trying so desperately to raise enough money for the dowries so that my two sisters can marry. If there is no work in the city there is certainly none in the village. How can we possibly inflict ourselves upon them?’ He felt sick with shame.

Next day Dolly went back to the company where she and Adhiratha had once been so happy. She went from bungalow to bungalow offering to do the washing for the families there. At the end of the day she had the promise of five households of washing.

She came home and told him, saying, ‘We will have to buy a charcoal steam iron.’

Adhiratha was aghast.

‘Suggest something else then,’ said Dolly. ‘At least I will be able to make just enough so that we have shelter and do not starve.’ She added with deepening bitterness, ‘Now I understand why Ma Durga never gave us a child. Because she knew we would not be able to afford to give it a decent life.’

Adhiratha held her tight against him, hugged and hugged her till her miserable shivering stopped.

Later he said, ‘We haven’t even got running water. How are you going to wash all these clothes?’

‘In the river. Like the other dhobis,’ said Dolly firmly.

‘Oh God.’ Adhiratha groaned and put his hands over his eyes. ‘But you don’t know anything about being a dhobi.’

‘Don’t know anything?’ she mocked. ‘Darling husband, who has been washing your clothes these last three years, since your mother stopped doing them? Have you ever complained? Weren’t your collars and cuffs always crisp with starch? Didn’t I always get the last grimy traces off them? Didn’t I starch your uniforms and dhotis with boiled rice water till they were so stiff they could have stood up on their own? How can you say I don’t know how to be a dhobi?’

‘But that was different,’ said Adhiratha. ‘In the bungalow we had hot running water from the tap. A clothesline in the garden. Electricity for the iron. Here you have none of those things.’ In the bustee room the only light was from oil lamps and lanterns. Water came from a ruptured pipe along the road.

But Dolly was undaunted. ‘There is no other way. I will manage.’

She washed endless piles of clothes, all day long, standing ankle-deep in the shallow part of the river, among a line of other dhobis. Daily at dawn she would be at the riverside wetting the garments, rubbing them with strong yellow soap, then beating them against a stone already rubbed smooth and shiny by hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of dhobi wear. From the time the sun rose until it sunk again Dolly beat the washing then laid it to dry on the riverbank. At night, carrying the vast heap of dry, clean washing on her head, she would return home. There she would prepare the evening meal for her husband and herself on a chula, a stove made in a pierced bucket that had been lined with mud and which burned the cow-dung fuel that Adhiratha collected and dried each day. Their morning meal was only rice water from the previous night’s cooking.

During the weeks that followed Adhiratha tried to help Dolly in every way he could. He struggled behind her carrying the heaps of dirty clothes. Went round the bungalows collecting the washing in a basket. Even tried to assist his wife in beating the clothes against the stones. In the end she told him, ‘It is not your dharma to be a dhobi. Try to find some work that is more suited to you.’

‘I am no good at it, you mean,’ he said humbly.

‘That is what I mean,’ she laughed.

Adhiratha found a job at last. Pulling a rickshaw.

It was Dolly’s turn to be aghast. ‘You are to become a rickshaw wallah? I am to be the wife of a rickshaw wallah?’

‘Well, I am the husband of a dhobi woman,’ he laughed. ‘We are coming down in the world. That is all.’ Then he gave her a hug and said, ‘We have still got each other. We are still young. Who knows what will turn up.’ He picked up her hand, and caressed it. It was wrinkled like the hand of a dead person from so much immersion in water.

‘We would be better off if we had never had the good period in the company compound,’ she thought. Their present situation, a home surrounded by stinking drains and a single daily meal of rice and dhall, would have been easier to bear, she thought, if she had not experienced those happy days in the leafy compound, where they ate chingri and hilsa and bathed their rice in ghee.

That year, on the first day of the Durga Puja, as Dolly passed the company shrine on her way to collect the dirty washing, she turned her head the other way. And hoped the goddess noticed and felt ashamed, for by this time Dolly and Adhiratha had been married for five years and, in spite of all her prayers, there was still no child. In fact Adhiratha had begun to say that it would be a disaster if Dolly became pregnant now.

Dolly was tempted not to offer homage to the goddess that year. She wanted to punish Durga who had given her a happy life for a very short time, so as to be able to take it away and let Dolly see what she was missing.

But all the same, after she had gone round all the houses, and her basket was full, she made her way back to the shrine.

She had gone without her meal the previous evening and bought a small milk sweet with the money she had saved. As she unwrapped this, her stomach let out a rumble of hunger. She became seized with a strong temptation to eat the sweet instead of giving it to a goddess who was never going to listen to her prayer. All the same she put the sweet down on its peepul leaf and prostrating herself, begged aloud, ‘Oh Mother Durga hear my prayer and make me a mother too.’ She did not mention Adhiratha’s eyes. Perhaps she had been presumptuous, the last four years, in asking the goddess for two favours at once.

She reached the river late because of her visit to the goddess. The other dhobis were already laying their clothes out on the rocks to dry.

Dolly waded out into the water and, wetting the first of her sheets, rubbed the harsh yellow soap over it. All afternoon, up to her thighs in water, she beat the cloth against the smooth rocks.

‘You had better hurry,’ said the other dhobis in the evening, as they folded their already dried clothes and stacked them in the baskets. ‘They will be bringing the Durga down here for immersion soon and you mustn’t still be in the water.’ Dolly had to bite back tears remembering the previous years when she had been celebrating the company puja with her husband. Now she was not even allowed to stand in the water when the goddess came.

Frantically Dolly worked but the pile was huge and the clothes filthy. By the time the sun began to set the other dhobis were leaving and she had still not finished.

She would have to take the wet washing home, ten times as heavy, to dry in the tiny apartment.

She heard the shouts. People were yelling, ‘Oi, Ma, get out of the water. The goddess is coming.’

She looked up and saw the procession approaching. Men in fresh white carrying the gigantic figure of Durga on a palanquin on their shoulders. Not Adhiratha this year. Rickshaw wallahs don’t carry the goddess.

They were coming to this part of the river to immerse the Durga.

‘Out of the water, out, out,’ they cried as they approached. To immerse the goddess in water polluted by an untouchable dhobi woman would be a terrible sacrilege.

Desperately Dolly began to gather up her pile of washing, pulling still wet sheets and saris, shirts and pajamas out of the water, hurrying because the Devi was very close.

Something bumped her knee as she scrabbled up her wet washing.

It was a hand of last year’s Durga, huge, the arms of clay long since melted away. It lay palm up, its beautiful fingers curled round something sharply gleaming. Dolly bent to take a closer look and felt amazed that the nail polish should still be intact after so long in the water, thrilled because the knuckles and finger rings were almost unblemished. She was thinking to herself, this must be a miracle, when the shining thing lying on the palm began to move as though it was alive. For a moment the light reflected off the holy hand became so bright that Dolly had to look away, dazzled.

When she could open her eyes, she bent to take a closer look and saw, cuddled among the goddess’ fingers, some creature with tinsel twisted round it. A puppy perhaps, that had got tangled in the remains of Durga’s marigold garlands.

The shouts of the approaching Durga worshippers were growing ever nearer and more furious.

Dolly was the only one still in the water but instead of hurrying, she bent, staring fascinated at what lay in the palm of last year’s goddess. The glittering thing let out a sound like the mewing cry of a cat. The hand began to twirl as the current caught it again.

Dolly’s arms were full of washing. It was only a half-dead kitten, then. Round the weighty bundle she did a namaskar of respect to the hand of Durga then turned away as the current caught the hand with its living glittering burden and started to twirl it off.

Then Dolly realised what the sparkling mewling thing was, dropped her armful of clean washing into the water and grabbed. Snatched the shining thing from out of the middle of the hand just a moment before it was carried out of reach.

She held a newborn child, still attached to its placenta and tangled up in sparkling tinsel. The hand that had prevented the baby from sinking went speeding off along the river.

Dolly stood thigh-deep in water, dazed with joy, because the goddess Durga had, after all these years, answered her prayer. Everybody knew that goddesses do not do things like ordinary people. This child had been sent to her in an unusual way, but all the same it was what she had asked for and what the goddess had given.

Grabbing up the once again filthy and now dripping washing and thrusting it into her basket, pressing the holy child against her breast and ignoring the furious outcry from the Durga worshippers, she waded out of the river and began to stagger home.

She arrived ages late. Adhiratha was home already and shocked at the sight of Dolly’s catch.

‘How are we going to feed this child?’ he demanded as Dolly began unravelling the baby from the twists of tinsel. ‘Put it back where it came from. We have hardly enough for ourselves. Wait till we get a child of our own then it will be able to drink milk from your breast and will cost us nothing.’

Dolly was furious. ‘How dare you speak in such a way of the gift of the goddess?’

‘Well, she should have provided some food for the child. How can she expect us to feed it?’ All the same he could not help creeping over and peeping curiously into the face of the little newborn baby.

‘Getting things from the gods is not like going shopping,’ Dolly ranted on. ‘You don’t just go and say “I would like two kilos of baby” as though you were buying onions. You don’t say “I want a couple of breastfuls of milk as well as a baby”. You just take what you get.’ The last of the tinsel was unravelled and then Dolly let out a scream of surprise for hanging round the little boy’s neck she had found a golden chain from which hung a disc. Taking it to the window she read the words ‘Koonty Pandava of the Hatibari of Hatipur’.

She turned to her husband, her eyes filled with amazement, and repeated the words to him. Her surprise now became touched with a tiny chill of fear which Adhiratha echoed by saying, ‘That is some other woman’s child.’

‘It is not. It is mine,’ cried Dolly hugging the baby against her body, and wishing the disc had been washed away in the water.

As she carried the new child to the water spurt, she felt terribly tempted to sell the piece of gold and then pretend it had never existed. She felt a scald of conflict. Without the disc the baby would have no identity but the one that she and Adhiratha gave it. Without that disc she and her husband were the baby’s parents. But on the other hand this piece of gold and the information it gave were the baby’s only possessions. She had no right to take them from him and one day the little child might need to know who he was.

She shook her head and tried to dash away the worrying thoughts that the disc aroused in her as she rubbed the mud from the baby’s body. When she got back into the room with the now spotless baby, Adhiratha was rushing round, hunting for something. He looked up, laughing, at the sight of her holding the child against her chest. The baby was making little whimpering sounds and nuzzling its lips into Dolly’s choli.

‘What have you lost?’ asked Dolly. The desperation of the baby was troubling her.

Triumphantly he held out his hands. ‘I knew I had some paise hidden in this pocket. I’ll go out now and buy some milk for her.’

‘For him,’ laughed Dolly. Happy tears began to run down her cheeks because she knew everything would be all right from now on. Holding the now howling baby in one arm, she reached up and kissed Adhiratha.

‘You don’t know how much I love you,’ she said. ‘You just don’t.’

‘I won’t be long,’ he said as he rushed out. ‘I expect there will be some left over at the khatal.’

The cattle stall in the centre of their area was owned by the landlord and his tenants bought milk for their households and businesses from there as well as using the dung for fuel.

Dolly stood at the open door looking down into the darkness of the stairway, till she heard at last the sound of his footsteps receding.

The baby went on crying for a little while and then, exhausted, fell asleep.

Dolly waited, thinking, ‘He is being a very long time. Perhaps there was no milk left at the khatal. Perhaps he has had to go to the house of the Gwala.’

An hour later she was still waiting. The baby woke up again and once more began crying. Where could Adhiratha be?

After another hour, in which Dolly started to panic and the baby’s desperation was unendurable, she decided the only hope was to go from room to room, and hut to hut begging milk from someone.

Adhiratha never came back. He was hit by a lorry and died on the spot. It was two days of numbing dread and misery before Dolly found out.