Shining Hero

At midday a lad rushed in and said the police were coming. The students were energised in a moment. Hotness and tummy upsets forgotten, they ran out to join the villagers who were already waiting with their bows and arrows. There was an air of excitement and expectation, as though having won once they could not fail to do so a second time.

‘Let them come,’ cried the villagers. ‘This time we will not kill just one but twenty.’

For the first time the students became a little alarmed, and urged, ‘No killing. Definitely no more killing.’ But the men were eager, like hunters who had sighted a plump herd of sambar. They pranced around, arrows at the string, waiting, ready, fearless. They were expert bowmen for the only meat they could afford to eat was what they shot, the occasional deer or monkey. Usually wild birds and even mongeese.

In the midday silence the sound of the approaching police cars grew and soon even the hopeful hunters realised that this was not just a jeep and a handful of constables, but a whole retinue of armoured vehicles. Even they realised that bows and arrows would not work this time. ‘Bring out the cows. Block the road with them,’ went round the call. ‘The policemen are Hindus. They will not hurt the cows.’ Now the police procession could be seen as a cloud of dust approaching like a slow grey ball. Putting their bows aside, men went running to the stalls and byres. Women dashed for their milking cows. Children emerged from huts hauling little calves. Field workers unhitched their bullocks and by the time the police arrived the road to Naxalbari was blocked with cattle.

The police rounded the corner. The first vehicle, a large armoured lorry, paused briefly. The villagers, watching from behind their cattle herd, began to feel smug and look triumphant. There came a shouted order from the rear of the police column and with a clatter of rifle fire, the first vehicle plunged into the cattle herd. There followed dull thuds as the jeeps and lorries banged against cows. The cows began rushing, swerving, falling, howling, galloping tail high, squirting shit, until they burst the thorn fences and escaped into the surrounding paddy fields and stands of maize.

There fell a small shocked silence from the watching villagers then the cry went up, ‘The women then. They will never dare to shoot women.’ Wives, mothers, daughters, grannies, urged by the men, came rushing to fill the gap left by the fleeing cattle. Shivarani thrust her way through the women till she got to the front and stood there. The sight of her, tall and fearless at their head, filled the women with greater courage and determination. They pressed around Shivarani, defying the oncoming police lorries that rumbled towards them. When the first lorry halted, policemen leant from it and pointed weapons at the women. ‘Stop this,’ yelled Shivarani. ‘Don’t kill women. What are you thinking of?’

There came the crack of a shot and Shivarani staggered as she felt pain pierce her shoulder. There followed a hail of bullets. In agony, Shivarani ducked and dodged as behind her she heard people screaming. She felt her strength going but forced herself to stay standing so that she could shield the bodies of the smaller women at her back. The pain was terrible but she forced her body to stay upright. She could hear a young girl crying. The women were scrambling to get away, and the police were still firing.

Then something came between Shivarani and the steady and menacing approach of the police. Behind, above, ahead she could hear the sound of shooting and screaming, could feel the desperate struggling of people trying to escape as Bhima put himself between her and the bullets. His body gave a heave as a bullet struck it, and then he crashed backwards, knocking her to the ground and falling on top of her. She felt warm fluid – Bhima’s blood – pour between her thighs.

The shooting stopped. The silence that followed was broken by screaming from the injured and the sobbing of women.

Koonty had joined a traditional Hindu joint family consisting of Pandu’s father, Kuru Dadoo, and his younger son known as DR Uncle. There was also DR’s wife, Gadhari, and their three sons.

Pandu told Koonty, ‘It is OK for you to laugh and run even when my father is there. He is very modern and won’t think you are being disrespectful.’ And when she still seemed sad, he told her, ‘Perhaps you don’t like to live in a joint family situation. Would you like us to go somewhere else? To a house of our own?’ The idea filled him with dismay, but he felt ready to do anything to make Koonty happy. She shook her head. It was not that. ‘What is it then? What is it? What is it?’ But he could not discover.

Kuru Dadoo was delighted that Koonty had joined his household and felt sure that he would be able to make her happy, even when her own husband could not. He had known her since she was little and continued to pinch her cheeks or pop sweetmeats into her mouth as though she was still a little girl. ‘What is the matter with my little Koonty?’ he would laugh. ‘Why is she looking so sad?’ He would pluck a flower from the hibiscus bush and hand it to her saying, ‘For your hair, my pretty little daughter.’ He had two sons and three grandsons. This was his first little girl and he was making the most of her. Gadhari watched with envy for Kuru Dadoo had never popped a dudh peda into her mouth. He had never given Gadhari flowers for her hair.

Koonty’s longing for the baby to be rescued from the river was tinged with fear because they would see the gold chain round its neck and discover her shameful secret. But days, then weeks, passed and this did not happen, and a few months later she became pregnant. To the relief of her family, her sadness lifted. ‘If this baby is a little girl,’ she thought, ‘I will know that the goddess has forgiven me. It will mean that Durga rescued my baby from the river and is giving her back to me in a miraculous way. I will not be the killer of my baby after all if this one is a little girl.’ She stopped waiting for the baby lost in the river to be brought back to her because the goddess had replaced it in her womb. She decided to call her daughter ‘Shobita’ because that means ‘Sun’, for this baby was really the child of the Sun God, and not Pandu’s at all.

When Koonty’s baby was born everyone laughed because it was a boy and there were three in the household already but then, as Kuru Dadoo pointed out, ‘You can never get too many boys.’ But Koonty’s dark mood returned. ‘Postnatal depression,’ Meena Gupta tried to console Pandu. ‘She will get over it, don’t worry,’ but Pandu was not convinced. In the end, to take his mind off his young wife’s gloom, Pandu, indulging in a lifelong dream, sold the Hatibari chandelier, took the money and travelled to South India, where he bought twelve pure-bred Jersey cows.

The villagers arrived in their hundreds to see the gold-haired, dark-eyed beauties being unloaded from the lorries. They laughed aloud at the sight of the wide, fair brows and hornless heads. They bent and giggled in wonder at the vastness of their bouncing udders.

‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful,’ was all Pandu seemed able to say, overcome with awe at the gracious appearance and prospective vast milk yields. ‘We must all work hard to make sure these pretty creatures do not suffer in our heat.’

Ice, prepared in the fridge, was crushed, poured into hot-water bottles and tied on the heads of the twelve new Jerseys. They stood in a mournful row at the shady end of their byre, looking silly under their ice-water bottle hats, water trickling down their eyelashes, their tails whacking exhaustedly at the attacks of fierce flies that were quite new to them. The darjee was called and set to work on his pedal Singer, stitching hessian coats for the cows to stop the flies from pestering them and Pandu had them dressed up till they looked like European women in frocks and hats.

Kuru Dadoo was shocked by his son’s new enthusiasm. ‘A zamindar should be out there, shooting tigers and sticking pigs, not spending his day in the dairy like some gwala.’

‘They are so beautiful, Papa. Look how they have dark round their eyes as if they have been painted with kajal. And don’t you admire their golden colour?’

Kuru Dadoo snorted with scorn. ‘If you wish for a beautiful golden creature with painted eyes why not go to Free School Street and find yourself a Nepali prostitute like I used to do.’

‘I prefer the local girls. And these cows are like pets.’

‘If you wish to keep pretty creatures you should go for cheetahs. My father had a hunting pair of great beauty and danger. Clever also. He never had such hunting luck when he was only accompanied with dogs. Shall I contact the zoo and see if they can obtain some for you?’

Gadhari was furious when she found out about the chandelier. ‘It was family property and worth a fortune. Why did you let him do it? You should take legal action against him,’ she raged at her husband. But DR Uncle, whose greatest joy in life was poetry, only smiled at his wife’s outburst, and said, ‘I’m sure it will be better cared for in its new home.’

A new-rich Parsee, called ‘Sodawaterbottleopenerwallah’ after the gadget he had so successfully marketed, had bought the chandelier. It now hung, pristine and resplendent in a brand new concrete and marble house in Alipore. No longer did sparrows perch and shit on its hand-cut Venetian pendants. No longer did pendants fall like leaves to be gathered up by the sweeper in the morning. No longer did it dangle sideways like a drunk going home from the foreign liquor shop.

The village gwala turned up at the Hatibari to give Pandu advice on how to care for the new cows and use the milk. ‘You do not know how to make ghee, Sahib, so I will show you. First we make kheer, then we turn that into butter, then we turn that into purest ghee,’ he said and began a demonstration on the Hatibari stove that took such hours that the cook was unable to prepare the midday meal.

The gwala brought milk from his own herd of desi cows and Pandu was forced to watch while the gwala and his daughter boiled it, stirring it till it was thick as heavy cream, and clotted with skin round the sides.

‘Surely that’s enough,’ pleaded Pandu. But the old man was merciless. He had known Pandu as a little boy and was not the least in awe of him. ‘We go on till the milk is solid,’ he said. It happened at last and the crusty lump that had once been twenty litres of fresh milk was crushed on the spice grinding stone till it separated into butter.

‘But I have read of butter being made in Western countries and it is not done like this at all,’ said Pandu. ‘There they take cream and beat it till it separates from its buttermilk. It is a much quicker process than this.’

The gwala roared with scoffing laughter. ‘If we made butter by such careless techniques in this hot country our butter would be left with water in it and go bad in no time. Now we cook this butter, always stirring, slowly slowly, into purest golden ghee.’ This took another hour of stirring. ‘Now see how the solid has fallen to the bottom, Sahib, and on top the butter oil is gold and clear. We pour this off carefully and there we are.’

‘Now I show you how to make channa,’ he said, just when Pandu thought he was to be let off the hook. ‘After that you can get cook to make it into all Bengal sweets, rossogulla, Lady Kenny, Gulab jaman and so on and also channa. We heat up the milk then curdle with alum.’ Pandu remembered alum. His father had used it to stifle the bleeding of razor nicks.

The boiling milk swished into two parts almost at once, as the alum was poured in and the old man brandished a soft firm lump of snow-white curd. ‘Now we grind again then mix with a little soojee. Roll in little balls then boil in syrup flavoured with cardamom pods till the jamans rise to the surface …’

‘I am tired,’ said Pandu. ‘I never intended to become a sweet maker.’

Ignoring him the old man went on, ‘Or we fry this with some of the ghee, rosewater, cardamom pods and jaggery till it goes thick and stiff and press it into moulds till we have shandesh …’

Pandu groaned.

‘As a small boy you were somewhat lazy and I see this has still not altered,’ said the gwala sternly. ‘Now we come to the feeding and the milking of the animals.’ He told Pandu that the animals must have hot feeds each evening of rice bran boiled with jaggery and that the cows would not let down their milk unless the calves were allowed first suck.

‘You keep a little muzzle on her baby during the day and at milking time you let baby have a little suck. Then mummy lets down milk and you give a pull. After a while mummy will find out it is your fingers and not baby taking the milk and she will pull it up again. Then you let baby have another, and so on.’

Pandu looked bemused, ‘But in the West they take the calves away from the cows at birth.’

The old man looked as though he was going to cry. ‘This is a terrible cruel thing. These poor Billaty cows. How much they must suffer. But then how do these foolish Billaty people get milk?’

Pandu shrugged. ‘I don’t know how, but they do.’

The old man went off at last, bemused and mumbling at the extraordinary ways of foreign cows, the cruel ways of foreign people and the terrible ignorance of the zamindar.

Pandu was thrilled with his new son, and when Koonty breastfed her child, Pandu would sit at her side, stroke her hair and murmur, ‘You two are the joys of my life,’ and think that he was the happiest man in the world. He would come each evening to watch with delight as Boodi Ayah bathed the new baby and pressed whiskery kisses on his body. ‘He is a big boy even now and when he is a man he will be magnificent like his Daddy,’ Boodi Ayah told Pandu. She was a hill tribe woman from Bihar with limbs like charcoal sticks that looked very black against the pure white of her short blouse and dhoti that exposed her bandy legs and large cracked feet.

After Adhiratha died Dolly wrote a letter to her parents, telling them what had happened to her and explaining about Karna. After a very long time her father sent her back a letter, written by the local scribe, in which he said that she should only come back to them if there was absolutely no other way she could survive. ‘For you are a widow and in this village such a person would, a generation ago, have been expected to perform suttee and even nowadays her being alive gives a certain offence in the villages. But as for this foundling child, we have barely enough food for our own stomachs and certainly not enough to feed another woman’s brat.’ He added, ‘I am speaking for myself and not your mother.’

Dolly cried when she read this letter, then she tore it up.

In the months that followed she would wake in the morning and sometimes her mind would trick her into thinking that Adhiratha was still there. She would reach out for him, her hand feeling around in the dark and it would be long moments before she would be plunged back into the sadness. There were happy nights when she dreamt that he was still alive so that during the day she would long for sleep, where she could find him. She tried for a while to continue washing clothes, but the money was not enough and the day came when she could no longer afford the room.

It was May and very hot the day she stepped out of the room where she and Adhiratha had lived together. She stood in the road, baby Karna in her arms, and did not know what to do next, or where to go. And as she hesitated, dazzled with the heat, the brightness and the hopelessness of everything, the realisation came upon her that even her work as a dhobi could not continue, for now she lacked anywhere to keep or iron the clothes. She had no income or home.

Holding everything she owned, including the precious baby, she began to walk along the pavement, not going anywhere, but not knowing where to stop. She walked like this for two hours until at last she sank down on the spit- and urine-spotted pavement because she was so tired and because the baby had started crying. She squatted in the dust with her child across her knees, while people going past jostled against her or stepped over her, as though already she had ceased to be part of the human race.

In the weeks and months that followed she lived on that piece of pavement, eking out the little money she had left from her dhobi work to buy the cheapest food and wondering what she would do when it was finished. At night she slept on the hard ground with only her straw mat under her, and a bedsheet wrapped round her and Karna to keep them from the mosquitoes. Karna was the only thing that made her life worth living. If it had not been for him she would have killed herself, thrown herself under one of the new underground trains, for there did not seem anything else in her life worth staying alive for. Often during those sad months she would take out the little golden disc on which was written what she had decided was the name of Karna’s mother. At first she had been tempted to take the baby back to this woman called Koonty of Hatibari, giving Karna back the life that was his right. Then, with Karna’s life ensured she would do away with her own. But a woman who has thrown a baby away once might do it again. In the end Dolly decided that the baby would be better off with her, in spite of the poverty, than being sent to a woman who did not love it.

When Karna was four months old, a charitable organisation that specialised in getting work for pavement people found Dolly a place as a live-in maid. Dolly was given a small room in the compound where she and Karna slept, but during the day she was forced to leave the baby alone. Dolly’s new employers did not allow children in their flat. ‘You are lucky that we are giving you this chance of a job but we can easily take on someone else without children if you do not want it,’ the wife said.

So whenever she had a little gap in her work during her fifteen-hour day, Dolly would race across the yard to feed the baby. As Dolly washed the cement floors with a piece of hessian, rubbed the utensils with charcoal or swept the beds with a short straw broom, her mind was always on her little boy. She would worry about him a thousand times as she scoured the dishes with coconut string, scrubbed the saucepans with sand in a tin bowl of cold water, or washed the floors with disinfectant. The moment her work was done she would run as though the goddess Kali was after her, to where her baby lay weeping in his cradle and only feel safe when she had him hugged tight inside her arms. And then, even though she was so tired that her legs shook, she would light her cow dung brazier, heat up water, and give her little boy his bath. It troubled her that the child was left so much alone, but at least she was earning a little money, they had a roof over their heads and as he grew older she would be able to give him decent food. Karna grew older, learnt to sit and then to walk. Dolly did everything she could to keep the toddler safe while she was out, but he was forever getting up to mischief and the room was not designed for a baby. Once Karna dragged a stool to the window, climbed up, fell out and had to be retrieved screaming and bleeding from the road. Another time he managed to find matches and nearly set their bedding alight. The final straw came when Dolly rushed in at midday to give him his meal and found the door open and the room empty. It was two hours before she found Karna toddling along on the main road. She seized him from the path of a lorry in the nick of time and sat sobbing, hugging and shivering, while nine-month-old Karna, thrilled to be back in his mother’s arms, beamed and prattled triumphantly. It was half an hour before Dolly could find the strength to get up and go back to her employers, carrying her exuberant child.

Her mistress was waiting on the stairs, her expression thunderous. ‘You are incapable of even looking after that single child, let alone performing domestic duties at the same time. Every day there is some new reason for you to abandon your work,’ she shouted. ‘And today, when my husband came home there was no midday meal for him. Now he has returned to his office with an empty stomach and a great anger. Things have gone too far. I do not want you in my service. I will pay you what I owe and you must be out of that room by tonight, because I have another maid coming already.’ Dolly threw herself at the woman’s feet, wept, begged, promised, but it was no good.

‘You have made all these promises so many times already and you have never been able to keep them. It is the fault of that child. He is more trouble than three children put together and as long as you are burdened with him you will never find anyone to employ you.’ Baby Karna beamed and chuckled as though he was being complimented. Just having his mother holding him was all he ever wanted and if it meant that some woman shouted at them at the same time, what did it matter?

That night Dolly and Karna were back on the pavement again. In a way she felt relieved, for now, although they were poor once more, she could keep her child with her all the time. She became a rubbish-heap scavenger, specialising in flowers discarded from women’s hair or from thrown away garlands that had been used for honouring gods or guests. She would also find overblown blooms that gardeners had discarded, or flower arrangements that householders had considered past their prime. There were usually a few blooms that could be salvaged from any bunch or garland, no matter how wilted and damaged they at first might seem. Dolly would sort through her finds and roll the good ones into a moistened piece of cloth, to be taken home later and woven into new garlands, a little more bedraggled than the originals, but cheaper.

Dolly scavenged among men, women, children, pye dogs, crows, cows, all making a living out of the filth of the rubbish heaps. There were people who collected string, carefully garnering the lengths then rolling them into tidy balls. Others worked with old tins, others with pieces of cloth, others gathered the tinsel from garlands. There were people searching for tin, for plastic, for paper. And there were the really desperate who relied on the heaps for nourishment, fighting with the crows, dogs and rats to eat some rotten discarded end of a banana or samosa. There would be a sudden scramble because a green coconut shell had been unearthed with a little flesh still adhering or someone had come upon a thrown out bread loaf. The little desi cows seemed to be the only creatures to thrive upon the heaps. They were plump and had shining coats as though old newspapers, in which greasy food had been wrapped, provided a better diet than all the care and scientific feeding that Arjuna’s father gave to his pure-bred Jersey herd. Pandu’s Jerseys would never look as fit at the little cows of Cal. The cows were rented from their owners by people in the bustees, who fed and milked them and used their dung for fuel. They were let loose all day to forage on the rubbish heaps or among the shops where shopkeepers and passers-by would give them fruit or a sweetmeat. In the evening the animals returned to the bustee for hot bran and jaggery.

The rubbish heaps, breathing out powerful odours of rot and gas, were cleared away a couple of times a year. The raw rubbish was carted in lorries to the wet lands on the outskirts of the town and there dumped on damp land where it acted as a fertiliser for fields of vegetables. Among the hectares and hectares of still stinking debris grew the largest whitest cauliflowers, enormous aubergines, cabbages nearly two feet wide and the best ladies’ fingers in the whole of Bengal.

A new British Deputy Commissioner found one such stinking heap toppling near the High Commission and contacted the council, complaining of the health hazard, the smell and the flies and requested it be removed regularly, but was told there were insufficient funds. In the end he offered to pay for it himself, but this generous offer was greeted with fury by members of the ragpickers’ union. They marched in vast and tattered numbers round and round the residency shouting that they were about to be deprived of their living until he was forced to withdraw his offer and had to continue to live in the proximity of the heap. Sometimes these heaps would grow to ten, fifteen feet high then suddenly topple. Several ragpickers had been killed or badly injured by being buried under a collapsing heap of rubbish.