Author - Naval Langa
FOR SOME PEOPLE, their day starts with morning music, and for some with a
fixed good smile from their spouses. For me, a day starts with one big thrust
on my cabin door and the entry of a large-sized monkey-shaped man, my peon
Bora.
“Ma’am, here is your coffee.”
Again a thrust on the door, and he goes out. On
seeing him I always remember what Aristotle had written: ‘the man is a social
animal’. I am sure he would have written the word animal in bold letters.
I have also read that animals do not smile.
I have no idea about other creations of God whether
they smile or not. But I am ready to say on oath that Bora has never smiled,
not even on his wedding day. This is only half of the details about him.
Another half you would immediately get by just looking at his square face,
uncombed hair, and a permanent bidi in his mouth
We have two different species of animals in our
office. Another one is Bhima. He is from the world of sophistication. He is
lighter than the light. You can measure his lightness right from his feet.
Light slippers in feet, light colour pyjama and kurta, and finally
the lightweight head. But whenever you look at him he would be smiling, no
reasons needed.
“Would you like a biscuit with tea Ma’am?”
And it would fetch him a ten-rupee note. A packet
of biscuit costs seven rupees. I take biscuits daily, my doctor has told me so
for maintaining a good level of sugar in my blood. I remember everything that
my doctors tell me. But I do not remember the day when Bhima had given me three
Rupees back. After putting the packet on my table he would just stand at the
door and would do his all-time favourite act: smiling.
At home, I would talk as less as possible about my office. But whenever Vijay, my dear dear husband, refers to his staff, it would prompt me to stand up on a sofa and clean my throat. “Let… let me introduce my staff.”
I would copy the movements of my entire staff. One-by-one. Miming of the office ranges from slightly comic to heavily funny—comic when I talk about the personal secretary, Elena, and funny when I talk about the habits of my peons. The most terrible is my local manager’s character, Mr Prakash. He is a thin primitive ape in a suit, wearing coloured specs even in darkness.
On Vijay’s ‘once more’ I would copy all the functions of Mr Prakash’s eyeballs, which
always keep touring around the regions of Elena’s table. There are several
other versions of his introduction available from our staff. But the most
authentic is like this. He has married twice. The first wife always kept his credit
cards overdrawn, arranged big parties, and finally eloped with her
ex-boyfriend, an owner of a chocolate factory. The second is wealthy, seven
years older than him and she, the wealthy second wife, calls him ‘puppy’.
Vijay would keep thumping sofa-sides with bursting pleasure and clap in
between. “O my God. Please, Julia, have an interval, please. Now I will
recognise anyone of your colleagues at first sight.”
This is how my staff provides free of cost entertainment for us.
*************
TODAY BHIMA WAS collecting his monthly loans. He borrows from all those who were addicted to giving him money. Borrowing is his time-bound habit, always starting from the twenty-fifth of every month. There are fifteen staff members in my office, including the ‘puppy’. But Bhima would get money only from four persons. And he is a man of confidence, too. He would borrow from me only after exhausting the other three sources.
He knows that I would never say no. He
would look at my purse and smile incessantly, and I would assume that the date
must be twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
But today was a different story. He demanded a big amount from the three
other lenders and had already collected more than Rupees two thousand. He was
not smiling today. Strange.
“Sir, my mother is ill. I need five thousand.” He told everyone.
The day was to end and Bhima had not yet contacted me. I had kept the
delivery ready for him. I knew certain facts about his mother, too. And at
last, he came in and looked straight at my purse. He had confidence. He might
have hoped, as big as Rupees three thousand in his eyes, too.
“Ma’am, my mother is ill. Please give me three thousand. I will repay after
getting a loan from Provident Fund. Please, ma’am.”
“You just get out of my cabin.” I delivered all that I had kept ready
inside of my skull. It was, perhaps, a big blow for Bhima and a wonder for the
rest of my staff members. They had never seen me in an angry mood.
************
VIJAY IS READER of the moods. He would have caught the filaments of distress
on my face. On that evening, we were sitting on a good chair of a good restaurant in a
very good surrounding.
It was on Vijay’s insistence: the dinner.
A waiter in a red coat, which they all put on even on hot summer days,
first stood beside me, vertical as a new recruit in the army. With
pole-straight limbs and non-stop smiling, he looked like a red chocolate-bar
melting from its top.
In restaurants, Vijay always followed a logical sequence. First, he would check the menu, searching for the articles that would not act as the rebels in our stomachs; and then he would dictate a foot-long order admiring the waiter’s dress, telling him to apply a greater portion of his energy for speedy execution of the order.
The sequence followed o that evening, too. The melting
chocolate-bar, the waiter, wrote down the foot-long order.
“Julia, I am to tell you one thing.”
“Don’t tell me that you have won the lottery.”
“No. I am serious.”
Then the words he spoke, the information he revealed, the circumstances he
narrated for not telling me about the issue and his pleading for an
unconditional apology for the matter he kept secret till the day: this
everything went into my head and heart like fireballs.
I straightaway left the table, leaving everything as it was, and ran out of the restaurant. I thrust open the car door and sat inside, sobbing, almost crying, and repenting for believing that I was the happiest woman in the world and my husband never kept anything secret from me.
It was the greatest defeat
for me. I felt as if the land under my feet had been snatched, the land on
which I stood firm till the date. I was still unable to believe what he had
said. But it was a fact. And the fact was a bombshell: before we met, Vijay was
married. He had taken a divorce.
“Julia, I… I am…”
“Don’t touch me.”
The road up to home was dead silent. The night was sleepless for me. I did
not care whether he was sleeping or awake. He was on the drawing-room sofa till
morning.
***********
NEXT DAY: the coffee is on my table. I do not remember whether Bora has thrust
the door or not. Bhima is absent. His Provident Fund loan application is on my
table. I sign it immediately for sending it to our head office.
“I will be back within an hour,” I tell Elena who looks after my work in my
absence.
I know where Bhima lives with his family.
I drive out of the city. A giant-sized ditch, a bucket for dumping the garbage is a dividing range between the main city and the area where Bhima and people like him live.
There comes a polluted water pond. It is full of dirty
water as if the whole city had vomited and the liquid is gathered therein. My
car dribbles through the heaps of garbage, transported from the city, and then
runs on a straight road that looks like a long swollen bruise, or a mark of a
flog on the back of the land.
On seeing my car, Bhima comes running. He gets me sitting in a room from
where his wife is visible, sleeping on a cot.
“Bhima, you may not be remembering, you might not have seen me on that day,
but I was the only person from our office to visit your home on the day your
mother died. It was a rainy day and I sat among women.”
“You know ma’am…”
“It’s okay. Take these three thousand and don’t worry about paying it
soon.”
“Ma’am, I lied because I needed money for my wife’s illness, I mean the
delivery. Everyone would have laughed at me, as this is our fourth child. So I
told everyone in the office that my mother was ill.” His eyes are tearful and
so are mine.
He makes tea. He gives me biscuits and smiles, too.
Bhima was a small liar. He lied only for a small gain, borrowing money for
a week. He is not a cheater. There are people who cheat; and cheat on a great
scale. There are cheaters, who inflict lifelong wounds on others.
THE END
[Image courtesy Julia Margaret Cameron,
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