She Will Build Him a City (28 page)

They get up, Kalyani holds Ma’s shoulder as they walk. Baba clutches the plastic bag – which carries all the reports – as if it were a living thing. As if all the incomprehensible letters and words typed on those sheets that confirm the disease also spell out, if rearranged, the secret to its cure which will heal his daughter, his eldest child and the one he, secretly, loves the most.

~

Baba gets his rickshaw to the hospital, today he will drive them home.

Ma holds her close, one arm around her, just like when she is a little girl in the village. Baba drives cautiously, skirting the bumps and potholes on the street.

‘You drop me off and you both go to work,’ says Kalyani. ‘I will take my medicine. Anyway, I will sleep most of the time.’

‘Shut up,’ says Ma, ‘if I don’t go to work today, nothing will happen. I have told Didi that I need to take you to the doctor.’

Baba sees a fruit cart by the side of the road and pulls over. He buys two apples and two bananas, almost half a day’s earnings.

As he walks back to the rickshaw, he wants to think only of his daughter. How she has become so thin he can see her ribs through her blouse. He wants to think of what he can do to help her recover. He wants to think of what he can do to save her because she is his baby, his firstborn, and although, in the village, everyone says it would have been better if he’d had a son, he falls in love with her the first time he holds her in his arms. He wants to think of how she pulls through when she is a child, every time she is struck by disease. Through malaria, typhoid, so many bouts of high fever that he has lost count. Once, everyone gives up on her, when she is eight years nine years old, but she recovers. And this when he or his wife don’t pray as much as the others. In fact, he doesn’t tell anyone but he doesn’t quite believe that prayers make a difference. So it must be something inside his Kalyani that keeps guiding her to safety, that makes her the only one in the family to finish school, all twelve classes, that makes her read and write, even English. He is proud of her and he wants to think of that pride as he drives her home.

But all what enters his head, above the noise of traffic, the creak of his rickshaw’s wheels, the jangle of its chain, the laboured breathing of his daughter, is the thought of money.

All the money they have saved since they moved to New City.

About Rs 45,000, accumulated rupee by rupee, month by month, from the earnings of all five. Even from Pinki, his youngest, who should not be earning. Some of the money he keeps in a box under the bed, the balance he has kept with the rickshaw owner, tells him that he will take it when he goes to his village.

He has big plans for these savings: to add to them each month; to use them for, first Kalyani’s and then Pinki’s marriage; to move to a two-room house; to buy a TV, because he doesn’t like that on some evenings his wife and children have to stand outside their neighbour’s door to watch TV. He wants to save more so that he can buy some land in his village because that’s where they will return to when they are old, when the three children have married and left to live in their own homes, he will need to go back to the village because that’s where home is, under the bright sky, not in the shadows of this little house in New City.

But now Kalyani cannot work, for at least a year, that’s 7,000, 8,000 gone every month. Doctor says six to nine months but she will need at least three more to recover fully. There will be more tests. The medicine he can get for free thanks to the slip Doctor has given him. He needs to show that at the TB centre every time he needs to pick up fresh stocks of the pills. But he has to buy fruits and eggs and fish.

He and Ma don’t have to eat fruit, they don’t have TB. Even Bhai, he is an adult now, he will understand. But Pinki is a child, how will they keep her away from the fruit? Maybe once a week he will get some for her, that much he can afford. But that is only if all goes well, if Kalyani is cured in six months.

What if she is not?

What if she has the kind of TB, which, Doctor says, takes two, even two-and-a-half years? Then there is also a kind of TB that doesn’t get cured. He knows three people in his village who died of TB but, no, he will not think of that. They were all old, older than him, much older than Kalyani.

His daughter cannot die.

~

Baba’s off on his rickshaw, Ma goes to take a bath, Kalyani sneaks out of the house to go to the local phone booth and calls up the hospital she is supposed to join in a few days.

The operator keeps her on hold for more than ten minutes and then, after two wrong connections, puts her through to the human resources woman who interviewed her and offered her the job.

Kalyani tells her she is ill, she needs to take medical leave. She knows what the answer will be.

‘How long?’ asks the HR woman.

Kalyani knows she cannot say six months, that’s too long.

‘At least a month,’ she says, ‘or two.’

‘I am sorry, Kalyani,’ says the HR woman, firm but polite. ‘You haven’t even joined us so you don’t get any leave, but let me tell you something. Please get in touch with me once you are well and then check if there is a vacancy. All the best, you take care of yourself.’

She doesn’t ask Kalyani about her illness.

On her way back, Kalyani needs to sit down at the bus stop to stop her feet from flowing away from her body like water.

~

That evening, Kalyani is the first one to have dinner. Alone, in a corner. Egg curry, some rice, a slice of fish. And an apple, later.

Pinki watches her eat.

‘I don’t need both eggs and fish, Ma, either will do,’ says Kalyani.

‘That’s fine,’ says Ma, ‘we have both today and I made this for all of us. Pinki, come and help me, let your sister eat.’

Kalyani knows, however, that from tomorrow, this special dinner will be only for her. They cannot afford this every day, she has done the arithmetic.

~

That night, after they have all had dinner, Ma says, ‘Do not tell anyone about this, do not tell anyone that Kalyani has TB. All of them will tell us to stop working and if word gets around, no one will hire us. Pinki takes care of a child, I wash dishes, they will not want us around.’

‘Will I also fall ill, Ma?’asks Pinki.

‘No, no,’ says Ma, ‘we will keep the window open, we will let air and sunlight come in.’

Kalyani hears all this.

~

Kalyani’s eyes are closed but she isn’t sleeping, her back is turned towards her family as she faces the wall. She knows she will become, if she hasn’t already, a burden on her family, a burden that each one will have to carry and because of its weight, she knows, they will stumble and fall. That’s why the least she can do is not to let them know that she has heard what Ma has said. She will also not tell them that she has a secret of her own.

~

That she first spits blood when she is in Little House, that she wakes up with the chills next to Orphan, she suspects she has TB, she checks and the nurses’ handbook confirms this so that’s why she leaves Little House because she doesn’t want Orphan to catch the disease. Has she done the right thing? She is not sure. Because Orphan leaves Little House – that wasn’t part of any of her plans – and now no one knows where he is, so it doesn’t really help, does it? By not revealing her condition early, has she infected others in her home already? Has she made matters worse for herself? Well, no one in the house has any symptoms yet. Should she have told Doctor this morning that she has had symptoms for a while? How would that have helped? She is not sure. She isn’t the kind who keeps secrets inside her because these weigh her down, because she craves lightness.

So why is this happening to her? This web of lies and half-truths, these secrets, this illness that threatens to consume her. She hears everyone settling down to sleep, Baba switch the lights off, and she cannot hold it any more so she lets the tears flow, she coughs to cover her crying.

WOMAN

Patrick White

You say you have no interest in what I read but I need to tell you about a woman named Theodora Goodman because, I think, we have a lot to learn from her. Both you and I. She is the central character in
The Aunt’s Story
by Patrick White, one the three books they gave me as a farewell gift because White was awarded the Nobel Prize the year you were born. The book is in three parts and when it opens, Theodora is as old as I am when your father dies, as young as you are today, give or take a few years.

I will read some lines to give you a sense of how the book sounds.

~

She thought of the narrowness of the limits within which a human soul may speak and be understood by its nearest of mental kin, of how soon it reaches that solitary land of the individual experience, in which no fellow footfall is ever heard.

~

Theodora lives in Moreton Bay, in Australia, and we meet her the morning her mother has passed away. The coffin –
the shiny box that contained a waxwork
– is in the room which was her mother’s bedroom. Theodora waits for her sister, her very beautiful sister, Fanny, and Fanny’s husband, Frank, to come down from Sydney for the funeral.

Once upon a time when Theodora is in school, she and Frank are attracted to each other but nothing comes of it except a few awkward moments of tenderness. Theodora, who has taken care of her mother all these years, realises that she is free now but she doesn’t know what to do with this freedom. She cannot even cry like her sister Fanny. For Fanny, emotions were either black or white.
For Theodora, who was less certain, the white of love was sometimes smudged by hate. So she could not mourn.

~

Fanny has three children, two boys and a girl. The girl’s name is Lou, Theodora loves Lou. As the adults talk, the children play with a strange toy called ‘filigree ball’ that Theodora’s mother, their grandma, brought from India. Indians, Theodora tells them, fill this hollow brass ball with fire and roll it downhill.

Why do they do it, Aunt Theo, Lou asks Theodora who replies that she doesn’t know.

‘I have no idea
,’ she says. ‘
I have forgotten. Or perhaps I never knew.’

~

As she waits for the funeral, we get to know about Theodora’s childhood, her growing up in a house called Meroe which has deeply affected her. She loves – and she remembers – its trees, its rose garden from where, every morning,
roselight
enters her room and colours the wall. There’s a creek near the house which dries to white mud in the summer. Meroe is where she first meets Frank, Meroe is from where she goes to school and where she meets a girl called Violet Adams and they become the best of friends. For Theodora, Meroe is where
the pulse of existence quickened, where she ran into the receiving sun
.

Meroe is where her father dies.

~

After her mother’s death, Theodora moves to Paris where she checks into a hotel and runs into a cast of characters so strange it’s hard to know who is real, who is not. They have funny names, there is Sergei Sokolnikov, a general from Russia; Madame Rapallo, an American adventuress, rumoured to be the mother of a princess. They both have been guests in the hotel for years. There are twins Marthe and Berthe who walk around the hotel discussing war and language. There is Henriette, neither young nor old, who works in the hotel, whose body smells of
nakedness and sun
. There is a girl called Katina who is both white and black.

Theodora befriends them all and, soon, the general starts referring to her as his sister Ludmilla and Theodora plays along. They go for long walks during which he tells her stories of his life. Day by day, she, too, begins to settle down in this hotel.

~

Then one night, a night
thick with quiet stars
, there is a fire in the hotel. Theodora watches the flames, the smoke as everything burns, including the black beetle in the wood, the cockroach in the cold consommé. It’s the last part of the book that’s my favourite. I am not going to give the story away because, who knows, you may wish to read the book when you wake up.

~

Australia to Europe to America.

After the hotel burns down, we find Theodora on board a train in America that’s headed for California. There are cornfields as far as her eyes can see; houses and towns pass her by like notes of music that she can read. Abruptly, she gets off the train and finds herself in a small town where a stranger suggests she walk towards a guest house to stay for the night.

Between pines and firs, she walks. In her handbag, she finds aspirin and eau-de-Cologne, pictures of children, sticky lozenges, strips and sheaves of tickets she bought in New York. She tears all of these into small pieces and she walks on.

She is taken in by a family, who welcome her, make her a bowl of noodles and ask her to stay. When they ask her her name, she says she is Pilkington, her name torn out by the roots, just as she had torn the tickets from her handbag.
This way perhaps she came a little closer to humility, to anonymity, to pureness of being.

~