The Best Day of My Life (4 page)

When we got to the rooftop, I had a quick glimpse of the blue, blue sky and of the other buildings. I wanted to rush over to the low stone wall at the edge of the roof and look down. I had never been up so high!

But Mrs. Mukerjee held me back.

‘Time enough for playing later. I have to sleep now or I will be cranky when the business opens. And I can't sleep if I'm worrying about you. So you're in here for a little while.'

There was a shed on the roof. She opened the door and put me in it. It was empty except for a mat and a pail.

‘Pee in the pail if you have to,' she said. ‘I'll send someone up in a minute with some food. I assume you're hungry.'

She closed the door on me before I had the chance to tell her I'd had breakfast already. Then I heard a bolt slide into place and lock me in.

I decided I had better eat every chance I got in case I had to make a run for it.

A few moments later, a very sleepy-looking woman slid back the bolt, handed me a tray of food and locked me in again.

The shed wasn't very sturdy. It was made of wood boards that were nailed together this way and that. Sunlight easily got through them. If I needed to, I could probably just push my way out.

But first I would eat. I drank the hot tea. I wolfed down the roti and I ate the dal. I sat back on the mat with my back to the wall to eat the banana while I looked at the blue sky through the spaces between the boards. I had the whole mat to myself and my belly was full.

I found myself thinking about the woman who was not my aunt and about Elamma, who was not my cousin.

They would both be back at work by now, my aunt in the pit and my cousin carrying the baby. If they were lucky, they had gotten a good night's sleep. But that probably didn't happen. The man who was not my uncle coughed all night, and if he didn't cough it was because he was drunk, and if he was drunk it meant the children were hungry, and if the children were hungry they would have cried all night. There would be more room on the floor without me, but less coal money, too.

Today would be hard for them. Tomorrow would be the same.

It wasn't that I missed them, exactly. But I said a prayer to all the gods and goddesses that one day they, too, would be able to sit on a mat they did not have to share and eat a banana that someone else had worked for.

4

Soap

I
didn't try to escape. I took advantage of the soft mat and stretched out. I fell asleep.

I The bolt sliding back woke me up. Mrs. Mukerjee was there, dressed in a sari instead of a robe. Her hair was combed back. She had two younger women with her.

‘You're awfully scrawny,' she said. ‘How old are you? Nine? Ten?'

I didn't know. I shrugged.

‘Well, let's see what we've got under all that coal.'

We went back down the stairs to a little square cement yard. The water tap was there.

‘Burn those clothes,' Mrs. Mukerjee ordered the young ones.

‘I know how to scrub,' I said. ‘I could wash them.'

‘Burn them,' she said again. They were taken away.

At first Mrs. Mukerjee's assistants just poured water over me. It was cold and felt good. Black streams flowed away from my feet.

‘This will take a while,' Mrs. Mukerjee said. ‘I think I could use another cup of tea.'

She left the other women to it.

With the top layers of dust off me, they started in with the scrub brushes and soap.

I had used soap before. Not often, because it wasn't food, and food came first when there was money. And the soap only got to me after everyone else in the family had used it first. By then it was grey and slimy.

This soap was different. It had a paper wrapping. When the wrapping came off, I smelled all sorts of wonderful flowers and spices. The lather it made was white and frothy like just-poured goat's milk.

I felt like the star of a Bollywood film.

They washed my hair with soap that poured from a bottle. The lather this soap made was so thick it held all of my hair on the top of my head as if it were a basket of coal. The women let me whoosh it around with my hands. I laughed and they laughed.

I sat on a stool while one of them worked out the tangles in my hair with a comb and twisted it into a long braid. The other took a smaller brush to my fingernails.

When she got to my toenails, she gasped and backed away.

‘She's hurt. Her feet are all blistered and scarred.'

‘They're fine,' I said. ‘I don't hurt at all.'

‘Look. The child is injured. These are burns.'

The other woman looked. I tried to tuck my feet under the stool, but they held my ankles.

Mrs. Mukerjee took that moment to return.

‘Is there anything left of her now that the coal is gone?'

‘She's too thin,' one of the assistants said, ‘but her face is pretty. The customers will like her. Her feet are injured.'

Mrs. Mukerjee took a look.

‘How did you do this?' she asked me.

‘Jharia is on fire,' I said. ‘It's not a problem.'

‘You are very brave not to cry with such burns and cuts.'

I liked her thinking I was brave, but then I remembered that she didn't like liars.

‘I'm not being brave,' I told her. ‘I can't feel anything.'

‘You can't feel anything?' She circled around me, examining my skin. She lifted the braid off my back.

‘Look here.' Her assistants gathered around. ‘Her skin has white patches. Here, too.' She pointed to another patch on my upper arm. ‘And here.' She pointed to my thigh and my stomach. ‘Don't you know what that means?'

‘It means I'm getting white,' I said. ‘Soon I'll be all white without even buying whitening cream.'

‘But the patches will be covered up with clothes during the selection,' one woman said. ‘And in the rooms, the lights are low so – '

‘Fools!' Mrs. Mukerjee yelled. ‘Get her out of here!'

‘But …'

Mrs. Mukerjee kept yelling. ‘She is cursed! Unclean! Get rid of her, now! Where are her clothes?'

‘I burned them. You told me to.'

‘Then find some other clothes for her. Out! Get her out!'

Her assistants jumped into action.

Mrs. Mukerjee grabbed the soap and started to scrub herself vigorously. Then she suddenly stopped.

‘Is this the soap they washed you with?'

I nodded.

She screeched and threw it to the other side of the courtyard. She threw with such passion that the soap bounced off the wall and hit her smack in the face.

She screeched some more.

I laughed.

She didn't like that.

‘Where is the Dettol? I must bathe in disinfectant. Get out!' she yelled at me. ‘Get out! Those men had better not come back here. Get me the Dettol!'

She ran into the building.

The courtyard had no exit, and, anyway, I certainly wasn't going anywhere until I had some clothes.

I picked up the soap, wrapped it back in the paper and held it low to my side, hoping the women wouldn't notice. They came back out, breathing through scarves that now covered the lower half of their faces. They tossed some clothes at me and stayed well back. I put on the kurta and trousers.

‘What did I do wrong?' I asked.

‘You have to go quickly,' they told me. ‘She'll fire us if you're not out of here now. We'll lose our jobs.'

I had the rewrapped soap in my hand. I picked up the bottle of liquid soap, too, the soap they had used on my hair. I waited to see if they would tell me to drop it.

They didn't.

Instead, they showed me the exit.

In the blink of an eye I was back in the alley, staring at the closed green door.

‘If you ever come back here again, I will tell the police to shoot you,' Mrs. Mukerjee yelled down from her window. ‘In fact, I will shoot you myself.'

‘What did I do?'

‘You are cursed. Now get!'

I went.

I walked down the alley and crossed a busy street. I heard car horns and bicycle bells and people yelling at me to get out of the way. I knew there were things happening all around me. People passed and bumped against me. Handcarts and animals tried to share the alley.

But I kept my head down. I was too shocked to look around.

I didn't understand what had just happened. Why was she so mad at me? My skin was just my skin. It had nothing to do with how hard I could work or how well I could tell the truth.

A lot had happened in a short time. I was in a strange place. I didn't know anyone, and no one knew me.

I didn't know what to do.

I almost missed the family that wasn't my family. I almost missed the coal.

At least in Jharia, I knew what I was doing.

At least there, I had some place to go.

I walked for a little while from one alley to the other. Then I stopped and sat down on a doorstep. I put the soap on the ground and put my head in my hands.

I closed my eyes. I hoped that when I opened them again I would be back in the world I knew, even if I hated it. I cried.

Life passed by me in the alley. I could hear people, motors, bicycle bells, cart wheels. What did any of it have to do with me? I was invisible. I was nothing in Jharia, and now I was nothing in this strange new place I was in, whatever it was.

‘The burden of sorrow is lightened when I laugh at myself.'

Whoever was speaking those words spoke them close to me, but I knew he could not be talking to me. Why would anyone talk to me? I was cursed.

I kept my head down.

‘Not a fan of poetry?'

I raised my head.

In front of me was an old man with a long white beard. He wore a torn T-shirt over his thin chest and a red and blue lungi. He was leading a goat along by a rope.

The goat saw my head go up and came to say hello.

The goats in Jharia never said hello to me. They were too busy looking for food. This goat came right up to greet me.

It butted its head against my hands. Its nose was soft. Its mouth was smiling and its eyes looked kind.

The old man smiled.

‘See? There are still things to be happy about.'

The goat let me scratch the top of its head. When I stopped, it butted my hand until I started scratching again.

‘What is poetry?' I asked.

The old man sat down beside me in the doorway. There was plenty of room. He thought for a moment.

‘Poetry is life,' he finally said. ‘Poetry tells us who we are, where we have been and where we are going. It is even more than that. Poetry tells us what we can be.'

‘I already know what I can be,' I said. ‘Nothing.

I'm nothing. I come from nothing, and I have nothing, and I'll always be nothing.'

‘You have soap,' the old man pointed out. ‘Two kinds of soap.'

‘That's all I have in this world,' I told him. ‘I don't even have any family.'

‘You have a lovely green kurta,' he pointed out. ‘You have a beautiful long braid down the middle of your back. To someone without clothes and without hair, you are a millionaire.'

‘The people who gave me this kurta and this braid threw me out. They didn't like the way I look.'

‘You have a tongue,' he said. ‘And it knows how to form words. You have two hands and two feet and two eyes that can take in all the beauty of my pet goat. To someone who cannot speak, who cannot walk or touch or see …'

‘I'm a millionaire,' I finished for him. ‘But I don't know what to do. I ran away from the place I thought was my home. I have no place to stay, no one to look after me. I don't even know where I am.'

‘You are lucky,' the old man said. ‘You are on an adventure.'

‘I'm scared.'

‘If you were not scared, you would be having just an ordinary day.'

That got through to me. I knew what an ordinary day was like. I did not want to go back to that.

Then it was like I could see a picture of myself, sitting on the stoop with my two kinds of soap, petting a goat. It was a pretty funny picture.

I started to laugh. The old man laughed with me.

‘Can I stay with you?' I asked. He seemed like a kind man.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘You are welcome to the same sky as Margaret and me, the same ground, and the same air. It's yours. Take as much as you want.'

I understood. He didn't live anywhere.

‘Why do you call your goat Margaret?' I asked. ‘That's not an Indian name.'

‘Because when she tilts her head in just the right way, she looks like the former prime minister of England,' he chuckled. ‘Now, you will have to excuse us. We are heading to a particularly promising pile of garbage. Margaret has the great gift of being able to find treasures among the trash.'

He got up to go.

‘But what should I do?' I asked him. I didn't want to start crying again.

He looked at me for a moment.

‘Give your soap away,' he said.

‘Give it away? It's all I have!' Although as I said those words, I knew they were not true.

‘Find someone who needs it more than you.' He and Margaret walked away.

‘Wait!' I got off the stoop and went after him. ‘I don't know where I am.'

He turned around. ‘Do you remember the poem? ‘The burden of my sorrow is lightened when I laugh at myself.' It was written by Rabindranath Tagore. This is his city.'

He moved closer to me.

‘You have not landed here by accident. This is the city of great artists and thinkers, of writers and dreamers, of mathematicians and scientists. In this city, people have done amazing things. What should you do? You should do something great, like the others who have made this city their home.'

He walked away.

I called after him. ‘But what is the name of this place?'

‘My child, you are in the city of the gods. You are in Kolkata.'