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ignorance and jibes. Why did he know so little, he asked Meha. Why hadn’t they tried to teach him more? The village patshala schoolmaster had only taught him the alphabet, and that only in Hindi and Marathi, even though Bikaner was almost seven. Here he was taught English, the teacher recited strange-sounding nursery rhymes, Bikaner was bigger than all the children in his class (they were only four years old!)—the humiliations were endless.
Through all these cries, Meha was patient. Wait, she had said, taking Bikaner in her lap, in a year you will be in the right class. She tried to explain to him how they had had so little money for food and water these last few years, and so he had not gone to the village school regularly, and Bikaner would grow furious. When he quietened, she sat up with him every night after dinner under the orange halogen streetlamp, pointing out the letters he was to copy one by one. What is this? Z, he would laugh as he replied. You don’t even know Z, Ma. Idiot Ma. But she persisted, learning theunfamiliar shapes and sounds from him and in the process teaching him.
She opens her mouth and says, “Za-ye-d.” Just the way Bikaner had taught her. Pronouncing it wrong as usual, she knows. A little smile wells up in that great aching space her heart has turned into for these last four years. It was during those moments, sitting under that streetlamp, Chandar sleeping nearby in the darkness, that she had finally found something akin to affection for her son. He had laughed at her attempts to make out the curves and lines, had made fun of her, but they had learned together.
Three years passed on that footpath. They were moved a few times. Each time the good citizens of Mumbai considered the footpath-dwellers a blight on the landscape, they moved. From one footpath to another, in another street, in another part of town. In each place, there were new people to get used to, new sounds to block out at night, new bus routes for Bikaner and Chandar to learn. Then for another two years they rented a shack in a jhopadpatti — rows of thatched huts with a dirty canal on one side and an array of skyscrapers on the other. As she walked on the street between the huts of the jhopadpatti, Meha would look up at the flats towering above them and think of mosaic floors, concrete walls, a toilet that flushed, water out of taps.
All the money she saved was put into an account at the bank by her memsahib. Every night almost, Chandar and Meha would look over the passbook and she would explain the numbers to him, trying to remember what her mistress had taught her. Here was the credit column, here was Chandar’s monthly salary paid in, here was the fifty rupees in the debit column they took out to pay for firecrackers for Diwali. Slowly, the credit column grew and Chandar and Meha had enough for a down payment on a tiny flat on the outskirts of Mumbai. One bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, a small balcony. Three hundred and fifty-six square feet with walls. It was in one of the big buildings on the sixteenth floor. For the first few months Meha walked up the stairs every day, not trusting the old, clanking lift. It terrified her to get into that iron box with its metal crisscross folding screens. The first time, she held her breath almost all the way up, watching blocks of concrete and open floor spaces rise successively before her eyes. It frightened her to live so far above the earth that she loved. She did not look down from the balcony for many years.
They adjusted to Mumbai life and became Mumbai-ites. Meha survived the big city, thrived in it in fact, and Chandar continued his job as guard at the bank. Those were happy days, with no foreshadowing of what was to come. Bikaner finished his Intermediate and even got a BA in economics and then sat for clerical exams at the Farmer’s Bank.
The first day he went to work, pride in their son nearly killed both Chandar and Meha. She woke early that morningto iron his shirt,