The Hope Factory A Novel

sixteen





IF SOMEONE WERE TO ASK HER today how, as a young, widowed mother of one, with no experience and (in the light of this fiasco) very little of either judgment or brains, how then had she managed?—Kamala would rely upon the full serious weight of her dignity to reply, “Well, sir, I contrived. Somehow, I contrived,” and she would clack her thin gold bangles together to indicate that, by some measures, she had done even better than that.

Returning to her brother’s house was not an option she was willing to consider, come what may. When she went back to her village, she would go in strength and self-respect, or not go at all.

There was only one alternative open to her.

She became a coolie, a day laborer. A life immeasurably distant, it seemed to her, from the respectability of those who earned their wages monthly, or who toiled on the farmland that they and their ancestors before them had owned. A coolie worked through the day, took his money, and was free to drink it or spend it or lose it. A coolie had no fixed job, or job title. He went where the work went, one day to work on a construction site, another day to clear out a dirty gutter. And with the influx of village people pulled daily into the city, a coolie missing today, for whatever reason, was a coolie replaced with ease tomorrow.

Kamala joined construction work. Not, of course, on those large city sites that grew quickly into tall buildings of steel and glass—those were built by men in hard yellow hats using large, fantastical pieces of machinery—but on the smaller constructions: houses, small offices, which were built, brick by brick, entirely on the muscular strength of workers, male and female, just like her.

The supervising building contractor looked her up and down, and signed her up on the spot. She learned quickly, training herself to walk upon the narrow planks of wood that bridged one half-built wall to another with rounded trays of cement and stones and bricks balanced upon her head; surefooted, so she would not slip and fall into the open foundations below and break her head. She learned to form part of the winding lines of workers who lifted, carried, passed, and dropped mechanically, as they were instructed, in work that used the skills of a monkey and the brains of a child and the strength of every muscle in her body for ten hours a day.

For her work she was paid only half what the menfolk earned. This was natural, she was told; it was a job that relied on muscle power, and the men had much more of that to offer. The money she earned was not enough to feed, clothe, and house her in any respectable manner, but the job had one saving grace: she could take her baby with her to the job site and fashion a sling for him on the branch of a tree, and let him sleep there while she worked. And, if he should wake hungry, nobody minded if he cried loudly until his mother could attend to him. In the clang and clamor of a building construction site, a baby’s voice disturbed no one.

She lived with an acquaintance she met on the very first day, someone who swayed under a loaded head on the narrow plank bridge before her and whom Kamala instinctively steadied with her free hand. The white-haired woman thanked her in a voice rich with the stink of alcohol. She was fifty years old and as gnarled and dried as an old piece of firewood; she dealt with the circumstances of her life in the simplest of ways: each evening, she converted the day’s wages into arrack and drank herself to sleep.

Their home was a makeshift tent constructed from debris rescued from job sites. There were a whole row of these slum tents along the edge of a road, close enough for the residents to walk to their jobs on the construction sites nearby, then dismantle them and move on in a year or two, when they were chased away by municipal authorities or when the jobs ran dry. Like the other tents, hers was waist-high, with a triangular frame of low, crossed wooden poles covered with old rags and bits of asbestos sheeting, and draped over with a blue plastic sheet held down by stones placed along the edges. Inside, another sheet of blue plastic was spread on the floor, sufficient for the summer but none of it very effective against the wet of the monsoon, which sank, dense and cold, through all the layers—the plastic, the asbestos, everything—to embrace them to its poisonous bosom. At those times, Kamala would let the baby sleep on top of her, the chill and damp of the ground below rising through her body and making her tremble, but the blood flowing within her strong enough to keep her child warm, especially if she covered them both with rags and more plastic.

As payment for the use of her tent and stove, Old Gowriamma asked for nothing more than a mouthful of the food that Kamala cooked at the entrance to the tent. Kamala fed her baby on her breast, supplemented with a thin gruel of boiled rice kanji. She fed herself and the old woman on the same kanji, adding to it, for their adult delectation, a bit of salt and a few red chiles. Water they kept in a small pot at the rear of the tent. Once a week, Kamala queued up with her neighbors at the roadside tap and attempted to wash off the accumulated dirt on her body while the others shouted at her to hurry up, for god’s sake, for the tap was government-supplied and whimsical, running dry often and without notice. Under their gaze and shouts, she washed her arms and feet and face as best she could, wiping off the rest with a wet cloth, doing the same hurriedly for her child, and after a while, just letting much of it be. It was too much bother for a life that, every single day, led her straight back into the dirt.


HER PEERS ON THE construction sites were as hard as the concrete blocks they worked with: the harsh nature of life never allowed them to be otherwise. They handled their work without complaint and expressed their opinions with a forthright ease in voices strong enough to generate a headache and be heard three roads away and with endurance enough to maintain a point of view for hours. In such an environment, Kamala, with her head-tossing pride and sharp-edged tongue, might have been held by those who had known her well to be a candidate for a fight within the first week. But bewilderment had rendered her mute and, for the first time in her life, without argument.

Her companions formed their own notions of her character: she was a quiet one, keeping to the shadows of the world in a watchful way, never staring at others or challenging their gaze with her own, no matter what the provocation; volunteering no facts about herself, so tightfisted with her words, it was annoying for those who liked to enliven their work with casual conversation. In mitigation, however, it was also acknowledged that she worked hard; she learned quickly; she picked arguments with no one and gave no trouble; she raised her head from her work only, it seemed, to listen intently to the sound of her baby’s cry.

After a few attempts to draw her out, most of the women left her alone in some sort of acceptance. Of the Kamala who had left her brother’s home in anger and eagerness for the excitement of a new life, they knew nothing. And Kamala’s silence grew and grew, blanketing her mind, her skin, thickening her sense of taste and the sensitivity of her fingertips, rendering them, like the rest of her, hard and dead.

The months slowly turned into one year, and then two, and then moved into a third. It looked very much as though this state of affairs might continue endlessly, until her hair whitened and her teeth fell out and she learned to take comfort like her tent mate in a bottle every evening. Except, of course, the gods had made her of a certain temperament and finally decided, one fine day, to put it to some use.


THE DAY STARTED OUT MUCH like any other. The house they were working on had been in progress for six months now, and Kamala had seen it change from a weed- and wild-bush-encrusted plot of land that had taken them a week to clear to a three-story edifice, the layered slabs of concrete rooted deep into the earth with steel-spined cement pillars. This morning, she formed part of a line of women who passed heavy concrete bricks along, hand to hand, from the pile on the roadside where the supplying lorry had deposited them, up two temporary wooden ramps to the second floor, where they were stacked once more, this time behind the stonemason, the maisthri, who was layering them with cement into the wall that when completed would face the road.

Kamala did the job automatically, her body well used to the mechanics of hefting and passing. She stood second in the line, next to the woman who hoisted the bricks from the roadside pile, and from her position she had an unobstructed view of the construction site, the bricks that left her hand reappearing eventually in the hand of the maisthri perched like a large squatting frog, two floors above.

Her wandering eyes came to rest on her son. He was two and a half years old. Small, dark, and dust-covered, he played, as he did every day, with the young children of other on-site mothers, in the heaped piles of sand and chipped granite stones that fronted the site and spilled onto the road. His legs and arms were sturdy, his belly was round—and that thin protective layer of flesh was, for Kamala, her single greatest achievement. She still breast-fed him at night, just before he slept. Was it milk that flowed into his eager suckling lips, or her blood itself? Whatever it was, it drained her as it filled him, taking with it the last vestiges of her youth and leaving her body scrawny and roped with muscles, but that precious nighttime feed had filled and coated his body, shielding him and keeping him alive and strong.

He, her baby, had grown up on the construction sites; this was his natural world. He had learned to walk among the heaped mounds of sand and stones, staggering on little bare feet past rusty nails and sawed-off, treacherous pieces of wood, their shards reaching out greedily for his soft baby flesh. Kamala had fed him his first foods in such surroundings, had watched him holding unsteadily on to the sweet biscuit she might buy him for a treat from the corner bakery shop, watched him drop it in the sand and stuff it back into his mouth before anyone could run to him and stop him.

He never lacked for peers; there were always at least two or three other young children playing around. They appeared at work, on the hips and heels of their mothers, to the loudly exclaimed irritation of the contractor. What, was he running a nursery school or a badly paying construction site? But the contractor’s irritation became the pearl in the shell of Kamala’s life.

Even now, her son was following the leader of the pack, a little girl of six, who supervised the other children with an air of authority undiminished by her ragged, dusty locks and oversize dress, which slipped off one shoulder and hung forlornly to her ankles. She bounced a large baby on her hip and scolded the other toddlers if they dared to act obdurate, smacking them if they strayed past the area demarcated for their on-site existence—a great comfort to the mothers, for the road to the east was frequented by fast-moving cars, and the sand piles to the west guarded their children from the deep foundation pits and the risk of a careless slide into great injury.

Sometimes, when the work was going smoothly and the money flowed in without argument, or perhaps simply when his wife and his mother had between them allowed him a good night’s sleep, the contractor would watch the little girl commanding her brood and joke, “Perhaps, little one, you should supervise the full site for me, uh? Work will happen superfast then, no?” and give her a one-rupee coin, being careful not to let his fingers touch hers, for she was filthy and he was a fastidious man.

But this was not destined to be one of those days.

There was a tension in the air this day, but the workers kept unusually quiet since the site was being toured by the property owner and the architect. The contractor, who treated the workers either with civility (if things were going well) or (if things were not) with high cursing and shouting, now assumed a third, coy aspect: nervous as the owner and the architect inspected the house, ingratiating and seeking, as soon as possible, to plead for more money. In this mission, he was hampered by his own actions: he had not planned for the sudden rise in cement costs and for the delay in raw materials caused by the overwhelming building demand in the city. In such a climate, when voices had been raised, dissatisfactions expressed, and the money had not been forthcoming in satisfying quantities, the late and drunken arrival of the mason had been the thunder that presaged the storm.

The maisthri was a man whom Kamala had never liked, for he partnered his undoubted skill in masonry with a roving eye and foul mouth and a manner that implied that the women who worked on the site without the protective eyes of their menfolk were there for his personal delectation. Today he arrived two hours after everyone else, right when the owner was making his tour of inspection. The contractor opened his mouth to shout and then, realizing his audience, subsided until the owner should leave. The maisthri sullenly fell to work; the women were organized into a line to feed him the bricks he needed.

As quiet as she appeared, Kamala was not indifferent to the atmosphere on the construction site. It was rich with anger and tempers held in check. The voices kept suppressed while the owner toured the property emerged rested, refreshed, and stronger as soon as he left. And in the beating of the voices around her—the maisthri surly, demanding; the contractor angry in turn; the spreading excitement of angry comments rippling through the rest of the workers—Kamala could feel, in soothing counterpoint, the rhythm of her breath within her, the strong pull of air in her nostrils fueling her labors; the weight of the stone placed in her hands; the strength and play in her muscles as she hefted it from one side of her to the other; the welcome give in her body when she released the weight into the hands of the woman next in line.

You drunken, misbegotten rascal, she heard the contractor shout from his position next to the sand heaps where the children played, his rage magnified by the two floors that separated him from the mason. You come to work late, drunk, and then you ask me for more money? You rascal.

What, sir? said the maisthri, putting his tools down and staring at the contractor in a manner most disrespectful. You want good work, but you are not willing to pay. Why should I work for you? Other sites pay much better.

A few of the workers, sensing opportunity, agreed in loud mutters. Others, like Kamala, did not want disruption in their lives and kept quiet. She kept her eyes lowered, not wanting, even by accident, to offer anyone the direct gaze of confrontation. The bricks continued to pass through her hands, from left to right.

“You rascal,” said the contractor. Who will hire you? Only a trusting fool like myself. Go from here, you little rascals. Almost causing me to trip! Go that side!

Kamala looked up hastily; the last few phrases were addressed to the clot of little children. Her eyes searched urgently for the little six-year-old girl—she would surely lead the children smartly out of the way of adult noise and trouble. But the girl had stepped away, busily escorting a smaller child to the corner tap for a drink of water. The four other children, toddlers all, moved uncertainly in her absence.

“Did you not hear what I said?” the contractor shouted, his choler welling further at their lack of comprehension. He cast a look of dislike at the women working in the line, the sins of their babies visited upon their heads. “Go that side! Cluttering up my site!”

After some hesitation, the children began to move away. All, Kamala noted, except her son.

He sat halfway up a sand pile, scooping the fine grain with his hands and letting it trickle through his fingers atop a growing miniature hillock. He was absorbed and pleased with the results, oblivious to the adult cacophony around. Kamala felt her breath speeding up and breaking time with the rhythm of her muscles. Was there a way for her to run to her child and move him out of wrath’s path, without bringing the entire brick-passing line to a halt?

But the contractor’s attention had already shifted away from the children, and her anxiety receded. The contractor now worked to restore his dominance, turning his furious attention to the other workers.

“Why are you all standing around? Is this a street dance, being played out for your entertainment? Get back to work!” Sullenly, everyone, including the maisthri, did.

Perhaps the contractor should have left it there. He had achieved obedience. He controlled the purse strings. The sullenness, if given a day to fade, would be replaced by industry. Everyone present knew that the contractor, in fact, did the best he could. He was far from being as bad as some others in his position, and if he had difficulty in managing rising costs, well, then, he was not alone in that.

But the contractor, today, would not let himself be soothed. A semblance of peace returning to the site was broken once more by his voice, loud, embittered, querulous, weighed down by the injustices he labored under.

“Why I need to be burdened with you,” he said, “the gods only know.” His words were addressed generally but directed, everyone knew, at the maisthri. “What have I done,” the contractor said, “to deserve it?”

The maisthri perched above them all and continued to layer the concrete blocks, his work slowing down as his own voice began to rise, once again, in audible counterpoint to the contractor’s. That this was heading toward a bigger fight was in no doubt.

The tension began to infect Kamala. The maisthri was aggressive by nature; it was not likely that he would be content with words. Kamala kept her body poised and her eyes on her son. In a few moments, she was sure, the maisthri would abandon his bricklaying and storm down. And when that happened, she herself would swoop out and pick up her baby, still sitting peacefully with his hands in the sand, not one foot away from the contractor.

The bricks were not the usual red-brown ones made out of kiln-baked mud; these were of gray concrete, with a rough, grainy texture that could sear the flesh off your knuckles if you were careless. They were hollow, which rendered them, oddly enough, all the stronger. They were much bigger than the traditional mud bricks—and much heavier as well. Old Gowriamma had gotten careless one day and dropped one on the edge of her toenail—within a day, it had blackened and died. Their weight was sufficient that they had to be passed one at a time, hand to steady hand, instead of being loaded onto trays and balanced up the steps on the heads of the women. The maisthri too was careful with them; he had worked with them for years, his movements in his job as precise and restrained as his mouth was not.

So did the hollow concrete brick tumble out of the second floor by accident, the mason’s hands getting careless as his temper rose, or did he engineer its fall on purpose? In all fairness, his cry of warning indicated the former, a shout that caught everyone’s attention and echoed through the spectators in gasps and cries. The block tumbled heavily downward, striking a protruding steel rod on its descent, and getting gently deflected on a path that arced, with horrifying accuracy, toward the contractor and the little two-year-old playing in the sand at his feet.

The contractor saw the brick descend and hit the steel rod; he shied in fright and glanced at the child. There was just time for him to pick up or push the child out of the way—if he was the type to move quickly and in a well-coordinated manner. Perhaps he was not that type, or perhaps, with the child so dirty, he could not bring himself to touch him with his hands. Some would later remember him making a weak, ineffective motion, as though to push the toddler out of harm’s way with his foot.

And then the brick landed safely upon the sand.

The maisthri, shocked out of his own temper, came hurrying down. The contractor, shocked in turn, could only stare blindly at him, searching within himself for words to deal with the situation. The silence was broken by neither of them. “You dog,” she said. “You street-filth-eating dog.”

Kamala had dropped the brick that was in her hands, careless of where it landed. She ran to her startled child and settled him tightly astride her hip. And thus bolstered and fortified, she turned to the speechless men confronting each other and seemingly unaware of her diminutive presence until she opened her mouth.

“You could have killed him,” she said. You rascal. You careless dog. He could have died. What did he do to you, my poor child, that you should want to kill him?

And then, with all the force of her well-developed muscles, she slapped the maisthri across his face. Next to him, the contractor flinched, as though he had received the slap on his own face.

Sister! she heard someone say. Don’t do this. Come away. Your child is safe.

She saw the stunned look on the maisthri’s face succeeded by growing outrage. “You whore,” he said, stepping toward her. “Who do you think you are? I’ll teach you a lesson.”

He was prevented from doing so by the contractor, who restrained him with a warning hand on his shoulder. “It was an accident,” the contractor said, as though more for his own comfort than for hers. “It was an accident.”

But Kamala would not be comforted. Two and a half years of dammed anger broke through, sweeping everything—judgment, economics, her future—before it. Her child was, after all, not harmed. But her anger seemed to have nothing to do with that. “You rascal,” she said. “Scoundrel. Despoiler of your sisters and mother.”

Sister, sister, the voices around her said. The contractor said, “Come, come. You cannot behave like this. What is this.”

She swung her hand again toward the maisthri; he stepped back and avoided it. So she collected her breath in her lungs and spat into his face. Hands tried to grab her and restrain her.

Do not touch me! she said.

And it was undoubtedly the force of her temper, radiating powerfully from every inch of her, that kept everyone at bay, silent and watchful, as she went to the corner of the site, picked up her plastic woven lunch basket, and, holding her baby tightly against her, walked away from them all.


HER TEMPER KEPT HER company through the day, as she fed her son some food and scowled at the road that ran in front of her tent. Her only continuing regret was that she had missed striking the mason’s face on her second attempt.

But by sunset she had calmed to the point of taking decisions. The anger that flooded through her lent a great clarity to her thoughts.

The next day, she rose before dawn. She quietly collected everything she would need that morning into a large jute bag. Then she woke her sleeping child, quieting his protests with the comfort of her breast. He did not wake fully, and so she maneuvered herself out of the tent with him sleeping on her shoulder, the bag clutched awkwardly in her hand. She quietly crossed the road, leaving behind her other possessions and Old Gowriamma, who slumbered on undisturbed with soft alcoholic snores.

The previous evening, she had reached up her saree skirts in the privacy of her tent and untied the strip of cloth that she always kept mid-thigh. The papers that crackled within were her talisman. She had told no one about it, even if it occasionally constrained her movements, feeling it fatten over the months with the same satisfaction with which she had witnessed the flesh collecting on her son.

She had counted them all out, the paper notes old and worn and sometimes dirty, but with their value undiminished. From the bundle she extracted a few rupees and proceeded briskly to make certain purchases that she would have considered very frivolous even half a day earlier.

And now, in the predawn chill, she planned to make a businesslike use of them.


A LANE LED OFF the main road that housed the slum tents, and Kamala walked toward it. Down the lane, right at the end, in this quiet corner of Koramangala, was a large two-story bungalow, clean and new. Kamala knew it well; she had worked on it for much of the previous two years, moving to the new site only when the construction work on this was completed. The house was still unoccupied, its windows bare of curtains, the front door firmly locked. Some fellow came every now and then to attend to the garden; the only person who remained daily was an old watchman who spent his day hours squatting by the gate, smoking beedis and communing with the wall opposite. At night, he engaged in a flurry of activity—drinking a tot of arrack (purchased alongside Old Gowriamma), trying his luck and limited economics with the prostitute who opened for business at night in one of the slum tents after concluding her daytime labors as a construction worker, and finally, rolling himself into a tight, blanket-covered ball at a sheltered corner of the house’s pristine verandah and sleeping the whole night through, waking a little after sunrise.

That was usual. Once a week, he vanished for a day and a half, attending to business god knows where. And that absence was perfectly timed for Kamala’s needs this morning.

In the predawn darkness, Kamala paused outside the gate of the bungalow, hushed and abandoned. She opened the latch of the gate and slipped through, shadowlike, on the path that led to the rear. There, surrounded by high walls that would assure her of privacy, stood the object she sought: a cold-water tap that was used to water the back garden. The rooftop tank that fed it was kept full by the watchman, and now, when she turned it on experimentally, the water gushed out, cold and clear and priceless.

Her son, well fed on her breast, was content to sit sleepily while his mother grimly made her preparations. Then, when her fell intent became clear, he burst into tears, but to no avail. A quick smack reduced his wails to a continuous, grizzly whimper, and Kamala tucked her saree up at her waist and proceeded to give her son the first full bath of his life.

She stripped him of his nightshirt and rubbed him down with expensive sesame-seed oil, working it deep into the skin to soften it and dislodge the dirt, in a cleansing ritual she had almost forgotten. Then, when his body and head and hair were so well oiled he almost slipped from her grasp, she doused him with cold water from the tap and proceeded to use the soap that she had purchased along with the oil the previous day. She used it once to get rid of the oil and dirt, washing it away, and then, without mercy, used it once more until it bubbled and frothed under her fingers, rejoicing in the sweet smell that rose from his skin. When he was washed clean, she unraveled the top half of her saree and used it to dry him. The bath, or rather its earnestly awaited conclusion, revived him, and clad in nothing he capered about the lawn while Kamala attended to herself.

The sky was still dark, but the blue bloom of predawn was upon them. She had to hurry. She kept her underskirt on but removed everything else, unmindful of the depravity of the act in her desperate desire to feel the rush of water on her body. The oil gleamed against the darkness of her skin, burnishing it, and the cold water cascading through her hair seemed to wash away two and a half years of construction site dust. She raised her skirts to wash between her thighs and down the oiled length of her legs, and then, finally, she was clean.

As with her son, she dried herself with the saree she had just removed, and then reached inside the jute bag for a change of clothes, pulling out a clean cotton saree that she had carried with her for two years and rarely worn, saving it blindly for just such an occasion. For her son too, she dressed him in a new shirt and combed his locks. The kajal stick for both of them, to line their eyes. And for herself, as a finishing touch, a dot of kajal as a bindi on her forehead. Her hair ran wet and loose down her back; when it dried, she would tie it into a braid, and decorate it with a bunch of jasmine flowers behind her neck.

She wore no jewelry around her neck, wrists, or on her ears except for a black amulet thread that she wore like a necklace, but that did not matter. She was dressed and prepared as a bride might be, ready for a momentous change in her life. In the early morning light that began to glisten off the house windows, she caught sight of their reflection and rejoiced. The baby at her hip was clean and glowing and well dressed; if the contractor were to see him now, he would not hesitate to pick him up and hold him tight. And the calm, respectable woman in the plate of glass showed no sign of the desperate life she had led for over two years. True, her face was thin and dry and her body a little scrawny, but that could not be helped. And perhaps, if she handled the day with due attention, she might eventually have a chance to reverse some of that damage.

And thus, washed and attired, she turned her attention to the next step.


WHEN THE JOB BROKER emerged from her house, she was met by Kamala, who had arrived an hour earlier and squatted down on the dry earth in front of the building, waiting for her quarry to appear. She had moved only once in that hour, to peel and feed her son a banana. Now she rose and folded her hands respectfully.

“Namaste, aunty,” she said.

The job broker returned her greeting with some reservation. She was good at quickly sizing up people; there was an air of implacable determination about this girl that might signal trouble.

“You asked me to come and see you, aunty,” said Kamala.

“Oh,” said the job broker. “It is you. Yes, yes. Finally …” she said. “You must be Saroja, and you, wretched girl, are a whole two days late.”

I am not Saroja, said Kamala. And I am right on time.

Seeing the job broker’s confusion grow, she explained. “You asked me to come and see you when my baby was older,” she said. “He is now two and a half years old, and I can perform any household job you want me to.”

The job broker stared at her in some astonishment and curiosity, as though hoping to penetrate this shroud of confusing statement. She seemed to notice everything, the job broker, from the happy toddler, clinging to his mother’s saree and smiling up at her with a full-fed, sunny chubbiness in odd and telling contrast to the hollowness of his mother’s cheeks, to the awe-inspiring aura of cleanliness that clung to Kamala, the washing and bathing and donning of scrupulously clean clothing. And, in the serious intensity of her face, the job broker finally registered a fleeting contrasting memory of the same face: younger, fresher, sparkling with a look of eager anticipation. “Why, I remember you,” she said, her face incredulous. “You came from that village, I remember, and with the baby.”

Yes, said Kamala. And now, as promised, I would like that job.

The job broker opened her mouth to indignantly repudiate this claim of old promises—for surely such statements were implicitly accompanied by expiry-dates and a time-bar?—but instead she said nothing and stood pondering.

Perhaps she was troubled by the weight of professional demands caused by the errant Saroja and her urgent need for a hirable maid. Or perhaps it was simply that Kamala’s sudden and desperate appearance triggered some latent sympathy within the job broker, jostling her, for a minute, by the recollection of chances she had received in her own life that had allowed her to prosper. For, in spite of her brusque, businesslike exterior and her capacity for holding the hearts and dreams of others in her hand, the job broker was not, by nature, a bad woman.

“Fine,” she said. “I will keep my promise.”


AND SO IT WAS that Kamala had at last slipped upward into the ranks of the domestically employed, where she had remained for the past decade, working hard to raise her son respectably. She was proud of what she had achieved, alone, unaided. Prouder, perhaps, than her brother was of anything he had done.

But it was the unacknowledged truth of her life, celebrated by no one but herself. She had kept those years of her past secret, when she lived in a roadside tent and toiled amidst cement and stone; speaking about that time to no one, not even her son, for everyone she knew would find it shameful and degrading, not recognizing the strength she had discovered within herself because of it, or the fears of destitution that haunted her even today of waking up to find herself living by the side of the road in a tent, white-haired, drunk.





and, of course …

satyameva jayate

truth conquers all