The Hope Factory A Novel

twenty





THE COURTYARD WAS QUIET these days, for more than half the rooms that surrounded it lay empty. The landlord had sent tenants on their way as their leases had come to an end, without renewing them or replacing the tenants with fresh ones. But early this morning, the silence was rent by noise that showed no signs of diminishing.

Kamala opened her door and quickly shut it again in shock, before sitting inside the darkness of her room, listening hard. Narayan sat cross-legged next to her, barely discernible in the dark, offering the mute comfort of his hands, which Kamala clasped tight, as much to soothe as to be soothed.

Loud wails, shouts of anger, the drag and thump of heavy household objects.

“But where are we to go? Mother, please!” The young bride wailing. “Brothers. Please. You are like family to us. We have no one else.”

If you throw us out like this, where do we go?

If we have nowhere to live, how can he find employment?

Please give us another month. We will find the rent. Mother, please. Brothers!

But the landlord’s two oldest sons, normally so polite, would not relent. They dragged the belongings of the reluctant young couple out onto the street, under the unyielding supervision of their grandmother. The landlord himself was nowhere to be seen. It was well known that he could not bear to witness scenes of sorrow among his tenants.

At some point, Kamala and Narayan crept out of their room and, unnoticed, past the shouting figures outside the courtyard, he to school, she to her work. Today, Kamala was sure, the landlord’s mother would ask for increased rent. And how was she to handle that? She recalculated, again and again, the figures in her mind. Would Vidya-ma agree to a small raise in her salary? Would Anand-saar? Who else could she turn to for a little extra money?

The landlord’s mother was indeed waiting for her that evening. But she did not ask for increased rent. Dumbly, Kamala listened—and finally much of what she had seen over the past few months became clear to her. Things she had stupidly ignored, small, telltale signs, were suddenly connected to one another in a hateful pattern. The reason the courtyard lay silent and empty. The reason the bride and her husband had been so rudely evicted. The growing sorrow of the landlord’s face, where unhappiness multiplied every time he glanced at her. And right there, on the corner where the main street touched her gully, stood the reason why.

For a thousand or more years, this little neighborhood had slumbered as a village. Then, the distant city rumbled closer and closer until, one day, it was entirely swallowed up: a village no more. The farmers sold their fields and turned shopkeepers; erstwhile village homes were offered up for rent to any passing stranger; trucks and buses and bicycles flooded through without courtesy and with easy right-of-way. Opinions were generally divided as to the desirability of all this. There were those who bemoaned the loss of the fields and the cool, clean greenery of the village—they were usually old or idle. The others were too busy trying to create employment from their altered circumstances. Overnight, the villagers’ character changed: from farmers protective of their own to businessmen eager to engage with the strangers in their midst.

And thus it might have remained: a malodorous, low-grade urban neighborhood, teeming with life and refuse, if a fundamental shift had not happened in the newly developed rich neighborhoods that lay alongside: the land prices there began to rise rapidly. Rumors flooded down the linking road to the slum: over there, earth that had once existed as ragi fields was now turning valuable, earning per square foot, the rumors said, sums that a provision-store keeper might be hard-pressed to earn in a month. What madness was that?

Whatever the nature of such insanity, it began to seep into the village-slum. And the first proof, that it was not just idle talk and the stuff of male fantasy around the tea shop, was right there on the corner of the main road.

The little provision store had vanished, along with the butcher next door, who had always kept a cage of long-suffering chickens at the entrance to his shop. In their place stood a brand-new building, three stories high, glossy, gleaming, girded with fresh paint and steel. Inside, people had already set up shop: a lawyer, two doctors (one for general sickness and the other with a piles and fistula clinic), and an Internet café. The basement bore a sign that proclaimed the future location of a language training center for English. The erstwhile butcher and store proprietor now danced about like vastly superior beings, buying clothes, televisions, scooters, and sending their children to English-medium schools.

And this was what Kamala learned from the landlord’s mother: how could any rent she paid—even if it were doubled—compare to the sums the landlord might earn if he sold his property to the real estate touts sniffing around daily like eager dogs scenting the tracks of a bitch in heat?


WHEN NARAYAN RETURNED IN the evening, he discovered his mother seated on her haunches in a darkened room and staring at the wall. She had not lit the lamp. She had not prepared any food.

“Amma,” he said, her very silence alarming him. “What is it? What is it?”

She hesitated briefly, but the story quickly spilled out of her. He would bear the consequences of it soon enough; he may as well hear of their fate right away.

They were going to lose their home. Mindful of their eight-year friendship, the landlord’s mother had approached the subject adroitly, describing the deep financial difficulty her son found himself in, the claims of others upon him. Poor man, she’d said, the troubles multiply about him and age him before my eyes. To meet these claims, he was forced to put this courtyard up for sale. What choice did he have? She felt terrible, she’d said. But Kamala had the bounty of her brother to rely upon, a prosperous life waiting for her in the village if she so wished, so she did not worry.

Kamala had known, instantly, that it was time for her to plead. She could not think of leaving her job for another: the salary was decent, the gift of Narayan’s education a pearl beyond price. She needed to safeguard that at all cost. She also could not afford to move anywhere else. New rentals in this area had become recently unaffordable; the day she moved out, this neighborhood would be closed to her. The nearest affordable places were far away in the distant tendrils of the city, in strange new neighborhoods among unforgiving strangers. To reach her workplace, Kamala would have to begin her commute before dawn—and what would happen on the nights when she was required to stay late? Buses late at night were difficult beasts to catch, slippery with their schedules, murky with nameless predators who feasted on lone female travelers. Narayan too would have an equally long commute to his new Anand-saar-sponsored school. She would never see him; he would be entirely out of her control and management, prey to his own inventiveness.

So Kamala had pleaded. Please increase my rent, Kamala said. Just for a little bit. Or allow me to make a large lump-sum payment that will help your son. Something to delay the sale of this courtyard by a year or two. Please. Amma, please.

The old lady had listened, and something in her implacable face had yielded to Kamala’s tears. She’d placed her hand upon Kamala’s head. “You have been like a daughter to me. I cannot promise anything, but let me speak to my son.” She’d nodded. “And you in turn speak to your brother and see how much you can raise.”

I will, Kamala had said. I will.

Now she gazed hopelessly at the wall in front of her. It was one thing to make such an offer, but how was she to raise a sufficiently large sum of money? Her mind spooled forward into ever-widening aspects of misery.

“How large, Amma?” asked Narayan. “How large a sum?”

“Why?” cried his exasperated mother. “What difference does that make to us, the size? It is so large that it doesn’t bear speaking of. When one cannot put two-pie together, what use is it to speak of whether lakhs or crores are required?”

“They would want so much?” Narayan asked, startled.

“No,” she said grudgingly. “But they may as well. It would be a sum as much out of our reach.” Then, in response to the persistent question in his eyes, she said: “I don’t know, perhaps as much as fifty thousand rupees?”

This sounded to her like a substantial offer of money. Would it be sufficient? Would the landlady expect much more? Fifty thousand rupees was forty thousand more than she had saved in the little cover at the bottom of her trunk. That ten thousand had been accumulated over ten years, painfully, squeezed out like blood from a bone when all the flesh has withered away and the bloom of life long vanished.

“Oh, Narayan,” she said. “We will be forced to roll up our beds and sleep on the streets. Where will we go?”

She glanced at him helplessly. She had been so proud of him; so proud of the ease with which he had settled into the new school, so smart in his new uniform and proud of his book bag. His English tuition master had reported that he was learning the language quickly; good news, so pleasing to his mother—and now this. Why did the gods envy the little she had? And immediately temper the good with bad?

They ate their night meal in silence; Kamala could not cook in her distraction, and the meal of dry chapattis and pickles would not settle in her mouth. She tore at half a roti before giving it up. Narayan too ate absentmindedly, his young brow furrowed in thought. “Can we not raise the money, Amma? Somehow?”

“Forty thousand? How is it possible, Narayan?”

“My uncle,” he said. “He said we have wealth waiting for us in the village. From my father’s family.” His mother’s silence was eloquent. “Amma, do we really have cows and fields waiting for us in the village?”

“You and I do not. That is certain,” said Kamala. “But do not be spreading that around the courtyard. It would be disrespectful to your uncle.”

“Can you ask him for the money?”

“I have not asked your uncle for a paisa since you were a baby. I should be ashamed to start now.”

“Can we start a chit fund like Thangam? She has made a lot of money with it.”

“Us? A chit fund? Are you crazy? Who will run it? You? It is not so easy. And besides, I think it is one of those things that gives trouble more than it helps.”

Narayan did not look convinced by his mother’s lack of enterprise. “In that case, do you suppose Thangam might be able give us a loan?”

“Aiyo! Ask! Ask for money!” She slapped her hand on the ground next to her, feeling the pain radiate powerfully through her palm. “I, who have never asked anyone else for a paisa, not for a glass of water that I have not earned, now you want me to lower myself, abase myself, abase the entire work of my blood and body, and go, like a beggar, and ask for money? Did you not hear what I said? That chit fund of hers is in trouble. More than you know. People are defaulting. So eager to join, greedy for the big payout, but now they find they cannot keep up with the monthly payments. She has to be ready to pay on their behalf, but she also cannot afford to, this chit fund is so big. In fact, she is so frightened, she has been asking me for money.”

“Anand-saar,” he said, after some further moments of silence.

But Kamala was already shaking her head. “Anand-saar is already giving us so much. I will not go ask for more.”

“Yes, my education, I know,” said Narayan. “But, the truth is, it is easy for them. This is not so big from their side. They can easily afford it.”

“That does not change the generosity of this gift, Narayan,” said his mother. “Or lessen its rarity.”

“They spent twenty thousand rupees just for the fireworks at the Diwali party. I heard her say so.”

“Yes, and the corner shop man spent thirty thousand on a new scooter,” said Kamala. “How does any of that affect us?”

Dissatisfaction was easy to feel and could twist the mind into unprofitable thoughts. Narayan would have to learn that lesson for himself. If he ever did. Or he would spend his entire life unhappily chasing after the shadows left by the lives of other people as though they were real.

She said: “Your education. I did not ask. He offered…. To ask for money … I have seen that, with others. It is not good. There is no self-respect in it.”

Narayan said nothing more, but the question that shone from his eyes echoed loudly around the little room: was there any self-respect in being thrown out of their home?