When he wakes, it’s stopped raining, it’s silent, and there’s a weird glow throbbing in the dusty glass of the small window floating above the junk. He doesn’t know where he is, then it slowly comes back to him, the journey receding like a dream, only the room solid, disconnected from everything else.
He lies motionless a long time in the blankets, his mind a bird sleeping above the ocean as it flies.
The sun is falling behind the mountains across the valley, the clouds have lifted to reveal a pure blue. The grasses of the terraces bristle with droplets. Loneliness throbs out of the building above. He climbs the steps to peer in, but the lights are off inside the main house. Now he doesn’t know what to do. All the houses up and down the mountainside seem abandoned. So he returns to his room and covers his head with the blankets and waits.
* * *
—
“Have you washed your hands?” Daddy says.
Ajay lies and whispers yes.
“Wash them again.”
It’s the mantra of the house.
Wash your hands. Wash them again. Wash your feet, wash your clothes. Wash your snotty little nose.
Ajay is being fed. Daddy encourages him to eat. “For the work,” he says, “you need to be strong. Eat rice with salt and ghee, drink milk, don’t skimp on the good things, there’s ghee and milk to spare.”
Now he’s being told about the work. He absorbs it all impassively.
Daddy has a small farm an hour’s climb through the woodland in a high meadow. Ajay is replacing the last boy. His job is to tend to the milk, to make ghee, and to take care of the household chores, make breakfast, sweep and mop the floor, wash the clothes, tend to the fire, prepare lunch, and when lunch is finished, wash the dishes. He is given his own plate and cup and bowl and spoon.
“Do you know how to cook?” Daddy says.
Ajay shakes his head.
“Then you’ll learn. Starting now. And tomorrow, after breakfast, we’ll go to the farm.”
* * *
—
Mummy shows him how she makes dinner that night, chicken curry, aloo gobi, palak paneer, rice. He gawps at the wealth of ingredients, the indulgent spicing, the spoonfuls of ghee. Mummy is a generous cook, a patient teacher. He is given drops of things to taste on the back of his hand, looking up as his tongue explodes each time with wide eyes of disbelief.
“Look at his smile,” Mummy says. But Daddy is buried in the paper.
When it comes to the rotis, he is ordered to make them himself, and they are declared good, though he is too thrifty with the salt.
Now he is shown how to lay the table, how to arrange the serving spoons, the bowls, the plates, and when dinner’s ready, he is asked to sit with them at the table.
He doesn’t know how.
“Sit,” Mummy says, pulling the next chair out. “Right here.”
He climbs up the chair, gazing at her.
“Now, serve yourself,” she says.
He looks at them both hesitantly.
“Go on.”
He reaches for a serving spoon, clumsily bringing small portions to his plate, Daddy pretending not to watch as he spills food along the way.
When Ajay’s plate is dotted with small mounds, Daddy finally succumbs to the urge to intervene. “You need more than that,” he says, heaping large spoons of rice and dal on Ajay’s plate and topping it all with spoonfuls of ghee.
“Isn’t it the best ghee you ever tasted?” says Mummy.
“Yes,” Ajay whispers.
He’s never tasted ghee before.
“Your father died,” Daddy says, as if his father had called on the phone to relay the news. “And your mother needed you to help her in the best way you can.”
He is establishing a history.
“So you came here to work in order that everything at home would be OK.”
Ajay just stares.
“Your mother doesn’t have to take tension anymore. Your family is happy because you work.”
Ajay pictures his mother’s face, waiting in the dark as he’s loaded into the Tempo. He pictures his father’s smoldering corpse. He sees the wheat fields, he turns and runs away from his sister’s screams. He crushes a cockroach with his bare feet, repeating in his head the names Kuldeep and Rajdeep Singh.
“I know you come from a place,” Daddy says, “where they hold many backward customs and beliefs. Many rules and customs that are true to the reality of your world. But we’re free of that here, and so you are free now. Do you understand?”
He looks from Daddy to Mummy, to the embers of the fire, to the chicken curry.
“In our household,” Daddy says, “we have different rules. It doesn’t matter where you come from. We’re all human beings, and all humans are the same. Do you know what that means?”
Ajay says nothing.
“It means if anyone asks who you are and where you come from,” Daddy goes on, “you tell them this: I come from a Kshatriya household.”
Ajay lowers his eyes to the plate.
“Say it,” Daddy says, elongating the words. “I come from a Kshatriya household.”
Ajay looks to Mummy; she nods at him encouragingly.
“I live in a Kshatriya household,” he whispers.
“No,” Daddy says. “You come from one now, OK?”
Ajay nods. “I come from one.”
“Very good,” Daddy says, job done. “Now eat.”
He tries.
He makes a ball of rice and dal. Stares at it.
But he cannot lift it to his mouth.
He seems paralyzed.
“What’s wrong?” Daddy says, putting his spoon down pointedly.
“What’s wrong, child?” Mummy leans toward him so he can whisper in her ear.
After he speaks, she looks at Daddy with troubled eyes.
“He wants to know,” she says gently, “if he can eat down there”—she pauses and shifts her eyes—“on the floor.”
Daddy takes a long deliberate breath that communicates his feelings better than any words.
“I told you,” he says to Mummy.
“I know,” she replies.
“Very well,” he says to Ajay, switching back to Hindi. “Take one of the metal plates and go.”
Ajay jumps down from the table and fetches one of the cheap metal trays. He transfers the contents of his china plate and loads up some more chicken and hurries to the corner of the kitchen, where he sits cross-legged, with his back turned, stuffing his face. It’s more in one meal than he’s eaten in a week—he feels that his stomach will burst.
After dinner, when Mummy and Daddy are resting, he is charged with doing the washing-up. When everything is clean, Mummy shows him how to make warm milk with turmeric.
“The day starts at five,” Daddy says, as Ajay squats drinking his haldi doodh by the fire. The heat is hypnotic. He has the urge to lie down and sleep right there. But when it’s done, he’s given sandals and sent down the cold steps, shivering in the damp air, locking himself in the room, covering himself with as many blankets as he can find, lying in the grief-stricken dark, waiting for dawn.
5.