River Town Chronicles (3 page)

After we finished our tea, Ram Swarup took Pat and I on the grand tour of our new home. The single room of our house, where we had been sitting, was about twenty feet by thirty feet. Behind this room was the small courtyard filled with rubble and a hand pump to draw water from a well. Off to one side was a small shelter with a cabinet built into the wall. This would be our kitchen. On the other side of the courtyard was a small brick enclosure. Ram Swarup said this was the bathroom. I opened the door. It was a bathroom without a bathtub, without a sink, without running water or electricity. And, it was a bathroom without a toilet! There was just a shallow drain running along the cement floor and out into an alleyway. I could only imagine what was going through Pat's mind at this time.

On the other side of the courtyard was a small passage way that led to the area occupied by Ram Swarup and his family. I followed Ram Sarup through the doorway into three small rooms. In one room were
charpois
for sleeping. Another room was used for storage and the third room was a small kitchen area with a
chula
(a small earthen cook stove) on the floor where
bhabhi
prepared the family's meals. Ram Swarup said we would share the courtyard. “Oh, and watch out for the monkeys. They are very clever.” “Monkeys?” I asked. “Yes. They like to terrorize the children.” I looked around, wondering if there were still more inhabitants I didn't know about. “Up there. On the rooftop. You'll meet them soon.”

I left Ram Swarup and returned to our room, where Pat had begun to unpack our bags. She was hanging clothes on the pegs that stuck out from the wall and rearranging the remaining items in the suitcases. She decided to use the suitcases as chests of drawers. I unwound the twine from the top of the gunny sack and began to remove the items. First the blankets, then the sheets and pillows and the small kerosene stove and a few pots and pans. Finally, I pulled out two thin cotton mattresses and threw the empty sack in a corner of the room. “That's all? That's all we have to live with in this place for a year?” Pat asked incredulously. Her hands were on her hips again, surveying the meager items I had pulled out of the sack. “A homeless person living under a bridge would have more possessions than this.” I put the cotton mattresses, sheets and blankets on the two
charpois
in the middle of the room. Maybe Ram Swarup would be able to find three more
charpois
in the morning. Pat and I sat down on the two chairs with the crushed bottoms and Tim, Brian and Lori sat on the
charpois.
Pat pulled out some sandwiches and fruit she brought from Fonseca's and we ate our first meal in River Town. It was clear that the next few days would be difficult. What would we eat and drink, and where would we get it? And the bathroom? How did that work? There was no toilet, no sink, no water, no light. Only a brick shed with a drain running along the cement floor and out into the alleyway. “You know,” Pat said, “I think that taxi driver in Delhi was right. We won't like this place.”

It started to rain again. At first it was just a light drizzle and then suddenly it poured down in torrents. A small stream of water trickled down one corner of the room and splashed onto the floor. A bare wire with a light bulb attached at the end and hanging from the ceiling began to sputter and spark. We were too tired to care. We finished our meager meal, put the three kids on one of the
charpois
and Pat and I got on the other
charpoi
and pulled the sheet and blanket over our heads.

W
HEN WE AWOKE
the next morning, there was a gaggle of small children peering through the iron bars of our windows. The word was out that there were strangers in town.
Bhabhi
shooed them away and Mohan brought us cups of hot tea. We still needed food to eat, so as soon as the rain let up a little, I walked out the door of our new home in the bazaar and made my way up the lane to the
chowk
(center of the bazaar). I bought a kilo of oranges and a half kilo of bananas. I bought some vegetables and some flour, rice and sugar. I even found a small shop that had a few loaves of
double roti
(sliced bread). I looked for eggs, but couldn't find any in the bazaar. And meat was nowhere to be found. I filled a tin with kerosene and returned to the house with my meager bag of food and was immediately set upon by Mohan, who extracted each item from my bag.
“Kitnaa paisa?”
(How much?) he demanded, holding up a bunch of bananas with the seriousness of a homicide detective deep into a murder investigation. I told him they cost a couple of rupees.
“Bahut ziyada”
(way too much), he replied. Mohan proceeded to examine each item in the bag, inspecting it for quality and price. “You ought to return all of these items to the bazaar and demand your money back.” I was discovering that no detail was too small to escape the attention of Mohan. After all, his family were
banias,
members of a merchant caste and the merchants had traditionally been a powerful force in River Town. But at the moment, my real concern was that we were hungry and had to survive on the few things I had brought from the bazaar. I was not about to return any of them.

As soon as Mohan had completed his investigation and returned to his house on the other side of the courtyard, Pat lit the kerosene stove and boiled the buffalo milk that
bhabhi
had brought over in a brass pot. She sliced up the bananas and poured the hot milk over them and gave each of us a slice of bread toasted over the kerosene burner. The children devoured the bananas and toast and disappeared into the courtyard to play with Mohan, Mena and Paphu. “What are we going to do for lunch and dinner?” Pat asked. “We can't eat bananas and milk three times a day.”

For lunch, we had bananas and milk. Brian began to cry and we tried to get him to take a nap on the
charpoi,
but that only made him cry more. Suddenly,
bhabhi
stuck her head in the doorway and, seeing Brian, rushed to his side. She picked him up in her arms and began to speak softly in his ear. Ram Swarup hurried in and announced, “It's the bananas and milk. They shouldn't be eaten together. It has made Brian (bu-rai-yan) sick.” Great, I thought. Now we will starve to death for sure. Brian looked over
bhabhi's
shoulder at us and stopped crying. He looked perfectly happy in
bhabhi's
arms. He had found a co-conspirator, an enabler, someone to take his side.
Bhabhi
carried Brian into her cooking area next door to the courtyard, and sat him down next to her. She continued to speak to him in Hindi while she began grinding spices and making preparations for the evening meal, still many hours away. Tim had wandered out front, where the
mochi
sat repairing shoes and Lori raced around the courtyard chasing Meena and Paphu. Pat and I sat down feeling our familiar ways slipping away from us. “Should we try bananas and milk for dinner?” I asked. “No. I'm making an Indian meal tonight. Chapattis and vegetables. It will be good,” Pat replied.

That evening, she prepared vegetables and made chapatti dough from the flour I had bought in the bazaar. She lit the kerosene burner and cooked the vegetables, then rolled out the dough and began to slap it back and forth into the rough shape and thickness of a chapatti. Saroj and Madhu watched every move from the edge of the kitchen, as Pat struggled to make the chapatti puff up on the
talwa
(a shallow, saucer shaped iron pan).
“Nahin, nahin,
that's not the way to do it.” Saroj rushed over and picked up a ball of dough and rolled it out, slapped it between her hands and placed it on the hot pan. She gently pressed it with her fingers and the flat bread puffed up in the middle and around the edges. She took it off the pan and rolled out another chapatti and repeated the process. “And those vegetables, you haven't prepared them properly,” Madhu scolded. Pat looked crestfallen. She was a grown woman with a husband and three children being chastised by two teenage girls for her poor domestic skills. It took only one day to expose us as incompetent, bumbling Americans. Pat couldn't cook, I didn't know where to find food or what to pay for it in the bazaar, and neither of us knew that bananas and milk, taken together, would make you sick. How were we to know any of these things? We were being swept up in a rip tide of local culture. What would be next? That we needed toilet training? Actually, I hadn't yet figured out that whole bathroom thing. It was possible that some kind of training
would
be necessary.

W
E SOON MANAGED TO MASTER
the mysteries of the “bathroom” (the brick room without a toilet or running water located next to the courtyard). It required a skillful act of squatting over the drain while retaining one's balance in order to avoid falling into the drain. And I had managed to find a stash of toilet paper hidden behind some canned goods in a Sikh gentleman's shop in the bazaar. The final piece of this puzzle was solved one morning when I heard a commotion at the door that led out into a narrow alleyway near the bathroom. There was a loud banging noise on the door.
“Kholo. Darwaza kholo”
(open, open the door), followed by a stream of profanity hurled from the other side of the door. I raced to open the door and was confronted by a middle-aged, pock-faced woman with a bunch of reeds fastened together at one end to make a broom about three feet long. She held the broom in one hand and balanced a flat basket on her hip. She looked me square in the eyes, unafraid, challenging, as if she possessed some deep, hidden powers. She was barefoot and wore a dirty
kamiz
(shirt) that hung down below her knees. Her
shalwar
(baggy pants) was rolled up to her knees and her
dupatta
(head scarf) was draped loosely over her matted, tangled hair. For a moment neither of us moved. “Who are you?” I asked. “Kaga” (crow), she replied. “I'm your sweeper.” She said it in a manner that implied she was attached to me in a permanent manner, like an arm or a leg. There would be no getting rid of her.

Kaga jabbed her broom at me, narrowly missing my shoulder and I jumped aside letting her pass into the courtyard. Her words were rough and demanding: “Get me some water from the pump. Get out of my way. Hurry up, I don't have all day.” Kaga spotted Pat and the children inside the house and cautiously moved toward the door with her broom raised as if she were about to take a swipe at some invisible flying object. She hesitated at the door and poked her head inside.
Bhabhi
had heard the commotion and rushed out from the other side of the courtyard. “Get away from there,”
bhabhi
shouted. “Go. Go do your work.” Kaga turned toward
bhabhi
with her broom still raised, then bent over and began to sweep the courtyard, mumbling something under her breath.
Bhabhi
watched from a safe distance, a broom length away. Kaga entered the brick bathroom and cleaned out the drain, threw a pail of water inside and swept it out into the drain in the alleyway. Then she disappeared, the basket full of waste gracefully balanced on her head.
Bhabhi
slammed the door shut behind Kaga. “Be careful with her. She is very clever and will try to take advantage of you. She's dirty, a woman of the sweeper caste. Don't let her pump water from the well. Don't let her touch anything.”

Kaga was now attached to us and would make her daily appearance, banging at our door each morning for the duration of our stay in River Town. She would learn the intimate details of our lives from the garbage and waste we left behind in the brick “bathroom.” From these findings, she would divine advice on how to live our lives and would suggest medicinal cures when she detected illness. She roamed the courtyard as if she owned it, shouting out insults that made
bhabhi
grab her ears in horror. Kaga was a vaudeville act and we were her captive audience. With her broom in hand and basket poised on her hip she struck fear in everyone, regardless of caste or nationality. She swore, commanded, and threatened us all with no fear of losing status because she had no status to lose. She was a sweeper, at the bottom of the caste hierarchy and she was as much a part of our existence as the sky above and the earth below.