The Faith of Ashish (5 page)

As Virat stood and waited, Mammen Samuel Varghese opened his book and printed:
Virat the Chamar.
Next to that:
1 man, 1 woman, 1 child.
Now all three belonged to him.

I
t may be that the boy is breathing more easily," Latha offered hopefully. "He ate a bit of mashed rice and a few bites of curds. Perhaps—"

"What's done is done," Virat said. "We cannot go back." He took the
chaddar
from his head and wrapped it around his son.

With Latha beside him, Virat carried the child up the path to the place where it joined the main road. There they waited in silence for the landlord's cart to come for them. Latha, shading her good eye against the rising sun, was the first to spy a cloud of dust far up the road.

"Look, Husband!" she said. "It must be the landlord's bullock cart."

As the cart lumbered closer, Virat gasped, "The landlord himself sits on the bench!" Yes, and beside him, his son Boban Joseph, driving the team of bullocks—white ones with short hair, fine bullocks that showed off Mammen Samuel Varghese's wealth. In his hand, Boban Joseph clutched a sturdy, yet supple, branch he could use as a switch.

When the bullocks ambled to a stop, Virat obediently handed the boy up to the waiting landlord. Mammen Samuel took the child in his own arms and laid him in a box in the back of the cart, made soft with fresh-cut grass. But when Virat tried to climb up into the cart after the child, Mammen Samuel shoved him away.

"Not you," he said. "Only the boy."

"No!" Latha wailed as she pushed past her husband. When Mammen Samuel barred her way, too, she jumped at him, her fists pounding. "I will not leave my son!"

In a flash, Boban Joseph snapped his switch. It caught Latha across the face, sliced across her bad eye and slashed all the way down to her chin. She stumbled backward and fell hard against her husband, knocking them both to the ground.

"You will
obey
me," Mammen Samuel pronounced in an icy cold voice.

Stunned into silence, Virat and Latha stared up at the stout, perfectly arranged man. Boban Joseph raised his switch for another blow, but his father grasped his arm.

Resuming his more reasonable tone, Mammen Samuel said, "The English healers will not look at the boy if they see him arrive in the company of Untouchables. But if I carry him in my own arms, they will treat him with the tenderest of care. So you see, it is for the boy's own good that I must turn you away."

"No!" Latha sobbed. She struggled to her feet, but her husband grabbed her arm and held her back.

"The landlord is a wise man, Wife," Virat said. "He knows the ways of the English. We do not."

With an impatient sigh, Boban Joseph lashed at the bullocks, and the cart lurched forward.

"Pack up your belongings and move to the laborers' quarters," Mammen Samuel ordered. "Both of you. Take the pathway behind my fields, not the road through the village."

Virat bowed low. "We have our own house in the untouchable settlement," he protested. "We will not need to—"

"From now on, you will make your home on my land."

"It is not so far for me to walk each day," Virat protested.

"I will only return your son to you when you are on my land," the landowner said. The icy tone had returned to his voice.

"Please, Mister Landowner—" Latha cried, but Mammen Samuel Varghese had stopped listening. The cart already rumbled on with Ashish in the back.

"I do not understand why we must leave our house," Latha insisted to her husband. "You could work in the landlord's fields during the day and come back to our mud hut at night."

"We will work in the landlord's fields," Virat corrected." Both of us."

Latha stared at her husband. "But Ashish. Who will care for him?"

"The laborer's settlement is large with many children," Virat reasoned. "Probably old grandmothers look after the young ones. Don't worry."

"But why must we move there? The fields are not so far away from our mud hut."

"Because the landlord requires it," Virat said.

Two earthenware water jars and one clay bowl. Two earthenware cooking pots. A small sack of rice. Earthenware jars that held oil, dry vegetables, spices. Three woven reed sleeping mats. Virat's drying racks for the animal skins. One cotton towel. Between them, Virat and Latha could carry everything they owned.

Virat sneaked a look at his wife. In many ways she was a most attractive woman. Not in all ways, though. Her right eye shone a deep spicy brown, bright and expressive. But her left eye was cloudy and gray, and the skin around it scarred and twisted. Once she had told him she couldn't remember ever having two working eyes, but that's all she ever said and Virat didn't ask for more. Her eye belonged to her. Its story was hers to tell or to keep to herself.

"Remember when we first came to this village?" Latha asked. A tear glistened in her good eye.

"Pooni will watch over the house until we return," Virat said.

"Baby number five had just died and Ashish was not yet born," Latha reminisced softly. She spoke more to herself than to her husband. "I couldn't accept the
karma
of our village, so I begged you to leave your home and your family, and find us somewhere else to live."

"Pooni is a good friend to you," Virat said. "She will respect our house and care for it as her own."

"It was in the time of famine, remember? Your family shed no tears when we bade them farewell."

The wistful sadness in Latha's voice unsettled Virat. "Ashish will be with us tonight," he said.

"I should not have persuaded you to leave your home and your family. I am sorry, my husband."

Virat set the clay pots down on the ground, taking care to make a small indentation in the dirt for each one so they would stand upright. He laid the bowl down beside them. Even in so public a place, he dared to brush his rough fingers along the smoothness of his wife's arm. "In this village, I have achieved the most important things in life," he said softly.

"I made a place for us. I found friends for us. I fathered us a good son."

For the first time since her husband had carried Ashish to the road, Latha looked Virat full in the face. His skin was darker than hers by far, his face leathered by the sun. His chin and cheeks bristled with graying whiskers. Virat smiled his gap-toothed smile, cracking a blister the metal cup had burned on his lip. He picked up the pots and the bowl, and led his wife toward the path that would take them to Mammen Samuel Varghese's fields.

"
Chamar!
I am sorry to see you go!" Ranjun called out after them. Virat turned with a smile, his mouth ready to answer the unexpectedly kind words. But Ranjun had more to say. "I wish you were not leaving,
chamar,
because now we will have no one filthy enough to clean up the dead animals for us!"

More than a hundred tiny thatched huts, huddled behind the fields of waving wheat, housed Mammen Samuel Varghese's laborers.

Latha frowned. "Not like our huts of mud in the village." Virat said nothing.

"Which one is ours?" Latha asked as she gazed from one hut to the identical ones surrounding it.

"I don't know," said Virat. "One out on the far edge, I suppose."

Overhead, the sun burned hot. Latha sighed and set the earthenware containers on the ground. She swiped at her face with the edge of her
sari.
When Virat saw that she didn't intend to move, he leaned his drying racks against a rotting tree stump and piled his other burdens beside it. Because the land was devoid of trees to offer them shade, they sat on the hot ground and waited in the sun.

After the sun had moved so far across the sky that it cast an orange shadow over the settlement, Virat spied a lone figure striding toward them along a pathway between the fields. Virat and Latha stood up and waited uncertainly. The man's dark face was deeply furrowed, his bare back and sturdy legs burned almost black. A faded yellow
chaddar
wrapped around his head like a turban glowed golden in the setting sun.

"Come!" the man called out to them. "Follow me!"

The man was Anup, Mammen Samuel Varghese's overseer. He led Virat and Latha on a winding trail to the middle of the settlement. "This is your place," he said pointing to a hut no different than the ones surrounding it.

Virat hesitated. "I do not think so," he said with a polite bow. "I am but a
chamar."
He held up his drying rack as evidence." I belong on the outskirts of your village."

"Not here," Anup said. "This is not like every other village. Here all
jetties
live mixed together." An up gestured to the left." A potter and his family live there." Then to the right. "Over there is a Sudra."

"They will live together with one such as me?" Virat asked incredulously. "With one who handles the dead?"

"All of us labor at the master's will," said An up. "To him, we are all the same—laborers, all bonded to him. Nothing more and nothing less."

"Our son," Latha said. "Is he here waiting for us?"

Anup ran his hand over his stubbly black beard. "I know nothing of your son. I only know that you are to settle yourselves in your hut before nightfall. Tomorrow at dawn both of you will follow the other workers out to the field to begin work."

In a flat, open area, Anup pointed out a well with a community cup sitting beside it. "That's for all the laborers to use," he said. Off to the side and under a tree stood a mortar with two millstones. "Grind your grain here, either before you go to the fields in the morning or after you return in the evening. You will work in the fields from dawn to dusk. Not on Sunday, though. The master is a Christian, so we do not work on Sundays."

The hut consisted of one small room with a dirt floor, with nothing inside but a flat stone positioned in front of a small opening in the wall. A rim of mud and pebbles surrounded the stone. Latha smiled. A place for bathing, it was, and in the privacy of their hut too. More than she'd had in the mud hut. Nothing in there but the trunk of the date palm tree that supported the thatched roof.

"We must hurry, Husband," Latha said. "Everything must be in order when Ashish arrives."

Latha grabbed up the two jars and hurried to the well to fill them with water. These she set against the inside wall of the hut, on one side of the bathing stone. On the other side of the stone, she placed the clay bowl and cooking pots. Along the opposite wall, she laid out the sack of rice and her earthenware jars of oil, dried vegetables, and spices. Virat stacked their sleeping mats against the third wall. Because it was what she always did, Latha headed for the wooded area at the edge of the settlement to collect firewood.

"The landlord took my boy to the English healer," Virat said to Anup, who still stood outside the hut.

"Yes," said Anup.

"It is worth the debt I now owe to save the life of my son." Anup said nothing.

"Even if we must work an entire year, it is worth it."

Still Anup said nothing.

"My son is but an innocent child."

"Of course he is not," said Anup. "If he were innocent, he would not have been born an Untouchable, and certainly not the son of a
chamar.
Everything has already been decided—for your son . . . for you . . . for me. Not one of us is innocent or we would not be here, slaving for the landlord."