The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,6
especially that stolid Ganesha who lived opposite, whose mud-encrusted mind was free from independent thought and always looked to his mother’s face for answers. But now, that same stolid Ganesha had grown into a boy who worked at his studies in the evenings and gave his mother no trouble.
“Did they give you much homework today, in school?” she asked. Narayan’s eyes met hers, so brimful of mischief that her heart immediately sank. She gazed sternly at him, trying to decipher his actions. And immediately understood. “Bad boy!” she raged. “How could you! Do not tell me you have missed school again! Bad child! Why do you do this!”
“Don’t shout, Amma,” he said. “It was for a very good reason. See what I have brought for you.” He emptied out his pockets and displayed, before his mother’s astonished gaze, a collection of notes and coins. “All for you! See?”
“But where did you get this? Child, what have you done!”
But Narayan, with his inborn air of a showman, was not to be hurried. He ate the last scraps of his food. He washed out his plate and placed it to dry. And when he judged his mother was ready to explode, he sat down and told her his news.
“It was that Raghavan’s idea,” he said, not quieting Kamala’s anxiety a bit. Raghavan was three years older than her son, and a product of the streets. His father was a drunk, his mother something worse, and he had survived doing god-knows-what. He was tough, resourceful, and in Kamala’s view, not at all to be trusted. Not for Raghavan a life of decent hard work; he had about him an air of raffish dissoluteness and was always talking of ways to make money quickly.
Kamala disliked him and absolutely hated his friendship with her son. He would lead Narayan down wrongful paths, Raghavan, with his heavy-lidded eyes, and his pack of lazy, good-for-nothing friends, who thought that smoking cigarettes like their favorite movie star was sufficient to render them just like him. And if in his movie roles, the star stared with disrespectful, lustful eyes at passing girls, so must they. As he fought and defeated the corrupt lathi-stick-wielding policeman with his bare hands, so too must they mock and harass the local traffic policeman, who did nothing worse than stand tiredly at the street corner occasionally misdirecting the traffic. When his movies suggested that outspoken, defiant damsels needed acid thrown on their faces or were indeed asking to be raped, they nodded wisely. When he played a poor man who challenged the authority of the rich, he did so to the untrammeled appreciation of Raghavan and his friends, who refused to recognize that the actor lived, in his off-camera life, an existence fully as wealth-encrusted as the ones he opposed onscreen. Kamala could not accept any of it. That irritating young male braggadocio, besides being unpleasantly disrespectful, conveyed, at its base, a distinct lack of common sense. That wretched actor, instead of (in his latest comedy) portraying a young man who defied his parents and survived on his wits by resorting to robbery along with a pretty female companion, why couldn’t he have played a young man who studied hard and listened to his mother and aspired to a job offer at a nice city office? Then all his besotted young male followers would follow suit, and all across the state, mothers would light lamps in thankfulness and young girls (and policemen) would sigh in relief. Or if the movie star should plead innocence and say, why, my work is just entertainment, why should I be asked to behave like a pious temple priest a-blessing the poor, then why couldn’t young idiots like Raghavan, thought Kamala, coming to the nub of the matter, realize that movies were one thing and real life something quite different? Fools.
So now she prepared to listen to Narayan with a certain amount of prejudice in her mind and a dread that the money he held had been acquired through illegal, dubious means.
“Guess where I got this from, Amma,” he said. She was in no mood to play guessing games over his latest deviltry. “Nonsense,” she said. “Tell me immediately, how did you receive this money?”
“From the street corner,” he said.
“What do you mean, from the street corner. What nonsense have you been up to? That policeman is going to catch you and give you a beating! And perhaps that would be a good thing!”