The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,69

in installments of up to six months.

All this had been explained to Kamala over the telephone, and Kamala was entirely agreeable. For a good job, even a payment of three months’ salary seemed a small price. But now, as she waited for the job broker to appear, she steeled herself for the discussion about to come. What if the job broker, having coaxed her this far, now demanded four months’ salary as her pay? Should Kamala demur or pay up without argument? Or perhaps argue a bit to save face, and then concede? Wasn’t, in fact, even five months’ salary, an indenture of almost half a year, worth it ultimately? To have good food in her belly and the promise of more?

The woman appeared on her landing, and Kamala looked down at the ground in relief. The job broker had the generous girth of someone who stretched her employers’ budget to feed both them and her own family on ample scale. She had the calm demeanor of a woman who did not break her promises lightly. Kamala felt her fears quieten.

“Namaste, aunty,” she said respectfully to the massive and competent figure who stood a few steps above her. Her laden arms prevented her from joining her palms in greeting, but the job broker did not seem to take offense. She nodded back, looking over Kamala in a considering manner. Her eyes rested first on Kamala’s face, and something in it brought a hint of a softening smile to her own; then they swept downward, dismissively, over Kamala’s body and dress, before coming to a sudden, freezing halt halfway down.

“What is the meaning of that?” she said, pointing to the sleeping bundle tucked under Kamala’s arm. “That’s not a baby, is it?”

“Yes,” said Kamala, smiling proudly. “That’s my baby. My little one, my son.”

“You are to be congratulated,” the job broker said. “And do you have somewhere to leave it while you work? Someone who can look after it for you, this baby?”

No, said Kamala. I am alone.

The job broker stared at her before turning away to spit on the ground, the bubbles of her saliva resting on the earth before sinking and converting a small circle of dry sand into mud. “You stupid, stupid girl,” she said. “Have you no sense at all? Should you not have told me about this earlier? Who will hire you with a babe in arms?”

I can do the work with him, Kamala said. Really. Please believe me, aunty.

He is a good baby. No, he will not cry and disturb the masters, she said.

No, aunty, how can you say such a thing, yes, of course I was married and widowed—I did not lie about that.

No, he is not a mistake.

I can do the work with him. I promise.

But the job broker, as job brokers will, kept her eye on her own internal quality standards and could not be swayed. “Come back when he is older, or when you have made other arrangements for him,” was all she would say, before turning away with a censuring shake of her head and disbelief at the naïveté of village girls.

And, as with all foolish, ill-considered plans, it had come to naught, as simply as that.

sixteen

IF SOMEONE WERE TO ASK HER today how, as a young, widowed mother of one, with no experience and (in the light of this fiasco) very little of either judgment or brains, how then had she managed?—Kamala would rely upon the full serious weight of her dignity to reply, “Well, sir, I contrived. Somehow, I contrived,” and she would clack her thin gold bangles together to indicate that, by some measures, she had done even better than that.

Returning to her brother’s house was not an option she was willing to consider, come what may. When she went back to her village, she would go in strength and self-respect, or not go at all.

There was only one alternative open to her.

She became a coolie, a day laborer. A life immeasurably distant, it seemed to her, from the respectability of those who earned their wages monthly, or who toiled on the farmland that they and their ancestors before them had owned. A coolie worked through the day, took his money, and was free to drink it or spend it or lose it. A coolie had no fixed job, or job title. He went where the work went, one day to work on a construction site, another day to clear out a dirty gutter. And with the