The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,70
influx of village people pulled daily into the city, a coolie missing today, for whatever reason, was a coolie replaced with ease tomorrow.
Kamala joined construction work. Not, of course, on those large city sites that grew quickly into tall buildings of steel and glass—those were built by men in hard yellow hats using large, fantastical pieces of machinery—but on the smaller constructions: houses, small offices, which were built, brick by brick, entirely on the muscular strength of workers, male and female, just like her.
The supervising building contractor looked her up and down, and signed her up on the spot. She learned quickly, training herself to walk upon the narrow planks of wood that bridged one half-built wall to another with rounded trays of cement and stones and bricks balanced upon her head; surefooted, so she would not slip and fall into the open foundations below and break her head. She learned to form part of the winding lines of workers who lifted, carried, passed, and dropped mechanically, as they were instructed, in work that used the skills of a monkey and the brains of a child and the strength of every muscle in her body for ten hours a day.
For her work she was paid only half what the menfolk earned. This was natural, she was told; it was a job that relied on muscle power, and the men had much more of that to offer. The money she earned was not enough to feed, clothe, and house her in any respectable manner, but the job had one saving grace: she could take her baby with her to the job site and fashion a sling for him on the branch of a tree, and let him sleep there while she worked. And, if he should wake hungry, nobody minded if he cried loudly until his mother could attend to him. In the clang and clamor of a building construction site, a baby’s voice disturbed no one.
She lived with an acquaintance she met on the very first day, someone who swayed under a loaded head on the narrow plank bridge before her and whom Kamala instinctively steadied with her free hand. The white-haired woman thanked her in a voice rich with the stink of alcohol. She was fifty years old and as gnarled and dried as an old piece of firewood; she dealt with the circumstances of her life in the simplest of ways: each evening, she converted the day’s wages into arrack and drank herself to sleep.
Their home was a makeshift tent constructed from debris rescued from job sites. There were a whole row of these slum tents along the edge of a road, close enough for the residents to walk to their jobs on the construction sites nearby, then dismantle them and move on in a year or two, when they were chased away by municipal authorities or when the jobs ran dry. Like the other tents, hers was waist-high, with a triangular frame of low, crossed wooden poles covered with old rags and bits of asbestos sheeting, and draped over with a blue plastic sheet held down by stones placed along the edges. Inside, another sheet of blue plastic was spread on the floor, sufficient for the summer but none of it very effective against the wet of the monsoon, which sank, dense and cold, through all the layers—the plastic, the asbestos, everything—to embrace them to its poisonous bosom. At those times, Kamala would let the baby sleep on top of her, the chill and damp of the ground below rising through her body and making her tremble, but the blood flowing within her strong enough to keep her child warm, especially if she covered them both with rags and more plastic.
As payment for the use of her tent and stove, Old Gowriamma asked for nothing more than a mouthful of the food that Kamala cooked at the entrance to the tent. Kamala fed her baby on her breast, supplemented with a thin gruel of boiled rice kanji. She fed herself and the old woman on the same kanji, adding to it, for their adult delectation, a bit of salt and a few red chiles. Water they kept in a small pot at the rear of the tent. Once a week, Kamala queued up with her neighbors at the roadside tap and attempted to wash off the accumulated dirt on her body while the others shouted at her to hurry up, for god’s sake, for the tap was