The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,75
she went to the corner of the site, picked up her plastic woven lunch basket, and, holding her baby tightly against her, walked away from them all.
HER TEMPER KEPT HER company through the day, as she fed her son some food and scowled at the road that ran in front of her tent. Her only continuing regret was that she had missed striking the mason’s face on her second attempt.
But by sunset she had calmed to the point of taking decisions. The anger that flooded through her lent a great clarity to her thoughts.
The next day, she rose before dawn. She quietly collected everything she would need that morning into a large jute bag. Then she woke her sleeping child, quieting his protests with the comfort of her breast. He did not wake fully, and so she maneuvered herself out of the tent with him sleeping on her shoulder, the bag clutched awkwardly in her hand. She quietly crossed the road, leaving behind her other possessions and Old Gowriamma, who slumbered on undisturbed with soft alcoholic snores.
The previous evening, she had reached up her saree skirts in the privacy of her tent and untied the strip of cloth that she always kept mid-thigh. The papers that crackled within were her talisman. She had told no one about it, even if it occasionally constrained her movements, feeling it fatten over the months with the same satisfaction with which she had witnessed the flesh collecting on her son.
She had counted them all out, the paper notes old and worn and sometimes dirty, but with their value undiminished. From the bundle she extracted a few rupees and proceeded briskly to make certain purchases that she would have considered very frivolous even half a day earlier.
And now, in the predawn chill, she planned to make a businesslike use of them.
A LANE LED OFF the main road that housed the slum tents, and Kamala walked toward it. Down the lane, right at the end, in this quiet corner of Koramangala, was a large two-story bungalow, clean and new. Kamala knew it well; she had worked on it for much of the previous two years, moving to the new site only when the construction work on this was completed. The house was still unoccupied, its windows bare of curtains, the front door firmly locked. Some fellow came every now and then to attend to the garden; the only person who remained daily was an old watchman who spent his day hours squatting by the gate, smoking beedis and communing with the wall opposite. At night, he engaged in a flurry of activity—drinking a tot of arrack (purchased alongside Old Gowriamma), trying his luck and limited economics with the prostitute who opened for business at night in one of the slum tents after concluding her daytime labors as a construction worker, and finally, rolling himself into a tight, blanket-covered ball at a sheltered corner of the house’s pristine verandah and sleeping the whole night through, waking a little after sunrise.
That was usual. Once a week, he vanished for a day and a half, attending to business god knows where. And that absence was perfectly timed for Kamala’s needs this morning.
In the predawn darkness, Kamala paused outside the gate of the bungalow, hushed and abandoned. She opened the latch of the gate and slipped through, shadowlike, on the path that led to the rear. There, surrounded by high walls that would assure her of privacy, stood the object she sought: a cold-water tap that was used to water the back garden. The rooftop tank that fed it was kept full by the watchman, and now, when she turned it on experimentally, the water gushed out, cold and clear and priceless.
Her son, well fed on her breast, was content to sit sleepily while his mother grimly made her preparations. Then, when her fell intent became clear, he burst into tears, but to no avail. A quick smack reduced his wails to a continuous, grizzly whimper, and Kamala tucked her saree up at her waist and proceeded to give her son the first full bath of his life.
She stripped him of his nightshirt and rubbed him down with expensive sesame-seed oil, working it deep into the skin to soften it and dislodge the dirt, in a cleansing ritual she had almost forgotten. Then, when his body and head and hair were so well oiled he almost slipped from her grasp, she doused him with cold water from the tap and